It doesn't. Don't pay attention to morons.
It's not perfect, but it's the greatest and most influential sci-fi show we've had in decades. It follows the books quite closely too, in spite of what morons might tell you. Sometimes it even improves on the book. In my opinion the latter half of S5 is the weakest part of the show, but it's great from beginning to end.
>It follows the books quite closely too, in spite of what morons might tell you.
Ehhhh. It takes a LOT of liberties with the source material, especially in the back half.
Book Naomi is an actual good character is why. To be fair, almost all of the book versions of the characters are better in every single way except for Bobby. The show definitely improved Bobby.
sci fi nerds tricked me into watching this because they shouted remember the c**t 24/7, it's tolerable until that detective dies, afterwards it's pretty much just the-planet-of-the-week garbage
1-3 are god tier
4 is pretty good but a major departure from 1-3
5-6 are dogshit family drama involving mostly naoimi and her moronic child and baby daddy while amos and alex and holden are just kinda in the background.
yes its kino:
S2=S3>S1>S4. ( you can stop watching after s4) S4>>>S6>>>>>>>>>>>>>>S5
too much screentime for naomi and her ugly mutt kid in s5 so i skipped all those scenes and ended up watching like 7 or 8 minutes from each episode. Amos and Peaches s the only okay thing in S5 and maybe bobby and the Mars shit. the rest is negligible
1-3 are god tier
4 is pretty good but a major departure from 1-3
5-6 are dogshit family drama involving mostly naoimi and her moronic child and baby daddy while amos and alex and holden are just kinda in the background.
Seasons 1-4 yes
Seasons 5-6 no
Agree with everyone here, just watch until season 4 and read the wiki for the plot after.
You won't "see" most of the real story anyways. The only thing you see is Naomi's face frowning
Does anyone have that 9 image kino-collage where 8 of the squares are just scenes of naomi crying in a dark corridor and then the last one is the space battle for the gate?
It perfectly summarizes the show, at least season 5-6
It's all good with a season 6 that was either 1. too short or 2. they shouldn't have spent somuch time showing laconia shit if they have no intention of further producing the show
People will say it sucks after s3, but that's not because the show went bad, s4 is just different because thats how the book is - it's different. S5 is heavily focussed on Naomi, so if you hate Naomi ofcourse you're not going to like it as much (it gives a big exposure into the Free Navy though) and s6 was just rushed.
Still plenty of space kino battles, dangerous situations and plots that aren't babby tier basic all the way through. I'm sad that it didn't get more. The show does not do a game of thrones where they didn't know what the frick to do and hard quality drop, it follows the books pretty faithfully and improves itself (with the writers blessing) in many ways by comparison.
As a big homosexual sci fi nerd I put this one up there with babylon 5.
>or 2. they shouldn't have spent somuch time showing laconia shit if they have no intention of further producing the show
This will never not annoy the frick out of me.
Why would they spend what equates to roughly 30 minutes of the entire season dedicated to building up the glory that is Laconia if they weren't going to end the season with Laconia declaring war on the rest of Humanity and coming through the gate?
I'd much rather them end the show on that massive cliffhanger and then not ever do another season than keep it how they did season 6 where they have this entirely detached story from the Strange Dogs novella that has no relevance whatsoever to the actual story being told.
How exactly did anything in the Laconia portion have anything to do with the rest of the story happening? Other than the most basic of "they're all humans that originated from Earth" type of nonsense.
Nothing in their story was relevant to the other story, and nothing in the other story was relevant to their story. They were two completely seperated things that may as well of been part of two comlpetely sepearte tv shows.
ok but im not reading a book im watching this show
It makes zero sense to build this up as your final 2 seasons when you can't do anything with it
My point was more that the writers had no idea what to do with the 4th dimensional red space gods, so even if the show followed the books you wouldn't get a satisfying conclusion to that plot point. They're barely even a factor in the last 3 books other than occasionally doing the exact same shit they did during the last couple of seasons where they randomly just kill whatever goes through the gate system.
In fact, they're even less of a threat in books 7-9 because by then Humanity has figured out exactly when the next "eating" is going to occur and have it set up where they just send a couple of empty ships to reset the count and not harm anyone. Until one of the captains sets up a ship full of nukes and sends it through the gate and blows up the red aliens on the other side which causes the red aliens to spazz out and quite literally shut off the brains of all humans in the local space for like 20 minutes
Actually now that I'm typing it all out they did kinda deal with them in books 7-9. We got robbed.
I don't think it's fair to say he didn't know what to do with the aliens, you have misframed his plot intention. The story is really more focused on the builders and their technology, the energy system behind that technology and the red "aliens" are a bad consequence of that technology and you can't really frame them as a new enemy faction entering the fray. The writer is a big nerd (and has some degrees in several areas of science) and most of the things in this are actually from reality/scientific theory and quite fully fledged and thought about - PROTOMOLECULE SPACE JELLYFISH BRO.
I don't think it's fair to say you have any idea what you're talking about when you refer to James SA Corey as a single writer.
