Right now it feels like you have 100 new TV shows every week.
And most of the interesting ones are average (at best) and you forget about them after you finish it.
This one certainly is my highlight of the year (besides "The Last of Us") even though I could only see the 3 episodes that are available so far.
One new episode each Friday.
The setting is excellent, the story is very suspenseful, actors like Rebecca Ferguson(!) and Tim Robbins(!), and an awesome score by Atli Örvarsson.
And the show has a score of 8,4 on IMDB... if you care about it.
Check the storyline there: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14688458/
Based on Maskripper's recommendation, I am interested to see what this is all about, and how it differs (or hearkens back to)
the many sci-fi tales of post-apocalyptic underground civilizations (and those who escape from them) which have been done in the past.
[Offhand, I can think of Logan's Run, THX-1138, Cleopatra 2525, City of Ember, and the 'bunker' from The 100, but I'm sure there are many more.
I imagine The Island kind of counts, too, right? I think it was underground.)
Will check out the first three episodes tonight if they are accessible, and report back in this post.
Update: Report on first 3 episodes
Having never even watched Lost even once (that's correct. I did not have access to it at the time it was popular, and frankly the whole story about a bunch of people trapped on an island just didn't appeal to me anyway), I can't reference it.
But what I can say is that this series is incredibly trope-laden (one of the main characters is named JULIA!) and that there is nothing original about it.
The cast also reflect the exact same "correctness" you see in the past few years of streaming productions (and this is true of Apple+ shows as well) where there are women running major aspects of harsh post-apocalyptic society that you would not even expect them to run in plain old 2023, and possessing all sorts of superhuman upper body strength you would simply not expect them to have.
You look at the 10,000 people who live in this society and wonder how they were chosen to be the saviors of the human race if they are the only ones left. The answer, of course, is that some sort of "central casting" selected them to be down there. Not natural selection, and not privilege, and not merit, either. It just looks random as hell, kind of like the "Belters" from The Expanse, but there it made sense because they were at least hardscrabble refugees from an authoritarian Earth government. Why save 10,000 people and stuff them in a silo if they are mostly going to be mindless worker bees. You don't get civilization that way.
That being said, the bigger problem is the believability of the world-building we are looking at.
These people have tons of luxuries. They have nice cafes and restaurants. They have computers that work, endless battery-powered objects, and a gigantic generator powered by steam but NOBODY KNOWS WHERE THE STEAM COMES FROM. They have a technology which is sophisticated enough to visually deceive the entire populace via image manipulation. They have well-run hospitals and hi-tech contraceptives. There is also a world outside which is supposedly poisonous, but somehow they can't build a workable biohazard suit or a traveling vehicle to go out and explore it. At least they did that in The Last of Us.
There are incredibly competent and heroic engineers (that's one of the best aspects of the series so far, as well as the incredible performance by engineer heroine Rebecca Ferguson) but no scientists? Nobody is trying to research anything, to discover anything? Is the steam geothermal?
Inside, there is a world where nobody questions anything. The sheriff sees a conspiracy and blatant lies in front of his eyes and literally glosses over it, believing the integrity of the totalitarian system over his own wife. Also...all religions just disappeared to be replaced by "The Founders"?
The soundtrack Maskripper mentioned? Also very tropey. The music is extremely manipulative in its emotional hooks, like it was made in a damn dark electronic music factory with lots of input from someone who listened to a lot of Sigur Ros 20 years ago. I think composers of TV shows like this have often painted themselves into a corner these days. But that's just a minor quibble compared to all the other issues.
I'm going to keep watching - why not? - but there's going to have to be something truly magnificent for me to be impressed.
Remember when I made a thread about the overwhelming trend of eco-disaster flicks? This fits right in there, as well as with general scenarios of dystopia, apocalypse, and totalitarian control.
There's so much of this kind of theme in modern sci-fi (and so little actually hopefuleness) that one has to wonder...has it just been the zeitgeist this whole time making everyone write the same kind of gloomy stories, or are there super-rich conspirators far in the background somewhere funding entertainment that makes us all feel miserable so they can keep us endlessly worrying about the future and perfectly willing to surrender individual rights to remain under their safe control?
Maybe *that's* the real dystopian tale which should be written!
Last edited by shevek11 months ago, edited 5 times in total.
100.jpg)
