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Fututor Magnus posted:so earth is the only place with 300+ year old elite with an incredible amount of power? is it because the colonized worlds aren't old enough for their elites to approach the same age as earth meths? Possibly, there's a passage in the book where Kovacs is suddenly struck by how ancient everything feels in the Bancroft residence and it sort of unnerves him. There's a lot of remarks about how old and rundown Earth feels.
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Feb 10, 2018 00:13
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FuriousGeorge posted:Possibly, there's a passage in the book where Kovacs is suddenly struck by how ancient everything feels in the Bancroft residence and it sort of unnerves him. There's a lot of remarks about how old and rundown Earth feels. The other thing is that in the books, Kovacs wasn’t in storage for 250 years. That’s about how long the entire trilogy takes place over. He’d been on ice for like eight days between that first shootout and being resleeved in Altered Carbon. I think they made it longer so viewers would get the fish out of water aspect better.
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Feb 10, 2018 00:15
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Fututor Magnus posted:so earth is the only place with 300+ year old elite with an incredible amount of power? is it because the colonized worlds aren't old enough for their elites to approach the same age as earth meths? Book stuff: So, basically in the system protectorate/colonized worlds, there is no real democracy. There is window dressing to one degree or another, enforced by the occasional prole rampage which starts with riots, gets some wealthy members of the Oligarchy having their stacks fed to the EMP, and always ALWAYS ends with the Envoys and Protectorate stomping all over both sides, reestablishing the local oligarchy in some fashion and saying “don’t make us come back.” The oligarchs are all meths, they just don’t call them that because Christianity isn’t particularly wide-spread off Earth. Earth seems like it has a little more in the way of actual political power and a pretense of representative government amongst the lower class than say Harlan’s World does. The law enforcement on the World explicitly works for the oligarchy, so there wouldn’t be any bribing of cops or back talk from Ortega on Harlan’s World. The Unsettlement kicked off amongst the proles on Harlan’s World and Quell was a huge factor there, both as a revolutionary philosopher and a guerrilla leader/general. The fighting eventually made one of the major continents mostly uninhabitable due to large numbers of AI driven war machines. It’s never said explicitly but the normal “bombardment from orbit” tactics don’t work on Harlan’s World because the Martian defense satellites still work, are uncontrollable, and blow anything bigger than a small hang-glider out of the sky at like 100 meters. That’s why Kovacs mentions that “we don’t go off the ground much where I’m from.” Quell was eventually defeated, but enough concessions were wrung out of the Harlan family that life became tolerable enough for the proles that the revolution fizzled out when she died. The Envoys, iirc, were created as a response to Quellism, which, as a philosophy keeps cropping up and causing problems.
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Feb 10, 2018 00:24
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Harlan’s is more ruling dynasty than meths. The orbitals only blast advanced craft, you can use helicopters there, but jets are out. (That reminds me, were the (ep7) red lasers on the ship with rei and quell supposed to be angelfire lining up? Woken Furies also takes place like 250 years after Altered Carbon, so setting details there arent really one to one when it comes to advances.
