Which television shows are you watching? Part III

[civvver]

I thought the last mandalorian episode was the best one. I have only two complaints. The spoiler free one is I wish they had just gone R with it or at least PG-13 equivalent and upped the violence level. You never see anything more than someone taking a blaster shot. It kind of cheapens all the fighting to have it remain in the PG realm, when it's supposed to be about a ruthless merc. And of course they end up fighting a lot of droids cus you can blow a droid to smithereens and it doesn't spray guts all over. I just think an adult focused star wars would've been a better viewpoint since we've seen all the kid focused ones already.

The other:

Spoiler spoiler :

The mandalorian seems at times kind of inept at fighting. This last episode he engaged multiple droids in hand to hand combat, made it look cool but also took a long time to kill them all. Why not just use your blaster? Compare that to when the lead merc guy with the guys walked up to two droids and just shot them all up in a couple blasts. It just seems dumb, he's supposed to be like the best fighter ever but he's not that efficient at killing stuff most of the time.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I thought the last mandalorian episode was the best one. I have only two complaints. The spoiler free one is I wish they had just gone R with it or at least PG-13 equivalent and upped the violence level. You never see anything more than someone taking a blaster shot. It kind of cheapens all the fighting to have it remain in the PG realm, when it's supposed to be about a ruthless merc. And of course they end up fighting a lot of droids cus you can blow a droid to smithereens and it doesn't spray guts all over. I just think an adult focused star wars would've been a better viewpoint since we've seen all the kid focused ones already.

The other:

Spoiler spoiler :

The mandalorian seems at times kind of inept at fighting. This last episode he engaged multiple droids in hand to hand combat, made it look cool but also took a long time to kill them all. Why not just use your blaster? Compare that to when the lead merc guy with the guys walked up to two droids and just shot them all up in a couple blasts. It just seems dumb, he's supposed to be like the best fighter ever but he's not that efficient at killing stuff most of the time.

I haven't seen The Mandalorian, but I'm trying to remember how the violence in Rogue One was portrayed. I thought that was 'an adult Star Wars', in some ways, but I don't remember it being exactly realistic, either.

 

[Laurana Kanan]

I wish they had just gone R with it or at least PG-13 equivalent and upped the violence level.

I never want to see an 'R' rated Star Wars movie or show.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

@EgonSpengler
It was standard violence for Star Wars with a couple of notable scenes that stand out -

There was a tank ambush taken straight from the Iraq war which was a more serious take on insurgent violence than teddy bears tossing logs around.

There was a depiction of mass destruction on a personal level at the very end. Sure, we've seen the Empire nuke planets before, but we've never seen it from the perspective of the people on the ground being wiped out. In Rogue One they went there and the movie was sooo much better for it. Honestly I find the scene where they get laser-nuked to be quite moving.***

The movie also leaned very heavily on portrayals of heroic, sacrificial death more than others in the series though this not a foreign concept to Star Wars.

Other than that, I can't even say that the violence in Rogue One was especially intense.


***Edit: I legit gave myself chills just thinking about the ending

 

[hobbsyoyo]

The Expanse, Season 2 - Rocinante's Planetfall (scene)

The animators modeled the scene of the landing after the way that Jeff Bezos's New Shepard rocket lands. That rocket can deeply throttle so it ends up doing this little hover-dance over the landing pad to square things up. Falcons on the other hand hover-slam, where they come in at full speed and then fire up to full throttle such that speed = 0 at the exact moment that altitude = 0. Very different landing modes.

I've been debating with myself which mode of landing would be more accurate for the Rocinante.

Spoiler space spam :

It's a very dense ship compared to modern rockets and we would say it has a terrible mass fraction - the ratio of fuel to not-fuel is low for the Rocinante because it has wonderfully efficient engines and doesn't need to bring as much fuel as real rockets. So this means it is very heavy and needs very high thrust but at the same time, it can't use its main drive (with extremely high thrust) during landing because that would nuke everyone on the ground. So instead it lands on its 'teakettle' engines which are water rockets. I would not expect those to have super high thrust, especially as the show depicts a ring of about 12 of these engines firing during landing. So I think this means that the thrust to weight ratio of the Rocinante is probably very low during planetary landings with the water rockets, which is effectively equivalent to deeply throttling a powerful engine.

Therefore, the Rocinante would likely do a hover-dance like Bezo's real rocket instead of a Falcon 9 hover-slam.

Moreover, a hover-dance is a more appropriate landing mode for a space vehicle landing on unprepared ground. The hover-slam only works if you find and successfully target perfectly flat terrain but a hover-dance lets you meander around looking for a good spot. A hover-dance would be worse for kicking up debris if it goes on too long but you can mitigate that by hovering at a greater height off the ground and then dropping throttle such that the terminal approach is over in a second or two. For reference, the real-life lunar landers were hover-dancers as well and this saved the first moon landing when they managed to hop over a major boulder field and find a better spot to land.


