I come in peace... three times a night -- FOR ALL MANKIND (Apple TV Plus)

Also killing off Molly offscreen is kind of a dick move, though probably happened for budget reasons.

With efficient carbon dioxide scrubbers you can reuse your atmosphere for a long time. The ISS reuses its atmosphere repeatedly, it isn’t constantly supplied with big oxygen tanks.

More hints about s4.

https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/8/12/23301727/for-all-mankind-season-3-finale-joel-kinnaman-interview-apple-tv

I always thought the show was going to have a hard time introducing itself to the audience because it’s not until Season 3 that you really understand what the grander vision of the show is.

so happy that S3 revealed the true nature of the show :(

I get the sense that he may not be a good interview subject.

Wrenn Schmidt comes across as a much more thoughtful interviewee. I’d forgotten about the Werner von Braun plot in S1.

I had a long piece typed out that got fucked up, but I'll say I agree with "mostly lol, kind of sad."

But anyway:

So much of this season's finale, which was generally competent (acting/directing) was set in motion by so much silliness and stupidness and people being stupid in service of stupid television. Just totally contrived. It's a show about space and solving space problems. I don't need all this manufactured cliche drama.

Jimmy's whole subplot was dumb. Who hates NASA that much? Why? And we all know NASA security sucks, because look what this news van managed to bring in, and the stolen statue, but pistol whipping Jimmy in a crowded news scrum parking lot? Then tying him up? I mean, come on. There are dozens of reporters there with cameras etc.

And Karen, when she learns that something is clearly going on, when someone not Jimmy picks up the phone and she *sees it*, she ... doesn't get security?

I'm glad Ed put Danny in his place, again, finally saying out loud what we'd all say - "you think after that I'm going to put you in charge of something so important!?" - but space jail? Really? To what end? I'm not sure I want to watch a show with Danny and Jimmy still in it. Fuckin' Stevens kids.

And North Korean guy, how had he survived? Where did he get enough food? How was he planning to ever get home in the first place? Was the gun sent as a suicide failsafe? Anyway, it is now Chekov's gun, because for no good reason they conveniently buried it and marked where it was buried ... right next to the space jail. (How did Ed remember so much Korean several decades after his casual war exposure?)

Kelly ... who even cares about Kelly and her stupid space baby? She was dumb to even risk getting pregnant in the first place, and her flying through space was super dumb.

And Margo ... not only was escaping to Russia dumb (how?!?), but why would they smuggle her intel-connect boyfriend into America after learning he was the other anchor of a multi-year spy ring?

And so on.

Whoops. Spoilers ahoy!

("Sorry, don't know what went wrong." - me, and also the show's writers)

who hates government agencies? and what if they’re maybe hiding big things? maybe they’re a corporatist lesbian conspiracy! maybe one of the two

seriously though, man, “to even risk getting pregnant” like, space condoms are 100% magically and doing it in the space program isn’t hot?

have your experiences been like “yes earth wife, the condoms are tight and the time is right and we’re on earth so variables are ok”

Some of these are not questions needing asking:

And Margo ... not only was escaping to Russia dumb (how?!?), but why would they smuggle her intel-connect boyfriend into America after learning he was the other anchor of a multi-year spy ring?

Margo’s military contacts smuggled him in, who are seperate from the FBI, and so had no idea he was part of anything.

nd North Korean guy, how had he survived? Where did he get enough food? How was he planning to ever get home in the first place? Was the gun sent as a suicide failsafe?

He was the sole survivor if what was probably meant to be a multi-month 2-person mission, so had double the food he needed, and as for planning to get home, he obviously wasn’t (landing craft wrecked) hence the whole intending suicide thing. The gun was presumably included because 1. it was a traditional part of Soviet space kit (Gagarin had one on his first man in space flight) and 2. this is a history that has already had armed US/Soviet combat on the Moon, so who knows what would happen

When I saw Margo looking around her office then sitting down at the piano I was certain they were gonna find her in there at some point having taken her own life.

And Karen, when she learns that something is clearly going on, when someone not Jimmy picks up the phone and she *sees it*, she ... doesn't get security?

She does get security though? And then the guy triggers the bomb when he notices her doing so.

No she doesn't, iirc she gets that weird call from Jimmy, then she heads outside the building to look around, then she calls Jimmy back and sees the phone ring and young Josh Brolin pick it up and hang it up, then she goes to investigate, then she finds Jimmy in the back of the van, lets him out, then she gets security, then it blows up.

DOWN AND TO THE LEFT

I wonder if Moore and the other showrunners even understand why people liked season 1 and 2. There's a lot of interesting science drama (wait, there's more than enough buried water on Mars to bring down a cliffside? Helios' merging of their ship with the hotel) that previous seasons would have devoted more time to instead of Stevens brothers' bullshit. Felt like the North Korean plot was lifted from Arthur C. Clarke's 2010 Odyssey Two and bolted on here. Presumably everyone is supposed to remember that it was a piece of DPRK space hardware that damaged the hotel in the season opener and *irony alert* it's a piece of DPRK space hardware that brings everyone back.

In a way, sure. But I wonder if there will be a full-on Trump analog (with all the bullshit that goes with it) in the same way this was an Oklahoma Bombings one.

I'm guessing Season 4 will be a full-on Global War On Terror + 9/11 season as petrocrats who don't have lunar Helium-3 investment economies act out.

