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CubanMissile posted:Did I miss something? How did Demrezel get the Prime Radiant? Who’s training the mentalics if they’re both asleep? You missed the episode before this one yes.
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Sep 16, 2023 16:23
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CubanMissile posted:Did I miss something? How did Demrezel get the Prime Radiant? Who’s training the mentalics if they’re both asleep? Maybe they can mentalic it out of a popsicle
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Sep 16, 2023 16:32
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I don’t get it why did gale have to keep mind melding with Hari after he escaped and faked his death?
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Sep 16, 2023 18:34
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I guess actively hastening Empire’s downfall will reduce the length of time of the “age of darkness”?
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Sep 16, 2023 19:07
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Boris Galerkin posted:I don’t get it why did gale have to keep mind melding with Hari after he escaped and faked his death? I think she needed to do it until he was far enough away from the rest of the mentalics, otherwise they would have been able to hear his thoughts.
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Sep 16, 2023 19:39
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Mr. Apollo posted:I guess actively hastening Empire’s downfall will reduce the length of time of the “age of darkness”? I think that’s the implication. But this kind of belligerence will result in the Foundation becoming just like the empire it replaces, hence the need for a Second Foundation to secretly manipulate things from the shadows. But secret puppeteers is also bad, so that’s where the Third Foundation comes in…
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Sep 16, 2023 20:14
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You also sneed a Fake Foundation, a Silly Foundation, a Foundation that only includes clones if a guy named Steve and a few others, otherwise the whole psychohistory tentacle will collapse.
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Sep 16, 2023 20:18
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imagine four foundations on the edge of a crisis psychohistory works the same way
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Sep 16, 2023 20:24
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Mr. Apollo posted:I guess actively hastening Empire’s downfall will reduce the length of time of the “age of darkness”? The problem is it cheapens the whole idea of psychohistory if Seldon (and the Foundation) are actively bringing about the downfall of Empire. Imagine a friend coming up to you and saying he found a scientific way to make predictions of the future and you ask him "oh really? Can you predict what we both will do this weekend?" and his answer to that is "Well, I'm going to shoot you and you will die because of it". You laugh about it and go your separate ways, then the weekend comes and your friend shows up and actually shoots you and you die. After that he stands over your body and just screams "You should have believed in Psychohistory, this is exactly what it predicted!" That is the show and why it's kind of ridiculous, it undermines what psychohistory is and what Seldon really wants to achieve. I have written it previously but Seldon (in the books) doesn't want to see the Empire die. He cares about humanity (and its "progress") in general and would be totally fine with the Empire. The show obviously leans heavily into the whole "evil Empire"-angle and thus makes you feel that the Empire itself is the "sickness" that needs to be cured for a "better future" but in the books the Empire is more a reflection of humanity and a general societal decline so there the Empire is just a "symptom" of the sickness and why getting rid off the Empire isn't even a goal, it's end is afterall what will lead to a dark age. It's also constantly highlighted that there WILL be a dark age, there is no "good" ending to a fallen Galactic Empire (its not a revolutionary story), it's all about reducing the time this "dark age" lasts and there is also no suggestion that hastening its downfall would be positive, especially considering that the Foundation relies on the fact that it can develop in its shadow. That is an important distinction and I really don't think this comes through in the show, especially now that we have Demerzel who acts as another "evil" force behind the scenes and controls Empire instead of Empire's (the actual institution, not the person) actions being a result of a slow societal/political and bureaucratic issues. The bureaucratic part in the books is especially important because its hammered home how unwieldy the Galactic Empire has become, the scale of it is mind-numbing and it's supposed to consist of 25 million(!) planets with a total population of 500 quadrillion(!!!) and yet the show definitely doesn't give you that feeling, we barely see anything outside of pretty empty places and a few barren planets. Now imaging that this Empire with 500 quadrillion people is worried about Seldon and his little group. It also doesn't help that the Cleons give you the feeling that they micromanage this whole Empire, not to mention that the existence of the Cleons "individualizes" the Empire and thus it never feels like they are just the tiniest tip of an iceberg or simply the face of an unfathomably large galactic governing system that mostly runs itself under the