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Anyone ever read the book Nemesis by Asimov? This show is insanely incomprehensible, but it's giving me the same vibes as that book. For those unaware, the book is about (spoilers for the book ahead) a colony of humans living in a space habitat above a somewhat inhabitable planet which unfortunately seems to cause an illness in some sub-set of people causing them to go insane and die. Therefore, only a tiny research outpost exists on the world, which tightly filters out any contaminants from the planet outside, where scientists study the assorted soil-borne microorganisms on the planet. One of the main characters is an ugly girl who has the ability to read the intents and thoughts of people through some kind of super empathy when she looks at their faces. She exists in a constant state of loneliness because she can't help but see that other people think she's ugly, or are scared of her. She eventually goes down to the planet and it turns out that the soil-borne bacteria are actually a gigantic planet-spanning colonial intelligence, which is also very lonely and has been trying to reach out to humans but was driving them insane. It turns out it can talk with her though and they ultimately discover companionship together without judgment. So yeah, I think that the planet is alive and that all those holes are part of a vast underground network that Mother and Father hilariously left unexplored. At first it could only work with what fell down the holes, but when the ark slammed into the ground they mention that it "cracked" the surface. That's when the creatures first started appearing and when people started seeing Tally or hearing voices. I think either the ark crashing into the world "woke it up", or it provided something that allowed it to start loving with androids and humans alike. EDIT: I mean, when I first saw those holes I thought they were loving breathing, but then I shook that first impression off until later episodes where plot points keep centering around the holes and how air keeps moving in and out of them. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 09:16 on Sep 21, 2020 |
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Sep 21, 2020 09:12
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 11:20 |
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LentThem posted:I'm a little annoyed at the complete lack of curiosity by all of the characters and it's really making it feel like the writers are doing it on purpose so that New Events can happen whenever they want. YES. I started writing a rather long post about how this show feels like some kind of fever dream with a weird fluid idea of reality, but then deleted it because I hate when people just constantly hate-watch in TVIV threads. But absolutely I've been seeing what you mentioned. It feels like everyone is mildly sedated, responding to incredibly strange things like they are no big deal, and making odd decisions as if they don't realize they are a fragile fragment of humanity on an alien world. I'd understand it if the setting indicated that space-travel to other habitable (and inhabited) worlds was common place, but other parts of the show seem to indicate that this was the first time they had engaged in interstellar travel. Finding giant serpent skeletons? No worries, they must be extinct (how do they know?!). Weird alien artifacts? Okay, time to move on. All of our children are missing, and our colony is doomed without a next generation, no worries. We have our kid back, lets take him and only ourselves to an isolated zone, it's not like this will doom our son to die alone on an alien world or anything. Father, an android, literally sees a child who he knows is dead, and shrugs it off even though he is A MACHINE THAT SHOULD NOT BE NORMALLY HALLUCINATING. Like, he can play back the memory (we know they can do this) just to confirm he in fact saw a child, it's not like he should be able to shrug it off as being too tired and imagining things like a human might. Also the fact that they spent 14 years on the planet and never found another food source despite Campion finding the fungus in a single day...It just goes on and on.
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Sep 23, 2020 08:27
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Open Source Idiom posted:That said, I think it's pretty clear what's happening at this point. Yup, I'm with you on this for the most part. I have a pretty good idea of where this is going at this point, but basically need a little more info to really nail all the pieces together. I'll spoiler my guess just in case some part is too close to being right. I'm 99% sure this is an alternative history Earth at this point. Christianity (and the other Abrahamic religions) other never occurred or were crushed in their infancy. The Mithraic are a religion from at least Roman times considering they are keeping relics of Romulus in their religion. Apparently the Mitchraic holy scriptures includes blueprints for weird pieces of technology including the "Dark Photons" (lol) that power the Necromancers. My guess is that the religion is alien inspired, and thus the Necromancers are partially alien technology. The aliens themselves might have literally come down from the heavens to found the religion. Okay, so my next leap is that this world used to be populated by a humanoid species that eventually went almost extinct. I believe the random parkour stranger is the last of these aliens. The weird hole dwelling monsters may also be technologically regressed members of this species (in fact I'm 99% sure on this one). This species is behind the Mithraic texts and may have visited Earth at some point. They have been coy as gently caress showing the faces of the parkour stranger and the people