I don't think the ideas are that bad, you could have made a good season out of:
- Government and private initiatives compete to be first on Mars
- The stress of the Mars expedition stretches the astronauts to breaking point, and some do break
- Because of its dominant influence on the economy and culture, NASA becomes a focus of anti-government sentiment
- Margo realises she is in too deep with the Soviets and has to keep her head above water while dealing with all the above

But the execution didn't really work. The stories were underdeveloped or didn't make sense (the anti-NASA storyline went protest->stolen statue->bomb with pretty much no connection between them). Danny and Jimmy needed to be characters that we cared about (e.g. the Ellen storyline wasn't that great either but Ellen is a character I feel invested in so I enjoyed it).

Just started Season 1. If the last season has been bad, should i just give up now?

I suppose BSG got worse and wose from around the end of Season 3, but I'd still happily watch the first seasons

No, first two seasons are really good, and the third one is still competently made, just frustrating after the first two. Sort of like Battlestar Galactica, iirc.

first two seasons are fantastic, don’t hesitate to jump in

I thought season 2 was boring, but season 3 is awesome (finale aside).

pvmic lol

i just finished season 1 and thought it was excellent. we’ll probably keep it rolling until our free apple tv thing expires but i’d 100% endorse season 1.

will agree that seasons 1 and 2 are almost miraculously great television while season 3 feels like a different creative team took over and had two weeks to get some scripts in

Have to wonder what season 4 is going to be like.
It can be pretty gung ho even at its best. I guess anything to do with the US space programme may be a tad propagandistic about the underlying message of what America is supposed to be. & other people have mentioned that settler colonial message that keeps popping up in speeches throughout. But it does have a liberal side in the presence of women early on in the space programme and some black presence even if the main moneymaker guy is black & at least giving the surface level idea of egalitarianism in his workplace.
But keeping communist Russia as the bad guys after the point the Soviet Union ceased to be in the real world has some message to it surely.

Season 3 does move further away from real history than other things have. & the feel does change. Might have been better to have further exploration of motivation for some actions and wonder if suggestions of this were progressively written out or just plain skipped. I need to look further into Carbon dioxide scrubbers and in what circumstances they do and don't work and how much energy they need. I'm still stuck with it being odd that a person might survive that long in what must have been a damaged craft surely. Though it must be intact enough to be used for its final purpose. Though how convenient that is to the story seems to rankle a bit too.

Deciding what to do with the USSR seems like an important question - if communism still rules in the 2000s what does it look like? Keeping it basically the same as in the 1980s would be odd, Putin-like authoritarianism would match FAM's liking for sticking close to our timeline for inspiration (even if the dates would be off). Or they could just ignore it and just keep the Soviets as sneering adversaries without any texture.

So The Expanse starts in 2350 with a unified government on Earth and the Moon with competition from Mars and the Belters caught between. How we get from FAM in 1990s to whatever future comes 100+ years later would be a fascinating to explore. Like does FAM's space baby unify Russia & the US and head Earth down a path towards planetary government? The quick glimpse of Margo at the end of S3 suggests not. I guess we will get the story of early colonization of Mars. They didn't really deal with what's happening on the Moon in S3. Maybe they can keep the plot running for another 10 seasons to cover the whole 21st century. Current cast will need some serious make-up work lol.

Just caught up on this season the past week. The space race episodes were pretty strong and it got weaker when they got to Mars. The subplots were hit and miss - everything involving Jimmy totally terrible - and more leaning towards dramatic storylines you'd find on any show. Liked Ellen's story though. Dunno if anyone mentioned it but Kelly's rescue was also extremely similar to the movie The Martian, which... I imagine the writers must have realized, right? Weird they'd copy it so closely. Still a good season overall for me, ready for S4

It’s strange how little China figures into this show. Does the survival of the Soviet Union mean that China is somehow kept from rising?

well, in our timeline the chinese space program didn’t really hit their stride until after the most recent season of the show and I could see them waiting for their own independently-developed technology instead of buying last season’s soviet gear

It’s strange how little China figures into this show. Does the survival of the Soviet Union mean that China is somehow kept from rising?

In the beginning montage of season 3, episode 1 there's a newspaper headline with a clear "China set to open first moon base next month" headline dated 1987.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/for-all-mankind/images/0/0b/FAM_301_PressReview_20_China_Moon_Base.png

lol that's some attention to detail!

pvmic lol

Was this to me? lol I swear I'm not trying to be contrarian.

no we just often end up at opposite ends of the spectrum in tv viewing etc, i like it!

I know VG doesn’t like for me to mention other shows on this thread but I just came to say that I am currently getting a Gordo fix by watching Patriot for the first time.

i need to do that

It’s so good, some absolutely astonishing sequences, and he is great in it.

To muddy the waters further, his brother is played by the same actor who plays Ricken on Severance.

talented family!

Indeed. Syd Straw’s significant other is in it too.

When you’re ready, there is a Patriot thread since awesome shows should have a thread

Patriot on Amazon Prime: Let me Walk You Through Our Donnely Nut Spacing

Was wondering, thanks!

Ricken also is an Imam(?) on Ramy.

wait a fucking minute here

Gordo, like, Michael Dorman, is from fuckin NEW ZEALAND? 🤯

well his accent is on point bc i bought him as from Texas even back when i started & dnf Patriot

hat’s off

which reminds me i need to try that Joe Pickett show he’s starred in recently

Gordo, like, Michael Dorman, is from fuckin NEW ZEALAND? 🤯

He's in a great movie called "Triangle" where the entire rest of the cast is Australian, and they are all playing Americans. Weird to have an all Antipodean cast that's playing Americans.

talk of Gordo's new show reminded that (can't remember when reading thread ages if noted)

was amused by the fact that the biopic made about Gordo and Tracy starring Dennis Quaid & Meg Ryan means that regardless of the erasure of the film The Right Stuff in that timeline, Dennis Quaid still got to play an astronaut called Gordo
cosmic balance and all that