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mobocracy's Replies
The first episode was a little slow, but it seemed to tighten up the pacing after that.
I hope there's something in the next season which serves the moderate the potential power of the aliens. I liked this more than a lot of shows, but it's a bit nagging with this multidimensional quantum computer thingy. They could just use it to wipe ourselves out and then just show up to depopulated planet generally healed from whatever Armageddon we got ourselves into, mooting all the spy-vs-spy secret agenda they've been using since.
The last bit you mention, the apparent technological prowess of the civilization -- building some kind of multidimensional quantum computer, a fleet of generation ships, advanced AI, etc -- suggests there were a bunch of other possible alternatives for their civilization besides fleeing to Earth.
Which IMHO is part of the larger problem with interstellar aliens as a concept -- if they can conquer interstellar space travel spanning light years, what the heck is Earth to them anyway other than *maybe* a 7-11 stop for material resources they might find harder to grab elsewhere, and only this maybe if turns out that transmutation of elements even with limitless power sources isn't viable and the distribution of elements is wildly uneven on a galactic scale.
And if they possessed the power to basically achieve omniscience over Earth with their quantum multidimensional computer, aren't there 1001 ways they can fuck with Earth civilizations to ruin any chance of resistance? Only making scientists crazy and sabotaging their research seems like unnecessary stealth and complexity.
Haven't read the novel(s), but I feel like they somehow need Earth and its people for something and just letting us annihilate ourselves and letting Earth heal for 400 years isn't sufficient.
A bit harsh. Plus, for most non-Japanese viewers the cultural differences can mask a lot of things.
Fanny is pretty high on her moral high horse. It's probably something of a necessary indulgence to sell the idea that Fanny, who had few good financial options of her own, would reject a marriage into wealth. That your husband would cheat on you was more or less a given, but if it came with a sumptuous lifestyle which would mostly let you pursue your own interests and love affairs after a period of time and maybe an heir or two, it wasn't really up for much debate.
If it wasn't for her relentless moralizing, it would have had to have been another man or an affair with Mary and a lesbian identity which was her motivating elements.
I think that the film industry generally feels it needs to show period settings as "old" to help sell the time and place to audiences, even when the places they show were relatively new by in the era where they're set. There's probably also the issue with trying to deal with real-world historic settings which aren't practical to make "new looking" for historical accuracy. The outside of Kirby Hall is just plain old and they don't have the budget to make the exterior look only 50 years old.
The Bertram family fortune seemed to have its origin in the plantations of Antigua, which probably means that they made their fortune and built Mansfield park within the last 50 years of the film's period era. So it not only wasn't that old, they would have had the money to keep it up.
The forces working against this, though, were just the realities of what level of "decay" people of the era were willing to accept as normal, even among the upper classes. It's not like a can of paint for touching up the walls was down at the home store, nor did they have modern cleaning products, either, so I think things were a bit dingier than we'd expect today.
It could also be that Mansfield was one of those country estates which had been bought as a partial ruin by the newly rich Bertram family, who then embarked on building a new wing to live in with the idea they'd refurbish what was still standing and integrate it later. Then there's also the idea that in an era of candles and lamps that some wing caught fire and just hadn't been rebuilt yet.
I think this is the right answer. In addition to the kind of soft-focus "lesbianism" surfacing as a result of gender segregation and sublimated same-sex sexuality, there were actual lesbians as well. Given that marriage in the upper classes was still significantly about semi-arranged marriages focused on dynastic and financial advantage and not romantic love, even a lot of heterosexual marriages were about producing an heir and a spare and not much more. So its likely that upper class closeted lesbians would have been more present in society because escaping marriage wasn't really an option socially or financially.
So you probably had both "frustrated" single women with no/limited sexual outlets and women who were lesbians circulating in the same circles operating in a highly gender-segregated world. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that resulted in a certain amount of sexual intimacy, in addition to there probably being secretive and covert networks among actual upper class lesbians, too.
I haven't read the books, but the relationship between Mary and Fanny seems not unlikely to have been one where same-sex relations of some kind would have resulted. A true upper class woman like Mary who was possibly a lesbian would find a woman like Fanny, who lived in but was not of the upper classes and thus had fewer options for both marriage and sexual outlets, an ideal potential lover. You could also argue that Mary's willingness to marry the second-in-line heir who wanted to become a clergyman wasn't just a conniving path to the inheritance, but a desirable least-worst path for a woman who preferred the company of women since it would likely be less sexually demanding because Edward was something of a weaker personality overall.
