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feedmyleg posted:Also the "You still look like Cal" thing was dumb. It's just them calling attention to the fact that there's no reason for him to be played by the same actor. Coupled with Adrian's (hilarious if a bit too meta) line about problematic appropriation means they're trying to have their cake and eat it, too. There's absolutely no in-universe reason for Jon to stick with Cal's appearance and it just calls more attention to itself as a cheap TV production issue or something they didn't want to have to deal justifying in the writer's room. Like, there would be no issue had her changed his appearance before he went into the dead dude's body, but he didn't. Unless I'm missing and he didn't literally use the body's meat and just took on his appearance. But even if so it just seems super cheap and they clearly recognize it by labeling it. There is no in-universe logical reason for him to revert either, there are however pretty clear emotional reasons for why this demi god who is clearly putting efforts and sacrifice into 'remaining human' would in his presumably final moments stick to the form which he occupied for the past decade, the form he occupied when having a very strong relationship with a woman he loves who's standing right next to him. He's also pretty discombobulated during that whole segment, so I guess I just don't get why this stuck out with people.
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Dec 9, 2019 13:10
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I'm disappointed that this super hero show wound up being a super hero show with a time travel twist instead of solving race relations in america.
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Dec 9, 2019 14:57
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Doc Manhattan is basically a Tralfamadorian, an alien species that appears in several Kurt Vonnegut novels, they're 4 dimensional beings to whom all time occurs simultaneously, from their perspective everything is inevitable and the concept of 'change' is absurd, everything is in the constant process of going from point A to Z where all the points in the middle are known in advance. One of the bits that appear in the novels is that the Tralfmadorians have intimate knowledge of how the universe ends, one of their members experiements with a new type of starship fuel and accidentally destroys the entire universe, when asked by a human character "why doesn't he just not do it then?" they're flabbergasted by the question, this is just a thing that happens, that it happens in the future or in the past has no bearing on the fact it is a thing that 'is'. But of course Vonnegut is a bit of joker, I think another way to look at Manhattan's "lack of involvement" is that his consciousness is seperated from his actions, the same way it is for every human, we do things and then we come up with a narattive that explains them and makes it all seem like our little cartesian consciousness agent is pulling the strings behind our choices but in actuality the science is pretty murky and our brains our capable of 'making choices' long before our conscious perception kicks into gear. So, maybe this is just how it is for Manhattan, he sees events unfolding but this doesn't necessarily mean 'he' really has agency. emanresu tnuocca fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Dec 10, 2019 |
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Dec 10, 2019 07:50
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Zaphod42 posted:My favorite thing about Slaughterhouse Five is how the Tralfmadorians are like "Free will? What? In all the universe, only Humans pretend Free Will exists." It's a fair distinction, I should have used 'free will' but I felt it wasn't adding much clarity to my argument; basically if free will is an illusion then agency is just a perceived property we attribute to things that are sufficiently human. Or maybe in a more manhattenesque way to phrase it, the difference between a hydrogen atom and a human being is that a human being can tell a story about why he did certain things, but otherwise both are just being governed deterministically by the laws of physics.
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Dec 10, 2019 08:25
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LG wasn't down with the 7K but his main beef should be with Veidt; if Veidt returns to earth from Europa on the finale I can easily see LG playing the confession tape on mass media, sort of a "gaze upon my works ye mighty and despair" moment, which is par for the course.
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Dec 10, 2019 11:04
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Nail Rat posted:You don't have to be able to see the future to know not to stand directly in front of a tachyon cannon with your back to it. That's just being a loving idiot. I only watched the scene once but the cannon is manned when Angela storms out of the house and when Manhattan is standing with his back to it it's actually not pointing at him, the cannon locks on to him and fires. Of course it shouldn't have 'fooled' manhattan because nothing should, but this isn't (at least as far as I remember) a "just take one step to either side and you're fine, you dummy" situation. But really, this is a predestination paradox, we all know this, of course Manhattan has the powers necessary to stop the whole thing, he didn't do it for reasons that will be revealed in the finale. WE ALL KNOW THIS.
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Dec 10, 2019 14:25
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Jay-V posted:Question, only Dr. M knew that Veidt was on Europa before Veidt's SOS, but presumably (maybe there's proof otherwise) the squidfalls continued for 10 years since 2009 when Manhattan sent him away with basically 0 warning. Does this imply Dr. M was continuing to do the squidfall somehow (even tho he forgot his powers), or maybe it was just Adrian's week to throw some squids into a portal, next week it'll be someone else in the gov't?? Veidt saying "a little elephant told me" suggests he's already in contact with Trieu in 2009, which mean she's probably aware of the fabricated attacks, I would say it's pretty likely that she took over the operation.
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Dec 11, 2019 07:17
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Can we just do a read along of The Sirens of Titan instead of arguing about the philosophical veracity of sci-fi time travelling tropes?
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Dec 12, 2019 06:14
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Jon is like a fictional character, not only in the sense that he is literally a fictional character but also in the sense that's he's watching the script unfold, the fact that he read the script doesn't mean that he can change it.
