Bannon

Different Sol, as well...

I want to emphasize again what a daunting task it was to produce a really good resolution to this hugely complex story in 120 minutes, after a 13 year break. If those hoopleheaded Emmy voters don't find a way to recognize Milch in his twilight, and this cast, well, they suck cock by choice!

I think he is pretty accurate, and now that I think about it, I know that people suffering from radiation exposure are isolated because their immune systems are compromised, not because they will irradiate others. What I liked about the show was the depiction of bureaucratic incompetence, and a lot of that was spot-on, but the Forbes piece was right; in the Soviet Union of 1986, a single bureaucrat would not be threatening subordinates with summary execution. Kind of disappointing that Mazin took such dramatic license, because I don't think it was necessary.

So I did some reading, and it appears that original cost cutting move was using uranium which was not as highly enriched, which meant putting graphite tips on the control rods was more attractive, since using the graphite with less enriched uranium in particular provides the operators with more detailed control of the reaction. However, it is then critical that the control rods, with the graphite on the tips, never be completely withdrawn from the core, because when they are, that space gets filled with water, and when the tips are eventually reinserted, that water is quickly displaced, and (for a lot of interconnected reasons which I cannot competently explain) puts you on the path to disaster. Now, the reactor designers were aware of this, and put in controls that would prevent the removal of the graphite tips from the core, but the reason for these controls was never disclosed to the operators (I think this was depicted in the show), so the operators saw these controls as a mere annoyance that made their jobs harder, so they disabled the controls. To say this stuff, technically and bureaucratically, is complicated, is an extreme understatement. It gives some insight as to how Boeing's current 737 max catastrophe came about.

The way Legasov was perhaps most damnably implicated was when he was trying to convince people of how bad the situation was, and he was challenged with the question of how it was possible for that type of reactor to explode in the manner he was describing, and he stated, falsely, that he did not have one. If he had said from the start, as he knew, that the graphite tips on the control rods were a possible source of disaster, the emergency response may have been much more timely and effective.

I would like an explanation of why putting graphite tips on control rods lowers costs. This was a terrific miniseries, and it is simply an inattentive viewer who claims that all the blame is put on one man; for a professional critic to make that claim is inexcusable. The weakest element of the show to me was the subplot of the pet slaughterers. I mean, it is an unpleasant task, but I was borderline offended when the directer implied, in the behind the scenes segment, that killing irradiated dogs and cats was emotionally on par with being in sustained combat in war, and I truly was offended that he claimed that all killing in war was pointless. Really dumb. My sometimes too dark sense of humor made me laugh out loud at all the bureaucratic idiocies depicted, because I've witnessed similar things, just fortunately not with the fate of a continent at stake. "The good meter is locked in the safe"....HA!

In particular, if there had been time, I would have enjoyed hearing more conversation between Seth and Martha. In the show, I really enjoyed how it was depicted that two imperfect, but fundamentally decent people overcame tremendous obstacles in building a very loving and beautiful relationship.

Well, look, the original story outline obviously had Doc dying of tuberculosis, and when those seasons disappeared, to be replaced by a two hour movie depicting a 13 year interval from the beginning of the story, the writers had to make a choice; do we bring back a terrific, and known, character like Doc, or do we spend some of the 120 minutes developing new characters? I think the reasonable choice was made to only have one new character, and do some hand waving about a misdiagnosis of Doc's condition, or miraculous recovery. With regard to Jane, as much as I loved the actor, character, and show, I always felt they didn't quite nail how her alcoholism affected her; just a little too over the top. If I had a conversation with a healthy David Milch, I'd ask him about his backstory about Jane. In the 1st episode, Wild Bill references her ability to mete out violence to those that displease her, but then we later get scenes where she is frozen in terror by the mere sight of Al or Cy. Now, obviously this is psychologically explainable, especially today, with our insights about how past trauma can produce contradictory behavior. This is such a rich, hugely complex world that Milch created, that it's hard to fully explore everything. I appreciated Jane showing what Hickock referred to in the first five minutes of the show, 15 years ago. Milch, and whomever assisted him, faced a tremendously difficult writing task here; how do we pull this very complex world back together, showing an interval of 10-plus years, and get a resolution in 120 minutes? Would I have liked it if they had 3 times as many minutes? Yes, but I think the end result was really good, given the task.

A statehood celebration really is a big fuckin' deal, and one of the principal owners of the local fuckin' bank would see, as would the hoopleheads, travellin' to the celebration as normal fuckin' civic responsibility.

Unless she being carried on the back of a running Gendry, which means, according to "Beyond the Wall", that the distance might be traversed in approximately the same time it takes to drive from Denver to Kansas City on I-70, in a Corvette doing 95 the entire way.

Halfway through season one; my fourth viewing of this show. My opinion is unchanged: it is the best written dialogue of any television show ever, and 2nd place is so far behind that it can only barely be seen.

You'd have to put some effort in to resolve Bran's story, along with some other characters', and these two stiffs weren't interested in extending themselves, so the story just kept getting more disjointed, until we end up in up in Exposition-palooza, The Happiest Place on Earth for Lazy-Ass writers. Ugh. The more I think about the rich opportunities left on the shelf that these two bozos had available to them, the more irritated I become with what was served up to the audience.

It was again due to my misplaced optimism that I thought these writers would do something interesting with the rich religious cultures that Martin supplied them. We have followers of the Lord of Light who play a major role, after some hideously bloody missteps, in the defeat of the Night King. We have a student of the Many Faced God who actually deals the NK the death blow. The arrogantly fanatical adherents to the religion of Southern Westeros play a huge role in the dissolution of the Houses of Barratheon, Tyrell, and Lannister, and the travails of Kings Landing. Brienne specifically sees her duty through the prism of that religion. Bran, of course, is of the North, with its older, more nature-based religious traditions, and it seemed to me, as the repository of all historical knowlege of Westeros, he could be someone who could be a religous/cultural figure who helps draw together these diverse elements of this society, and acts as a counterbalance to explicitly secular political powers. Ya' know, like a complex human society. This, however, requires writers who aren't phoning it in, as they begin planning their next payday. Oh well....

It really is as if these guys never sat down with Martin at the outset, to work out how all these supernatural or incredible powers would fit in with human behavior in a manner which would allow for a story with human character development which was compelling, and not a disjointed mess. When you make George Lucas look like, by comparison, a master of psychological realism akin to Dostoyevsky, you really need to try harder.

Yeah, that last scene, where Bran drives home the fact that he could have prevented Cersei, via Euron, successfully mounting an attack on Dany's fleet sailing south, and then Bran baldly states that this was the outcome he sought all along, means that Bran is essentially Stalin, with unsurpassed intelligence gathering abilities. Before he's done, he'll likely be denouncing the hoarders, wreckers, and Kulaks, and starving the population of Westeros into submission. Jon/Trotsky, in exile, will get an ice axe driven into his skull, and won't get ressurrected this time.