It's not so much they had no idea what to do with the 4th dimensional red alien gods, it's that what they did with them was incredibly shallow and disappointing. They've been looming as this massive threat for half of the book series and at the end it turns out they weren't really a threat afterall and they were stupidly easy to deal with, and that the real big bad was one of the dudes from Laconia that injected the protomeme into his brain or whatever the frick happened there, who was trying to convert all of humanity into a hive-mind, exactly like the Builders, because he errantly thought having humanity as a hive-mind would save them when it's the main reason that the Builders were killed, and humanity having individualized thoughts and minds is the only thing that saved them from the 4th dimensional red alien god universal strike.
It's checkovs gun without firing the gun. Poor writing.
3 months ago
Anonymous
Holden being against playing with builder technology fearing against facing the same fate as them is a repeated thing throughout the series though. Turn it off TM was always on the cards. I think you have been let down finding out that the alternate dimension aliens aren't really traditional aliens and may as well be sentient radiation coming out of chernobyl for all you care - which is fine, I respect your right to be disappointed, but I don't think you were mislead about it or that they didn't know what they were doing with it.
3 months ago
Anonymous
I think it hinges on the fact that early on the red gods simply were. After X amount of mass going through the gate network, the next Y amount of mass would get swallowed up.
If they kept it at that, it would have been fine.
But they explicitly turn them into creatures that are capable of shutting off an entire systems worth of humanties brains for 20 minutes at a time when they were actually attacked - assuming it would kill them like it killed the Builders - and then they attack 3-4 more times throughout the next few books before Holden just says "frick it, we're closing the gates to seal them away".
They were built up, especially during books 7 and 8, as the actual big baddies of the series, and then they rugpulled us during the last couple of chapters of book 9.
3 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah, I agree there is element of "wtf that's breaking the rules" but it is about / at the point of oh they can just change the rules of physics on the fly tier sci fi material so whaddyagunnado. Red gods was an apt description in respect to their lack of tangible substance.
The close it down ending doesn't surprise me though seeing as most of Holden's solutions boil down to either blow it up or shut it down - Duarte already tried the blow it up option so moving onto option 2.
3 months ago
Anonymous
>The close it down ending doesn't surprise me though seeing as most of Holden's solutions boil down to either blow it up or shut it down - Duarte already tried the blow it up option so moving onto option 2.
lmao
ive never actually thought of it that way but holy shit you're right.
3 months ago
Anonymous
Technically "Duarte" didn't think humanity as a hive mind would save them. That was protomolecule/Builders talking, and it nearly got Holden too. The Builder goal was always to get beings of physical matter to eventually reboot their network, get properly infected, become a hive mind, and then hook up to the Adro Diamond (which is the Builder hive mind in quarantine from their destroyers) to reboot the entire hive mind except now the hive mind is in bodies that are less susceptible to the destroyers fricking with them (not immune, just less susceptible, because they used to exist as photons and light particles and that was really easily fricked up by the destroyers because their "body" was insubstantial and every time they got attacked and even when they were torching solar systems they got dumber, since they had evolved to be a giant light-based neuron processing brain existing without a body). Then they would have rearmed with all their toys and gone back to war.
3 months ago
Anonymous
Sure, but that doesn't really change the fact that it didn't end up happening and the way they dealt with the red gods was to just shut the gate network and not allow them access to our reality, which is my fundamental problem with the way the series ended.
I guess it's a bit more themeatic when you look at it like it was essentially the protomeme vs holden at the very end, but still, the way the handled the red gods really rubbed me the wrong way and turned the series from my favorite sci-fi series of all time into just another middling series that botched the ending hard.
3 months ago
Anonymous
You've answered it yourself, as I said earlier you're just (rightfully) a bit disappointed. Compare it to all the other garbage out there and this is still better than most though.
3 months ago
Anonymous
you think it'd be better if they killed them somehow or started talking to them and made peace? That'd be even dumber. The whole idea was that they're so far above and different from our reality that there is no fighting them nor communication.
3 months ago
Anonymous
I wanted SOMETHING. Instead we got NOTHING.
We didn't learn about them in any way other than they're capable of doing some insane shit like turning off consciousness in an entire region of space.
There was enough chapters from the Protomeme point of view, I just wanted one chapter from the red gods point of view. Not even a full chapter, just like 2-3 pages of it.
Hell look at something like Death's End (book 3 of the Three Body Problem series which is actually called Remembrance of Earths Past or some shit but everyone just calls it 3 body). The entire series is from the POV of humans with like 1-2 POVs from the aliens that are invading earth who might as well be humans given the way their POV was written.
But then during the last book there's this incredibly esotetic chapter from a random alien whos job is to (esentially) wipe out entire star systems, that is completely different from the rest of the book. That's the kind of SOMETHING I wanted from the red gods.
Just ANYTHING that gave us the slightest bit of insight into them other than they're 4th dimensional red space gods. Hell we don't even know that they're 4th dimensions space gods that's just one of the dozen of random things people call them because there is practically nothing known about them.
