I watched it straight as a TV show without knowing it was a book series and thought it was fine. The cliffhanger abruptness is common in many American TV shows that want you to be hooked.
I actually watched it through twice to get the nuances of what was going on and realised there was gap filling required for complete information but it was interesting enough fanciful reflection of real world international politics.
Has anyone watched the ânewâ Studio Ghibli series Ronja, The Robberâs Daughter, thatâs streaming now on Amazon? If so, how is it?
Dark Matter is the epitome of Canadian scifi. Itâs not terrible and it tries really hard. Iâve kept up with it, and while it gets a little better and has hilarious and touching moments, itâs definitely not going to be my go-to recommendation, unless you like the camp, questionable writing, and cheesy acting. Canadian scifi is my guilty pleasure though, probably like B-horror is for some. I think itâs what I get for having a Stargate shaped hole in my heart.
Continuum was actually a pretty decent show and that was Canadian scifi, wasnât it? What else is?
Yeah it was. Most of them have been listed already, but this is my completely non-serious (and NOT necessarily a recommendation) list for canadian scifi as a genre (medium tier writing & acting, inclusive cast & awareness of social issues, scifi trappings, the. same. actors):
Cancelled:
Airing
The Famous living children:
American TV trying to be Canadian:
(not enough special sauce)
Netflix is the new Canada:
Iâve been enjoying 3% though itâs a blatant rip off of like a million YA novels at this point, the non-original plot is made up for by some interesting characters and high stakes. (and Brazilians)
Yeah I watched the first season of The Expanse before getting into the books and really was not left wanting more from the show for what was shown. I absolutely wanted to know what was next, but the show did fine at what it did cover. The plot was perfectly legible.
Of course itâll be interesting for season 2 because Iâve now read all the book content going in so I wonder if Iâll feel, like Churba, that it is leaving things on the table.
Re-watching the series with my brother I did feel a lot of moments where I got like âI got it, but I donât know if you didâ sensations but I think thatâs mental. He did seem to get it. I think the content is overall clear enough to follow along if youâre interested in it. And if youâre into actual space stuff and want to see that in sci-fi, itâs hard not to be really interested in what The Expanse is showing.
[quote=âSWATrous, post:29, topic:277â]
Of course itâll be interesting for season 2 because Iâve now read all the book content going in so I wonder if Iâll feel, like Churba, that it is leaving things on the table
[/quote]Oh, I havenât read the books. I just noticed a lot of âAs you knowâ spots, where theyâre laying something down as if youâre already familiar with it, and it doesnât require any worldbuilding(as itâs already built). Itâs something that happens with adaption shows sometimes.
Hmm.
I never got that it was lacking in world building. Itâs supposed to be very normal to everyone and not wondrous, but routine. I feel you should feel like you landed in a foreign country but not an alien or fantastical place. I guess, I dont need world building as long as there is a built world? I donât know if thatâs fair. Like Iâd rather play catch up on the side while watching things progress than sit through exposition, so Iâm OK with it personally.
I will say I wish more establishing shots were there, to show us where stuff is in the solar system. GOT gives us this awesome intro that not only shows places, but more or less shows how to get from one to another. You can definitely get an idea of where everything is geographically located in the show, and thereâs a lot of things to get, simply by paying attention to the interesting intro. I know some of the places in the Expanse are asteroids and some are moons but I have to really think hard to try and imagine how youâd get from Ceres to Eros. I have no idea where Tycho station is, etc. That is something lacking in the current show.
Well Westeros and the Game of Thrones environment is a fake place (even though itâs loosely based on the British Isles).
While The Expanse is based in the same galaxy as you live so I would hope you could at least Google where things are if you didnât already know.
I personally never had an issue. The opening for Game of Thrones is more fan service than an actual map as far as Iâm concerned. If it were actually to be useful it would show show what political allies are where and why and having homing beacons on all the key players with distances mapped out. Like closer to what your cable TV news / pretend news shows during an election.
Iâm not sitting and watching The Expanse and thinking hmm, these guys seem to be from Mars, wonder where that is? I know the name, it rings a bell. Damn I wish they gave me an introduction to this stupid environment, Iâm totally lost.
Did you find you were getting much out of the series having already read the books? I gave the first few episodes a go, but I didnât feel like there was enough there to make me want to experience the story again in a different format. Maybe it was just because Avasarala wasnât cussing enough. Did you find it eventually hooked you in even when you were aware of the upcoming plot twists?
[quote=âHeidi, post:34, topic:277, full:trueâ]
Did you find you were getting much out of the series having already read the books? I gave the first few episodes a go, but I didnât feel like there was enough there to make me want to experience the story again in a different format. Maybe it was just because Avasarala wasnât cussing enough. Did you find it eventually hooked you in even when you were aware of the upcoming plot twists?
[/quote]Yeah, it took a while to get going, but it still had plenty of meat to it. There wasnât really a sudden hook, I just kinda found myself wanting to know more all the time, so I suppose you could say it did.
