I guess technically, yes, the seatbelt was responsible for him being shredded. If he hadn't been belted in, all of him would have ended up as a strawberry-colored paste on the bow wall of the cockpit instead of just the parts of him the seatbelt didn't restrain.
Does Amazon air their shows on a weekly basis? For some reason, I thought they were the "post the entire season at once" crowd.
Mostly, that's the case I think - an exception being season one of The Tick, which was divided into two parts. It would make sense for Amazon to rethink their strategy to discourage freeloaders.
Because they know (exactly like Netflix or Youtube Red) that a lot of people will do it. But they also know: 1) for what show people will use their free month, so they know where to invest. 2) a percentage of these people will continue to pay to use the service. Otherwise, why would they offer a free month?
I actually read a positive review of The Expanse which argued it was essential because it painted a more optimistic view of humanity's future. At first it seemed weird to consider, because it seems pretty crapsack at times, but they are right. Mankind has colonized much of the solar system, people on Earth and Mars have high standards of living, and living past 120 is common. It's certainly not a utopian setting, but it's more technologically advanced, a tiny bit more socially advanced, and most importantly, there are idealists who still strive to do the right thing.
Every action show makes its setting seem dangerous. If it's set on the ocean, it will focus constantly on storms, predators, and other dangers of the ocean. If it's set in the city, then the city will be racked with crime, violence, and natural disasters. Heck, it's not even limited to action shows. Riverdale is set in what's supposed to be an idyllic small town, and it's had more than half a dozen murders, a gang war, riots, and a mob takeover in the past 18 months.
Some on Earth might have high standards of living but for others that's not the case - we saw that when Bobbi was on the run and from references to the clinic that Anna and her wife run. We don't really know what life is like on Mars.
I'm rewatching Season 1 right now, and it's explicitly said the average life expectancy on Earth is up to 120 years . That weird slum community Bobbi runs into is some group who - for whatever reason - decides not to live off Basic Income. Certainly the fact that "Basic" exists to any extent at all suggest poverty is way less of an issue in The Expanse's world (at least on Earth, not so much The Belt) than in our world - although income inequality still seems to be a big issue.
^The issue is that it's not "Basic Income," the trendy cure-all social welfare all the nerds love these days, where the government simply cuts everyone a check and lets them figure out how much money to spend on what sort of food, shelter, and clothing, but "Basic Assistance," which is a whole parallel subsistence economy that's much more similar to present-day US welfare (though more comprehensive) where the government dictates precisely what you get in regards to food, a place to live (like, they'll move you to another city if that's where the available public housing is, and if your family and friends are somewhere else, tough luck), medical treatment, and other basic necessities, whereas the people who can get jobs live in a capitalist system where they can freely exchange money for whatever goods and services they care to own. That is to say, people on Basic Assistance are specifically disallowed from earning or using money. They are prohibited from getting jobs. Everything they get, they get with rations similar to present-day food-stamps, that cover only specific necessities that the people in power judge to be appropriate for poor people. Education and training are also hard to come by for people on Basic Assistance, so once you're in, it's not easy to get out. IIRC, that slum doctor Bobbi met was one of those. He was educated in medicine, but he couldn't get into the system. People opt out of Basic because it's demeaning, and they'd prefer to scrounge and get a little freedom and, maybe, a better chance to eventually be "worthy" of joining the ranks of the employable. In this past week's episode, Berlin mentioned when she was trying to interview Amos that it was nearly impossible for someone in his situation to get out, and the way The Expanse's Basic system is set up is why. It's probably the worst possible way you can address poverty that isn't simply ignoring it.
Yeah I think it's a bit of a clue that "basic assistance" is hardly a soft option when Avasarala used it as a threat to some goon that was messing her around in season 1 (I think it was when she went to visit Holden's mum, but I could be misremembering.) Then there's Amos's exchange with the scientist with the empathy lobotomy. Something to the effect of; "...it was the smell of sickness and death. We're both from the slums so I know you know the one." If that's a familiar odour then it seems as though most of Earth is one big slum, with a relative handful living comfortably and a select few in abject luxury.
I really agree with this post. And if we're going to be honest, I would call Star Trek more idealistic about humanity and the future, than optimistic. Or I could also call it fantasy-ridden optimism, which isn't real optimism. Star Trek is too strongly based in fantasy for me to draw any inspiration from. The Expanse shows us a possible future, or at least a future more in line with what we know is likely if humanity doesn't destroy itself and the planet, I would call that true optimism.
It's sad for me to hear that, since Star Trek was practically the first science fiction TV series that made any effort to create a plausible and scientifically literate version of the future, aside from a couple of '50s kids' shows. For me, growing up, it was unique among SFTV shows in its relative believability, and I've always considered that part of the reason why it stood out so much from the pack and garnered such a loyal and passionate fan following -- because it was the only show that was grounded enough to draw inspiration from, to believe in as a plausible future worth aspiring toward. Unfortunately, a lot of its later creators haven't made the same effort to keep it credible.
