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- [00:00]
Professor Stephen Dicey
We gather here tonight to bring women back to their rightful place. The Testaments, a new Hulu Original Series from the executive producers of the Handmaid's Tale. It's easier to accept a story than
- [00:12]
Professor Jeff Dudas
believe that the people around you are monsters.
- [00:14]
Professor Stephen Dicey
The battle isn't over.
- [00:16]
Professor Jeff Dudas
There comes a time when you have to take action, when you have to choose your own destiny.
- [00:20]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Never quite as it seems. What's the new Hulu Original Series? The Testaments, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers.
- [00:29]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Terms apply.
- [00:32]
Professor Stephen Dicey
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Professor Jeff Dudas
to help you hit your money goals.
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Professor Stephen Dicey
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- [01:11]
Professor Jeff Dudas
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Professor Stephen Dicey
blower kit now $79 plus save $80 on a char broil performance four burner grill, now $199. It's springtime and our best lineup is here at Lowe's, valid through 413, while supp varies by location.
- [01:31]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:35]
Professor Stephen Dicey
It's the pop Culture professors, and today we begin our analysis of For All Mankind, the Apple TV Sci Fi alternate history show. We discuss the first two episodes of the new season, Season five, beginning with our discussion of episode one, called First Light, and then continuing with our discussion of episode two, which is called the Hard Six. This is why I think it's the most ambitious show on television and one of the most interesting for making sort of politically salient points in that it's offering a positive vision of the future, which is just not well, or a positive vision of a different path to the present, which is not that common nowadays in our screen representations. And it's centered on people being better. And the mechanism is technological progress. But technological progress is often portrayed nowadays as a source of dystopia, not kind of elements of utopia. I'm Professor Stephen Dicey.
- [02:31]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And I'm Professor Jeff Dudas.
- [02:33]
Professor Stephen Dicey
And we are two political scientists who have just watched the first episode of season five of For All Mankind, the Apple TV drama an alternate history of the 1960s until, at this point, 2012. We're going to break down what happened in the episode. But perhaps more importantly, we're going to break down the political themes and ideologies that are present in this show, how they relate to our contemporary politics, and how this show, you know, what could have been. Cause that's the heart of this show, Jeff. And that's the thing I find most interesting and exciting about this show is that it is, in each of its seasons, showing us a different period of contemporary history. Not only what could have been different and how it could have been different, but it has a fundamental orientation that things could have been better than they are today. And that I find almost unique on television today.
- [03:20]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, the structure of the show is consistent and has been consistent over the course of its five seasons. And that kind of backdrop, as you say, it's the alternate history. It's a show that is. That's sourced in an alternate history of the space race and then sort of spins out a variety of storylines and alternatives based upon the premise that the humans continue to go to the moon. Humans don't ever stop going to the moon. And then it sort of builds out from there. This appears to be a season that's going to be hyper fixated on Mars.
- [03:52]
Professor Stephen Dicey
So I think. Sorry not to interrupt you. I think that's super, super interesting. And I'm really, really excited because Mars is being set up in this season to play a role that it recurrently plays in science fiction. So there are lots of stories of this type that employ Mars as sort of a mirror to Earth and an alternate to Earth and commonly a side of a progressive revolution. So I think of something like in particular, Kim Stanley Robinson's long social, political and economic history of the development of an Earth colony on Mars, but then the development of a genuinely different socialist society on Mars. And I think that's in the background of for all mankind at this point. Cause the more recent TV series the Expanse employed, you know, came from a similar tradition and set Mars up as kind of an alternate to Earth and a challenge to Earth. And what usually happens in these stories is that, you know, the Martian outpost begins as sort of a colony. It's usually established for economic purposes. It's in an exploitative relationship with Earth. So structurally, what's been shown is the more classical relationship of the exploitation of the workers by the people who are already sort of in power. And as the colony grows, it develops its own political identity, its own social and economic identity. And eventually there's a revolution on the colony that not only establishes an independence from the imperial core, from Earth, but also kind of infects Earth with its own ideas of a more egalitarian society.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, and there are some. It strikes me that there are some different types of Mars stories as well. I'm thinking, as you were talking, I was thinking of Total Recall based on the Philip Dick story, which offers a pretty starkly different vision of Mars politics and the sort of the possibilities associated with Mars. Last season, season four for All Mankind also was very focused on the development of the Mars colony. But it always set the development of Mars colony in it nested it within what was happening on Earth. And I don't know, I mean, we'll see. I didn't get a lot out of the sort of the Earth stuff last night. And so I'm curious, like what's happening on Earth?
- [06:23]
Professor Stephen Dicey
I thought there was some.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
There's some. But for example, I mean, NASA has been an omnipresent portion of this show and in the early seasons it was by far the dominant sort of institutional force with which we were confronted. There wasn't a single scene last night that even referenced NASA.
