Halfway to season 2 is where the first book ends. Most people think that's when it goes from ok to good. There's enough stuff happening so there's something for everyone. I think i fast forwarded most of the politics parts. I generally root for Amos and there's few good belter characters ahead. I'm fairly neutral with rest of the main cast.

When you're done with the show if you don't get bamboozeled into reading the books, there's Hyperion for entertaining space opera. They're similar in some ways or they hit the same note at least. I should re-read the first 2 books at some point.

i literally bought hyperion cantos based on the fawning and total adoration of this nerdlord:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1r...r0Ve_Y_soxZNWQ

i havent read it yet. i also downloaded the audiobook and had some slick ideas about saving it for when i buy a tesla and drive across the country, that sort of deal.

but yeah on the list, it is.

fred is a huge pussy and his season 2 accent is disappointing. alex is a much, much bigger pussy and his accent is actually much, much more irritating.

amos remains god.

Alex possibly metoo'd himself from season 6. Something something comic-con groupies. I think they had already shot season 5 before the allegations.

its not hard to imagine someone who has to keep that accent up deciding he deserves some ass for his troubles, because no amount of money alone could possibly be worth it.

looking forward to season 5, about to start season 4 tonight.

the vibe im getting rn is that season 3 is the 'dune: messiah' of the series. eg its where the actual plot is revealed/explained.

i also liked that they cut a whoooole lot of fat off the bones in terms of extraneous characters and really only added one dude (the pirate security guy or whatever).

also i hope they make alex's death interesting/artful because real fucking talk they need to game of thrones some of these principles because i am dead... fucking.. tired of the constant video game challenges that you know will come to absolutely naught because no one of consequence ever really fuckin dies.

im guessing they scratch that itch more in season 4 because they are running out of ways not to, looking forward to finding out.

also man o man do i love fast forwarding through this show.

Season 5 should start December 16th and run till February. I might have mildly spoiled that Alex stays around so i won't say anything more on that. Jeff Bezos personally resurrected the show after it was cancelled in season 3 i think, so it should be on pretty safe standing. There's 9 books and a handful of short stories to work with.

minor pet peeves:

- theres no sound in space but in this show there totally is.

- the world building in this show largely excludes automation. something i liked about dune is that they explained the lack of automation by setting up an AI revolution that compelled humanity to abandon 'thinking machines'. but for some reason my coffee machine has more automation than these fucking space ships. all the manual steering, aiming, etc, its offputting.

- the flight physics are wonky. eg ships slowing down when their engines get turned off. i wonder if thats like an epstein drive theory thing. also wtf ever happened to epstein? they showed him unable to slow down his ship and then... just kinda left that thread hanging? in any case they are violating a fundamental law of physics if its not somehow a quality of their warp drives that ships slow down when the drives turn off.

- ok bonus complaint they are doing some medical shit to prep naomi (god i hate naomi) for 1 g or whatever and its intensely painful and shes totally unmedicated and thats hilariously stupid.

- ok bonus bonus when the fuck are we going to have our chekhov's gun moment with the protomolecule thats spooged into the crawlspace in their ship. am i to seriously believe no ones scanned/checked there? and that there are no scanners looking for protomolecule all over the fucking place, always? bad form.

There's some explanation on realism of the show somewhere on youtube. I mostly just went with, it's not hard scifi, so i don't care. I'm strangely forgiving on that with scifi and fantasy, but really hate that type stuff in anything based on recent history.

The automation i think was the reason why most people on earth are unemployed, but it doesn't stretch to ships, Mars and Belt because reasons.

fuckin reasons.

There's also a tradition in western scifi for space pilots to do space piloty things. It's likely a hard sell to replace that with sentient or non-sentient algos fighting against other algos. Now i wouldn't mind a crew on board a ship that's piloted by a 100 year old self learning sentient algo with it's own devious agenda doing it's thing in thousands of places at the same time, but i'm not sure it would work with most focus groups.

2.2k pages of stuff...

https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/The_Expanse_Wiki

...there's also stuff from the books so it's not completely safe for dodging spoilers. I think the gist was that Epstein drive does all the things and there's a bit about protomolecule on Rocinante, but that's not safe to read before watching season 4 maybe.

ill wait a few days until i finish the season, cheers regardless tho as im looking forward to a diving into the lore.