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I was sad at the lack of Proteus. The assault on the station had me rock hard the entire time though, goddamn that was good.
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Jan 14, 2022 04:30
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That felt like the end of Season/Book 6. Not like the end of the series. Didn’t Strange Dogs end with Cara also getting the treatment or did they leave it at the same spot?
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Jan 14, 2022 06:11
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Does she die a bit later? I thought she was supposed to be a teenager.
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Jan 14, 2022 06:12
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Strange Dogs literally ends with Cara saying that line about it being okay if she dies since she knows the dogs will fix her. It's left open what happens to her until Book 8.
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Jan 14, 2022 08:34
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They really cast some generic dude as Duarte just to have him show up in exactly two speaking scenes.
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Jan 14, 2022 09:50
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IMO having Duarte be some rando you'd expect to find commanding a desk is a fine decision, he's a spreadsheet nerd who made a power grab and wants to lead humanity's conquest of whatever the gently caress might come out of poking at the protomolecule. Casting Bro Chadley in the role would be too cliche and miss the point.
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Jan 14, 2022 12:32
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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He's still a great leader strongman authoritarian archetype who convinced a lot of people about some pretty wild stuff, he should definitely be a pretty commanding or charismatic presence in some way.
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Jan 14, 2022 12:47
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I noticed that the end of the credits the ring space starts to turn red. I don’t think it’s done that before. Also, the Proteus is visible in the center of the ring (albeit blurry). It’s like a “to be continued…”.
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Jan 14, 2022 13:29
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Duarte was always just James Earl Jones in my mind so this casting choice was really weird for me. Maybe he'll grow into the role with some aging make-up. This reminds me, did we ever actually learn what the point of the neutron star trap was supposed to be in book 8? My best guess is that it was an attempt to play tit for tat with the dark gods. They gently caress with the physics in a star system and bad things happen to them. A valuable life lesson. But then the physics changes needs to be so extremely specific to trigger it that you would have to know about the trap. Also, there is no reason why the builder couldn't trigger it by hand. Did they just drop the whole plot point without explaining it?
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Jan 14, 2022 14:06
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James Earl Jones and not Edward James Olmos? I think they even describe his face as being pockmarked -- I remember having the feeling that the authors had EJO in mind when they were writing his part.
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Jan 14, 2022 17:14
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They should've killed Bobbie in this episode I reckon. Wouldn't have missed much character-wise going forward, let her go out like a valkyrie early. (Clarissa would've been too obvious/easy after the work they've done with her this season.)
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Jan 14, 2022 18:31
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VagueRant posted:They should've killed Bobbie in this episode I reckon. Wouldn't have missed much character-wise going forward, let her go out like a valkyrie early. (Clarissa would've been too obvious/easy after the work they've done with her this season.) I want to see Bobbie send the antimatter bomb using her power armor suit rockets.
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Jan 14, 2022 18:49
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yeah if there's a chance you can get Bobbie 1v1ing a loving alien battlecruiser in a mech suit, you've gotta go with that
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Jan 14, 2022 18:53
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Anonymous Zebra posted:Strange Dogs literally ends with Cara saying that line about it being okay if she dies since she knows the dogs will fix her. It's left open what happens to her until Book 8. Yeah and IIRC later when Cortezar is talking about the subjects, he says she eventually ate local food out of hunger and died. quote:I want to see Bobbie send the antimatter bomb using her power armor suit rockets. This, also I think narratively it's important that Jim and Naomi are about to retire and make her the captain (Amos never would want to be captain) even if she's the captain of the Roci for like five minutes.
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Jan 14, 2022 18:56
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I read the spoilers of the ending So Amos is basically the expanse version of duncan idaho?
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Jan 16, 2022 03:08
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Typo posted:I read the spoilers of the ending The last man standing. Presumably Xan and Cara are also hanging out. And it's not like the repair drones went away on Laconia. Although maybe the ring space being popped made them stop working too?
