S04.E04: A House Divided

[paulvdb]

Quote

An accident on Mars strains relationships, while Miles embarks on a risky venture.

Premiere date: December 1, 2023

[PurpleTentacle]

I'm calling so much bullshit on the reason that asteroid mission failed. NASA has never worked in imperial units. So they would have never sent the specifications in pound-feet.

There have been conversion errors that lead to mission failures, specifically to NASA ramming a probe into the Mars surface, instead of landing it, but it was because NASA was using metric and the american companies manufacturing parts were not. Since then NASA requires all companies who work with them to use metric.

I don't know why, but stuff like this really grinds my gears.

Edited December 1, 2023 by PurpleTentacle

[PurpleTentacle]

Look I'm not an expert, but these consequences the Helios dude suffered seem ridiculous. Even if the suit completely lost preassure immediatly, which it did not look like, he would have gone from 1 bar to 6 millibar. That can make your lungs rupture, if they are full, which is a concern, but it doesn't seem to have been what happened here. It won't give you the super-bends, as they stated here. For comparison 2 bar is only 10 meters down in water. That is about the depth the bends can occur, but it is only the threshold and the case will be pretty minor and can be resolved with a hyperbaric chamber pretty fast, more like hours than days. (Edit: Actually thinking about it, in this case you wouldn't even need a hyperbaric chamber, you'd just need to bring him inside. In diving accidents you use the chamber to put the diver back on the preassure where they started [let's say 5 bar] and then slowly bring them back down to 1 bar. But this dude started at 1 bar and he lives at 1 bar, so putting him back into the habitat should be all that's needed. None of this makes any sense!) They act like he went from 10 bar to 0 or something.

That being said, Svetlana assaulted a guy and should stand trial, as long as it's fair. So India was a good solution once it was proposed. The original punishment of 60 days suspension was an insult and I understand why the helios workers would have been mad. Glad Danielle saw the light there, with some preassure from earth. Of course Ed was completely unreasonable as always. Danielle is so right about him always doing this bullshit and getting people killed or at least into serious danger.

I did notice thought that they still wouldn't say what exactly happened to Danny.

I feel like Irina Morozova could have been honest(ish) with Margo. "He will stand trial, but not for his fuckup, but the attempted cover up." That seems reasonable and would make sure that you aren't caught in a lie if Margo finds out. You don't have to exactly tell that the outcome is a foregone conclusion and that it's off to the gulag for life for him.

Also "NASA never appreciated you"? Margo was the damn director of NASA. How much more appreciation can you get? That has to have been the worst attempt at appealing to somebodies ego I've ever seen.

Edited December 1, 2023 by PurpleTentacle

[marinw]

Miles continues to be an idiot. I thought he was a goner before remembering that the gravity on Mars is lighter than Earth. Although it does require a suspension of disbelief to accept that he escaped serious injury. Good thing Sam was there to save his stupid ass. It does seem sloppy that no one noticed a rover went missing. 

I’m predicting that the series will end with Ed and/or Danielle commanding the first trip to Proxima Centuri when Ed is 100.

Why smuggle porn when you have the internet? I would spend my Mars money on chocolate or decent coffee. You could get lots of porn on the web even in our 00’s. Or so I’ve been told.

Edited December 2, 2023 by marinw

[Haleth]

Miles is an idiot.  Ed is a jerk.  Margo needs to go to India.

[PurpleTentacle]

13 hours ago, marinw said:

Miles continues to be an idiot. I thought he was a goner before remembering that the gravity on Mars is lighter than Earth. Although it does require a suspension of disbelief to accept that he escaped serious injury. Good thing Sam was there to save his stupid ass. It does seem sloppy that no one noticed a rover went missing. 

They said earlier in the episode that she had somehow acess to the rovers. Not sure how that wouldn't be obvious though.

13 hours ago, marinw said:

I’m predicting that the series will end with Ed and/or Danielle commanding the first trip to Proxima Centuri when Ed is 100.

While that would be fun. That doesn't seem to be within FAM technology. Maybe when Kelly is 100.

13 hours ago, marinw said:

Why smuggle porn when you have the internet? I would spend my Mars money on chocolate or decent coffee. You could get lots of porn on the web even in our 00’s. Or so I’ve been told.

They don't have the internet. They can get messages and TV from earth and send messages back, but that's it. Mars is between 3 and 22 light-minutes away from earth (depending where the planets currently are in their orbits). The internet works by constantly sending request and recieve packets back and forth. That's not possible with that kind of delay.