- [06:45]
Professor Stephen Dicey
But hasn't it been in the mythology of the show in its history? Hasn't it been superseded by this M6, by this alliance of the major space faring nations? So the Martian colonies.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
But how does the M6. I agree, yes, but the M6 has to have institutional homes.
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Professor Stephen Dicey
Sure.
- [07:03]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And so not only do we get nothing out of NASA, there's also nothing out of. Was it Star.
- [07:08]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Star City, Soviet? Yeah.
- [07:11]
Professor Jeff Dudas
So maybe that stuff is coming, I don't know.
- [07:13]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Well, cause I think what's going on here is that Mars is being set up both in the, you know, the text of the show and then the kind of extra textual elements, you know, on the Apple TV website there's additional of these kind of news breaks that fills in what happened between that. Was it 2004? The last season ended in it's 2012. This one begins in. Mars is being set up as a, as an analog to Iraq. Right. It's a, it's a similar time period. So in the, in the extra stuff, Paul Bremer, who was actually the United States first sort of plenipotentiary governor of Iraq, is also the governor of Mars. You get these MPK elements walking around the Martian colony, Martian peacekeepers. And so Mars is both.
- [07:56]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And there's also the Abu Ghraib torture analog.
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Professor Stephen Dicey
Right.
- [08:00]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Throw us back to the end of the story.
- [08:01]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Yeah. And so Mars is, it's not necessarily as directly an immediate NASA concern because it's grown into a project that's a transnational. Although you could say, well, where's Star City? But is also beyond a mere space operation. Right. It's a fully fledged. It holds the key, as far as I can tell to, to the current Earth economy and what's going on on Earth. Sorry is that two things Economically, there's a tremendous amount of money is being sort of fronted to this mining operation on the promise of tremendous returns from the iridium that's in the kind of Goldilocks asteroid and the economics of it are causing kind of inflation or debt crises on Earth which are sort of analogs to the great financial crisis that happened in our time.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
Well, but I think it's an analog to a much earlier in history, in world history, which is to Spanish colonialism in 1500s. This is, this is the storyline of the Spanish crown extracting silver and gold out of the. Forcibly extracting silver and gold out of the minds of the Americas. And again come coming into these kinds of eventually very lopsided and unequal relationships with a capitalist class of merchants in Spain who fronted the crown all this money to go out and you know, continue these expeditions in the new World. And the, you know, spoiler alert, it doesn't work out for the Spanish crown because what comes back is never enough for them to service their debt to their own emerging capitalist class. Right. And so I, I do think here that the analog, I do agree there's a, there's an Iraq War analog. But to the extent that we're talking about colonization and we're talking about sort of exploitive relationships between core and periphery and to the extent that we're talking about the sort of detangled relations between a central sovereign authority and a kind of shadowy semi sovereign economic sort of wealth based power. It's actually early European colonialism, which is I think maybe a stronger analog here,
- [10:14]
Professor Stephen Dicey
except that the Iraq thing is, is, you know, Bremer is nowhere near as damaging on Mars as he was in Iraq. And the, the mk, the peacekeepers are sending around there are not as violent as the actual experience of Iraq was. And the torture that takes place nowhere near as horrifying as Abu Ghraib, which continues A consistent thing this show does, which is it will pick things that happen in our timeline and if they happen at all, they happen in a less devastating or a more benign way. Not to get politically, but let's say you found Reagan a problematic political figure. Reagan still happens in for all mankind and he's still quite sort of aggressive and bellicose. But Reagan was also an idealist and a dreamer, and he had this kind of cinematic imagination. And in for all mankind's universe, it's that side of him that's activated, and it actually becomes a progressive thing rather than a potentially sort of negative thing. So that's been a consistent thing that the show does. Other things that have gone on, you know, I always find it interesting, this kind of history dump. They do both in the extra textual elements on the website. But at the start of each new season, a bunch of stuff happens. There's an Al Gore presidency, but he's defeated by Ellen Wilson's former vice president, what was called William. No, Jim Bragg. Bragg, yeah. Jim Bragg. Alar's vice president is Paul Wellstone. There's a G. Wellstone thing. Paul Wellstone was a progressive senator from Minnesota who died in a plane crash in our history and was a sort of environmentalist and was. Was regarded as sort of someone on the. The progressive edges of the Democratic Party.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
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Professor Stephen Dicey
You know, and G was regarded as a centrist Democrat. It kind of, again, shows how you get these real figures recurring, but that they're always pulled two or three ticks more in a progressive direction in this universe.
- [12:03]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Right. Or they're just brought back to life, as in the case of Wellstone, but also JFK Jr. Who's alluded to as a coming presidential candidate. So he also doesn't die, also in a plane crash. Which makes me wonder if there's. There's sort of a subtle claim. Yeah. That somehow the planes are better, they're safer, you know, and. Which would fit with this sort of broader theme of, you know, progress as particularly technological progress.