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Jan 16, 2022 03:34
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Some strategic bits of the epilogue as a flash forward right at the start of things if the Expanse ever gets going again in some form would be a heck of a thing. After how important the rings have been, seeing some guy flying a ship through a dead ring or some teenage Belters in spacesuits dicking around on it would be a pretty striking image, and make me curious to see how the story ends up there.
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Jan 16, 2022 10:56
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External Organs posted:The last man standing. The fact that the rings start drifting after the Ring Space is destroyed makes me hope that is the case, otherwise Laconia would have the ability to create immortal leaders/ warriors. Amos still being around makes me hope the authors intended on it being a situation where if you were “repaired” you are fixed forever, otherwise the robots and their healing pool stop working Edit: saying that the ending to this is comparable to GoT is silly. This show was cancelled and I think that they did a good job wrapping things up: tensions have eased between the main three groups, humanity still has regular access to the 1300 worlds, trouble on the horizon like there always is but let’s worry about tomorrows problems tomorrow, etc Edit edit: I got the threads crossed up. I swear I’m not drink, I just need coffee Professor Shark fucked around with this message at 12:26 on Jan 16, 2022 |
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Jan 16, 2022 12:20
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Professor Shark posted:Edit: saying that the ending to this is comparable to GoT is silly. I think there are some reasonable comparisons - I think the show has wrapped up the story in a neat and coherent way, but this season suffers in the same way as the last two GoT season in that sudenly halving the episode count means that there's fewer simultanous plot threads being maintained which makes the universe feel smaller, but the ones that are being told have to tread water more than they would have to previously in order to make up the runtime. One similarity in particular is that the sense of time and the fact that ships move about 'the world' in a consistent way went a bit out of the window. This season is really only about one thing happening - Marco running from Ceres to the Ring annd the race to stop him. But in this time the Rocinante goes on a mission to the far edge of the solar system, comes back, encounters the Pella on its way out and engages it, returns to the fleet, and goes out again and beats everyone else to the ring. Much like GoT's teleporting armies, Holden and his crew just seem to bounce around the solar system incredibly quickly to be in all the places the show needs them to be. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Jan 16, 2022 |
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Jan 16, 2022 12:38
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I agree with the complaints that this season made the world seem a lot smaller and for similar reasons late-season GOT did with people traveling very quickly everywhere.
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Jan 16, 2022 14:32
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Thom12255 posted:I agree with the complaints that this season made the world seem a lot smaller and for similar reasons late-season GOT did with people traveling very quickly everywhere. It’s been an ongoing problem. I think season one is the last time they really cared about travel time. By the end, flight between earth and the ring is treated as all but instantaneous, they don’t even mention the weeks it takes to get anywhere.
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Jan 16, 2022 16:10
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I dunno. They at least talk about how they need Ceres logistically, and the Roci and Pella are on the burn towards the ring for what, episodes 4 and 5? Overall you're right, and some of the fun parts of the books happen in that interstitial space between locations. There's a big set piece in book 8 where the scale of it and time involved is really fun.
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Jan 16, 2022 16:14
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You can just about reason it out, but if they had 4-5 more episodes and were running another major plotline then that would create the space to add a few sequences establishing that the Free Navy is moving slowly because its fighting a rearguard action to get critical supplies through the ring, then suddenly it all makes sense.
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Jan 16, 2022 16:38
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Not completely disagreeing - it's more they fast forward things rather than ignoring the travel time entirely. Like there's no "Gendry runs 1000 miles overnight", it's just "now we're back at the gate again and nothing really happened in between scenes even though it took two weeks". Sure it'd be great to have more scenes of bonding time for the crew, though I think they had a sufficient - though minimum - amount of that already.
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Jan 16, 2022 16:38
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I do agree - its that the smaller number of episodes forces a pace of events thats not necessarily bad, but feels 'off' in relation to the rest of the show.
