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The Expanse #6: better to go down swinging than rolling over


AncalagonTheBlack
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2 minutes ago, HokieStone said:

Does Amazon really have a motive to use time on their TV show to push people to the books?  Do they think they'll make a ton of money on people buying the books through Amazon?

Amazon doesn't run the show. Alcon does. Amazon foots the bill.

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14 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

What do you mean by everything?

In terms of personality, show Drummer is closest to book Michio, I think.

In terms of what she goes through in the show she is: Rosenberg + Bull + Michio + Drummer. 

Speaking of Bull, I wonder why that actor didn't come back. Same for the actor who played Admiral Delgado. He had left his posting to go hunt down Marco. If any character could have easily been killed off screen, it would have been him, but at least mention it in the show.

I agree, show Drummer is more Michio, than any of the other characters, but that's mostly because of her season 5 and 6 story arc. In the earlier seasons she's more book Drummer, when she's working for Fred. Not sure where the Rosenberg comparison is coming from though. I guess she did know a lot about engineering in season 3.

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1 minute ago, sifth said:

I agree, show Drummer is more Michio, than any of the other characters, but that's mostly because of her season 5 and 6 story arc. In the earlier seasons she's more book Drummer, when she's working for Fred. Not sure where the Rosenberg comparison is coming from though. I guess she did know a lot about engineering in season 3.

Her attraction to Naomi. If I recall correctly it was implied that Rosenberg had a thing for Naomi.

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Great last episode. What a wonderful series this has been. It has absolutely raised the bar for TV sci-fi and has been a terrific adaptation of the books. And as I said before, I am weirdly proud of the showrunner and writers for sticking by their story and not trying to cludge together some version of the last series that races to the end of the novels and does them a disservice in the process. There's more to story than plot. We didn't get to the end of the plot, but we would have had to sacrifice everything else for that to happen. What we got instead was better.

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10 hours ago, Falcon2909 said:

What was the point of showing Laconia if nothing actually came of it

So here's the main point that I got:

With Cortazar's protocol working, they were able to believably utilize the factory in orbit. Once they could do that, they had absolutely no need for anything from Sol. That was always their hope, mind you, but until they got that working they were always at some risk of being overrun because their tech and manufacturing capacity would not be enough to deal with Sol's ability to kill them. 

So before that happens, they absolutely needed Inaros as an ally to keep people out of Laconia gate. But that was always a contingency plan and one that they didn't particularly want to have.

So why did they do Strange Dogs? Because they needed to have us have some viewpoint on Laconia to tell us that specific central bit of information, and just randomly switching to Cortazar and Duarte talking without any other context would be a weird infodump. So they repurposed Strange Dogs to both give us an idea of what was happening on Laconia and tease the future of Expanse AND give us that information about Inaros' allies and have us not have no idea who the hell Duarte was.

I'm not sure how entirely successful it was, but I think that was the main reasoning. We had to have some idea of why Duarte and Laconia would abandon Inaros after helping him so much previously, and I think that reasoning is because they were successful talking with the factory.

2 hours ago, Prince Yourwetdream Aeryn said:

Is there any other novella that are adapted to series like Stranger dogs? Because I remember a lot of unrelated refugee stories in the show.

 

There's a number of them - the Churn got repurposed a bit here and there in Amos' backstory. The Butcher of Anderson Station was made into a major plotline as one of the eps. So was Drive (about the Epstein Drive). Gods of Risk was adapted for Bobbie's story in season 4. 

The one I really, really wanted them to do in some way was Vital Abyss, which is my favorite of the whole thing by a large margin and is really fucking cool - it's about Cortazar. 

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2 hours ago, HokieStone said:

Does Amazon really have a motive to use time on their TV show to push people to the books?  Do they think they'll make a ton of money on people buying the books through Amazon?

Absolutely 100% yes. It's why if you watch an Amazon show based on a book in your web browser, it will flash up a link to the first book in the series, or the store page for the author or series.

I mean, are they thinking they're going to cover the entire costs of the show from their retailer's cut of selling the books? No. But it's a nice chunk of cash, and I suspect it's something Amazon leverages when talking to potential partners. They can sell the original books directly to customers which Netflix and HBO cannot.

Wheel of Time has shifted an absolute fuckton of books in the last two months (and sales were steadily rising before that, for the first time since the paperback release of AMoL in 2014). If even 10% of them come through Amazon, that's a nice chunk of cash and something they can factor into deciding to renew a show or not.

A Song of Ice and Fire sold ~78 million books off the back of the TV show, The Lord of the Rings sold 50 million books off the back of Jackson's movies (in the first five years after FotR came out, I believe, so probably a lot more since then) and The Witcher has sold at least ~10 million off the back of the Netflix show. If a show hits a phenomenal level of success, the profit generated by the books for the retailer alone can easily stretch into the millions to tens of millions, enough to offset the cost of production of at least a few episodes.

How the hell they'll handle LotR though is another question. There isn't a single book the story is based on, and the closest equivalents, The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, I think will be fairly offputting to the general audience.

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1 hour ago, Kalibuster said:

 I'm not sure how entirely successful it was, but I think that was the main reasoning. We had to have some idea of why Duarte and Laconia would abandon Inaros after helping him so much previously, and I think that reasoning is because they were successful talking with the factory.

Well just to make a comparison in the adaptation. In the novel, Duarate never abandons Marco. In fact Duarte is the one who gives Marco the rail guns so he can hold onto the gate network for as long as possible. There is never a call in which Duarate says "you served your purpose, I no longer need you", like a traditional villain would give. Don't get me wrong, Duarate in the novel, was 100% using Marco as a puppet, he just never out right told him that and did everything in his power to help Marco cause as much trouble for the Sol System for as long as possible. He was even willing to give Marco more reinforcements, once he showed he could retake the gate network at the end of the book. For obvious reasons that never happened though.

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7 minutes ago, sifth said:

Well just to make a comparison in the adaptation. In the novel, Duarate never abandons Marco. In fact Duarte is the one who gives Marco the rail guns so he can hold onto the gate network for as long as possible. There is never a call in which Duarate says "you served your purpose, I no longer need you", like a traditional villain would give. Don't get me wrong, Duarate in the novel, was 100% using Marco as a puppet, he just never out right told him that and did everything in his power to help Marco cause as much trouble for the Sol System for as long as possible. He was even willing to give Marco more reinforcements, once he showed he could retake the gate network at the end of the book. For obvious reasons that never happened though.

In an earlier episode we see one of the rail guns coming out of the Laconian gate, which made plenty of viewers believe it was a ship. They also mention that it's Martian design but made of unknown metals.

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Just now, Corvinus85 said:

In an earlier episode we see one of the rail guns coming out of the Laconian gate, which made plenty of viewers believe it was a ship. They also mention that it's Martian design but made of unknown metals.

Yea, I'm just disappointed we didn't get to see a Proteus Class Battleship install it. The way the Laconian ships are described in the books, is just insane and we only got a brief glimpse of one.

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10 hours ago, Werthead said:

Wheel of Time has shifted an absolute fuckton of books in the last two months (and sales were steadily rising before that, for the first time since the paperback release of AMoL in 2014).

I'm pretty certain this is not an Amazon decision -- it's an Alcon and a Naren Shankar decision that has more to do with honoring their collaborators and maybe to dangle the fact that there's more story out there for someone else to eventually pick up and wrap up the series on screen. Accommodating Amazon seems to have largely entailed wrapping in 6 episodes and the existence of the X-ray bonus scenes.

EW interviewed Shankar and he says about incorporating "Strange Dogs":

Quote

And then there is Duarte looking up at the orbital platforms, which are coming to life to build the battleships that he's going to need. It's spooky and weird and creepy, and it shows that the protomolecule is still out there doing things. And that gives you as an audience member, the sense that, well, maybe there's more out there, that there's three more books.

Emphasis mine. 

The rest of the interview gives the sense that he and Ty and Daniel had long discussed how to wrap it up early, and basically they decided on exactly what they've done here, namely wrapping it up circa the end of book six and leaving the big remaining plot threads just remain looming rather than memory-holing them or trying to force a wrap on those as well. Amazon doesn't seem to have had creative input on this aspect of things.

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14 minutes ago, Scott_N said:

Happy they stuck the landing and I will really miss this show. It ended well but it somehow seems inconceivable there won't be a continuation of some sort.

I mean there is a massive time skip after the 6th novel. So they could always do a sequel series with a different cast playing older versions of these characters. The only alternative I see, is them using old person makeup..............which almost always never looks right.

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25 minutes ago, Consigliere said:

Or they could just go The Last Kingdom route and mostly ignore characters aging. It's not such a big deal. This is a setting with effective anti-aging drugs and advanced medicine too.

They're also already building the next-gen warships at the end of the series and they could easily say it only takes 5 or 10 years to get ready rather than 30. In fact, making it 30 years in the books felt a bit ridiculous, keeping everyone on the Roci for that long and most people in the exact same place (reminded me of George Lucas getting everyone into exactly the same place at the end of Revenge of the Sith that they were at the start of A New Hope, apparently ignoring the fact that nineteen years is a really long time).

The fact the Peaches has a 5-year time bomb ticking suggests that if they do the timeskip, it's not going to be 30 years. It also allows them to keep Avasarala in play until the very end.

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3 hours ago, Werthead said:

They're also already building the next-gen warships at the end of the series and they could easily say it only takes 5 or 10 years to get ready rather than 30. In fact, making it 30 years in the books felt a bit ridiculous, keeping everyone on the Roci for that long and most people in the exact same place (reminded me of George Lucas getting everyone into exactly the same place at the end of Revenge of the Sith that they were at the start of A New Hope, apparently ignoring the fact that nineteen years is a really long time).

The fact the Peaches has a 5-year time bomb ticking suggests that if they do the timeskip, it's not going to be 30 years. It also allows them to keep Avasarala in play until the very end.

And make it believable that Drummer is still president of the TU.

But I thought the 30 year jump in the book was fine, too. I have no problem with people who consider themselves family staying on the same ship. They love what they do. It's like any professional staying in a job for decades if they love it. And the 30 year time jump allowed for a more believable Laconian society that has its own ideology but with a limited number of Martians directing things who still remember the old days, while the core of their forces are made up of a new generation who are unfamiliar with Belter tactics.

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I liked the finale and I think they stuck the landing: Overall I think the final season was very good (which I think of every Expanse season) even if a few more episodes probably wouldn't have hurt. I think that if they aren't going to adapt the whole book series, this is probably one of the best places to stop, even if the inclusion of the Laconia stuff feels pretty weird.

I'll miss the show and I'll miss Drummer, Amos and even Holden, but it did go out on a good note.

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

They're also already building the next-gen warships at the end of the series and they could easily say it only takes 5 or 10 years to get ready rather than 30. In fact, making it 30 years in the books felt a bit ridiculous, keeping everyone on the Roci for that long and most people in the exact same place (reminded me of George Lucas getting everyone into exactly the same place at the end of Revenge of the Sith that they were at the start of A New Hope, apparently ignoring the fact that nineteen years is a really long time).

The fact the Peaches has a 5-year time bomb ticking suggests that if they do the timeskip, it's not going to be 30 years. It also allows them to keep Avasarala in play until the very end.

  Yeah, the time-skip in the books didn't really work for exactly this reason.

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