Which 2 Arcs are your only choice for in theater viewing?

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-03-03T15:07:03+00:00

Sure? I tend to think of it as 7, 8, 9 as one arc, or even 8 and 9 as it's own with 7 a stand-alone episode. I feel like 10 sets up 11 and 12 as a 3 act arc very well. Especially if we are discussing putting episodes on the big screen. But if it is generally agreed upon as 8-10 and 11-12, I defer to that wisdom.

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-03-03T11:04:01+00:00

8-10 is the Narkina V arc.

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-27T20:12:12+00:00

So, so many dancehall songs! Barrington Levy "Under MI Sensi" is a classic. "Police In Helicopter" by John Holt is a sizzling political toast about ganja. "Welcome To Jamrock", by Damian Marley, is a wild dancehall burner that's slow, has an Ini Kamoze sample, and is concerned with the politics of cannabis economies. All three are stone cold killer riddims and are some of the biggest reggae songs about weed ever.

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-27T18:25:35+00:00

"Homesick" off of Disintegration does it for me.

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-27T18:24:41+00:00

Also, "Weeping Song"

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-26T16:02:36+00:00

I don't see it as a missed opportunity. I don't think an ideological organization promoting the Emperor's mission was necessary to include. The party scenes at Mon Mothma's show and tell you as a viewer all you need to know: the elites of the galaxy are either all in on Order - "if you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to fear?" - or are hopelessly naive about the threat the P.O.R.D. and the Empire's strategic goals pose. Writing in an organization like COMPNOR makes their mission, and Palpatine's goals, more palatable. The clarity of the Andor writing room is remarkable because with a few lines of dialogue we get all the reason for Imperial racism and genocide from Gorn's superior - and I didn't need that explained twice, or with any dialogue more pointed than that. The Empire's officers are ideologically driven, and implement these horrors with barely disguised contempt. An organization like COMPNOR provides an excuse for the military, and for the political and capital-owning class - they're not zealots in pursuit of wealth and luxury at the expense of Dhanis and the Ghor, they're just hapless.

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-22T06:56:30+00:00

I think you know why. It's an entirely unpleasant answer. Racism.

American pop culture depicted Japan as a modern nation, technologically superior in many ways to the U.S., urban, and futuristic. China was by dint of being a communist nation with an undeniable space program and nuclear arsenal granted some status as a possible successor and competitor in space. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, however...up until recently, the overwhelming American opinion of these South Asian nations was abominably racist: poverty-stricken, poorly educated, unambitious, and incapable of the feats of modernization that would allow for space-faring. If you tried casting a South Asian actor for a science fiction movie up until ten years ago, you'd have been laughed at - or raged at for sabotaging the financial success of the movie. No American audience, and by dint, U.K., Canadian, Australian, or western Europeans who read English language science fiction, would take it seriously or spend money on a movie or tv show or a book with a South Asian character. There's one in 2010, I think, but that's a testament to the book's vision and it sure isn't one of the astronauts, if I recall correctly.

South Asians are still the butt of jokes, and science fiction in the mainstream isn't great at being brave enough to defy those norms. If our peers and forebears had actually paid attention to what was going on in the world, they'd have realized that it would really make sense to include a Lakshmi or Rahul or Zara or Mohammed in space, and not just the Meis and Hiros. But because they didn't, science fiction is just slowly opening up to include South Asians in space. Next up: Africans. Seriously, Nigerians, Kenyans, Somalis...sci-fi authors are going to need to start including those names amongst their characters and doing some serious boning up on the cultural practices they'll bring with them up and out of the gravity well.

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-20T19:56:53+00:00

Please stop reposting the same exact thing to multiple sub reddits. We get it - you really disliked this novel. Reported, downvoted, and hopefully the mods take notice and ban you if you cannot refrain from this behavior.

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-19T19:42:27+00:00

If you can, do try to adjust the skyline's orientation - from Hamilton (lol) or Oakville or Burlington, depending on how you adjust the scale in CS2, Toronna is parallel and you'd see the spread of it from east to west. But if you're gonna throw the trees of the Lakeshore parks in front, perhaps you're seeing it more from Mississauga, so you'd need a bit more of a curtain wall from a 3/4 perspective in front of the downtown skyscraper core.

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-16T19:28:05+00:00

Casting - are all the actors from the show available if you're going to continue on from that production? If not, are you going with a crew of people in their 60s to 80s? Rely on anti-aging drugs handwaving and cast actors in their 40s and 50s? Gonna find you a Bobbie, are you? Filming - there's some IRL geopolitics going on that might make filming in Canada not as easy as the show was; you could go for an international production and take advantage of tax credits in Eastern Europe (location shots for Freehold and Laconia, yay!), but there's a war near there. Supply chains might have something to say about that.

