I learned it from Princess Leia
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Ka D’Argo is the OG for me.
While not sci-fi, it was 60 years ago today that they lit the candle under Alan Shepard in his pee-drenched spacesuit, making him the first American to successfully complete a space flight.
As an aside, early Russian space flights required the capsule to land on…umm…land, as there wasn’t an available area of water large enough to accommodate a splashdown. However, I learned recently (like in the last couple of weeks) that Gagarin and other early Cosmonauts did not actually land with their spacecraft. They ejected prior to the controlled landing of the capsule because it really wasn’t a controlled landing at all; it was a crash that was almost certainly unsurvivable for the occupant.
The Russians actually hid this fact for decades. Notably, the international body that verified and maintained such records, required any successful flight - space or otherwise - to end with the pilot returning safely to the ground with his equipment; which makes a lot of sense if you think about it. So, technically, while Gagarin was the first man in space, his flight wasn’t completed within the definitions of the international rules, so Shepard actually had the first officially qualified space flight.
Once the Russians’ deception came to light, though, it was deemed prudent simply to amend the rules for Gagarin’s flight to have qualified, and so he remains the holder of the record for the first successful space flight. I do not have a problem with this, because that whole process must’ve been fucking terrifying!
However, in the spirit of FAM’s alternative reality, think about this: if the Russians’ ruse had been discovered at the time and Shepard’s flight became the first recognized space flight instead, does Kennedy shoot for the moon?
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He probably still does.
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Tyang Shit
I’m sure it’s laced with coronavirus, at least in the minds of many FB idiots.
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Army of the Dead is clichéd, hackneyed, dumb and derivative. It’s also a zombie movie, so what do you expect?
Mild Plot Hints
Just imagine if the xenomorphs were zombies and LV 426 was Las Vegas and the team from Predator was trying to pull an Ocean’s 11-sized casino robbery but the people who sent them in had a different agenda and there are regular shambling zombies but also 28 Days Later fast-movers who have a surprisingly developed society like the apes on Planet of the Apes.
Worth a watch if you like this sort of thing.
Major Spoilers
Ward’s daughter (no relation) was warned that fucking around would get people killed but she fucked around anyway and got about half the team killed, including her Dad. She didn’t deserve to be the only survivor; Ripley she ain’t.
I did wonder if they were going to set up a Shaun of the Dead epilogue, with her keeping her zombified dad around, but she just put a bullet in his brain (using her incredible gun skills that she just had, Rey-style).
Also, I thought they were going to pull a “Guy Ritchie” and let a black character survive, but instead just used him to set up the sequel, carrying the zombie virus to Mexico City. Him apparently being saved earlier by the sacrifice of a whiter-than-white German was a bit of forced “wokeness” as it didn’t seem truly earned but, to be honest, none of the self-sacrificial deaths seemed earned. Probably more to do with the sheer number of characters, because the movie is 2 1/2 hours long, so it’s not like there wasn’t time.
Lastly, the death of Burke Martin (played by the always booable Garret Dillahunt) at the teeth of the zombie white tiger was the least surprising thing in this whole movie. It wasn’t so much foreshadowed, as fore-printed in neon letters across Martin’s forehead. The tiger was shown early - like Chekov’s gun - but only really seemed to bother Martin and was seen again only once more, giving Martin his deserved retribution once he’d completed the fucking over the rest of the team.
We started watching Jupiter’s Legacy on Netflix a few weeks ago. It’s an absolute grind for the first four plus episodes and really only gets interesting in the last half of Ep. 5, which is not a good thing when there are only eight episodes in total. The pacing is gratingly slow for most of the first half, and the daughter’s storyline in particular seems largely irrelevant (ETA: I think the intention was to make her character frustrating, but the mediocre acting makes that irrelevant).
Anyway, we decided to plow through the second half of the season last night. Fortunately, things really picked up in Eps. 6 &7, enough that the two of us saved the last episode for later. I’m actually looking forward to watching it. Maybe I’ll find out why I was supposed to care about the daughter’s storyline.
Interested to hear if anyone else watched the show. Will report back after the season finale.
Billy Zabka was the guest on “WTF with Marc Maron”. It’s an entertaining listen (Maron is consistently able to craft interviews that seem like a natural, free flowing conversation), touching everything from Zapke’s childhood and start in acting, to his thoughts about playing douches, his music video work and documentaries, his Oscar nomination (seriously), Cobra Kai and his dealings with Eastern European gangsters.
Available wherever you get your podcasts.
Billy Zabka is great
Just wanted to say I really enjoyed episode 1 of Loki. I think this is going to be a fun one.
Life imitates art.
I’ve been binging Maniac this week, a 2018 Netflix series with Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, among others. It’s one of those shows I scrolled past dozens of times and only tried because of a Reddit suggestion on a thread asking about series similar to Dark (a terrific, if not confusing, three-season German sci-fi show that I would also recommend).
Maniac hits on a lot of themes - depression, loss, despair - and is billed as a dark-comedy, but much more dark than comedy, IMO. It centers around a pharmaceutical study with unintended side effects and some as-of-yet unexplained connection between Hill and Stone (I’m only seven episodes into the 10-episode series). I look forward to finishing it this weekend in between the absurd amount of baseball I plan to watch.
I liked Justin Theroux in that. Interesting show.
10-episode season coming September 24.
Finally.
What does that mean? “One episode season”? A movie?
The Foundation Trilogy set in motion my fascination with sci-fi and is the bellwether of all that is good (or not) for me in the genre. Through no fault of their own, this show will have a tough critic in me.
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I think he left off a zero. Wiki says 10 episodes: first three drop on 9/24, then one a week after that.
I’m not familiar with the books at all, but I’m here for Jared Harris and Lee Pace.
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Correct, and corrected.
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Finally got around to checking out the Watchmen series on HBO MAX. Really really excellent and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Other than having watched the '09 movie, I had no real knowledge of the Watchmen universe and I did not have any difficulty followed the storyline.
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Finished up the second half of season 2 of For All Mankind over the last couple of days. I should have see the Russian reaction in Ep 9 coming, but I didn’t. And whoever said that Ep 10 was intense was understating things a little bit.
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