Ohh yeah. This show is getting better with every episode. Very tense. (Even as a book reader who knows what will happen - roughly - they do change some things)
in the credits last night there was a listing for a "special appearance". Yes I'd call the role a special appearance
This might get into spoilers, but for people who have read the books, I've noticed there's some discussion about book order versus show order for the future seasons. The showrunners seem to be indicating they are going to speed through Abaddon's Gate in the back half of this season, which seems doable, because the plot of that book is very straightforward compared to the first two and can be condensed into a half season if need be. The question is, what to do about the next book, Cibola Burn: Spoiler: Book Spoilers Cibola Burn is one of my favorite books in the series, but it is sort of a momentum killer. All of the action takes place outside of the solar system, which puts the political intrigue on hold. There in't much of a role for the non-Roci main actors (plus Naomi and Alex are stuck on the ship). Bobbi could always head out with the Roci crew on the mission. It will be nice to have Havelock back, and I suppose Basia's arc could be given to Prax, but a lot of the characters we know and love will not have much of anything to do - unless they somehow mix it in with new solar-system side plots. In addition, an accurate telling of the New Earth/Illus arc would require way, way more CGI than has been in the series to date. There are two basic ideas about how to handle this. One is basically to skip the book entirely, shoehorning the important protomolecule stuff somewhere else. The other is to do the books out of sequence, skipping to Nemesis Games and Babylon's Ashes, and only returning to Cibola Burn after the Inaros stuff has been dealt with. There is some logic to the second idea, IMHO. One plus is it means we get more of Miller's force ghost. The other is given the series is only showing minimal time skips, waiting another two seasons would be more plausble in terms of setting up a (small) extrasolar colony.
I used to believe Star Trek was plausible as a teenager growing up watching it, until I watched a few documentaries and read a few books (The Physics of Star Trek), that set me straight. The technology is just over the top fantasy-transporters, warp drive, so many worlds with sentient life...I'm sure some people can still draw inspiration from it, but I don't think the new iteration of Trek (Discovery) is going to inspire people to become scientists or doctors in the same way earlier Trek series did. Sure, there are role models like Saru, or Burnham, but I just find the universe itself implausible. The Expanse has a different problem, it has a believable future, but the scientist/doctor characters are evil, I suppose Alex Kamal (pilot) and Naomi Nagata (engineer) are somewhat inspirational characters.
These things are relative. Compared to the sheer, ignorant nonsense of most other SFTV from the '50s-'80s, Star Trek's moderate degree of scientific literacy was a major improvement. Hell, at least Star Trek knew the difference between a star system and a galaxy and knew that you couldn't reach other star systems on rocket power alone. Science fiction doesn't need to actually be realistic. It is fiction, after all. It just needs to sell the illusion convincingly enough that the audience can suspend disbelief and buy into the fantasy. As long as you include enough plausible details that the audience trusts that you know what you're talking about, then it's easier to get away with the more implausible bits. The audience knows it's an illusion, but it's a convincing enough illusion that they're willing to play along. Like I said, using warp drive to reach other star systems is a lot more plausible than using an ordinary 1950s-style rocketship to do it, or just somehow drifting there on the Moon after it's been blown out of orbit like on Space: 1999. At least using warp drive recognizes that the speed of light exists and that other star systems would be years or decades away without FTL, which is more scientifically literate than Lost in Space or Battlestar Galactica ever were. And even though it's unlikely to exist in reality, the concept of warp drive arises directly from Einstein's equations of General Relativity. It's called "warp" drive because it's based on the principle of altering the topology of spacetime, i.e. warping it. So it is a scientificaly grounded concept -- not in the sense that it can realistically happen, but in the sense that it arises from a real physics theory rather than just being some made-up thing. As for an abundance of worlds with sentient life, there's no reason to think that's implausible. The "Rare Earth" hypothesis may have been fashionable a decade or two ago, but it's been largely discredited by all the subsequent discoveries about the ubiquity of Earthlike exoplanets in stars' habitable zones. No, the most implausible thing about Trek's portrayal of alien civilizations (aside from them being humanoid) is how many of them are at a technological level within a few hundred or a couple of thousand years of ours. If anything, statistically speaking, most would probably be millions of years ahead or behind, or at least hundreds of thousands if we assume a planet goes through repeating cycles of civilizations or of new sapient species' emergence. Prax Meng was a good-guy scientist. And there were the guys in the ship studying the construct on Venus, before their ship got disassembled. I'd expect there to be some decent scientist types studying the Ring in the current storyline.