And I get it, cool you have this creature that is so far beyond the characters understanding that it's also beyond the readers understanding. But to me, that's just lazy and poor writing, from a book series that up until then was pretty well written and had some interesting ideas.
3 months ago
Anonymous
They don't need the gates to access our reality. The issue for them was that the Builders were cannibalising their universe by stealing energy from it, running it closer to heat death - the "destroyers" were never a greater scope villain but were actually victims of the Builders (the primary villain, the Leviathan that woke in the first book and fell in the last) as much as anybody else.
How exactly did anything in the Laconia portion have anything to do with the rest of the story happening? Other than the most basic of "they're all humans that originated from Earth" type of nonsense.
Nothing in their story was relevant to the other story, and nothing in the other story was relevant to their story. They were two completely seperated things that may as well of been part of two comlpetely sepearte tv shows.
[...]
My point was more that the writers had no idea what to do with the 4th dimensional red space gods, so even if the show followed the books you wouldn't get a satisfying conclusion to that plot point. They're barely even a factor in the last 3 books other than occasionally doing the exact same shit they did during the last couple of seasons where they randomly just kill whatever goes through the gate system.
In fact, they're even less of a threat in books 7-9 because by then Humanity has figured out exactly when the next "eating" is going to occur and have it set up where they just send a couple of empty ships to reset the count and not harm anyone. Until one of the captains sets up a ship full of nukes and sends it through the gate and blows up the red aliens on the other side which causes the red aliens to spazz out and quite literally shut off the brains of all humans in the local space for like 20 minutes
Actually now that I'm typing it all out they did kinda deal with them in books 7-9. We got robbed.
The book premise of humans stumbling upon tech from a wiped alien race, slowly learning to use it, then slowly learning why they got wiped is so interesting.
But the book writers put in too much filler and they didn't write many interesting characters.
3 months ago
Anonymous
I loved that part of the book. Of course humans would leap at the chance to use alien technology. But it's actually set up as a booby trap that will all the hibernating aliens to assimilate and essentially destroy humanity? Then a small group of people have to try and convince the whole to stop using it due to that severe danger. Really neat
Good take. I liked the Laconia stuff. There's still hope someone will pick it up and continue on.
I think it's a case of where trying to do justice and adhere to the source material was a mistake. It didn't work in this instance because it cannot be finished / won't be. It should have been dropped or formulated as a better entwined story with better cliffhanger. I don't know what happened at Amazon, especially since Jeff Bezos supposedly loved the show, but there are a load of extra small features that are about 5mins long each that show the happenings of the respective crews in the plot of season, adding much needed exposition that was completely missing in that 6 episode rush to the finish and you find yourself asking "Why?". You know you have made a blunder in media when, if you showed this to someone else, at the end they will be slightly dumbfound and have quite a lot of questions that require someone who has read a book to go "WELL AKSHULLY.." filling in blanks that shouldn't be there as a bit of cope. A shame.
They knew going into season 6 that it was the last season and that Amazon was not picking it up again because season 4 did poorly and season 5 did even worse.
Unless Alcon has plans to somehow revive the show a second time, there was no reason for them to put the Laconia stuff in the show at all other than to blueball fans.
Nah, I enjoyed seeing the Laconia stuff on screen. Not like there was much better that they could have replaced it with instead. The finished story is still there in the books. They can pick it up and finish it at any time.
>The ending of this show is literally a massive cliffhanger where they reveal a dangerous race of alternate dimension red-aliens, and they reveal that the blue alien spaceship or whatever has been reactivated by mars >Oh also there's life on this planet! >Wow, interesting, I wonder where this will go. They just spent all this time setting this stuff up. I guess we'll find out in season 7
But there is no season 7. And they new that. Season 6 literally just sets up cliffhangers so it can end
What in the frick???????
>they shouldn't have spent somuch time showing laconia shit if they have no intention of further producing the show
It's obvious that they've always intended to continue the show in some form of another, so adapting Strange Dogs in S6 was 100% necessary. Amazon and covid really fricked them over, though. S6 could have been so much better if it was at least 3 episodes longer.
Fortunately, Amazon's streaming rights are going to expire soon, so we might see Laconia kino in the near future.
>so we might see Laconia kino in the near future.
It's never going to happen
No one is going to buy the rights to an old failure of a sci-fi show where the actors have all moved on, not that they had any draw anyway
>The ending of this show is literally a massive cliffhanger where they reveal a dangerous race of alternate dimension red-aliens, and they reveal that the blue alien spaceship or whatever has been reactivated by mars >Oh also there's life on this planet! >Wow, interesting, I wonder where this will go. They just spent all this time setting this stuff up. I guess we'll find out in season 7
But there is no season 7. And they new that. Season 6 literally just sets up cliffhangers so it can end
What in the frick???????
This is why they should have changed it or ignored stuff for the show. The book after has a huge time skip, everyones old, amos becomes an undead alien giga chad and there was no point alluding to any of this as they are not going to show it.
