sad_otter

I quite enjoyed this. I recognized a few actors faces but only familiar with Alexander ...Ludvig? ( I can't remember how his last name's spelled but that dude). Thought they all did a good enough job I'm one of those people that generally always finds the book better but haven't read this one. Didn't see any previews, came into this pretty blank overall and quite enjoyed it.

Watching this is interesting as you'll notice all the ways our expectations have been conditioned by all the post-apocalyptic content we've seen. Which is hilarious really, sheer volume of sensational post-apocalyptic narratives we're potentially exposed to. Other cultures can be inscrutable but our fascination with the collapse of society and necro-cannibalism ain't exactly normal. Nor the equal fascination with super people in plastic clothing. Methinks we're stuck in fantasizing and have given up on solving our own quite solvable problems.

Anyway, I kept expecting...violence, community warfare, cutthroat survival, all that. Earth Abides takes the whole "everyone dies" hypothesis and explores what's next, without walking corpses or aliens or mushroom people narrowing the whole plot down to short term survival. People are still people and some of these characters, like real people, suck quite bad. But there no Negan bad guy. It's about living small scale. And to some extent how your values change. When you think about the majority of our drives, most of them go up in smoke in a situation like this. Stuff? Most of that's useless. So much is dependent on infrastructure to function (something to ponder DOGE fans) so great swaths of previous society are suddenly moot. Ish focuses on what most of us would: supplies, power, shelter, etc. This show also made me wonder how much harder this scenario would be in another 20yrs. Less libraries and less books in them.

The time changes can be sort of jarring but maybe just me. It could've been a bit more fleshed out, but usually shows have too much filler so that's okay. I did think it odd that predators became an increasing problem until they suddenly seemed to stop. Maybe they put up a 10ft chain link fence I didn't see. Stuff like that isn't the focus. It's more about life and living. We're in some mighty polarizing times but we all still have way more in common than we differ. Everyone prefers a beautiful landscape to a drab polluted one (I guess the problem there is a lot of people go for Option 3, support ruining it to cash in and just stay inside, pretend they're not part of their own problem).

Again I couldn't get over how much I expected violence or doom in certain moments. Sure, Ish does get some guns pretty quick (he'd watched TV too I suppose) but for animals as much a people. I would too. I'm one of those gun loving liberals (we're just like the other kind, but we pick our targets by representation rather than threat level) but guns are heavy and after weeks/months of never using it your focus would shift. Guns definitely come in handy a couple times, but not glorified.

The deer dressing seen was amusing. It's a good show. I wanted more. Don't skip the opening credits, at least initially. The cinematography, colors, it's a pleasure to watch.