Is rather good. Game of thrones team take on a Hugo winning SF book series. Something for everyone. It begins with particle science running amuck being investigated by a film noir detective. Beautifully done. HDR and Dolby Atmos. 8 episodes. There will be more.
I am assuming I need to be somewhat sober to get it. Here is my personal problem. Sober me needs more friends to binge watch shit with. Not having a wife or significant other to be sober for has put me in a predicament where I have to find something to do with someone else so we can discuss things while not in my nesting state. My nest does not have other people in it, and that is where I do me things. I think I need more friends, or to talk to less people. I started this program and within 10 minutes realized it did not hook me. Not that I hated it, but I did not care about it. This is where other people come in. If I am left to my own devices I have only a few things I have to watch. I have just been learning I do not want to watch things that do not capture my interests on the off chance they might be useful in conversation at a later date. Then on the other hand absolutely no one comes and watches the things I like except for one person. I need a fucking roommate or something. Someone weak willed, but energetic enough to spit out ideas.
An excellent, thoughtful series based on some excellent, thoughtful books. Probably far too cerebral for some folks.
It’s not too cerebral at all. It takes the aliens 400 years to get to earth. In that 400 year span nobody thought, “hey maybe we shouldn’t kill these people, but instead try terraform a nearby moon or live with them peacefully or go somewhere else or anything else? How about the aliens not telling anyone their plan? What’s the point of the game device, seems kind of pointless? Please explain how this show is cerebral and not another Netflix attempt at intelligent science fiction that falls flat and is boring.
I binged the series this weekend. Thought it was OK, will come back if/when there's a S2. Things I don't know if I like/don't get: Is it supposed to be true that the San-Ti didn't understand the concept of lying until basically just 2024? Because it seems like the exposure they had to humans from 1980 to the present would have been ample time to come across that concept. And although I guess it could be that their human agents are the ones doing the actual lying prior to that, stuff ranging from how they take on human forms that are nothing how they actually look like, the VR game, the countdowns that they impose, etc. are more or less lies. I don't know if I enjoy following any of the Oxford characters all that much. Wade and his detective friend are way more interesting. It also seemed like the pro-alien and the anti-alien folks were suboptimal AF. You don't need to do an elaborate game to bring people on board to welcome the alien overlords, and you probably don't need to do much elaborate to derail the alien conspiracy. It seems like once you do the raid, you should never frigging let any of those people out of your sight and it should not be that tough for the detectives to get plenty of leads to figure out what is up with the aliens and their supporters.
The 400-year span hasn't happened in the show. We don't know how the next stage of the show will turn out (at least, I don't know as a non-book reader.) All sorts of things could happen between the show's 2024 and 2424ish, when the aliens are expected to arrive. What makes you say the aliens didn't tell anyone their plan? They seemingly told Ye and Evans the broad strokes of what they were preparing to do -- stymie Earth's scientific progress so that by 2424, Earth couldn't mount a meaningful defense, and Ye and Evans enlisted others to get them to execute it. If you are talking about "Why did the aliens come out of the closet by revealing that they were there and they consider humans bugs," well, I would guess the answer is that on finding out that Evans was a liar who couldn't be trusted, the San-Ti decided no need to run a slow roll about their plans. The humans apparently wanted to run the VR devices to see who was creative enough and smart enough to appreciate the 3 body problem and thus would be useful to their alien masters, who would develop enough of an affinity for the aliens that they could be groomed to help the San-Ti. Also, it's possible/probable that by sticking their heads in the VR devices, the San-Ti were pulling data that would allow them to evaluate on other grounds as well.
Out of those four, only one could be considered "cerebral". The other two are high quality television. And, in fact, one of them is overrated hot garbage for folks who like to think they're smarter than they actually are.
Given how FF "handles" Star Trek, by parroting whatever YouTuber he's last watched said, continuing to rage against anything that Alex Kurtzman has been involved in, claiming that the current writers don't know the true meaning of Trek while regularly showing misunderstandings and knowledge gaps about the earlier series, I'm disinclined to consider cable of handling something more cerebral.