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Feb 10, 2018 00:42
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Also the whole thing about space exploration is bunk. One of the things that WAS Martian-related is how the Protectorate has so many worlds; they found Martian starcharts. There was no blind exploration of deep space, they had the guarantee of habitable worlds waiting for them on the other end of the trip.Ugly In The Morning posted:Harlan’s is more ruling dynasty than meths. The orbitals only blast advanced craft, you can use helicopters there, but jets are out. (That reminds me, were the (ep7) red lasers on the ship with rei and quell supposed to be angelfire lining up? Nobody knows what the targeting tolerances are, they just know that micro-lite helicopters usually aren't it. Even then, you need to be nigh-suicidial to trust in one not getting lit up by angelfire. Also the worlds aren't all Oligarch-ruled. Latimer wasn't. All the Protectorate cares is that it's a stable pro-Protectorate regime with the general threat of Don't Make Us Come Over There. Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Feb 10, 2018 |
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Feb 10, 2018 01:03
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navyjack posted:The Envoys, iirc, were created as a response to Quellism, which, as a philosophy keeps cropping up and causing problems. I don't think that's right -- my recollection is the Envoys are a UN thing that predates Quell, and are basically created to deal with the problem of governing colonies on the former Martian worlds that humanity settles, where you can needlecast in data to fill a stack and sleeve troops right away, but to send actual trips on a ship would take generations. There's a part early in the book where Kovacs explains it to Bancroft: "Space, to use a cliché, is big. The closest of the Settled Worlds is fifty light years out from Earth. The most far-flung four times that distance, and some of the Colony transports are still going. If some maniac starts rattling tactical nukes, or some other biosphere-threatening toys, what are you going to do? You can transmit the information, via hyperspatial needlecast, so close to instantaneously that scientists are still arguing about the terminology but that, to quote Quellcrist Falconer, deploys no bloody divisions. Even if you launched a troop carrier the moment the poo poo hit the fan, the marines would be arriving just in time to quiz the grandchildren of whoever won. That’s no way to run a Protectorate. OK, you can digitise and freight the minds of a crack combat team. It’s been a long time since weight of numbers counted for much in a war, and most of the military victories of the last half millennium have been won by small, mobile guerrilla forces. You can even decant your crack d.h.f. soldiers directly into sleeves with combat conditioning, jacked-up nervous systems and steroid built bodies. Then what do you do? They’re in bodies they don’t know, on a world they don’t know, fighting for one bunch of total strangers against another bunch of total strangers over causes they’ve probably never even heard of and certainly don’t understand. The climate is different, the language and culture is different, the wildlife and vegetation is different, the atmosphere is different. poo poo, even the gravity is different. They know nothing, and even if you download them with implanted local knowledge, it’s a massive amount of information to assimilate at a time when they’re likely to be fighting for their lives within hours of sleeving. That’s where you get the Envoy Corps." So my understanding is the Envoy Corps are developed because of the realities of the colonial worlds and the availability of the stack/sleeve and needlecast technologies. Quell is a Harlan's World revolutionary -- and she's certainly presented in the book as being interested in smashing the local governing system in ways that makes the Protectorate antsy -- but it doesn't seem to me that the UN creates the Envoys to deal with Quell. I say this having only read the books, and not yet having tried out the show, but everything I've read here about the changes they made to what the Envoys are, who Quell was, and how stacks works sounds really weird, and not great compared to the books, and if Morgan was on board with all, it makes me think that the things I enjoy and think are important in the books must be totally different than what he thinks.
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Feb 10, 2018 01:06
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Neddy Seagoon posted:VR time is expensive. Why spin up someone when you can just store them on the cheap for a century. That's my point! Agh you guys keep picking a random comment to reply to ignoring the context of what I've been talking about. You keep thinking I'm asking a basic question but I'm trying to dig into a deeper problem. There's constant contradictions in this show like the writers can't keep poo poo straight and you guys are so busy just getting the basics you don't seem to notice the implications. Once again, people in prison generally aren't punished because they aren't spun up, because its expensive. That's exactly what I was driving at. That's what I keep saying! So prison is generally meaningless. You'd think, even if expensive, they'd make an exception for a terrorist. If Kovacs isn't put into some hell virtual reality as punishment, that means nobody is. That means you're just a stack. Which means you're the same as old people or poor people, there is nothing punitive about prison. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Feb 10, 2018 |
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Feb 10, 2018 01:18