in the robes, so I think they are aliens. At some point these creatures built an AI (based on Dark Photon technology), but poo poo must have gone wrong and they locked it up inside the big stone object. The vision Mother saw inside the data card (which is alien, but also readable by her because she is alien technology) was an actual historical document that was interpreted by her mind through the use of metaphor. The actual event being depicted was the aliens sealing up their AI inside the stone object, but her brain instead saw a metaphor of an alien Android (that's why it was spitting up white blood) being locked in a much smaller stone decahedron next to the pits. My guess is that a massive machine exists inside the world, and the pits are vents coming up from it. It is likely that this machine was once controlled by the AI, but the aliens locked up it's control core or something inside the stone object. The machine is somehow able to influence humans and androids through psychic (or weird alien waveform projection) commands and is attempting to use Mother (compatible because of alien tech) to build a new body for it. The parkour stranger is attempting to communicate with the humans to STOP this from happening as it is aware of the AI, but is unable to communicate about what it is doing. The data cards were an attempt to show the humans what was going on, but "Sol" got Paul to burn them. Also Paul says "Sol" isn't evil which is basically TV speak for "It's very loving evil". In any case, this entire show is late-stage terminal Ridley Scott as gently caress, which is good or bad depending on whether you've liked his most recent sets of movies. If I'm correct, then the bizarre way this show has been shot and presented to the audience is just a bunch of mirrors and smoke bombs to hide a fairly straightforward plot, which is ultimately less interesting than a show about androids trying to raise actual human children and failing to be able to predict and control human behavior (Go watch the Netflix movie "Mother" if you want to see a good version of that story). As soon as that medical android mentioned Mother being based on decoded religious texts it basically snapped everything in my speculation into place, so basically they needed to hide any background to the Mitchraic's and their religon, because as soon as you reveal even that sliver of info it basically spoils where they are going with the plot because there isn't really any actual complexity to it once you remove the intentional obfuscation by the writers. EDIT: On a side-note, I'm still utterly baffled by how loving Dark Souls that rapist character was.
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Sep 25, 2020 07:41
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Father somehow detecting Ultra-Rapist's power levels like he is a DBZ character was also top notch, good job. EDIT: "Father! What does the scouter read?" "He's almost at Mother's level" *crushes holographic control interface*
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Sep 25, 2020 08:13
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I know, I know. Father wasn't reading his power level with a scouter, he was reading it with a location tracker that also transmitted Rapist's metabolic readings. Wait, what's that you say? Mary-Sue in an earlier episode explicitly said that the location trackers don't transmit medical data hence them not being sure the children are even alive, and also why they are fooled by the trackers being removed from their bodies and left in a trapped skeleton cave? I'm sorry my friend, we are in a post-modern era of TV where events and dialog shown on screen are not relevant to predicting future events.
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Sep 25, 2020 08:44
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A main character in Battlestar Galactica screams "Jesus!" at some point in the first season and the director in his podcast had to say, "No, stop theory-crafting based on that. Sometimes actors improv their lines and I'm not going to reshoot the scene because otherwise that take was loving excellent."
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Sep 26, 2020 23:06
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It's going to be the Dark PhotonsTM that went from Mother's Tears to baby Campion. Since they've never bothered to explain what component of Mother is the Dark PhotonsTM , we can assume all her bodily fluids have them and thus that's where Ultra-Rapist, and special protagonist Campion come from.
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Sep 27, 2020 06:49
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Of course there is a comic/novel/Fortnite tie-in that explains all the plot they forgot to include in the actual main story. You can't complete the checklist of lovely storytelling without the tie-in!
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Sep 29, 2020 15:36
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Gonz posted:This show is if Zardoz had a baby with the baby from Eraserhead. People keep bringing up Zardoz in comparison to this show and I just need to say, as a person that LOVES Zardoz, and has watched it many times with others...Zardoz for the most part makes sense the first time you watch it through. I'd say 90% of people mentioning it have only seen the first 5 minutes with the giant stone head (which is pretty wild) and never gotten past that, but the rest of the movie uses surreal imagery and terminal British-acting to tell a pretty straightforward story with consistent rules for what's going on. I mean, the movie even has multiple flashbacks where characters explain in specific terms what's going on just in case the viewer is getting lost. In other words, Sir I know Zardoz, and this show is no Zardoz.