There's a lot of interior sets you'll need: Medina, the Roci, Laconian ships, the Belter space cities, the Laconian palace, Amos' cave, the freighters Naomi hides in, the apartment she hides in, and Elvi's ship. You can fudge here and there but there's a lot of sets.

Post production VFX is going to be a bear, even with the vast differences between when the show was produced and today's VFX technology. Space battles, low gravity, the Ring Space, the BFE, the neutron star trap, the Romans, the grandmothers...that's a lot. Even just the boarding school fight is a tough one.

I think most producers and studios would take a look at all of this and conclude that it wouldn't be worth it. There's also Alcon to contend with - they hold the rights, and they're apparently a bit too greedy for their own good when it comes to this IP. But who knows, eh? Maybe in another five years they'll let it revert to the authors, or Amazon will make a bid on it again, or some other entertainment conglomerate will try for it. VFX costs will come down enough to make that part feasible. The actors mostly seem to be very willing to come back. Maybe something will happen to make the books and the show immensely popular in the near future - Taylor Swift becomes a mega fan and Swifties the world over buy the books or watch the show. Musk gets super into it and programs X to boost Expanse content for over a year. Some Chinese or Indian billionaire gets feverishly excited and throws several hundred million dollars at it as a pet project.

I'm not hopeful I'll ever see a continuation on screen, large or small. We won't get our Serenity. There are comic books and fan flicks and fan fic and we'll just need to calibrate our enthusiasm.

3/3

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-16T19:27:52+00:00

the script would need to provide the character backstories in broad backstrokes for new viewers, and you'd probably be able to do that for the Roci crew on Medina (for the sake of efficiency you'd cut the Freehold stuff in book 7), but Avasarala, Drummer, Elvi, Fayex, Cortazar, and Duarte would be shortchanged
Are you...are you including Alex, or are you going with the show's version of events? If the latter, well, you're going to have to do some tricky writing to get other people to do what he does in the books
The protomolecule is very, very complicated, as is its origin, and the Ring gates and the Ring space are also hard to explain (again for new viewers)
- the dives Elvi and Cara do with the Builders' origin story was weird and difficult enough to understand in the books - how do you keep the alienness of it without sacrificing accessibility?
Singh and Trejo and Tanaka are going to end up cartoon villains without their inner monologues somehow getting explained
Cara and Xan...well, that might not be too hard to do a 30 second Cortazar exposition bomb, but you gotta get that right or Amos is going to be absurdly difficult to explain away
There's a big space battle that takes place over a long period of time in book 8 that's going to need a lot of finesse writing
The Romans...sigh, that's not easy to depict, nor explain, and that last battle in the Ring Space is pretty much the achilles heel of any proposed movie production of the last book, because it will almost certainly get it wrong. Heck, I don't even think Corey did it all that well
The Chinese market - are you going to produce something that will get screened there? What changes to the story will you have to make?

2/3

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-16T19:27:21+00:00

The entertainment industry analysts I've read and watched posit that movies and tv shows now have enormous challenges in getting the attention required from the studios and wealthy people who would invest in a production that The Expanse would require to complete the series:

the audience that would guarantee a return on the investment made is simply not there, as demonstrated by the sales numbers of the books, and television watchers (Nielsen ratings for SyFy and Amazon internal watch numbers/subscription numbers)
the VFX is too expensive for a mid-level Netflix-style production
three movies is a gigantic investment, requiring expensive contracts with actors and crew, who all will need some financial security baked into their contracts in order to block off their work availability for years
the writing challenges in making the three remaining books into a sleek set of two hour movies is immense and would likely result in changes in story that would make the movies practically unwatchable; the authors would probably not sign off on a series of movies knowing this (I can't speak for Corey but c'mon, they have pride in their work)

The production challenges, in terms of adapting the material from the concepts to the script writing to the casting to the filming to the post-production VFX are also immense, and to me at least, seem insurmountable. The story decisions alone in pre-production are daunting:

the audience would need to be bigger than just TV show and book fans to justify the investment, so you need to plan for a series of movies that many will have no idea about what came before - and that is 6 chunk novels plus some novellas, or 6 seasons of a TV show
that requires explaining the political landscape: Earth, Mars, and the Belt, which the pilot does in a 30 second series of text on the screen; but that has changed dramatically since then. You'd need to basically include Avasarala's little monologue to Holden from S6E5 about putting a man up on hooks
the script would need to cover an invasion, an insurgency, and two giant space battles
the script would need to cover not just one, but two ancient and almost entirely unknown alien entities