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McCoy Pauley posted:So my understanding is the Envoy Corps are developed because of the realities of the colonial worlds and the availability of the stack/sleeve and needlecast technologies. Quell is a Harlan's World revolutionary -- and she's certainly presented in the book as being interested in smashing the local governing system in ways that makes the Protectorate antsy -- but it doesn't seem to me that the UN creates the Envoys to deal with Quell. I swear blind one of the books, I can't remember which, mentions that the Envoys came after Quell (and not due to her), because the Unsettlement would've been over very fast if they had existed. Also my bet would be that Morgan was just happy to have Altered Carbon adapted in any form, after seventeen years of it being optioned. Zaphod42 posted:Once again, people in prison generally aren't punished because they aren't spun up, because its expensive. That's exactly what I was driving at. That's what I keep saying! So prison is generally meaningless. The punishment comes from losing all connection to your former world. Family and friends have moved on or gone, society changes, you lose everything. Least of all your sleeve. Especially if you do a century or two. Old people aren't doing it for fun, they're willingly going into non-existence rather than endure the strain of another lifespan. Poor people don't go into Storage for no reason though, I dunno how you got that one. It's also because the writers can't think beyond their adaption changes to their repercussion on the rest of the story, and Kovacs was just a petty Ex-Envoy criminal in the books; They nailed him for a heist, shot him in his apartment, and he went into Storage before Bancroft leased him out with a shitload of money. Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Feb 10, 2018 |
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Feb 10, 2018 01:22
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Fututor Magnus posted:what were the quellists in the the book like ideologically? the ones in the series are kinda loving stupid as per their end goal, bringing back real death and older, shorter lifespans? The soul market was on a colonial planet suffering a years long civil war/rebellion featuring lots of deaths and battlefield hazards. I think the idea is that scavengers cut out and sell stacks for fairly low prices to the merchants, who at best do a quick VR boot up or on disk static psych analysis to determine skills and personality types. Then they sell them by the bucket and it’s up to the buyer to screen more extensively and conduct VR interviews before offering employment or picking your slaves. The sleeves probably cost a lot more than the stacks for basic applications.
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Feb 10, 2018 01:26
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Zaphod42 posted:That's my point! Forced time travel and a random body aren’t punishment? Imagine a 28 year old getting a thirty year sentence in 1988. You woke up today to find your kids are older than you are mentally (who knows how old your sleeve is or what race), the Cold War is over, your country is culturally different, Donald Trump is president (after some guy named Barack Obama, pull the other one), and you have no friends.
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Feb 10, 2018 01:33
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I thought the soundtrack was coming around today..I need that cover of More Human Than Human.
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Feb 10, 2018 01:37
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Needlecasting off-planet to do a job and then returning is yet another super cool sci-fi concept. Don't need teleportation if you can download your brain into a new body. But then Quellcrist starts with her speeches and I am cringing so hard. Syzygy Stardust posted:Forced time travel and a random body aren’t punishment? Imagine a 28 year old getting a thirty year sentence in 1988. You woke up today to find your kids are older than you are mentally (who knows how old your sleeve is or what race), the Cold War is over, your country is culturally different, Donald Trump is president (after some guy named Barack Obama, pull the other one), and you have no friends. We just went through this on the last page, I don't see the point repeating it all that much. Its a punishment but its pretty drat minor, especially for crimes like real death murder. Its a little weird that your loved ones go on without you and you miss out on things, but if they aren't about to die of old age right away either it doesn't seem all that bad. Everything starts to lose its meaning and humanity in that context. Like they put children in adult bodies, that's screwed up in a ton of ways, but that's where their society is. Nothing really means anything. I feel like it would work better if only Meths had stacks. Then the show could have its "death is gone; for the rich" thing straight up. The show quickly just starts real death-ing people so they can keep the stakes exciting but that also seems kinda weird, like the writers are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Earlier someone called out that it was super rare in the books which makes more sense.
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Feb 10, 2018 01:52
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"Drop your weapon, I want him alive" I feel like whoever wrote this TV show didn't fully understand the ideas from the book or something. Lines like this make no sense whatsoever. Shoot the poo poo out of him and he'll live just don't shoot him in the stack you should be experts at this...
