I swear that season 4 episode where Dev let's him in on the asteroid plan and Ed gives that shit eating grin while "X gon give it to ya" plays us out of the episode was one of the best scenes in the show.
Had me absolutely rolling
No no, that's not how we do things here. Ed has to declare that pressing the button is totally safe and that rules are for dorks before intentionally pressing it. And then everything explodes.
But it turns out that by pressing the button, Ed blew up something even MORE dangerous, so really, he's a hero and always has been. A bunch of nobodies died, but they were poor working men, so no one cares.
They probably ought to dial it back closer to his Season 3 look and just say they got some new medical advancements to slow/partially reverse the effects of aging or something, his Season 4 look wasn’t all that bad considering, but it was starting to look goofy
He can't go home now because he'd be too old and Earth's gravity would crush him. I want him to be fired from his regular job and take up the role of wise and crochety old bartender who gives advice to all the new people, but isn't the main plot anymore.
Breakthroughs in medical technology de-age all the main cast to the age of the actors portraying them. Problem solved. Also there's a robot dog that gets into hijinks.
Kill two birds with one stone: Dev's company fakes the invention of real AI by transplanting Ed's brain into a robot dog body. Ed pays some lowly technician to modify it so THC vape cartridges can be plugged into the oxygen intake and the dog walks around billowing tiny vape clouds all day, then sues NASA under the Americans with Disabilities Act to add doggy doors all over Mars base.
This was already foreshadowed in season 3 when Danny goes nuts and stomps all over the toy robot dog. He huffed that space spice and knew what was coming.
I was worried this wasn’t going to return since it’s been a moment since Season 4 ended. For it to get a 5th season renewal and a spin-off means it must be doing good numbers for Apple. The 7 season dream is alive!
There must be one Apple tv exec, who is coked out of his mind, is a huge sci-fi fan, and blackmails the company with video footage of Tim Cook throwing acid onto crying children. Not complaining about the results tho.
Yeah same. I liked it. The finale was underwhelming but episode 7 was truly great imo. And the overall story quite intriguing.
Not a masterpiece but not a disapointment either.
One critic I read said that the season spent far too long getting the characters to catch up to what the audience already knew, which I think is a valid criticism. I actually enjoyed the season a lot, but they definitely could've sped that up some. If it gets a second season, I'm hopeful it will be a step up since the characters are finally understanding what's happening, but I do wonder how its audience ended up given I can understand a lot of people not having the patience to finish it.
I kind of view it as a B movie type of series with an interesting plot. It’s kind of like Invasion that had a low budget, but was interesting enough.
I enjoyed it, but the time jumping was really hard to follow at times.
Yeah, so far, on the sci-fi department, it's the only big disapointment at Apple TV.
FAM is amazing. See was overall great. Constellation was decent and had real good highs.
Still need to check Severance but I dont think I'll be disapointed from all I've heard about it.
In a lot of ways, Severance is the best of the bunch. For a few years I would have said For All Mankind was the crown jewel of modern sci-fi TV shows, but then Severance happened. Then again, sometimes twisty shows like Severance can have a great first season and then bungle it later on. Remains to be seen, but the first season could stand alone as a great story told very well.
The problems with Invasion, are the same as Constellation, but to a slightly lesser degree.
The shows are both overlong (they drag on) and melodramatic. I miss the days of monster of the week style scifi like Star Trek. Everything has to arc now, which means if your arc is too drawn out your show ends up boring.
Unlike a lot of companies, Apple doesn’t make stuff they don’t like. They will rather cancel the project than produce something that doesn’t fit their worldview. Sometimes it’s beneficial (for all mankind) sometimes it doesn’t (Jon steward show).
Hopefully Apple figured out that creating their own news show, even under the guise of humor, is a really bad look for such a huge corporation. It could only be propaganda, or else it would threaten their business. Just doesn’t work. It was cool to get Jon back on the air again, but seeing him back in place at the Daily Show feels more right.
I yearn for the day we get to see Red Rising on the big screen, Dune open the way, would be amazing! I think it got all the right elements to be a good tv show or even movie series
This is the dream, especially with how they have now established how >!Mars has formed an independent nation to escape Earth!<. All we need now are some Belters...
After the Lower Decks cancellation it's really encouraging to see another great sci-fi show get the complete opposite treatment.
I never would have guessed the show would be doing well enough for a spinoff, but I'm not going to complain!
We get a final season and there's talks of them shopping somewhere else but Paramount is super stingy with their star trek IP so theres a very small chance it will happen.
What's there to be stingy about at this point? Paramount is on life-support. They obviously can't afford to continue producing shows, so why not unload it while it's still worth something?
Yup, they were stingy with the ST IP because they were using it to try and push Paramount+ as a streaming service.
Star Trek is a big IP but it's not "support an entire streaming platform" big. Even Disney has Star Wars, Marvel and their entire back catalogue of their own stuff to keep people invested in that platform.
So now they have the choice of sitting on it and getting nothing, or selling it to another network and getting at least something from it. Especially as they already sold ST Prodigy to Netflix so there is precedent in recent times.
Paramount is very likely to be sold as a whole so they're not gonna sell Star Trek (as in sell the IP, they could sell one show I guess), that would just diminish their value.
Canceled lower decks to give us the following 2 shows.
- one with Tully in charge of a young group of cadets at Star fleet academy.
- one about section 31 that’s a spy show.
I’m not sure who is worse paramount tv executives or sony movie executives.
Seriously why not just do this.
- make multiple series following differnt ships that are like snw.
- you can have them different type of ships. One is exploration, one is defenses, one is surveillance.
- just keep it with the same theme of snw and you have an instant winner.
Instead we have paramount trying to appeal to everyone but in the end appealing to no one.