- [12:29]
Professor Stephen Dicey
So just as in previous seasons, Chernobyl doesn't happen because they've got better nuclear technology, because they've been running these reactors on the moon, and they've got different material that. I haven't thought of that. That's a really good point. Also not dead. John Lennon, still not dead.
- [12:43]
Professor Jeff Dudas
He's collaborating with Jay Z, which was.
- [12:46]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Which is awesome.
- [12:46]
Professor Jeff Dudas
This is a strange. I mean, let's just fixate on this for a minute. I don't want to go too far down the John Lennon rabbit hole, but this kind of move, I think, for the show to make, and we probably shouldn't make too much of it, it's probably just a cute little throwaway. But, I mean, John Lennon's assassination has nothing to do with obvious sort of political currents. Right. It is. I mean, he's assassinated by a deranged superfan who blames Lennon for the breakup of the Beatles. And it's, it's an odd kind of. It's an odd locution, right. If you were going to save somebody from assassination, it seems to me there would be other figures who would. It would make more sense to save them. Within the for all mankind universe of technological progress, it's very unclear to me how Lenin fits into this sort of story or a character like Lenin with those kinds of dynamics.
- [13:40]
Professor Stephen Dicey
So I think there's a couple of possibilities, right? One is, as you say, it's just a cute thing. It's just a moment of, oh, I know that didn't happen. So it's showing you how once you start changing things in an alternate universe story and alternate reality, butterfly effect, lots of things, Lots of things can change. And it's, you know, if you were really into the metaphysics of this, you might say that it's become somewhat implausible that the butterfly effect wouldn't have grown greater than they are. Like, why. Why do. If the timeline changes that much? Like, why is Al Gore still.
- [14:13]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Right.
- [14:14]
Professor Stephen Dicey
What's go's life like in a. In the up for the from. And is it really so similar? And the only thing that really changes is he. He wins the. Yeah, the election rather than loses it. So, so you could make that metaphysical. But I think they might be making a more symbolic point with John Lennon, which is he's a, you know, he was gunned down and it was seen as a loss of, you know, the give piece a chance guy and the, the utopian guy and the, the. The peace, love and happiness and type guy. And if, and if that, if that current continued to exist, you know, would that have had its own positive effects or would he continue to exist just because the society as a whole is less violent, is less sort of deranged, is less paranoid. If you remember the role Lennon played in previous of these seasons.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
I don't.
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Professor Stephen Dicey
History dumps. So at one point they have a news clip, characteristically sort of badly overdubbed from real footage, but they have a news clip where Lenin's not taking full
- [15:10]
Professor Jeff Dudas
advantage of the AI Yeah. Revolution.
- [15:13]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Lenin's like, there is a. We can talk about this. There is a point about the show's aesthetics that I think bothers you a little more than me, but that Lennon says to. About Ronald Reagan when he's president, you know, come on, Nancy, tell Ronnie to go back to bed, grow his hair and give peace a chance. And he sort of exerts this kind of popular cultural pressure on Reagan to be Less bellicose. So there's that element. No Hurricane Katrina, because there's no climate change. I thought a nice callback to the fact that this is a world in which one of the central problems of our time, climate change, was just halted in the 1980s. And how do you continue to make that point or remind people of that point? That. There you go, there's that. I'll shut up in a second about this, this kind of history dump thing. There's an Uhuru. Robotics is alluded to. Uhuru, of course, being the communications officer from Star Trek. So there's that little nod. One thing I do think is really interesting about for all mankind, and I'm interested to see if we will ever see it or if they're deliberately excluding it from this story, is that technology has advanced on many, many dimensions in this show. And you would imagine that, that it would therefore be a wave and all technologies would advance on those dimensions. They've still made no illusion at all to artificial intelligence. Right. That, you know, and it just seems that these were technologies that existed, you know, in the, the 50s and 60s. These were the, the initial kind of advances in artificial intelligence. It's not like no one had thought of it before. The timelines diverge and you'd have thought if things were advancing that you would be seeing like large language models in this. Unless. What the point the show is making, I wonder if it is, is that these are not positive technologies. Right. And so it's excluding them from its more positive future because it's seeing them in the present as dangerous or negative technologies. So you get robotics with Uhuru robotics. Yeah, but there's no sense that you're getting the same kind of LLM or cognitive advances in artificial intelligence that you're getting in our time.
- [17:17]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. It's an interesting point. I. You may well be right. I don't know. I'm not sure that I would at this point read too much into that. It feels like it could be the same sort of. Because you're right, there is a robotics sort of element, but we don't actually see much of it. Right. I mean, it's a very quite incipient human centric show.
- [17:40]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Exactly.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
And in ways that actually is not really all that consistent with the real history of Mars exploration, which has been done entirely by robots.
- [17:53]
Professor Stephen Dicey
But I think the point you made is, is the salient point, right. That it's a, It's a human set. It's a humanistic show. Right. It has a. It has a. This is why I Think it's the most ambitious show on television and one of the most interesting for, for making sort of politically salient points in that it's offering a positive vision of the future which is just not well, or a positive vision of a different path to the present which is not that common nowadays in our screen representations. And it's centered on people being better and the mechanism is technological progress. But technological progress is often portrayed nowadays as a source of dystopia, not kind of elements of utopia. And I do think it's sort of a unique show for embodying those elements.
- [18:37]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, let's talk about the human centric elements of it because this is so, so far we've spent a lot of time, I think, talking about the structural elements of the show which I do agree are interesting. And they're, they are very much the, they're the foundations of the show. You take those things away and, and what you're left with. In my opinion, soap opera is a soap opera and not, not a soap opera that's particularly interesting or well told and certainly not portrayed by characters who I find to be particularly compelling. Put that aside for a minute. The other thing, and you had alluded to this and something we talked about. I am surprised that this show doesn't look better on the screen than it does. You mentioned those sort of interstitial histories that are on the website but also sort of contained within bits and pieces of the show. Like those look bad. I mean our YouTube videos look better than those do,
- [19:39]
Professor Stephen Dicey
except our faces are in them.
- [19:41]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Credit I suppose to your incipient editing skills. But I mean, I'm shocked at how bad some of this stuff looks. Like Mars, in my opinion, does not look good. The Colony doesn't look good. And you contrast these kinds of aesthetics, excuse me, to other, you know, prestige aiming TV shows. Let's go to Apple tv. Let's talk about Pluribus, for example. Pluribus looks extraordinary on the screen. It's incredible looking show. It seems like what I've heard, what I've read is that this, the budget for, for all mankind is quite big. It's an expensive show to make. I don't know, I can't see on screen where the money is going. Like the aging of Ed and Margot in particular. Like, I get it, it's difficult to age actors to make it look authentic. They, they look, they, they don't even look close to. I mean it's, it's obviously faked aging, which is also surprising given the sort of the advances in CGI and sort of video editing stuff. So I, I think the show looks bad.
- [20:44]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Don't agree. So the. I, I agree there's times when, but particularly the new shots of, you know, Al Gore saying, I just conceded to Jim Bragg and not. And you're like, yeah, I could see your mouth. You said George Bush. So I get it.
- [20:59]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It doesn't even sound like Gore. They haven't even gotten the voice, which,
- [21:03]
Professor Stephen Dicey
which I agree is trivially easy to do with contemporary AI Although, you know, maybe they're making a meta point that we don't have that AI and that we don't engage with. Doesn't throw me out of the show, I think, I think because I don't, that that's not what's interesting to me. What's interesting to me is the ambition of the ideas. And so, you know, the special effects were not good enough. Is, is sort of, to me not a, not a reason for not engaging with the, with the ideas. And I remember something like, you know, at some point you, you, you obviously have to suspend an element of disbelief or go on a leap in order to go with a story. I remember in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, you know, widely regarded not only work of science fiction, but also of sort of political theory that, that he has this device of like an anti aging treatment or something that allows people to live, I know, hundreds and hundreds of years. And so you get the same characters again and again, you know, who, who are the same people and they have these treatments. And at first you're like, yeah, that's an obvious plot device. And, but, but then you have to kind of. And it seems a bit Hawking, it's a bit hand wavy how it all works. And that can definitely throw you out of the thing. But then what you realize he's doing is that these characters are. They're not really meant to be real people. They're standing in as for ideas or for the notion of human consciousness across different historical epochs. And they're important as frames of reference to allow you to understand the kind of swirl of social and political change around them. So I suppose I just have a higher threshold before it would throw me out.
- [22:41]
Professor Jeff Dudas
But do you think that's what these characters are? Cause I don't. I think they're trying to tell human stories here. In line with what we were talking about earlier is the human centric elements of the show. I just think at this point the stories that they're telling are about these particular types of characters are not very compelling.
- [22:57]
Professor Stephen Dicey
So I Also don't agree, but I think what they're trying to do, I think the methodology of the show is intended to be empowering and it's intended to show you that significant changes can happen in the macro direction of societies within the course of human lifetimes and can often be materially impacted by, you know, the things that individuals do within their lifetime. And so we're all sort of agenda captors when we're not just subject to unchangeable human natures or. Or, you know, pre selected deterministic developments, which is a. A major divergence between different. Different philosophies.
- [23:39]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Right.
- [23:39]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Of macro and micro politics. And so it's showing you the lived experiences of these people in ways that are both quotidian and profound in saying that there's not actually a big divergence between the two. So I think it is important to follow someone like Ed Baldwin, however difficult it becomes, to square the physical age and appearance of Joel Kinnaman with the age and appearance of Ed Baldwin, particularly in the last two seasons. And I agree it's difficult. Right. You have to squint a bit and squint more than Ed Baldwin in all that to get through it. But it is important to look at the Korean War veteran.
