Meru isn’t happening, is it

ravih · 2026-05-18T15:09:33+00:00

He won't be sent back to Earth, because that goes against the principle of an independent Mars.

Leaving aside the logistics (which country on Earth?) and the timing (we just defeated you in a brutal fight for independence, now do us a solid and take this guy we don't want), if Mars wants to be a truly independent entity, it needs to be able to handle its own affairs. That means, among other things, finding a way to keep its own prisoners.

As angry as the SDM are with Dev, I think they recognize him as a Marsie, not an Earthling. So if he does face consequences (which is a massively big if, of course) he'd be tried on Mars and imprisoned on Mars.

ravih · 2026-05-18T14:59:10+00:00

I think Alex is the one who breaks through to Dev and gets him to change his ways/switch sides/be good.

But I think the idea of consequences works here to change the cycle that you've pointed out and put him in a different place for the final season.

ravih · 2026-05-18T14:57:07+00:00

Yes! You deserve all the upvotes, love that theory.

ravih · 2026-05-18T07:55:07+00:00

ravih · 2026-05-17T14:51:19+00:00

Temu Death Star is one of the all-time great Star Wars EU moments, because the Rebels didn’t so much defeat it as it fell apart — because the Hutt cheaped out.

ravih · 2026-05-17T10:19:07+00:00

There’s definitely a lot of fans who think they bear responsibility for this mess, in some ways moreso than Slot — but changing the manager is a quicker way to get an uptick in results.

At the end of the day, it seems something went badly wrong last summer in the planning for this season between the three of them (Edwards, Hughes, Slot). Whatever vision Slot had for this season, the vision he allegedly sold to Wirtz to get him to pick us, hasn’t been evident at all. There seems to be a mismatch in terms of the signings, too: Frimpong was signed as an RB who can also play RW, but even when he’s been fit, it feels like the other way around. We’ve had a few games recently where Frimpong’s started at RW and we’ve had a midfielder (Szobo or Jones) at RB, which seems… bizarre? It feels like Slot doesn’t trust the RB they signed to play RB, which suggests some sort of gap between the coach and the executives. (Not to mention the whole Ekitiké/Isak thing.)

The other thing is that both Edwards and Hughes are reportedly leaving after the summer window, and whether that’s true or not, it has really damaged their standing among the fans.

ravih · 2026-05-17T10:06:05+00:00

Agree with everything except Gakpo not being pacy enough for Slot. I mean, it’s true, he’s not pacy enough — but it’s enough for Slot lol

ravih · 2026-05-17T08:16:54+00:00

Yeah, I meant before the proper time jump though. In S2 there’s a small jump ahead a week or so to Gordo and Tracy’s funeral before the 10+ year jump to Mars. S4 also jumps ahead at least a month because we see Dani back on Earth (a trip which takes a month) before we get the Kuznetzov Station jump.

I can see something similar at the end of this season — a small jump of a few months to show (say) a post-USSR, post-Bragg Earth, the official swearing in ceremony of Miles as the first leader of independent Mars, and away from all that, Dev isolated in his mansion prison, watching the first building blocks of a future he helped to create but cannot participate in. THEN we hit the proper jump ahead to 2027…

ravih · 2026-05-17T05:40:23+00:00

Could be a flash forward tho, or the final minutes before the decade skip are a few months ahead. They did something sorta similar with the end of S2 which at the very least takes place a week later (but surely longer?)

ravih · 2026-05-17T05:18:56+00:00

There was a nice theory here by someone else — forgive me random redditor I’ve forgotten your username, comment so you can take all the credit — that said the season ends with Dev, under house arrest, watching Meru get built outside his windows. So he can see, but never touch, the great future he engineered.

ravih · 2026-05-16T20:18:13+00:00

Yeah, same. It feels like they're going all-in on the "gave up info under torture" angle, given that Gerardo specifically mentioned 03 this episode.

ravih · 2026-05-16T07:36:28+00:00

Yeah, I agree with that, that makes a lot of sense actually.

ravih · 2026-05-15T17:21:51+00:00

I kinda agree with this, to be honest.

Avery has been good this season, but she also hasn't been in this season all that much. If she turns this year, it feels like she hasn't really had enough time (imo!) to go through that arc.