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Feb 10, 2018 01:55
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I don’t think Morgan had anything at all to do with the poo poo-stupidity of what they did to the Envoy Corps/Quellists/Rei
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Feb 10, 2018 02:38
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Syzygy Stardust posted:The soul market was on a colonial planet suffering a years long civil war/rebellion featuring lots of deaths and battlefield hazards. I think the idea is that scavengers cut out and sell stacks for fairly low prices to the merchants, who at best do a quick VR boot up or on disk static psych analysis to determine skills and personality types. Then they sell them by the bucket and it’s up to the buyer to screen more extensively and conduct VR interviews before offering employment or picking your slaves. The sleeves probably cost a lot more than the stacks for basic applications. human civilization has spread out to several planets, there should be death EVERYWHERE and also plenty of criminal smuggling of stacks, nothing else makes sense for this level of human civilization where everyone has stacks and there are a lot of people long dead and forgotten still around in stack form. i would just needlecast around and do some shopping, hell, even on earth there ought to be plenty of loose stacks around, even if it wouldn't be a buyer's market like on some world right after a devastating war with ridiculous "body"count. i could be a far better future pimp than rey, if you want your workers to be 100% loyal and disposable, why the gently caress would you recruit people who actually have poo poo like family and friends in the outside world. that's no way to run a highly illegal prostitution, rape, and murder business. also, someone mentioned last page that christianity is not common outside of earth, so this neo-catholic programming stuff is just on earth?
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Feb 10, 2018 02:46
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Fututor Magnus posted:human civilization has spread out to several planets, there should be death EVERYWHERE and also plenty of criminal smuggling of stacks, nothing else makes sense for this level of human civilization where everyone has stacks and there are a lot of people long dead and forgotten still around in stack form. Catholics are very much a forgotten relic at this point. No sleeving means no needlecasting or d.h.f., so they never got off Earth when the colonization barges left over 400 years ago. They have a few cryo ships out, but they're still going and won't reach any of the Protectorate worlds for decades to come. Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Feb 10, 2018 |
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Feb 10, 2018 02:49
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Neddy Seagoon posted:I swear blind one of the books, I can't remember which, mentions that the Envoys came after Quell (and not due to her), because the Unsettlement would've been over very fast if they had Yeah, I might be misremembering that it was due to The Unsettlement, but they definitely didn’t exist during it.
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Feb 10, 2018 02:58
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MrMojok posted:I don’t think Morgan had anything at all to do with the poo poo-stupidity of what they did to the Envoy Corps/Quellists/Rei Has he said anything about the changes in the show? I thought I read that he had some involvement when it was being made, but I can't find anything specific. Not that I'm sure I'd really trust Morgan's judgment, given his hilarious defense of the sex scenes he writes McCoy Pauley fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Feb 10, 2018 |
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Feb 10, 2018 03:36
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Catholics are very much a forgotten relic at this point. No sleeving means no needlecasting or d.h.f., so they never got off Earth when the colonization barges left over 400 years ago. They have a few cryo ships out, but they're still going and won't reach any of the Protectorate worlds for decades to come. Okay so how did they reach the Protectorate worlds to begin with?
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Feb 10, 2018 03:43
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navyjack posted:It’s never said explicitly but the normal “bombardment from orbit” tactics don’t work on Harlan’s World because the Martian defense satellites still work, are uncontrollable, and blow anything bigger than a small hang-glider out of the sky at like 100 meters. This is background information that Kovacs knows and isn’t plot revealing, but it’s not all written down till the third book, so I’m spoilering it to be safe: They have six‐seat helicopters. Any flying machine larger than that is guaranteed to be taken out. You can still lose smaller craft by exceeding the speed and/or altitude limit. I think hang‐gliding would be impossible for that reason—certain prisoners are executed by strapping them to jetpacks and lighting the engines. At least one of the defence satellites doesn’t work, creating a launch/landing window once per day (over the equator, I think), which is how the colony barges were able to set down at all.