Caught this last week - I know about the books (I would love to go back to reading multiple books a week, rather than maybe one a year if I'm lucky) and like those, the plot is mostly smart, but the need to service where the author wanted to go left a few holes in its wake, when those holes could be good servants of the overall plot rather than something you could drive cattle through. I mean, you've something proton sized that can expand as it unfolds spatial dimensions, and can move at light speed, and it needs to re-program cars to assassinate someone? Just unfold in someones brain or heart. In a 400 year timeframe it could cheerfully commit complete matricide and cheer up all the incels whilst collapsing the population. If it can't do that, well, there's a technological, strategic, and/or psychological gap that can be taken advantage of. Or just brush that under the carpet, whistle, and move on. Or, rather than go to all the hassle of invading a planet 400-ish light years away, dessicate your population in ships, park them outside the system and go send your sophons out to sniff out strange new worlds, preferably without strange new civilisations. It picks up a lot of hard sci-fi ideas though, such as Fermi's Paradox (S2's take on the Dark Forest theory ought to be interesting), but seems to miss a few - for example, is our capacity to lie tied into how quickly we advance? And can lying be taught? And, if so, what impact would it have on a civilisation that never had the capacity before, and without anyone played by Ricky Gervais? The story did plod a little at times, and I confess the de-sinofication of the characters raised an eyebrow, you expect it from the reams of Very White Fiction out there, not so much from something originating from a culture so repressed by its batshit government. You can see a fair few influences - I suspect Liu Cixin either read the Tripods prequel, or similar, with the game element (Tripods used a TV show, but was written pre internet) Knowing whats coming, I'm curious how they'll tackle books 2, and especially 3, especially given how Netflix is getting more cagey with budgets and likes to cancel shows, and if they'll keep some of the more debate worthy aspects.
Other shows/ movies that are considered cerebral (of course all of this is subjective so WAB can fuck right off) Dark, Severance, Mr. Robot, Raised by Wolves, Black Mirror, Foundation, Westworld, Twin Peaks, True Detective, just to name a few more. None of these were too hard for me to understand, WAB is just a prick who’s had it out for me for years.
Okay, finally finished this. I see the cerebral argument, it’s an allegory about climate change and Christian fundamentalism or right wing ideology, I get it. It’s also an allegory for fundamentalism as a whole. They also do a better job of what The Last Jedi ham fisted tried to say about the nature of war. Good job, you did what Ryan Johnson couldn’t do, but you’re no better than what George Lucas and Dave Filoni had already did in Clone Wars and what they did in Andor. I like what they did with Saul and Will, I think that might be something to deal with in the second season. They implied that the cryogenic chambers are being improved on so my initial thought is that at some point Will is rebuilt, takes the San Ti’s side and Saul has to convince him to take humanity’s side. But Will’s pod was lost you say. I think that’s a red herring. So it ends with Waide being intimidated by the aliens, we’ll see if that sticks. I think the hype was too much, but worth following up on. 7.75/10 I think The Expanse or even NuBSG is better. Not too cerebral for me. If this spans for hundreds of years, I’ll take Foundation over this.
I am actually with you here. The plot is really convoluted and unnecessary unless there is some twist and the aliens are already on earth manipulating people, or it is AI fucking with people. It throws a whole lot of sciency words at us, but the writer obviously does not know much about anything. The boat scene was funny, but yeah fucking dumb. The whole series was tell me you don't know shit about how things work, but don't actually tell me that. The whole play on faith and god is so heavy handed. I get it, but I would have to smoke enough weed to make me weedtarded so I would think it was interesting and not something I was realizing in my teens. It has as many dead ends as Serial experiment Lain, but without the really cool theme song. The characters are OK and likable enough. Once they started to get into the whole dying from pancreatic cancer thing and focussed on those moral choices and some of the drama over killing in war served up some nice human moments. By the end of this part I am wondering why the fuck the aliens didn't just do The Happening and make everyone kill themselves. Maybe they are and they are just doing it really slow so we all die out after 400 years. Even when they had a good idea like the boat scene it just did not fit the actual problem. Considering the whole boat was sliced up really easily and then burst into flames, why not just hit it with a missile because the threads would have cut a drive to pieces. Of course it is alien technology that they don't have, but I guess the humans built all the super storage, but none of the other processing or memory power on a fucking ship? Of course it always goes back to tell me you really have no idea how everything works without telling us you really dio not have an idea how everything works, but we know you think it is all magic. It is clear the writer wanted to express ideas about god, faith, and science, but we already had that flop in star trek 5 and I am left wondering what does god need with a video game VR helmet when he can just beam numbers into your brain or make everyone see the stars flicker like christmas lights. They had some interesting ideas, and they might have made things interesting if they could have just explained a little more. The whole sky turned into a giant eye, don't ask me why, they probably swallowed a fly.
The only time i would have bought a star for someone would have been when I was five and didn't have a printer that I could have just printed a fake deed up with. Even then I would not have had the money for a printer or computer to do such a thing, and I do not even think printers were a thing yet. Really, super strategy dude would have been really fucking wrong to launch my head into space because if the aliens could make me a girl's body and wanted me to help rid this planet of the human plague you would all be fucking done. Imight ask to save a couple of you, but I am helping with the invasion and I am riding in on a space ship like Pixy Misa dressed as captain harlock. The really honest aliens are going to givbe me everything I want to make me talk, and then I am supposed to backstab them for humans? They don't even need to give me a new body to fuck everyone over, just give me one of those headsets and set it on girl mode and I will give you the gate codes. I am cheap.