Hover-dance versus Hover-slam
(skip to 2:34)

Spoiler :

(notice how quickly it decelerates and how it just plops right down in the water without much final adjustment and no hovering - it does this for drone ship landings too)

Spoiler :

That is a long-winded way of saying the producers didn't necessarily change the art direction to please Jeff Bezos and created a realistic portrayal of the terminal landing sequence of the ship. The landing in the show is actually portrayed more realistically than landings in the books, fwiw.


Edit: I cannot find a clip of the Rocinante landing on youtube :-/ It's very cool and worth a watch of its own accord.

 

[rah]

The landing in the show is actually portrayed more realistically than landings in the books, fwiw.

Believe it or not. I remembered it differently also but was more concerned about the changes in the plot.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I read the first line of @Laurana Kanan 's spoiler and had sort of a freakout. Kind of stressed about what changes are coming with respect to Bobbie. I haven't had time to watch any more of it; I've had to watch E2 three times because I keep getting distracted and missing stuff.

My friend works at Blue Origin (the company that makes Bezos's rockets) and the cast did a tour of the facility and sat and answered questions from the workers. The landing scene was intentionally cribbed from the New Shepherd rocket but that doesn't make it wrong.

 

[Synobun]

Watching E1 of the new Expanse season right now. Production value is way up. Looks nice. But I'm not sure how to feel about the changes to the aesthetic of the crew. Naomi looks almost sickly thus far.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

She is sickly with her treatments though...(but yeah she looked like that before the treatment)

I actually liked the new look for all of them this season. It is weird that TV Amos has never been fat or balding and TV Naomi isn't Asian like they are in the books but I do like their new hair cuts.

I wish Cara Gee would go back to the super heavy eye shadow. She still has a lot of it but it's scaled back this season and that's a tragedy.

 

[EgonSpengler]

It's hard to miss that Camina Drummer is a much more important character in the show than in the books, and it's easy to imagine that the writers just fell in love with Gee and wanted to give her more to do.

Episode 7, "The One-Eyed Man":

Spoiler :

I wouldn't argue with anyone who thought Drummer's line about people "coveting other people's land and then killing them for it" was a little too on-the-nose. I thought the meta-commentary was alright, though, and the show isn't generally so heavy-handed with its real-world analogies. (For those who don't know what I'm talking about, Cara Gee is Ojibwe/Chippewa.)

I'm also on the fence wrt Bobbie's strange turn. It's been several years since I read Cibola Burn, but I don't remember this storyline from the books. I do feel like Frankie Adams' performance has improved since season 3, though. To my memory, she seemed like a nice "first-round draft pick" who wasn't 'there' yet, but she's been very good this season.


Business Insider, Dec 17, 2019 - "'The Expanse' season 4 is a hit"

"The Expanse" is punching back after being canceled by the Syfy network last year.

Amazon saved the series and renewed it for a fourth (and fifth) season. Season four debuted on Friday on Prime Video, and it looks like the show is a hit. The series' audience demand in the US increased by 34% week-over-week, Parrot Analytics said on Monday, making it the data company's seventh-most in-demand digital original in the US this week.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I am still at episode 2 but what they had in that wrt Bobbie was definitely not in the books and was super frustrating.

Spoiler :

They have her character court martialed and dishonorably discharged between the TV seasons which was not in the book, at all.

Not only did this not happen in the book, it was not even plausible for the events in the show. In the show (as in the book), she single-handedly saved a major Earth politician who become the Secretary General and helped uncover a massive conspiracy that started a war. Those things do not add up to a court martial now matter how you look at it. In fact, I don't think Bobbie was even in Cibola Burn! These books regularly drop characters and then bring them back; the cast is not steady beyond the 4 main crew and I don't think Bobbie became a regular Rocinante member until like book 5 or 6. There was one book (and it may have been Cibola Burn or maybe the next one) where they have a single chapter in the very beginning which shows her resuming life on Mars (she works for the VA in the books, not loading cargo) but then don't show her again at all until the final few pages where she has a brief cameo.

WRT to Cara Gee/Drummer - I think you're right. The funny thing is that the last time I looked (a couple of months back), Cara Gee was not even given top billing for the seasons she was heavily featured in. In fact, it actually took me a lot of digging to find the actress because despite having a lot of screen time, they were treating her character almost the same as an extra when it came to cast billing but I assume that was a contractual thing (like she was basically a step above an extra when they planned the season and signed contracts and then her role grew as production advanced). I do know in S3 they made her character into a composite after they cut the main anti-hero of that book - they made her character fill that role but without being a massive jerk. She was just a regular hero in that season; not an anti-hero. I wonder if fan reaction to her helped get her a bigger role in the show this early or if the producers just liked her. She does a killer belter accent and I think she really owns and defines that character as an actress.

