Is anybody else watching The Expanse?

also cool to know that there will be an S5, thanks

lol yes, basically the future looks like Gary, Indiana.

If S5 is based on Book 5, then damn .... looking forward to that for sure

My guess:

Season 4 will be book 4 + the Bobbie Mars novella + Sol system background from books 5 and 7.

Season 5 will be the arc from books 5-6.

Season 6 will be the arc from books 7-8.

Season 7 will be the forthcoming book 9 (the confrontation with the what fans are calling the Goths), plus a healthy amount of denouement.

plant guy
"half the station's in ruins, infrastructure's smashed.. how are we supposed to find anyone there?"

alex
"the first step is getting there. we'll leave the Somnabulist once we dock and then we'll mingle with the locals"

plant guy
"and then?"

alex
"and then we'll assess the situation"

plant guy
"are your plans always this vague?"

amos
"this is about average"

except amos plays the punchline like he's proud of average which is like punchline 2.0

His name is Praxidike Meng, and he deserves more respect.

one of my all-time favourite characters but they barely know him at this point - they actually call him 'plant guy'!

I was kinda more mocking the authors, there...

ok! certainly did not intend disrespect. but i never knew his name was praxidike so thank you.

they call him Prax fwiw

when bobbie lays eyes on those cucumber sandwiches in jules pierre-mao's luxury cruiser

<3

s3e1 is just so good.

- avsarala's security guy is hot
- drummer doing upside-down chin-ups with a visibly bleeding abdomen
- drummer's full-body revulsion at johnson's revelation that he volunteered the existence of the protomolecule to dawes. every lines drips with disgust. (tho there's a scene in s2 where it's implied they used to have a relship.. hmm)
- drummer is reminded of the existence of naomi. '-bitch.'
- despite their sophisticated electronic navigational systems johnson/gee's command centre is festooned with neatly hand-drawn equations and notes on orbits and telemetry
- that said the spaceships are not really as crud-punk as some people make out
- the escape from pierre-mao's spaceship is sensational. a set piece that not only spans episodes, but seasons - and thoroughly worth it. the mech suit. the esprit de corps. sometimes it's a pleasure just watching people you admire (and even people you don't) working out how to wriggle free from a bad situation. trying every door, having every door slam in their face. now what?
- s2 was full of moments for amos - some weird, some suddenly profound, some no more than a pause held a moment too long. feel like alex now is like OK I get a backstory goddammit! i have softened towards alex, the big galoot, but i'm not sure i needed his guilty, pathetic call back home. just when i was warming toward ya kid. turns out you're kindof an asshole. iirc his wife calls back in a later episode and is like "hi alex. sorry, i've moved on. BYEEE!' which makes me kinda feel for him here. but not really. she's right.
- after the Tycho vs Io power struggle i feel like Naomi wants to say, 'well, could you drop me off?'
- Avsarala's bodyguard has an emotional moment prior to Avsarala's escape with Bobbie in the racing skiff. He turns to Bobbie. 'good work, Marine.' without hesitation Bobbie replies 'same to you, spy!'
- 'Hitch your tits and pucker up, it's time to peel the paint!'
- 'Brace for impact!' Bobbie i appreciate the consideration but we're at 6G suckin juice, i can't do much more than i'm doing right now

security guy = 'cotyar' i have just discovered. the wonders of subtitles! the actor's from beirut.

we need a gallery of Bobbie's reaction shots when she tries new food - the 'red kibble' face was priceless

"if this is one of your 'teaching moments' i'd prefer to bleed out in silence"

i am enjoying the hell out of this!!!

reading thru this thread it finally twigged -- the handball scene with drummer and naomi could be a lil nod to this gem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outland_(film)

I just ordered a Blu-Ray of Outland; will watch for anything that makes me think of The Expanse.

ha I haven't seen it since I was a teenager, I hope it holds up

btw how is jared harris's ridiculous mashup accent so entertaining and energetic and david strathairn's such a mess? you hate to see it.

Harris' sounds like a real, albeit ridiculous, accent; Strathairn just sounds like a bloke doing a silly voice...

And also a bit like Papa Lazarou:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHdcP-WxSRE

they're both extremely good not bad, you're not allowed to carry on watching if you diss the endless mutability of full-on belter codeshifting

it's almost as if you want their accents to wear UNIFORMS

"in this fucked up alien place, we're all on the same side"

drummer re-growing her own spine through force of will while getting around on jerry-built mech legs is some hardcore next ish

code beratna abort

yes that took me 24 hours

been thinking about mark's post, about what i think is my fave aspect of the show:

i don't find this surprising or unconvincing, it's part of their world -- yes of course they know in their bones lots of stuff i have a v dim grasp of at best -- but the show is i think very good abt getting across the mind-expansive* element of this newer layer of technical knowledge, even as they're showing basically p ordinary people who've mastered it (alex is an excellent space pilot but he's not a marvel superhero). so we get the high-speed mastered competence but also retain a sense of the OMIGOD WOW cultural effect it's going to be having

a LOT of onscreen SF is not actually that good at bringing these two wings of SF into such intimate working contact? (except sometimes conceptually sometimes, like with the stunt eps of o/g stark trek where the alien is an omnipotent baby or all the people on a planet are under the age of 10 or whatever). but i'm talking abt a different kind of juxtaposition of ordinary and extraordinary: like we can actually get a sense of it in the fingertips of these ppl, even if some of them are basically twerps like the Xtreme rockhopper-racer -- they have casual physical dominion over a space and its technics that we can currently only dab it on diagrams, but this show is good at getting across a (of course faked) sense of what might be practical; and routine and even tiresome abt such mastery, without masking what we find startling

lol i need to go to bed, i don't think this is any clearer at all

*blimey i think i just twigged something

― mark s, Monday, July 8, 2019 5:45 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

i realized in watching this that i was dimly aware of some of the technical underpinnings here from gaming. gnarly dry stuff like GURPS Space and Transhuman Space that of course i never played. accel/deceleration & spin gravity, how the captured atmospheres work, some solar geography, why the ship weapons all seem sort of primitive (no lasers), the effects of low-g on the human frame -- even gestation is brought up at one point? people like having their babies on ganymede?