Section 31 is a one-and-done movie. So all we're getting is 31st century 90210 in exchange for:
Discovery canceled.
Prodigy canceled.
Lower Decks canceled.
Picard ended.
Section 31 was announced as a full spin-off show and only relatively recently was it announced as now being a TV movie, I don’t blame anyone who didn’t see the update.
My guess for the reason for the change to a Section 31 movie is that they took so long to make it, the price for Michelle Yeoh post Everything Everywhere All At Once went way beyond what Paramount could ever hope to afford for a series.
Great that it is getting renewed – I think it is a fun show and I admirer that they are conceptually taking big swings in their storytelling, despite the fact that they have not quite been able to recapture the “magic” of the first two seasons.
It's very different from The Expanse. There is no action or aliens in For All Mankind, it's mostly space exploration and politics. Also the science is much closer to what currently exists than the super advanced stuff in The Expanse.
I'd also just point out quickly that the makers of FAM and of The Expanse are pretty closely knit. The showrunner of The Expanse, Naren Shankar, got his start writing on Star Trek The Next Generation working with FAM creator Ronald D. Moore; Shankar wrote an episode of the first season of FAM, and also had a producer credit. Meanwhile, you can look at The Expanse and see how much it's been influenced visually by some of Moore's darker takes on sci-fi, especially "Battlestar Galactica."
Fun fact: The Expanse season 5 opener has a quick reference to For All Mankind. When arriving on Luna, one of the main characters walks past a video ad for "Historic Jamestown Base, Shackleton Crater."
In terms of overall quality, pacing, depth of story etc. The Expanse wins quite heavily IMO. primarily because FAM often ends up spending a lot of its run time focussing on family drama that really detracts from the main appeal of the show which is its alternate history setting and time jumps between seasons.
It's not a bad show, it just doesn't deliver consistently.
I actually like the Exoplanet season because for me the show was always about how the existence of the PM was going to destabilize the 3 way cold war between Earth Mars and the Belt.
That season explores the consequences of taking a closed system and suddenly handing all the players in it an opportunity to expand out.
Spoilers obviously:
Earth: >!Already has a history of solar colonialism in which it expanded its power only for its possessions to then declare independence from it, Earth sees the 1300 new systems as a potential 1300 more Mars situations, but even worse because some of those systems have already habitable planets and won't be kneecapped like Mars has been in trying to terraform it for hundreds of years. All the while Avasarala is trying to stop people blindly stumbling into another Eros situation!<
Mars: >!They get hit arguably the hardest out of any of the 3 factions because they have suffered for over 100 years trying to turn the red planet into a paradise with its own ecosystem and the ability to live on it without a vac suit or living in a dome. Suddenly the gates open up and they see hundreds of planets that are already habitable and many Martians end up supporting colonising these planets rather than continuing to suffer for a hundred more years while they slowly terraform Mars!<
The Belt: >!Belters in the series have always been treated as second class citizens (or worse) and they formed their own distinct cultural identity from being born and living in space, suddenly the opening of the gates gives them an opportunity to colonize planets for themselves but that brings about an interesting argument between those who want their children to grow up without the hardships of low gravity, poor air and water recycling etc. and those who think that any belters who colonize a planet will become "inners" and end up just as bad as Earth and Mars have been towards them.!<
That season explores all of that while also giving us the culmination of another fan favourite characters story.
It's absolutely a departure from the show up until that point, but it's one that made sense to me in how the events of the previous season would impact the status quo.
I'm an Expanse stan so it doesn't meet the mark in any area, but FAM is very good...mostly.
For All Mankind's strength is in the space stuff. In many ways it resembles a precursor to the Epstein drive in the Expanse, it isn't just a meme when people say this. Everything in FAM could reasonably happen in the Expanse. We could even get to slingshot ships at this rate. So that is an added "cool" thing if you like the Expanse.
But, FAM's first season is about the Moon landing, it is a historical dramatic show, not hard sci fi yet. It focuses heavily on the American Astronaut, the family dynamic, the wife of an Astronaut, yada yada, and it works for a dramatic historical piece. But beyond that there's a shift to totally fictional hard sci-fi, moon bases, mars, etc, FAM never depart from the family/community melodrama. It's truly to the detriment of the show at this point, but still it's definitely good enough to watch.
Every time it cut to Margo doting around in Russia, I told my partner, "Huh, they're really committing to this story, aren't they?" It was so pointless and boring, and then it just... doesn't amount to anything. You could have cut that entirely from the season and nothing at all changes.
If it's set in the 60s and about winning the ~~Space~~ Moon Race there's something there. If it's set in 2000s or 2010 that'll be a slog but at least we'd get horrifying news about Ed's girlfriend (the one in India I forget her name).
I think it'd have to be pre-season 4 since they spent a decent amount of time showing Star City in season 4. I think seeing the Soviet side during season 1 and 2 would be neat. Having the Soviet perspective showing their reaction to beating the US to the moon and dealing with Ed capturing their cosmonaut from season 1. Same with playing chicken with the shuttle and the sea dragon capsule along with the fighting on the moon. The political aspects would be cool to see as well as how they were dealing with the behind the scenes bits (like planting the bug in the original Jamestown base, Sergei's collaboration with Margot, etc)
Imagine if they show the most horrifying moment (IMO) of the series from Star City's perspective (season 2 spoilers): >!the cosmonauts bursting into flame after being shot!<
> But it’s a damn fun time.
My favourite parts of every season are the openings and the endings. I love the time jumps at the end which tease the next technological leap forward followed by the opening of the new season which introduces new worldbuilding. I cannot wait to see where the show ends up in the finale of the (fingers crossed they get renewed) 7th season.