Her character does become super important in later books but never has a central role. I have a feeling she will be front-and-center in the final book though given the set up and what her character becomes.

 

[EgonSpengler]

She does a killer belter accent[...]

Yeah, she doesn't even speak in the same register. She uses her hands a lot when she speaks, too.

 

[Synobun]

Episode 2 of The Expanse was the bomb.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Yeah, she doesn't even speak in the same register. She uses her hands a lot when she speaks, too.

Holy smokes, that's crazy! She really gets into the Beltalowda personality when she's acting. The talking with hands thing is evidence of that as well; in the books they frequently point out how belters have a cultural propensity to talk with their hands as it is an evolution of working in clunky spacesuits where you can't always see the speaker's face.

Edit: oh you meant in real life she uses her hands, sorry I misunderstood

Spoiler :

Edit 2: I don't think that is a rude hand gesture but I'm not sure so I spoilered it.

 

[Laurana Kanan]

I'm also on the fence wrt Bobbie's strange turn. It's been several years since I read Cibola Burn, but I don't remember this storyline from the books. I do feel like Frankie Adams' performance has improved since season 3, though. To my memory, she seemed like a nice "first-round draft pick" who wasn't 'there' yet, but she's been very good this season.

I love her as Bobbie! I didn't realize she was a Samoan/New Zealander. As I mentioned before her character arc this season seems completely out of character. I'm glad Egon mentioned the books, because after Episode 8 I was really questioning what the point of the whole Mars storyline is. Not just Bobbie and her weird left turn to organized crime, but also why Mars is disabling/retiring large chunks of their military so quickly after the truce with Earth & The Belt. Neither storyline feels logical to me. I was hoping someone could shed some light from the books.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I didn't realize she was a Samoan/New Zealander.

This matches her character in the books, fyi.

The books are all about gender and racial diversity. I don't think they've had a transgender character but they have a balanced cast of characters in the books. The TV show actually takes this further; Drummer I am pretty sure is white in the books but Cara Gee is Native American. Naomi is Asian in the book but black in the show (I guess because they have other Asian characters but not black ones at this point in the series), etc.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Episode 2 of The Expanse was the bomb.

In the fight scene, it occurred to me that while it's de-emphasized in the show, different kinds of drugs are used pretty frequently in the books. They use drugs for high-G accelerations, for instance. Anyway, the MCRN probably enhances its marines with more than just training and armor.

Holy smokes, that's crazy! She really gets into the Beltalowda personality when she's acting. The talking with hands thing is evidence of that as well; in the books they frequently point out how belters have a cultural propensity to talk with their hands as it is an evolution of working in clunky spacesuits where you can't always see the speaker's face.

Now that you mention it, the books note characters doing that quite a lot, but I don't really see it in the show.

I love her as Bobbie! I didn't realize she was a Samoan/New Zealander. As I mentioned before her character arc this season seems completely out of character. I'm glad Egon mentioned the books, because after Episode 8 I was really questioning what the point of the whole Mars storyline is. Not just Bobbie and her weird left turn to organized crime, but also why Mars is disabling/retiring large chunks of their military so quickly after the truce with Earth & The Belt. Neither storyline feels logical to me. I was hoping someone could shed some light from the books.

In Nemesis Games, book 5, Bobbie is looking into MCRN equipment that's gone missing, which plays a big role in the subsequent story (huge, in fact - it's such an important plot point for what happens after Cibola Burn that I can't imagine the writers of the show leaving it out). I don't remember the cop she meets in the show being in the book at all. I haven't finished the season yet, so it's possible the show's writers are just taking a different route to get to the same place. The other ex-marine she's spending time with isn't the book, either. I don't know if he might play some role in moving the story backs toward what's in the books. In the books, Alex visits Mars and he hangs out with Bobbie for a little bit, and helps her investigate the missing equipment (they don't sleep together, though, so maybe Bobbie is better off with this ex-marine).

 

[rah]

Only at ep2 so not sure about the rest but it does look like they're combining a few books into this season. Otherwise most of the other characters wouldn't have many scenes.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Now that you mention it, the books note characters doing that quite a lot, but I don't really see it in the show.

Miller did it in a few scenes and some of the extras do as well (like the prostitute teaching Miller's partner) but not the rest of them.

Only at ep2 so not sure about the rest but it does look like they're combining a few books into this season. Otherwise most of the other characters wouldn't have many scenes.

They sometimes feed-forward characters without dragging the rest of the other books with them. See Avasarala in season 1 and 2.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I guess I need to start watching the new episodes.