- [24:12]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [24:13]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Who tortures a person who's an awful dad, who completely mistreats his wife and. Yeah. And son. Who tortures Soviet cosmonaut in. In Cold War 1960s.
- [24:26]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [24:26]
Professor Stephen Dicey
And to them see him as what. What I think is a kind of proto Marxist revolutionary on Mars in 2012. And it's important. That's the same guy with a human lifetime.
- [24:35]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. But ironically, I mean, I think that Ed Baldwin is by far the most successful character in this show at this point precisely because of this kind of character growth and transformation over time. As stark as it seems to be, I thought he was clearly the highlight of season four. I suspect he'll probably be the highlight of season five for me as well. But I mean, it'll be interesting. I mean, I'm hopeful that what we're gonna see in the next couple of episodes is a few. A return to focus on some of the few interesting characters who were introduced last year who I think deserve more time. Like the new head of the Soviet Space Agency. I found her to be a pretty interesting and compelling character. I hope that we see more of her going forward. I hope that we get something out of NASA. I find it hard to believe that they simply are irrelevant at this point. And I'm hopeful that we'll see some meaningful development from Dev and not just, you know, another cover of Men's Health in a different pose. Okay. I do think they're developing a storyline that might be interesting there about like the, the, the conflicts between sort of the healing running Helios on earth and the shareholders and whatever Dev the visionary is doing on Mars.
- [25:56]
Professor Stephen Dicey
I want to take a quick break and then I want to come back and just talk about some of what, what I think are the storylines that are being set up for this season and maybe some of the new characters that were introduced. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into sign up for your $1per month trial@shopify.com SpecialOffer this episode
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Professor Jeff Dudas
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- [27:24]
Professor Stephen Dicey
And we are back. So we wanted to talk about a few of the storylines that we see having been set up in that first episode and that we think are obviously gonna get paid off over the rest of the season. I know one concern you had was that a lot of the characters you felled in the last season had kind of run their course and so forth. And I had that concern as well. My view is that it's a really good idea to have introduced the sort of new generation of the what are effectively the grandchildren. Certainly it's Ed's grandson, Alex Baldwin, crucially not Alec Baldwin, which I think clearly someone put their hands up in the writers room and said, hang on, what's this Guy called.
- [27:59]
Professor Jeff Dudas
This is an interesting point. I actually want to. Let's spend some time on this because I do think it will be interesting to see the way that the show treats the grandchildren of the sort of the patriarchal families as opposed to how it treated the children, which was horrendously in both of the. I mean.
- [28:19]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Oh, like Danny Stevens and.
- [28:21]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, right. The Stevens family. Kids are. I mean, they. One of them becomes a terrorist. The other one, like, just spirals out of control and is eventually left, literally left for dead on Mars, which was
- [28:35]
Professor Stephen Dicey
the one that had that weird affair with.
- [28:37]
Professor Jeff Dudas
That's Danny. Okay. Yeah.
- [28:40]
Professor Stephen Dicey
That was the strangest moment.
- [28:42]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Then you get. Right. The treatment of the biological child. Right. The Baldwin son from the first scene.
- [28:49]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Like, that was horrific. So. But that was making a point about Ed and his. It was development, but. And the development of the nuclear families.
- [28:58]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I have a broader point here.
- [28:59]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Go ahead.
- [29:00]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Which is that, like, these are boomers, you know, treating their Gen X kids terribly, or the Gen X kids really getting, you know, the short end of the stick. And it's the generation after, it's the grandchildren's generation who becomes sort of elevated as the sort of the golden children in the eyes of the grandparents. And that is one way, arguably, in which what we're seeing on screen is consistent with what this is not an alternate history, actually, in that way. And so I will be interested to see how these. How this new generation of grandchildren are treated by the show. I have a suspicion that they are going to be treated very, very well indeed in ways that create a stark contrast to the way that the actual children were treated. And I also have a suspicion that in so doing, Ed Baldwin, for example, will be redeemed as a paternal figure.
- [30:04]
Professor Stephen Dicey
All right. Yes, I'm very sure. If he hasn't already, I'm very sure that that's where they're going. One thing I was going to say was dramatically, I think the introduction of that generation gives it. That gives to me, anyway, new life to the show. And there's sort of energy just about them. You know, how much can you watch Ed and Margot shambling around, you know, and just the fact that they sort of run rather than stumble is, you know, not to be ageist or whatever, but it did give a bit of vitality to the show and their interactions. But I think more importantly and more seriously, you know, obviously Mars is going to come to represent a more egalitarian energy. You know, it seems pretty clear to me that obviously there's going to be some sort of revolution On Mars, clearly they're going to try and take further control of the resources that they captured at the end of the fourth season, but that are now still being shipped back to Earth. And clearly that's going to redound upon Earth politics because they're going to try and break the M6 cartel monopoly and they're going to start negotiating with this alternate group of less wealthy nations for access to the iridium. And it's going to set an example of egalitarianism on Mars led by these grandchildren who are children of Mars, you know, who have started to form a different identity that's not only shaped by an earthbound heritage. And then that's going to lead to like political. A positive political change on Earth. So I think that. I hope that's going to be really, really interesting. Kelly Baldwin, it keeps looking for life. This was alluded to in previous seasons. And she's back on that beat. There's one more season of this show. I mean, my suspicion is that one of the finale things of the whole show is gonna be. They'll find. I don't think they're gonna find like bacteria. They'll find. Exactly. I don't think. Yeah, but, but even that would fundamentally reorient and open human horizons. It would be the biggest discovery in the history of the, of the species. So that's gonna be really interesting, I think. And then more broadly we're going to have this kind of colony versus sender politics sort of, sort of played out.
- [32:09]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. Periphery, core.
- [32:11]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Yeah. For free. Car. Yeah, stuff. So does any of that grab you or you. Do you, do you retain concerns?
- [32:19]
Professor Jeff Dudas
We'll see.
- [32:20]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Okay.
- [32:21]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I mean, I, I retain concerns until proven.
- [32:24]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Until proven otherwise.
- [32:25]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [32:25]
Professor Stephen Dicey
All right, good. Well, I think it's very interesting, Jess. And we, you know, we, we commonly have quite closely aligned views on things and it's quite interesting to see that. I think I'm a little higher on this at the moment than you are. Although I think you're still sort of open minded and so forth. As am I. I mean, this could cradle, to use a metaphor from the show, this could create a very quickly. And you know, season four was a bit problematic towards the end. I just felt more of an uplift or a jolt of energy from the start of season five. So I'm sort of back on board for this. But if you have thoughts either on what we've said in this video or what you think of the show overall, where it's going, what its politics are, how it's relating and retelling our contemporary history. We'd love to see them, we'd love to interact in the comments. We try and respond to every comment that we get. And we will be back here. Do I have you on board, Jeff, for a good episode too? Same time next week. So we will be back here with another video next week. And on that bombshell, another big storyline that's going through this season is these craters, these people who essentially undocumented migrants who are stowing away on pressurized craters and are then arriving on Mars and they're classical refugee or stateless persons, which is in, you know this better than me, but in political philosophy and legal studies, these are hugely significant liminal cases. Right. Because what you know, because it gets at precisely the core question of these kind of rights frameworks, which is what rights adhere to you as human qua human, and what rights are only available to you as citizen of. Of a state. I'm Professor Stephen Dyson.
- [34:08]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And I'm Professor Jeff Dudas.
- [34:10]
Professor Stephen Dicey
And we are two political scientists who have just watched episode two of season five of For All Mankind, the episode called the Hard Six. We're here to discuss its ideas and its themes. And I think there were big ideas and big themes in this episode. After we've done that, I think we're going to discuss it as a. The episode is kind of a work of drama and engage in some, some critical appraisal of that. And then at the end of the video, we'll respond to some of the comments that we got last week. We got some very provocative, interesting and informative comments, which we really do appreciate, and we'd like to kind of engage in a dialogue over. Over them. Episode, episode two, season five, the Hard Six, I think really introduces some major themes, including the most major of all possible themes, which is, unless I'm totally misunderstanding what happened or they're totally misreading their own data, didn't we just discover extraterrestrial life?
- [35:01]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, it seems like as though that's the case. And as you were talking about off camera, it's done in an almost offhand, very matter of fact way, which is surprising given I think something that we did talk about last week, which was that we both had the sense that this would be a story that they were leading up to as the kind of finale, the cliffhanger of the season. And we get it here, I mean, actually at the beginning of episode two, as I recall, and it doesn't carry the kind of, I don't know, earth shaking impact that you would imagine that it Would.
- [35:36]
Professor Stephen Dicey
I thought it could have been not only the culmination of the season, but actually of the series. I could have literally seen a final series, you know, the kind of finale where a blip comes up on a scream and they're like, screen and like, you know what this means? Cut to black and the whole thing's over. So they find that something is making proteins on. Is it Titan? Titan on the moon of Jupiter. I do keep wondering how they're going to find a monolith and then a message, you know, you know, the plot of 2010. Or does it, you know, all of these worlds are yours. Attempt no landing here because something's growing. They find something making proteins on Titan. This immediately put me in mind of a really important idea in philosophy and politics and other spheres, which is the idea of the Great Filter. And the Great Filter is tied to the notion of the Fermi Paradox.
- [36:27]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yes.