burden of its enormous bureaucracy (though I think you could still have made it work with the Cleons if you changed their role/depiction a bit). That the show centers the downfall of the Empire around the Cleons and Seldon (or very specific events/actions) misses everything Asimov wanted to explore with the story around the Foundation, ie it's a SciFi case study of the age old historical question of "why" and its answer "well, it's complex". You could say the TV show makes the same mistake as a (bad) history student trying to boil down the fall of the Roman Empire to a single (or even a couple of) bad Emperor(s) and their decisions. Now you might argue that makes for a better story/"drama" but I would argue otherwise. Not only is that type of story really played out, there is something fascinating about the inevitably of larger forces and you could easily have played up the whole tragedy of Empire trying to prevent the fall/decline while the circumstances and larger factors simply conspire to prevent any escape from that outcome or show how all these factors lead Empire to bad decisions. That would of course have needed more nuance for Empire (the Cleons) so you can't use them just as the "bad guys" (and in season 1 I still had hopes in that regard, at least early on) but instead the show chose to go down a well trodden path and season 2 ends with your generic villain that does the typical villain stuff (and the only reason it's not a total disaster is due to Lee Pace being far too good for this show). So the show sadly ends up as being the SciFi version of the "Great (Wo)Man Theory" and thus wastes its chance to do something different and you have to wonder why you'd even want to adopt the Foundation series if all you do is to tell the most generic space opera story.
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Sep 16, 2023 22:12
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Rectal Death Adept posted:imagine four foundations on the edge of a crisis
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Sep 16, 2023 22:14
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LinkesAuge posted:The problem is it cheapens the whole idea of psychohistory if Seldon (and the Foundation) are actively bringing about the downfall of Empire. I stopped reading here because the rest of the post is entirely irrelevant if this is where you’re starting from. Did you skip the first episode where they clearly explain this? The show literally tells you that the purpose of the foundation is to shorten the dark age and a pretty clear way to do that is to make the empire decline & collapse faster so you can get to the rebuilding part, like the person you’re responding to says. It seems like you misunderstand what psychohistory predicted?
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Sep 16, 2023 23:10
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the book version of psychohistory and tv version of psychohistory are not really the same and the show makes this very clear on like… numerous occasions
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Sep 16, 2023 23:27
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It's been one day since the season ended and I already don't know what to do with myself so I'm reading the prequels for the first time. I can't wait to be even more annoying in discussing how book details relate to the show.
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Sep 17, 2023 02:36
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It seems like the show diverges enough from the books that I'd rather just watch the show and not touch the books at all if it's gonna make me mad about the divergence.
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Sep 17, 2023 02:45
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DaveKap posted:It seems like the show diverges enough from the books that I'd rather just watch the show and not touch the books at all if it's gonna make me mad about the divergence. Foundation is my favorite book series, I read all 5 at a pretty formative time and grew up on Asimov stories and Robot novels. You'd only be mad about the show doing the books dirty if you read the books first and had some kind of attachment to them. Even that isn't permanent if you can get over the fact that the show has nothing to do with the original story. Once you can separate the two the show is fine on it's own. This only happened halfway through the second season for me though. It may even make you appreciate the books more since it's the same general concept of future prediction in 47,000AD just done differently. I found the hook of a society forming around a series of what amounts to VHS tapes left by Seldon and exploring an anthology at different points in his predicted future more compelling than the show but you can judge that for yourself. If you like the show the books are a mostly good and complete story while the show will be multiple years to develop whatever the gently caress it's doing and might get cancelled at some point. Rectal Death Adept fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Sep 17, 2023 |
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Sep 17, 2023 04:00
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Snowmanatee posted:I think that’s the implication. But this kind of belligerence will result in the Foundation becoming just like the empire it replaces, hence the need for a Second Foundation to secretly manipulate things from the shadows. But secret puppeteers is also bad, so that’s where the Third Foundation comes in… That's the beautiful part. When wintertime comes around, the fourth foundation simply freeze to death.
