Author: Thoughts On The Dead (Page 88 of 1031)

• Space is scarier than any serial killer, real or imagined.
• Serial killers generally only murder people in one way.
• Y’got your stranglers, your stabbers, your poisoners, etc.
• Specialists.
• Space, on the other hand, is a generalist: it has a thousand different deaths for you, each more bowel-loosening than the last.
• You could suffocate, decompress, cook, freeze, or take a micrometeroid going 1% of the speed of light to the forehead; it is worse than Camden, New Jersey.
• The reason for this is simple: human beings are not supposed to be there.
• No.
• That’s not true.
• The human body is not supposed to be in space.
• Human beings go everywhere.
• It’s our nature.
• “What’s over there?”
• “I dunno, but I bet there’s stuff.”
• “I love stuff.”
• “It’s the best. Let’s go.”
• Such is humanity.
• And such is The Expanse, seasons three and four of which I plunged up my asshole over the past day or so instead of bringing joy to the world or feeding a hungry child or culling some pythons.
• (Burmese pythons have infested South Florida; they have no natural predators and ample prey, and so have flourished. The local governments have responded by organizing hunting parties. That’s right: I live in a state with a Whacking Day.)
• Anyway, you know those marathon losers?
• I watched 23 episodes of a scientifictional teevee program in two days.
• Top that…
• Uh…
• I can’t think of a famous marathon runner.
• I wanna say Haile Salassie, but I think that might be racist.
• Fuck it, I’m doing research.

• HAHA!
• SEE?
• NOT RACIST.
• I was a little off, but I mostly got it.

Excuse me.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. You can’t just drop us out of the Bullet Points like that.

I can. I did. Accept the new reality and move forward. 

I feel violated.

This is supposed to be about The Expanse. Write about the program, please.

I was getting to it. The path to Mars runs directly through Haile Gebresalassie.

That sentence has never been written before.

Yay me!

• As I was saying, The Expanse is about the spaceships in the same way the Fast & the Furious series is about the cars: not at all.
• They’re both about family.
• Sadly, The Expanse does not contain a scene in which the crew of the Rocinante gathers round a table with some Space Coronas and toasts to Fam-blee.
• That’s how Vin Diesel says “family.”
• I don’t get why that fucker’s famous.
• He’s like a troll for a shitty bridge; the Throgg’s Neck, maybe.
• The Rocinante is the good guy’s bitchin’ ride.
• Okay, The Expanse is a little bit about the spaceships.
• Y’got the blocky, truncheon-shaped Roci, which is a gunship our heroes stole (sorta) from the Martian Navy, and the Behemoth, a massive hollow drum built to generate spin gravity, and the Guy Molinari, which is named the Guy Molinari.
• If you create a fictional world in which a United Nations warship is named the Guy Molinari, then I will be interested in that fictional world.
• That’s the kind of attention to detail I prefer in my entertainment.
• And everybody zips and boings around the solar system shooting at one another and stroking out during hard braking maneuvers.
• Physics are very important in The Expanse, except when they’re not.
• At one point in season four, the magical aliens from beyond the stars literally turn the physics off.
• Oh, yes.
• Magical aliens from beyond the stars.
• They always pop up.
• And they’re completely incapable of having a normal conversation.
• Always with the inscrutable technology appearing out of nowhere, and mindgames.
• It’s always mind games with magical aliens from beyond the stars.
• NO ONE KNOWS WHAT YOU MEAN, SPACE BABY.
• Are you telling me that immortal fourth-dimensional beings can’t learn English?
• I learned English, and I’m a moron.
• Surely, they could take a course, or download that Duolingo app.
• Nope, Space Babies and dream sequences.
• Infuriating conversationalists, magical aliens from beyond the stars are.
• Anyway, the show was cancelled by SyFy Network despite a positive critical response and solid ratings after three seasons; a bunch of nerds protested and yelled, and Amazon picked the production up.
• The taxonomic name for a bunch of nerds is a “con.”
• You can tell, too.
• SO MANY EFF-WORDS.
• Space cursin’.
• The accents are delightfully all over the place.
• Pretty much everyone from Earth speaks uninflected middle American, also known as Broadcaster English, except for the Secretary-General, who has the upper-class Indian accent her spectacular saris suggest.
• And that’s where the cohesion stops.
• Mars is a mess.
• One actor’s got the thickest New Zealish accent on teevee, another’s clearly from California, a third is a black guy from Philly using his natural voice.
• One of our heroes, the pilot of the Rocinante, is from Mars, and he has a Fake Texas accent.
• Straight-up calling people “Hoss” and tipping his imaginary Stetson to ladies.
• This comes from the books, by the way.
• Apparently, the residents of Mars’ Mariner Valley are really into cowboy shit, so everyone sounds like John Wayne.
• The Belters are the best, though.
• They alternate between English and Lang Belta, which is called a creole by the dominant culture, and a language by those who speak it.
• (A creole is neither a dialect nor a pidgin. A dialect is a subspecies of a language, generally based on location, that shares a grammar with the parent tongue. A pidgin is a simplified combination of two languages, generally used for trade. A creole has vocabulary from two or more lexicologies, but its own grammatical rules.)
•  And this Belter language comes with an accent.
• More precisely, several similar but not quite identical accents.
• The delightful Jared Harris, who excels in doing ludicrous voices, chooses a mutant Cockney for his character.
• Many of the other players go with what could be called Vaguely Samoan.
• Except for these two magnificent bastards:

• She sounds like a Dragon Lady, and he sounds like a Drunken Yorkshireman, and half the time they’re not even speaking English.
• It’s like the Wookiee segments of the Star Wars Christmas Special, but with more eye makeup.
• That picture isn’t doing her mascara any favors.
• Look at this bullshit:

• What’s hotter than a Space Goth chick?
• Nothing, that’s what.
• To balance out the sexism: the dudes take their shirts off, and they are muscley beefcakes with no body hair at all.
• How, precisely, one gets swole in low gravity on a diet of protein paste and vitamin supplements is not explained.
• I haven’t even told you about the main characters yet.
• How rude of me.
• Four heroes on the Rocinante; they voyage among the stars getting into scrapes and learning lessons and enjoying friendship.
• Your traditional scientifictional character slots are filled.
• The Hotshot Pilot, who is played by an actor who looks so much look Taika Waititi that eventually I stopped correcting myself and now think of him as Taika Waititi.
• The Redemption-Seeking Brute.
• The Scotty.
• The Captain.
• And it is here, Enthusiasts, that I’m going Full Woke.
• I’m making it about race.
• The Scotty should be the Captain, but the Scotty is a black lady, and even in space, black ladies get fucked.
• All of the events of the series–events in which millions of people died–are precipitated by him walking into an obvious trap.
• Plus he’s just bad luck.
• Captain gets on a ship, ship gets blown up; Captain visits a settlement, settlement comes to life and hurls itself into Venus.
• You ‘ll never guess what Captain did when he found an impossibly ancient megastructure abandoned by extinct aliens and/or elder gods.
• Of course he touched it.
• Began fiddling with it immediately.
• Bare-handed, too.
• Jesus, man.
• At least keep your damn gloves on when you start fingering the extrasolar object.
• Scotty would’ve kept her gloves on.
• Scotty knows better, and also Scotty had just got her nails did.
• SPACE IS RACIST.
• Okay, go watch the show.
• (And the first one’s free, just like those mythical drug dealers we were warned about as children. I spent half my life looking for that guy.)