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Oct 2, 2020 06:30
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The finished product of Babylon 5 is certainly an impressive piece of continuous storytelling, but the story viewers saw was NOT the one planned out ahead of time. JMS definitely did have a story that he wrote the barebones of ahead of the show, but the final product did not resemble huge parts of that original plan. Part of this was because actors and actresses left the show for many different reasons, while other parts of his original show was untenable for cable television. Most of the first season (which was easily the worst one of the original four) sticks to his original plan, but after that things went off the rails and the writers had to scramble to make it all work. JMS is an excellent salesman, and he had to convince people that main characters (including the goddamn lead actor) leaving the show was all part of some big plan and was not a sign of a troubled production, so that's what he did. Just to give you a preview of the original plot and how it diverged, let's talk about Babylon 4. Remember the two episodes seasons apart that feature Babylon 4? The ones that everyone points to as a sign of how cohesive the plot was? In the show Babylon 4 is travelling through time, appears briefly in season 1 where weird stuff is hinted at, and then reappears in season 3 where that weird stuff is explained and then the whole station travels backwards through time to the distant past to serve as a base to fight the Shadows. In the original plan for the show, Babylon 4 was traveling forwards through time (hence it disappearing and then reappearing in season 1), and was meant to serve as a base for humanity in the future in the war against the Minbari Warrior Caste. Wait, why is humanity fighting the Minbari? Because they are upset that Delenn and Sinclair's child is some kind of cross-species chosen one that will merge the two civilizations and have already blown up Babylon 5 at that point. This is why Sinclair appears a grey haired man in the season 1 episode and why Delenn (off screen due to her transformation) is acting like his lover. There's a bunch of other stuff that's different: -Sinclair is not Valen, just a dude destined to gently caress a Minbari, -the Vorlons are a manipulative elder-race in the middle of a great decline who beat the Shadows 1,000 years ago, but whose decline allows the remaining Shadows to reappear -there is no Order/Chaos fight, the Shadows and Vorlons are just two elder races that want to rule the galaxy and the Shadows kill all the Vorlons in one of the later portions of the original plot. -Kosh copies Talia's memories so he can bring her back after her personality is erased by the Psi Corp programming -Talia's entire psychic godhead plot line that got left on the cutting room floor when the actress got sexually harassed off the show. And so on.
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Oct 2, 2020 17:54
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LibCrusher posted:No I do not
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Oct 4, 2020 02:47
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Solice Kirsk posted:OK, swinging in to find out if finishing this show up would be worth my time. I think I stopped around the fourth episode. Right when the kids had run away and Mom and Dad split up to find them. Did the show ever get going? You should watch just to see Father read a dude's power level like a DBZ character after the guy transforms into Super Rapist Form 2.
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Oct 5, 2020 18:22
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They had the Atheist face tats.
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Oct 6, 2020 17:22
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Now that I've had time to think about the show I realized I was wrong about some stuff and totally mischaracterized the show. I thought it was a silly incomprehensible fever dream of a show with a Dark Souls rapist, but I now realize it was a silly incomprehensible fever dream of a show with a Bloodborne rapist. Sorry for my mistake.
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Oct 7, 2020 07:52
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I know I'm dunking on this show constantly, but really, it's a very different show from what I expected it was going to be from both the one sentence blurb I read about it ahead of time and from how the first 40 minutes of it played out. I originally thought it was going to be about competent, but ultimately non-human androids attempting to raise a new society on an alien world and the troubles they would run into due to the disconnect between themselves and their human children. I knew religion played a role before I started watching, and I honestly thought it was going to go over the difficulty of teaching atheism to children who are naturally prone to magical thinking and fantasy. I really thought it was going that direction when it show Campion starting to make up his own prayers, and that the show was going to time jump many times to show how just one of the original six children becoming religious ultimately led to religion developing on the world through future generations. Teaching children to not do things by simply telling them not to do them is ultimately an unsuccessful route, because every child will want to rebel and push past the boundaries that are set for them. Perfect parenting machines failing to grasp this leading to unfortunate results is a fun story (seriously watch the Netflix movie Mother for some of this). But by the final episode the children are side stories and we are looking at milky snake births, dark photon jacked up rapists and prophets, and what ever the gently caress the last 3 minutes of this show was supposed to be. And the path it took there was profoundly stupid, but it was stupid in a very earnest and humorous way, which makes it apparent that everyone working on this show thought they were doing something really deep while essentially just redoing everything Ridley Scott has done better in previous films, so at least it's something fun to laugh at.
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Oct 19, 2020 18:59
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I seriously was resisting the near uncontrollable urge to just post "Praise the Sun!" when it came to them because that poo poo is such a tired meme, and I was willing to see where they were going with their weird Monty Python reject looking troop of dudes carrying around plastic shields and using androids with page-boy haircuts. But then the loving rapist was wearing a goddamn Bloodborne helmet, black robes and literally had a voice straight out of DS1 and I just had to wonder if any of this was intentional.
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Oct 19, 2020 23:09
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