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They need the brother's army to have a chance against Ishido. But since the brother has already aligned himself with Ishido, it sounds like checkmate unless deus ex machina and there's another hidden army which is loyal to Toronaga. Or maybe an even bigger earthquake in Osaka. Even if Blackthorne is the greatest naval tactician, how is one ship going to go up against thousands, many of them wielding arrows and probably some other range weapons? His ship would need an army to keep the enemy forces engaged so it can freely lob cannonballs at strategic targets. Cannon is not for taking out thousands of soldiers on foot, despite the scene earlier in the series, unless the soldiers are hiding in a fort and the cannon is mostly to knock out the fortifications.

Well they were killing people or their lackeys on earth were killing people, killing scientists to prevent them from doing certain research, etc. But considering how we're dealing with climate change, you wouldn't expect such urgency as depicted on the show. They would spend some money to try to organize a defense, to research the aliens more. Wade though seems to be getting a blank check -- not just money but powers -- to deploy whatever military assets he needs. Would all the global powers give one man all that power though? They don't explain his background either. You get some inkling of Benedict Wong's life but nothing on Wade, why he's so committed to the cause, even at personal sacrifice to himself -- I forget in which episode he announces his plans to be leading this planetary defense effort for a long time.

Never watched the RH shows. Apparently they wanted to feature her. She could say and do all those things but it's a choice to decide to air a lot of it rather than cut out her scenes. Also, the preference sheets, they seem to have professional headshots, particularly of Jill. Particularly from like 20 years ago or something when they were considerably younger. Maybe for TV, they put head shots on preference sheets so we can associate the faces with the names but most of the time I don't pay attention to their names until they make waves. It sounds like Jill's like this on the RH shows she's on but they must have prodded her to just comment and much as possible on her ideas of how services should be and so on. Presumably she wanted to enjoy the scenery, the water sports and the food but it seems like she wants to do a job as well. Why is Kerry blaming Anthony. He was there when the primary kind of yielded to Jill and let her arrange everything with Anthony. If he objected to them catering too much to Jill, he should have told them that right then. Fake drama to make the crew look bad. They definitely created this situation.

Some injection of reality, though Elena thinks if the people see her, they will stop and not overthrow her. Will Tracy cites what Ceausescu was doing up to the last years but he says he reads about several authoritarians so Elena is kind of a mashup. Not too much dark humor in this one, just getting real as her dismissive but delusional view of her country and her people catches up to her.

Larry feeling a certain way about a fuck buddy from back in the day who has transitioned from Kendra to Ken. Also the masseuse is second Asian this season with that heavy accent. His views of Asians ability to speak English is stuck in the ‘80s if not older. If she’s Vietnamese, most of them would be second generation or later. They escaped Vietnam in the ‘70s so most of them the age of the masseuse would have been born and raised in the US. I can’t recall if he had other ethnicities with stereotypical accents, like the Palestinian Chicken episode. Episode was fun otherwise and it wasn’t a big parade of celebrity guest stars like other episodes this season. Also you don’t get Covid from sharing the same glass of water, but instead all the time LD and Bruce spent talking to each other close to each other. If they did infect each other. But they show Les getting on the bus and them shouting at each other in that bus.

Well supposedly they didn't know until like 60 years after Ye made first contact that humans are deceptive. They decide then and there that they can't live with liars. Judgey much? They ghosted Evans and then contacted Tatiana, who apparently is some super assassin, getting the jump on the secret agent type who was trailing Ye to China. They decided to taunt Evans on that jet, made him scared for his life. They have more human qualities than they like to admit.

They might have the brain as an amuse-bouche, a taste of what feast they have in store when they arrive on earth.

I think it makes sense for Ye to be religious. She made a leap as a young woman to invite them, offering to help them. She had a reason to have a chip against the world. And to carry that on for decades, through major life events like moving to the UK, having a child, you have to have some faith to sustain all of it. Evans wanted to save birds. I don't know why he'd think the San Ti would care about his concerns, which is roughly the environment? But apparently he inherited an oil kingdom and continued to let it make a fortune for him so that he could set up that tanker with all those people inside and a big dish to communicate with the "Lord." I don't know, that's a weird trajectory. Why did they become true believers. Would like to see a back story for Tatiana, the warrior for the cause, who's killed how many? What made her do the things she's doing now? I don't want it to become Lost, which spammed you with back stories just to keep the show going for as many seasons as they could for $$$. But they're trying to do some character development, why are these traitors so hardcore? What made them true believers? Because the San Ti might be like that mini series from the '80s, where the aliens promised to give humans cures and technology but it turned out they just wanted to feed on them. Did the San Ti make promises to make the world better? That would probably be deception, which they're not capable of doing, right?