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Sep 17, 2023 06:42
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Rectal Death Adept posted:You'd only be mad about the show doing the books dirty if you read the books first and had some kind of attachment to them. Yeah when I said "I can't wait to be even more annoying in discussing how book details relate to the show" it was a joke because there is no serious relation. The fun in reading the books with the perspective of just having watched 2 seasons of the show is like, I dunno, going back to read 1950s Superman comics after watching the Henry Cavill films (Goyer wrote Man of Steel--this is the best analogy I could find ok).
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Sep 17, 2023 13:39
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Big Bowie Bonanza posted:I stopped reading here because the rest of the post is entirely irrelevant if this is where you’re starting from. Did you skip the first episode where they clearly explain this? The show literally tells you that the purpose of the foundation is to shorten the dark age and a pretty clear way to do that is to make the empire decline & collapse faster so you can get to the rebuilding part, like the person you’re responding to says. It seems like you misunderstand what psychohistory predicted? The show didn't do that, at no point does Seldon say the Empire has to die earlier so the dark age is shorter. It's probably something you FEEL the show tries to tell you because it's what the plot is geared towards but it's once again just a misunderstanding of Psychohistory and the whole setup of the story and like I said a big problem of the show is that it puts so much emphasis on setting up Empire as villain that the audience would of course think the Dark Age is all about Empire being evil and if Empire would be "better" then it wouldn't happen at all. It's also a rather random assumption that a faster declining Empire would help Foundation, you could just as easily argue that it would give Foundation less time to prepare for the complete chaos of the "Dark Age". However he most important point in this context is that it really doesn't matter how fast the Empire declines because it's already on a path that makes it (practically) near impossible to prevent and that the timespan of the decline is overall rather insignificant compared to the "Dark Age" (the show itself establishes in ep1 that Empire will fall within 500 years followed by a dark age of 30.000 years and the best(!) case scenario for Seldon's plan is to reduce that to "just" 1000 years). Maybe you should have read the rest of my post to understand why it's even thematically a very bad idea to link the existence (or a faster decline) of the Empire to shortening the Dark Age. It's the reason why I gave this example you quoted in the first place because if you do this then you are just creating a self-fulfilling prophecy (at best) and that's NOT what psychohistory is (which is why the Second Foundation is needed in the first place). There is a reason why Asimov CHOSE to largely ignore the Empire from the perspective of the Foundation, that wasn't done by accident, it had a logical, narrative and thematic reason. But like I said, the show is already contradicting itself because it doesn't even follow the "original" plan, it has conscious versions of Seldon changing the plan on the fly and reacting to ongoing events and not only that, it's reacting to singular individuals and in very dramatic ways (and we haven't even talked about whatever is going on with the Prime Radiant being some sort of super intelligence itself who now actively intervenes). One could argue that Seldon in the show does kinda act like the Second Foundation in the books but even there it's a lesser version of that because the Second Foundation took great care about how it interacted with the galaxy and to which degree "manipulation" was even okay, it was all about very subtle intervention instead of what Seldon is currently doing in the show (that's why the Second Foundation had to be hidden/a secret). This also follows another important axiom of psychohistory, ie that the population should remain in ignorance of the application of psychohistory because otherwise it changes it's behaviour. In the show Seldon did at one point allude to this fact but the show doesn't really seem to care about that. All of this is even further complicated by the fact that Gaal can see the future in the show, another factor that is now in constant conflict with the whole concept of psychohistory (and kinda trivializes it). If you look at it from a plot/concept perspective Gaal should really be a villain/antagonist to the Foundation. LinkesAuge fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Sep 17, 2023 |
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Sep 17, 2023 14:21
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Rectal Death Adept posted:It may even make you appreciate the books more since it's the same general concept of future prediction in 47,000AD just done differently. I'm not a book-reader and this is the sense I've been getting from reading book-reader posts. It feels like they took the original concept, from a soviet sci-fi, a genre notoriously difficult to adapt to the screen, and tried to make a compelling TV drama series of it. It was awkward in the first season, but the second season feels like it's getting into full swing, even literally with Lee Pace throwing fists  I enjoyed how this season turned out. I don't have any desire to go back to the books, and just look forward to more of Apple TV's Foundation. Bless you book-readers but  about divergences.
