How, though? They have a magic beam weapon that detonates fissionable material, and the US has a pretty solid idea of where just about every major source of fissionable material is - unless the beam has a recharge timer of a long time, in which case using it indiscriminately is a monumentally stupid decision - how could a retaliatory strike be effectively launched? Even ballistic missile subs, which aren’t deployed in huge numbers like they used to be, are kept track of pretty well - and as I said, who’s hitting Sao Paolo?
Apparently the whole beam thing is an attempt to modernize the story and wasn’t in the original story anyway and wasn’t thought out all that well.
I wanted to like the story - low budget, takes place almost entirely through dialog and a few images… coming from a sci fi story… that’s the sort of thing that, if done well, can prove you can make interesting TV without just making big budget special effects. Unfortunately it just become a pretty boring story.
I never understood how no one could ever put good sci-fi on TV. There are so many good SF short stories that would be perfect to adapt to an hour long show, and yet shows that attempt this have always been pretty boring - picking the wrong stories, making the wrong changes to adapt them to screen, etc.
The timeline didn’t make sense. If he thinks it’s still 2007 and he’s 41, but lost 24 years of memory that makes it 2031, right? He said his children were what, 12 and under? Then wouldn’t they all be adults by the time of the One Minute War? She asked if she needed to show him the children, implying she was speaking of actual children. Were they his kids or grandkids?
You’re misunderstanding him. Major Judy Garland showed President Waterston the charred remains of his wife and then asked if he wanted to see the kids. In his mind, the kids are 11 and younger. If she showed him “the kids” she’d be showing him the remains of two adults. The corpses would be two and a half decades older than the children of his memory.
Ah, I see. I was thinking the one minute war took place in 2010, but in retrospect (the HMMWVs during that scene had regenerative brakes or something, indicating a bit more into the future) maybe I’m mixing it up with the date of the initial deployment of the system or something.
Even so, I don’t see a big problem with it. You can still refer to someone’s offspring as “your children” even when they’re adults.
Edit: Yeah, given that he moved into politics, and eventually to president, the one minute war must’ve taken place quite a while after I was thinking it did.
From a more critical perspective, I guess I’m not really understanding why it was so important that the President remember what he did or why there was an issue with the resources being used for his treatment or why the doctor/Major was under any time pressure. So he’s incapacitated, but the VP is there for continuity of government (for the 781 people in the bunker). There was some vague line about making him face the consequences of his actions but to what end? Were the bunker folk going to put him on trial? Impeach him? Were they just angry that he couldn’t remember while they could and just wanted him to have to suffer? And if one of these is the goal, why the time pressure? Was his term about to expire or something?
It’s ;possible, I suppose, but it seems a stretch. L. Sprague de Camp and P. Schuyler Miller’s Genus Homo seems so close to Planet of the Apes that it’s scary.
The point was that they didn’t know for sure the beam weapon set off the fissible material. The attack was probably meant as a pre-emptive point attack (and I agree that more background would have been nice.) Thus, they accidentally set off material near the sites of the attack, and the attacked nations had plenty of weapons left to retaliate. That part made sense.
In the original story, it was a standard cold war pre-emptive attack. Moved to now, I don’t really know which countries with enough weapons to cause this devastation they would have attacked.
But Otto got the biggest problem right - why is it so important? The VP might not be there, but they could (and have) defined the next in line. Clearly this president is incapable of performing the duties of the office. The original had the same problem.
Oh, and the original mentions that his kids are grown up at the time of the war.
I watched and found it to be as talky as advertised. It kept my attention, but I haven’t read the source story, so I’m not sure how faithful the teleplay was to it.
Did anyone else feel the “Mission Accomplished!” line at the end had a political feel to it?
I think I’ll still watch the other episodes, but I know I’m going to wish that they had adapted “All You Zombies –” instead of “Jerry Was A Man”
“Jerry was a Man” is probably a better ‘story’. The characters are better developed. The message is much simpler. They can produce cute CGI critters. Jerry will be interesting, the story’s meaning will mean less today (thankfully) than when RAH wrote it, but it was a story with a 20 pound sledge hammer of a message.
“All you Zombies” is still the definitive time Paradox story, but I am guessing that many viewers might not be able to follow the story and the paradox.