12 ms·

I'm kind of surprised how many nerdy people I know who have never watched this show. It is by far the best (maybe only?) hard sci-fi TV show ever, and almost ev

• dharmab 6y ago
  Planetes is also hard sci-fi and quite good.
  • dreamcompiler 6y ago
    Haven't heard of it. Will check it out.
  • AndrewLiptak 6y ago
    Oh, I've heard of this, but haven't checked it out before. Will add it to the list.
  • andrewflnr 6y ago
    Is that a show, now? I remember the manga.
    • patagurbon 6y ago
      It aired between 99-04
  • patagurbon 6y ago
    I concur, excellent show and much "harder" then The Expanse. Some people have an aversion to anime but it transcends that in my opinion.
    • decafninja 6y ago
      Howabout Gundam? Angsty teen/preteen protagonist trope can get annoying, but I'd classify a lot of UC Gundam as pretty "hard" SF. Granted there are some deus ex machina type elements to it (psychic newtypes, Minovsky particles, etc.).
      • dharmab 6y ago
        In a way you're right- Gundam was considered a "real robot" show in contrast to more magical shows like Ultraman. But Planetes is on a different level, with accurate depictions of orbital dynamics and spacer life.
      • Hemospectrum 6y ago
        Gundam was always about societies experiencing large-scale changes that no individual person has a handle on, and the struggles of people who try to make a difference anyway. In that sense, it's comparable to The Expanse, and the "magical" elements serve more or less the same purpose. Planetes, on the other hand, isn't much like either of these. Its subject matter is intensely personal, and even when the characters occasionally get involved in high-stakes situations, it's less to do with changes in society (which occur much more slowly) and more to do with someone turning their small-scale private difficulties into everybody else's problem. The political elements intrude for a while and disappear again, and I don't remember them nearly as well as the bits about a lost watch, or a marriage proposal. In a nutshell, if Gundam and The Expanse need magic because they're larger-than-life, Planetes has no use for it, because it's exactly-the-same-size-as-life.
• AndrewLiptak 6y ago
  What's also great here is that it's not just technically right, but it doesn't ignore the human element: we squabble, fight and make up, and that's a key part of the world they've constructed.
  • FreeKill 6y ago
    Yeah, I think it shows what humans of right now would be like in space, if we had the same technical progression, rather than imagining how we would be instead.
    • AndrewLiptak 6y ago
      Yeah. That's a key thing. I think it's the same reason why Babylon 5 has really held up.
      • metabagel 6y ago
        Babylon 5 has been fully remastered, by the way, available for purchase or on HBO Max. Just dropped last week, and it’s excellent. The previous DVD remaster was an abomination. Warner Bros spent 6 years on the new remaster. It was reportedly a labor of love by those involved.
        • em-bee 6y ago
          can you elaborate on how the remastering affects the quality? what do you see in the remastered version that you didn't see in the older version or the original?
          • majormajor 6y ago
            I haven't watched the HBO Max version yet, just seen some comparison vids and shots, but the DVD conversion handled the special effects shots very poorly. The original show was broadcast in SD 4:3 which is what the effects were rendered at. The DVD conversion went to 16:9 widescreen, since that's what the film was shot at, but then decided to get 16:9 effects shots by zooming in and cropping the already-low-SD-resolution renders. So it's now basically half resolution, and then run that through an interlaced DVD and put it on a big HDTV, and it looks awful. The effects shots also include a lot of conversations and other shots with people, since they used quite a few virtual sets. From the comparison shots I've seen of the new version, they kept everything 4:3, and instead of cropping the effects shots, did a pretty decent job upscaling them instead. So it's not HD quality like if they were rendered in HD, but at least it's not sub-broadcast-quality anymore.
• op03 6y ago
  The last 2 seasons have been really boring. Going no where really.
  • alvarlagerlof 6y ago
    Season 5 is really good so far if you ask me.
• f38zf5vdt 6y ago
  I'm not sure I'd call it hard sci-fi along the lines of Lem. The protomolecule has a deeply magical element to it, almost like the One Ring from LotR.
  • aqme28 6y ago
    It's the hard sci-fi equivalent of magical realism. Everything is "accurate" except for this one alien element.
    • herodoturtle 6y ago
      Which is a brilliantly entertaining balance imho. I love it.
    • herbstein 6y ago
      In other words, it's in the "One Big Lie"-category on Moh's Scale of Science Fiction Hardness[0]. Fair warning, it's a TVTropes thing. [0]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness
  • detritus 6y ago
    Ijon Tichy's scratching his head, wondering if he's Hard Sci-Fi - as too the Ijon Tichy from ten minutes in the future who's just popped in and started eating the pancakes he'd just finished eating.
    • f38zf5vdt 6y ago
      Thanks for the laugh, I needed that. Obviously not the entire body of his work. :)
  • Gatsky 6y ago
    Yes, in some parts it became like Game of Thrones in space, except with protomolecule soldiers instead of the white walkers.