Did you ever watch Silversun? That was my preferred poison in the 2000âs Australian trash sci-fi genre.
Hmm. Perhaps I will give it another try then.
Not sure I agree with you here. Westeros is totally made up so if I had never seen even a crappy map of it and was watching the show I might not get that Kingâs Landing is near the southernmost tip of their kingdom, or that the Eyre is apparently on the eastern coast, and south of the Iron Isles, which are up near the Wall. As an average viewer I certainly am not going to go looking up a map to figure it out, so I want that presented to me within the show or Iâm just going to assume they donât care or want me to know. But they do tell me enough that I donât need another map to at least have a vague sense.
Now, as an average viewer, of The Expanse I might know my Solar System pretty well from elementary school. I might even know Pluto is no longer a planet, RIP, frowney face HashtagPutBackPluto or whatever. I might even be somewhat into my space facts and sci-fi and know that some of the moons like Europa, IO, Titan, and a bunch more are around either Saturn or Jupiter. I might be able to say Ganymede is definitely one of those too.
OK theyâre on Ceres, thatâs a moon right? Oh, itâs not? Oh, was it the tiny planetoid near Pluto? So theyâre really far from everything? No, itâs in the belt eh? OK cool, A belt moon!
And then now theyâre on Eros. itâs also an asteroid in the belt? OK. Wait itâs an asteroid that sometimes is closer to Earth than even Mars? So itâs not really a Belter kind of place is it, being down the well from even Mars. Except it looks pretty Belter to me. Guess itâs in the belt somewhere for now. But is it anywhere near the other belt stations or is it literally on the other side of the belt? The belt is a big place after-all. Guess it doesnât matter?
Thatâs the kind of confusion that comes up even for me at times, and even some basic Google searches of the Solar System will not yield data sufficient to point out where these various things are unless you start looking up the locations one-by-one. I only just now found out the big where Eros actually sometimes comes in and crosses the Mars orbit down into Earthâs. Thatâs an insane fact! That might have huge implications in the story! Knowing that changes things potentially. Especially by the end of season 1 if you know Eros could be near Earth, thatâs like âoh shitâ
But, OK, occasionally we see a hologram of the system in the show, and sometimes people will drop enough hints to get maybe an idea of where some stuff is. It never really truly hurts the show and you can totally get by only knowing the order of the planets and just go with the rest. And, Syfy put up a pretty cool interactive map on its website that does help a lot with showing where all this stuff is. But again it requires you to go and look it up. The show could spend a few seconds every once in a while and do the same thing right in the primary source.
I donât even think itâs vague. If a viewer was just not paying attention to the intro at all then I could see them having this issue. But the show clearly even changes its intro to highlight where are the main events are taking place, and their relation to other points on their world map. The one thing, however, it doesnât really do is show you auxiliary regions to the main story. Like I donât remember if it ever shows where Dorne is on the map. I could be mistaken about this, but they, at the very least, highlight where things like The Wall are in relation to Winterfell, and Winterfellâs relation to Kingâs Landing enough that even an average viewer should pick up on that type of stuff.
It definitely showed Dorne when we saw scenes in Dorne. It diddnât highlight it before then.
And yes, the GoT map was great for establishing locations. My point is that as crude and stylized as it was as a map, it still worked perfectly good enough for casual viewers to understand the geography of Westeros.
Currently watching Westworld and Sneaky pete. Westworld is the 2nd run through of the series.
Westworld opening
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRi3ULhyQq0
Seaky Pete Full episode 1 (official from Amazon prime video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq0KXnnVHmk
I see where youâre coming from now.
I by no means hold up The Expanse to be in the same tier as many other TV shows.
I guess I was a bit more forgiving as I havenât seen any good space sci-fi in a while, maybe even Battlestar Galactica , I mean even thatâs not super hard sci-fi I was willing to over look some short comings.
I agree with @MATATAT is the auxiliary regions arenât obvious unless youâve watched the prior episodes. I also had no idea of how huge âThe Northâ was till I played the board game or the relative distances between cities.
However it didnât hamper my experience watching.
I do wish they put more of the Dorne and Greyjoy stories in, I canât understand why they cut so much of it, I mean they could be milking a full or half season out of it rather than a few portions of episodes. The show does have a better handling on moving the story along while the books can get bogged down in certain chapters. However the show tries to indicate that politics is only present in Kings Landing rather than all the other cities.
Iâm currently enjoying Sneaky Pete too. I can guess some of the things that happen but the acting, plot and story are really enjoyable.
In my review of Leviathan Wakes, the first Expanse book, I had a complaint that the setting wasnât very expansive. There are scenes in three different space ships and four different space stations, three of which are inside asteroids, all of which were even stated, in the book, to look and feel so alike that the main characters felt like they were all the same place. It felt really claustrophobic.
In the TV show they put in scenes on Earth, so at least there is some contrast, but even then, it takes a while to work out how many different space stations there are, and what is different between them.