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

This is really good, says I after watching three episodes.

Real James is correct in his description.

Season 2 Gordo is a thing of beauty (beauty = sadness)

S1 = TOS cowboy/cowgirl lawlessness
S2 = TNG apex of bureaucratization (at least 2 episodes in)

As for Gordo: Damn this show for making me empathize with an ex-jock has-been!

oh when we were talking about fact v fiction

i forgot add for anyone who is unfamilliar, Molly Cobb’s character is based on aviator/Mercury legend & badass Jerrie Cobb (who rules) - S1E4 is dedicated to her

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrie_Cobb

The story about the big rocket at the very end of S1

Another weird fact vs. fiction which is a small S2 spoiler: Ellen Wilson seemed likely to be based on Sally Ride (particularly keeping her sexuality private), but then Sally Ride also becomes a character on the show!

This is so good, says I 1/3 of the way through S1.

:D

WVB stuff is incredibly well done imho

Probably didn't need to hide that, but who knows.

James: agreed -- I thought it a very important thing to show people who are urbane and charming were capable of being complicit in atrocities, and also the human cost of scientific progress.

S2: early on when Tracy eyes Danny all grown up, it was REALLY uncomfortable because of the smaller age difference between the actors.

Yes, at first I thought they were going to shy away from von Braun's past, but they really DID NOT

If I may go there, while there are some obligatory retro quotation marks, all the personal emotional relationship stuff is deeply, um, relatable, those quotation marks are not at all of the moronic ironic scary variety, as someone like our old friend Momus may have described them.

Feel like maybe that is TMI. We don’t talk about those things.

Houston, how long until that TMI?

can you re-state it in a less oblique way? sorry to be dim but idgi

Sorry I was obfuscating. Just feel like the characters aren't just stranded in their fate in the alternate timeline past. There is some bit of self-awareness in them under the uptightness. Which seems to have been done pretty carefully, so they seem both of their time but more up to date as well. I imagine this becomes more apparent later, I am only in the episode after "Hi, Bob." Don't know if I have explained any better this time around, sorry.

Maybe I just don’t watch enough tv these days and every show already does a good job of avoid this trap 🪤 I imagined while I was suffering from space isolation

Or, to paraphrase what I think JM said on this thread or maybe it was the other, I came for the tech fetish but stayed for the characters.

Okay, maybe I didn't want to go there, but I am especially relating to some of the stuff about being married and being a parent, the way it is handled.

the parenting / marriage stuff is so good, and it just gets more impressive/affecting/devastating as it goes

i know Moore only had a hand in writing a few episodes but careerwise his strength as a show runner & writer has always been his ability find the humanity in characters over beating you over the head w tech/concept

the writers are never so locked into the era/concept that they ever deny a character’s ability to respond like a human person

it’s a really underrated quality

i bawled my damn eyes out over s2e3, let alone s1 — will need tear duct surgery soon if they keep it up

Roger, VG, you are go on that TMI.

Showing the consequences on the characters' personal lives is a strong theme, and I think it's handled very well. Sci-fi as a genre doesn't have the best track record with it either

Watching this episode now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clvrPmTx4n4

Also wanted to say it was driving me crazy wondering who that actor was until I saw in the credits it was James Urbaniak.

So my ickiness at Tracy ogling Danny gets doubled down on in s2e7 when Danny kisses Karen.

Just you wait

Just finished S1. Now to see what this S2 is all about.

I get the impression that the creators of this show definitely watched Halt and Catch Fire. And it’s not just the parallel Gordons.

Just you wait

Hah ikr. Also, s2e8: THAT ENDING. OMFG talk about nightmare fuel.

S2E1 was kind of big adjustment for me but now getting into it

yeah its weird getting used to seeing Ed wuth a few extra pounds & riding a desk

I get the impression that the creators of this show definitely watched Halt and Catch Fire.

Another show I completely adored

wow yeah the gordos are definitely of a piece

Love this show, I feel one of the connections with Halt & Catch Fire is (for me) unfortunate and that's being a bit bashed over the head with seemingly unconnected period music, HEY it's the SIXTIES! Sitars!!! Jumping Jack Flash!!

Although that one Petula Clark song they chose was rad.

yeah some of the music cues have been kinda dumb

can’t remember which ep it was but early in season 1 i got in an argument w mr veg about a better song choice for one of the cues & he was basically like “why are u like this” lol

I would speculate that it could be because they're mixed way up and positioned in this slightly obnoxious, Good Morning Vietnam sorta fashion.