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Sep 17, 2023 16:43
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Jehde posted:I enjoyed how this season turned out. I don't have any desire to go back to the books, and just look forward to more of Apple TV's Foundation. Bless you book-readers but I kinda get the predicament the writers were in. The book versions are very different from traditional hero-goes-on-fun-space-adventures story which is arguably what appeals to the largest audiences and is what Apple ultimately wants. The books explore interesting ideas and concepts with people sorta tagging along as things unfold around them which would be a fairly experimental show and plot. It's just annoying that they used this property to shoehorn something entirely different into it. Surely there are loads of epic space operas with lasers and explosions to choose from.
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Sep 17, 2023 17:40
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I don't know a non-rude way to say this and I feel it needs to be said, so, sorry — while it is rude I know that I'd appreciate someone prodding me about this. Almost every single post I've seen from you has such a low value of signal to such a high value of noise, it is seriously impressive that you manage to type so much and say so little, on top of just being mostly wrong? I really tried to read your posts in full and in good faith but most of them are just going over the same point over and over again, and on top of that repeating points you've made in, what feels like, the last 5 of your previous posts. I really really tried, to read in good faith, etc. But now I'm just wondering if you're a troll poster or a gimmick poster?
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Sep 17, 2023 19:20
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Jehde posted:I'm not a book-reader and this is the sense I've been getting from reading book-reader posts. It feels like they took the original concept, from a soviet sci-fi, Wait what
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Sep 17, 2023 19:21
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I decided to stop responding to them because everything’s a giant Reddit reply
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Sep 17, 2023 19:21
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^^^^^ Yeah they are a page or two from me reaching for the Ignore button, for the first time ever Rappaport posted:Wait what lol they just read the name Asimov and assumed lmfao
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Sep 17, 2023 19:22
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alexandriao posted:I don't know a non-rude way to say this and I feel it needs to be said, so, sorry — while it is rude I know that I'd appreciate someone prodding me about this. don't rantshame
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Sep 17, 2023 20:59
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alexandriao posted:^^^^^ I had to go back to season 1 to see if Hari told Empire anything about stepping aside and sure enough it’s a big scene where he tells Empire to end the genetic cloning program and step aside to shorten the dark ages. And then that scene is referenced again in another episode lol. How much did this dude write about the show not showing us anything of the sort?
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Sep 17, 2023 21:15
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Rectal Death Adept posted:don't rantshame No they keep coming in here posting long screeds that go nowhere and are poorly written and show little understanding of the show. It's like the spirit of TV/IV has an account and must post about how bad they are at watching TV and saying anything coherent.
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Sep 17, 2023 21:43
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Binged the show over the last few days and I really enjoyed it. I read the books long ago and enjoyed them but don't have any issues with the direction the show is taking. I actually can't wait for season 3, specifically to watch the Cleon lineage get continually more hosed up. Should be nicely accelerated next season
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Sep 18, 2023 01:15
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Yea I had a great time with this season. More so than last season. Bit gutted that certain people won't be coming along to the next season Bel Riose was fantastic, but definitely makes sense that his story finishes with "accomplishing" killing a Cleon. Also, Homer Marshmallow was cool and it sucks that he's gone.
