I can recall Golden Girls playing on the television as I was growing up. So presumably my parents (at least one) like it enough. And from what I recall, I at least didn’t hate it. If it was all I had at the end of the world? I’d watch.
I’m sure it was a fine show. It’s the DVD of it that is the part that I was noting. I don’t know who I could picture wanting the boxed set of the show but my sense was not Carol. Maybe Helen and yeah maybe watching thing of her.
Who has DVD boxed sets nowadays? I’m sure someone does?
Separate thread coming up!
It was a birthday present 20 years ago from a clueless older relative who thought it might appeal to two female housemates. They were obsolete long before streaming, thanks to Netflix’s original business model.
My wife was catching up on the show so I rewatched episodes 3 and 4 with her, and I caught a throw-away line in episode 3 that I missed the first time. In the flashback at the ice hotel, Carol says something about how she “could have saved 100 grand and frozen my eggs here.”
I assume it wasn’t actually a throw-away line, and the existence of eggs from an immune person will have significance at some point.
We haven’t heard if any of the Joined are planning to make babies, but if not, the entire world will die off. Meanwhile, Carol’s eggs along with contributions from Manousos would allow for a gradual repopulation of un-joined people.
Unless they are preparing for an invasion that will occur within the next 20-30 years, they will start to run low on manual labour if they don’t start a breeding program. Eliminating wars and the need for entertainment/pastimes will free up a lot of the younger population but there is still the need to feed ~7 billion people.
Golden Girls was a very popular show for a very long time. I’m sure many people own the DVDs, just because they used to like the show. I really don’t see how that is a mystery or unrealistic.
The joined can manage the population however they want. Want to get things down to 5 billion people, no problem, just limit breeding as necessary. Want to ramp up to 10 billion, shouldn’t be a problem. Absolutely no problem to move millions of people around the planet to where labor is necessary to produce food or any industrial products the joined wants.
Think communism where everyone is equal, and nobody is even more equal. From each according to their abilities and so on. Anyone physically able to do work, can do it. Similarly, any two people with the right combination of genetics that the joined want can create children.
Unless we learn something about the joined bodies having extremely short lives, I don’t think they need to be in any hurry. If they’re transmitting the virus hundreds of lightyears, I don’t think it really matters if they do a Manhattan project to create a giant telescope array, or if they take a decade or two to build everything they need.
How did the aliens that sent the signal know enough to send the code for a virus compatible with humans? I suspect we’ll never get an answer for that though.
I wonder how the hive mind that doesn’t kill anything deals with obligate carnivore pets, like cats? Making food for them kills animals, but letting them starve kills animals, too.
My head canon is that it is a self adapting virus, like the protomolecule from Expanse. The virus codes for an organelle, which produces more complicated structures, and on until it is sophisticated enough to take over the host and install bio-transcievers.
My biggest issue is that they said it was only 73 bases long, which is too short to do much of anything. For comparison, a coronavirus can have a genome of 26-32 kilobases, which only encode for 20 or so proteins.
Maybe it was much longer, and the 73 (or whatever number) was just the beginning? Or did it repeat every 73 seconds, but maybe had thousands of bases per second?
New episode dropped this evening. Kind of like a drone dropping off a package.
Easier than a drone picking up a package.
And that too. No spoilers tho!
Spoilers here:
It can’t be Soylent Green, can it? That’s too completely obvious of a reveal, every-freaking-body’s first conclusion jumped to, so it must be something else, right?
Right. But no guess.
I don’t think we need to do spoilers btw.
It took a while for what she was looking at to sink in, so I don’t think it was anything as obvious as a corpse.
The recording about needing space and the mass exodus was very funny. And Carol’s declared mission to make the Others normal “just like us” shows she’s also immune to irony.
Well, that was one diabolical cliffhanger to leave us with.
Yeah, no spoiler boxes necessary, everything is open to discuss as soon as it airs.
I think it’s human meat that she reacted to - maybe it’s butchered in a way that she didn’t understand what she was seeing at first until it hit her, to explain her reaction.
And to be honest, I don’t think that’s somehow evil or problematic at all. Taboos about cannibalism are a human cultural issue and not always logical (for example, it shouldn’t be such a horrific thing to do in a survival situation after one of your compatriots has died). A very logical hive mind trying to make the most of its resources - not only should it probably be acceptable but it should be mandatory for them to eat people who have died who were previously healthy enough to be safe to eat.
It’s not like they’re killing people to eat them – that would be wrong, of course. They just had almost a billion people die due to the change, with many of them healthy enough that there’s no health concerns about eating them. Why not turn most of them into food? To do otherwise would be to waste the resources that are available to you.
Now that I think about it a little more, it’s almost certainly human meat. The sub-plot with Carol and the coyotes reminds us that our rituals around death and bodies are very important to humans and so it’s an even bigger cultural violation for the hive mind to be consuming dead bodies. Carol fought hard to protect Helen’s remains and the coyotes were the antagonists for just wanting to do the logical thing and eat some delicious human meat.
I just don’t understand how they preserve the meat, or turn it into crystalline form, especially with all of the personnel having left Albuquerque. That meat—or whatever it was—that Carol discovered did not seem like it was safe from contamination. Def Soylent Green vibes there though.