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

If she does, she hasn't admitted it to herself yet.

She looked at her picture and made a face! Film editing 101!

yeah she knows now for sure

Just rewatched s1 - what stands out is how confident the season is, it knows exactly what it's doing with each character and where they're going.

Looking forward to revisiting s2 now (though I may skip the Danny/Karen scenes).

Grump. They way over invested in the Danny and Jimmy plots lines. There is more than enough interesting stuff to build the season without them taking up so much time.

To seandalai’s point, it feels like they lost confidence in what made the show great (minus Danny and Karen) in S1 and S2. Hopefully they can right the ship over last few episodes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DYyds9shCA

really wishing Danny would take his Draco Malfoy routine and go be on another show, just poof, disappear

And while we’re at it, send Jimmy back to theBad News Bears sequel from whence he came.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rui0hzN-EFE

this was fine (didn't even hate Jimmy) until evil Russians discussing MASSIVE UNEXPECTED TWIST right at the end

i mostly liked this ep

definitely inspired by the Apollo 13 #worktheproblem CO2 filter fix … but it’s a good device at this point in the season from a storytelling perspective bc it refocuses character strengths so you get to see Margo run shit, Dev using his engineering knowhow, Karen going back to her Astronaut Wife roots… plus i think it was great to dig into ancient history ie Danny as Shane’s best friend, Ed as Shane’s Dad, to reclarify their tension & relationship though obv a bit too melodramatic

the Russian reveal at the end was a bit too much though, like do we seriously have to do THIS storyline ugh

also i could give a shit about Ellen & Pam tbh but thats just me

Def better. First episode I felt a touch of empathy for the ne’er do well Stevens kids. ||agree with veg grrl’s likes and dislikes. Do any of the survivors know Danny f’ed everything up with the drill? So far the big secrets are still buried waiting for some explosives…||

Arg used discord hidden text formatting

lol

Yeah it occurs to me now (duh covid brain) that the only person who did know what Danny did, is dead. And I liked that nerd too.

That occurred to me too, unless there's some sort of mission data recorder that's logging all configurations.

Given the hab they were in was trashed, I suspect not.

And I liked that nerd too.

Rewatching s2 and young Nick Corrado is the nerdy astronaut who gives Tracy and Gordo the tour of Jamestown when they arrive.

The show is pretty good at callbacks; the fanmail to Tracy that Rossi showed Jimmy in s3 first featured in s1 as letters to the female astronauts when they were still in training

starting to have a feeling that Danny will survive s3 - the way these things usually work is that he will redeem himself and die in the process, but with no witnesses and his confession to Ed being interrupted, maybe he lives and has to learn to live with himself (pretty nervous about what that might be like to watch)

This episode was better at what the show does best, and increasingly sometimes just as silly as every other show that tries to do what this does best but does it worse. Which is to say: focus on space danger, don't get distracted by goofy melodrama! If we're dealing with life or death space situations all the time, that's more than enough suspense to not need scheming Russians, love triangles, etc. If that shit comes up, let it come up naturally, don't make it so, I don't know, TV-like.

Incidentally, why does it matter that the Russians know what they seem to know? They're all stuck on Mars for months and years, what are they going to do kidnap the space baby and raise it as a Russian in their corner of the habitat? It's kind of played for menace, but I'm not sure how menacing you can be stuck in a Mars box.

Points for this episode calling it a marsquake and not an earthquake, I guess.

You can sneak abortifacients into someone’s food/drink.

Oh, great, so is that going to be a subplot now, too?

Finished my s2 rewatch. It's definitely the 80s blockbuster version of FAM: compared to s1 they've turned up the action, the drama, the plot(holes) all the way. It just about hangs together and it's a hell of a ride - the final episode is so kinetic that even if I'd seen it before, it still felt like anything could happen.

(I did skip the Karen/Danny scenes)

You can see how you get to s3 from s2, just keep going along the same trajectory and lose sight of where you started.

Glad they didn't go with the hinted subplot re pregnancy, HOLY SHIT at the end of this episode.

wtf was that ending!

I was hoping Ellen would do the thing, aka the I'M GAY, Y'ALL speech at some point as I couldn't see this going into a drawn-out political clusterfuck

I mean, it will be that, but not probably not with her turning into Nixon

Though not without teasing us with some Watergate Greatest Hits first.

I know that largely speaking we're here for the spaceships but the emotional beats still got hard, even if some of it is a little undercooked.

But yeah this show has been spoiling us stupid with their endings this season.

With the twin towers appearing prominently behind every news clip, wondering if Jimmy or the truthers are going to do 9/11 at the beginning of the next series.

Also no one seems to have noticed the missing statue yet.

yeah wow @ that ending

i expect a great many things but i truly never expected that

lol I jokingly called it a second or two before the reveal! My wife was like, no way. And the show responded a moment later with: way!

this was an ok ep, good human drama (as opposed to silly human drama).

Yeah good drama. do we think the North Korean dude was sent up to Mars without a way back home Laika-style? He looked like he was on his own. And how did the eye in the sky on the Phoenix not spot their activity? But still cool twist

I imagine Phoenix wasn’t looking: they only knew the probe was there just before they went to find it because the Russians gave them the coordinates.

The Watergate-y subplot, can anyone clarify.

The original incriminating conversation was in the Oval Office right, not on the phone? Or am I misremembering?

So if they're reviewing the tape in the Oval Office, and there are mics are in the room, wouldn't it just get taped over again?

The incriminating conversation was taped in the Oval Office not on the phone. When they showed the portraits on the wall in show Oval Office pretty sure it was Nixon in the center flanked by Lincoln and Washington. And yeah listening back to their conversation would re-record it.

just got to the new episode now lol that was ridiculous

good parts of the episode:

- Pam watching TV
- "you're dead to me" after Bill does to Aleida what her boyfriend did in S2

agh meant to do hidden text not quotes but I guess it doesn't matter much

Ah, they should have played How Bizarre over the end of episode reveal imo.

*bump*

HOLY SHIT

But no post-credits flash-forward!

What do you mean?

Oh.

Curious to hear what the non-James posters think.

my review: mostly lol, kind of sad

One thing I meant to post about after my recent rewatch was the almost-totally-unexamined evocation of the colonisation of America as the precedent for space exploration...like I think literally once someone says "what about the Indians?" but it's all Lewis and Clark and the Mayflower and Jamestown and pioneer days. I get that it is totally how e.g. Gordo would see things but considering that attention to other aspects of social justice is a defining characteristic of the show it's pretty weird to put it in the season-closing monologues in S1 (by Ellen) and S3 (by Kelly).

the Margo exfiltration twist was ridiculous and totally out of established character (not to mention how did it even happen)

oh yeah Danny in space prison (with a halfheartedly buried gun nearby) also ridiculous

This season was okay, it feels like the excitement of the alt-history aspect has faded, not that they're not pursuing that line, obv, but maybe it's just not sustainable. I liked the cold-war-iness of the first season best.

If the whole Jimmy plot was just a device for the last episode, then ugh, that could have been so much better done, and the exact purpose of this weird cell of 'activists' should have been telegraphed a bit more clearly and could have been written with more genuine threat imho.