That's great! Wonderful news!

A couple of years ago, @sixshooter recommended the TV show "For All Mankind" to me. I have finally gotten around to watching it.

This show is amazing. I was hooked from the very first scene of episode 1. Which, if you haven't seen it, is a spectacular emotional gut-punch. It reminded me a bit of how Battlestar Galactica opens with a terminal cancer diagnosis followed by nuclear war and mass genocide leading to the near-extinction of humankind, and that's just the first 30 minutes.

Then I noticed that Ronald D. Moore created it. And that makes complete sense.


Thank you, sir.

Have you watched "The Expanse"? Please do.

I have watched The Expanse through the end of Season 2, and am taking a pause from it.

To be honest, I am finding that show to be a bit tedious. Season 1 was quite good, but after that, it seems to have become more about just pushing the plot forward in spite of itself (Oceania has always been at war with Mars) and less about developing characters that make me actually care about them.

Thank you for articulating that so well. I had similar feelings about the addition of characters and the removal of others. The story arc is so expansive (ugh) that it does need to employ many moving parts.

I felt like I had to forgive many more writing flaws in the Battlestar Galactica series than in The Expanse.

Where is it playing? Thanks

Now that's interesting.

I'll admit that I view BSG through rose-tinted glasses, as it's been 15 years (wow) and it was really the very first show of its kind.

However, when I really apply my thinky-noodle, only one writing gaffe really still bugs me like a hangnail. And that, of course, is Starbuck.

Or... whatever the Starbuck-shaped-object which suddenly appeared several weeks after she was very much confirmed to have died by both eyewitness testimony and also clear, unmistakable video of her ship exploding, actually was. And they also found the remains of her dead body, strapped into the remains of her ship, at the crash site. Where she died. As a result of which, she was very definitely not alive anymore, and so the fact that she is presently standing next to you and talking about rivers and streams is most certainly cause for alarm.

Everyone, from the Old Man down to whoever mops the blood off of the deck after every assassination, was properly suspicious / paranoid / "BURN THE WITCH" after she first showed up.

But then a Bear McCreary cover of a Jimi Hendrix cover of a Bob Dylan song played, and suddenly no one thought she was the Space Chupacabra anymore. In fact, let's give her command of The Demetrius and let her go off and explore the galaxy, along with several of the main cast, according to what the voices in her head tell her to do. Oh, did we not mention the voices? Yeah, she's clearly fit for command.


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(It's tragic that McCreary was ultimately crushed to death under the weight of all of the awards which his music for that series won.)
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Compare that to:

The silent power-struggle between Adama and Cain.

The really quite intense rape and torture of Athena and PegaSix, both of whom were prisoners of war at the time and thus protected by whatever the Caprican version of the Geneva Conventions is.

The underlying theme of de-humanization of "the enemy," in order to allow such atrocities as the above to be committed by otherwise sane, reasonable, and law-abiding military officers.

Laura Roslin's swearing-in ceremony aboard Colonial Heavy 798 Colonial One, which was a frame-by-frame accurate homage to that of Lyndon Johnson aboard VC-137C SAM 26000 Air Force One after the death of president Kennedy.

Laura Roslin completely sacrificing her own sense of morality to throw an election, because she rightly feared that the consequences of Gaius Baltar being elected President would be catastrophic for the fleet.

Laura Roslin completely sacrificing her own sense of morality and directly ordering Adama to use a biological weapon to commit genocide against an entire humanoid species.

Fucking Gaius Baltar himself... I mean, that may be the most complex character ever written in all of TV. Which is even more amazing given that the 1978 version of him was such a flimsy, one-dimensional villain.

The breakdown of a seemingly utopian system of consensual self-governance into civil war.



With regard to For All Mankind, I watched S01E08 last night, and... Jesus Fucking Christ, this show is BRUTAL. They just killed the boy, and it looks as though Aleida is actually going to throw away everything she's accomplished because she's thinking with her hormones.

See, that's good storytelling. I'm actually getting kind of emotional over people who do not exist. They are merely photons thrown at a piece of reflective fabric which I have mounted on one wall of my house, and vibrations of air. But fucking Ron Moore has manipulated me into caring about them as though they were real people.

