Morning, my Harpies. Today I want to talk about something.
Everybody has been talking about the next big show to land on Netflix over in this thread, so I figure, what the hell, let’s give the show a thread of it’s own so we’ll have something official to bump when the show sweeps the Emmys.
Here’s what fans have been saying about this show:
And finally, kerzain says, “The total misapplication of science makes me want to hurt people. Katee’s pillowy husband in the show needs to be punched in the face until his stupid sweater unravels. This show is what happens when a writing team is assembled from practitioners of the fake-it-till-you-make-it-no-matter-how-stupid-you-are-and-always-will-be philosophy.”
I am going to finish this because Katee Sackhoff, but the writing is horrible and cheesy. i agree with the assessment of “Take everything annoying and make it the future”. The crew is just unbelievably annoying and stupid. I especially dislike bitchy curse girl. Closely followed by “I am the civilian representative and have no useful skills whatsoever”. Who sent these people in space? On such an important mission to boot. Are they supposed to be the best in their field or what? Makes zero sense. Looks like it’s written for teenagers and twenty somethings with only a marginal interest in Sci Fi as a trapping but not as a genre.
I started watching the first episode. After half an hour of clumsy exposition (“I remember back in the olden times, when Washington D.C. was above water…”), I quit.
I’ve made it to the end of the first episode so far. I like Sackhoff and her AI-buddy confidant’s relationship. Everybody else needs to get spaced, pronto. Even those Earthside need to get spaced. And the show’s (nonexistent?) technical/science advisor needs to be spaced.
I also wouldn’t mind if the show kept the crossdresser/trans crewmember alive though, because I’m morbidly curious to see how badly the writers fuck that one up too.
I’ve been watching this, and it’s not bad. At first, it seems ridiculous… It’s Starbuck captaining a ship of millennials, who lean in to the rule of acting like stupid 20 somethings.
But the production values are good, and the show has some interesting moments.
I’m amazed that people will watch a show specifically for Sackoff. I mean, she’s… Competent? Certainly BSG wasn’t her fault. She’s pretty good in Longmire. But there’s no way she’s carrying an otherwise garbage show.
For me it’s not because she’s some amazing actress, god knows I don’t care much about that except when it’s terribad acting. It’s because she looks like a badass space marine* and she was one of the best parts of BSG. So I think of her as sci fi royalty now.
* Frankie Adams from The Expanse is also an awesome space marine. I really don’t like when they cast model/stick figures as strongwoman archetypes. And both of these two make me think they’re legit strong in real life, which could just be good costuming and physical acting but I can’t tell the difference.
Honestly, i don’t really care that much about Starbuck.
There are other characters and actors who are more interesting on the show. The guy who plays the ship AI, for instance, is very good. The guy who plays the shop medic is also interesting, although maybe just because I’m not used to seeing a trans(?) character in a show. I don’t even know if he’s actually trans or just androgenous or whatever.
William truly is the highlight in the cast and the crew gets thinned more and more too. Still incompetence abounds. I wait for this to turn out to be not real at all and just someone fucking with Nikos brain to learn about humanity or something.
I started watching this. Then there where a moment so dumb, I had to shutdown it.
I dont know if the authors of the serie where trolling. Theres a moment where they discuse “distance between two points” has a scientific concept, then they say theres only one path. Then a second after that they show planet earth, a sphere.
No, motherfuckers. The shortest path between two points is not always a line. Much less in the surface of a planet. And not in space
There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
In the first episode I was like “Oh shit, this is going to be a WB/CW show about hookups in space between pretty 20-somethings, with lots of swearing and Katee Sackhoff rolling her eyes and shouting a lot”. But I stuck with it because of Sackhoff, she’s earned my loyalty between her run on BSG before it got stupid and her excellent job in Longmire, which is one of my favorite TV shows of the past decade.
Then it got a little more interesting with Samuel Anderson’s character William, the ship’s AI. Anderson has good acting chops, having starred in several long running BBC series, including a turn as Danny, Clara’s love interest in the Capaldi run of Doctor Who. The writers seem to be moving towards William becoming more human than intended, as he’s already formed a bond with Niko (Sackhoff’s character) that seems to go beyond that of a normal AI.
Oh, and Selma Blair shows up too as a reporter/social media personality back on Earth, and is looking ridiculously amazing in a bunch of different form-fitting outfits they pour her into. While the rest of the cast is a nightmarish mix of Generation Z stereotypes, I do enjoy watching Blu Hunt (August), as she’s completely adorable, and A.J. Rivera (Bernie) is doing a passable acting job as well when he’s on screen. The rest of them can get sucked out of the airlock and I don’t think I would even remember them by the end of the episode.
I’m 4 episodes in and will finish out the season because I’m curious to see where it goes, but I don’t foresee Netflix picking this up for a second season given that it has to be somewhat expensive to make.
Ya, this is the only part of the show which is weird to me.
On one hand, I can see the idea of “Make the characters more like young folks, to have broader appeal, and not just Gen X sci-fi nerds like me”, but then if I think about it for more than 5 seconds, i have to think that it’s a fairly insulting depiction of Gen Z folks.
I mean, I have to assume that if you’re going to be selected to be the crew for a fucking spaceship to go talk to aliens, even if they are picking fairly young people, they’re still going to pick people who have some basic notion of professionalism.
Some of the characters act like, literally, dumb ass college students. Just, doing dumb shit without thinking at all.
While this may be somewhat fitting for some of the characters if they were truely random 22 year old people, it doesn’t seem to fit with the idea of their mission, which you’d think would be performed by the top people in their field… probably military people. And I’ve known guys in the military who were 10 years my junior, but who were so professional and composed that I often thought they were older than me.
I could see them choosing to send younger folks into space… Buzz Aldrin was 39 when he walked on the moon. I could so them going younger than that.
But I don’t see them acting like idiots, as they do on the show sometimes.
All that being said, the show itself STILL works. It’s just that one aspect which seems like a really strange direction.
Yup, it’s like on Star Trek shows, there are always younger, fresh from the academy crew members who are there to learn as they go from more experienced crew. But with this show it’s like they decided to take all the cadets and load them into a ship with a single senior officer (with issues of her own to boot) and send them on the most important mission in the history of mankind.
On the other hand, maybe the mission is meant to fail from the start. It would be an interesting plot twist if it turned out the military already knew what the deal was with the aliens, and sent this ship full of pretty young people and a “hero” captain off to certain doom so they could use it as a PR catalyst for aggression against the aliens.