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Feb 10, 2018 04:02
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Rhyno posted:Okay so how did they reach the Protectorate worlds to begin with? Colony Barges aren't big cryoships, they just have cloning and sleeving facilities. Everyone rides in Storage. How they work is the big goddamn ship lands on the planet and starts spitting out probes. Everything gets modeled in virtual and observed for years by the Barge's AI before anyone is allowed to wake up. They learned that one the hard way with a few failed colonies suddenly finding Winter is lethally cold and lasts years at a time, or Spring causes colossal swarms of deadly insects to hatch. Oops. It'll also tailor the genes of livestock brought with them to endure the climate, along with immunization for local diseases and the like in the cloned sleeves. Platystemon posted:They have six‐seat helicopters. Any flying machine larger than that is guaranteed to be taken out. Some of the Orbitals over Harlan's World being gone/destroyed is known in the first book. He actually tells that to Ortega, specifically iirc. Also a six-seater helicopter is not a guarantee of not being zapped by angelfire; It's how Quellcrist Falconer died, after all. Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Feb 10, 2018 |
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Feb 10, 2018 04:06
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McCoy Pauley posted:
Occupational hazard of being a sci fi author.
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Feb 10, 2018 05:08
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Rhyno posted:Okay so how did they reach the Protectorate worlds to begin with? They didn’t, that’s why they’re explained to him on his arrival on earth.
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Feb 10, 2018 05:08
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Elendil004 posted:I thought the soundtrack was coming around today..I need that cover of More Human Than Human. Oh hey it's on spotify now. The actress who plays Quell covers Johnny Cash's "Ain't No Grave" which is also good.
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Feb 10, 2018 05:12
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Just finished the series, I really loved it. Probably gonna read the book as soon as I finish the latest Expanse novel. A couple silly questions that I was wondering about : Ep 4: When Kovacs goes into virtual to be tortured, why does he still look like Riker rather than himself? Since it's entirely within his own head, wouldn't his current sleeve be irrelevant? I get why they'd do it from a TV standpoint, but it's specifically part of the plot because Dimi the Twin still thinks he's Riker. Ep 10: Does Ava's sleeve have a twin? There's a random guard patrolling around on Heart in the Clouds (he's the guy Lizzie kills when she takes over the synth) that looks exactly like Ava and I feel like it's never touched on or explained. Cliff Chamberlain's IMDB lists him as "Ava/James" so it seems intentional but it's kinda confusing.
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Feb 10, 2018 06:07
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Hobo Clown posted:Just finished the series, I really loved it. Probably gonna read the book as soon as I finish the latest Expanse novel. The short answer is because there is no difference when sleeved. That is your body and who you are; He is not Kovacs in Ryker's body, he's just Kovacs. That's how everyone treats their sleeve, it's just awkward for him personally because he keeps running into people who knew (and generally hated) Ryker.
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Feb 10, 2018 06:19
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Hobo Clown posted:Just finished the series, I really loved it. Probably gonna read the book as soon as I finish the latest Expanse novel. Neddy Seagoon posted:The short answer is because there is no difference when sleeved. That is your body and who you are; He is not Kovacs in Ryker's body, he's just Kovacs. That's how everyone treats their sleeve, it's just awkward for him personally because he keeps running into people who knew (and generally hated) Ryker. More to the point, the fact that Dimi popped through the image of his sleeve was probably because of that multi-sleeve psychosis thing. After all, everyone else shows up in VR as their sleeve, including Lizzie who doesn't even have a sleeve anymore and is just recalling her lost body. Dimi is unique in having a strong enough self-image to show up as his "true self" and even that required Kovacs goading him into it.