For All Mankind is brought to you by The Pirate Bay, and by a grant from the Archer Daniels Midland company. ADM: supermarket to the world.

Ask your doctor if The Pirate Bay is right for you.

How much of the country's or world's food supply needs to be controlled by one or two companies before people become concerned? I guess the answer is when they pull up to McStarbucks Bell and there's nothing to buy.

In all seriousness, I believe that you have called out the answer.

In 2020, we experienced a toilet paper shortage which was the result of a meme.

Of course, the shortage itself was still quite real.

But for the majority of those involved, it was merely an inconvenience.


Imagine a reality in which you open the faucet in your kitchen, and water does not come out. That's the tomorrow which the prepper folks envision.

I find it hard to imagine that any of them have the strength to effectively resist what would inevitably come after that.

The complaint I had about BSG was that the writing was "naturalistic". Rather than classic fiction, where the plot is structured to start out small scale and events gradually ratchet upwards in a series of steps all tying together into a cohesive whole at the climax, this is a writing style that tries to make a story seem more like real life. Lots of things happen, but many of them are of no long term consequence. They don't tie into the major plot, they don't have any larger point, they kind of just are.

There are a few authors who write SF this way -- Kim Stanley Robinson is a big one in novels (Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars) and it was a style they took on for BSG. I liked just about everything else about the series (*), but I hated that part of the writing. Sure, it's more like real life, but I'm not watching a TV show to see real life. I quit after a couple seasons (I think the episode where Starbuck fell into the gas giant was the last one I watched).

(* Well, except the music -- as cliche as it may be I'll take a John Williams-style orchestral piece over the percussion that dominated the BSG soundtrack.)

IMHO the best American SF TV series ever made is still Babylon 5.

--Ian

Now that is interesting to hear.

If I'm really going to analyze the show's writing at that level, then I would have to take issue with the very noticeable change in tenor during Season 2. To wit, they began shifting away from multi-episode storylines, and took a note from series such as Stark Trek, in which each individual episode is a completely standalone story.

The Farm. Final Cut, Epiphanies, Black Market, Scar...

None of them did anything detrimental to the overall continuity of the series, but stylistically, they broke out of a pattern which had been working very well. It seemed... lazy.

Season 3 restored the old formula, and it worked. By the some Season 4 finally happened, the whole thing was basically just one single story arc. And I really loved that.



You speak high praise of Babylon 5, which is one that I never really became interested in. Too much of the Monster of the Week club ala Star Trek.


Did you ever watch Firefly?

I absolutely loved Firefly. I maintain that it is the best series ever made. Cast chemistry was evident in every episode, and because of that, I don't think we'll ever see a decent return to that fictional universe.

You missed MY biggest complaint with the re-make of BSG: Starbuck was cast as a woman!

Dirk Benedict will always be the definitive "Starbuck" to me.

Hollywood now being "all PC" cast Katee Sackhoff in the role which would have been OK with me except that:
* she looked ridiculous when smoking a cigar like Dirk Benedict used to do in the role (they should have dropped that part of the role)
* the "filler" episode where she beat Apollo in the ring was unbelievable - if she was much "beefier", or was a martial arts expert then it was possible, but in what was essentially an all-out slug-fest between a male and female of similar size and training, unless she got a good shot in early, there's NO WAY that she could endure it longer than him.

There was a publicity shoot with Katee and Dirk during the BSG series and Katee said he spent the whole time hitting on her - Dirk Benedict was "the real Starbuck".

This is where I stopped, I didn't want to handle it past then. I've been considering it again since they are up to 4??? seasons now and the algorithm keeps suggesting it to me as the first thing to watch.

It's on Apple + which somehow we have access to. I think Ted Lasso when I think Apple +. There's also Foundation on there which was good the first season but I forgot most of the things that happened by the time the second season came around and I don't care about it now. Way too slow.

B5 had a bit of the "monster of the week" during the first season while they were doing character building, but it really started to accelerate into a continuous story by the second season. B5 was really the first US SF show to do the ongoing "story arc" thing, and once JMS showed that it was something people were interested in you started seeing season-long arcs show up in DS9.