It was also normal for higher class women to have less fortunate women of higher class as essentially paid companions. Such a situation being taken advantage of as a covert means of carrying on same sex relations by seems likely.
I think it’s long lack of availability on home video or streaming has amplified its image, especially since it’s a pretty dark role for Diane Keaton who was better known for her association with Woody Allen.
It kind of becomes one of those cult 1970s films that’s supposed to be better than it is. It’s not a terrible film, but its more about its novelty and era than serious quality.
Hard to know what the origin story of a tribe like this is. They probably had a history of hunting/ranging over a wide territory to raid for cannibalism. Not enough people just passing through close by for easy ambush.
I also don’t see this as really long term phenomenon. Non-cannibalistic tribes were more numerous and certainly would have wiped them out. Any kind of contact with settlers would have led to them being exterminated by organized settlers or the army.
He was a civil war veteran and apparently a surgeon then too. Experienced and with a useful skill, although his erratic personality and sensitivity to stories of massacre made it seem like he maybe had some PTSD from the war.
He’s at least fit and capable of firing a weapon and the sheriff didn’t have much time to raise a Posse or a broad selection of people to choose from.
I'd assume the ship isn't designed for constant acceleration and merely accelerates to a high cruise speed for most of the duration of the flight.
I'd think a rescue ship wouldn't need to be some giant thing capable of bringing enough fuel to turn it 180 and point it back to Earth. They just needed to alter its directional vector enough to get it moving back into the solar system to enhance its recovery potential.
The other thing that bugged me was the single-source of propulsion. Surely they would have thrusters or secondary propulsion that would be useful for some kind of backup or directional control. You'd also think they could come up with clever ideas for using the domestic power supply in combination with reaction mass taken from the ship to alter its course.
The other thing that bugged me was their ability to jury rig the ship, normally accustomed to handling the milk run to Mars in 3 weeks, into a decade-long generation ship. While I get a ship like this probably has a lot of self-sustaining systems, its just not built for being self-contained for years on end and lacks the systems for that kind of endurance. Even if the Staten Island Ferry could handle transoceanic seas, it's not equipped for traveling to Boston, let alone the UK.
The best possible explanation is some kind of science probe or military weapon, which would mostly account for it not being meant to be opened, although not really explaining why it wasn't possible to get into it at all or that it was made from unobtanium materials.
The general plot purpose -- false hope of a rescue -- was fine, but leaving it a total mystery or potentially interstellar in origin was just needless ambiguity.
Yes, saying he sucked the oxygen out is a good way of putting it. I don't know UK's actorsphere well enough to know if he's a big deal or not, but I'm guessing he was positioned to be the "big star" of Shetland and sort of expected to carry the series, although it always seemed structured more as an ensemble, especially relative to the anthology/guest star element.
I don't mind the trope of CCTV (though in Shetland it seldom seems to actually contribute to cracking the case), it's the weak writing around police station activities. It's only point seems to be summarizing the plot up to that point and then issuing some predictable instructions to NPCs like Billy and Sandy and having an NPC interaction with fiscal. Maybe its a necessary narrative exercise, but c'mon, give it a bit more interest. Advance some in-house narrative, especially if it elevates Billy and Sandy beyond 2-D cutouts.
He did have that "blue wall of silence" moment a season or two ago, but I think he's too established as a beta character to evolve a whole lot without retconning a new past or something. I think the actor is fine, but they probably need to bring in a new character to supplement or replace him who could have a bit more substance. Or maybe the fix is developing a Billy/Sandy relationship external to the case or policing. Give Sandy a part time job as a bartender, and Billy a job as a bouncer in the same place.
I think it's been something of an improvement having Perez out of the show. It seems to bring the supporting cast forward a bit. And I don't miss the sideshow of Perez's family situation, either. I was really glad that they didn't turn Tosh's family life into a side plot, either. It took me half the season to recognize that the Bain matriarch was Phyllis Logan, which is either an example of my lack of insight or the quality of her acting to inhabit the character.
My biggest gripe is that they need to make the procedural scenes in the police station/offices more interesting than predictably telling Billy to pull CCTV footage and phone records, sending Sandy off on a trivial errand and having "fiscal" come in and act anxious. They also need to figure out how to enhance Sandy's character and engage it more in the narrative -- he was mostly a beta background character this season.
While it's great that each series has a new seasonal narrative and broad supporting cast, it'd be kind of interesting to add in some unrelated regulars (not main cast family or police) in Lerwick who persisted from season to season.