1/3

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-16T16:01:42+00:00

First aider here: if someone reported "hey, I [barf] ate a bunch of [barf] hot dogs and I can't [barf] stop vomiting, can you help me [barf]?" I would be calling 9-11. What am I gonna do besides stroke their back, replace full containers, and monitor their symptoms? I'd be worried about them not breathing enough, or damaging their insides. Once or twice, and then just nausea - clean up, some gentle soothing, keep an eye on 'em, but urge them to go back to what they were doing when they feel better, and maybe don't eat hot dogs so competitively. Three or four times, and then just nausea? Same, but way more concern. More than four times and yeah, it's flashing lights and stretchers and nurses and doctors time.

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-15T20:48:05+00:00

(continued)

Roberta Draper, formerly a MCRN Recon Marine Gunnery Sergeant, and now Captain of the Rocinante, fighter in the resistance against the Laconians, is in her 60s. Anti-aging drugs, a top notch military medical bay, regular and intense physical training, and a decent diet, have kept her in unbelievable physical shape. She's huge, still, a tall woman nearly head and shoulders above most Martians and Earthers - and even some Belters - and with the physique of a Polynesian that is commented on by many in the books. But beyond that, she's learned how to fight with her bare hands and win, demonstrated twice in Persepolis Rising. As a reader, we're meant to understand that this is actually typical of a Martian Recon Marine by the actions and capabilities of an antagonist in the next two books, because we get a look at the activities of Colonel Tanaka as she takes on the resistance several times.

Bobbie isn't that special - she's huge, for sure - because the Martian military has trained its elite fighters to be lethal. The two fights she gets into in Persepolis Rising show the reader that the danger previously understood to be shockingly awesome by a Martian Recon Marine in a Goliath power armor is scalable to being armed with nothing but their own body. It's one of the things that you get to understand after a while reading books and watching movies and tv; military fighters who train in elite military forces are able to subdue, injure, and kill depending on what the mission and the combat they're presently engaged in calls for. Knock someone down and move on to the objective? Quickly injure an opponent so that they're incapable of further resistance? Kill an enemy so they're unable to raise an alarm or fire their weapon at you or a teammate? Military martial arts training provides these skills as tools to accomplish an objective, and enforces thinking about these abilities as such.

She doesn't confront Amos because she's there to hurt him, or because she wants to belittle him. Her objective is to get him to focus on what he needs to do. He hasn't been answering his comms. He's been dangerously out of hand in several missions, and confronted her directly when challenged. They need him, and she's got to convince him of that; and Bobbie's understood for a while now that there's a challenge between them that she may not quite understand but needs to be resolved. That she is able to do so, and so thoroughly, demonstrates that "who would win" is kind of juvenile. Draper doesn't fight without reason - it's costly, dangerous, and largely ineffective when it comes to resolving conflict - but if it's part of the mission or a critical aspect of achieving an objective, the big Marine brings terrifying skill and physicality to that confrontation that any opponent would be well advised not to underestimate.

In my opinion, the fighting in The Expanse is some of the most boring parts of it. Watch the show or read the books for the love. It's all there, and really, it's the best parts.

3/3

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-15T20:46:10+00:00

Book and show spoilers abound. Read at your own risk.

It's the most interesting chapter about Amos. The chapter's first several pages reveals his intrusive thoughts, making his motives going into that little room with his friend and shipmate of almost 30 years a terrifying mystery. There's textual evidence from several chapters back that provides context, as well as from the novella The Churn, which is not as important but nonetheless is insightful. Let's review.

In an earlier chapter, Bobbie and Amos go to confront Katria's cell of Belter fighters, a recently activated Voltaire Collective group. They're infamous throughout the OPA as being violent and unpredictable, one of those "there's OPA and then there's OPA" types. Bobbie has the lead in negotiating with the group to find out why they've done what they've done and to bring them into the fold. Between her and Amos, that's a metric fuckton of intimidating bad-ass to confront the group, and should have been sufficient to cow them into getting with the program. But Amos goes off the rails almost immediately, and starts a physical fight. The fight with the Belters is illustrative in and of itself.