The only way they could get internet porn is if they asked somebody on earth to send it in their video-messages. Not sure if the dude wants to tell his family about his "weird requests".

[meep.meep]

On 12/1/2023 at 4:32 PM, marinw said:

Why smuggle porn when you have the internet? I would spend my Mars money on chocolate or decent coffee. You could get lots of porn on the web even in our 00’s. Or so I’ve been told.

And if they do have internet, it's on a government node where they continually sweep for porn and gambling.  

[PurpleTentacle]

11 minutes ago, meep.meep said:

And if they do have internet, it's on a government node where they continually sweep for porn and gambling.  

There is just no physical way to connect directly to the internet. A miminum 3 minute delay makes it unworkable.

They could have a server on Mars, that mirrors certain sites, but that seems like a waste of bandwidth on their only satelite to begin with and if they did, they wouldn't waste bandwidth on mirroring porn sites. No need to sweep for anything, it just wouldn't be there.

[marinw]

2 minutes ago, PurpleTentacle said:

There is just no physical way to connect directly to the internet. A miminum 3 minute delay makes it unworkable

Yet once the satellite was fixed they were able to stream a whole soccer game, although obviously not in real time. I’m assuming Happy Valley has a good DVD collection for movies and TV. Danielle would have ordered them after her own experience rewatching the same few TV shoes on the Moon back is season one.

[PurpleTentacle]

13 minutes ago, marinw said:

Yet once the satellite was fixed they were able to stream a whole soccer game, although obviously not in real time.

What does that have to do with the internet?

[marinw]

So the satellite carries both email, vid-mails and TV Signals, so the game was broadcast that way?

On the topic of TV, I want to know more about what the popular TV Shows of the FAM 00's would look like. There is already a reality show called Moon Miners, which makes sense. 

As an example, my favorite show of the 00's was 24. In the FAMverse, would this show had be as popular without the events of 9/11, or would 24 had found another way to tap into the mood of the era? Would Jack Bauer spend the day thwarting a terrorist attack on the Moon? Because I would watch that show.

Edited December 4, 2023 by marinw

[marinw]

Facsinating: https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/for-all-mankind-star-trek-timeline-uhura-danielle-poole

[PurpleTentacle]

On 12/4/2023 at 3:11 PM, marinw said:

So the satellite carries both email, vid-mails and TV Signals, so the game was broadcast that way?

It wouldn't be standard e-mail protocol, since that also depends on getting an answer from the server you are sending it to.

This would all have to be custom protocols, that are fine with never getting an answer or an answer like half an hour later. In essence, the speed of light is really fast, but on a cosmic scale, really, really slow. So anything realtime is just out and anybody designing systems for communication between earth and mars just has to deal with it. (until we can create stable wormholes, though those would break causality, so maybe they are only theoretically possible and not actually, it's a whole can of worms.)

I don't think it's technically a broadcast or even a multicast, if you only send it to one reciever, but you could send a video stream through the satelite. It just wouldn't work like our internet streaming, where there is a bunch of packets flying back and forth. the packets would only go in one direction and if some are lost, they are lost. Also of course you couldn't switch channels, unless all channels would be beamed up to you, which would probably be too much bandwidth. So I assume Ed had to tell, whoever is responsible on earth for that, in advance what they wanted to watch.

On 12/4/2023 at 3:11 PM, marinw said:

As an example, my favorite show of the 00's was 24. In the FAMverse, would this show had be as popular without the events of 9/11, or would 24 had found another way to tap into the mood of the era? Would Jack Bauer spend the day thwarting a terrorist attack on the Moon? Because I would watch that show.

The domestic terrorism from last season might have had a similar effect on TV. Jack Bauer might hunt a few less brown people in that show, but that would probably be the main difference.

[Joimiaroxeu]

It's funny how much the Roscosmos building inside looked like the one Margo worked in back in the US. Bureaucrats gonna bureaucrat.

The Cold War redevelops on Mars. Yikes.

Not a great imitation of Al Gore's voice. Wonder if it was AI-generated?

When he was out on the surface Miles almost looked like the robot from Lost in Space, the OG version, lol.

Guess Peloton not a thing in this timeline. I would've expected the head of NASA to have a much better exercise bike.

Ed has become quite the cranky old astronaut. He may not survive his undying support of Svetlana though.

WTH happened to Danny and why is it verboten to speak of?

Looks like that Roscosmos guy Margo ratted out met a worse fate than only having to find a new job. Not sure why she was acting weird about it. She should know the score by now.

