Latest season of For All Mankind just sorta kept on the trajectory the show’s been on since season 3, adding more and more soap opera bullshit, and less and less alt history stuff.
I appreciated the attempt at a company town/exploited labor/unionizing storyline, it’s just like, shit, I wish it wasn’t so fucking boring and cheaply dramatic. Also just amazed we’ve gotten this far in the show and they can’t be bothered to explore the russian side of things in any meaningful way but “they’re always scheming”.
All that said, Krys Marshall continues to carry this show on her back like Hera herself.
not watched the finale yet, but i think this season has been far better than season 3.
i think the show works at it’s best when it’s establishing what the expansion into space means and looks like in practice. it doesn’t hit anywhere near the heights of s2 for me in that regard, but i’ve enjoyed what they’ve done this time.
After all that stuff about it being too much for me, I took a sick day yesterday and watched 4 episodes of The Curse in one day. I’m up through 7 now. It continues to be harrowing, but I’ve sort of gotten acclimated to it now. Great show! It’s the closest TV show I’ve seen to Twin Peaks The Return, with its dissociative tone, the way it plays with structure and attention/inattention, and the unrelenting doomed, ominous feeling that pervades even mundane moments.
Fargo Season 5 is almost done. It’s doing some very Fargo things, but our heroine has been so thoroughly and uncomfortably abused and the lead villain is such an irredeemable prick – a violent, misogynistic, conservative libertarian authority figure – it’s hard to imagine they’re heading toward anything less than total catharsis this time.
Thinking back on S3, S4 is definitely a big improvement in terms of the meat of the story, which is the overall socipolitical situation of that world. The notion that if there is no profit to be made on Mars, we would abandon it, is very accurate, and Goldilocks is a pretty plausible excuse for what would compel mankind to continue exploration: Getting several trillion dollars worth of rare metals.
That the workers involved are nickle-and-dimed into middling pay is 100% also what will happen, since they’re so remote.
I mostly just found it to be kind of a chore to watch. Without the big engineering feats to balance out the dry politicking or the drama on the base, I dunno, this would’ve really benefitted from more time spent with Kelly Baldwin’s team, looking for life in the Korolev crafter.
I remember having similar issues with Westworld as it went on. It was interesting and all, but without that less-dire plotline in the wild west verse, it was just work to watch.
Suppose this might just be due to the nature of the show leaving the exploration phase of space and now moving into the more mundane day-to-day of extracting profit.
this is my big problem with virtually all Apple TV shows, I can’t count how many I’ve abandoned after like, seven episodes, some embarrassing number to quit after, because they make the absolute weirdest narrative/scope choices that make them very difficult for me to care about. something about how they establish “worldbuilding” vs “scenery chewing” is all wrong
A lot of decisions made for the sake of some bit of world-building or one-off idea that ultimately serve as a distraction from the main story, yeah. I recently finished Foundation season 2, another Apple TV show, and god, so much of this. Please focus, show.
I was talking to a friend about For All Mankind and they called it Space West Wing, full of limp shitlib ideas with no commitment one way or the other.
It gets into spoiler territory so I’ll put it here:
For All Mankind S4 Spoilers
I thought this season just continued the downward trajectory of the show. It has driven me insane since season 2-- the Soviets are the villains who are horrible and scheming and untrustworthy even though it’s always the US doing the bad shit. Remember how they killed a bunch of cosmonauts on the moon? Who cares!
This season has been even worse with the Scheming Russians and the Backwards North Koreans
The politics of the show are so heavily reliant on a shitlib worldview
The Good Business Guy’s first act on Mars is doing a bit of strikebreaking but FOR THE RIGHT REASONS.
These Mars laborers who are literally indentured servants of the company, they go on strike, but that strike is going to hurt the profitability of the Mars Colony! We better get the Business Guy in there to make sure there is profit in Mars and the only way to do that is to get people to scab - but get this, the scabs and the CEO are the good guys!!
They’ve had so many opportunities to make interesting changes to their obvious outlook or stupid in-show politics and just ignored them. Why doesn’t NASA have a reckoning with their approach to Roscosmos after the Space Murder? Why not use the NASA bombing as an opportunity to have Roscosmos like, offer Mission Control assistance as allies and make them less cartoonishly villainous? Why does NASA refuse to help them when yet another cosmonaut dies on Mars? Why is the US still roughly in charge of the Mars base after they let a drug addled idiot child kill a bunch of people up there?
No matter how evil NASA and SpaceCorp get, the USSR still has to suck at their teat because the Russians can’t actually Do Space without using espionage to get American stuff and NASA can’t compete with SpaceCorp because they’re willing to Take Chances
I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I dumped Silo 3/4 of the way through the season but this is exactly it. Both too much and not enough to care about.
was just reading through the thread after having it muted for the last week until i could catch up and was gonna say “wait until you see the ending” but i guess everyone else has caught up too
and well well well look what other show it invokes explicitly in the first ten seconds of the finale
Seconded, and it also gets a pretty good ensemble cast for that! therefore also from my side (as someone who watches too many K-shows and starts to get picky) highly recommended.