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Feb 10, 2018 07:10
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jng2058 posted:More to the point, the fact that Dimi popped through the image of his sleeve was probably because of that multi-sleeve psychosis thing. After all, everyone else shows up in VR as their sleeve, including Lizzie who doesn't even have a sleeve anymore and is just recalling her lost body. Dimi is unique in having a strong enough self-image to show up as his "true self" and even that required Kovacs goading him into it. That multi-sleeve psychosis thing is mostly the series' bad writing. It is a thing in the books, but you gotta really gently caress yourself up with repeated re-sleevings in a short span of time. Dimi the Twin gets like that because he regularly resleeves for jobs across the world, nevermind double-sleeving himself. The brother angle is just bad too, because the book has a far more pragmatic reason for him double-sleeving himself that tells you far more about the character; it's so he has backup he can trust. So episode 7 is evidently the flashback episode and good grief we get real stupid real fast here  . And show the writers just cannot hold their own when stepping away from the book's storyline. Again though, there have been some neat moments like Dia de la Muertos and skinhead grandma. It's a neat holiday to consider, given Stacks. Poe having presence as an actual character is good too. The Hendrix was just accommodation, mostly.The big problem is their new stuff wildly conflicts with what's extracted from the book rather than trying to build off it. Which often means it conflicts with other parts extracted from the book. The whole recruitment/betrayal thing is just terrible for starters (and I won't even go into that whole "you're a child IN A MAN'S BODY!" mess); The UN Protectorate are iron-fisted assholes, but the flipside of that is they actually honor their agreements. And can be very generous/forgiving if you do or give them something worth it. If they tell you they'll look after someone, they may as well be bulletproof. Takeshi's origins are far more mundane in the book, and better for it; He ditched home and his deadbeat father at eighteen and enlisted in the military. Did well, got selected for Envoy training from there. poo poo goes south on Innenin during an operation, he gets himself discharged. Also the General overseeing the Innenin beachhead assault mysteriously gets RD'ed in his home, but that's completely unrelated... The series, on the other hand, completely forgets what Envoys are. They infer the whole cold steely rear end in a top hat nature is just Kovacs' ex-military background, when it's supposed to be how they all are. It's part of their nigh-torturted-to-create mental discipline, after all. Instead we get cliche guerilla grunts in a jungle and no actual training. "I will train your mind", snap-cut, "Congratulations, let's go on an operation" is not good writing in the least. Especially when they keep trying to declare Kovacs as The Last The Rawlings viral strike is also just cut-and-paste terrible; "stack-transmissible" doesn't actually mean anything, because the things aren't able to broadcast or receive anything (Ones like Laurens' with remote-backup broadcast are expensive variants). It's a computer virus that killed almost everyone on the Innenin operation because it got broadcast through their comm gear and individually infected their stacks from there through the rest of their gear. Kovacs only survived because of a busted radio. "The Central Core", along with the anti-immortal diatribe is so cliche, I can't believe they actually ran with that. It'd be like saying "ALL INTERNET GOES THROUGH THE CENTRAL CORE, DESTROY THE CORE AND NO MORE INTERNET" just because everyone uses a smartphone. Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Feb 10, 2018 |
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Feb 10, 2018 07:58
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Neddy Seagoon posted:That multi-sleeve psychosis thing is mostly the series' bad writing. It is a thing in the books, but you gotta really gently caress yourself up with repeated re-sleevings in a short span of time. Dimi the Twin gets like that because he regularly resleeves for jobs across the world, nevermind double-sleeving himself. The brother angle is just bad too, because the book has a far more pragmatic reason for him double-sleeving himself that tells you far more about the character; it's so he has backup he can trust. The sad thing is that i would have happily watched a story about two hosed up kids tearing across the galaxy after centuries apart I think there's a compelling story there. But bolting it on to a murder mystery and making her the most evil woman alive didn't work very well.
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Feb 10, 2018 11:59
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Even the name Quellcrist was selected to emphasize her pro eternal sleeving ideal, its so goddamn bizarre for them to not only change it that way, butbtondo such a half-assed job of it.