[ahpny]

On 12/11/2023 at 8:26 AM, Joimiaroxeu said:

Looks like that Roscosmos guy Margo ratted out met a worse fate than only having to find a new job. Not sure why she was acting weird about it. She should know the score by now.

Margo didn't rat him out. She only pointed out the error, not who made it. He took responsibility for that himself even though he personally didn't seem to have made that mistake but was in charge of who did (and he seemed to know of it too). Moreover, what alternative did Margo have? Should she have said "I can't find the mistake" to save some nameless Soviet bureaucrat she'd never met? What would happen to Margo if she did that?

Margo was understandably weirded out by the whole affair because she was still the direct cause of the Soviet engineer's misfortune, even if she didn't know who he was, or what role he played in screwing up the English to metric translation. Moreover, in response to Margo's question about what would happen to him, the head Roscosmos gal promised Margo that his employment would simply "change." That appears to have been at best a euphemism (it's literally correct that going from "chief engineer" to "gulag prisoner" is a "change in employment"), but it more accurately seems to have been a flagrant lie. Margo was seemingly also upset because the one Roscosmos friend she seems to have made (who informed her of the KGB's kidnapping of the engineer) would drop Margo in a minute if that friend learned of Margo's involvement.

Margo's demeanor appropriately displayed a mixture of fear, guilt and hopelessness.

Edited March 13 by ahpny

[Joimiaroxeu]

7 hours ago, ahpny said:

Margo didn't rat him out. She only pointed out the error, not who made it. He took responsibility for that himself even though he personally didn't seem to have made that mistate but was in charge of who did (and he seemed to know of it too). Moreover, what alternative did Margo have? Should she have said "I can't find the mistake" to save some nameless Soviet bureaucrat she'd never met? What would happen to Margo is she did that?

Margo was understandably weirded out by the whole affair because she was still the direct cause of the Soviet engineer's misfortune, even if she didn't know who he was, or what role he played in screwing up the English to metric translation. Moreover, in response to Margo's question about what would happen to him, the head Roscosmos gal promised Margo that his employment would simply "change." That appears to have been at best a euphemism (it's literally correct that going from "chief engineer" to "gulag prisoner" is a "change in employment"), but it more accurately seems to have been a flagrant lie. Margo was seemingly also upset because the one Roscosmos friend she seems to have made (who informed her of the KGB's kidnapping of the engineer) would drop Margo in a minute if that friend learned of Margo's involvement.

Margo's demeanor appropriately displayed a mixture of fear, guilt and hopelessness.

I interpreted what happened differently, and I stand by my interpretation. Mileage varies.

[paramitch]

This show does love its creepy relationships and icky double standards.

I was gagging at Ed and Svetlana and their "final kiss" -- gahhh. I could not care less about them. She's at least 25 years younger than he is, and it's just gross, a trope, and I'm so tired of seeing it. He's also an asshole, and for the entire history of the show has basically been a conceited self-involved jerk with  only rare intermittent moments of spectacular heroism.

Is it worth it? Not for me. I can't believe we lost his wife and still have to deal with his crotchety ass.

And the double standard really bothers me. We certainly aren't going to see some hot young Russian engineer start gazing at 60something Margo, for instance. More's the pity.

I still don't blame Margo for her situation -- a classic "guilt by degrees" situation in which she was truly trying to save lives, little bit by little bit ("for all mankind") and got pulled into an ugly situation by the Russians.

Speaking only in fiction-watching terms, I'm kind of indignant on poor Margo's behalf. I mean, they destroy her life and then they don't even bother to be nice to her? Or use her proven intelligence or abilities? Or let her access a good dentist or immunologist? What's up with that?!

What did crack me up in this episode was realizing that Margo's wardrobe didn't change all that much EVEN IN RUSSIA because she has never really been about trappings/presentation and is much more inward-focused.

I know I am supposed to care about Miles but he's such a doofus it's difficult to. He is in an enclosed situation; a Martian mousetrap. I don't see how this isn't going to lead to terrible things for him. 

This season, the show just feels even more cartoonish than usual. Not in a bad way... but... it's just that the opening credits are all majestic and thoughtful, all dreamlike about space and dreams and humanity -- and then the result is -- this show that is so focused on the soap opera stuff, to an almost hilarious degree.

I mean, judging by the credits, this could be "From the Earth to the Moon." But when you watch it, it's any standard drama transplanted to alterna-Moon and alterna-Mars.

I like the show, but I'm embarrassed that I'm partly hatewatching at this point (I still can't forgive them for the terrible science of season 2).

 

Edited May 1 by paramitch
fixed missing word