  • dreamcompiler 6y ago
• sillyquiet 6y ago
  I don't know if I'd say the get the technical details exactly right, as there are some concessions to story-telling over physics - the (probably) impossibly efficient fusion drives, and the protomolecule is kinda magic sometimes, but it get is right enough, and way more so than any other sci-fi show I've seen.
  • dharmab 6y ago
    It's like Mass Effect. The mass effect phenomena is basically space magic, but most of the rest of the lore is realistic (aside from a few things like the quantum communicators in the third game).
    • fullstop 6y ago
      Shohreh Aghdashloo (Avasarala) was a voice actress in Mass Effect 2, so there's some additional relationships.
      • Gatsky 6y ago
        There is one scene where Avasarala comes aboard the Roccinante and is dressed in a white textured jumpsuit straight out of Mass Effect. The camera lingers slightly too long on her, it is a clear homage imo.
    • dwohnitmok 6y ago
      Eh... Mass Effect is fairly soft sci-fi and more of classic space opera. All these things happen in Mass Effect: Sounds in space, spaceships bunched way too close together, impossibly slow projectiles for space (especially the classic "blob of light/plasma thingy" traveling at what appears to be subsonic speeds), giant 18th-century infantry-style spaceship firing lines, in general heavy reliance on "spaceships as just extensions of naval warfare" trope, all alien communication neatly glossed over with universal translation, nearly universally bipedal humanoid aliens, etc. None of these are bad things! Mass Effect is simply much more similar in tradition to something like Star Wars or Star Trek than the Expanse.
  • 6y ago
• fabian2k 6y ago
  The first season is a bit slow, I only got hooked on my second try. Which is a bit odd as the first book is quite fast-paced. I wouldn't exactly call it hard sci-fi, but it at least makes an effort to keep some parts realistic, with the obvious exception of major plot elements like the protomolecule and all stuff derived from it. You can certainly nitpick many details about how gravity is handled, they make an effort to explain it without resorting to magic, but in the end simulating microgravity just isn't feasible on a TV budget.
• CodeGlitch 6y ago
  Yeah I know a few trekkies who hated The Expanse, but love ST Discovery. I watched half of season 1 of STD and had to switch it off. I've never hated a TV show so much as STD. The Expanse on the other hand is the best SciFi since Battlestar Galactica. Edit - to expand on why I hate STD so much, it's the completely unlikeable characters. I just couldn't root for a single one of them.
  • erulabs 6y ago
    STD is so eager to hit you over the head with “see how HORRIBLE society is?!?!?” The Expanse actually has its own world with its own problems that isn’t just a shallow mirror of the writers view of today. Also much less melodrama, although not none.
    • CodeGlitch 6y ago
      It seems STD is trying really hard to push certain ideaologies, especially around diversity - but it feels so "fake" as if they're trying too hard. The Expanse on the other hand has a diverse cast but it feels natural and realistic.
      • effie 6y ago
        Very fake, forced and the overall script/narrative is pathetic with some minor bright moments. STD looks to me to be more like a political bidding/propaganda piece than a science fiction TV show.
  • meowster 6y ago
    Trekkie here (more or less). I like The Orville better than Discovery. Discovery is down-right disappointing and stupid. Picard is better than Discovery, but still didn't live up to my expectations. You're probably right about Battlestar Galactica and The Expanse being the best hard sci-fi. It's hard to beat the episodes/stories in the earlier Star Trek shows. The Twilight Zone was able to pull off a faithful modern reboot, why can't Star Trek? (Someone else mentioned Planetes further down in the comments. That is also good hard sci-fi.)
• driverdan 6y ago
  Sorry but you can't call something that has sounds in space hard sci-fi. Overall they do a good job but to me no sounds in a vacuum is a key marker of hard sci-fi.
  • barrkel 6y ago
    If you pay attention, it's actually much more subtly done than that. The engine whooshing noises are more like what you'd hear on board, if you were on board. If they left those sounds out, the conveyed sensation of motion would lose a lot of its impact. But consider how the characters touch helmets in order to communicate when their radios are down, or when they want to communicate privately. Or consider Naomi's trial on board the Chetzemoka most recently. She needed to examine the ship spec plate to find out the air volume so she could calculate how many trips she could make to the unpressurized parts of the ship; she marks the number of trips on a wall, which doubles as a narrative device to demonstrate how many trips she made. Note also the way she touched her helmet to the hull in order to hear the radio broadcast while she was in the unpressurized area. Some of my favourite parts have been the battles, the way they demonstrate the harshness of space and the way the lack of gravity confounds expectations. The way the railgun punched through multiple walls of the Donnager, into open space, and the rush to patch up the holes. Or when Prax and Amos were in the cargo bay and some tools came lose, and they flew around the bay based on the ship's manouevers - or rather, tried to stay still while the ship moved around them.
    • driverdan 6y ago
      Like I said, they get a lot right and I love the show. But the engine sounds are rarely what they'd be inside. The Razorback propulsion sounds, for example, are always a rocket engine blasting by the camera.