- [36:27]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Do you know the Fermi. So Fermi paradox, in brief, is just a mathematical equation that says given the size of the universe and what we know about its composition, because the vast majority of which we have no knowledge of, but given what we can extrapolate from what we can see of its composition, there are so many possibilities of life supporting situations that just as a statistical matter, it's an absolute certainty that not only some life exists, but it should be plentiful, it should be all over the place. And given the kind of distances and time spans involved, that life, at least some of it, should have evolved to be extremely advanced and space faring and highly and much more advanced than us, and thus able to find other forms of life. And therefore, in the words of Enrico Fermi, the kind of World War II era Italian physicist, why when I look up in the sky, are there no space aliens? Where are they? And the Fermi paradox that he developed, and it was on his mind because he was working on nuclear weapons, was perhaps all of these civilizations reach a certain level of technological development and then essentially blow themselves up. And perhaps that's what we're doing here on Earth. The idea of the Great Filter is a kind of addendum to this that in my mind is associated with the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who's known a lot for theorizing about artificial intelligence. But he had a paper sort of 20 years ago when I think it was a probe was going to Mars looking for life. And he said, look, if we find life on Mars, it will be literally the worst news the human race has ever received. And that's really interesting. Cause I think in the show, it's gonna be received as amongst the best news we've ever received. And that's, that's how we imagine society. You know, we're not alone. And look how clever we are to find life. And Bostrom's point was this. The answer to the Fermi Paradox must be that there exists somewhere in the timeline of civilizations a Great Filter, or the timeline of the development of life, there exists a Great Filter. And there's two basic possibilities for where the Great Filter is. And the Great Filter is something that eliminates almost all civilizations when it occurs. And that's why we don't see the space aliens, because we're all eliminated by the Great Filter. There's two possibilities. One is the Great Filter occurs in the timeline, in the point of development at which Fermi imagined it would. You know, it's a highly technologized grape filter. Civilizations get advanced enough, they build something that can destroy themselves and therefore they destroy themselves. And Bostrom said that's actually really, really good news for us because the alternate possibility is the Great Filter is extremely early in the development of life. Like before it would be detectable as the kind of proteins they find on Titan. And that something happens that makes it almost impossible for any life of any degree of simplicity or complexity to develop. And that would be really good for us humans because that would mean we've already passed the Great Filter and maybe we're the only, the only life that ever has anywhere, or maybe one of a very small number. If the Great Filter is in fact really late, that's very bad news for us because it's highly likely we're amongst the large numbers of civilizations that never get further than where we are now. Bring us to a conclusion that directly impacts on the discovery of life, we think on Titan. If you were to find life on Mars, Bostrom was saying, or Titan or somewhere in our neighborhood that is independently, in incredibly close geographical proximity, life had developed in two parts of our neighborhood. That would mean that life is incredibly common, even more common than Fermi thought. Right? Because it must be just sprouting up all over the place. Which means that the late Great Filter thing is the correct hypothesis, right? Because it's developing all over the place. Because we've found it twice just in our immediate environs. Worst news humanity could possibly get, because it means we're almost certain to blow ourselves up. So. So what's received with indifference, it seems in from mankind, they're kind of vaguely excited and they're going to kind of follow. Let's let's check that out. We should follow up on that would be earth shatteringly bad news for humanity according to the Great Filter Hypothesis.
- [40:35]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. So that's all very interesting and it leads me to believe who knows how intentional any of this kind of thinking is behind the scenes in the writer room. But given the tenor of the show and its sort of optimistic utopian take on things, I, I don't believe that it's going to be troubled in that way by the Bostrom's kind of injunction.
- [41:04]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Yeah, no, I agree, I agree. And it's another example of I think the show's kind of relentless and to my mind really sort of brave and outlying optimism about things as life in general that it hasn't actually occurred to them that this could be the worst news and it's going to be received as the best possible news. It's also really interesting, you may think troubling or not troubling that the discovery is treated. I mean air's really expected and we have to remember these are different people who have just a different understanding of the world outside of Earth. Maybe they are really expecting this. They're not at all surprised to have found that. So it's a big deal. But it's like discovering a new oil field or something. It's like yeah, obviously there somewhere and we're really happy we've found it. And like the discovery of a new oil field, thoughts immediately turn to well that there must be huge commercial applications here. And I think Helios is seeing the ability to sort of discover life first almost as the ability to put down a rights claim on that life because they're pretty certain there's going to be some get highly commercialized. Yeah.
- [42:10]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Helios units, the early adapter, so to speak.
- [42:12]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Right.
- [42:13]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [42:13]
Professor Stephen Dicey
And so they're very interested in that race. They're as interested in going to the. To the moon, but they're largely interested in it for. For commercial reasons. I do think it was very interesting and very in line with the Shore's philosophy that the apparent discovery by these robots is one reason they're not jumping around is that they're like it's a glitchy feed. We're not sure what the robots. There's a probability attached to this the robots might have screwed it up. But also that the solution that's alighted upon is not to send better robots. It's. We really need to send people. And that's not just to be certain. It's Kelly says this is something humans have to do which is kind of in line with the show's exploration ethos, that this is a humanistic show about our discoveries, not the discoveries of technology. Yeah.
