Yeah. In the tv series it’s a weak attempt to show how spendthrift and corrupt the current pluto-gerontocrat regime is. Weak because it’s visually unimpressive and carries no weight on its own since the viewer has never heard of it before.
I’m thinking about reading the book series now since you guys have said the show doesn’t follow it exactly. I don’t want to read ahead of the show, so where does the show end in relation to the books? Is season 1 equivalent to book 1?
Sorta? They mix in concepts from future books and they’re different enough that you can probably read all the books w/o worrying about the series.
You should read Hyperion by Dan Simmons, then.
All I really remember about the book is how much I disliked Richard K Morgan first person prose. The plot deviations are pretty lost on me…
I finished the season the other night and I loved the show, though. Really makes me wish for a big budget television adaptation of something like Hyperion or Pandora’s Star, too.
Course, that was a while ago and who knows if we’ll see it. Also Syfy isn’t really known for its budget. But in theory, -something- is coming.
The Expanse has very good production, but that’s it. The rest of their shows look pretty sparse.
I liked this, but was very bothered by the gratuitous violence. The sex didn’t bother me so much (there’s much less of it and is way less explicit) , but I grew up watching European films.
I could have done without the flashbacks, though. I think the past could have been better explored from the present, as a slow burning character reveal. It felt on the nose. And I spent 50 minutes of episode 7 waiting for the obvious telegraphed “twist”.
Writers really didn’t trust their audience here.
But overall very enjoyable.
This is exactly right. If they didn’t want to drop all that exposition they shouldn’t have mixed up the narrative with pointless flashbacks. I speculate they wanted first to use a nonlinear structure to make everything excitingly mysterious, and then realized no one knew what was going on so they went back in and dropped these tedious exposition chunks everywhere. Like sleeves and stacks are absolutely universal in this society, so there is no way a class on the basics is being given to people who have just been resleeved.
In general in storytelling it’s better to use a simple linear forward-going narrative and provide depth and complexity in other aspects of the work. Nonlinear is fine if you know what you’re doing and have a reason for it, but not just for the hell of it or to deliberately obscure what’s going on.
Sex is more shocking because violence has alway been present (until recently), through various shape and forms, in our homes, public gatherings or war zones. Sex on the other hand was taken indoors, away from the public eye, either when we started drawing shit on cave walls or with the expansion of agriculture.
That definitely annoyed me.
I watched an interview with the TV show director who basically explained that she made the changes to the story with the assumption that future seasons aren’t guaranteed, so she tried to introduce all the book concepts up front.
I don’t agree with many of the changes but it does make some of the changes (i.e. introducing Quell upfront) make more sense.
For me the Quell presence in the TV show was a huge improvement over the books. Although of course why the visions continued indefinitely, was inexplicable… unless she being the inventor of neck diskery, uploaded herself into his in a way that gets copied around with him. Or it could just be poorly written, poorly explained guff.
Watched a couple episodes and digging it so far. Light spoilers ahead. Some interesting changes from the source material. Not sure how I feel about all of them yet. The change of the Envoy is kinda odd. I feel like it made more sense for it to be developed by the UN to quickly put down revolutions; you could instantly have a crack team of commandos on an enemy world who would immediately soak up the culture. I guess that benefit would go both ways. I do like that it gets Quell involved earlier.
What I do love is Poe. I don’t recognize the actor, but he’s fantastic as the hotel AI.
Other touches I like:
Having characters go in an out of a variety of languages
Special effects are pretty solid
The little bits of Envoy intuition they show
One thing I’m also hesitant about is that fact he referred to his sister as Rei…
Oh, I would love a Hyperion serie. Something in this serie remembers me the tone of hyperion.
So, regarding the last episode…
Did Poe die? Cause if so, that’s sad. He was cool.
I think so. The other books are in the same universe with the same lead, rather than a continous ‘saga’ but the show’s writers might not follow that recipe so they will probably add more AI characters.
Two episodes in and it’s good thus far. I never read the book(s), so it’s all new to me. Agree with some of the early posts that talk about how difficult it can be to pick up all the information being dumped on you in the first couple of episodes.
It’s also a little mind boggling to think that the main character’s stack has been on ice for 250 years, and yet technology hasn’t seemed to have changed all that much, as he acclimates fairly quickly. You would think at the very least in 250 years they would have greatly improved on the tech behind the stack, and could mass produce decent “sleeves” for everyone as well. An example : In the early scenes, when they put the stack of the 7-year-old girl into the older lady sleeve, that just seems ridiculous given the tech on hand. Come to think of it, why would they even have unattractive/old sleeves anyway? Or nicotine addicted ones?
Nitpicks aside, I’m enjoying the Blade Runner on steroids aesthetic of the show. I love me some dark, rainy urban landscape filled to the brim with high def video screens and neon everywhere. Toss in hovercars, some Asian influences and the themed entertainment and hotels, and you had me at “Welcome to the Raven”. The AI hotel (Poe) is by far my favorite character in the series so far. He’s entertaining enough to make me overlook the fact that somehow his hotel hasn’t had a guest in 50 years and yet is not only still in business, but spotless as well.
One other observation…the future sure is sexed up! It’s like the whole city is pretty much the internet come to life. Sex and porn everywhere you look. I get that the story, by necessity, is probably focused on the seedier parts of Bay City, but holy shit. Also, James Purefoy, if that is not a stunt double, good on you my man, good on you.
One of the premises of the series was that cloning was still very expensive and difficult, IIRC. The show is a different thing, of course, but they probably didn’t change that.
As @malkav11 mentioned, cloning is expensive. It’s only lightly touched on in the show, but from what is shown in the first three episodes I get the sense that true (perfect) clones are prohibitively expensive for all but meths. Which is why you see the married couple fighters, or the prostitutes who allow themselves to be killed for upgraded sleeves. Basically if you aren’t rich then you don’t have access to things like decent bodies.
How these subpar bodies come around, they haven’t touched. I suspect that it is basically the discarded bodies of those wealthy enough to upgrade. How that covers the needs of those with right to replacement bodies, like that 7 year old, I don’t know. Maybe the cloning process is inefficient and to get one high quality clone they may have 2-3 ‘inferior’ ones. Maybe cloning itself is cheap, but it is clones with the upgrades like perfect physique, or chemical attractors, or combat reflexes that are expensive. It certainly hints that there are grades of clone, so I’m thinking this is probably the reason.
Yeah, they did cover that exact replicas of yourself, like the meths use, are prohibitively expensive, and I would understand that sleeves with special abilities sequenced in, like the combat reflexes or the special pheromones, would also be priced at a premium, but as the show states that the process has been around for over 250 years, you’d think they’d have “baseline” models they could mass produce, even if the features were very similar, and that they’d have baselines at several age markers, so a kid could be re-sleeved into a kid, not an adult.
It just stood out as very odd that as pervasive as the tech seems to be in the society of Altered Carbon, it also seems to be very haphazard and inefficient for something that’s been around as long as it has.
Anyway, it’s a nitpick. It’s not going to ruin my enjoyment of the show or anything.