• expanseviewr 6y ago
  > getting so many of the technical details exactly right I'm with you. It bothers me when people are given sci fi on the hard spectrum but then debate 'how hard it really is' for the purpose of defining then diminishing the value of the material; feels very self congratulatory. Everyone who praises the expanse's 'hardness' are just as aware that protomolecule is space magic. Space magic has its place but the expanse also offers a level of hardness I appreciate outside the narrative elements requiring the space magic. I think its an important discussion in any talk of scifi to point out where the lens is callibrated with regard to hardness resolution. Turns "expanse is hard scifi" debate on its head by simply changing that statement to "I like the level of scifi hardness in the expanse". My nephew was reading a book and a character in it built a metal detector out of a radio in a survival scenario. Due to my interests my nephew asked me if it was possible; if 'he could do that'. I explained that i suppose you could construct a device to detect eddy currents out of the components of a radio, but it would be so terrible and unreliable that itd fail to detect any metal in any meaningful survival sense. My nephew was satisfied with the answer, he honestly was uninterested in if it would 'work' but rather 'how probable' it was. You could tell he was inspired to learn more about the topics that subjectively could allow someone know how to do that regardless of its objective viability. So, the story could have cut ahead to after its been magically built off screen or could magically source parts from the devices without the actual necessary base components to achieve the conversion ignoring the whole radio aspect or the character could reasonably source components that "magically" works well enough to allow their knowledge to save them (the level this story choose) or the character could sit down and read through a data sheet and spend screen time soldering components to pcbs then accept they wasted all that time, and narrative space, because its an untenable goal given what they have to work with. I think there are arguments for each of these levels depending on the narrative's slated goals, and being accessible to a broader audience is an important one of these goals. I feel the further you move down that hard ladder the smaller the audience becomes and leaves less of the 'fi' element of sci fi for you to work with narratively. I love ben eater's 6502 series and find it extremely entertaining, but does anyone expect that level of detail in a sci fi television show? Is that the end goal of these hardness debates? I simply appreciate where the Expanse chooses to push that line into the esoteric, and yes even in the other direction of space magic, while still remaining accessible to a broader audience allowing people with less technical knowledge to be inspired to pursue expanding their knowledge within those fields.
• noisy_boy 6y ago
  The only reason I haven't watched is that I've read the books and am wary (perhaps unreasonably so) of being disappointed.
• Krasnol 6y ago
  I've been into Sci-Fi as long as I can remember and I watched The Expanse but found it quite dull most of the time. I continued to watch it only because "it's Sci-Fi". I feels like the actual story is quite short but is being stretched between the first and last episode with repetitive tropes. It's too bad because it does have more potential.
• matwood 6y ago
  I do like the technical details, but I fell out of watching it one episode in to season 4.
• perakojotgenije 6y ago
  It's funny that you mention that, I grew up reading Clarke's books, along with Asimov, Frederik Pohl and many others. I've also read The Expanse and by the end of the last book I hated every word of it, I just can't make myself watch the TV series. Why, you may ask? The behavior of human characters in The Expanse is... terrible. They fight each other, everybody has their own agenda, they behave irrationally. Case in point: in the second book (as far as I remember) an alien ship appears in the Solar system - clearly a hostile force. Earth and Mars send soldiers on the ship and what do they do? They start fighting each other. No, I do not want to believe that humans would behave that way. If you read Clarke's books, when facing the new and possibly dangerous things humans behave logically, calmly. You do not see human vs human conflict in Rama, Childhood's End, The Fountains of Paradise, Space odyssey, Sands of Mars or almost any other of his books. It's about exploration, human unity, positivism, and there is nothing of that kind in the Expanse. I could not find a single character in the Expanse that behaves in the way Clarke's characters would. I apologize for the harsh words but I refuse to believe that Clarke would write such an abomination. And no, it is not just the Expanse's writers, I see it everywhere nowadays, it seems that the writers nowadays need to insert human conflict so they introduce whatever irrational behavior leads to it. </end rant>
  • nerfhammer 6y ago
    the dialogue sometimes feels like it's disproportionately characters barking or hissing at each other, even if they're in a very formal or very familiar environment where that level of rudeness and overt hostility seems out of place.
  • outworlder 6y ago
    > everybody has their own agenda, they behave irrationally Just like real life? There's a difference between being irrational versus being self-centered. > No, I do not want to believe that humans would behave that way Humanity is currently facing a potential extinction level threat due to climate change and you have plenty of people fighting one another and making emotional - versus rational - arguments.
• throwawaybutwhy 6y ago
  Not sure if praise from ~~that person from Ceylon~~ Arthur C. Clarke is worth anything. We don't go around quoting Jimmy Savile, do we? Edit: replaced the circumlocution with the paedophile's name.
  • breakfastduck 6y ago
    I don't really think that's an appropriate comparison. Television / Radio personality not really the same as one of the most important film directors of all time, is it?