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Jan 16, 2022 16:53
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Thom12255 posted:I agree with the complaints that this season made the world seem a lot smaller and for similar reasons late-season GOT did with people traveling very quickly everywhere. Shortening travel time is just a thing that always happens with any sci-fi/fantasy property. No one wants to write dialogue saying "wow that was a fun month on the road/on the ship/on the spaceship" and the way the story works justifies travel time being shortened or ignoring existing rules that have been set up for that universe. The two obvious examples of this for me are in Star Trek: Into Darkness and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Into Darkness has the Enterprise near or in Klingon space, the big scary Federation Black-ops comes to get them, Enterprise runs away to warp (on a barely working engine by the way, so not that it really matters but it's certainly not going top speed), the enemy ship comes up behind them and knocks them out of warp moments after they enter it, then suddenly they're in the Sol system. I'm pretty sure Earth and the Klingon homeworld are much further apart than that, but hey it's what the script calls for. Force Awakens has the lightspeed past a shield and into the atmosphere of a planet, ignoring that it's firmly established that the gravity created by planets will knock ships out of lightspeed and prevent them from entering lightspeed nearby (there's a whole interdictor-class ship that creates this sort of gravity well effect to do just this and interrupt or prevent hyperspace travel). Rogue One also does the reverse of this, hopping into lightspeed while still well within the gravity well of a planet. Ultimately rules about how travel works, and how long that travel takes, are the first thing to go out the window in any adaptation. They're also probably one of the story elements/rules of the world things that particularly work well in books but don't really work in other forms of media.
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Jan 17, 2022 06:16
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Listening to the Alt Shift X youtube interview with Ty and Daniel, they confirm this fan theory as basically accurate if you're into that sort of thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/comments/s7xggd/roman_master_plan_thread/
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Jan 26, 2022 05:15
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Grand Fromage posted:Listening to the Alt Shift X youtube interview with Ty and Daniel, they confirm this fan theory as basically accurate if you're into that sort of thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/comments/s7xggd/roman_master_plan_thread/ Mind blown.
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Jan 26, 2022 05:52
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Grand Fromage posted:Listening to the Alt Shift X youtube interview with Ty and Daniel, they confirm this fan theory as basically accurate if you're into that sort of thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/comments/s7xggd/roman_master_plan_thread/ Wowza, that's cool as poo poo.
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Jan 26, 2022 09:31
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Reading that Reddit thread it seems like people are doubting it because most of the GB’s actions are at odds with it. I think that for the last few books it became the intention, but maybe not the early novels.
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Jan 26, 2022 11:15
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Yeah, that theory really doesn't hold up with the early books. Given how the series shows very little evidence of foreshadowing and careful planning, and how the series went from three books to nine, I'd buy more that the authors came up with that concept during the last three books (but even then, I'd doubt it, I'd say they came up with this as writing the final book hence why it's exposited at the reader in dream sequences) as opposed to it being some grand design that makes you re-examine all the books previous. Let's be clear about the writing in these books: this is the series that didn't foreshadow really basic things like Julie having a sister or Naomi's entire past with Marco Inaros and so on. Rapturous awe? The protomolecule spends its time turning people into mindless vomit zombies. It gets where it is more from coincidence and human meddling than any evidence that it was manipulating people to fulfil the reincarnation of the Gatebuilder species. If the plan requires someone to interface with the Ring Station -- well, Holden does that in Book 3 and nothing happens beyond his trippy vision that treats the Goth attack like a cancer or sickness. If it requires someone physically infused with the protomolecule to do it -- well, if not for Duarte's experiments, it would've just kept turning people into vomit zombies. If it's some contingency then it's a weird, specific contingency that requires a lot of very particular events to take place that feels like the Gatebuilders had no way of knowing about or anticipating and only came about because one of their projects misfired. I'm also pretty sure Cibola Burn is written as if the Gatebuilders were a physical bodied species, too, given what it says of Ilus and the Gate network during it. In Abaddon's Gate, mention is made that the Gatebuilders had been so dominant for so long that they'd forgotten what it felt like to be under threat -- and yet they've got this complicated reincarnation protocol in one of their oldest artifacts? To continue, fight, and win a war that started after