Really? There was some awful writing in that episode, compared to the pilot. And the action sequence was kinda bad (was it filmed at the same place they shot Jughead, in Lost?)
Though my favourite exchange would have to be the wife freaking out to Scott Speedman's appearance on video. So much narm — my housemate and I joked that her reaction only made sense if she'd never seen a television before.
This post has been powered by avenging fury and a balanced diet.See, I really didn't pay much attention to that myself. I was more focused on Captain Chaplin handing anybody their ass whenever such service was required. His mini-Rousing Speech at the end did it for me.
That gunbattle at the pass was a little meh, for sure. But Commander Kendall going from "Why can't we get along??" to "Oh Shit...", when he learns who they're facing is cool.
It was an honorProblem is that he's not "some warlord" and Chaplain doesn't have the legal authority to meete out punishment as he sees fit. They're already in a dangerously untenable situation; lording up the right of might is going to help them at all.
That's what the opening scene with the banana was about. They're not hiding out on that island. They invaded.
This post has been powered by avenging fury and a balanced diet.I had high hopes for this show after the pilot, but that was a stupid episode this week and don't think I can stick with it much longer. Aside from the whole irrelevant secret Australian subplot, the main action was frustrating. There were a dozen ways the sub crew could have dealt with Julian better, but they failed in every way. You're in the f**king navy, if you're going to negotiate with terrorists, do it competently.
- Chaplin didn't confirm that his people were alive and okay first.
- When Julian set a deadline, Chaplin didn't say "What are you, a moron? We'll get back when we get back. You'll be able to see exactly when our massive nuclear sub leaves and gets back. Killing someone if we're late is needlessly antagonistic and forfeits your cargo."
- Didn't consider the possibility that Julian was sending them out to get killed/captured so he could get rid of them.
- Utterly failed to get an advantage by not opening the shipment. What if they're the weapons and explosives that Julian's alleged "insurgency" will use against them to kill many more than three sailors? What if it's communications equipment that he could use to sell out the submarine crew who he wants off his island? What if it's drugs that Chaplin could use to blackmail Julian to ensure that if he's going down, so's he? If there's a fair exchange, he won't know it's been opened until the hostages have been released and he can whine all he wants afterward.
- And yeah, they didn't just not return the shipment after one of the hostages got killed. Screw the logic of a hostage exchange, we need to wrap up the episode.
- And yeah, they didn't just kill Julian after one of the hostages got killed. Insurgency? Really? We've gotten no impression that Julian is owed any real loyalty beyond his death.
- Chaplin does NOTHING to prevent Julian from doing the exact same thing whenever he feels like it.
This episode was a blatant, lazy contrivance to insert drama and establish a status quo of having to grudgingly work with the islanders to survive. The Strawman Emotional Has A Point in the scene with the XO complaining to Chaplin at the end.
To be fair, it's the less interesting narrative option to slaughter Julian and his crew. I also think we have to take the narrative at face value when he claims that an attack on him would be foolhardy and drawn out.
He also has a point. They were invaded.
edited 15th Oct '12 3:54:10 AM by Nicknacks
This post has been powered by avenging fury and a balanced diet.As I see Julian its more about his Ego. Which is really nearing Too Dumb to Live.
"You can reply to this Message!"Oh, yes, it's about his ego and self-righteousness.
Which wouldn't have been a problem had they not been invaded.
I'm not defending his actions, but I don't think that I can condone violence upon him. It's not logical, and it's not legal.
This post has been powered by avenging fury and a balanced diet.They may have invaded, but that doesn't give him a carte blanche.
And building himself up to be a threat is simply a dumb thing to do. Unless he is protected by Plot Armor he will be committing suicide by ego shortly.
"You can reply to this Message!"I get where Unfound is coming from. There were more sensible ways to introduce a plot where they had to work with the local despot. Instead, they come off as weak, incompetent, or both.
And Nicknacks, I get your point about legality, but this is a guy who dropped a nuke a few hundred miles off the East Coast, comandeered a NATO radar installation, and went on a mule run for a warlord.
It's almost like Captain Chaplin is a Well-Intentioned Extremist when the script calls for it and then switches to Bothering by the Book when it doesn't.
It was an honorRe: the female characters. The engineer/ceo/sexpot did not actually bother me, because I went to school with several girls who were basically her. A lot of people become engineers because it is the family trade, and this seemed to be the case for an even higher percentage of the female engineering students. So people like that exist, and are not even very improbable. She was spoiled rotten by her rich father, entered the profession to make him proud and found she had real talent for it. This kind of thing happens.
The female character that bothered me is the admirals daughter. The kind of woman who gets picked to spearhead integration of a service is not selected for that post on the basis of who their parents were. They get picked because they have impressive as hell records and absolutely unshakable confidence. The brass knows people will give them shit. They pick individuals who can shut it down as far as possible and ignore it to the extent it is not. She is the only female officer on board, and one out of a handful in the fleet. She ought to be the scariest iron lady the navy could find.
In the grand network tradition of screwing over good shows, this has been cancelled.
While it was a very good idea with a medium-to-good execution I still think it would have worked better as a mini-series. The idea of holding off the entire United States could only be sustained so long. The only long term possibiility I saw was if the coup attempt turned into an actual civil war. That way on the one hand the Navy would be too busy to apply it's full force and on the other an independent nuclear sub would be a possibly pivotal game player.
Trump delenda estJust saw a snippet of this, some freak chemical spill in the torpedo room which someone lit on fire, then some action crap happened and then I just stood there going "what the crap did I just watch?"
Having actually worked on torpedoes, I can say that the only thing that will end up doing what that scene suggestedd is Hydrogen Cyanide, which is a by-product of torp-fuel combustion, which sort of neccesitates that the torps were actually FIRED, and probably no longer in the torpedo room to begin with.
Otto Fuel is actually pretty hard to ignite if you don't have a wick, and notoriously hard to extinquish since it's a monopropellant. Plus, you'll know pretty much immediately if you have a fuel spill, that crap gives you a headache like nothing else. But provided you don't ingest it, you can survive being bathed in it (knew a guy that happened to) and be okay. It also looks a lot like orange Kool-aid. But all you need to clean that up is some paper towels and some isopropyl alcohol, and that monster headache is done away with by a nice tall cup of hot black caffinated coffee (and they Navy practically runs off of coffee).
Hydrogen Cyanide (HCN)? Nasty stuff. You need a self-contained breathing apparatus or suck air out of a rubber hose to manage that. Facemasks won't help, looked like they were wearing facemasks. I still can't understand where they even got HCN from. That's not how Otto Fuel works.
Dunno, maybe I didn't understand the scene or something.
Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

Guess I may see if I can... *ahem* "acquire" a copy of the episode, and see for myself.
I do, though, want to expand on my issues with accuracy a bit, prompted by a post that came to me to make in another forum on the show:
But with LR? Not only "no", but "hell no". I totally wasn't buying it, even without the ludicrous premises required for the story to go as it did.