• I have the wrong type of personality for streaming services.
• There should be some sort of test before you’re allowed to sign up.
• Basic questions.
• “Have you ever eaten any amount of cookies other ‘all the cookies that were available?'”
• “Have you ever had cocaine left when you woke up?”
• That sort of thing.
• Because I watched the first season of The Expanse, slept for a while, and then immediately put the second season on and watched that, too.
• Just in case you were wondering where I’ve been.
• Usually, there are new skits and make-’em-ups and wacky hijinks every morning, but not the past couple days.
• Daddy had his teevee-watchin’ pants on.
• (Also, I decided to start referring to myself as “Daddy.” Deal with it. This is the new reality.)
• The Expanse is certainly the best scientifictional program ever made, and can even be judged favorably alongside respectable programs.
• It’s about the exact same themes as the high-toned stuff–class and power and the human goddamned condition–but folks get tossed out of airlocks so the show gets lumped in with Farscape and that kind of shit.
• I’d vote for Trump before I watched fucking Farscape.
• Or any of the Star Trek nonsense.
• Some of you love Star Trek, and that is your right as Americans, but Star Trek is about a post-scarcity society and is thus uninteresting and devoid of humanity.
• Being human means needing shit.
• You need air.
• You need water.
• You need those motherfuckers over there to leave you alone.
• First rule of the universe: everything’s hungry.
• The Expanse, like no other zippity-pew show I can remember, gets that.
• I am sure there are Enthusiasts clearing their throats in the Comment Section.
• “TotD, sci-fi novels have been dealing with deeper themes for many yea–“
• CHUH-SWHWAP
• That was the airlock opening.
• You’re floating in space now.
• Blood’s boiling, lungs exploding, skin freezing, the whole shmear.
• Simply the worst way to die.
• And you brought it on yourself.
• I hate scientifictional books: they’re all a thousand pages long with dozens of characters named Dre’x Fartbluff or the like, and there’s always 20 chapters describing engines or sex robots.
• Just tell me there’s a sex robot.
• You don’t have to list all the manufacturers of its parts, sci-fi writer.
• I’m glad you did your research, but you don’t have to share all of it.
• Or–God help us all–the power armor.
• Ever since Heinlein, we poor readers have had to sit though page after page of intricate detailing of the fucking power armor.
• I don’t wanna read about the power armor, man.
• Do I wanna see a Space Marine wearing power armor rampage through a unit of bad guys?
• Fuck, yeah.
• But ten pages on how the OS for the helmet display works?
• Shit, no.
• …
• What was I talking about?
• Right, The Expanse and why I love it so much that I’ve decided to stalk at least one of the actors.
• The basic premise: Hundred of years from now, humans have colonized everything from Earth to the moons of Saturn; there is no warp drive, but we can go a lot faster for a lot less fuel than we can now.
• Basically, a future in which we’ve solved the Rocket Equation.
• But–and here’s The Expanse‘s first sales point–the rules of physics still apply, kinda, mostly, and as much as the budget will allow.
• (Like, sometimes the characters are in zero-g and have to use their magnetized boots to walk around the ship, but their hair doesn’t float, cuz it would’ve cost a trillion dollars. Or that there are several location where gravity is less than half that of Earth’s, but nobody bops around like the moon astronauts. These are overlookable and explicable flaws.)
• When the ship is accelerating, there is g.
• When the ship is not, there is zero.
• Which is how space works.
• Gravity is another thing human beings need; I forgot to mention that.
• But we just need one.
• Precisely one g.
• Anything else will fuck up us over a long period of time, or kill us quickly.
• And The Expanse, unlike any other space-based show I can remember, gets this right.
• (Again: yes, yes, I know that the effects of gravity and inertia on the human body have long been a common topic in sci-fi novels, but I’m talking about teevee here. Usually, the spaceships can make 90 degree turns while going 18 million miles per hour and the actors will just lean slightly. In The Expanse: you accelerate too fast, you die. Stop too suddenly? Also dead. Which is how space works)
• Anyway, you got Earth, you got Mars, and you got the OPA, which stands for something.
• I am assuming that the “O” is for Organization.
• Although the “A” could be for Association or Alliance, which would rule out the “O” standing for Organization.
• Whatever, the initialism refers to Belters.
• Belters are Everyone Else.
• The large settlement on the dwarf planet Ceres, and the farmers on Ganymede, and the rockhoppers mining the asteroids in between Mars and Jupiter.
• Earth is dying, and Mars is ravenous in its need for raw materials with which to terraform their planet.
• Belters keep the Inner Planets alive.
• You’ll never guess how the Inner Planets treat them.
• The Expanse is the closest that any teevee show has got to Full Commie.
• The program is an indictment of capitalism with the occasional zap-gun fight.
• But it doesn’t hit you over the head with it, which is nice.
• In fact, The Expanse just flat-out doesn’t explain a ton of shit, and kudos to the producers for that decision.
• For example, most of the Belters have a tattoo around their neck.
• And at no point does this conversation take place:
• “I like your ink. What does it mean?”
• “It stands for my people, and harbledooblebabble.”
• And y’know why?
• Because everyone in that universe would be aware of that information.
• It would be like a private in an army movie asking another private about his necklace.
• “You mean my dog-tags? What the fuck’s wrong with you?”
• Another reason The Expanse is superior: something for everyone.
• Enjoy hard-boiled detectives with ludicrous haircuts and haunted eyes?
• That’s in here.
• Do you like diverse hotties in jumpsuits yelling at one another about attack vectors and other such foolishness?
• Also present.
• What about saris?
• Do you like saris?
• Because there is a character on The Expanse with the fanciest fucking saris you’ve ever seen.
• At least 20% of the show’s budget was spent on ethnic dresses.
• Look at this bullshit:
• 
• That woman’s name is Shohreh Agdashloo, and here’s how wonderful she is on The Expanse: I actually looked up her name out of respect.
• I will not look up her character’s name, though.
• She’s the Deputy Secretary of the UN, which is in charge of all of Earth, and she is wily and political and knows secrets and has a voice like an idling V8 motor.
• And when she has to go to Montana, she wears this:
• 
• I mean, COME ON.
• If Hillary had shown up to the first debate in that outfit, she’d be President today.
• There’s a lot of characters on the show, but no one else wears such insouciant color combinations.
• Mostly everyone else is in jumpsuits, except for Thomas Jane, who is a private eye from 1940’s Los Angeles.
• He’s looking for a lost girl.
• That’s what private eyes from 1940’s Los Angeles do.
• And it turns into this whole thing that may or may not end with a planetoid coming to life and trying to eat the solar system.
• The situation complexifies itself, y’see.
• Even the whole solar system isn’t big enough for us to get away from ourselves.