I can see how they made Tatiana disappear from the security cameras, which will be revealed a couple of episodes later. But why didn't the Benedict Wong character not see Tatiana pressing Jack against the wall to floor windows?

Everyone was horrible. She did try to get him promoted but her wielding the knife and making him whimper wasn’t great either. She also made up the stalking story but her boss didn’t care as long as she made money for the firm. They probably knew they were a couple but didn’t care as long as she produced. It’s a cutthroat world and she learned to be cutthroat herself. Was she going to keep hiding their relationship? It looked that way until he couldn’t take not getting promoted and acted like a prick. Sure it could be seen as gender politics, male privilege and fragility. Or they’re just all awful people, willing to do anything for money.

Jonathan Haidt says teens started having emotional problems such as depression in 2010, which is when the smart phone became common. So he supports the bill DeSantis signed, banning social media until teens are at least 14. And flip phones until the same or similar age. But when did giving smart phones to kids, including kids under 10 years old, become a common thing? I was under the impression that parents were giving hand me down phones as they upgraded themselves. In any event, the iPhone came out in 2007. It didn't really take off, have big volumes, until iPhone 4 which was announced in June 2010 and started shipping in fall of 2010. Were parents giving their kids the newest, state of the art phones in 2010? I'm guessing it became more widespread, with kids having phones which had reasonable performance, not antiquated, more around 2015. Does that time line match when kids supposedly got more depressed? I agree that social media have made kids depressed, like girls with body issues. But it's not a new thing, weren't there depressed kids or girls with poor self-esteem and body-image issues before the 2010s? Now maybe Haidt would say those issues existed but the problem exploded in the last 10-15 years. I quickly Googled his name. It appears he's written books, given talks and interviews so it's his thing now, even though his day job is a professor at NYU business school.

I can kind of see long hours on the yacht, away fro restaurants and cafes, could be boring for the guests. They get good food and get to drink as much as possible. But it could still leave several hours and rather than turn in, guests may want some kind of entertainment. So while I think the shows and theme parties are mostly driven by producers to make the crew do things, guests would want to be entertained. But I doubt they're saying "put on this theme party for me." It's more like "surprise me" or they're given a list of possible choices and they choose. They could give them some board games and let them fend for themselves. Or just offer tender service to the coast so they could go to some town. Producers would want the crew to entertain them but it's the fiction about the guests asking for these things that viewers roll their eyes at.

Lot of things to nitpick and question but I found myself wanting to keep watching and finish it. I haven’t seen any other movies or shows about alien invasion. But the human reaction to the existential threat is interesting. Yeah if we extrapolate how we’ve responded to things like climate change and the pandemic, it’s probably true that at least half the population would deny it’s a problem or just go about business as usual, unwilling to give up comforts or certain lifestyles. Here the governments all come together and make all science research about defeating the invasion. Wade has almost unlimited resources — well they only got 300 instead of 1000 nuclear bombs. Auggie and Saul are the only ones who aren’t willing to change their lives or ethics in Auggie’s case for this cause, even though the aliens got their friend Jack killed. But they just showed how easily they could have killed Wade. So the San Ti may not deceive but they will mindfuck.

That must be from the book? All these Oxford classmates are all involved in the PDC but didn’t Chinese Mom recruit or make sure they all came to Oxford? So maybe the San Ti chose them, got them into Oxford. I’d guess the San Ti go and retrieve the probe anyways. Presumably that is why they devoted so much time to Will on the show. Only way any of these character last until end of the show would be they freeze themselves? Chinese Mom gets to enjoy one last sunset at the top of the mountain with the radar dish. Tatiana has been sent there to kill her. Why? Well they let her go back to China instead of killing her before she left the UK. They must have hacked her flight reservations and sent Tatiana ahead because they can’t read minds right? Maybe the books don’t have these inconsistencies or what looks like inconsistencies.

