There’s no reason why an under 30 person wouldn’t have an other - perhaps not identical, but close enough for impersonation. If a couple has a girl in 1995, and their others also have a girl in the same year, chances are the resulting children would look very similar indeed.
There’s no reason why an under 30 person wouldn’t have an other - perhaps not identical, but close enough for impersonation. If a couple has a girl in 1995, and their others also have a girl in the same year, chances are the resulting children would look very similar indeed.
I guess you missed the parts about how Ian was originally from “our” side and the management from “their” side recruited him and gave him a new identity. The woman that was kidnapped was the other of Ian’s dead wife from “our” side. Who Ian had recently tracked down and started a relationship with, against orders.
It reminds me of a plot point I really liked in the movie About Time. Guy can travel back in time, “fix” stuff, and return to the present where the fixes have taken effect.
He learns about the one hard and fast (self-imposed) rule: Never change anything before your children were born. If you do, when you return to the present you’ll have completely different kids. It’s just too random.
Our worlds only started diverging 30 years ago because of the actions of management. And it wasn’t until the flu (I don’t remember when that happened) that things would really change for people not directly connected. So some people under 30 might have others, but some might not (like Howard’s daughter).
A little easter egg I thought I spotted. When management learned the Berlin Wall was falling, they were watching a soccer game from both worlds. Was that supposed to be the same soccer game that Quayle was at, where he thought his timeline diverged?
I’ve read the suggestion that Starz was wrong not to make the first season of the show available through Netflix or another streaming service, and that if it had, the second season would have had a larger audience. I think that’s been true of other shows, where people binge-watch the earlier seasons of a show via Netflix, and then go on to watch the new seasons as they aired.
As an example consider that the other day, a guy named Alex Mills died. He was better known by his Internet alias of Viper007Bond as the host of a Top Gear fan website called FinalGear.com. Before the BBC made Top Gear available around the world, his site helped people outside the UK watch the show (through illegal means, mind you). But this exposure demonstrated that the show was popular outside the UK and it became a huge hit for the UK internationally.
They did a terrible job marketing this show. I only found out that the second season was coming back because I watched an On Demand movie that happened to be from Starz.
Honestly, I think 2 seasons was enough. I’m not sure if I can take more seasons of the Silk Brothers bickering or the Quayle’s weird Mr. & Mrs. Smith marriage.
There’s one reason. Their parents might never have met. Millions of people were killed by the flu on one side. That’s a pretty big butterfly flapping it’s wings. Even if both parents didn’t die in the epidemic, one or both of them might have moved somewhere else and never met.
Amazon Prime did. Having binged watch it over the past five days, it was a delight to discover and watch. No clue if they’re going to produce new episodes like they’ve done with the Expanse, but I’m happy with the story’s resolution over two seasons. As much as I love the world created, I don’t know where they could go with the story since they wrapped it up so neatly.
I recommend reading the whole thing.
He said there’s no interest in continuing in another format, but did give some details about what the future of the show would be:
Found this show on Amazon Prime a week ago. Binged the two seasons. Although some of the spycraft got kinda dubious by the end, overall it was a great show. And was one of my favorite types of sci-fi: take a single unexplained premise and run with it as far as you can go. There’s no technology of the week. Just the portal, which aside from a few minutes of technobabble in one episode, went largely unexplained. It has simple, easily understood rules with wide-ranging consequences.
I had similar questions along these lines. However, there’s enough evidence to say that the tunnel is an exact duplicate on each side. If entering the tunnel is to the north on the Alpha side, then exiting is to the south on the Prime side. I.e., the two universes are rotated 180 degrees to each other.
Another possibility came to mind early on, which is that the universes are mirrors of each other–i.e., that they got reflected across the portal plane. Later on, we find out this isn’t true–the episode where the portal gets created shows the dropped flashlight, etc. as being rotated, not mirrored. But you don’t actually have to watch that far to know that’s not possible. The others can eat food in our world without problem. But a mirrored person would have opposite protein chirality and be unable to digest most foodstuffs. They’d starve.
There’s still the problem of what’s on the other side. I got the impression that it’s rock, debris, etc. But you’d think they could clear things out. I’m surprised that didn’t make it into the show somehow–a backdoor to the portal, accessible only by Management maybe, or used by Indigo.
Well, it’s not 100% explicit that there’s a backdoor, but it certainly sounds like a plausible theory. We know Management communicates with their counterparts and would need some means outside of the main tunnel. Using the backside of the portal would make sense. Or maybe the seam somehow extends upward through the Fourth Floor.
Some other posts in the thread indicate that they had plans for other portals in future seasons, but they would all connect to the same universe (i.e., there’s just the one Alpha/Prime pair). That feels hard to justify. In one post they describe a scene where the construction workers encounter their dead counterparts building from the other side.
But the timelines are already well-diverged at that point–why would the construction workers be the same? It’s believable if they split off another universe, but not if they’re just joining to the same one.
Unless the producers believe that there is some inevitability in the timelines as well. That contradicts the overall message of the show, with small divergences amplifying into big ones, but one could perhaps argue some kind of consistency principle as well, where the universe “conspires” to have the new split be a perfect replication, at least locally. Something like consistency principles in time travel stories, except here it’s spatial as well as temporal.
I’m still sad that this show was cancelled. It had potential. And I think it would have benefited from being made available on a streaming service like Netflix, while new episodes were on Starz.
Well, it’s on Amazon Prime. Or is it Amazon Alpha?
The AMA above mentions that the producers were getting tired after two seasons, but it’s been a few years now. Would be interesting if Amazon could fund another couple of seasons in a different locale (like Morocco, as mentioned in the AMA). They wouldn’t necessarily need to have the same cast (might be hard to wrangle everyone up at this point).