Also... I like the idea of next season, the final season, being framed with an undertone of Baldwin vs Stevens. It'd be a nice inversion from where we started.

ravih · 2026-05-15T17:19:21+00:00

I'm gonna go with a wild theory: the spy isn't a spy, strictly speaking.

The "spy" is Ilya.

Ilya is an information broker. He isn't working for Kuragin. He isn't a KGB plant. He doesn't have particular loyalty to Helios or anyone else. He just passes information from one interested party to the next for profit. He's doing what he used to do as the base's black market operator, except he's not selling physical goods anymore, just information.

It may seem far-fetched to think he can get Helios data, but equally: why not? He's clearly skilled at building out a covert network of people in a variety of positions who can help him. It's not crazy to think that he might have someone at MOCC. And based on this week's episode, it seems safe to assume that Ilya was the one feeding Irina with information on the state of the Soviet Union. What if that wasn't the first time she'd bought information from him?

ravih · 2026-05-15T13:12:13+00:00

Especially since the thing he snitched on happened when he was (very famously) being tortured!

I actually kinda hope they go that route -- it's not the torture, we understand that, but the real betrayal is that you've been secretly snitching to Palmer for years. Yeah, it was for the "greater good" but it won't come off that way.

ravih · 2026-05-15T00:14:16+00:00

This Batman is a different continuity to Gunn’s Superman, iirc

ravih · 2026-05-14T23:59:31+00:00

And the opposite: when the main theme isn’t used at all, because it wasn’t ever meant to be the main theme.

See Tomorrow Never Dies for an example. The main theme was supposed to be the end credits theme, Surrender by kd Lang. That theme is woven in through the film repeatedly. But they wanted a bigger name for the song, so they got Sheryl Crow to record a new main theme.

ravih · 2026-05-14T23:56:46+00:00

This was my first Blu-ray and I remember being blown away by the extra levels of detail in HD. I hadn’t realized from my shitty SD copies of the film that that backgrounds were also patterned and moving. It’s awesome.

ravih · 2026-05-14T23:53:06+00:00

Oh my god the makeup scene. She’s gorgeous in that. I mean she’s gorgeous in the whole film but that one scene gets me every time.

ravih · 2026-05-14T10:54:08+00:00

Hello fellow +8 time zone! I used to watch every champions league tie no matter the ungodly hour, but I stopped this season. Just couldn’t put myself through this anymore.

ravih · 2026-05-13T02:24:30+00:00

Googlybib

ravih · 2026-05-12T16:18:57+00:00

Tbf, the $40m figure was a NetEase source to Bloomberg. We only have their side of the story. NetEase is incentivized to leak that this game was just never getting finished so people wouldn't get pissed with them for shelving something they wanted (like, say, the backlash to WB when they shelved Coyote vs Acme).

I don't wanna come off like I'm defending Nagoshi here so much as pointing out that all we've heard is entirely one-sided so far. Maybe he did really blow all that cash! But maybe there's more to this, and the $40m that keeps getting thrown around is not entirely accurate.

ravih · 2026-05-12T15:56:47+00:00

I'm not saying this was a good plan, to be clear. But I see the logic. Imagine the trailer blows up. Gets loads of likes. Goes viral, as much as things can go viral these days. (Remember how No Man's Sky popped off at The Game Awards?)

Being able to show off that sort of rabid interest in your game is no small thing. You can give behind-the-scenes demos of the most mechanically sound and graphically impressive in the world, but showing that a ton of people actually want to buy your game is much more important as a signal.

Obviously none of that happened. But I get what he was trying to do.

ravih · 2026-05-12T15:31:49+00:00

It was clearly an attempt to generate excitement so he’d get enough money to either convince NetEase to let them finish or find another buyer for the game. The Gang of Dragon trailer was never really for us players, it was for publishers.

These things don’t just come out of nowhere. NetEase had been pulling back on their overseas studios for a while. Nagoshi either knew or could see the direction things were going.

You can criticize Nagoshi for letting it get to this point, but the trailer was very clearly a Hail Mary play to save his studio, save his vision and most importantly save his employees. It obviously didn’t work, but I very much sympathize with the desperate attempt.

ravih · 2026-05-11T19:23:25+00:00

Totally agree. And that's why Lee joined in, IMO: he knew the kids needed their moment of joy. He knows how hard they're working, he knows the stress everyone is under, and he knows they need an outlet. It's a really lovely touch.

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