Is anybody else watching The Expanse?

the crew of the rossie are all also idealists sorta-kinda but not really inflected thru an official ideology? alex is martian and certainly has residual martian loyalties -- and can get riled up when martian stuff is dissed -- but i don't think he gives a stuff abt the project or what it represents

(his deep loyalty is to the rossie itself: at the close of s2 he has a very fireflyish speech abt "she's beat up but she'll fly right")

Can't read this thread until I catch up, but man is this show good—pacing, music, characters, themes, direction. I keep waiting for it to go south like Star Trek: Discovery or Battlestar Galactica, but it's as if the whole series had been created as a whole before airing, without a care in the world for whether it gets canceled.

I never thought of "gunny" as being derogatory? I thought it was a reference to common US military nicknames? Like calling a Lieutenant "El-Tee" -- you would call a Gunnery Sergeant "Gunny"?

And the Gunnery Sergeant would be "Gunny" to differentiate them from a Staff Sergeant or other Sergeant who would be "Sarge"?

outside this show: likely not derogatory much of the time (caveat: i have not served and have only encountered this term in the context of fictio)
within this show, as said by others at bobbie: often if not always somewhat sneering in my opinion

i dunno mark! i just watched S2E1 last night and bobbie's CO calls her that a couple of times and i never felt that. he is always kind to her and generous with his experience. i guess what people used to call 'paternal' (in a good way)

ooh i will go back and check that out

red kibble

the invention of mpbile phones were you can see the message from both sides is a great step forward for privacy and security

scene where alex thanks bobbie for saving everyone: when he calls her gunny it is (i entirely accept) not sneery

i do however think it's an index of how he hasn't yet clearly worked though his relationship to his martian loyalties (since he only recently nearly got the roci and the razorback seized by three very cross martian children)

the slingshot vessel which cones to grief in the ring is call y que, which is the equivalent of " so what" but of course translates as "and what" :D

many redditors want a full release of the not-yet-identified version of "highway star" that manéo jung-espinoza is playing before he does the kessel run in under 11 parsecs, some on the grounds that it slams more than the deep purple version

a low-key virtue of this high-key grebt series is that the TV news ppl watch now and then is evidently just as shitty as our own

(provoked into the observation by the moodly collage of holden and tbe ring, with the legend "james holden to visit the ring", which inspires manéo jung-espinoza ito lol do the same, but there's several earlier examples)

the encounter between drummer (and naomi) and klaes ashford (and diogo) is terrific, given that it's also largely exposition and introduction

ashford cracks me up every time he's on-screen, esp. his accent, which is more like a weird ironic riff on scotty in star trek than any of the other belters

(in general this is a thing i like abt the belter accent, that a good percentage of it is actually consciously performative on the part of the individual belter: as in "i am now going to speak in a totally fucked-up way that fucks you up, for piratey lulz bcz i am in fact a pirate")

Ashford sometimes spoke a bit like Papa Lazarou.

I'm a bit disappointed the Martians aren't given any kind of defining accent. The first few we ever met (Alex excepted probably) had a kind of Germanic thing going on which I thought was quite cool.

alex has an accent!

back to klaes ashford: when he's confiding with e.g. naomi he has almost no evident belter accent at all, of any kind, which is what i mean by "performative" -- it's like code-switching in the wrong direction, to position yrself

(i mean obviously since it's all being performed -- by david strathairn -- so it can't help but be "performative" but there's a self-conscious outsizeness to it being deliberately signalled. it's not necessarily fully realised but i think the idea is that accent is actually mostly political in this context, rather than "natural" if you see what i mean) (this may also explain mars?)

i like when ppl regain consciousness and their nose blood is floating in pretty little blobs in front of their face

what's the little fleet of baby bits and bobs that tags along with the nauvoo aka the behemoth, i don't remember this ever being explained? i mean self-built salvaged belter shit but is there a reason they need it like space navally, or whatever

question for readers of the book i guess

They're automated drones that act like tugs.

ah! ok

why are tugs needed at all times in deep space?

Because the Nauvoo wasn't outfitted with thrusters (it being a generation ship) and firing up its engines would've melted Tycho Station into space slag. Some neat details here, I don't think it's too spoilery: https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Tycho_Manufacturing_Accelerator_Tug

ah i get it, like external micro-steering :)

(aka tugs lol)

i was reading them more like the reaver ships in serenity, but i guess if you look carefully they all look the same

"lids on and load up"

alex has an accent!