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Feb 10, 2018 13:49
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So episode 8; Or how to over-complicate a simple lie for no good reason; The ruse to sell Bancroft and close the case is largely the same as the book, save for one detail; loving over Prescott. And it's completely unnecessary. Bancroft went for some fun in a cheap virtual whorehouse, picked up a virus and stumbled home. They know he used a phone to check the time before offing himself, and we can surmise from that he wanted to make sure his backup hadn't gone through because he couldn't rely on his internal clock chip before burning out his stack. Adding in Prescott doesn't even really work, because somehow she went from being raped to infecting him at a virtual brothel by *mumblemumble* and going muhahahah when he's already holding the blaster in his penthouse. It also muddies what's meant to be a clean deduction because the time-check and suicide is what actually pushes Kovacs to actually put the pieces together and figure out the truth. Also oh no, Ortega nearly died again . The fight scene was admittedly neat, but good lord I think at this point we have to call the writers racist for just jumping from Japanese character to "THIS MEANS SHE USES SAMURAI SWORDS AND COLLECTS JAPANESE WEAPONS  ". Nevermind taking the only two Japanese-descendant characters from the book and making them related because...  .
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Feb 10, 2018 14:03
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Episode 9; The 3D printer really raises a whole lot of issues and questions about sleeving that just did not need asking, and there's a perfectly good way to follow the book for the Head in the Clouds heist; use the Japanese Kovacs sleeve from the Panama Rose. Whether it's another clone, or it was still intact after the fight, you now have a means to get the original Kovacs actually face-to-face with his sister. Also making Laurens a violent rear end in a top hat just completely undercuts the whole reveal with what he was actually doing in that missing 48 hours. See, he uses whores. That part's right, but it's just sex and he's a perfectly decent guy. Miriam dosing him is right, but she uses Reaper. Not "STALLION", which they just made up and, again, undermines the point of the event by saying it made him violent and aggressive towards women or whatever. As I've said a few times, Betathanatine just makes you completely amoral, and when they put Laurens in the room with a girl who looked like Miriam he did things he would never otherwise consider. Her body got dumped off the side of Head in the Clouds, and there's the girl found in the bay. Laurens stumbles home, realizing what he's done as the drug wears off, and torches his own stack so he can't be blackmailed for it. But no, now it's TWO girls! One was RD'ed by his own hands! And, and, she LEAPED to her death!  Also the whole antenna thing is just completely unnecessary; The reason Eva's called a Dipper is because they "dip" into the broadcast backups and d.h.f transmissions of celebrities and famous people just to catch a few memories as the streams go through satellites (big money for virtual experiences, tabloids, etc). All Eva has to do is dip into Reileen's broadcast as it goes out and add the Rawlings to it mid-stream. The fun part of the confrontation is watching her realize her backup really are gone when her private facility decides it would really like to make an urgent phone call with her.
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Feb 10, 2018 15:09
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It was stallion in the book though. Why would they use reaper (a drug that lowers body temperature and heart rate) to induce him to kill a woman?pile of brown posted:Even the name Quellcrist was selected to emphasize her pro eternal sleeving ideal, its so goddamn bizarre for them to not only change it that way, butbtondo such a half-assed job of it. He says "I didn't want to be brought back." Once. Then he changes his mind. I think. I guess he wasn't entirely onboard with the change either.
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Feb 10, 2018 16:11
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Rei's character: Is it just me, or were Rei's character motivations weirdly incestuous? It feels like there was an earlier draft of the script where she was Kovacs' ex-girlfriend or something. That scene where she's in Ortega's body seductively bathing in front of him creeped me out. I can't remember exactly what she wanted from him, but ultimately her sales pitch was something like "we could be together forever." None of it tied back into their flashbacks as children of domestic abuse and none of their interactions read like siblings.
