Short review of the Expanse:
Sad, sad, sad, how very sad this show makes me, and usually nothing at all can make me so sad...usually I am fairly impressed and intrigued & entertained by everything, but this show? I'm sorry. I watched two episodes and...as much as a part of me, I'll admit, does want to keep trucking forward with it-- because I've been waiting for a science fiction show for so long that I'll almost just take anything---I think I'm going to be bowing out now. Why?
Because the show, and I'm just going to be very blunt about this, but the show is filled to the literal brim with dumb grease monkey bullshit that reminds me more of, what, Armageddon, or maybe even something like Taxi - yes, Taxi-- than it does of what I feel the future not only will be but also already very much Is right now, in our own time. The Expanse is very much like another science fiction show that I only stumbled upon recently but could not believe how basically awful - and horrifically limited in scope it was. That show was called Firefly of course, and the Expanse seems to basically be a carbon copy. It's all about the Everyman the Everyman the Everyman. We must cater to this imbecile. Each and every time. These shows are all so obsessed with this rotten Everyman that they never manage to quite say much of anything, because of how scared they are of him. Well I am not scared of him, and I spit on him like he spits on me. Screw him and his endless prejudices and his ignorance. Stop letting the Everyman contaminate what could be incredibly awesome art.
It's very sad. So very sad. Artists you must stop playing to the Everyman. Don't you know he cheats you? Don't you know he is a liar? Don't you know he is a bully? The Everyman is no God. Do not make him one. Do not serve him these shows and these plots. It's so sad.
Here's my basic opinion on these shows like the Expanse and Firefly : Whoever is writing them isn't all that interested in the future. Hell, they ain't even interested in progressive, future leaning politics of the modern day or even 30 years ago!. All they're interested in is the same old same old bullshit and the same old boring, standard characters that we see all over the place everywhere else, but with a science fiction background. That's it. That's all this is. It's the cast of Taxi in space. In fact, these people weren't even as interesting as the Taxi characters. The people in Taxi were essentially illiterates but at least they were funny and colorful. There was nothing at all colorful about these characters, and sorry, considering that fact that most typical people have been getting progressively *more* colorful with each passing decade since 1605, I'm not falling for it, the Expanse. You have no excuse, and no real reason, to assume that people in the 23rd century will be this hum drum. I felt like I was watching , I don't know , Full Metal Jacket. The testosterone in this show was overwhelming. Not buying it. At all. Even Firefly, in fact, had some feminine lightness to it. Not this. This was dark and miserable the whole way through. Gung ho marine oorah bullshit. Come on!
This show might as well be set on a submarine, or an aircraft carrier, rather than a spaceship in the "23rd century". 2 centuries have passed, 2 centuries beyond our own , in the universe of this show ....and yet you walk into it and the characters all seem to have just stepped out of some modern day illiterate American gang of macho men and grease monkey military girls.
Is it really that hard for screen writers to come up with progressive ideas, or to, "God" forbid, imagine a future where people aren't exactly like the Marines or Air Force soldiers endlessly obsessed over In seemingly every film in this time period? Apparently it is very difficult and downright impossible, because every time you hear about a science fiction show where someone is going to be on a spaceship, you just keep seeing this same dumb character pop up over and over and over again. The idea that a nerd would be on one of these ships is apparently unthinkable. Firefly, in fact, actually scored more points than this show does, 15 years earlier , in this nerd department, since Firefly featured an educated well read Doctor and a feminine non greaser woman as main characters. Aka people who can converse about something beyond a wrench or old war stories. This show was 2 episodes in and all I saw were marines doing the goose step . Can't do it, guys. Can't do it. I thought I was going into the future, not boot camp.
This sort of repressed and dreary worldview looks painful even in a modern day setting...but trying to take it and apply it to something that's supposedly occurring 2 centuries from now is just sad and demented. Which leads to me having to say this : the people writing these shows now that pass themselves off as "sci FI" are no longer the imaginative writers we once had working in this genre like Isaac Asimov. Those days are gone. The grease monkeys shot them down with their big fancy Texas pistols because grease monkeys are terrified of liberals who can read. And in their place we have now received...something else, which is this sad state of affairs, where nothing imaginative or truly progressive can be worked in aside from background details, and where typical and one dimensional characters who seem like they're from 1965 must be our sole heros. The fact that I only saw one strong memorable female character, for starters, out of 2 entire episodes, was absurd. Absolutely absurd. And this make me very sad.
I normally don't like critiquing artists. But when it comes to sci FI, I really think this is all just demented. This show honestly had me feeling like I was in the past rather than the future. Maybe so much as 50 years in the past. Is this really how modern people still act out there? Observing these oh so strict gender roles and strength contests and grease monkey ways? If it is I feel very badly for them and I think it's time they move on. Come on barbarian boys, it's called a book . Pick it up and read it and don't worry, no one will think you wanna suck a cock if you do.
I really can't get over it and must go on about it: In the universe of this show you'd almost think computers have never been invented whatsoever. Everyone seemed to be some sort of NFL draftee with an IQ of 85 , even the people who we were being led to believe were intelligent. I had to hear about "dock jocks". And so I ask now: Is it simply not possible to escape the jock and football Hooter's crowd on Tv? Must I expect to find them dominating literally eveeywher -- including scienc fiction? Is there seriously no where that an old nerd can go to rest easy? Will even the little lanky feminine looking elves in the fantasy genres be pumped up with steroids next, and given Doc Martens and Guinea tee shirts to wear?
Apparently it's the case. A nerd can never see another nerd anywhere, even though it was we nerds and social outcasts and all around freaks who created these plotlines for you ungrateful greasy imbeciles in the first place, all those years ago. We must forever sit and be exposed to "dock jocks" forecer more forever more. It's like a bad dream and it never ends and it makes me so upset, so so upset, to see that these shows try so pathetically hard to play towards the jock crowd rather than the nerd crowd . They assume, I think, that we nerds won't complain. That we nerds will accept. They're afraid ot the jocks and the gung Ho Dumbos in the audience so they play to them.
Well let me be the one to say it: I am complaining and I am tuning out of your show, because this is just sad. I do not watch science fiction to see people who look and talk and joke literally exactly like the people outside in my blue collar town do. I tune in and I read sci FI to see SMART PEOPLE. Literate people. Computer people. Intelligent people. Science people. Not dock jocks.
Very sad. Watch the Expanse at your own peril.
No comments:
Post a Comment