Loved it, you can’t get enough of Italy and Tuscany, though the $800 a night hotel in Monteverdi is close to the border with Umbria. They didn’t drive him from Florence to Monteverdi in that little tuk tuk thing and all the way up that hill. How much do you pay truffle hunters to go hunting? BTW, it’s a serious business with some dogs being poisoned. Bending down to pick grapes would be serious work, especially for an older person, as fit and healthy as Eugene is. The jousting must also be costly, to feed and house those horses. So bespoke. But you can enjoy the beauty of the Val’Orcia without these customized activities that they arranged for TV.

Snookie started online and the. Went brick and mortar? So any level of TV fame and you can make money from peddling tacky junk, like Kristin Cavalieri trying to get her name out there. Vinny wants to refrain from porn in case he meets his “gal” soon. Pauly is gossiping to the AC repair man. Does he not talk to Nikki any more? And a neck pillow? He’s flying commercial? He’s not flying first class? Guido and country music culture would seem to be a bad fit. Why would people going to Nashville buy JS paraphernalia. But this whole QVC and sales of reality show merchandise are baffling. Anyone regularly on TV can get millions of followers and use that to hawk crap. Like Craig from Southern Charm with the dumb pillows. The appetite for kitschy Americana is immense. Speaking of kitsch, they think the jacket Mike was wearing with the tassels hanging from the sleeves was stylish? Maybe guido and country western does mix. They go to an old movie theater whose name is spelled like one of the senators from Arizona, not the former astronaut guy, the other one. Semi-literacy is cool! Deena and Nicole should get higher salaries than the rest because they’re willing to get loaded and give them more footage of drunken antics than the rest of them. Sammi cutting Vinny down to size was good. So much buildup for the arrivals. What made JS work was how spontaneous the cast was, so that it came across as unscripted compared to other reality shows.

Yeah it kind of feels like it went from this fast-moving plot about alien invasion and the conspiracy to enable their conquest to this very emotional story about the characters, even Ye Wenjie at the end trying to reach out to the San-ti, like they're her lifelong best friend. Auggie is angry that her nano fibers killed a thousand people, Will has this unrequited love story thing and you have the melancholic soundtrack. Everyone is up in their feelings about this. A lot of smoking, a lot of drinking, some puking, sobbing. These are the people who are going to use their brainpower to save the planet? Maybe Wade being a bastard is what they need.

Beach kind of reinforces it as a vacation. Especially if they have to make compromises to adapt to a smaller home. Both parents are working remotely on CA time. So it does seem like an adventure, not a serious move.

Yeah I'm curious how sophons changed the sky. They work at the sub-atomic level! So they can change other matter quickly and disrupt all electronics all over the world? That is how they scrubbed Tatiana from surveillance videos, you know super sub-atomic particle just changing pixels or getting into Auggie's optic nerve to impose the countdown? But there are only two of them yet they can pretty much paralyze the earth, like say take out the power grid of whole continents which would pretty much lead to them spiraling from a modern civilized society into barbarism? Davos was a boss but Wade is a bossy arsehole. Maybe that's what the earth needs but you would think regardless of which secret UK agency he works for, organizing a planetary defense would be way above his pay grade. You'd think it would be some American who eventually is put in charge. But he didn't trust Raj or Auggie, told each of them to double check the other's work. So nano fibers are apparently virtually invisible except they have infinite tensile strength? It's sub-molecular! I'm guessing they find a way to cure the cancer of the one guy? Or maybe after this season, the cast turns over except they somehow find a way to get a couple of characters to be around way beyond their lifespans to still lead the cause. Saul is suppose to be a brilliant scientist but every other scene he's in, he's hitting the weed. Have we seen him do any science? Speaking of gender politics, yeah the brilliant scientists and engineers are women. Wade questioned whether Auggie would be ruthless enough to kill to accomplish the mission. So Jin will be tested? But just as Wade wouldn't be leading the effort, I would think they'd call in all the best scientists, many of them much older and probably male, instead of relying just on Jin to come up with some science-based strategies. She's a theoretician on multi-dimensional worlds yet she's going to problem-solve a technological deficit?

