Well here I am blasted off in space cadet mode again. Now that Season 5 has finished, I went ahead and jumped on board that next transport via Apple TV for the red planet and I'm watching For All Mankind again. Like so many of these shows these days, the vast amount of time between seasons forces me to rewatch at least the whole prior season in order to get back on track so yesterday, from about 8am to roughly 8pm, allowing for little breaks... that's what I did. A full day of binge streaming. Could I have simply watched a reviewer's Season 4 recap like Pete Peppers which would have been a good hour or so at least of clips and commentary to get me back into the groove? Not with my Shameless brain. I need the full monty.
So now it's Sunday and I'll be starting a fresh day of streaming, likely finishing the series off to the current end sometime later today. Oh, yes, the show is continuing. It's already been renewed for a sixth season, but when's that going to air? 2028? Right now, I'm in the third episode, I think, where Ed's just festered the North Korean dude away to the other Mars city (the other Mars city?... surprise!) which is like the Cold War non-aligned nations coalition. Oh, and Ed is dying of cancer, so there's that drama.
My one critique, and I'll soon see if it's corroborated by likeminded folks on Reddit, is that Season 4 and, so far, this season, are great in character development and drama, this one seemingly going down a very "whodunnit Colombo path," but I want more SPACE! More spaceships, more science, more awesome spectacle. What we get is a lot of grey, dark corridors and now a Deep Space Nine-like promenade, replete with familiar eateries (and did I spy a Starbucks sign?) and the "smuggler duo's gone straight" bar & grill which is pretty much just Quark's.
We know... budget, budget, budget. Guys, don't cheap out on us. Read the subreddits. We fans are out here. We watch quality sci-fi and remember the good ones, not just for the run of the show, but for decades thereafter (BSG 2004, I'm looking at you... which, BTW, Ronald D. Moore, you are the EP for this show as well so...) That means return viewers for subscription based models and for commercial-supported TV. More subs = more direct revenue, more viewers of commercials = increased ad revenue. I mean, isn't that what it's all about? We know it's not all bread and circuses. Money doesn't make just THIS world go 'round, baby, Mars spins on them greenbacks too.
EDIT: Okay, so I finished it and I gotta say my above criticism still holds, especially when you weigh the proportion of the show dedicated to either the arc concerning the military shit going down on Mars and the one of theTitan mission.
A Redditor put it best saying that they were dismayed to the point of considering abandoning their endeavoring on because of the apparent shift of focus in the series over the past two seasons; for the same reasons I state above, and they bemoan the lack of awe.
Another Redditor responded to a query posited by someone regarding the depiction in the show of Titan and its deviation from known facts like gravity, orientation of its orbit in relation to Saturn's rings and the atmosphere appearing grey-blue in the show, not yellow as it really is by simply laying out the fact that the showrunners needed to make choices based on either budget or aesthetics. What I was struck by though was their description of the real-life aspects on Titan, according to them, which I'd guess, this being Reddit and all, was likely scientifically true.
And like them and other replies to their comment, I would have LOVED to have seen the show render this... This is what makes the blood boil, the heart sing and the eyes well up with longing tears. All I can think is perhaps, if THIS were shown, some youngster watching this show today could grow-up, become an astronaut, or taikonaut, or cosmonaut, and see the real thing, one day, in the future, with their own fucking eyes:
Titan is honestly one of the most bizarre places in the Solar System, and it would be insane to render properly. The methane rain would look like syrupy beads dragging slowly through the nitrogen air. And the surface itself is just weird in the best way possible. The “rocks” are actually water ice, which is rock-hard at Titan’s −180°C temperatures. So you’d have landscapes made of ice pebbles and boulders, shaped by flowing liquid methane and ethane instead of water, shiny and sticky because of hydrocarbon sludge. Sluggish oily waves on black lakes and rivers and cryovolcanoes erupting with water-ammonia slush and freezing almost immediately. And all that in a yellow-orange-red-purple, forever shimmering, haze.
Edit 2: Oh, I thought I'd whip up a little simulated Happy Valley in Planet Coaster:
