I’m enjoying this show. It’s not the greatest show in the world, but with Hugh Laurie and Armando Ianucci, I’m in for whatever they want to do.
IMDB is listing 8 episodes for the first season but they are not listing dates for 5-8.
That’s what the show reminds me of. The ship from the Hitchhikers books that was filled with telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, management consultants and all the other useless members of society.
As a side note, I actually have a phone sanitiser branded with a Deloitte logo from a conference I attended last year. I’m not sure if that was intentional and no one seems to get the reference.
Anyone else still watching this? It really isn’t very good. Though I like the casual mentions of future history (the collapse of Google, the French famine, Daniel Radcliffe shitting himself at the Superbowl…)
Seconded.
I like the show as a clever allegory on the American political system: Those at the top are mere figureheads, there for show (read: Congress, keeping itself busy re-naming post offices). An enterprising, aggressive person (Karen) offers to do the real work of dealing with the passengers, and the figurehead gratefully accepts—never stopping to think what she could do with that power.
In allegorical terms, this is: Congresspeople, leery of taking substantive votes that could upset their personal gravy trains, letting Presidents handle all the functions Congress used to deal with. With obviously bad results.
…okay, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch. But Ianucci is deeply interested in power and how it’s exercised, and that’s a big part of this show. Even if it seems to be about orbiting coffins and rich morons (and their flunkies) and a man pretending to be more competent than he actually is.
An episode or two ago, there was a bit about a leak in an external pipe carrying sewage that was literally spewing shit into space. I thought the writers intended something like in Asimov’s short story Marooned Off Vesta, where three astronauts are stuck in orbit around an asteroid, until one of them causes a hole in the water tank that propels the ship closer to the asteroid.
I don’t know, I’m really digging it. Absurd dark humor has always been right up my alley, and every episode gets grimmer and funnier to me. I mean, a bad stand-up comic trying to do his act while dead bodies and human feces float behind him and everybody thinks the ship is running out of oxygen? Somehow that all hits my funny bone hard.
The cast - especially Hugh Laurie - is great. Of course some characters are stronger than others, but it’s a fine ensemble. And I think the premise holds enough comedic potential for future seasons if the show is successful enough, which I hope it is.
Okay, episode 8 was probably the best one so far.
Of course it’s not ideal for any show to have its better episodes much after the first few. But in the olden days of 28-episode seasons, we saw many shows start out poorly and then later become huge hits. (Among half-hour comedies, Seinfeld comes to mind.)
Hope this show will get a chance to build an audience. It has a lot to offer.
Zach Woods is all I need to be happy.
(Jared is the single most brilliant character ever in a comedy, and Woods improved alot of his lines…)
I think it can be applied to any modern exercise of power (politics, business, etc). The show itself reminds me of elements of Iannucci’ Veep, with the works of Douglas Adams and Mike Judge. But kind of fails to deliver on any of it. Not that it’s a bad show. It just can’t seem to decide what it wants to be. Other than perhaps another commentary on how the world is really run by and for insufferable morons.
I get the point they were trying to make, but the scene with people willingly walking out the airlock was a bit hard to swallow. One person might be that stupid, but six others, after literally watching the first one die, stretches the boundaries of plausibility. And that Harrison was one of them made no sense at all (though I didn’t much care for the character, so I’m not mad he’s gone).
While that scene was a miss, I’m still on board (so to speak) with the show. Season finale is Sunday; I do hope we get a coherent stopping point in the story, and not just another episode that leaves everything hanging until next season, if there even is one.
Wow, Josh Gad in yet another TV show…
I don’t disagree, though I think Iannucci could be building to something much more pointed.
(About power and a world run by and for morons, perhaps. That’s, sadly, a very timely theme.)
No. The ship would have to be truly massive for it to have enough gravity for objects to orbit it after being ejected at any reasonable speed.
Let’s assume the ship weighs as much as a Nimitz class aircraft carrier, or about 9.2 X 10^7 kg. Asteroid Bennu, which NASA is currently visiting, is about 1000 times more massive, and yet its escape velocity is only .5 to .7 km/h. So any reasonable ejection speed of the coffins would have easily sent them out of orbit.
Also, if they did manage to launch them slow enough to be retained, the result would be an elliptical orbit with the perigee at the point of ejection - in other words, they’d loop around the ship and then hit it. Some force would be necessary to circularize the orbits.
Finally, if something did orbit an object that small, it would orbit very slowly. Osiris-Rex takes 62 hours to orbit Bennu, even though it’s only 1 km away.
Yeah, nothing even accidentally remotely close to accurate science in any aspect of this show whatsoever.
At best, we can fanwank that the shit and dead passengers are caught in the Avenue 5’s artificial gravity field.
Also, people don’t flash freeze and shatter when exposed to the vacuum of space.
It is unlikely that there is a orbit where a space shuttle from Earth can intercept and dock with the Avenue 5 in a few hours but the Avenue 5 has no means of returning to Earth for three years.
It’s unclear why they would have several years worth of food for a planned 4 week trip.
You can’t change a spaceship’s trajectory by having all the passengers fall to one side of the ship. Same reason you can’t survive a falling elevator by jumping at the last second. Newton and all that.
Just binged this over the weekend. It did seem a little scattered, at first, like it didn’t know what it wanted to be. But I think it mostly found its footing by the eighth episode, and I think I’d like to see more.
Definitely a hard pass for anybody looking for hard science in their comedic sci-fi shows, though!
I think Gilligan’s Island rules apply here.
My sister watched in the other room. I half listened. I have no desire at all in watching any of it. It sounded awful. Just really terrible. I love Hugh Laurie, but I hate Josh Gad, so, that doesn’t help. Guess it’s a hard pass for me.