i wonder where, if not for games, this body of factoids would be kept? i'm really unfamiliar with hard sf discourse otherwise. it all flows upward: basic physics implies the engineering which implies the political economy. at least, that's the refreshingly dorky seduction of it. since it's "real" they can get down to character, conspiracies, hats, accents. i've found recent high-concept scifi stuff like black mirror less interesting

ok maybe the space thrusters are not real, the amount of energy involved there is like big, right

i think it's essentially the equiv of releasing a fire extinguisher - just using controlled depressurisatons of stored gases (which is why they don't show up in radar)

er no I meant the big g-inducing drives for interplanetary travel.

which are, interestingly, given their own origin story in flashback! one of 3 things to get one iirc, along with Fred Johnson's war crime and the Mao family dynamic

I can’t remember if it’s mentioned in the show but in the books, which I just started, they explain the origin of the unfortunately-named Epstein drive

I have trouble separating the books from the show but fairly sure there was a sequence in one episode that showed Epstein in his ship and unable to reach the non voice-activated controls due to the g-forces involved.

there was

that was the origin story of the drive!

thankfully he left the schematics behind, because his test journey was a one-way trip

in the show the flashback is narrated by epstein himself, which lends an odd effect once you realise he is speaking from the great beyond

the expanse, if you will

The first person narration makes more sense in the written context. The novels, and anciliary novellas like "Drive", all have viewpoint characters (which rotate in the novels).

Wise for most of the broadcast series to avoid this, as it would be 30 hours of voiceover ala the studio cut of Blade Runner.

there's a rotation of viewpoint characters, but I believe everything I've read so far is second person perspective. not omniscient, although there's enough overlap between chapters to provide a preview of what's about to happen before they rotate

it's like Game of Thrones that way

second person perspective

Third person, surely?

hmm yes, not sure how I thought "third" and typed "second"

Miller? MILLER!!

coupla tidbits from wiki

"Ty Franck began developing the world of The Expanse initially as the setting for a MMORPG and, after a number of years, for a tabletop roleplaying game. Daniel Abraham, who had authored a number of novels on his own, suggested, given the depth of the setting, that it could serve for the basis for a series of novels. "People who write books don't do this much research", Abraham has said."

"Franck writes all the Holden, Bobbie and Anna chapters, while Abraham writes the Miller, Melba, Avasarala, Bull and Prax chapters."

"You don't sa-sa nothing--me crush ass to dust!" lmao

My only complaint is that a lot of the character arcs and dialogue in the finale seemed off. Ashford in particular, I get that they were trying to make him a noble antagonist but but it really seemed to come out of nowhere. And Melba, whose storyline has always seemed kinda dumb tbh, asking a stranger if one good deed will make up for a lifetime of bad choices was just awful writing and totally unnecessary.

JoeStork i found myself agreeing with this once I finally got to the last episode on my rewatch last night. It's extremely weird that these things happen in this sequence:

1) ashford and drummer have a profound near-death experience together, where each is willing to sacrifice their lives for the other
2) once holden's plan to turn off all the ship drives is hatched, they immediately consider ashford the enemy - they don't even bother trying to explain it to him
3) and this is BEFORE they even know of ashford's plan to turn the comms laser into a giant knife.

the less said about melba the better. though i would appreciate knowing where her intermittent superstrength / ham-mode comes from? i don't recall it being explained

it is explained fairly quickly -- her powers come from these glandular modifications(?) which is in keeping with the sci-fi biotech being used for sketchy purposes that figured more in the first season.

The “Pinus Contorta”? Haha

I'm so happy I watched this show. This is right up next to tng as my favorite science fiction TV ever.

Way better than TNG! (I'm not particularly a Trek fan)

i've only started watching this (which is to say I binged all the way through the second episode of season 2) and it's really impressive. The plotting is maybe the most impressive part thus far, but the acting is mostly really good as well. Thomas Jane is great and makes for a really fine antihero/detective in over his head/asshole with a heart of gold. The character walks a fine line between understanding why most other people think he's a dick but also why he's an extremely good guy who is covering up the fact he's damaged goods. Shohreh Aghdashloo just completely owns.

What's most impressive though i think is the sense of a fully populated system -- to cite a recent example, Game of Thrones had multiple episodes taking place in a city of a million people and it felt like there were a couple thousands people at most in the entire place (vs earlier seasons, where the filmmaking was crafty enough to use less scope to hint at a more populated world). And the entire world of Westeros just felt sparsely populated, like an empty game board upon which you moved around the pieces that were main characters until half of them were gone, collected by your opponent. But here, even with a much lower budget, you get the real sense of humanity having spread out. And I appreciate the limited reach of the story; they've only gone so far into the solar system, but not beyond (at least at this point that seems to be the case). I'm sure it's been pointed out previously but it makes life in space look like a real chore, you can see how easy people have it just living a life on earth vs the strain of trying to be merely normal on an asteroid or Mars.