They could have just had an all-out war between Earth, Mars, Belters, Mars/alien ships, whatever
Instead we got naomi crying and tons of set up for cool things we will never see. like WHY
They could have just had an all-out war between Earth, Mars, Belters, Mars/alien ships, whatever
Instead we got naomi crying and tons of set up for cool things we will never see. like WHY
Jesus you guys are such morons. So concerned with whining about brown people you couldn't even fricking pay attention. There was PLENTY of interesting plots going on in season 5-6. The goddamn Earth gets devastated. Asking why Mars can't be at war? Durrr the moron didn't pay attention that MARS IS FRICKING GONE BECAUSE OF THE RINGS OPENING! That was a gigantic plot point for many seasons. Mars, the belt, the whole solar system is in upheaval because people are leaving for the new worlds. And people are angry and scared, so those like Marco are using that fear to gather armies and lash out.
>bruh ignore the 8 episodes of 45 minutes of nothing happening but naomi crying in a dark corridor because in two of the episodes there was a 5 minute sequence of interesting stuff happening
lol
naw dog.
While I share your frustration in that I also enjoyed those seasons, Naomi is a bad miscast and it requires a measure of mental fortitude to get past how annoying she is and appreciate her actual character. She was a failed diversity implant into the show, she's written as a beautiful super mary sue (which explains why two of the most powerful men system fumble over her) and it isn't bad she's a mary sue as such, it fits there as interesting stories where people do extraordinary things are generally not mundane people. It's a shame and a missed opportunity when you consider the literal shit eating horror misery that her character has to go through during s5 that they didn't cast a beautiful looking white woman with unusual belter features (like the skinny ayylmao prostitute) which would have further played into her characters issue being unable to live on a planet. Would have fit better and been much more dramatic.
Good news, you can read the final 3 books in the series and realize that they never had plans for the super dangerous race of alternate dimension red-aliens since they just end the series without actually dealing with them at all other than closing the gate network so humans stop poking the 4th dimensional red bears because they are literally so far beyond our comprehension that we couldnt not concieve of a way to deal with them in 100,000 years.
if you're not into space politics then you can stop at season 4 and still feel like you watched a full series. It was never fully adapted so watching until season 6 won't do much either and will just leave unresolved threads in the story
It's pretty much reddit meets netflix meets globohomosexual feminism. Basically it's feminism the show made to hypnotise the viewer into thinking "white men bad" and "POC women good". There isn't really much more to this dreary show than that.
Holden has jungle fever in the books. The first chick he bangs (the white blonde chick in the show that gets blown upon the cant) is basically pic related in the books (bald headed and everything), and Naomi is roughly that shade of dark in the books as well.
Camina Drummer in the show is like...half a dozen different characters from the books rolled into one.
Then theres the whole book Michio Pa is show Camina Drummer and book Camina Drummer is show Michio Pa thing.
Ashford sucks in the books and is a generic 1 dimensional villain, in the tv show he's in the top 3 characters.
Tons of minor little things like the spaceships being bulky square/rectangular skyscrapers in the books but sleek "cool" looking ships in the show.
Humanity is a lot more spread out in the books early on, whereas in the books it's basically just Earth, Mars, and some small outposts on the Belt. Books a lot of Jupiters moons are fully colonized, as are Satun and Neptune moons, and there's outposts on Pluto, so it truly is the "Outer Planet Alliance" instead of just the belt+ juptier like it is in the show.
They tried in the show, but I really feel they just didn't do the best portrayal of the Belters. Maybe it needed to be animated to depict properly. Their huge physical differences, how many of them there are, that they are all over the asteroid belt weren't ever really demonstrated that great. People watch the show and come away just thinking they are normal humans, there's just a small amount of them, and they're all a cohesive faction that hates Earth and Mars.
They realised it would be too difficult to get the right actors and costuming/setup to depict them all as 7-8 feet tall, and people are proven to empathise more with human-looking people than things that are different to that degree.
I never understood the belter problem. Earth/Mars supposedly need them for mining. But actually earth is overflowing with unemployed people that would kill to have a job in space.
They are subservient to Earth/Mars and forced to do whatever they say and punished by turning off air and water. If Earth company demands they work eighteen hour days in shit conditions with failing equipment then they better do it. Most of them don't have that great a life on the various rocks and turn to crime/drugs. That's why Miller has to keep busting the kids who try to steal water. The idea of the OPA was to shift the power balance so Belters could be treated more equally and as important as Inners. And all that unrest is why Marco gained such a following since the Belt's days were suddenly numbered as everyone was fleeing for the new planets. So those that stayed turned to him since he promised to give them power over the Inner planets and keep the Belt alive.
I started off really liking it.
Character called Bobby showed up (start on season 3 I think)
One of those gender swaps where it's a woman but she some super strong commando warrior despite being a 60kg woman.
iseewherethisisgoing.jpg
gave up
Seasons 1-4 yes
Seasons 5-6 no
What way does it turn to shit?
It just turns into frustrating filler. There's some good plots going on in the background that they spend almost no time on.
Most of it is about Naomi, the most I liked character, and how her ex husband and son who killed billions of people actually dindu nothing.
Also one of the lead characters got cancelled which led to some weird situations.
"Naomi, the most unliked character" is what I meant
It doesn't. Don't pay attention to morons.
It's not perfect, but it's the greatest and most influential sci-fi show we've had in decades. It follows the books quite closely too, in spite of what morons might tell you. Sometimes it even improves on the book. In my opinion the latter half of S5 is the weakest part of the show, but it's great from beginning to end.
>It follows the books quite closely too, in spite of what morons might tell you.
Ehhhh. It takes a LOT of liberties with the source material, especially in the back half.
FPBP
came to say exactly that
Solid fpbp there. I might drop it back to S1-3, with 4 skip as well, but you can still reasonably watch most of 4.
>never going to see GLORIOUS EMPIRE OF LACONIAN SUPREMACY
Yes.
/thread
Seasons 5~6 still have some good episodes so he might as well watch the wole thing.
>Seasons 5~6 still have some good episodes
Name them, I dare you.
Hard mode: admit how much Naomi screen time they have
The book series is based.
The books also really drag on about the Naomi plot like the show though. It's just that she isn't as insufferable in the books.
Book Naomi is an actual good character is why. To be fair, almost all of the book versions of the characters are better in every single way except for Bobby. The show definitely improved Bobby.
too bad Bobby is dead in the books
Too bad the show is nothing like the books
The books are woke garbage. Competently written but got worse with each book
The budget and a lot of the casting doesn’t do it justice. The books are great though, go read or listen to them.
Seasons 1 and 2 are good. 3 is ok, the rest is shit.
kino
Yes, it's fantastic. All of it. Best scifi this decade. Some anons seethe over it because it has brown people in it.
there's no defending naomi, sorry
Detective is the main character
sci fi nerds tricked me into watching this because they shouted remember the c**t 24/7, it's tolerable until that detective dies, afterwards it's pretty much just the-planet-of-the-week garbage
it starts good and worse over time. and it spends a lot of focus on belters who are just the most worthless irritating people
it's complicated
1-3 are god tier
4 is pretty good but a major departure from 1-3
5-6 are dogshit family drama involving mostly naoimi and her moronic child and baby daddy while amos and alex and holden are just kinda in the background.
Foundation clears
1 - 6/10
2 - 7.5/10
3 - 9/10
4 - 7/10
5 - 2/10
6 - 2/10
yes its kino:
S2=S3>S1>S4. ( you can stop watching after s4) S4>>>S6>>>>>>>>>>>>>>S5
too much screentime for naomi and her ugly mutt kid in s5 so i skipped all those scenes and ended up watching like 7 or 8 minutes from each episode. Amos and Peaches s the only okay thing in S5 and maybe bobby and the Mars shit. the rest is negligible
Agree with everyone here, just watch until season 4 and read the wiki for the plot after.
You won't "see" most of the real story anyways. The only thing you see is Naomi's face frowning
Does anyone have that 9 image kino-collage where 8 of the squares are just scenes of naomi crying in a dark corridor and then the last one is the space battle for the gate?
It perfectly summarizes the show, at least season 5-6
I need tall lanky cute belter gf
It's all good with a season 6 that was either 1. too short or 2. they shouldn't have spent somuch time showing laconia shit if they have no intention of further producing the show
People will say it sucks after s3, but that's not because the show went bad, s4 is just different because thats how the book is - it's different. S5 is heavily focussed on Naomi, so if you hate Naomi ofcourse you're not going to like it as much (it gives a big exposure into the Free Navy though) and s6 was just rushed.
Still plenty of space kino battles, dangerous situations and plots that aren't babby tier basic all the way through. I'm sad that it didn't get more. The show does not do a game of thrones where they didn't know what the frick to do and hard quality drop, it follows the books pretty faithfully and improves itself (with the writers blessing) in many ways by comparison.
As a big homosexual sci fi nerd I put this one up there with babylon 5.
>or 2. they shouldn't have spent somuch time showing laconia shit if they have no intention of further producing the show
This will never not annoy the frick out of me.
Why would they spend what equates to roughly 30 minutes of the entire season dedicated to building up the glory that is Laconia if they weren't going to end the season with Laconia declaring war on the rest of Humanity and coming through the gate?
I'd much rather them end the show on that massive cliffhanger and then not ever do another season than keep it how they did season 6 where they have this entirely detached story from the Strange Dogs novella that has no relevance whatsoever to the actual story being told.
>entirely detached story from the Strange Dogs novella that has no relevance whatsoever to the actual story being told.
moron
How exactly did anything in the Laconia portion have anything to do with the rest of the story happening? Other than the most basic of "they're all humans that originated from Earth" type of nonsense.
Nothing in their story was relevant to the other story, and nothing in the other story was relevant to their story. They were two completely seperated things that may as well of been part of two comlpetely sepearte tv shows.
My point was more that the writers had no idea what to do with the 4th dimensional red space gods, so even if the show followed the books you wouldn't get a satisfying conclusion to that plot point. They're barely even a factor in the last 3 books other than occasionally doing the exact same shit they did during the last couple of seasons where they randomly just kill whatever goes through the gate system.
In fact, they're even less of a threat in books 7-9 because by then Humanity has figured out exactly when the next "eating" is going to occur and have it set up where they just send a couple of empty ships to reset the count and not harm anyone. Until one of the captains sets up a ship full of nukes and sends it through the gate and blows up the red aliens on the other side which causes the red aliens to spazz out and quite literally shut off the brains of all humans in the local space for like 20 minutes
Actually now that I'm typing it all out they did kinda deal with them in books 7-9. We got robbed.
I don't think it's fair to say he didn't know what to do with the aliens, you have misframed his plot intention. The story is really more focused on the builders and their technology, the energy system behind that technology and the red "aliens" are a bad consequence of that technology and you can't really frame them as a new enemy faction entering the fray. The writer is a big nerd (and has some degrees in several areas of science) and most of the things in this are actually from reality/scientific theory and quite fully fledged and thought about - PROTOMOLECULE SPACE JELLYFISH BRO.
I don't think it's fair to say you have any idea what you're talking about when you refer to James SA Corey as a single writer.
It's not so much they had no idea what to do with the 4th dimensional red alien gods, it's that what they did with them was incredibly shallow and disappointing. They've been looming as this massive threat for half of the book series and at the end it turns out they weren't really a threat afterall and they were stupidly easy to deal with, and that the real big bad was one of the dudes from Laconia that injected the protomeme into his brain or whatever the frick happened there, who was trying to convert all of humanity into a hive-mind, exactly like the Builders, because he errantly thought having humanity as a hive-mind would save them when it's the main reason that the Builders were killed, and humanity having individualized thoughts and minds is the only thing that saved them from the 4th dimensional red alien god universal strike.
It's checkovs gun without firing the gun. Poor writing.
Holden being against playing with builder technology fearing against facing the same fate as them is a repeated thing throughout the series though. Turn it off TM was always on the cards. I think you have been let down finding out that the alternate dimension aliens aren't really traditional aliens and may as well be sentient radiation coming out of chernobyl for all you care - which is fine, I respect your right to be disappointed, but I don't think you were mislead about it or that they didn't know what they were doing with it.
I think it hinges on the fact that early on the red gods simply were. After X amount of mass going through the gate network, the next Y amount of mass would get swallowed up.
If they kept it at that, it would have been fine.
But they explicitly turn them into creatures that are capable of shutting off an entire systems worth of humanties brains for 20 minutes at a time when they were actually attacked - assuming it would kill them like it killed the Builders - and then they attack 3-4 more times throughout the next few books before Holden just says "frick it, we're closing the gates to seal them away".
They were built up, especially during books 7 and 8, as the actual big baddies of the series, and then they rugpulled us during the last couple of chapters of book 9.
Yeah, I agree there is element of "wtf that's breaking the rules" but it is about / at the point of oh they can just change the rules of physics on the fly tier sci fi material so whaddyagunnado. Red gods was an apt description in respect to their lack of tangible substance.
The close it down ending doesn't surprise me though seeing as most of Holden's solutions boil down to either blow it up or shut it down - Duarte already tried the blow it up option so moving onto option 2.
>The close it down ending doesn't surprise me though seeing as most of Holden's solutions boil down to either blow it up or shut it down - Duarte already tried the blow it up option so moving onto option 2.
lmao
ive never actually thought of it that way but holy shit you're right.
Technically "Duarte" didn't think humanity as a hive mind would save them. That was protomolecule/Builders talking, and it nearly got Holden too. The Builder goal was always to get beings of physical matter to eventually reboot their network, get properly infected, become a hive mind, and then hook up to the Adro Diamond (which is the Builder hive mind in quarantine from their destroyers) to reboot the entire hive mind except now the hive mind is in bodies that are less susceptible to the destroyers fricking with them (not immune, just less susceptible, because they used to exist as photons and light particles and that was really easily fricked up by the destroyers because their "body" was insubstantial and every time they got attacked and even when they were torching solar systems they got dumber, since they had evolved to be a giant light-based neuron processing brain existing without a body). Then they would have rearmed with all their toys and gone back to war.
Sure, but that doesn't really change the fact that it didn't end up happening and the way they dealt with the red gods was to just shut the gate network and not allow them access to our reality, which is my fundamental problem with the way the series ended.
I guess it's a bit more themeatic when you look at it like it was essentially the protomeme vs holden at the very end, but still, the way the handled the red gods really rubbed me the wrong way and turned the series from my favorite sci-fi series of all time into just another middling series that botched the ending hard.
You've answered it yourself, as I said earlier you're just (rightfully) a bit disappointed. Compare it to all the other garbage out there and this is still better than most though.
you think it'd be better if they killed them somehow or started talking to them and made peace? That'd be even dumber. The whole idea was that they're so far above and different from our reality that there is no fighting them nor communication.
I wanted SOMETHING. Instead we got NOTHING.
We didn't learn about them in any way other than they're capable of doing some insane shit like turning off consciousness in an entire region of space.
