The thing with the teal and orange is that at least you get some contrast!! :P.
Also, it’s harder to pull off than the blue on blue desaturated look, since it actually requires to know your tools pretty well (otherwise good luck isolating skintones). Thing is, many movies are re-color corrected for the TV releases and pushed even harsher on these crazy palettes (which are so extreme that they happen to be very stable among a wide array of TV sets). Actual digital film stills from many of those movies pictured are much more subtle.
Still, it is a sign of a cinematographer not caring too much. And there’s very little excuse.
Really enjoyed it, especially after the first few episodes. And yes, Bandersnatch, I was wondering what happened to this dude. I assume he’s going to play a part in future episodes, but why the hell did we waste a half an episode on this storyline this season if it is never referenced at all?
My only real complaint is that everyone seems very cavalier about
spoiler
a bio-weapon/unknown alien virus that they know has killed a host and seems to be sentient in some way.
Yes, the green tint was really annoying. I was watching a friend watch the show and thought there was something wrong with the TV.
I’m confused. Some questions answered by more questions.
The scientist/operative in charge of the bad guys says that “She (Julie Mao) will save us all”.
What we know
Who’s this ‘we’? He reports to Pierre-Mao Sr.
They are purposefully infecting another station.
They seem to want war between factions?
Cabal to take over Earth government?
Some hokey thing like communicating with an alien spore? Trading favors with the devil deal? Seems too foolish and too dangerous.
I’m confused. I want more. Time to go read the books! At least the series is done and don’t have to wait for him to write the ending…
Cute. The good news is that Abraham is just vastly prolific. Unlike GRRM, Abraham’s problem seems to be that he is putting out too many books at once… so many that he feels the need to use multiple pen-names lest the audience tire of him.
As much as I’m looking forward to a new Expanse book, I’m glad that the next one is a new “Dagger & Coin” book. Looks like there will be a new Expanse book out in August.
What I want to know is why they’re zapping Julie Mao’s corpse with lasers.
Why?
[spoiler]Also, unless in the future they have magical radiation-sickness reversal*, Holden and Miller are dead men in any case, so why give us hope by having them get to the ship?
Abraham is a co-writer. I haven’t seen the breakdown for later books, but for this group, Abraham wrote the Miller chapters and Ty Franck (GRRM’s assistant at the time) wrote the Holden chapters.
It’s implied they are going to live, magic nanotech and whatever. When they say “you have antirads on the ship” that’s when the audience learns they will live, after all.
Julie’s being radiation zapped, whatever that goo is needs energy to grow.
The interesting thing is, along with Miller’s (mohawk detective) hallucinations of Mao, is it implies her corpse will be reanimated somehow. Not sure how much humanity will be left, if any. I expect none with just some faint glimmers because it makes for better TV.
As an aside, I’m kinda glad the goo ate cyber-UN spy. He was getting annoying.
I don’t know anything about the books, I just assumed they were done. But they have been pumping them out every June on the dot so all seems good!
Yeah, I think that was an unfortunate visual, especially after the otherwise-excellent depiction of radiation earlier in the episode. They were basically juicing Julie’s corpse with energy to cause more goo-growth, not trying to cut her up.
They’ve established pretty clearly that the goo needs energy to grow, and it seems to like anything in the electromagnetic spectrum from visible light to a ship’s reactor’s output.
Incidentally, this is why Julie smashes all the radiative sources in her room and retreats to the dark shower - she can either feel it happening or else she remembers what happened on the Anubis and wants to forestall it in herself.
Auto-docs!
As Wisefool noted, there was a line while they were looking for meds where Miller asks if there is any medical gear on Holden’s ship that could help them, and Holden basically shrugs and says something like “I sure hope so.”
If there was absolutely no hope, I reckon that Miller would have been even more driven to kill everyone involved in Julie’s death.
Fantastic season finale to what has been some of the most entertaining TV I’ve watched in a long time. Still in shock that this was produced by SyFy! I thought they did pretty well with Dark Matter and Killjoys last fall, but The Expanse is on a different level altogether. I hope this is just a taste of good things to come from the network, I’ve missed good Sci-Fi on TV in the last decade.
I really enjoyed how this episode opened. It basically ran through everything I’d summarized/theorized earlier in the thread, acting as both a “previously on” segment and filling in some minor gaps in the story and continuity. It also helped set the stage for later events without a ton of exposition needed, as we quickly learned everything we needed to know about the proto-molecule from watching Julie’s story unfold. I assumed the lasers were to feed the proto-molecule the energy it needed to grow, just as the radiation burst was for the newly injected folks. It looks like the scientist guy and his mercenaries are trying to turn the station into a giant nest for the proto-molecule, to see how it will adapt, grow and evolve. The only thing I can’t figure out is WHY? It’s not like they can control it, or even communicate with it, unless maybe scientist guy is thinking if they grow it big enough, perhaps they can communicate with it. That could be what it was trying to do with cyber-spy guy before deciding just to absorb him instead.
The only part of the whole thing that struck me as kind of dumb was that the bad guys were working for Earth-based people, with the knowledge of the UN version of the CIA, and somehow were still stupid enough to use engines that could be traced back to their manufacturing origin. I know they killed the UN woman’s friend and tried to set it up so that it looked like he stole and supplied the engines, but it’s pretty weaksauce for the level of game their playing everywhere else in the universe…
Bummed that it will be 2017 most likely before we see any more.
I found the first few episodes less than impressive so I was rather surprised when I hit the midway point in the season. It felt like I was watching a different, and suddenly much better show.
That’s a perfect summary of my experience as well. I started out feeling like it was not BSG level, but plenty watchable, now I’m feeling like it may be better.
I think The Expanse greatly benefits from knowing where it’s going plot-wise, whereas BSG very much had a flying-by-the-seat-of-one’s-pants vibe to it. On the other hand, I can’t really say that The Expanse’s characters do much for me, with the possible exception of Miller, whereas BSG had me hooked from day one on that front. (I have not read the books.) Certainly the CGI has greatly improved in the intervening years.
I don’t like the serie much.
I like some of the character, some of the scenes, the setup… but I am not enjoying this enough.
It could be the pace, that is slow.
I like Amos, because is amoral and TV or Hollywood rarely touch amoral characters. They make them into evil guys with evil agenda, but rarely theres a neutral or lawnfull amoral character.
Yeah, I loved BSG while it was on, but still feel particularly burned by the ending, so maybe I find the prospect of a show that I can be more certain is actually building to something more worthwhile. I think this show needs to simmer with me for a bit to see if I’m just in the middle of a hype wave. I’ve decided that I am going to pass on the books, though. The few differences I’ve read in this thread make me glad I could be tricked by the various dramatic red herrings without knowing better.
An expanse book is around 165k words. Last Martin book was 415k. So almost three books of the Expanse, with the expanse being split in half between two writers.
It’s really not very impressive even if you count all his other books. There have been WAY more prolific writers. Sanderson, Erikson for example.
Well, I wasn’t proposing Abraham as “winning” anything. And maybe “prolific” wasn’t the best possible adjective – let’s go with “regularly productive.” He puts out a book every eighteen months for each of his two or three series. He’s like Butcher in that you can pretty much count on something coming out when he says it will.
I love Martin, but I’d be a lot happier if he could put out 165K yearly rather than 415K every six years.
The Expanse books are all around 600 pages so I wouldnt call them short. The last GRRM book was under 1200 pages so it was twice the size, not 3 times. Anyway GRRM is a bit of an exception when it comes to book size and as mentioned he takes so long to put out a book that he may be less productive in all actuality.
