I think the problem is you needed something related to the protomolecule. It was a major plot point in the first four seasons, so you just can’t drop it. I agree though it could’ve been better done. I would probably leave out the kid stuff and just focus on whatever Duarte was doing. That way it’s a better twist in the end when Marco is left in the lurch.
I still didn’t get what it was that Duarte was doing.
Did he know that the “dogs” would resurrect dead bodies, and was he goading the girl into taking her brother out to the forest?
That whole conversation he had at the funeral (viewing, wake?) seemed entirely inappropriate to have with a kid while her brother lays dead in front of them. I assumed it was not just idle chitchat, and actually had a point to it. I just didn’t really get what that point was.
It seemed to me that Duarte was building some sort of weapon. I don’t think he even knew about what the kids were doing. I think that was the problem with the Laconia story. It seemed to be two separate plots that had nothing to do with each other. (Haven’t got that far in the books).
The problem is that the means of death is something that sounds profound in print but is utterly lost in translation to a visual medium. In the books, whenever anyone “feels” being inside a gate they experience slowed perception and suddenly see details of everything down to the atomic level, then they are eaten. The destruction of the Barkeith at the end of book 5 is described like this:
Keller fell apart. No, that wasn’t right. Keller was where she had been, sitting as she had been sitting. But she was a cloud now. All of them were clouds. Sauveterre held up his hands. He could see them so perfectly: the ridges of his fingertips, the spaces between the molecules, the swirl and flow of his blood beneath them. He could see the molecules in the air – nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide all bouncing madly against each other, obscuring some more profound space between them. A vacuum that penetrated them all.
I’m having a stroke, he thought. And then, No. Something else is wrong.“Kill the drive!” he shouted. “Turn about!” And the waves of his words passed through the visible but invisible air in an expanding sphere, bouncing against the walls, shuddering where they intersected with the cries of fear and a blaring Klaxon. It was beautiful. The cloud that was Mister Keller moved her hands and miraculously didn’t slip through the vast emptiness of her control deck.
He saw the sound coming in the rush of molecules before it reached him and he heard the words. “What’s going on? What’s happening?”
He couldn’t see the image on the screens to know if the stars were there. All he could sense were atoms and photons of the thing itself, not the pattern they made. Someone was screaming. Then someone else.
He turned and saw something move. Something else, not another cloud like himself, like the others, like matter. Something solid but obscured by the emptiness of material like a shape in the fog. Many shapes, neither light nor dark, but some other thing, some third side of that coin, passing through the spaces between the spaces. Rushing toward them. Toward him.
Sauveterre did not notice his death.
The death of Inaros at the end of book 6 is described like this:
Something was wrong with his monitor. He thought at first that the image had gotten grainy, the resolution rougher, but that wasn’t right. It was the same size, only he could see the parts that made it up. He wasn’t looking at the Rocinante. He was looking at photons streaming off a sheet of electrically excited plastic. The polymer chains glowed dark and light and dark. It was like seeing a woman’s body in painting across the room and then, without warning, only the brushstrokes that made it up. Naomi was nowhere in it.
He shouted, and could sense the pressure waves going out from his throat. The clouds of molecules that made his fingers slapped against the ones that were the control pad. He meant to type that they should fire, that they should kill while the chance was still with them, but he couldn’t make out the letters in the splash of photons that spilled off his screen. There was too much detail.
Where the air began and the crash couch ended was lost. The boundary between his body and his environment blurred. He had known since he was too young to remember learning that atoms were made from more space than material, and that at the lowest levels, the things that made atoms could bounce in and out of being. He’d never seen it before. He’d never been so aware that he was a vapor of energy. A vibration in a guitar string that didn’t exist.
Something dark and sudden moved through the cloud toward him.
And in the TV show you get a freeze-frame with holes getting punched in it.
A lot of relevant detail was lost going from book to screen, and a lot more would have to be lost filming the final three books.
If you don’t expect anyone to pick up the rest of the series and don’t plan to read the books, here is a pretty good 1-page summary of things.
I agree some kind of teaser regarding the future protomolecule and Laconia was a good idea, but they spent too much of their limited time on it, and they didn’t spend that time very well. I’ve never read the books, but all that really stuck to me from the Laconia scenes were some kids and some weird alien creatures, then one of the kids turned into a zombie. If anything that made me less excited for future seasons, and those scenes had none of the impact or mystery that the protomolecule had on Eros, Ilus, and the formation of the rings.
They could have made a more effective and interesting 2-5 minute teaser at the end of episode 6, and used the rest of the time used on Laconia to give the main Belter/Inner storyline of season 6 more substance.