Maybe he thinks he can return with reinforcements and make Japan trade with the English. But before they give him more money, he's got to show that it's going to be worth another expedition. This time probably for military conquest.

Traitor to the human species. in the first episode she was sneaking kisses with the guy in the labor camp, maybe you hoped she could build a life after the way her parents were killed and she was sent to do hard labor. But then she welcomes the alien overlords, leans into betraying the human race. She finds a partner but unfortunately the partner also wants to help aliens exterminate the human race. Presumably as long as they subjugate and kill all humans except the cult members. She has a child, who grows into a brilliant scientist in her own right but the daughter must not have gotten with the program so she had to go? The motivation of Chinese Mom — Tiger Mom from Hell — and other cult members don’t make sense either. Sure people believe In a cause greater than themselves. They’re usually religious fanatics but at least they are being enticed by the carrot of eternal life or rewards in the afterlife. These cultists OTOH are smug and think aliens will improve life on earth, though they themselves will be long gone. For all they know, the aliens are not humanoid as represented in the game but some kind of reptilian predators which are coming to feed on humans. Plus Ye Wenjie represents all humans, inviting them? They’d be easy to ignore and bat away like flies except they have alien technology as well as belief that the lord will protect them. Though Tatiana uses a gun and survives being shot, maybe the aliens didn’t tell them how to make weapons. Real time communications with the lord shouldn’t be possible, unless again they sent some blueprints for alien communicator but it looked like Jonathan Pryce was using an old-school analog microphone. But the aliens don’t believe in subterfuge or deception and they think ultimately they can’t trust or coexist with humans who are capable of deception. The aliens don’t hide that they’re sending an invasion force, intent on conquest.

That’s my thought too. Not only did civilization develop, they have much more advanced tech than human beings, despite an unstable environment or solar system. They’re capable of interstellar travel yet if not for Ye Wenjie inviting them, they wouldn’t have sent ships exploring other possible homes?

China in the ‘60s was minimally industrialized I believe. They would need help from the West to build factories, learn to manufacture at scale, which wouldn’t occur until like the late ‘80s or early ‘90s. So it seems unlikely that they had an advanced SETI project, so shortly after they purged all the intellectuals, any that they suspected would believe in Western ideas, including science. Let’s say Ye Wenjie turned out to be a world class scientist and engineer. Even with blueprints from the aliens, they wouldn’t be able to fabricate those HMDs nor make the skies blink nor make an assassin who is human not appear on video cameras. Sure maybe an AI-like device to photoshop every frame of a video, in real time, maybe. Or make Auggie see the countdown based on her shutting down her project. They could see what she was doing at all times and know about her research to consider her work a threat? These sci fi devices make for striking images and scenes. But something humans, even those in communications with an advanced alien species, can pull off in the current time? Not plausible.

I haven’t read the books but the description of this story made it sound like a cool, soulless tale or one that fails to connect emotionally, kind of like Westworld. It’s striking how much the short opening credits look and sound like the WW opening credits, probably done by the same people perhaps. The scene of the young daughter witnessing her father’s execution is right out of Game of Thrones. I thought cool, this could be the Arya Stark moment. But this character would turn into a vengeful, smug, misanthropic figure, not eliciting the sympathy that Arya does, because the viewers witness her journey over several seasons whereas in this, Ye Wenjie revels herself as just as embittered and awful as the young woman who murdered her father. Traitors to their own species, that’s quite the ambitious goal for evil villains.

They must not have been allowed to switch even though there were other water taxis that teams arriving at the dock after them were allowed to take. That could have really hurt them but fortunately the cousin dudes went back and forth between the detours and burned a lot of precious time. Yeah 60 floors is crazy. I just stayed at a skyscraper, the 54th floor. Nobody was taking stairs, everyone was queueing up for the elevators. Even the young racers were bent over by the time they reached the top. That dish was weird, it was like a plate of everything including the fried plantains as desert? Probably tasted good but they were different tastes piled together. The abuelas were enthusiastic when they went thumbs up. Coffee beans task was cool. The male nurse probably did it the fastest. I thought they had to roast the beans as well but no, just husk them through the grinder.