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Feb 10, 2018 16:12
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Collateral posted:It was stallion in the book though. Why would they use reaper (a drug that lowers body temperature and heart rate) to induce him to kill a woman? edit: I take that one back, you are right I just checked; he got dosed with Synemorphestrone. I got that mixed up with Kovacs riding it for the low body temp. Zoracle Zed posted:Rei's character: Rei's just another Meth in the book, and a past associate of Kovacs. Still psychotically dangerous, but completely sane about it. Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Feb 10, 2018 |
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Feb 10, 2018 16:17
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Episode 10; Oh no, another secondary character get killed and it's ~REAL DEATH!~. Like every single other major death in the series . On the other hand, I was genuinely sad they offed Poe  . He was a fun character. Having Eva cross-sleeved was actually an interesting take (in the book she's sleeved in the body of a black woman), and it's not a bad change in the slightest. Also I never thought I'd say this, but in hindsight with how the reveals ride close to the book, Lizzy really should've been white and blonde. The deal with her being knocked up by Laurens doesn't actually work as-presented because he has a very clear type that even the series keeps; Blonde, blue eyes, buxom. Everything his wife is and he can vent his sexual frustrations on, because his urges come from venerating his wife like she's up on a pedestal after 300 years of marriage. The whole thing with her going Terminator through Head in the Clouds is mostly plucked from Kovacs' assault through the place in the books, and it's a decent-enough end to her arc. Bringing down Head in the Clouds is just needlessly destructive though, considering it was apparently right over Bay City. Whole bunch of people just got flooded out and probably died, but no biggie, right? . Good thing it wasn't presently drifting over the city proper, I guess.As for the whole thing with Long killing Ortega's family... Wow that was pretty hosed up right there  . He was actually a decent antagonist, though the series' thing of Meths being untouchable nigh-deities falls right apart at the end with Laurens and Miriam getting arrested and the Protectorate not even thinking twice about charging them rather than trying to make it all go away.Rei's whole crazy sister who LOVES HIM thing spins out to the conclusion we all saw coming with spotlights and a little man waving the plot in for landing. Hope Ryker doesn't mind being a clone. As for the big reveal of Quell being backed up ~somewhere~ that was about as unsurprising as possible, I'm curious to see if a second season will just skip right to the third book; Woken Furies.
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Feb 10, 2018 16:49
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I've really been enjoying these write-ups. Interesting about how the show seems to lead to the third book. I'd like a well done, faithful adaptation of Broken Angels more than I would want almost any sci-fi adaptation I can think of, but given the changes the showrunners made here to fundamental storylines and characters -- changes that seem hard to understand how someone would think some of them are a good idea -- a well done take on Broken Angels seems impossible.
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Feb 10, 2018 16:58
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I'm not sure how they can adapt Woken Furies properly. The Unsettlement never happened. Quellists were a small cadre in the forest that I think they will just go with a tech thriller to find Quell (though that would kind of defeat the point of making her anti sleeving, perhaps she will change her mind as quickly as Takeshi did) and start ~The Unsettlement~. Which would be a bad name since it is now 300+ years after The Settlement of Harlan's World. Rather than the book version which happened soon after, due to very poor conditions for the lower classes. The changes they made will make it hard, if not impossible, to adapt the third book.
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Feb 10, 2018 17:05
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Collateral posted:I'm not sure how they can adapt it properly. The Unsettlement never happened. Quellists were a small cadre in the forest that Given what generally happens when the writers get to slip the leash and write their own content, my hopes are not high for the quality of a second season. Also on second thought, I think I'm going to walk back what I said about Long a bit; the whole blitz of killing Ortega's family, Mikey and Poe (but not Eva, because we need her for Vernon and Lizzie's happy ending) just feels like OH NO LOOK poo poo GOT REAL writ large.
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Feb 10, 2018 17:08
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Also one of the main motivations for Takeshi turning into The Patchwork Man is what happens to Sarah while he is on Earth. They could keep many elements of it though. Certainly I can see young Takeshi coming into it, hopefully they keep his hilarious fate. Will they keep Kinnaman? How could they explain it. "I liked this sleeve." Or something equally thin.
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Feb 10, 2018 17:22
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