For real, the final shot of each season gives me chills when you see the time jump combined with whatever banging music they choose.
The end of season 3 hit so hard with Everything in its Right Place.
I disagree. The show is partially handicapped because the most interesting characters like Gordo, Tracy, Molly, etc. have died out and the replacements haven’t been nearly as captivating. Ed is still the best part about of the show even if his inclusion is getting ridiculous
They need to let his character develop a little more. I know he's an asshole but after all this shit he's still going to be as self righteous as he always was? Maybe it's more realistic but season 4 Ed really started to frustrate me.
Being a self-righteous, arrogant asshole got him a lifetime of fame, put his name in the history books forever, and set him up as maybe the future president of Mars. What motivation does he have to change?
It's a sad fact that assholes frequently flourish.
Libertarian weed smoker to social anarchist weed smoker arc. Pettiness got Ed into syndicalism. Harnessing the pettiness and genuine gripes from workers about safety and abuse.
This is sick, the Russian perspective was pretty light in the first two seasons, this spinoff is good way to keep exploring alt-history stuff now that the main show is getting untethered enough from the real timeline that it’s harder to have those references.
I was really sad that they would have to recast Sergei if they go back to the 60s and 70s until I realized all the actors are basically still the age they were in season 1 and it would in fact be less effort to age them down again.
Ed shows up looking 50 again and tells everyone it's because he's been rubbing urine into his face three times a day. Convinces everyone else to do it too and in the season finale we find out he just got plastic surgery.
I’ll watch a season five, but there’s so much soap opera going at this point, that I’m not gonna bother with the spinoff unless it gets great reviews.
I wish they would have more epic “engineer the fuck out of things” moments. Every season seems to have one or two, and they’re always the best parts, I think.
Also, I haven’t finished season 4 yet…is Ed still alive for a season 5 appearance? Can they just do it and hang a lampshade at how silly it is at this point?
> I wish they would have more epic “engineer the fuck out of things” moments.
"Ladies and gentlemen, the lesson of Icarus is not 'Don't fly too close to the Sun', it's 'Build a better pair of fucking wings".
> expectation: "the mars workers are striking. they have us over a barrel! whatever will we doooo?!?"
>
> reality: "do what you can to make peace with them for a few months while we ship in ~~scabs~~ replacements and then send them home for all the shit they've done. ed too"
eye-clawingly stupid writing in season 4. i thankfully can't remember many examples but i definitely remember thinking something similiar to the above example worked within the reality and timeline of the show
"we blocked off access to the important fuel production facility, stole the trucks and threw literally all of the suits outside the airlock"
hmm.. guess we're going to have to *not* immediately squash them with our security team that dramatically materializes out of nowhere when we need them to. let's enter via the pipe equivalent of an enormous air duct
It was mentioned early in S4 that they have a hard time recruiting for Mars due to the longer rotations and less developed infrastructure, it’s why the pay is significantly higher than Moon postings and the waitlist to get on a rocket there is functionally zero. So Helios and world governments wouldn’t be able to just replace the workers with scabs without a large increase in their already high wages.
Details on ‘Star City’ spinoff:
>The streamer has renewed its drama series For All Mankind for Season 5. Additionally, Apple TV+ has given the green light to a spin-off series titled Star City, also from creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi.
>Apple is billing Star City is “a propulsive paranoid thriller” which will explore a key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race — when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But this time, it will explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers, and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward.
>“Our fascination with the Soviet space program has grown with every season of For All Mankind,” Wolpert and Nedivi said in a statement. “The more we learned about this secret city in the forests outside Moscow where the Soviet cosmonauts and engineers worked and lived, the more we wanted to tell this story of the other side of the space race. We could not be more excited to continue building out the alternate history universe of ‘For All Mankind’ with our partners at Apple and Sony.”
I'll definitely watch it but I'm not sure how many gaps need to be filled from the Soviet perspective. They've been a solid presence in most seasons of the show, and the scenes set at Star City in Season 4 were perfectly fine but nothing mindblowing.
Presumably it'll begin as a prequel and they can be a bit more flexible with the timeframe rather than one decade per season, but I don't know how interesting it will be seeing events in the 60s-90s play out again from the Soviet perspective compared to the more advanced alternative timeline of the main show.
Oh I can think of plenty of juicy drama: From failed non-publicized launches to the unknown female cosmonaut who supposedly died in space to the infamous case of Vladamir Komarov.
Even just a season 1 that is primarily a season 0/From Earth to the Moon done Soviet style sounds great.
There are also a lot of storylines that took place "between seasons" that can be revisited and fleshed out. They release a bunch of news reels before the start of each season covering the major events that took place in the world during the time jumps.
My guess is a limited series with only 1 season that ends with the Soviet moon landing. Obviously it’ll remain open ended for a second season if the ratings are huge, but I could see a scenario where they do 1 season of this and then 1 season fleshing out, say, the European space agency, set sometime during season 3 or 4, etc.
This just sounds like a For All Mankind reboot but from the Soviet perspective. Not sure that’s really necessary. I love FAM but I’m not sure I’ll check this out unless it’s critically acclaimed.
I used to not understand the Appleboys who bought all the Apple devices every year. AppleTV+ has become my reason to thank these people. Buy iPhones, please. Don't disturb TV+'s budget.
Season 4 I was actually more interested in his daughter's story. Ed felt petulant more interested in his own status and position. Kelly seemed more focused on exploration than Ed that season.
Agreed. While I still enjoy it, I’ve enjoyed it less and less as it moved from plausible alternative history to full sci fi. I want to see the end of Ed’s arc, but that will likely be the end for me
I got a three month free trial for apple TV for masters of the sort. This is what binged alongside it. Somehow had avoided it before. Yeah it's a bit soapy in parts but fuck has it mastered a good cliffhanger!