One thing that is still fairly unique about B5 is that JMS structured it as a novel, where he had a plan for every season of it from the start. There were only ever going to be 5 seasons, after that the story was done. Most TV series don't go that far, they've basically just moved their interchangeable stories from being episode length to being season length. The US TV business model makes doing multi-season stories really hard, because you never know if you're going to get renewed or not. This actually hurt B5 as well, during season 4 there was a serious concern that the network funding it (PTEN) would go belly-up before they got season 5 out, so they moved a lot of the major arc story episodes from season 5 back into season 4. Ultimately they did get season 5, but it wound up feeling a bit lightweight compared to season 4 as a result.

No, I have not watched Firefly. I know it's good, but I didn't catch it when it was new and afterwards the fact that it's incomplete and will never BE completed meant that I was never terribly motivated to go back.

--Ian

Had to buy a new dishwasher today; the old one was shot. They just don't make 'em like they used to.

It was only 46 years old.

Impressive. I had to do mine last year; it was 33. To be fair, it was still working fine other than having recently blown a door spring.

Firefly was unique, and I doubt we'll ever see anything like it again.

In one sense, it was extremely campy. Literally the wild west, but with spaceships.

But in another sense, it was extremely grounded and realistic. Much like BSG, there were no laser weapons, no photon torpedoes, no force fields, and, crucially, no green aliens.

In that sense, I feel as though The Expanse is trying to copy the formula. But, for some reason, they're failing to make me really care about the characters. It's not something which I can describe in words, there's just some kind of magic potion which the writers of BSG and Firefly knew the recipe for, and the writers of The Expanse are trying to guess at.


It's like a joke I once heard. That airplanes have windows, and houses have windows, and yet most houses cannot fly. Thus, it's not the windows which are the crucial part in enabling flight, it must be something else...

Stop?

Hell, no.

It may be brutal, but that's what makes it engaging. The fact that that scene affected you emotionally means that they're doing an excellent job.

I mean, you didn't stop watching Bambi when the hunter shot its mother, did you?

I really liked The Expanse, but I'd read the book series first and perhaps that's why. It's a very good adaptation, but maybe you need the extra depth and context that comes from reading them first to appreciate it?

It's more Noir than Wild West though.

--Ian

First, snowmobiles have weird-looking crankshafts. That's not relevant here, but it's a fact which I just became aware of, and I feel the need to share that knowledge.


Perhaps the fact that I was not really much of a fan of the original BSG series biases my judgement in this regard, however I really had no problem with Katee Sackhoff being cast as Starbuck.

Yes, the cigar thing seemed... forced with her. But the writers quickly figured that out, and wrote it out of the story in a way which really amplified the hardship of scarcity being faced by the fleet as a whole. Something which the original series never addressed, incidentally.

(What, don't all airliners on Earth also get loaded with an infinite supply of toilet paper for the Paris to JFK route?)


Same as how they made Boxy quietly disappear after one very bad cameo.


Making that character female, in my opinion, made it possible for the whole "daddy issues and harsh, overbearing mother" storyline to exist. For reasons which I can't quite articulate, that would have felt awkward with a male character.

It also made possible the whole "sees Adama as a father figure, even though I'm directly responsible for the death of his son, who I was banging" angle.


In other words, they were able to give a whole lot of depth to that character, which Dirk Benedict never got the opportunity to explore.




Speaking of Apollo, try and convince me that Tom Zarek was not one of the best, most complex, most morally ambiguous villains ever written.


Go ahead, I'll wait.



https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...3276a49df6.png

I was not aware that The Expanse began as a book series. That may, in fact, explain a lot.

So, here's an interesting thing which I don't get to say every day.

I just received a notice from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (how cool of a name is that?) that we're about to get nailed by a severe geomagnetic storm over the weekend, and to expect stuff like satellites to potentially go apeshit.


Fucking climate change, it's even affecting the goddamn SUN now.

This is something which I find tremendously gratifying, and which I have a huge amount of respect for: When a showrunner has the courage and the dignity to deliberately bring the series to an end.

Think about some of the most highly-acclaimed TV series of the past few decades. Oz. The Sopranos. Six Feet Under. Breaking Bad. Better Call Saul. And, yes, Battlestar Galactica.

What's one thing they all had in common? They all ended. And they all ended spectacularly, with zero ambiguity about the fact that the story was FINISHED.