Just like a Texas-y accent though no? None of them have a wacky made up space accent like the Belters.

the all-blue protomolecule room inside the nucleus inside the ring reminds me (inexplicably, given the colour scheme) of cult 1957 east german TV fairytale the singing, ringing tree

http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/spotlights/2007/rtuk_obscura_0803.jpg

actually there's quite a lot of blue there i guess

here's the entire thing (which i haven't seen since the night thatcher resigned lol)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhVFcy4ZMIg

yes that's true chap, but in my (evolving) theory, belter-speech isn't so much an accent as a syncretic urchinspeak patois* unrolled as a political act of defiance and subversion: mars was officially settled (in discrete communities which largely retained their speech-of-arrival even despite the fight for independence) whereas the belterworld is much more fluid and piratical and marginal and etc

also in dramatic terms it makes sense for earth and mars to be on a level language-wise for the big set pieces, which a third accent would probably fuck with

(also lol belterspeak being extremely unstable of manifestation is acceptable in one made-up way of speech if you can give it a rationale -- if that's what i'm even doing -- but i think two of them would tend to suck a bit) (a LOT)

and getting the mars one to be stable wd just end up annoying

for me the true Martian accent is Bobbie's Australian one. i kind of pretend everyone else has one. making the best of an inhospitable desert world.

dude it's NZ-samoan

DAMMIT

shohreh aghdashloo meanwhile has a BA in international relations from brunel

i still think it's weird how quickly she became a good guy given that we saw her literally torturing a belter in person in S1

brunel's very well regarded

"regrowing a spinal cord is a delicate procedure even under the best circumstances"

trudat!

Alex comes from mariner valley which was colonised by Texans and Indians so he has the classic mariner valley drawl. The writers make a big deal of this in the books.

Bobby is from Londres Nova which clearly doesn’t have a distinctive accent because I’m not sure it is mentioned once.

nu-coquenie

if you bear in mind what's happening w/her spine, drummer's mini-waldo in the final ep of s3 is as bad-ass as ripley's in the finale of aliens

I like the way this show has an arse-kicking grandmother with a voice like razorblades, and it makes perfect sense.

finished my rewatch of the expanse s1-s3, now rewatching the singing ringing tree for the first time in 29 years just in case it's relevant expanded universe material

Belterese is a creole of a bunch of different languages, so of course they're not going to speak like Holden or Alex.

the books go into the origins and syntax of Belterese -- but yeah, it works really well in the context of the show because it can sound credible spoken by actors with wildly disparate accents.

i think my added point also works onscreen which is that density of irl marginal accent in fast-changing multicultural contexts is often an in-the-moment political decision of codeswitching: you deepen or soften the weirdness and the threat -- the refusal to communicate merely politely and helpfully -- by choice depending on who yr talking to and how. this is a dimension you'd probably omit in a book in the actual dialogue (you might mention it in descriptions of the dialogue), but it's something inventive actors can have fun with, and that's going on here

errinwright is one of most deliciously hatable baddies in the history of tv

a few thoughts on S2:

- plowing the nauvoo into eros is so awesomely bonkers. the very implausibility of it makes concrete the stakes of what would happen if eros is allowed to continue. extremely strange however that it's now "unguarded" given its importance to jp mao and by extension to errinwright? and presumably mars knows how important it is given what happened on phoebe?

in any case the speed with which a skeptical holden agrees to the nauvoo plan is pretty whiplashy! he goes from never wanting to see miller again to partnering up with him on the hijacking of a multitrillion pound spaceship and scuppering the most ambitious migration attempt ever attempted in human history. he grits his teeth real good for a second. and naomi's basically like - I'm down for whatever!

- the roci crew decides to annihilate the médecins sans frontières dudes. good scene. tense. but like GUYS THE DEBRIS. did they not think of it?? if they'd played those cards slightly differently, diogo's nuke is fine and miller comes back. they fucked up big time!! but nobody ever says sorry.

- speaking of miller and his nuke, he seems to have had a real death wish this whole time. he volunteers for spin station boarding duty, then for the nuke planting spacewalk, then takes the fritzing nuke from diogo. fine, buddy. but then in E4, once the nauvoo's missed eros, suddenly he's like hey guys, you want to get me off this rock? what, NOW??

and this is nitpicky but i thought nuking eros would spread protomolecule all over the system in a million tiny pieces (TM james frey)

in s4 the roci goes off through a supplied wormhole to a far-off galaxy where they encounter the deep descendents of the nauvoo 2, who have added to the tales of their religion told over tens if not hundreds of generations a great deal of cross detail abt these ARSE HOLES who ripped them off back in the old solar system days, and now (unexpectedly) a reckoning can come!

(ok i think there's a glitch in this plot timewise but handwave handwave alien protomolecule alien ideas handwave handwave there i fixed it)

lol extremely down for that