I was waiting for Bobby Draper to say, “Come on, you apes - you wanna live forever?” She was the only one with powered armor.
This had to be influenced by Starship Troopers, as it really captured the essence of a ‘capsule drop’. The claustrophobia, the fear watching people dropping with you getting burned out of the sky, getting buffeted around by G forces, then ejecting the shell and finally being able to see… It was almost exactly as depicted in the book.
So I just finished Persepolis Rising and I have some thoughts about how they were setting up Season 7.
Spoilers for Book 7:
I’m thinking that they were still planning to do a time jump but a MUCH shorter one. Clarissa’s med scan said she had basically 5 years left to live, but she’s still hanging in there 30 years later in the books. The bonus scenes also implied Avasarala wasn’t doing well but she’s still alive as well. But the biggest difference is how they handled Drummer. I was really confused reading Book 6 why the Drummer character was named Michio Pa and the actual Drummer was a pretty minor character. But then she becomes President in Book 7, so it makes sense to me that they would rather just keep the same character for both storylines. But it would make sense for her to be President for 30 years, so I’m thinking everything still works with maybe a 5-10 year jump instead.
I’ve just watched the season, and I’m surprised there’s no discussion about Holden’s disarming the nuke. Holden for 6 seasons has come close to being a perfect character but this decision was so overwhelmingly bad.
Every death in the last 3 episodes is Holden’s fault, because he couldn’t kill an active enemy fighter who was his girlfriend’s son. 95% chance the Free Navy would have just collapsed into factions without Inaros. Holden ends up destroying the Pelas anyway, not realising Filip is absent,
People making bad decisions is not necessarily bad plotting, but in this case the decision was so horrendously bad and out of character and nobody, (not any of the crew who find out or the narrative voice of the series itself) gives him any shit about it.
It certainly wasn’t the first time he made a decision that frustrated me as him doing the wrong thing out of a belief that he was doing the right thing.
I’m not sure it is exactly out of character for Holden, who seems to largely exist to drive the plot by making decisions that service plot complications rather than being a whole character onto himself. (I used to think that the character was flat because the actor playing him wasn’t very good but I’m come to realize that Steven Strait is a good enough actor but doesn’t really have a lot to work with.) The other characters do, in fact, give Holden shit about it; Naomi lectures him that it now makes her responsible for the subsequent deaths caused by Marcos, and it is implied that this is the reason that Amos leaves the ship to participate in the assault on the Ring Station.
The real problem is that it is just an unnecessary reason for the complication; it is supposed to show how clever Marcos is in manipulating people by knowing that Holden wouldn’t destroy the Pella with Filip on it even though Holden has previously made hard, self-sacrificial decisions. It would have been better if the Pella has been able to restart its engines or one of the other ships had come to its aid rather than having Holden be the cause of its escape, but because of the compressed timeline of the season the writers needed a quick way to put into question Holden’s fitness to command the Rocinante, and having Holden disable the torpedo let them combine two complications in one action. The same problem exists with Holden being elected President of the Transport Union and then immediately resigning to put Drummer in that role; how could have Avasarala not seen that coming?
In general, the sixth series was rushed and poorly plotted in comparison to previous series, probably in part to the pandemic filming restrictions and additional per-episode costs with so much CGI action, and also because of all the time devoted to presage the future story that the producers are obviously hoping to get someone to pick up. It was still a pretty decent ‘ending’ in comparison to most long arc shows but it does feel like with two more episodes they could have expanded the story out and given the plot more room to work out organically rather than rush to tie things up.
Also, where was this mass-energy limit of transiting the ring when they flew the Behemoth into it? How did that not possibly exceed the threshold when much smaller ships did?
The ships disappearing was caused by the beings who lived in that weird in-between space. Holden makes it clear that the human activity in the ring space had “woken them up” or some such thing, so the disappearances didn’t really start until some time later. The Behemoth and the whole fleet we saw there transited to the ring space quite early on, so probably wasn’t at risk at that point.
And even then, it appeared to be a statistical thing - some ships would disappear, others wouldn’t. It took several years of observations to conclude what sorts of transits were safe, and which were risks. I don’t think it was ever a guaranteed “Over the limit, you disappear” kind of thing, because that would be pretty easy to notice.
Yeah. Without giving too much away, in the later books there is the prospect that ships “going Dutchman” can be prevented with what amounts to air traffic control.
