Great sci-fi TV: "The Expanse" and "Altered Carbon"

I thought it would make a change of pace to break my run of rant reviews on bad/terrible sci-fi (despite having a couple more of those in hand *cough* "Lost in Space" *cough*). These two shows were great entertainment and gave me hope of more to come!

The Expanse - Season 3:

I really wasn't very fussed about the previous season of The Expanse (be the my own fault or bad pacing or direction on their part, I'm not sure). But this one was a joy to watch, even more so than I remember of S1. So I'm actually really glad that Amazon are picking it up after SyFy cancelled it.

The first half of S3 was very compelling and rolled along so smoothly, wrapping up all the character threads and solar political tensions from S2 very satisfyingly, it was pretty much perfect. Then rebounding into a new chapter (presumably a different book of source material) for the second half.

This felt a little more rushed and rough in places, but the plot finally graduated from pure solar system politics to grander scale space opera, albeit with those 3 established factions (and characters) along for the ride. Thematic echos of Clarke's later "2001" series novels (with dead character(s) re-incarnated as tool in a mysterious alien artefact), Reynold's "Revelation Space" (in the tense run up to the encounter inside the 'station') and maybe Baxter's "Raft", at a push (modified physical limits in a pocket universe).


The budget for spaceship CGI seemed to have been augmented, looking genuinely good in places. Far ahead of the disappointingly blatantly shoestring budget of something like "Dark Matter" (padded out with much conduit crawling and parading around Canadian forests).

The biggest problem I had, spoiling the second half, was Dominique Tipper's atrocious 'Belter' accent. A fictional space-men accent is always going to have the potential for many cringes (regardless of how cerebral it's creation). but Cara Gee and David Strathairn make it stick, un-hobbled by their variations of it, even in their tense confrontations over flagship captaincy. The Naomi Nagata character switches conspicuously between the unbelievable creole and her (real life) posh London accent depending upon which ship she's on, with even more painful half-way sound while en-route between...

"WTF is going on with her accent?!"

Other than this, the ugliest plot point was the sudden declaration that their space medicine, normally quite magical, is now unable to stop injured people bleeding to death, internally, without (acceleration based) gravity. (Wound drining, clotting, or something.) Obviously a way to shoehorn the plot into taking place within the Belter's salvaged, "Babylon 5" style, Mormon 'generation ship'. I think they say it's spinning at 1G too, which would be internally inconsistent, given that (Earth) gravity was used by Chrisjen Avasarala to torture a captured Belter in the first episode of season 1.

From a technical stand point, I suppose that the relatively mild deceleration injuries are far more illogical: For whatever reasons, only the hulls of the ships are immune to inertia when the station instantaneously stops them, letting any contents not screwed down slam into walls internally. But many of the ships were travelling at 1000s of meters per second - rail gun projectile speeds! Human bodies wold be pulped and/or punch their way out through the hulls. Even if the ships were trying to fix their position exactly (relative to the gate) a tiny discrepancy would still be like getting hit by a train.


... Oh, and finally: why can Draper can be mauled by a proto-molecule zombie without any hint of contamination to her armour? While an entire UN battleship is overwhelmed by the infection from one in mere minutes...?

Altered Carbon - Season 1:

I guess I should specify the season, seeing as this Netflix show is confirmed as renewed for S2 (with new lead casting - which makes perfect sense given the plot, but is still pretty daring for big entertainment these days).

I'd not read any books by the author of the original material for these, either, so again had no expectations to be dashed. But I quite liked this show too. Overtones of Gibson's "Neuromancer" (in the stereotypical, neon city sprawls), Neal Asher's "Gridlinked" (for the first 50 pages I managed, anyway, with flying cars and persons transported between worlds, rather than whole ships) and maybe even a tinge of Rajaniemi's "Quantum Thief" (in the context of complex murder mystery).

This show followed the popular fantasy trend of "Game of Thrones" and "Westworld" of making a splash with fairly brave quantities of male and female full frontal nudity, in sexual and non-sexual contexts. Attention grabbing and titillating, for sure. But in the context of this fiction, hopefully also coaxing viewers towards broader empathy for disparate others, in seeing our bodies more as vehicles, rather than solely defining our identities.

There was sufficient intrigue, with flashbacks worked in various parts of the protagonist's former life. Although some revelations were pretty obvious episodes in advance. For example, it didn't help that "Hiro Kanagawa" was type-cast so perfectly as the police captain: it gave the game away right off the bat, for me, having already seen him play the roll of police-boss-who-turns-out-to-be-bent in "iZombie" and "Man in the High Castle" (I think?).

I find readily recognisable faces fairly distracting, and there were a fair few from various other shows here: from minor recurring Buffy parts to a couple from "Doll's House" (which is thematically similar to this show, as it happens). This includes Dichen Lachman, who played "Sierra" there, and wasn't *quite* convincing in either show, for my liking. Despite being seemingly perfect, from a racial inheritance perspective, and nudity clause perspective - I guess that didn't leave all the roll didn't leave that many casting options in the North America sci-fi acting pool...

Thankfully all the other actors in more major rolls were novel to me, and performed well. Perhaps barring the daughter, who's ass kicking fell kinda flat in the finale (perhaps more character design or direction issues...).

Character wise, the hotel AI "Poe" was the most richly interesting and sympathetic. Which brings us to the ever recurring question of: why do the AIs in this world not run the show? Especially given that this one is apparently able to access pretty much any information and training, instantly, and has been left well alone for many decades. Well, apparently the smart material, computational substrate their minds must inhabit, is super-susceptible to little remote control devices that can disintegrate them instantly...

Even more arbitrary than this is the technology of the 'cortical stacks' which hold people's soles. It doesn't really make sense that *everybody* now has them, given that most can't afford to be 'resleeved'. It also seems entirely arbitrary enough that new bodies are expensive (dystopia, I get it). More so that backups are expensive, given that the stacks are mass-produced and implanted in every poor sap.

So the stacks fail almost entirely to prevent death by natural causes, let alone homicide, with murder rampant. The murder needing only to destroy the stack, as opposed to the brain. (Quite aside from the political machinations in the plot, blocking the spinning back up of the dead on religious grounds.)

But my biggest quibble is: the ultra-super-rich dynasties are answerable to the regular police force in any way. That's not even true in our present day reality, where inequality already makes the few at the top essentially untouchable - redefining the relevant laws by buying politics, throwing money and/or lawyers at any would be legal problems. Swindling one person makes you a criminal, but swindling entire nations makes you President/Prime Minister/financier/media mogul/captain of industry/etc.