"You talk to your chicken?"
"What kind of parent do you think I am?"
Hey that was one of the best lines, best scenes
Netflix's Lost in Space Season 3
- Thread starter Starscream2112
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Hey that was one of the best lines, best scenes
Marathon-ed S3 from E3 to end yesterday. What a ride. I so hope these characters continue in some way in chapter 2.
I'm tempted to suggest that Will and the Robot find themselves on a planet of gigantic humanoids, with the show retitled to Land of the Giants. On the one hand, I resist that idea because it would break the relative scientific plausibility of the show too badly. On the other hand, what I loved about the Netflix LiS was how much it revolved around clever problem-solving in survival situations, and Land of the Giants was also very much about that.
Oh please no while I loved LOTG as a youngster I'm torn on that in the present day. If a good director could pull off the idea I'd be all for that but not for this cast or this series.
Sure, it's mainly a joke suggestion. I wasn't taking it seriously at all, but then the problem-solving angle occurred to me and made me go "hmm" about it, just a little.
Having said that how tall is King Kong? so LOTG isn't out of the question if a good director can pull it off.... I just realized Kong is as tall as any of the giants would be.
Kong's height varies from production to production, from as little as 25 feet in the Peter Jackson film (half the height of the original) to over 330 feet in Godzilla vs. Kong.
In Land of the Giants, everything was scaled up exactly 12 times -- presumably so that the set and prop builders could easily convert sizes, since it was one foot for every inch. So the giants would've been in the range of 65-75 feet, mostly. The only Kong that corresponds to that height is the second Japanese Kong from King Kong Escapes, at 66 feet.
Of course, no upright biped that large makes any sense, per the square-cube law. You'd have a dozen times as much weight pressing down on every square inch of cross-sectional bone or tissue, and human proportions couldn't support that. There's a reason that larger animals have thicker legs. Also, there's no way a humanlike circulatory system could pump blood up that high. I don't think you could plausibly justify anything remotely humanoid being larger than, say, 20 feet or so in height, and even that's pushing it.
How tall was Kong in Kong Skull Island? Wasn't he the same Kong from Godzilla vs Kong?
Primates have similar internal details to us so how does his circulatory system work?
I mean it's all fiction anyway so why would it matter?
See the link. He was just over 100 feet in K:SI, but it was set in the '70s and it was explicitly stated that Kong was still growing, since they knew he'd have to be much larger to take on Godzilla two movies later.
Of course it matters! Fiction is not a license to be random. On the contrary -- if you want to earn your audience's suspension of disbelief, you need to establish a set of rules and play by them consistently. If you're telling a gritty urban crime drama, you don't suddenly have the detective ask his fairy godmother to solve the case for him, because that would break the rules of the world. Conversely, if you're doing a series about heroes who routinely battle vampires and werewolves and evil sorcerors, you don't do a story claiming the heroes don't believe in ghosts, because that would break the rules of the world as well. It isn't playing fair with your audience to rewrite the rules you've laid out.
Science fiction is the same way -- some is "harder," more plausible and grounded, and some is more fanciful. And once you've established a set of rules for a fictional world, it's cheating to change those rules mid-stream. The Netflix Lost in Space had some fanciful elements, but it was relatively science-literate and plausible compared to most film and TV sci-fi. Its intelligence and science literacy were a large part of its appeal to me. Something like Land of the Giants crosses the line into pure fantasy, so it obviously wouldn't fit in the same reality.
I will check out the link again.. You reminded me about that line in KSI where they say he's still growing.
Thank you for that great post. OK then I'll change my POV. Land Of The Giants is fantasy so if you played within those rules then could you do a story about that kind of thing?
Well, you can do a story about anything, but different stories have different ground rules. The point is that my frivolous suggestion of doing Land of the Giants as a followup to the Netflix Lost in Space isn't something I'd really want to see, because it would abandon the relative credibility of the show's universe. Of course, there is, sadly, a long history of SF screen universes that start out relatively plausible getting more fanciful in the hands of later creators who don't respect that plausibility, e.g. Star Trek to an extent, SeaQuest DSV, and Andromeda. But that's just why I don't want it to happen again. If LotG were remade, let it be something separate, in its own reality. Although I wouldn't mind if it were from the same writers/producers, since they did a good job with LiS.
If someone did LOTG I'd like it to go horror because there must have been a heck of a lot of horror for Earth people in the giants world and more then a few incidents of Earth ships ending up there, like that passenger plane and all we see left are posters on buildings the giants made and clothes that were taken from the crash about the place, and that leads me to think a bit of off screen nasty stuff happened to all those people.
Most audiences don't know or care about the square-cube law or most any science that matters to "giants," whether human or animal, Liliputian or Brobdingnan. Mostly they just care if the story is good or it's a fun ride, and, maybe, if it's internally consistent.
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To be honest that's all I would care about in such a story, as long as it's consistent within the world that is presented and entertaining I'm not going to complain too much. Facts and science be damned as long as the story is good I'm in.
The thing about "most" is that it isn't "all." There has always been an audience that does care about such things, and there is an entire thriving genre of hard science fiction that is tailored to that audience. It's as valid as any other genre and has thrived in prose for generations. It's just rarely been featured in film and television. But there have been hard-SF shows and movies over the years. The Expanse is a hard-SF show, and it's been quite successful. Hard-SF movies like Gravity, Interstellar, and The Martian have done well. And as I said, the Netflix Lost in Space chose to take a relatively grounded, scientifically literate approach -- not entirely hard SF, but solid enough to appeal to audiences like me who do care about such things. My entire point is that it should be internally consistent with the style it's established, so you're contradicting yourself by dismissing my point while citing the very consistency my point is based on.
