Almost. The Committee on Human Rights was a dissident group in the USSR, one of the few that was able to operate semi-openly and take part in international dialogue because they were very careful to take a public stance of being Soviet patriots who supported the state even though they disagreed with its behavior. One…

Gabriel's been pretty consistently portrayed as someone who often has doubts about the Center's policies, but whenever he's with his agents he sticks totally to the party line, like he thinks the most important thing is for them not to have any doubts. It makes sense to me that the first time he's really open with…

I like the Caliban creature design okay, but I also kind of can't take it seriously because of something my sweetie said about something Naren Shankar said. Mrs. Hob doesn't listen to the podcasts but does get my recaps of them, and she was very entertained by Shankar's joke about how in the VFX sequence of the…

The disassembled pieces of the ship weren't being burned, corroded, or even shaken around by the wind. So I think the idea is that, whatever action-at-a-distance mechanism the protomolecule is using to grab hold of things, it's freezing them in place not just as large objects but down to the molecular level so nothing…

The full opening credits are always there if you watch it on iTunes, btw. They're just compressed to the short version during the regular SyFy time slot.

I'm really enjoying this character. She seems to have pretty clear ideas of what she wants, but doesn't really need anything and doesn't seem to give a crap about anyone's opinion, which puts would-be manipulators at a disadvantage. And even if she doesn't know Philip is a fake, she's got his number in some ways: he wa…

Maybe, but I feel like she was also having a little whiplash from having been originally determined to hate him so much for his alleged plot against the USSR, and then feeling guilty about that once she found out it wasn't true, and giving herself permission to like him a little. After all that, it'd be natural to be…

Prax said that Mei, at least, was very sick before she met the doctor. Whatever they're doing, they aren't just starting with healthy kids.

Not sure what you mean by book check. Like, you've read all the books and want to know how close they're sticking to the plot?

Oh, Adam… you live in San Francisco like me. I don't wear gorgeous dresses because I have no style, not because I'm a guy. It's OK to admit that.

The map isn't super helpful there, it just shows the ship being somewhere in between the orbits of Earth and Mars. Not sure how you'd even define a "neutral zone" between two planets, since they don't just sit there with a well-defined area between them, but anyway… they're not in the Belt yet, Tycho is still further…

They might not have needed "all that many ships" to take on the Roci, but why would they want to lose any of their ships? The blockade was supposed to be against UN ships and general trade vessels; they weren't expecting anything that was neither one, but was heavily armed.

This is kind of off-topic because it wasn't a military ship, just some random OPA vessel, but I was very amused by the show having a ship called the Guy Molinari (in the assault on the Protogen station). Molinari was a New York politician with a long career but no noteworthy achievements at all to my knowledge; I can…

Ah right, OK. The characters have such a different background, I forgot the names were the same.

Highlights of this week's Expanse podcast, with guest Terry Chen (Prax). This is all paraphrased unless it's in quotation marks. Also, I've finally learned to tell Ty's voice apart from Daniel's.

Not quite - Errinwright is the Undersecretary of Executive Administration, Chrisjen is the Deputy Undersecretary of Executive Administration (or, in the books, "assistant to the undersecretary"). She's been around longer and was his mentor, so she has seniority in that way, and some other characters have pointed out…

This went by pretty fast in the dialogue, but Errinwright did say that the poison was applied by contact - on the opera program - not in the Scotch.

Prax's expertise has nothing to do with this mad-scientist monster business, anyway. The botanical and ecological stuff he's talking about wouldn't give him any basis for deciding whether people who have had some unspecified kind of experiments done to them are "past the point of no return" (whatever that means - I…

"I’m curious how much Melissa featured in the books"

Kids who (at least in the two cases we know about) had a genetic disorder that blocked their immune systems.