Now, think of some of the most tragically disappointing series. Firefly and Deadwood spring to mind immediately. Both were phenomenally well-written and brilliantly cast. And both were deprived the dignity of a proper ending.

Ironically, and this only just now occurred to me as I was writing that last sentence, Firefly and Deadwood also shared the somewhat unique experience of being resurrected long afterward in the form of a feature-length movie which ATTEMPTED to give them the closure which they deserved, but ultimately wound up being a disappointment.

A few other that I was disappointed in: The X-Files, Alias, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, and all for the same reason: they never had a plan for what to do next season. They plot out one season with a cliffhanger ending and no real plan for what to do next. They'd figure that out when/if they got renewed. You can get away with doing this once or twice, but ultimately the contradictions and inconsistencies pile up and it just gets stupid.

--Ian

It's interesting that you mention the X-files.

27 years ago, I was a college student, living in an apartment with two other pretty hardcore nerds. We collectively had purchased (and refurbished) an old rear-projection TV, as all three of us had a pretty serious hard-on for The X-Files. Never missed an episode.

It was during the season finale of 1997 (I think) that the local FOX affiliate suffered a transmitter failure which took them off the air, during like the last 10 minutes of the show.

Today, I'm an mid-level exec at a (very small) TV network. So I'm familiar with the sort of legal and contractual concerns which surround the airing of first-run-syndication programming.

As a tender youth, I did not have that understanding.

And yet WOGX actually got permission to re-air it. I found out years later from a friend who worked there that they had the actual B master tape shipped from network ops down to Gainesville, FL. They took out a full page ad in the local newspaper announcing the re-air, and re-broadcast the episode in its entirety the following week.

Why network didn't make a dub of it I can only assume was due to them being insanely paranoid about the distribution clauses of the contract. X-files was a big deal, financially, back then.



Today, as "the boss," I still carry that memory with me. It influences every major design decision which I make.

Because I never, EVER, want to be in the same position as the chief engineer back at that little Fox affiliate in northern Florida was in '97. I have no idea what the failure actually was, but I do know exactly how they felt when dealing with it.

I finished the last episode of Season 1 of For All Mankind tonight.

The first episode began with a spectacular gut-punch.

The last episode, the last five minutes of it in particular, were the emotional equivalent of spending that same amount of time in the ring with Mike Tyson.


This is seriously good storytelling.

A great place to visit when it's raining in central park*:


*assuming you prepay** for tickets of course

**minimum admission charge has gone up to $0.01. You used to be able to smile & nod and walk past the guy collecting 'tickets' to the confusion of those tourists who just waited in line to pay the suggested donation. I'm sure if it was $0 someone would write a bot to reserve all the tickets every day forever.

This is at the Natural History Museum?!

Jesus...

Well yeah, where else would have an exhibition of Hip-Hop jewelry?

​​​​​​​I was on streetview looking at the various entrances to determine my best course of entry when i saw way up above the main entrance a huge engraving about T.R. A few streetview images prior shows a nice statue out front that's now gone. Teddy conquering life with his native and african buddies is racist, so glad my kids wont be forced to experience it.
https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...140f7192f1.jpg

Goddamn...

It wasn't until this conversation that I became aware of the fact that the AMNH is a private organization, not funded by the gubment. As are MoMA, The Guggenheim, etc.

I don't know why I always assumed that these were state-funded entities. But I did.

So, I suppose that they can exercise whatever editorial judgement they like in terms of revisionism and pandering to the woke. But it still hurts to see.

To your earlier point, it was always kind of fun to just breeze right past the line of folks waiting to pay at the entrance. Fun fact: when I lived in Hoboken, I was about two blocks away from Carlo's, which by then had turned into a friggin' tourist attraction due to the popularity of the TV show. They had the same policy- flash a local ID to the bouncer and just breeze right in. They had phenomenal lobster tails there. (The pastry, not the crustacean.)

I used to love spending whole days at that place. (The museum, not the bakery.)

And also the churches. Loved just walking around inside the big, old churches during weekdays when they were nearly empty and quiet.

Actually, that reminds me of one specific church I stumbled upon in East Harlem, which was the exact opposite of quiet. I took a video:



I miss Manhattan so very much.