After all, how is "most audiences" relevant here? All fiction is not alike, nor should it be. It doesn't all have to appeal to the same majority tastes. You want different works of fiction to offer a range of different styles and approaches, to have something for every taste. The wider the variety of different styles of fiction there is, the better. So an appeal to the preference of the majority is nonsensical in this context.
Anyway, half the fun is spotting where movies and TV get the science wrong. If there weren't any errors, MythBusters would have finished far sooner than it did.
It's not much fun when they aren't even trying, though. Hal Clement, a scientist-author acclaimed for his hard science fiction, liked to say that hard SF was a competition with the audience -- the writer would try to make the conjectural science and technology as believable as possible while the audience would try to spot the mistakes. But with the typical TV/movie approach to sci-fi as utterly science-illiterate nonsense, there is no competition for the science-savvy audience member -- it's like trying to play chess against a toddler. That's why something like LiS is so refreshing.
Although LiS's internal consistency did suffer somewhat in season 3, like how it forgot about the Jupiters not having artificial gravity, or the ridiculously overcluttered asteroid field around the robot planet. Yet another case of a TV show's initial attempts at good science getting eroded over time. But it wasn't as drastic a deterioration as something like SeaQuest DSV or Andromeda, both of which started out as intelligent hard SF but got retooled by later producers into mindless sci-fantasy.
Speaking of zero-G consistency - in a new Expanse episode, Avasrala was floating in mid-air in her quarters to enjoy the zero-G. Then Bobbie walked in on her mag-boots and helped her get her feet on the deck. Avasarala then walked over to a counter and picked up a drink in an open cup, SAT down and crossed her legs and took a sip. Later we see Drummer talking to someone on her ship, which is not under thrust, and she sits back to lean on a railing while talking.
I mean...
I mean...
I didn't notice those instances but I'm nor surprised. Some of the manoeuvring depicted during battles this season strikes me as very unconvincing for the large sizes of the ship involved. For example, when the Rocinante (46m long) flips end over end in the order of a second (average rotational velocity of π radians/s), the peak acceleration at each end of the ship would be something like 46g - eek! It might look cool but to me it seems unrealistic. At one point, the Rocinante also appears to accelerate from rest in the camera frame and move its own length in about half a second, which is an acceleration of 37g. The mass of the ship usually quoted is 250 metric tons so that's a thrust of about 90MN (90 meganewtons) or roughly 2.6 times the thrust of the Saturn V first stage (34MN). The thrust value quoted in fandom based on the performance previously shown onscreen is 6.37MN (about the same as that of a single Rocketdyne F-1 engine at sea level) . Did they sack their science adviser to save money after season five?Speaking of zero-G consistency - in a new Expanse episode, Avasrala was floating in mid-air in her quarters to enjoy the zero-G. Then Bobbie walked in on her mag-boots and helped her get her feet on the deck. Avasarala then walked over to a counter and picked up a drink in an open cup, SAT down and crossed her legs and took a sip. Later we see Drummer talking to someone on her ship, which is not under thrust, and she sits back to lean on a railing while talking.
I mean...
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Yeah, The Expanse has always been inconsistent in its treatment of microgravity and "walking" in gravity boots, and has consistently depicted the use of cups, cans, and other drinking vessels that wouldn't work in microgravity. What drove me crazy was having a drip coffeemaker on the Rocinante. If they ever shut down thrust in mid-brew, there'd be boiling-hot globules of coffee flying all over the place. That's a lawsuit waiting to happen.
And of course, the whole idea of magnetic boots is utter nonsense, making as much sense as trying to swim by strapping weights to your feet and walking on the bottom of the pool. It has no advantages over just floating and pulling yourself along by handholds. It wouldn't work anyway, since spaceships are made mostly of lightweight, non-magnetic materials, and the magnetic fields would screw up shipboard electronics. It's just an incredibly terrible idea all around. I'd be happier with a fictitious black-box artificial gravity system, because at least then we could imagine it was based on some principles not yet discovered, like the Epstein Drive. I'd find that more plausible than magnetic boots, because we know precisely why those could never work as shown.
Still, most science fiction in film and television is far more implausible than that. I'd say that The Expanse, despite its imperfections, is the hardest hard-SF show we've probably ever had on TV, and certainly the most successful hard-SF show we've ever had. (Andromeda started out as hard-SF but totally lost it due to the staff changes in seasons 2-3.)
And of course, the whole idea of magnetic boots is utter nonsense, making as much sense as trying to swim by strapping weights to your feet and walking on the bottom of the pool. It has no advantages over just floating and pulling yourself along by handholds. It wouldn't work anyway, since spaceships are made mostly of lightweight, non-magnetic materials, and the magnetic fields would screw up shipboard electronics. It's just an incredibly terrible idea all around. I'd be happier with a fictitious black-box artificial gravity system, because at least then we could imagine it was based on some principles not yet discovered, like the Epstein Drive. I'd find that more plausible than magnetic boots, because we know precisely why those could never work as shown.
Still, most science fiction in film and television is far more implausible than that. I'd say that The Expanse, despite its imperfections, is the hardest hard-SF show we've probably ever had on TV, and certainly the most successful hard-SF show we've ever had. (Andromeda started out as hard-SF but totally lost it due to the staff changes in seasons 2-3.)
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