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Dec 12, 2019 13:59
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AtraMorS posted:So I've always preferred to read the comic's Manhattan a lot differently. Don't get me wrong, the explanation of Manhattan y'all are going over is valid in the comic and enforced in the show, but Manhattan always made more sense to me this way: That's Paul Atreidis basically. Prescience in Dune is less about being a Jedi and actually seeing the future and more about running an overclocked brain and being able to deduce future events. Paul sees the future and comes up with the conclusion that he doesn't have the strength of character to change it and live with the consequence, I think Jon has similar views. Dune has other parallels, in that Paul realizes that controlling the future deprives humanity of its freedom and understands that beings like him cannot exist without becoming tyrants. emanresu tnuocca fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Dec 12, 2019 |
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Dec 12, 2019 17:42
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But yeah the sort of non chronological causality we've seen when Will and Angela used Jon as a temporal communication relay cannot work if we're merely dealing with 'extreme prescience' unless we're willing to throw in some pretty crazy 11 dimensional chess shenanigans into the whole thing.
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Dec 12, 2019 18:01
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Show should have ended with Angela cracking the egg instead of lowering her foot into the water, it's not interesting whether she's Manhattan or not, it's interesting whether she'd choose to be, that one was a misstep designed to end the show on a visually compelling cliff hanger but it really was not necessary. Otherwise I liked the superhero show, I don't know why everybody is complaining, it was well produced and compelling, superhero TV shows can hardly make complex meaningful statements about... anything, really. Visual metaphors and having the black blue jesus killing the KKK was good enough really. Show was enjoyable really, the finale was nowhere near as disappointing as the Lost finale.
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Dec 16, 2019 15:37
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massive spider posted:E; Nothing that happened on Europa really made sense beyond some flimsy 'veidt got really bored and is into roleplay' explanation. He basically got bored the second he arrived and started planning his escape while also making it a touch inconvenient? The smartest man on Earth didn't suss out that it'll take him four minutes to be bored by Dr. M's unimaginative Utopia? He cares for his 8 billion children but takes ten years to participate in an escape room adventure? So the fart was basically veidt slam dunking on a mentally challenged person, not much more. I mean, yeah the show has some issues, I still liked it!
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Dec 16, 2019 16:20
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I think the whole 'ironic twist' with Trieu is that she actually didn't do anything too bad to set herself up as evil but once Veidt returns we're basically supposed to go 'oh so... there's two of them', and then Veidt of course recognizes her as a danger because game recognize game and the final irony of course has our audience surrogates arresting Veidt, basically because the audience is supposed to recognize the a God Emperor Trillionaire is a bad thing, Manhattan powers or not. But then of course for the sake of a mystery box we end up with Angela participating in the miracle of transubstantiation and becoming christ, which, as I said before, felt to be a bit tonedeaf, why are we supposed to view that as a good thing? It would be interesting if it ended with Angela's dilemma on whether she should eat the egg or not because well, that's a temptation and a good question to pose to the audience, Angela in that sense is just a stand in, but instead we're getting the show kind of stating "People becoming gods is generally a bad thing, unless they're REALLY GOOD PEOPLE", which as others pointed, wasn't really ever established as far as Angela is concerned, what makes Angela a really good person? She's a sarcastic badass who didn't repent her ways a single time, why should we cheer her becoming Mrs. Dr. Manhattan all of a sudden?
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Dec 17, 2019 07:47
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The waffle is also a better Jesus allusion, as others itt pointed out last week.
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Dec 17, 2019 09:09
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Jon didn't arrange his death, he just didn't prevent it, all of the events that actually led to the 7k and Trieu doing their thing didn't involve Jon in an active manner. The only thing Jon set up was a safe place for the kids to stay in when he was getting zapped out of existence and dropping the clues about the egg. Even the death of Crawford really wasn't impactful, Angela's lining about 'starting this whole thing' was spoken without real understanding of the situation.
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Dec 17, 2019 09:37
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Raxivace posted:Honestly the Trieu/cross thing would have been fine if they only showed the shot the one time. And then they had the final shot with the cross burning too, it was very much on the nose.
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Dec 17, 2019 16:55
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I liked the Superman story where this mind controlling villain called domino or something like that convinces supes he has to be a fascist dictator if he is to save humanity from itself. I remember reading it as a teenager so like 16 years ago.
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Dec 19, 2019 14:10
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Ordered the graphic novel from Amazon, regarding the Hooded Justice discussion, it's pretty amusing that in the 'Under The Hood' sections Hollis pretty explicitly states that Hooded Justice was vocally pro third-reich before WW2.
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Dec 29, 2019 08:32
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What show maintains relevance other than a few truly unique outliers? The Sopranos is relevant 20 years later, GoT was forgotten in less than a year, nobody really talks about Breaking Bad, yet Seinfeld and Friends are still culturally relevant. This is a metric for nothing, really; Watchmen wasn't a timeless masterpiece, very few shows are. The truth is that with the inclusion of the Tulsa massacre and the emphasis on cops and race relations Watchmen is a lot more relevant than MOST shows could ever claim to be, so really, of all criticisms against this show (like, a disjointed narrative that drops a major plot point half way through the season), this one seems least... relevant.
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Jun 18, 2020 05:41
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Meh, I'm just saying nobody really talks about BB that much, even when people discuss Better Caul Saul they do not really contextualize it as that BB prequel, I'm not saying BB wasn't awesome. it was.
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Jun 18, 2020 06:09
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I still maintain that the finale would've been much better had the cut been before Angela drinks the egg, rather than before she steps on water. Her choice is what the viewer should be left to ponder, it's the "I leave it completely in your hands" moment, does Angela think this power should exist, would she want to go down the same path Jon did, that's the meat of it. Just end the show 30 seconds earlier.
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Jul 1, 2020 10:19
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