One thing handled really, really badly in the season: at the very end of one of the episodes (don’t remember which one) you see a weird ship pop out of some gate somewhere, and is never mentioned again. That ship was what installed the railguns on the ball thingy at the center of the ring space, and was sent by Duarte from Laconia.
Given the fact that we had pretty much seasons 2-3 already dedicated to “zombie protomolecule children”, I was also a little underwhelmed at spending all the time in season 6 just to tease something similar.
One of the worst parts of the Laconia storyline, for me, was when the little girl (Kara?) tells her parents that the dogs fixed her brother (or maybe it was the bird) and the mom says “dogs?”
Are you fucking kidding me? They don’t know about this large-scale lifeform? They don’t have a comprehensive tally of flora and fauna and they’re letting their kids run around this freaking planet unsupervised?
Are you fucking kidding me?
Right, I just thought that the conversation that he had with her was a bit odd, even creepy. I was trying to figure out if he was actually trying to get her to take action, as if he did know what they were doing.
They may have had a different name for them, and she was the only one that called them “dogs”.
Even with a comprehensive tally, it’s pretty irresponsible to let a kid of that age wander around unsupervised.
I suppose, since none of the animals can eat terrestrial food, maybe they weren’t worried about predation, but kids can still slip and fall, crack their head open and stuff like that.
Part of the problem is that in the books that made up most of this season, Laconia wasn’t really much of a factor. They used the Free Navy guys to get their stolen Martian fleet out of the Solar system, and then holed up in Laconia, and we didn’t see much from their point of view at all. They were mostly an off-stage mystery, “What the fuck was that all about?” kind of thing for most of the main characters. The scenes on Laconia in the show are all from a short story that doesn’t really connect to the rest of the story of these books, it only really becomes relevant in the last few books. So it’s a bit of a Frankenstein plot. Most people’s objections seem to focus on the obvious scars from stitching them together.
So book readers, do I have this right?
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The “dogs” were some kind of alien animal that can sorta resurrect things…by filling them with protomolecule? That did tie into the protomolecule story somehow?
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The good guys shot a bunch of stuff into the ring to get it up to the “max capacity” level so that anything going through would be destroyed by orange…stuff. How did they know what level is “max traffic” or whatever? How did they get it up to maximum capacity?
I have more questions than I thought when I started this post. I am kind of confused.
They took the freighter that carried in those shipping container and sent it through the ring at the same time as marco (I think they exploded the reactor for good measure), and the more mass that’s going through the ring at a time, the more likely it was going… whatever it is that happens to some people that go through the ring. I thought they explained why Marco’s ship got disintegrated very effectively, although they didn’t explain how they concluded there are “ring entities” that they could potentially awaken.
The dogs are alien maintenance machines built by the protomolecule/ring builders. Their job is to find broken machines and take them to a repair area. Sometimes, for some reason (never explained) they take non-protomolecule tech in for repair, too. Say you toss a broken radio, or a burned out toaster. They find it, take it to be repaired, bring it back working again (though not necessarily working identically to before). One broken thing that they can repair is dead animals. They come back mostly normal, other than looking a little different, no longer aging, and having a Deadpool-level healing factor making them nigh-unkillable immortals.
In one of the earlier seasons, James talks about how every time he transits a ring, he can sense the entities lurking there after his experiences on the killer planet from Season 4(?). When the ships start disappearing, they began investigating and the video showed enough for James to tie it to his entities.
That was explained a few episodes back when “science exposition lady” was on the vid phone with Naomi. She sherlocked it by looking at the known missing ships and doing some science-y stuff. And I’m not sure Naomi was 100% positive that everything they did was going to be enough. Hence the drama.
The ‘Pet Sematary’ subplot was pointless and confusing. I would have much preferred to spend that time with the likable characters, like Amos and Drummer and Avasarala. I wish the Jared Harris and David Strathairn characters hadn’t been killed off either, but perhaps they had other commitments. And they were expensive too, I bet.
The final season made sense to those who read the books. For the rest of us it was an entertaining yet baffling mess. Solid finale overall, though.
Ashford’s death was a necessary catalyst in Camina becoming who she is at the end of the series. But he was a fun damn character. “tili go tili go”
Having now seen what they did with this season, I for one would rather have had the extended hiatus begin before they made it.
When Holden and Elvi made pychic contact with them (passing through a gate / playing with an orb on Ilus)?
I read the short story yesterday and it made the point that the “dogs” first appeared the day after the Martians managed to reactivate the orbital platforms (along with other new alien fauna). So they had been dormant for billions of years and everything switched on at once, pretty much like Ilus. None of which the TV version made clear in any way whatsoever.