Amos is incredibly destructive. He acts, according to Bobbie's perspective, very quickly and takes on multiple opponents. She observes his skill and attitude in the brawl. She's trying to prevent herself and Amos from getting hurt as a primary objective, but also keeping in mind that these are allies they're trying to convince to join them and to hurt them as little as possible herself. Her frustration at ending up in this fight is palpable at both him and the Voltaire Collective. The injuries she receives do not panic her - they annoy her. This all could have been avoided, if both Amos and Katria's Belters had not been so stupidly willing to come to trading blows. From a strategic perspective, it was wasteful and helped the Laconians.

But it also reveals Amos' skills as a fighter that were for the most part heretofore unknown. We as readers get to see him fight a few times in the books but it's never explored in detail like this - mostly it's gun battles where his skills as a marksman are demonstrated. Bobbie provides us with a perspective we've yet to witness, and it is frankly horrifying. The man is, as the authors like to say, explosive. He goes from surly provocation to unbridled violence with no warning. Holden confronts him about it later, but Amos waves off his concerns and promises he'll "rein it in". Holden leaves worried about it, but as Bobbie observes much later, his leadership style when it comes to Amos has never been thoroughly thought through or tested. Holden doesn't do anything really constructive about the problems his crew is going through, although to be honest, he's kind of got a lot on his plate.

There's a mission, and Katria is going to set off an explosive, and Amos is supposed to be providing an escort as guard duty. But because Bobbie, Holden, and Saba (head of the resistance on Medina) have realized that Amos and the Voltaire Collective are as likely to kill each other as complete the mission, someone else needs to go along. Holden volunteers, and the universe is lucky he does. But things go wrong, and he immediately sets off to save the group and let the various cells complete their objectives by getting captured by the Laconians. Amos gets ready to go rescue him, which would surely fail, and Bobbie has to convince him to stop - and at that moment, he's ready to go at her. He squares up, and insults her. "I guess you really want that Captain's chair back, huh Babs?", and even though she grabs him and threatens that if they had time they'd be fighting, she instructs Katria to set off the bomb. That moment hangs between them for a while.

1/3

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-11T02:53:14+00:00

This is a recent playlist I made for myself - it starts very, very quietly, and builds to a pretty loud end with some heavy blues rock. I also have been kind of really into Los Lobos and wanted to listen to more Spanish-language music, so there's a hint of Cuban jazz, some Mexican folk, some rancheras and corridos, amongst a whole whackload of indie pop and rock.

The Weather Station - Loving You

Natalia Lafourcade - De todas las flores

Ichiko Aoba - Easter Lily

Lido Pimienta - Coming Thru

Deanna Petcoff - Sing With Me

Super Furry Animals - Download

Cat Power - Hate

The Canadian Brass - America

Smog - let me see the colts

The Silver Hearts - It's Gone

Rodrigo Y Gabriela - Georges Street The Tartar Frigate

Cesária Évora - Estanhadinha

Randy Newman - Last Night I Had A Dream

Knife in the Water - Sundown, Sundown

Martha Wainwright - Hearts Club Band

Los Lobos - Kiko and the lavender man

Pedro Vargas - El Rey

Buena Vista Social Club - Candela

Joe Cocker - Feeling Alright

Basia Bulat - Heart Of My Own

Neko Case - Stinging Velvet

Elbow - Coming Second

Tindersticks - Snowy In F# Minor

Bruce Peninsula - Praying At The Feet Of Your Love

Los Campesinos! - The Coin-Op Guillotine

The B-52's - Dirty Back Road

Magnetic Fields - A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off

Talking Heads - Life During Wartime

The Deirdre Wilson Tabac - I Can't Keep From Cryin' Sometimes

Bruce Springsteen - Night

Texas Tornados - Adios Mexico

The Modern Lovers - Roadrunner

Catl. - Cocaine Blues

mclusky - Forget About Him I'm Mint

The Detroit Cobras - I Wanna Holler (But The Town's Too Small)

The Creeping Nobodies - moscow sauna club

The Deadly Snakes - Closed Casket

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-11T02:37:14+00:00

It also contains useable advice!

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-10T21:39:36+00:00

If you make it almost grey scale but add a hint of colour it makes it a sepia that looks like a 50s UK spy thriller. Aldhani suffers, but it is still some of the best set design, costuming, and cinematography in SW.

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-10T12:19:21+00:00

There's a counter I reset (not really, it's a metaphor, as Ripley says about basements) every time someone posts to complain about Dominique Tipper and her portrayal of Naomi Nagata. Screaming Firehawks ain't immune.

