Is anybody else watching The Expanse?

this sucks i hate everything

;_;

Ask these good gentlemen anything tomorrow. ANYTHING. #TheExpanse @JamesSACorey @AbrahamHanover https://t.co/zGodpSdkiq

— Cara Gee (@CaraGeeeee) June 14, 2017

mark do i need to send a usb or something?

season two resolutely not appearing on netflix uk

;_;

that sucks

Reddit seems to think it's getting a worldwide Netflix release on July 7th

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/comments/6d13sh/expanse_season_2_uk_release_date/

Nog even volhouden! Seizoen 2 van The Expanse is vanaf 7 juli te zien op Netflix.

— Netflix NL & BE (@NetflixNL) May 21, 2017

apparently david straithairn is joining D'EXPANSE!!

niiiice. more people should really have watched Alphas

aka the only superhero thing from the last decade I kinda liked

I tried to watch Alphas but it was too much like Misfits of Science and I am no longer 7

oooh strathairn :D :D yay

How's the prose in the books?

SEASON TWO IS HERE ON UK NETFLIX

Your life has been improved

I'll be dead and never even see season 3, by the mark s + UK Netflix catch-up on The Expanse seasons rate. No wonder the torrents still reign!

https://techraptor.net/content/the-expanse-review-choose-wisely

Just finished S2

I love this. So gloomy and dark and claustrophobic, alienates 'earth' wonderfully. I feel more at home in cramped space tunnels than on earth after watching. Anderson Dawes is wonderful. I was reading a website about how real space rockets work before I watched this and like all the realness they put in.

Was a bit let down by the monster. It was a bit too blue and glowing. I think I'd have preferred something pale, naked and hairy.

The bits of bad acting don't seem to matter in this, unlike in the nu BSG. I like Gunny, her violence and her weary confused offense at everything around her. I have a mate who looks and behaves exactly like Amos.

In terms of a family tree it seems to connect with a lot of British vibes, Dr Who obviously but also with like, Bottom, Maid Marion, and Red Dwarf and 2000AD. And also with a certain something called Rogue Trader which I'm not sure I should admit to knowing about or liking but whatevs.

But it is also its own, new kind of thing and feels as though it's incidentally ticking my boxes whilst being something new?

The hybrid is a letdown but I think the episodes with it remind you of what works in good old B horror, it's the human reactions to it are what make it frightening and effective. I haven't read the books but I suspect it's better in prose form, like most monsters.

I think I agree with your last two sentences. Part of me would like to see this show get knocked off 3 different ways, like a CSI or L&O.

ok finished my first watch-thru (and finally read the whole thread): going straight back in when this ep of celebrity masterchef is over

i no longer hate everything

lol you guys have known all this for so long and yet i had unspoilered even miller's end (by the useful magic of being ancient and forgetful)

the end... OR IS IT

envisaging the planet venus sporting a huge hat made of protomolecule tipped at an irritating angle

lol

these ppl are very wasteful with whole moons

slightly unexpectedly miller just reminded me of my mum: "i hate space" was a phrase she once used when i was watching a documentary abt the solar system, an anathema that stayed with me bcz it's such a big and distant and kind of routinely unobtrusive thing to hate

anyway miller just said "god i hate space" -- he has more obvious reason to

it was a great moment

i miss the ol' scenery chewer, i do

TIME TO PLAY SQUASH

AND THEN A RAVE

holden is so boring

Yeah I didn't like the squash or the rave

There's always something a bit hokey about depictions of 'nightlife' in TV shows (apart from the Wire) and doubly so in space TV shows

the young guy whose music miller hated shd have been a 24th century wire reader and chin-stroker

Yeah what we've seen of the Expanse clubbing scene is all a bit contemporary white American college student naive 'rave' style.

