If AC Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were alive they'd be heaping praise on this show for getting so many of the technical details exactly right.
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.
The weightless thing is obviously understandable but it's the kind of thing where you can't unsee the things they do to convince you there is no gravity (magnets everywhere!)
- Lights inside helmets to light up a person's face is a pretty dumb thing when you think about it, but it makes complete sense in a tv series, as you definitely want to see the actor's face.
- Transparent/Glass tablets & phones is still a complete mystery to me how this could be useful in any way... other than it "looks cool".
Only if you are doing EVA astronomy and need pitch black darkness to see stuff outside. Because you can light up someone's face enough and still not interfere with their activities.
Otherwise – it would be important to be able to see the other person's face, both to interact with them, and to gauge their well-being.
Their phones are not exactly transparent, they are "holographic". They can project images larger than their own size. Same as many screens depicted in the show.
On the transparent glass phones: "looks cool" is reason enough for most any consumer product. I haven't read the series, so I don't know if there is some lore explanation somewhere -- but --- if the technology is lying around as some component of a space habitat AND it looks cool, yeah, that tech is definitely going in a phone.
They’re also always referred to as hand terminals, which is so much of a better name for the devices we carry around and very rarely use as phones.
There's also budget constraints, they can't accurately portray things every time. Although we know the producers know about the issues.
Examples: the first belter we see is more accurate to what they should look like than subsequent ones. Taller, and more frail.
Coriolis effects as Mueller was pouring his drink.
More recently, Avasarala pouring liquor while at the Moon. Even though the actors don't look like they are in the Moon (because in real life they are not), the producers will waste some CGI budget from time to time to remind us that – "hey! we know this is supposed to be the Moon. Look!"
This criticism doesn't really make sense to me. We're watching through the lens of an invisible space camera with some sort of amazing lighting rig to make things look better. Why can't that space camera also have a laser microphone and sound synthesizer which makes things make noise to provide audio cues that the audience can latch on to? Alternately: the gun and engine noise comes from the same place that the background music comes from, and nobody questions that.
That's the excuse provided by EVE Online. The lore is that they have extremely cheap "camera" drones. And that the neural interface synthesizes sounds (and other senses) to increase your awareness.
The Expanse does sounds inside ships just fine. You hear your own ship firing, you don't hear others. And whenever actors (as opposed to a disembodied camera) are in space, they don't hear anything.
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.
There's also that hilarious moment in S2 where a supporting character dies and everyone goes "oh no, she was my best friend!" and gets a teary send-off, but we -- the audience -- barely knew her and she didn't really speak with anyone and there was no evidence she was actually friends with anyone before. Like bad writing 101, almost an in-joke by the writers.
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.)
It took me awhile to discover it, but what a great show. Personally, and it probably has to do with when I grew up, Star Trek TNG is my favorite sci-fi (though not necessarily 'hard' sci-fi) show.
It can be done by the right people, see Enterprise which had the trekky heart and was good on start (it did have increasing problems in later seasons).
Trek is in wrong hands now. Some commentators say the main showrunners actually hate the previous classic Star Trek, and they are trying hard to revision it.
That's exactly what it feels like to me: Either they know nothing about the Star Trek universe or they actively hate it and want to kill it.
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.
Extremely unlikable is right.
I could go on a long rant here but I'll just mention one of the ultra-ridiculous plot points of STD: The ship runs on mold. Seriously -- not dilithium crystals, but mold. They even imply that the very fabric of subspace is -- a fungus.
Stupidest show on television.
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.
I had been thinking a great deal about the joke which was left unfinished early in S5 about what a Belter, a Martian, and an Earther would drink. I initially thought that it was never going to be completed so I was kind of happy when they did and was rather let down by the joke.
That wasn't the point of it. Delgado started telling the joke before the rocks fell and finished it well afterward. You might think that his views on Belters had changed after they attacked Earth, but the punchline reinforces that he thought that all Belters were complete trash before all of that.
Showing the human element is something that they do very well, and a lot of it is a thin projection of what we, as humans, often do between different races, countries, classes, and beliefs. It's somehow easier to discuss when it's Belters, Earthers, and Martians instead of black, white, etc, even though they really represent the same thing.
He follows up with, "That used to be funnier" putting him into the 'self-aware wolves' category at least.
Warner Bros spent 6 years on the new remaster. It was reportedly a labor of love by those involved.
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.
Also, this:
https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-22-babylon-5-digital-video-...
There used to be a website which had examples of the CGI before and after the DVD remaster, but I can’t find it at the moment.
https://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2020/07/babylon-5-fan-re-re...
[0]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardnessExpanse is more along the lines of "geopolitics in space" with the protomolecule being a MacGuffin to drive the plot along and create space zombies and wormholes. Which isn't to be derisive, as I find it very entertaining, but I don't feel like it's delving deep into the scientific or philosophical ramifications of first contact.
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.
But Planetes is on a different level, with accurate depictions of orbital dynamics and spacer life.
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.
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>
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.
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.
So does that mean that Star Trek is "harder" now without even changing its material content simply because it inspired people to build those very devices seemingly run on 'space magic'?
But I've found the more I know about something the more I know about all the stuff I have yet to know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m...
I feel the 'protomolecule' plays pretty well within these "plausible bounds" of uknown physics.
I think it's a fine metric but how or where you apply the function is subjective.
There is potential for issues even taking this route though.
There is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard is musing on Fermat's Last Theorem; a yet still unsolved problem in mathematics in the 24th century.
To the character the idea of solving it, even in a far future, was implausible. Yet when we watch it now it plays anachronistic because we are the 'more educated more informed viewer from 30 years later' who know Fermat's Last Theorem was solved by Andrew Wiles in 1994.
But it's still fun. Both then and now.
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.
The Razorback propulsion sounds, for example, are always a rocket engine blasting by the camera.
Edit: replaced the circumlocution with the paedophile's name.
Television / Radio personality not really the same as one of the most important film directors of all time, is it?