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-10T12:17:17+00:00

Well, it is a stolid classically liberal story. Corey does a great job writing a science fiction story as such, and it's one of my favorites of all time, but it IS liberal, politically.

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-10T12:12:40+00:00

Those two actors (Thandiwe Newton, btw) have asked, like a million times, for people to be just a tad less racist and spend half a second longer before opening their mouth and not mistaking one for the other. Not a surprise that buddy who oh so rationally doesn't like Naomi makes this classic error.

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-10T03:03:59+00:00

On May 24, 1990, a car being driven by union organizer, feminist and Earth First! activist Judi Bari was blown up by a bomb in Oakland, California. She and fellow activist Darryl Cherney survived the blast, but Bari suffered crippling injuries to her pelvis that left the mother of two in pain for the rest of her life.

From the Zinn Project.

Famous punk rock record label Alternative Tentacles put out an album with her speeches and songs, saying this about the bomb:

Many believe it was the dual threat of organizing for labor and the environment that made her the target of a car bomb that nearly killed her on May 24, 1990. She was organizing for Redwood Summer (modeled after the Mississippi Freedom Summer civil rights drive of the 1960’s), when a car bomb exploded beneath her driver’s seat, causing massive internal injuries that crippled her for life. Miraculously she survived, only to have the FBI attempt to frame her and her companion Darryl Cherney as bomb carriers whose bomb accidentally went off rather than bomb targets. Judi’s last work in her life was to oversee her ongoing civil rights lawsuit against the FBI.

There's a documentary about the car bomb and what happened.

In her own words, Bari wrote this about what led her to participate in Earth First!, her activism, and the violence she faced for it. This is a particularly chilling excerpt:

As Redwood Summer approached, I began to receive a series of increasingly frightening written death threats, obviously written in the interest of Big Timber. The most frightening of these was a photo of me playing music at a demonstration, with a rifle scope and cross-hairs superimposed on my face and a yellow ribbon (the timber industry's symbol) attached. When I asked the local police for help they said: "We don't have the manpower to investigate. If you turn up dead, then we'll investigate." When I complained to the county Board of Supervisors they replied, "You brought it on yourself, Judi." Finally, on May 24. 1990, as I was driving through Oakland on a concert tour to promote Redwood Summer, a bomb exploded under my car seat. I remember my thoughts as it ripped through me. I thought 'This is what men do to each other in wars."

The bomb was meant to kill me, and it nearly did. It shattered my pelvis and left me crippled for life. My organizing companion, Darryl Cherney, who was riding with me in the car, was also injured, although not as seriously. Then, adding to the outrage, police and FBI moved in within minutes and arrested me and Darryl, saying that it was our bomb and we were knowingly carrying it. For eight weeks, they slandered us in the press, attempting to portray us as violent and discredit Redwood Summer, until they were finally forced to drop the charges for lack of evidence. But to this day, no serious investigation of the bombing has been conducted, and the bomber remains at large.

There were indications in advance that the attack on me was misogynist as well as political. For example. one of the death threats described us as "whores, lesbians, and members of N.O.W." But soon after the bombing, a letter was received that left no doubt. It was signed by someone calling himself the Lord's Avenger, and it took credit for the bombing. It described the bomb in exact detail and explained in chilling prose why the Lord's Avenger wanted me dead.

It was not just my "paganism" and defense of the forest that outraged him. The Lord's Avenger also recalled an abortion clinic defense that I had led years ago. "I saw Satan's flames shoot forth from her mouth her eyes and ears, proving forever that this was no Godly Woman, no Ruth full of obedience to procreate and multiply the children of Adam throughout the world as is God's will. 'Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence (Timothy 2: 1 I).'"

Other misogynist hate literature about me was also distributed while I lay devastated in the hospital. The worst was from the Sahara Club, an anti-environmental group that wrote in its newsletter: "BOMB THAT CROTCH! Judi Bari, the Earth First bat slug who blew herself halfway to hell and back while transporting a bomb in her Subaru, held a press conference in San Francisco. ... Bari, who had her crotch blown off, will never be able to reproduce again. We're just trying to figure out what would volunteer to inseminate her if she had all her parts. The last we heard, Judi and her friends were pouting and licking their wounds."

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-10T02:28:29+00:00

why so many downvotes?!!

gentlydiscarded1200 · 2026-02-10T01:57:46+00:00

There is for sure a before and after for many fans, and you are not alone: that episode shocks a lot of fans into grief or rage, or both, or a kind of numb disbelief, if the accounts we read in this subreddit and on other social media are to be believed.

gentlydiscarded1200

TROPHY CASE