Fully expected Gimme Shelter to appear at some stage (well, S1 EP9), it's like the Helvetica of period film music.

love to hear what John Lennon would have thought about a moonbase

iirc that's what the song "Jealous Guy" is about

I didn’t get the burn right
And made you miss
The TLI

I didn’t want to burn fuel
Until the LOI

Finished S2. Generally, I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as S1, for the more bureaucratic orientation of the action, which was nearly all backloaded into the final 2-3 episodes, while all the melodramatic swerves were a little overwrought (the whole Karen/Danny thing was -_-). Even in episode 9, the maneuvering to set up the climactic finale felt heavy-handed, with some very unsubtle foreshadowing that made all the military characters seem like trigger-happy idiots, where every problem has a gun/missile solution. BUT -- jeeeeezis that finale turns things around. I'm not sure I buy Ed's sudden turnaround to fire on Sea Dragon, but the Stevenses? Right in the feels. However, the reveal that Sergei is being forced to try to turn Margo felt heavy-handed too, but I think that's my intense desire for a happy (or more accurately speaking bittersweet) ending.

Okay, settling into S2. Agree about some of the musical (mis)cues I guess, but it doesn't really bother me that much for the most part.

Lking some of the incidental original music though. Just heard some nice Philip Glass-style strings that seem to occur quite often, during an important discussion at the Baldwin house.

S2 Gordo reminds me of C or D: Emitt Rhodes?

The period music thing feels a little more toned down in S2.

yeah def

I feel like the cliche is that 70s period music lends gravitas, whereas 80s music does the opposite. I'm sure there are many counter examples to that (The Americans had a few), but that's my general impression as someone that watches way too much TV

focus instead on*

ILX TEXT

This season was annoying because if you reduce it down to a few sentences: a new East India Company is formed with NASA as the Royal Navy when asteroid 16 Psych is discovered. BTW, Margo defected - to me that sounds like it would be completely awesome - only it’s done all wrong.

I was disturbed to see Margo so far off her game. She’s one of the more interesting characters on television and her trajectory through this season was (quoting that's not my post) “gets jerked around by the plot.” Dani finally gets out of this too, but I have a question that better writing should have addressed.

What the hell is NASA now in 2003? Are we supposed to care about anything Eli Hobson says? I feel like so much time was wasted on stories that were either fake drama or another five second shot of Aleida looking worried. If this show was at all realistic, someone would have fragged Ed by episode 4.

I’m not joking about the East India Company nor what the hell NASA is now. Think of it as an analog of an unanswered question from Aliens What exactly is the relationship between the United States Colonial Marine Corps and Weyland-Yutani? If you look at it sideways, are these actually the good guys? Is the Kelly Baldwin plot just science washing? The CIA showed up there PDQ and could have easily owned the place if the plot would have let them. Just how much money is the M7 industrial complex spending on Mars that a proportionate black market that stooge Miles bottomfed on. Fuck that guy. I’m not joking about Ed - frag him.

Because I live near JPL and a life long fan of the robotic space program, just as in real life, the show has ignored anything w.r.t. the outer solar system. What I want for season 5 is for life/organics to be discovered on Enceladus, Helios responds by setting up a methane processing plant on Titan and hilarity ensues. We all know about Europa, attempt no landings there.

Rioting in this is handled as well as it was on nuGalactica and similarly I feel like FAM is stuck in one of malaise-era runs where you hope the payoff is worth the trudge.

ILX TEXT - now you all know what my IA Writer file name is.

I mean it’s a great marker

Too many dropped threads and the story couldn’t figure out which characters to highlight and when.

The only relief in the narrative was Margo getting her diplomatic immunity dropped, meaning she’d go to a US federal prison and not to whatever presumably grimmer fate she’d face back with the Soviets. The head of Roscosmos knew her own fate was screwed and it was nice she didn’t take everyone down with her.

The Helios staff far outnumbered everyone else on Mars, right?

Seemed that way. That just added to the frustrating hand-waviness of the season, since the installation of an invaluable resource on Mars would not have guaranteed security, rather, it would have likely done the opposite, provoking a complete military takeover, especially after how said Helios employees behaved.

I must have missed it, but what did the head of Roscosmos do wrong to earn implied punishment at home?

The attempt to send the asteroid to earth failed. Soviet chain of command just sends you to the gulag if your task fails and Margo was under her direct supervision and took the blame for the asteroid's diversion.

She would have been in deep shit even without the Margo angle, but with it, double deep shit

I didn’t get why Margo’s boss revoked her diplomatic immunity to let the Americans lock her up (and why this treated as a cruel act). Federal Superman beats the hell out of the KGB prison she was headed to if she goes back to the Soviet Union!

I think she liked her? But yeah, Margo macguyvering a gulag escape plan with her cellmate Boris Yeltsin next season would have been a better thing to look forward to than sad Elon Musk conquers Mars.

They very clumsily set up Margo as the new Werner. If we see her in the next season, it’s not going to be at NASA. Might make it out of federal prison and be stuck around a shabby apartment in the US

I don’t think it was set up as cruel, just that both she and Aleida realized she got a raw deal all around after Sergei clued her in that it was Irina who played him to begin with, and now that he’s been killed and Margo took one for the team she’s out of cards to play.

Sergei got the worst of it. Poor guy.

That entire conversation where Margo tried to draw a parallel between her choice and Werner was clumsy as fuck, though. The human misery she was willing to accept was… earth not getting a giant supply of iridium sooner rather than later? The fact she was getting busted?

So not watching this that I don’t even mind reading the thread for spoilers.

Hope I am not overstaying my welcome with these irrelevant comments, like I did when VG told me to take my COUNTERPART commentary elsewhere and I ended up starting a new thread.

irrelevant comments ~about this show~ are welcome lol

great job on making probably the least sympathetic group of rebels I've ever seen in a movie! who exactly were we supposed to be rooting for in that ending?

space

Yeah agree, Ed and gormless Miles were not heroes. That one dark haired woman was, but geez I cant even recall her name now so they didn't flesh her character out well. Dev was a cockhead Musk-lite. Dani was completely useless as a leader, frankly. I thought she'd come in and kick some arses but under her (despite her? who knows) everything went to hell.

I preferred this season over S3, except maybe the parts of S3 where they're racing to Mars. countless plotholes and dropped threads as you all have mentioned, and I can't blame anyone for giving up on this show, but I'm still enjoying the ride. finale as usual had me gripped. this show is basically turning into an Expanse prequel

great job on making probably the least sympathetic group of rebels I've ever seen in a movie! who exactly were we supposed to be rooting for in that ending?

Can't believe they spent the first two thirds of the season setting up the upstairs/downstairs union plot only to abandon it in 10 minutes in order to hatch a plot to make a zillionaire God of Mars.

If it was so easy to get that Mars glass back to Earth, why did it need to be a power struggle between the Russian guy and the dopey American? Also you want me to believe a bunch of Americans had been on Mars for 10 years without anyone thinking to try and send back Mars stuff to sell?!

Also lol at being able to smuggle a load of actual people to Mars. Surely weight is strictly regulated plus how would they even survive/eat etc during the six months (or whatever) it took to get there?

maybe oblique reference to
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91gKbMrXH+L._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

I'm 4 episodes into season 4 and am wondering what happened to this show, was it always this stupid, and if the rest of the season worth carrying on?

it wasn't and it isn't

Bail out now and read a recap or two. Your time is more valuable

After they strapped a preganant woman to the outside of a spaceship I kind of mentally checked out of this show but I watched it anyway haha.

Lol, pretty much yeah

Can someone explain why Sergei was killed? Obviously it must have been the Russians that did it, but the Roscosmos lady didn't know Sergei was talking to Margo and Aleida, so why would she have ordered the hit?

Think was because he defected and they didn’t know where he was until he shows up in Houston.

But no-one saw him in Houston except Margo and Aleida?

I thought she did know, including their plans to escape and operate a space burger program in bolivia, and Margo sussed that she had Sergei killed, which factored into Margo's "revenge"

I must have missed that, but I have no idea how she found out.

the show never actually comfirms margo ever successfully evaded her minders so maybe they knew everything from the beginning?

Never explained how they knew about Sergei but very likely they had Aleida's house bugged/monitored since Margo was regularly talking to her and going there. In fact, my wife and I thought it was a bit silly that Margo met him there, but there's a bunch of stuff in the season that doesn't make sense

Real mars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy_RPd0rblI

It looks way too terrestrial though! It's weird how the show fits my bad SF-addled concept of Mars more than real Mars.

Also the scene when Margo met Sergei outside a diner stretches credulity because she would never have been allowed there without her minders.