they built it? The theory seems to stem from the person believing that if you read all the data in the big space diamond that you would become one of the Gatebuilders. I feel like this is about as accurate as believing that if you read all the data in Wikipedia on the Babylonian people that you become Babylonian. Whatever's in the diamond is a "land of the dead" filled with "songs sung by ghosts." That's not a scary consciousness repository waiting for new unwitting hosts -- that's writings in an ancient crypt. Additionally, the quote about "a hive of mostly hairless primates" comes from before Holden even injects the protomolecule into himself. It's Holden reflecting on how Duarte's hive mind gambit will reduce humanity to components of a war machine in a conflict that might never be won. It will make them functionally identical to the hive-mind species that lost the war if not so much lesser than that. Given that's the quote the whole theory seems to be built around, well... edit: Looking further into it, it appears that there's a lot of the theory that depends on "It's unclear" or "I don't know" to explain away issues with the earlier novels and how they depicted the Protomolecule. Like, were the Gatebuilders a form of "substrate" life or not? The theory seems to go both ways depending on what looks best. From a more conceptual stand point, I think it's really unfortunate for a hard-ish sci-fi series to go so heavily into space magic, ancient alien plots, and so on for its final entry. Similarly, that Duarte was actually under the control of the Protomolecule. tl;dr - the theory seems to work for all the information presented in the final book but it doesn't really mesh with the books previous. And it feels like it remains unclear as to the point of it. Like, what happens if this plan goes off? The Builders collective consciousness shows up in human minds, and gets turned off by the Goths again? The theory seems to posit that "substrate" hardware is resistant to Goth attacks and this is what the plan depends on, but it's the collective consciousness itself that was uniquely vulnerable (from memory), and the authors themselves seem to imply in their comments on the theory on the podcast that the hardware is irrelevant to how the Builders 'software' will function, soooo...? Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Jan 26, 2022 |
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Jan 26, 2022 12:24
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I share the skepticism that this was planned before the last few books, but a lot of the early book contradictions (the PM almost wiping out humanity every six months) can be waved away by the Phoebe PM being dispatched before the plan was concocted. The thing that's harder to reconcile is the ring station's indifference/hostility to humans, and failure to warn them about the goths. This could be chalked up to the GB thinking a red carpet would be too suspicious and that knowledge of the goths would scare humans into isolation. The whole thing gets more sinister if you consider that the Investigator (or its overseers) may have only learned about the plan upon reaching the ring station, and then took further steps to lead humans in the right direction: 1. Opening all the gates. 2. Guiding Holden to Ilus, where a remnant of the Goths was. 3. Guiding holden to link to the station again.
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Jan 26, 2022 20:31
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Even then, though, it's a bit shaky. The Investigator doesn't send Holden to Ilus, it just wants Holden to check out as many systems as possible. Holden goes there because Fred sends him there. And then the Investigator gets its network node vaporized off the Rocinante, ending whatever influence it had over the substrate world. Like, it just volunteers the information before Holden's even on Ilus even when it knows that Holden hates and fears the Protomolecule like nothing else, even telling him when and where it was installed. I feel like the theory is better served by the idea that it came about due to Duarte's particular protomolecule infusion altering both sides of the coin, but even that depends on there being this five billion year old consciousness repository out there with a contingency to create and highjack a new collective consciousness once it integrates with the Ring Station. And that interpretation seems to hinge on the person's take on consciousness and identity being simply knowledge and data. Like, you read all of Space Wikipedia and you become a Space Wikipedian. The authors themselves seem to disregard the idea that "hardware" has any effect on consciousness. They had some quote on the podcast like "a flight simulator thinks the same way regardless of whether it's installed on a PC or a Mac." It's possible I've missed something, but everything I see of it seems to come down to thinking the above in regards to then nature of consciousness, plus literalizing a metaphor, and insisting parts that support the theory in the Dreamer chapters are literal and true whereas parts that do not are unreliable metaphors filtered through a human perspective. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Jan 27, 2022 |
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Jan 27, 2022 02:04
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I have to say that I’m fine/ like the concept of a lazy alien species who’s MO is to just hijack better species and incorporate them into itself and it makes sense that they might set a trap that no space-faring, physical species could turn down (it also creates a nice, tidy ending with I always figured that the Romans were crab aliens for some reason, like the Mirelurks from Fallout 4.
