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

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

Starting to watch Triangle now, thanks. Seems to be a worthy addition to the thriller on a (sail)boat genre.

And good call about DQ.

I HAVE JUST REALISED GORDO WAS CHRISTIAN IN THE SECRET LIFE OF US WTF

lol this guy is full of surprises!

Right now I would watch this dude in anything.

= how i am feeling

plus he’s kinda hot? esp in patriot

I recently watched the whole of excellent/ridiculous crime show BANSHEE starring Anthony Starr, now on The Boys, and he's another NZer whose accent work is astonishing.

We are three episodes into For All Mankind and loving it.

Enjoy! First season especially is the most pleasantly surprised I've been with a show in years.

This show is so good. It's like Mad Men had it's DNA replaced by GLOW.

There are some things I roll my eyes at once in a while, but its relentlessly positive vibe has just won me over. Who wants to nitpick when we are exploring space?

Exactly

for real

Absolutely.

Man, Patriot is like watching a whole series based on “Hi Bob”/dinner club circuit Gordo.

haha that’s very true!

S1 E7-8. Holy shit, just devastating. What a show.

Haven't been giving episode by episode reaction here, but I'll just say this is one of my favorite shows I've ever seen. The ending of S1 was pretty amazing.

The S2 build up capped by the one-two punch of E9-10 was possibly even better. The end of episode 9 with the scene of the cosmonaut team climbing through the windows of Jamestown with AK-47s was just pure menace. And E10 was a masterclass in sustained tension even though I pretty much guessed the ending.

I like that the show does an excellent job of zigging when you think they are going to zag. I have noticed they like to really tease you by making you think a worse outcome is going to happen before pulling back, but they are so assured it works.

Also, did not realize how much soap opera there was going to be or how much I wouldn't actually mind. Like some sort of space . . . opera.

S3 E1 was the worst episode of the series by far. More ridiculous sentimental action in that one episode than in the previous two seasons. Felt like a later Game of Thrones episode. Hope the whole season isn't like this.

Makes me feel better that your reaction is very similar to the reaction many of us had to S3.

You couldn’t pay me to watch S3

It's not *that* bad. I'd watch it again if someone paid me.

Ha, yes, exactly.

I wish the show had done another season set in the early ’70s before time jumping. Aside from being more fond of that era than the 80s, I liked the show best when its alternate history wasn’t so fantastic. Also, when had more relation to its advertising as a show about women astronauts. I don’t find the new cast as compelling as the original, so not looking forward to them taking over as the timeline gets further from the first season.