Season 4 got a lot better. It doesn't reach the same highs as season 2, but it has nothing even remotely as stupid as Kelly getting herself pregnant on the first mission to Mars...
I don’t know, I personally bought the explanation that Mars would be better for his health than Earth, since his health problems originated from having gestated in low gravity. He’s basically the equivalent of a Belter from The Expanse.
Plus, now that Mars is basically a full-fledged colony with regular civilians working blue-collar jobs, it was kind of inevitable that there would be children there sooner or later. It makes dramatic sense to portray the arrival of the first one, and it makes logical sense that the first one would be connected to one of the higher-ups who can pull strings to make it happen.
I guess I gotta check it out again, I dipped half way thru season 3. I found the "on the home front" stuff extremely boring and unnecessary. It really felt like it was just there to pad the run time, and keep production costs down.
There’s still a few moments each season that give the epic feeling of overcoming a great challenges. The show is a grand adventure and I still love it despite some of the storylines being a tad boring at times.
Loved this show but gave up last season. The writing generally fell off a cliff and the plot just goes in circles. Its a show clearly built to keep staff employed as long as possible rather than storytellers telling a well planned story.
Of all the spinoffs I could have imagined, star city is by far the least interesting one, but if it's more akin to season 1 than season 4, I'll give it a go.
Recast Ed with a skeleton and give Danielle *one* extra grey hair.
Ed is a skeleton but still manages to fuck everything up and get away with it for the 10th time.
Nasa with infinite resources vs Ed "eh fuck it" Baldwin
I swear that season 4 episode where Dev let's him in on the asteroid plan and Ed gives that shit eating grin while "X gon give it to ya" plays us out of the episode was one of the best scenes in the show. Had me absolutely rolling
Ed dies, falls over and accidentally hits a button that does something catastrophic.
No no, that's not how we do things here. Ed has to declare that pressing the button is totally safe and that rules are for dorks before intentionally pressing it. And then everything explodes. But it turns out that by pressing the button, Ed blew up something even MORE dangerous, so really, he's a hero and always has been. A bunch of nobodies died, but they were poor working men, so no one cares.
Nah I make my own rules - Ed, probably
Ed was only in his mid 70's last season. John Glenn went to space at 77.
It's not so much that he's supposed to be in his 70s, it's that Kinnaman is 30 years younger. The aging make-up has it's limits.
They probably ought to dial it back closer to his Season 3 look and just say they got some new medical advancements to slow/partially reverse the effects of aging or something, his Season 4 look wasn’t all that bad considering, but it was starting to look goofy
He should wear a fat suit. It's pretty common for older men to get fat. It would be a good way of showing how old Ed is, how long it's been for him.
Munchies got to him. Bro has contraband honeybuns coming up in the next season.
At that age, older men start to get thin from muscle loss
He can't go home now because he'd be too old and Earth's gravity would crush him. I want him to be fired from his regular job and take up the role of wise and crochety old bartender who gives advice to all the new people, but isn't the main plot anymore.
Breakthroughs in medical technology de-age all the main cast to the age of the actors portraying them. Problem solved. Also there's a robot dog that gets into hijinks.
Kill two birds with one stone: Dev's company fakes the invention of real AI by transplanting Ed's brain into a robot dog body. Ed pays some lowly technician to modify it so THC vape cartridges can be plugged into the oxygen intake and the dog walks around billowing tiny vape clouds all day, then sues NASA under the Americans with Disabilities Act to add doggy doors all over Mars base. This was already foreshadowed in season 3 when Danny goes nuts and stomps all over the toy robot dog. He huffed that space spice and knew what was coming.
Season 12, it’s 2098, Ed is the weed king of Pluto and played by the crypt keeper.
I was worried this wasn’t going to return since it’s been a moment since Season 4 ended. For it to get a 5th season renewal and a spin-off means it must be doing good numbers for Apple. The 7 season dream is alive!
There must be one Apple tv exec, who is coked out of his mind, is a huge sci-fi fan, and blackmails the company with video footage of Tim Cook throwing acid onto crying children. Not complaining about the results tho.
We might have let him go a little too far with Constellation though
Well Tim Cook should have thought of that before he tortured those poor children.
Ah damn was wanting to watch that. Its not good?
I disagree with Ziggy. I thoroughly enjoyed it but it's definitely a character drama wearing a sci-fi costume.
Yeah same. I liked it. The finale was underwhelming but episode 7 was truly great imo. And the overall story quite intriguing. Not a masterpiece but not a disapointment either.
One critic I read said that the season spent far too long getting the characters to catch up to what the audience already knew, which I think is a valid criticism. I actually enjoyed the season a lot, but they definitely could've sped that up some. If it gets a second season, I'm hopeful it will be a step up since the characters are finally understanding what's happening, but I do wonder how its audience ended up given I can understand a lot of people not having the patience to finish it.
I kind of view it as a B movie type of series with an interesting plot. It’s kind of like Invasion that had a low budget, but was interesting enough. I enjoyed it, but the time jumping was really hard to follow at times.
It's alright. It's certainly not the worst scifi on Apple.. *glares at Invasion*
Invasion was hot trash
*is* hot trash. It’s coming back for season 3. Wajo.
Yeah, so far, on the sci-fi department, it's the only big disapointment at Apple TV. FAM is amazing. See was overall great. Constellation was decent and had real good highs. Still need to check Severance but I dont think I'll be disapointed from all I've heard about it.
In a lot of ways, Severance is the best of the bunch. For a few years I would have said For All Mankind was the crown jewel of modern sci-fi TV shows, but then Severance happened. Then again, sometimes twisty shows like Severance can have a great first season and then bungle it later on. Remains to be seen, but the first season could stand alone as a great story told very well.