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Sep 18, 2023 03:22
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I won't pretend that I prioritise plot logic over emotional logic (though I do care about mechanics, it's just priorities, you know?). There's basically nothing about the cleaning bot that makes much sense -- it doesn't even appear to have cleaning attachments!? -- but i got teary, and I laughed at the name gag. Great stuff. Pace was on fire these last two eps (as was Laura Oldmate, Demezel). Shame it looks like he's gonna be playing completely different role(s) going forward, I could have done with at least one more arrogant wanker beatdown from him.
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Sep 18, 2023 03:56
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Spiteski posted:Yea I had a great time with this season. More so than last season. Bit gutted that certain people won't be coming along to the next season Bel Riose was fantastic, but definitely makes sense that his story finishes with "accomplishing" killing a Cleon. Also, Homer Marshmallow was cool and it sucks that he's gone. Sucks that the magical space coffin only works on the ground to the point where one random person a continent away in the middle of nowhere is fine but someone in orbit is hosed.
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Sep 18, 2023 04:36
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D-Pad posted:No they keep coming in here posting long screeds that go nowhere and are poorly written and show little understanding of the show. It's like the spirit of TV/IV has an account and must post about how bad they are at watching TV and saying anything coherent. Theres literally a line by Polly where he says "The circulation cuts off on the extremities first, it'll be a long while until the rot hits the core" but Linkes goes on this huge rant about THE EMPIRE NOT DYEING MORE?? Likewise theres a throwback scene with Rayech where it makes it clear that Rayech's death and the long dark period of being stuck in The Machine made Seldon somewhat reconsider the impact of individuals on history. The entire point of Seldon in The Machine is to continually develop psychohistory, as well. All of their complaints are neatly answered by the show but the show doesn't break the fourth wall and sit down and go "hi here is why we are doing this" so wooosh it flies over their head along with any and all subtext
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Sep 18, 2023 05:39
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Show is obviously working off the general ideas but has its own way to go through the story. I'd say you just have to kind of accept that because I don't think the book series as it is would be very compelling as a televisions series otherwise. They are good books, I just don't think a direct translation would come through well.
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Sep 18, 2023 15:31
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Well that was definitely better than season 1. Though at the end there was way too much "sike - that didn't actually happen" nonsense.
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Sep 18, 2023 16:47
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You’d think a studio would love changing the cast every season because then the actors would have no leverage in contract negotiations.
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Sep 18, 2023 20:38
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CubanMissile posted:You’d think a studio would love changing the cast every season because then the actors would have no leverage in contract negotiations. Hey at least we got rid of Salvor! Hopefully!
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Sep 18, 2023 21:08
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AcidCat posted:Well that was definitely better than season 1. Though at the end there was way too much "sike - that didn't actually happen" nonsense. It genuinely feels like it improved just because tiem was spent on better plotlines. The first season was roughly 1/3rd empire, salvor and Gail. But salvor and Gail were both boring as poo poo. This season is 1/3rd empire, terminus (in various forms) and Gail/Salvor. Empire was always good, and the terminus plotlines were stronger, which meant I only tuned out for the Gail stuff.
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Sep 18, 2023 21:15
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I was just starting to like Salvor
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Sep 18, 2023 21:16
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Yeah outside of Phara's idiot bubble Salvor was pretty good this season. Her and Hari bonding was a highlight of the mentallics plotllne.
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Sep 18, 2023 22:28
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I thought the Gaal/Salvor stuff was good when they were doing a planet-of-the-week at the start of the season. Sticking with the mentallics, though required by the plot of the overarching story, made me care less about whatever they were up to because they were only interesting in spots, not interesting as a whole. Maybe Salvor's plot was getting better but I honestly couldn't give any fucks about her and Gaal's mother/daughter dynamic. I think it's because I'm of the mind that a mom is a parent who raises you. Trying to make a mother figure out of someone who is the same age as you just seems like a bad idea.
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Sep 19, 2023 01:31
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