I've got to disagree. I thought other than the unnecessary race change on Ade they gave us remarkably diverse cast.
Compared to five or ten years ago, maybe. But I guess I've been spoiled by recent shows like
Sleepy Hollow and
Minority Report (and even
Star Wars Rebels), which do excellent jobs with diverse casting. On
Minority Report, aside from the returning characters from the movie (which had an almost entirely white cast), the lead and supporting characters alike were majority-nonwhite, which was a good representation of what the demographics of the US are expected to be like in 50 years -- and, indeed, was a good representation of the
present-day demographics of Washington, DC, where the show was set.
Hell, there are still shows on the air with all white main casts, so it seem ridiculous to me complain that a show with 5 non-white actors, going by what Santa Kang posted, is not diverse enough.
I'm not comparing it to present-day shows, which are mostly a pretty crappy baseline for inclusion (although, as I said, there are a number of present-day shows that do better than this one, so it's hardly "ridiculous"). I'm comparing it to what would be plausible to expect from the demographics of a spacefaring civilization in the 23rd century. After all, the show is striving for plausibility in its portrayal of physics and technology, so why is it wrong to assess the plausibility of the show's demographic futurism? When you choose to do hard science fiction, you open yourself up to a higher standard of criticism when it comes to every aspect of your work's credibility. You're deliberately courting an audience that desires and expects such high standards. As a hard-SF author myself, I think that's entirely fair. I'm applying the same standards to this that I apply to my own work.
Actually, I think magnetic boots are featured in the novels too. People seem to switch between using them or just floating around.
The book, which is not restricted by filming in gravity, explicitly says that they use magnetic boots when exploring the Scopuli. And it makes sense to me as well. They are investigating a damaged ship that could be dangerous. Using magnetic boots allows you to anchor yourself without needing to grap hold of something, leaving your hands free to do other stuff, like aim a weapon.
If you need to anchor yourself by your feet, there are going to be plenty of straps and handles and crevices that you can hook your toes into as well as your hands. I've seen SF that portrayed microgravity-dwelling populations that went barefoot and had nearly prehensile toes, thanks to a lifetime of using them to grasp things, if not due to genetic engineering. In free fall, feet don't need to be weight-bearing platforms, so they're free to become dextrous gripping tools in their own right.
Not to mention that in free fall, you don't necessarily
need to anchor yourself. Once you've come to a stop, you'll just stay there. At most, you'll rotate around your center of mass, but with practice you can control your body orientation through subtle corrections.
NASA experimented with magnetic boots, but abandoned them for a variety of reasons. For one thing, a lot of spaceship/station construction is aluminum, which magnets don't stick to. Ferromagnetic materials would be heavier and would waste fuel to push around. Also, the magnets would create interference with shipboard electronics, sensors, or communications and could be dangerous. Or you could inadvertently get some floating wrench stuck to your foot or something.
For another thing, magnets strong enough to hold a human-sized body in place would be extremely hard to pull off the surface, so you'd quickly get exhausted from the effort, and you'd be in deep trouble if you needed to move quickly and suddenly. You could probably devise some kind of smart boots that turned off the electromagnets when they sensed you lifting your foot, but the constantly changing magnetic fields would probably be even worse for shipboard electronics, and it's still immensely more efficient just to push off and coast forward, and you have far more freedom of movement. Using magnetic boots in free fall makes about as much sense as trying to swim with 30-pound weights strapped to your feet so you can "walk" along the bottom of the pool. It is vastly harder to do and you don't gain anything by doing it. And it wouldn't give you any real sense of up or down, because that's a function of your inner ears rather than your feet. It wouldn't actually feel like walking in gravity at all.
In every respect, magnetic boots are a terrible idea for moving around in space, and the only reason for ever using the conceit is to make an excuse for the fact that you're not actually filming in microgravity. I can understand why a show filmed on Earth has no choice but to use the trope, but it's still intrinsically implausible. I'm bewildered to hear that the books use the trope, because there's no reason for it there.