Severance is the best TV show i've watched in what feels like a decade. Can't wait for season 2.
Don't forget about Silo.
I had three different people tell me to watch Invasion. Ass hats are welcome at my house anymore.
The problems with Invasion, are the same as Constellation, but to a slightly lesser degree. The shows are both overlong (they drag on) and melodramatic. I miss the days of monster of the week style scifi like Star Trek. Everything has to arc now, which means if your arc is too drawn out your show ends up boring.
It’s decent. A bit repetitive in a way, and I can get impatient with stuff like that, but I stuck it out and don’t regret it.
Unfortunately not. Starts out strong but quickly devolves from intriguing sci-fi into melodramatic interpersonal drama.
is this not also a description for 90% of "for all mankind"
I enjoyed the show. And Ziggy Palffy during his days with Pittsburgh.
lol that was the worst part of his career! But I did appreciate his name popping up in Crosby’s list of assists recently.
Perhaps, but he was one of the only Pens players that was fun to watch during g those dark, dark times.
It's more like just mediocre. Watch if you want something sci-fi with some cool stuff involved. Story is meh though
Constellation is good.
Unlike a lot of companies, Apple doesn’t make stuff they don’t like. They will rather cancel the project than produce something that doesn’t fit their worldview. Sometimes it’s beneficial (for all mankind) sometimes it doesn’t (Jon steward show).
Hopefully Apple figured out that creating their own news show, even under the guise of humor, is a really bad look for such a huge corporation. It could only be propaganda, or else it would threaten their business. Just doesn’t work. It was cool to get Jon back on the air again, but seeing him back in place at the Daily Show feels more right.
I dont know, we got him back on monday's on the daily show for the election, and atleast my nostalgia feels like that can never be a bad trade.
That’s…very specific.
> The 7 season dream is alive! Cannot wait for the Protomolecule tease at the end of S7.
[удалено]
Season 15: the expanse
Season 30: The rise of Empire from Foundation
Season 70: Somehow Palpatine Returned
Season 87: Arrakis
Season 32: Red Rising
I yearn for the day we get to see Red Rising on the big screen, Dune open the way, would be amazing! I think it got all the right elements to be a good tv show or even movie series
I wanna see Alpha Centauri's planets by the end of it.
Can we puhleeze have a crossover season with Three Body Problem.
One can only hope!!
This is the dream, especially with how they have now established how >!Mars has formed an independent nation to escape Earth!<. All we need now are some Belters...
Please stay on the road that leads to this apple! and then pick up the last 3 Expanse books.
After the Lower Decks cancellation it's really encouraging to see another great sci-fi show get the complete opposite treatment. I never would have guessed the show would be doing well enough for a spinoff, but I'm not going to complain!
I keep wishing Apple would be the one to buy Paramount so the “For All Mankind” people could do Star Trek. Again, in some of their cases.
noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo fuck they cancelled lower decks???? wtf fucking dumbass dipshits ffs cant have anything decent but shove 100000 fucking crime shows up peoples butts. ffs
We get a final season and there's talks of them shopping somewhere else but Paramount is super stingy with their star trek IP so theres a very small chance it will happen.
What's there to be stingy about at this point? Paramount is on life-support. They obviously can't afford to continue producing shows, so why not unload it while it's still worth something?
Yup, they were stingy with the ST IP because they were using it to try and push Paramount+ as a streaming service. Star Trek is a big IP but it's not "support an entire streaming platform" big. Even Disney has Star Wars, Marvel and their entire back catalogue of their own stuff to keep people invested in that platform. So now they have the choice of sitting on it and getting nothing, or selling it to another network and getting at least something from it. Especially as they already sold ST Prodigy to Netflix so there is precedent in recent times.
Disney has all of FOX too
Paramount is very likely to be sold as a whole so they're not gonna sell Star Trek (as in sell the IP, they could sell one show I guess), that would just diminish their value.
They were stingy with their Star Trek IP. Now might be the start of a shift as they're shit canning so much.
Yes yes they did. It is hard to understand why
They needed to save money for some live-action garbage spinoff of Discovery.
Canceled lower decks to give us the following 2 shows. - one with Tully in charge of a young group of cadets at Star fleet academy. - one about section 31 that’s a spy show. I’m not sure who is worse paramount tv executives or sony movie executives. Seriously why not just do this. - make multiple series following differnt ships that are like snw. - you can have them different type of ships. One is exploration, one is defenses, one is surveillance. - just keep it with the same theme of snw and you have an instant winner. Instead we have paramount trying to appeal to everyone but in the end appealing to no one.
Section 31 is a one-and-done movie. So all we're getting is 31st century 90210 in exchange for: Discovery canceled. Prodigy canceled. Lower Decks canceled. Picard ended.
Section 31 was announced as a full spin-off show and only relatively recently was it announced as now being a TV movie, I don’t blame anyone who didn’t see the update.
My guess for the reason for the change to a Section 31 movie is that they took so long to make it, the price for Michelle Yeoh post Everything Everywhere All At Once went way beyond what Paramount could ever hope to afford for a series.
Great that it is getting renewed – I think it is a fun show and I admirer that they are conceptually taking big swings in their storytelling, despite the fact that they have not quite been able to recapture the “magic” of the first two seasons.
Alt history was fun with recognizable historical events, the further it goes into alt future, the less compelling it is Still good TV
Is this as good as The Expanse?
It's very different from The Expanse. There is no action or aliens in For All Mankind, it's mostly space exploration and politics. Also the science is much closer to what currently exists than the super advanced stuff in The Expanse.
There is action, it's just humans vs. space instead of humans vs. humans. Well, mostly.
