An interesting mental exercise is contemplating how you would adapt this book with the focus shifted to Mercerism. How would you do it?

I would say that there's enough there to think the expectation might be satisfied. We do not see the urban squalor of the streets and flats yet; we do see the smoggy haze; the dust storm around Deckard's closed hotel hangout, the rainy nights.

…heavy on atmosphere, and light on shit actually happening

I had much trepidation about this project when it first came to light. All I can say from the trailer is that it *looks* like a BLADE RUNNER movie should look. That's important. That was necessary for the spell it created.

Presumably they chose one of the more geologically stable areas on the moon. But yeah - it would still be a hellscape - fun for the CGI department.

Yeah. About 3/4 of the way through, perhaps.

I'd prefer to say she went full Starship Trooper…

I kinda thought that Mei was in a base on Io, not on a ship.

I think it was clear that Moore & Co. didn't really have the later seasons all that well mapped out. Hard to think they really had "The Final Five" thought out at the outset. It all made a hash of the tag line "And they have a plan."

Oh, I think they had great ideas still in the toolbox after Season 2. I actually think Zarek's failed coup was one. So was the gut-punch arrival at the "real Earth" of "Revelations." The problem was there just wasn't enough of them to sustain two expanded seasons, they didn't cohere well enough as a sustained…

That's true, but this scene still seems more like one inserted to deliver a great character beat for Holden (and some heightened) drama than to bear up under close examination. I doubt the MCRN needed all that many ships to take out one of their own corvettes, after all (and they would know its capabilities and…

Yup, it surprises me to see how little people understand about the sheer lack of popularity the aztecs had around their neighbors and how effectively that was used against them.

I think I would say that several hundred Spaniards *could* do quite a lot to the Meso-Americans, and in fact their ability (through superior weapons and tactics) to resist the attacks of tens of thousands of Otomis and Tlaxcalans was what helped persuade the Tlaxcalans to make an alliance with Cortes, just as it also…

That's an excellent connection with Banks, actually.

Well, at least we got 13 episodes this season instead of 10. I mean, this season could by rights have been over two weeks ago…

There's some accounts of natives seeing armored, heavily bearded men on armored horses and not being able to work out what is part of which there right away, but given that it was Europeons writing that down and the language barriers involved, who knows how seriously one should take those accounts.

As I understand it, the difficulty the Aztecs and other Meso-American peoples had in their first encounters with the Conquistadors was not that they couldn't *see* them for their strangeness, but that they had no ready means for comprehending them for what they were. The Spaniards, by contrast, did not have the same…

Prax of all people should understand that the monsters are already past the point of no return…

It's almost the opposite of Galactica, which came out of the gate at full tilt, only starting to trip up with Season 3. Whereas The Expanse started out sluggishly, struggling to establish its key character arcs.

"A giant canoe" is not something beyond the realm of imagination for any natives.