There was enough chapters from the Protomeme point of view, I just wanted one chapter from the red gods point of view. Not even a full chapter, just like 2-3 pages of it.
Hell look at something like Death's End (book 3 of the Three Body Problem series which is actually called Remembrance of Earths Past or some shit but everyone just calls it 3 body). The entire series is from the POV of humans with like 1-2 POVs from the aliens that are invading earth who might as well be humans given the way their POV was written.
But then during the last book there's this incredibly esotetic chapter from a random alien whos job is to (esentially) wipe out entire star systems, that is completely different from the rest of the book. That's the kind of SOMETHING I wanted from the red gods.
Just ANYTHING that gave us the slightest bit of insight into them other than they're 4th dimensional red space gods. Hell we don't even know that they're 4th dimensions space gods that's just one of the dozen of random things people call them because there is practically nothing known about them.
And I get it, cool you have this creature that is so far beyond the characters understanding that it's also beyond the readers understanding. But to me, that's just lazy and poor writing, from a book series that up until then was pretty well written and had some interesting ideas.
They don't need the gates to access our reality. The issue for them was that the Builders were cannibalising their universe by stealing energy from it, running it closer to heat death - the "destroyers" were never a greater scope villain but were actually victims of the Builders (the primary villain, the Leviathan that woke in the first book and fell in the last) as much as anybody else.
The book premise of humans stumbling upon tech from a wiped alien race, slowly learning to use it, then slowly learning why they got wiped is so interesting.
But the book writers put in too much filler and they didn't write many interesting characters.
I loved that part of the book. Of course humans would leap at the chance to use alien technology. But it's actually set up as a booby trap that will all the hibernating aliens to assimilate and essentially destroy humanity? Then a small group of people have to try and convince the whole to stop using it due to that severe danger. Really neat
I think it's a case of where trying to do justice and adhere to the source material was a mistake. It didn't work in this instance because it cannot be finished / won't be. It should have been dropped or formulated as a better entwined story with better cliffhanger. I don't know what happened at Amazon, especially since Jeff Bezos supposedly loved the show, but there are a load of extra small features that are about 5mins long each that show the happenings of the respective crews in the plot of season, adding much needed exposition that was completely missing in that 6 episode rush to the finish and you find yourself asking "Why?". You know you have made a blunder in media when, if you showed this to someone else, at the end they will be slightly dumbfound and have quite a lot of questions that require someone who has read a book to go "WELL AKSHULLY.." filling in blanks that shouldn't be there as a bit of cope. A shame.
They knew going into season 6 that it was the last season and that Amazon was not picking it up again because season 4 did poorly and season 5 did even worse.
Unless Alcon has plans to somehow revive the show a second time, there was no reason for them to put the Laconia stuff in the show at all other than to blueball fans.
Nah, I enjoyed seeing the Laconia stuff on screen. Not like there was much better that they could have replaced it with instead. The finished story is still there in the books. They can pick it up and finish it at any time.
They should have made the entire final season Laconia based and used the 5 minute opening segments for the Sol System drama.
Good take. I liked the Laconia stuff. There's still hope someone will pick it up and continue on.
>they shouldn't have spent somuch time showing laconia shit if they have no intention of further producing the show
It's obvious that they've always intended to continue the show in some form of another, so adapting Strange Dogs in S6 was 100% necessary. Amazon and covid really fricked them over, though. S6 could have been so much better if it was at least 3 episodes longer.
Fortunately, Amazon's streaming rights are going to expire soon, so we might see Laconia kino in the near future.
>so we might see Laconia kino in the near future.
It's never going to happen
No one is going to buy the rights to an old failure of a sci-fi show where the actors have all moved on, not that they had any draw anyway
>The ending of this show is literally a massive cliffhanger where they reveal a dangerous race of alternate dimension red-aliens, and they reveal that the blue alien spaceship or whatever has been reactivated by mars
>Oh also there's life on this planet!
>Wow, interesting, I wonder where this will go. They just spent all this time setting this stuff up. I guess we'll find out in season 7
But there is no season 7. And they new that. Season 6 literally just sets up cliffhangers so it can end
What in the frick???????
This is why they should have changed it or ignored stuff for the show. The book after has a huge time skip, everyones old, amos becomes an undead alien giga chad and there was no point alluding to any of this as they are not going to show it.
Was honestly really weird cause season 5-6 has really no interesting plotlines aside from setting up stuff for later
They could have just had an all-out war between Earth, Mars, Belters, Mars/alien ships, whatever
Instead we got naomi crying and tons of set up for cool things we will never see. like WHY
Jesus you guys are such morons. So concerned with whining about brown people you couldn't even fricking pay attention. There was PLENTY of interesting plots going on in season 5-6. The goddamn Earth gets devastated. Asking why Mars can't be at war? Durrr the moron didn't pay attention that MARS IS FRICKING GONE BECAUSE OF THE RINGS OPENING! That was a gigantic plot point for many seasons. Mars, the belt, the whole solar system is in upheaval because people are leaving for the new worlds. And people are angry and scared, so those like Marco are using that fear to gather armies and lash out.