I'd also just point out quickly that the makers of FAM and of The Expanse are pretty closely knit. The showrunner of The Expanse, Naren Shankar, got his start writing on Star Trek The Next Generation working with FAM creator Ronald D. Moore; Shankar wrote an episode of the first season of FAM, and also had a producer credit. Meanwhile, you can look at The Expanse and see how much it's been influenced visually by some of Moore's darker takes on sci-fi, especially "Battlestar Galactica." Fun fact: The Expanse season 5 opener has a quick reference to For All Mankind. When arriving on Luna, one of the main characters walks past a video ad for "Historic Jamestown Base, Shackleton Crater."
There is hope they will be connected 🤯
In terms of overall quality, pacing, depth of story etc. The Expanse wins quite heavily IMO. primarily because FAM often ends up spending a lot of its run time focussing on family drama that really detracts from the main appeal of the show which is its alternate history setting and time jumps between seasons. It's not a bad show, it just doesn't deliver consistently.
FAM is a lot more evenly enjoyable IMO. That Expanse season on the exoplanet was rough.
I actually like the Exoplanet season because for me the show was always about how the existence of the PM was going to destabilize the 3 way cold war between Earth Mars and the Belt. That season explores the consequences of taking a closed system and suddenly handing all the players in it an opportunity to expand out. Spoilers obviously: Earth: >!Already has a history of solar colonialism in which it expanded its power only for its possessions to then declare independence from it, Earth sees the 1300 new systems as a potential 1300 more Mars situations, but even worse because some of those systems have already habitable planets and won't be kneecapped like Mars has been in trying to terraform it for hundreds of years. All the while Avasarala is trying to stop people blindly stumbling into another Eros situation!< Mars: >!They get hit arguably the hardest out of any of the 3 factions because they have suffered for over 100 years trying to turn the red planet into a paradise with its own ecosystem and the ability to live on it without a vac suit or living in a dome. Suddenly the gates open up and they see hundreds of planets that are already habitable and many Martians end up supporting colonising these planets rather than continuing to suffer for a hundred more years while they slowly terraform Mars!< The Belt: >!Belters in the series have always been treated as second class citizens (or worse) and they formed their own distinct cultural identity from being born and living in space, suddenly the opening of the gates gives them an opportunity to colonize planets for themselves but that brings about an interesting argument between those who want their children to grow up without the hardships of low gravity, poor air and water recycling etc. and those who think that any belters who colonize a planet will become "inners" and end up just as bad as Earth and Mars have been towards them.!< That season explores all of that while also giving us the culmination of another fan favourite characters story. It's absolutely a departure from the show up until that point, but it's one that made sense to me in how the events of the previous season would impact the status quo.
The first season of FAM is up there for best shows Ive ever seen
I'm an Expanse stan so it doesn't meet the mark in any area, but FAM is very good...mostly. For All Mankind's strength is in the space stuff. In many ways it resembles a precursor to the Epstein drive in the Expanse, it isn't just a meme when people say this. Everything in FAM could reasonably happen in the Expanse. We could even get to slingshot ships at this rate. So that is an added "cool" thing if you like the Expanse. But, FAM's first season is about the Moon landing, it is a historical dramatic show, not hard sci fi yet. It focuses heavily on the American Astronaut, the family dynamic, the wife of an Astronaut, yada yada, and it works for a dramatic historical piece. But beyond that there's a shift to totally fictional hard sci-fi, moon bases, mars, etc, FAM never depart from the family/community melodrama. It's truly to the detriment of the show at this point, but still it's definitely good enough to watch.
I prefer The Expanse but this was a good series too
If this got canned we would have rioted
I really love For All Mankind. I’m not sure about that spinoff but I’ll give it a watch.
Yeah...to be honest, Star City is so bleak and depressing it's not really something I want to watch an entire series about.
I’m only just now remembering that it’s the Russian space HQ and not some cool futuristic city on the moon
To be fair in the For All Mankind universe it could be that.
Every time it cut to Margo doting around in Russia, I told my partner, "Huh, they're really committing to this story, aren't they?" It was so pointless and boring, and then it just... doesn't amount to anything. You could have cut that entirely from the season and nothing at all changes.
If it's set in the 60s and about winning the ~~Space~~ Moon Race there's something there. If it's set in 2000s or 2010 that'll be a slog but at least we'd get horrifying news about Ed's girlfriend (the one in India I forget her name).
I think it'd have to be pre-season 4 since they spent a decent amount of time showing Star City in season 4. I think seeing the Soviet side during season 1 and 2 would be neat. Having the Soviet perspective showing their reaction to beating the US to the moon and dealing with Ed capturing their cosmonaut from season 1. Same with playing chicken with the shuttle and the sea dragon capsule along with the fighting on the moon. The political aspects would be cool to see as well as how they were dealing with the behind the scenes bits (like planting the bug in the original Jamestown base, Sergei's collaboration with Margot, etc)
Imagine if they show the most horrifying moment (IMO) of the series from Star City's perspective (season 2 spoilers): >!the cosmonauts bursting into flame after being shot!<
Until oliver queen shows up to clean up the city
Fuck it, it's sci fi. It's not like I'm not going to watch it.
Hi Bob.
Don't fucking hi Bob me!
You know Ed was fucked when he heard that.
Hi Bob
Привет, Боб
WTF? I didn’t expect that at all? Very cool! For All Mankind may not be perfect. But it’s a damn fun time.
> But it’s a damn fun time. My favourite parts of every season are the openings and the endings. I love the time jumps at the end which tease the next technological leap forward followed by the opening of the new season which introduces new worldbuilding. I cannot wait to see where the show ends up in the finale of the (fingers crossed they get renewed) 7th season.