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Jan 27, 2022 10:29
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Even then, though, it's a bit shaky. The Investigator doesn't send Holden to Ilus, it just wants Holden to check out as many systems as possible. Holden goes there because Fred sends him there. And then the Investigator gets its network node vaporized off the Rocinante, ending whatever influence it had over the substrate world. Like, it just volunteers the information before Holden's even on Ilus even when it knows that Holden hates and fears the Protomolecule like nothing else, even telling him when and where it was installed. The bfe isn't just space Wikipedia though. The builders are creatures of light and information by the time they go out, so it isn't exactly implausible that a race composed of information is able to store itself in a way that it could be functionally reborn under the right circumstances. And to be honest, their plan doesn't require all that much. If I had to hazard a guess, the idea is probably something along the lines of: Shut down the gates. Eventually our pm samples will hit various places and law of large numbers one of them will interact with a space faring race. Space faring race will dick around with our tech. A person infected with the pm will get to the ring station and hive mind their species. It isn't a guarantee by any stretch, but as a last ditch survival plan I certainly buy it as something they'd try. Duarte and Holden are the only protomolicule infected characters to have any agency after the gate is opened, everyone else is basically held at gunpoint. If you assume that the pm samples were sent out before poo poo got bad, then perhaps it isn't 'programmed' roght for the task. Once Duarte is heavily infected he immediately goes 'you know what would be a great idea? Creating a human hive mind'. He knows exactly where to do it and the station coincidentally seems to be equipped to allow him to do it. Holden jabs himself, tries to take over keeping things running for the short term and even he starts thinking of the idea as beautiful. For all we know the people in the pens all wanted to make hive minds of their own, they were just too heavily restrained to get to the ring station to do it. Edit: I tis also possible that had Eros been successful in the first place that they might have just kept Julie alive as a host and sent her directly to the ring station. She comes across very similar to Duarte in the whole 'plugged into this horrifying alien monstrosity' thing. Caros fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Jan 27, 2022 |
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Jan 27, 2022 11:17
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Yeah but Julie’s mission would have sent her crashing into Earth and turning the majority of those hive mind hosts into ring construction material.
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Jan 27, 2022 16:00
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It's also possible that the "new hive mind" directive didn't kick in until the Goths confirmed they were still around by loving with reality in the way that broke Duarte.
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Jan 27, 2022 21:13
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They mention a breakdown of the Dreamers chapters in that youtube video that I'd be curious to see. I kinda zoned out in the dreamer chapters, and even with the Elvi 'explanations' after, I'd be very interested to find out what they implied in detail.Professor Shark posted:Yeah but Julie’s mission would have sent her crashing into Earth and turning the majority of those hive mind hosts into ring construction material.
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Jan 27, 2022 21:40
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For the sake of making this work and following that thread, maybe bulldozing the native's homeworld is a way of strong arming the survivors into actually using the ring network to not starve.
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Jan 28, 2022 21:30
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Professor Shark posted:Yeah but Julie’s mission would have sent her crashing into Earth and turning the majority of those hive mind hosts into ring construction material. Again, long view. So long as someone starts the hive mind, it hardly matters for their plan. Under a hive mind the population could bounce back in a mere few centuries. Presumably they would either know, or very quickly learn how to avoid triggering the goths. At which point they can spend a few thousand/million years building up infrastructure, population and so forth before prodding the bear.
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Jan 28, 2022 23:42
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