I reckon Belters would listen to music made on bits of metal detritus found lying around and used as percussion, or that copied the ambient sounds of space stations. Or would consist of fragments of earth music they find a significance in that we wouldn't, like music from classic adverts or windows startup sounds. I dunno. Probably some rapping too, seeing as the bit where Dawes was giving a speech to the different OPA factions was more or less a toasting session. Mind you the program gives us enough worldbuilding that this conversation isn't entirely ridic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWO5Ai_a80M

Real belter music is the reactor hum

anus: "bombs away! always wanted to say that" (second sentence is quieter and smiling, almost more to self than others)
holden: "feels like we're covering up a crime" (wooden as ever)
anus: "yeah! that's feels exactly like that" (still quiet, still smiling, wonderingly to self)

^^^really liked this exchange

well, half of it

nice touch also when the nauvoo is launching away from wherever it was docked as a mormon cathedral, and all the little tug-drones* are peeling away from it, the animators took care that a couple of them get a little close to the flames of the thrusters -- i don't think they burn up, but there is a brief flare-up as if serious singeing is going on**

*i assume unmanned
**animation of relative scale of spacecraft seems much better this series

total digression -- and it's probably not the only other work that charts this territory -- but this story (of a catastrophic war between earth and elements of the colonised solar system) is also more or less the distant backdrop to samuel delany's TRITON

more relevantly maybe, a fvck of a lot of old-school quasi-hardcore hard-science nuts-and-bolts rocketships type 50s/60s SF -- the stuff that wasn't stars wars and wasn't the ballardian new wave -- was about how the science-which-we-didn't-understand was actually opening portals to magickal elvish realms

(i'm thinking colin kapp's "lambda-1" or donald malcolm's “beyond the reach of storms” and the like, maybe lewis padgett's "mimsy were the borogoves" -- which is abt fourth-dimensional logic rather than rockets)

so anyway

ps the miller-julie death-sex in eros aka magic blue elfland scene is interminable, they shd have played squash imo

I'm tempted to read the books, although I've heard the show really goes in some different directions. I am curious if they're going where I think they're going with the protomolecule!

One pretty wild science fiction idea is that long-distance space travel really sucks, so instead of sending a crew that terraforms a planet, why not use the same process on organic life you find. As in, you send some sort of technology that turns organic matter *into you*

wd they have let plant guy watch the spacing? i think probably no

"when the european tall ships first arrived in the new world, the natives couldn't even see them -- they were just too far outside their experience to comprehend"

a: usually hear this story abt australia rather than south america?
b: either way i don't believe it, not even slightly

you send some sort of technology that turns organic matter *into you*

Mild book spoiler: the protomolecule is indeed a colonial technology. But it doesn't turn the biomass it encounters into its maker. End spoiler.

The most plausible accounts I've read of human expansion to the stars involve nanotech Von Neumann probes, gossamer like light/microwave sails, travelling well below light speed, and reconstituting ecologies using stored genomic data.

Mormons wouldn't approve of this technology. They're really a perfect literary device for slowboating to the stars. I suspect the colonists on the Nauvoo would face a similar outcome to those of Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, probably the best space sci-fi I've read from the past decade.

wd they have let plant guy watch the spacing? i think probably no

If you feel oppressed by economically and technologically superior political entities, you probably assume others feel similarly. In contemporary ISIS videos, one can glimpse non-implicated locals in the audience.

maaaaybe -- i just think they'd hustle him away and not require him actually to watch, esp.as he started enacting that very intense goodbye, it makes a liability of him by needlessly heightening a possible conflict of loyalties?

suddenly realised at the end of S2 E13 that this is turning into CAPTAIN SCARLET :D

https://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/d/d2/Mysteronised.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20161009174122

One thing that is pleasing about the future as portrayed in the expanse is that very few things are voice activated and no computer has a voice. This is a future I’d be entirely comfortable with.

I know we’re not talking about the novels here, however I am pretty excited by Persepolis rising coming out in December and I’m just about to launch into a re-read of the preceding 6.

so it's possibly partly an expanse-expense-of-cgi issue driving this, but to me one of the great strengths of this telling of this story is the extent to which (one mass-spacing excepted)* large-scale horrors happen largely OFF-screen**, including the gradual revelation of what originally happened on eros, but also the wipe-out of draper's team -- of course it's about the effects (and the politics) of hiding things with massive effect and implication. but it helps us stay on the ground with the small crew and the various individuals that we haven't witnessed first-hand*** much either, it's creeping in on the viewers as an unsettling reveal (of a world-changing encounter and of the world-changing crime that immediately followed it)

*tho probably i've forgotten something that invalidates this post (i'm not including huge but distant explosions)
**sometimes just as ships blinking out of existence off of a radar
***not sure if "first-hand" is the right term for what viewers are seeing on-screen, but it isn't second-hand either

Still think budget/PG13 considerations forced them to eliminate the most impactful scene from Caliban's War. Gunny Draper watched as the protomonster tore through the UN and Martian marine patrols, in graphic detail.

if true than budget has underpinned a strength