>bruh ignore the 8 episodes of 45 minutes of nothing happening but naomi crying in a dark corridor because in two of the episodes there was a 5 minute sequence of interesting stuff happening
lol
naw dog.
While I share your frustration in that I also enjoyed those seasons, Naomi is a bad miscast and it requires a measure of mental fortitude to get past how annoying she is and appreciate her actual character. She was a failed diversity implant into the show, she's written as a beautiful super mary sue (which explains why two of the most powerful men system fumble over her) and it isn't bad she's a mary sue as such, it fits there as interesting stories where people do extraordinary things are generally not mundane people. It's a shame and a missed opportunity when you consider the literal shit eating horror misery that her character has to go through during s5 that they didn't cast a beautiful looking white woman with unusual belter features (like the skinny ayylmao prostitute) which would have further played into her characters issue being unable to live on a planet. Would have fit better and been much more dramatic.
Nobody except you mentioned "brown". She's a poorly written character and poorer acted still.
Good news, you can read the final 3 books in the series and realize that they never had plans for the super dangerous race of alternate dimension red-aliens since they just end the series without actually dealing with them at all other than closing the gate network so humans stop poking the 4th dimensional red bears because they are literally so far beyond our comprehension that we couldnt not concieve of a way to deal with them in 100,000 years.
ok but im not reading a book im watching this show
It makes zero sense to build this up as your final 2 seasons when you can't do anything with it
They were banking on another company picking the show up
The child molester drive?
post webms
if you're not into space politics then you can stop at season 4 and still feel like you watched a full series. It was never fully adapted so watching until season 6 won't do much either and will just leave unresolved threads in the story
It's pretty much reddit meets netflix meets globohomosexual feminism. Basically it's feminism the show made to hypnotise the viewer into thinking "white men bad" and "POC women good". There isn't really much more to this dreary show than that.
turns to complete shit when the show focuses on Marco Inaros
Does anyone else think it was an absurd misstep to not have Naomi and Phillip merge consciousness at all in the last book?
Figured that would be a given but I am fine with never hearing from him again after he said “frick this”
I couldnt get over the strong black woman in the first season
What are the big differences between the books and the show?
Drummer and Ashford are very different in the books. The show versions are FAR superior
Holden has jungle fever in the books. The first chick he bangs (the white blonde chick in the show that gets blown upon the cant) is basically pic related in the books (bald headed and everything), and Naomi is roughly that shade of dark in the books as well.
Camina Drummer in the show is like...half a dozen different characters from the books rolled into one.
Then theres the whole book Michio Pa is show Camina Drummer and book Camina Drummer is show Michio Pa thing.
Ashford sucks in the books and is a generic 1 dimensional villain, in the tv show he's in the top 3 characters.
Tons of minor little things like the spaceships being bulky square/rectangular skyscrapers in the books but sleek "cool" looking ships in the show.
Humanity is a lot more spread out in the books early on, whereas in the books it's basically just Earth, Mars, and some small outposts on the Belt. Books a lot of Jupiters moons are fully colonized, as are Satun and Neptune moons, and there's outposts on Pluto, so it truly is the "Outer Planet Alliance" instead of just the belt+ juptier like it is in the show.
forgot the pic
They tried in the show, but I really feel they just didn't do the best portrayal of the Belters. Maybe it needed to be animated to depict properly. Their huge physical differences, how many of them there are, that they are all over the asteroid belt weren't ever really demonstrated that great. People watch the show and come away just thinking they are normal humans, there's just a small amount of them, and they're all a cohesive faction that hates Earth and Mars.
They realised it would be too difficult to get the right actors and costuming/setup to depict them all as 7-8 feet tall, and people are proven to empathise more with human-looking people than things that are different to that degree.
I never understood the belter problem. Earth/Mars supposedly need them for mining. But actually earth is overflowing with unemployed people that would kill to have a job in space.
They are subservient to Earth/Mars and forced to do whatever they say and punished by turning off air and water. If Earth company demands they work eighteen hour days in shit conditions with failing equipment then they better do it. Most of them don't have that great a life on the various rocks and turn to crime/drugs. That's why Miller has to keep busting the kids who try to steal water. The idea of the OPA was to shift the power balance so Belters could be treated more equally and as important as Inners. And all that unrest is why Marco gained such a following since the Belt's days were suddenly numbered as everyone was fleeing for the new planets. So those that stayed turned to him since he promised to give them power over the Inner planets and keep the Belt alive.
Doesn't answer the question: why deal with difficult belters or uprisings even, when you can just space them and replace them with earth NEETs.
From the books it's clear that earthers would kill to work 18 hours in shit conditions
>didn't get Laconia kino
I started off really liking it.
Character called Bobby showed up (start on season 3 I think)
One of those gender swaps where it's a woman but she some super strong commando warrior despite being a 60kg woman.
iseewherethisisgoing.jpg
gave up
mindrotten little baby kek. I pity you, can't enjoy anything, must seethe over the most inconsequential things