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It's not groundbreaking and I was in Bill's initial mindset thinking Frank was gonna ruin everything by wasting resources. However, I thought of the game and how it's almost non-stop killing or be killed by almost everyone you run into. Something like this was needed to break that up, in addition to the main characters. Otherwise it is relentless and leads to despair.
I like how Bill was dragged over by Frank to the new way of life but still tried to maintain some boundaries eg. in his final letter to Joel.
There's videos of couples and small families living off the grid or relatively off the grid lives on youtube. The compound plus his home seemed hard to sustain alone. Adding Frank in helped but he wasn't doubling Bill's output.
Gas can be made from poop and garden waste with a bio digester.
Rain water harvesting, filtration and storage were reasonable for him given the likely climate in the episode plus Bill's other skills. There's earthships and tiny homes that do this. They rely on commercial filters which they could have stockpiled. But once those run out it is possible to build low tech filters. There's people in New Mexico living off grid where there rely on 9 inches of rain a year. They re-use their grey water to water crops and flush the toilet. Can use composting toilets to save even more water.
He had a lot of surface to harvest water from. Could also have built a pond / reservoir etc.
"They are ready for few weeks in summer then they stop growing and you have to wait another 10 months for fresh tomatoes to grow again. And those you cut - they wont stay fresh more then 2 weeks. You have to eat them or they will rot."
I live in Scotland with a short growing season. My yard wasn't great so my tomatoes never ripened even by the end of summer. I took them inside and they'd keep growing. They would slow down in winter by I was getting fruit still ripening in those months.
Their climate doesn't look like they could grow year round but they could grow stuff inside and it would be reasonable given the resources that Bill had.
Tomatoes and cucumbers / squashes etc can also be preserved / canned / dried / pickled.
"What you need is to grow is potatoes and then you need to know how to storage them in cold place."
That's not hard. If the ground frosts then harvest them, then store them in a container with soil or sand covering them. Store those in a cool place like a garage. It's not hard. If the place doesn't freeze then you can just dig up batches periodically. This can be done for a bunch of root crops (but not all). They can be processed differently to make them last. Potatoes can be dried and powdered, carrots can be dehydrated.
For places with light frost or mild winters, some crops hold well in the ground with minimal or no protection. I still have some greens in the garden that survived this winter with no protection. It was colder this year and normally I have a much higher survival rate.
For someone more prepared or with the knowhow, build a root cellar.
You don't necessarily need to grow corn or cereals. There's stuff like root crops, legumes, stuff close to cereals and depending on the climate you can grow bananas, taros, breadfruit (probably not possible in the climate shown in the episode).
You don't necessarily need to do a shitload of farming to grow food. There's plenty of stuff that is relatively low maintenance.
I put potatoes in the garden as a kid, I never looked after them. We harvested them from then and there was no getting rid of them until we paved the area over. The ones in out front garden came up for decades. We just left it and it was good ground cover.
There's other low maintenance crops like jerusalem artichokes. There's perennial vegetables that you just harvest and need minimal maintenance. Fruit trees need some periodic care for optimal production.
Some crops we are accustomed to may need a bunch of maintenance. He could have grown stuff hydroponically under cover. That doesn't need that much work.
There's many videos on youtube about low maintenance farming. There's people that guerilla farm, throw the seeds or plant stuff in public land and just go back now and again to maintain and harvest.
They don't necessarily show every thing. Old movies sometimes did that and it gets dull fast. I remember watching a zombie movie and there was 10 minutes of them shopping in a store. There was tense music and everything but nothing happened and it was a complete waste of time if they wanted to just let us know this is how they obtain food.
Did you miss the plot points where Frank opened up trade? Bill was against it but Frank traded a gun for strawberry seeds. It's not unreasonable that they traded more stuff later despite Bill's initial hostility. Joel even mentions how there was fence rusting.
There's also ways to make gas relatively easily with just garden waste and poop. I think they are called bio digesters and are not that high tech.
That said, his lifestyle was questionable. He was running a tight ship on resource management and yet his house didn't seem adapted for low energy usage. It apppears he was living his previous lifestyle. There's homes which need little to no energy for heating and off the grid but those tend to have thick walls for insulation and thermal mass, also oriented to the south for winter solar gain etc.
Gay male dynamics can be quite different from heterosexual ones. Try chatting with gay men and some will want to have sex without having seen your face and are ready to meet you. Not saying all gay men are like this but things can be far more direct.
There's a higher biological cost to pregnancy born by women plus societal norms make them more picky in general.
So direct flip without acknowledging this isn't that instructive.
So without episode 3 it wouldn't have been full homo?
Many people found inter-racial behaviour repulsive too.
I thought it was amazing. I found it boring at first but then got drawn in. I was Bill and thought Frank is going to get them killed and waste Bill's resource management. By the end I got the message and grudgingly agree, though the gun for seeds was still a horrible trade. Strawberries produce a ton of runners. He could have asked them to bring strawberries one time and just planted the seeds on the strawberry.
This show is actually a step forward in survival realism. The details are usually glossed over. In Lost they had a ready supply of mangoes which were in the usual unripe state you find in the supermarket. The Walking Dead improved a bit and actually showed the odd scene of them farming but I remember a scene where veg crops were conveniently the size of stuff they could have gotten from a farmers market and just stuck in the raised bed.
This one might not be perfect but they did showcase some stuff Bill had, some principles like resource management. Then Frank came in and was like nope, we will break all your rules because living is more important than just survival. For all Bill's griping he was converted (albeit grudgingly in some ways) by the end.
In episode 4, Joel even mentions the breakdown of gas and how they must regularly siphon more as it doesn't last long. Most shows and movies act like gas lasts forever.
The enemies in this franchise have been British, Japanese, American and Chinese.
Have you watched American movies? They've recently stopped due to China's box office power but routinely, Asian people were cast in stereotypical roles where they were either submissive women, triads, dragon ladies, villains, speaking broken english etc.
Now they tend to swap out Chinese villains with North Korean.
There was a period when many villains were black, russian and asian. Black actors managed to break into the mainstream and get supporting roles earlier. Asians kind of only broke the barrier to audition for smaller non-villain roles with no specified race in the last couple of decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrayal_of_East_Asians_in_American_film_and_theater
Imagine? We don't need to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrayal_of_East_Asians_in_American_film_and_theater
Not all the white girls were racist. Plenty were on her side and cheering her. The white teacher defended her. Bruce had white and black students. Did they not help fight off the bullies at the diner with him?
There's bad Chinese in the whole franchise. A basic trope in most of these movies is that all the other Chinese masters hate on Ip Man until he bests them and wins their respect.
The masters at the first Chinese Benevolence Association meeting actually showed the Chinese being reverse racist. They were hating on Ip Man due to Bruce teaching non-Chinese. That didn't look good to me. They come around after the beating when they shelter at Bruce's school.
The bullying, ghetto-ization in Chinatown due to various racist laws, institutional bias, inequality under the law, discrimination, lack of recognition for their contributions were all part of the Asian American experience.
That said, this is the type of movie Hollywood would have made from the 1900s-1970s. Chinese media is paternalistic, full of tropes, careful to not fall foul of ever increasing censorship etc so they are still at that cringe stage that Hollywood now moved past.
Where is the pro communist party propaganda though? I notice you retreated now and missed out the communist part.
The film went overboard. Not all non-Chinese were bad. There was an african american ally - Bruce's student who also informs them of the impending immigration raid. Did Bruce not have white and black students who fought off the bullies in the diner?
Why were Chinese in Chinatown? Have you examined what it was like for Asian Americans in America? They were made to work harder for less. That pissed off white low wage workers and were used as scrapegoats politically. They were actually specifically banned from emigrating for a long time whereas white people could come in freely. Chinese people cleared the west but later in some places Asians their own farm land seized or forcibly sold. There's accounts of Chinese and other Asians being lynched.
Chinatowns begun as they were confined there due to bigotry. Non-citizen Asian men that married an American were singled out for denial of citizenship. Asian women were limited to stop Asians from perpetuating. Asians tried using the courts to help them and they got some relief at times but then the people and politicians were so anti-Asian they passed laws to trump the courts.
America, Britain, Japan and other European countries had just come out of centuries of quasi-colonization of China. They didn't allow them to emigrate but they forced their way in with guns. Have you any idea how many Chinese died because of them? Chinese weren't even allowed to live in certain areas of their own country due to them.
A teenage girl? She recruited 6-7 boys as well and came with a blade.
The bullying, ghetto-ization, social attitudes of Chinese as criminals, lack official recognition for their contributions, inequality in institutions, legal discrimination were all based on historical fact.
Chinese movies can be a bit backward and due to censorship have to be careful. There are bad Chinese main characters in Chinese media but even those are getting rarer.
Not exactly correct. The corporate media, at least big chunks don't want to offend China. They are after profits so that isn't surprising. Their loyalty is not to America.
Where was the pro-CCP propaganda though? Ip Man lived in Hong Kong which was under British rule. At the end he opts to not send his son to the US but stay in Hong Kong. They did not decide mainland China was much better.
Where did Ip Man get the idea of schooling in the US from? The doctor that treated his son was educated in the US. When he conversed with his friend, it was said offhand that getting that education from abroad and coming home was rather prestigious. Notice that doctor was a western doctor and not a traditional chinese medicine practioner. Chinese martial artists will rely on TCM methods for lesser injuries and yet he takes his son to a western doctor.
When Ip Man first arrives at the Chinese Benevolent Association he meets Master Lam who was also a recent emigrant from Hong Kong. He went to another continent than to the PRC.
At the end, did you read? The epilogue stated that Chinese martial arts were incorporated into the US military. It's like the ultimate desire was for white America to acknowledge them. You can spin that as pro-Chinese in that they are good enough to be adopted by those who looked down on them. You can spin it the other as Chinese people crave white American approval. It seems typical of a film helmed by Hong Kong Chinese.