Hmmm…that doesn’t really make sense, either, because plenty of ships transit after the Barkeith; it ends up being kind of a convenient plot device but is never really explained enough that the main characters could dependably use it to destroy the Pella. And it is a bit of a deus ex machina solution to tie up loose ends instead of dealing with the messiness of a failed attack by the Free Navy and having to cope with a continuing insurrection. Really, the sixth series just suffered from a desire to wrap up loose ends (save for those laid to feed into the next story) in contrast to all previous series that always had open storylines. As much as people griped about the story on Ilus dominating the fourth series and how shoehorned Bobby Draper was, it was far more narratively consistent and advanced the story and worldbuilding than this series was.
That’s one thing that the show did not do a good job of, showing the passage of time. I am not actually sure if the show followed the same timeline as the books, or sped it up, but it didn’t feel like much time was passing.
“Let’s go to Neptune!” Screen wipe “Here we are arriving at Neptune!” How many months or even years were in that?
It really is a deus ex machana, in that it is something actively done by the aliens, not some quirk of physics. In the last book, it is revealed that the “slow zone” is a pocket forcibly punched into an older, more energy-dense universe and the power to run the gates, keep the pocket open, and run some other advanced tech is being drained from that universe. It is never stated if the damage being done is the equivalent of your next door neighbor cutting down those border trees you like or if it is like draning power from the sun and causing an ice age, but either way the natives of that universe do not like it. They found a way to kill all of the wormhole builder aliens by making small changes to the laws of physics of our universe, and when humans started to ramp up the damage again, they started to look for a way to kill all of us with many localized experiments. (Eventually they killed a whole solar system of colonists when they tweaked “ionic bonds to be slightly stickier”.)
I figure (plot-wise, of course, since it is fiction and never stated) the buzz had to get just so loud before they bothered to swat one individual mosquito while they were working to develop DDT.
Yeah, that’s one of the constraints in a TV show, unfortunately. The books make it clear that transit times can be months or even years, but it’s hard to show that kind of passage of time when you’re filming for a couple of months. The books just have to make it clear that the later books are 5, 10, 20 years after the first, and update character descriptions accordingly, but you can’t really age the actors by several decades. “Old person” make-up still looks fake as hell, even today.
They do a better job explaining it in the book: Basically, it works like a wave. You put enough mass through the gates and it slowly pushes it above the threshold. Then anything after that disappears. But if you wait the effect slowly dissipates until it’s clear to pass through again. So a big ship has no problem passing through even if it ends up pushing it above the threshold, it’s just the ships after that get screwed. Also, the threshold is cumulative across ALL the gates.
Finally finished it, very enjoyable.
I picked up the Aliens reference but didn’t see the other ones, nice. Someone should have asked Amos how many combat drops this was for him.
The whole laconia stuff could have been dropped for more politics and and maybe a bit more crew time. I get the want to set up a new season, but precocious kids having moments of danger , not so interesting.
I was also pretty sure Peaches was going to die. Also nice call back to when we fiest met Bobbi launching rockets out of her battle suit.
Holden’s disabling of the nuke seemed entirely in character, to me. His main character trait is doing what feels right to him, no matter the consequences to everyone else. The very first action he took in the series was some shenanigans that forced the ship he was on to respond to a distress call, even though the captain had decided it was a bad idea, and even though it might cost everyone on the crew a bonus. Over and over and over he stubbornly follows his conscience, to the exasperation of everyone around him. In this moment, his conscience told him not to murder Naomi’s son, so, fuck everything else, he disabled the nuke. Naomi’s final speech to him in the series finale lays it out beautifully.
I thought that was great. Too much of the finale, though, was rushed–especially the death of Inaros. There wasn’t nearly enough time between “Let’s kill him with math and eldritch horrors!” to the moment of his death; it felt very out-of-left-field.
This was the most frustrating moment in the series for me. It just . . . the consequences and stakes for society were just too huge for it to feel reasonable that Holden would convince himself that it wasn’t that big of a deal.
I mean, when Frodo can’t let go of the ring, the stakes are equally huge, but it’s literally magic that prevents him from acting. Holden getting to Mount Doom but refusing to throw the ring in because . . . his relationship with his girlfriend might be forever broken was wildly unsatisfying. And, it flies against the growth we’ve seen in Holden, where an increasing sense of duty to humanity leads him to make more and more un-selfish decisions.