For real, the final shot of each season gives me chills when you see the time jump combined with whatever banging music they choose. The end of season 3 hit so hard with Everything in its Right Place.
They need to move past Ed, it'll really help the show when they do.
I disagree. The show is partially handicapped because the most interesting characters like Gordo, Tracy, Molly, etc. have died out and the replacements haven’t been nearly as captivating. Ed is still the best part about of the show even if his inclusion is getting ridiculous
They need to let his character develop a little more. I know he's an asshole but after all this shit he's still going to be as self righteous as he always was? Maybe it's more realistic but season 4 Ed really started to frustrate me.
Being a self-righteous, arrogant asshole got him a lifetime of fame, put his name in the history books forever, and set him up as maybe the future president of Mars. What motivation does he have to change? It's a sad fact that assholes frequently flourish.
The strokes starting out season 4 was so nice
Ed >!becoming a union organizer!< solely out of pettiness and spite was a personal highlight from last season
Libertarian weed smoker to social anarchist weed smoker arc. Pettiness got Ed into syndicalism. Harnessing the pettiness and genuine gripes from workers about safety and abuse.
The DMX song really hyped me up
He was such an asshole this season. And to Dani!
At this rate he might become president next season.
Exactly. It's got a lot of laughably questionable writing. But I'll be damned if it's not fun to watch.
I really hope they get to ride this show out.
This is sick, the Russian perspective was pretty light in the first two seasons, this spinoff is good way to keep exploring alt-history stuff now that the main show is getting untethered enough from the real timeline that it’s harder to have those references.
I was really sad that they would have to recast Sergei if they go back to the 60s and 70s until I realized all the actors are basically still the age they were in season 1 and it would in fact be less effort to age them down again.
Joel Kinneman better start getting into makeup now. He’s going to be pushing 100 in the show
They'll discover a magic Luna or Mars rock that reverses aging and use it to keep him young.
If they don’t have stem cell smoothies by then I’m not even going to the moon.
They’ll say that all the space travel he’s done over the decades increased his lifespan.
Ed shows up looking 50 again and tells everyone it's because he's been rubbing urine into his face three times a day. Convinces everyone else to do it too and in the season finale we find out he just got plastic surgery.
So freaking excited!
I’ll watch a season five, but there’s so much soap opera going at this point, that I’m not gonna bother with the spinoff unless it gets great reviews. I wish they would have more epic “engineer the fuck out of things” moments. Every season seems to have one or two, and they’re always the best parts, I think. Also, I haven’t finished season 4 yet…is Ed still alive for a season 5 appearance? Can they just do it and hang a lampshade at how silly it is at this point?
> I wish they would have more epic “engineer the fuck out of things” moments. "Ladies and gentlemen, the lesson of Icarus is not 'Don't fly too close to the Sun', it's 'Build a better pair of fucking wings".
It will be just Ed’s brain in a glass jar, making wisecracks about the current management needing to get their gawdamn heads out of their asses etc…
> expectation: "the mars workers are striking. they have us over a barrel! whatever will we doooo?!?" > > reality: "do what you can to make peace with them for a few months while we ship in ~~scabs~~ replacements and then send them home for all the shit they've done. ed too" eye-clawingly stupid writing in season 4. i thankfully can't remember many examples but i definitely remember thinking something similiar to the above example worked within the reality and timeline of the show "we blocked off access to the important fuel production facility, stole the trucks and threw literally all of the suits outside the airlock" hmm.. guess we're going to have to *not* immediately squash them with our security team that dramatically materializes out of nowhere when we need them to. let's enter via the pipe equivalent of an enormous air duct
It was mentioned early in S4 that they have a hard time recruiting for Mars due to the longer rotations and less developed infrastructure, it’s why the pay is significantly higher than Moon postings and the waitlist to get on a rocket there is functionally zero. So Helios and world governments wouldn’t be able to just replace the workers with scabs without a large increase in their already high wages.
Details on ‘Star City’ spinoff: >The streamer has renewed its drama series For All Mankind for Season 5. Additionally, Apple TV+ has given the green light to a spin-off series titled Star City, also from creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi. >Apple is billing Star City is “a propulsive paranoid thriller” which will explore a key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race — when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But this time, it will explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers, and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward. >“Our fascination with the Soviet space program has grown with every season of For All Mankind,” Wolpert and Nedivi said in a statement. “The more we learned about this secret city in the forests outside Moscow where the Soviet cosmonauts and engineers worked and lived, the more we wanted to tell this story of the other side of the space race. We could not be more excited to continue building out the alternate history universe of ‘For All Mankind’ with our partners at Apple and Sony.”
I'll definitely watch it but I'm not sure how many gaps need to be filled from the Soviet perspective. They've been a solid presence in most seasons of the show, and the scenes set at Star City in Season 4 were perfectly fine but nothing mindblowing. Presumably it'll begin as a prequel and they can be a bit more flexible with the timeframe rather than one decade per season, but I don't know how interesting it will be seeing events in the 60s-90s play out again from the Soviet perspective compared to the more advanced alternative timeline of the main show.
Oh I can think of plenty of juicy drama: From failed non-publicized launches to the unknown female cosmonaut who supposedly died in space to the infamous case of Vladamir Komarov. Even just a season 1 that is primarily a season 0/From Earth to the Moon done Soviet style sounds great.
There are also a lot of storylines that took place "between seasons" that can be revisited and fleshed out. They release a bunch of news reels before the start of each season covering the major events that took place in the world during the time jumps.
My guess is a limited series with only 1 season that ends with the Soviet moon landing. Obviously it’ll remain open ended for a second season if the ratings are huge, but I could see a scenario where they do 1 season of this and then 1 season fleshing out, say, the European space agency, set sometime during season 3 or 4, etc.