I think there maybe was some idea that viewers might decide the policewoman was meant to portray a native American and the writers didn't do anything to dissuade viewers of this. But I think it was just part of a larger attempt to insert diverse actors into the cast, despite the setting being extremely unlikely to have diverse characters in those roles in real time.
An African American North Dakota State Trooper? Maybe there's one in the whole state. Right-wing nutjob sheriff and rancher has an African American ranch boss? Random, small-town Minnesota police department with a female, south Asian officer? These all seem entirely unlikely, although I will grant that the show sort of seemed to play fast and loose with where Scandia was relative to the metro area and how big the town was, which could suggest that maybe it was a big enough town close enough to the Twin Cities that they did a diversity hire.
It's probably a good survival instinct, especially one in a universe like the Road where good luck can often be a trap or an ambush and even if it isn't, maximally exploiting the good fortune leaves you exposed and vulnerable.
That being said, I think rationally weighing the situation against these risks might suggest they could have reasonably exploited the bunker. In a word of total deprivation, it hadn't been found yet and the extremely low population density would suggest its unlikely to be found soon. Anyone nearby had already decided there was nothing there and it could be ignored. Random travelers roaming are few and far between (since just doing that is, as shown, extremely perilous).
Probably more importantly, though, is that staying at the bunker would have distorted the narrative, offering hope where none was supposed to exist except maybe at the end. Holing up, gaining some nutrition, and not moving wasn't compatible with it.
A lot of modern jetliners are fly by wire -- the controls are just glorified switches and position-sensors attached to buttons and levers which rely on a computer to send the signals to actuators which do the mechanical work of adjusting control surfaces and engine controls previously done by hydraulically-assisted mechanical controls.
I'm willing to mostly suspend disbelief and buy into the idea that the systems on modern jetliners could possibly become hacked enough that control inputs could be put into a non-responsive state remotely and result in the planes crashing.
Ships I'm even less convinced of. Some may have similar fly by wire controls, but unlike an airplane at 48,000 feet, the ship's engineers have complete, real-time access to the entire mechanical process and could either retain operational control or just shut off the engines. Or hell, just swing a sledgehammer or a cutting torch on the retainer holding the anchor out of the water, letting it drop, which I think would eventually stop the ship as the water got shallow enough and the engines couldn't overcome dragging several tons of anchor and chain on the sea floor.
I think it'd be difficult to do without leaving noticeable scarring. Maybe there's some kind of tattooing technique that would work.
It'd be a lot easier to do it with makeup for the camera.
It's kind of funny, but I read a CDAN item about Bullock chatting up a random grip or lighting tech on a set and then flying him to NYC for a long weekend of sex in a hotel suite.
Maybe both can be true, but it I'm kind of leaning on her not being a lesbian based on the men she's had failed marriages with. Maybe she's bi and it doesn't work out with men she marries?
Yeah, I think the general idea is that the Teslas were hacked and they were being intentionally crashed in a pile to block off the road.
And you're right, for them to get there they would need GPS, which wasn't working. I think a movie like this doesn't take its own premise seriously and try to operate within the mechanics of the world they created, so "GPS is down" except somehow for Teslas? It's maybe 50-50 if the writers even considered that or maybe believe they can navigate visually.
I don't think movies like this come into existence because the producer/director/writer wanted a film about what a major cyberattack would do. I think they use science fiction elements to just spin up chaos that they then use to drive whatever character driven drama they're actually interested in.
Archie got bit by a bug and presumably this is linked to his tooth loss, but we're at a loss as to WTF caused some random bug to make his teeth fall out. The deer is sort of the same way -- weird microwaves from a satellite are causing them to organize this way? Or is this some kind of mystical collective natural intelligence on display? Or is it something even more banal, like "Hey guys, let's have deer herd up and act creepy!"
If there had been more time lag involved here -- like the owners showed up and talked about a bunch of weird technology-related problems in NYC before TV and cell service cut out and the problem wasn't being portrayed in the media as a widespread cyber attack, OK, then I can see the renters getting huffy and not buying the owner's story at all.
But when they showed up after all comms were out, TV isn't broadcasting anything but EBS, I think I'd find myself much more cooperative, especially if the people carried themselves like Ali and his daughter did -- well dressed, Bentley in the driveway, and extremely not possessive of their own house. Yeah I'd want a refund, but we can work that shit out later when ESPN is back on.