I don't think it's possible to be cruel to dogs and not meet a horrible fate in a Stephen King book— he shows about as little mercy to animal abusers as to child molesters. His animal-POV scenes are always very sympathetic, even for Cujo. One of my favorites is a brief bit in Desperation where some wild animal…

I bet in the next movie, they travel to Apokolips and it looks like a cross between Munchkinland and Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Snyder has been saving up all his colors for this, you'll see.

I keep seeing comments like this and I don't get it. People in other countries aren't idiots, at least not any more than we are. They like stories, they like movie stars. And the script has to get translated no matter what, they're not watching it with the sound off, so it's not as if making the story really stupid…

Sorry, didn't mean to go on so long about it! Just being cranky.

For that matter, early aircraft were called "airships." "Airplane" refers to a specific flight technology - the fixed wing.

Yeah, rather than "there are only two branches" I should have said "there are only two branches that are ever mentioned in any way in the books." I guess it's always possible that the government characters just didn't have any occasion to mention them. But there's also no reason to assume that the UN military would be…

I'm not sure if this has come up on the show, but in the books at least, they do refer to Navy troops as sailors. But there are only two service branches on both planets: Marines and Navy. I think it's reasonable to assume that "soldiers" and "airmen" would stop being terms with such specific meanings once the…

[eh… never mind, my comment wasn't helpful]

There's no way for it to be a "standard", because it doesn't actually say anything that you could prove or disprove, or that you could use to discover something else. If we discovered an alien civilization tomorrow, or came up with a solid number for how many Earth-like planets exist, that still wouldn't give us any…

Also, for book readers: Iturbi is kind of wrong too, because the protomolecule isn't evidence of an active alien civilization (which is what the Drake equation is about); it's a relic of a dead one. So I think this is meant to be at least partly an ironic reference. One of the most common responses to "If intelligent…

I think it's like with a lot of things in the show and the books: everyone's got a point in a way, no one is entirely stupid, but everyone's got blind spots and character quirks. The audience knows that Iturbi happens to be right in this case, inasmuch as there really is alien goo on Venus now. But Janus is right in…

I think Janus had a pretty good point and wasn't being particularly cynical. The Drake equation is, as he said, a guess— not something you can actually calculate. Drake said as much; his intention was just to start a conversation in the early days of SETI. No one's done anything with it mathematically since then,…

One of the producers mentioned somewhere (podcast?) that SyFy rewrote their Standards & Practices recently to allow fucks, but the Expanse team didn't get the memo until most of season 1 had been filmed.

"it's more likely that the show doesn't have the time or resources"

The guy says flat out that it was for revenge— I don't remember the exact line, but it was basically that the Ganymede disaster was the inners' fault.

I don't know how early you stopped watching, but IMO the show got pretty interesting the further it got away from the original "future cop pretends to be a present-day cop while hunting the future villains" plot. But I wouldn't have said "so good" about its first few episodes, so maybe we just like different things.

In the big Mao/Avasarala scene a week or two ago, he kept claiming that Protogen was independent enough in its operations that MK could plausibly not have known what it was up to as long as it stayed under budget. So, not that different from the (alleged) situation in the book.

Nina herself wasn't necessarily a secret— Gaad seemed like he didn't care if Stan was sleeping with his informant. But Stan committed espionage for Oleg to protect Nina, even if it wasn't as much espionage as Oleg wanted. Oleg also knows that Stan murdered Vlad; Gaad knew about that too and had helped to cover it up,…

Moon is a last name people have.

Am I remembering wrong… everyone including the reviewer seems to think Stan is just standing up for Oleg on principle, but I assumed he's also trying to cover his own ass. Oleg knows most of Stan's dirty secrets, doesn't he? For non-Stan agents to start trying to pressure Oleg seems like it could be very risky for…