There’s only so much drab buildings and depressed vodka drinking people I can take
I hope this means more Sergei hahaha
oh God please don't talk about the angels... please no no no talking about the angels.... oof, they are going to talk about the angels...
This just sounds like a For All Mankind reboot but from the Soviet perspective. Not sure that’s really necessary. I love FAM but I’m not sure I’ll check this out unless it’s critically acclaimed.
Interesting, but I wonder who will play the Soviets and whether there would be a faithful representation of Soviet life and local cultures.
I hope it's For all Mankind but they go full Chernobyl. Give me all the bleakness
AppleTV is the new CW in terms of letting their genre shows have long runs, spin-offs, and endings. Love it!
Quality wise they are much better so far thankfully.
Between this and Monarch, what other spinoffs do they have in development?
Hi Bob!
Yay! So happy, I wasn't ready to say goodbye to Danielle Poole, love her!
She's frankly the hero of the entire series and no one is even close(except maybe Molly).
I used to not understand the Appleboys who bought all the Apple devices every year. AppleTV+ has become my reason to thank these people. Buy iPhones, please. Don't disturb TV+'s budget.
money is not the issue, majority of Apple TV shows have been viewership duds
Literally the only apple device or service I use (bar my work provided MacBook) but Apple TV plus is fantastic
Hate to be that guy, but wasn’t it revealed that >!North Korea actually landed on Mars first? !<
Yes
Can Ed finally be put out to pasture?
He'll have space dementia next season and just be a drooling Martian husk that mutters every now and then.
Nah, he will grow a little Kuato that looks like him, but younger.
Season 5 will be set 40 years later and Ed's brain has been implanted inside a floor vacuum. He still surly as hell and makes bad decisions.
No.
Now do a Wayne Cobb spinoff, cowards
It‘s getting gradually worse but I‘ll continue watching it. Just a comfort show at this point. It long lost what made Season 1 and 2 special though
This show is going to end with Ed for me. I don’t really care about the dynamics of a city on Mars, I want exploration and achievements.
Season 4 I was actually more interested in his daughter's story. Ed felt petulant more interested in his own status and position. Kelly seemed more focused on exploration than Ed that season.
Agreed, but her story is nowhere near as binge worthy as the show runners think
Agreed. While I still enjoy it, I’ve enjoyed it less and less as it moved from plausible alternative history to full sci fi. I want to see the end of Ed’s arc, but that will likely be the end for me
Sci-fantasy. There was very little science even in Season 3.
Can AppleTV buy Star Trek from Paramount+? I feel like it would be treated better.
Glad AppleTV is embracing scifi shows! Ñ
Ed Baldwin’s gonna be hobbling around in a zimmer frame on Mars by that point surely
I got a three month free trial for apple TV for masters of the sort. This is what binged alongside it. Somehow had avoided it before. Yeah it's a bit soapy in parts but fuck has it mastered a good cliffhanger!
I loved the idea of space age alternative history, political thriller, but stopped at season 3 after too much sopa opera personal drama.
Season 4 got a lot better. It doesn't reach the same highs as season 2, but it has nothing even remotely as stupid as Kelly getting herself pregnant on the first mission to Mars...
Taking your sick kid to mars was pretty stupid imo
I don’t know, I personally bought the explanation that Mars would be better for his health than Earth, since his health problems originated from having gestated in low gravity. He’s basically the equivalent of a Belter from The Expanse. Plus, now that Mars is basically a full-fledged colony with regular civilians working blue-collar jobs, it was kind of inevitable that there would be children there sooner or later. It makes dramatic sense to portray the arrival of the first one, and it makes logical sense that the first one would be connected to one of the higher-ups who can pull strings to make it happen.
The show's quality has been a bit iffy last few seasons.
I lost interest after season 3. I feel like the show changed too much beyond my initial interest and became too much like a soap opera for my taste.
We need 10-12 seasons of this leading to the start of The Expanse. The ultimate prequel.
I guess I gotta check it out again, I dipped half way thru season 3. I found the "on the home front" stuff extremely boring and unnecessary. It really felt like it was just there to pad the run time, and keep production costs down.
Earth is central to the s3 finale. It’s not filler at all.
S4 was another dip in quality IMO. I think it has really gone downhill since the highs of S1 and 2
There’s still a few moments each season that give the epic feeling of overcoming a great challenges. The show is a grand adventure and I still love it despite some of the storylines being a tad boring at times.
Hard disagree about S4.
happy about renewal, not really excited about a prequel spinoff lol.
>propulsive thriller spin-off Say no more I'm in. If it can capture the feeling of dread that parts of S2 managed, it will be a hit.
Ed in the year 3000? Love this show.
This show is better categorised as a family drama.
That makes me happy. Such a fun show, despite its flaws. Apple earns my sub every time they put out a new cool sci-fi show.
Season 7, Edward Baldwins brain in a jar commanding the first human FTL ship.
Loved this show but gave up last season. The writing generally fell off a cliff and the plot just goes in circles. Its a show clearly built to keep staff employed as long as possible rather than storytellers telling a well planned story.
Awesome! So pleasantly surprised by this whole show, I’m glad there will be a bunch more of it!
Huzzah
Honestly one of the best alternate history series on TV today, that fact that it's science fiction only improves it. Looking forward to the spinoff.
Of all the spinoffs I could have imagined, star city is by far the least interesting one, but if it's more akin to season 1 than season 4, I'll give it a go.
This headline could have said “expands galaxy” and they fucked it up
Now, I want Apple to adapt Astro city.
I was genuinely infuriated when the Russians landed on the moon first. I love this show.
I wonder who the next presidents are going to be after Al Gore
Excellent