- [43:03]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And that's consistent with something that we had talked a little bit about last week as well, which is that this is not a show, for all of its technological complexity, that really has much interest in the robotic, or at least if it does, we rarely see them put on screen and that. So that would track right, with the kind of the human centric elements of the show. Clearly there are significant mechanical devices and technological capacity that's available to people, but it's something. And this is something you mentioned off camera. It's not a symbiotic relationship between humans and technology. It is an instrumental relationship. Human beings use tech full stop and do not appear to be impacted by the nature of that tech or by the capabilities of that tech themselves.
- [43:54]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Yeah, it's tools as tools rather than the masters of us. And one of the comments has used a phrase I liked last week, which was talking about aspects of the darkening of our timeline. And I like that phrase, the darkening of our timeline. One thing that has, if you're of this way of thinking, darkened our own timeline is potentially us losing the distinction between technologies that work for us as tools and technologies that manipulate and change us in ways that we either don't know about or we actually know about and are really unhappy about. And the example that I was thinking of was like the Internet and social media as attention, hacking devices as vectors of, you know, conflict, vectors of misunderstanding, vectors of information siloing. I mean, all the critiques of the information, you know, and that would be an example of a technology that has become somewhat the master of us in the age of the algorithm, determining our chances, what we see, what jobs we get, surveilling us K Pop Demon hunters
- [45:01]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Haja Boy's Breakfast meal and Hunt tricks
- [45:03]
Professor Stephen Dicey
meal have just dropped at McDonald's.
- [45:05]
Professor Jeff Dudas
They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja boys could take
- [45:11]
Professor Stephen Dicey
breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
- [45:14]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It is an honor to share. No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really, stop.
- [45:21]
Professor Stephen Dicey
You can really feel the respect in this battle.
- [45:24]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Pick a meal to pick a side.
- [45:26]
Professor Stephen Dicey
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- [45:54]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yes, yes, yes.
- [45:56]
Professor Stephen Dicey
They've got plenty of options. Your call. Say yes to shopping the way you want. Join now@samsclub.com yes. And you must be 18 years or older to purchase a membership and membership is subject to qualifications. Visit samsclub.com yes. And for details.
- [46:14]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. Yes, I agree that that is the iconography of the show, but the history of humanity is that the tools that we use have always transformed us in multiple ways, sometimes physical ways. Think about the introduction of the wheel, right? It's a development of the wheel going, you know, maybe not all the way back, but pretty far back. Think about the, the introduction of writing, right? And the capacity for human beings to put their, their thoughts and their dreams down on something that's more, more rather than less permanent. So in a certain it's, it is a strange out of time kind of imagination, it seems to me, of the relationships between human beings and tools in that way. And in a certain way this, for all mankind's kind of utopian imagination of the full instrumentality of human control over tools is redolent of kind of enlightenment era imaginations and sensibilities. That human beings are at the center of everything and that human beings are in full. That the human dream, the progressive human dream is to be in full control of all elements of the Earth, all elements of technology, and that human beings have a kind of limitless capacity to dominate the things that they encounter, including tools. So there is a kind of, there's a way of seeing this sort of technological utopianism as itself a darkening of the timeline.
- [47:52]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Yeah, I understand what you're saying. That's entirely true. That the kind of cornucopian approach to how humans would, you would, would dominate nature and that that would lead. That's exactly what this is. That's its form of utopianism. And you know, you'd asked me off camera how I, how I thought about this show in relation to another show we've covered on the channel, Alien Earth. Yeah, and, and I try. I'd been making an argument that because I'm interested in utopian thought, I'd be making an argument that Alien Earth had a utopian underpinning in, in the, the rebelling of the. We won't get into the whole Alien Earth plot summary. But anyway, that, that, that approaches its utopianism in a sort of post human way. Right? It's, it's, it's it's not trying to say humans are the best and humans are, you know, and it's only technology is the problem. It's saying in Alien Earth you have to. It's actually the, the, the embrace of, of each and the, the mutual altering of the other is not inevitable and not necessarily dystopian, but it, but it's going to create a new form.
- [48:47]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [48:48]
Professor Stephen Dicey
To take over.
- [48:49]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It's what you go. It's, that's the code in the cyborg.
- [48:51]
Professor Stephen Dicey
100% right.
- [48:53]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Which is not existing in for all men.
- [48:56]
Professor Stephen Dicey
100%. And this is Donna Haraway in that line of thought. And that line of thought was explicitly sort of anti humanist in the way that humanism is classically understood as saying that humanism in the way for all mankind is deploying it, which is essentially we're a good species and we just have to let our better angels flower and we as humans should remain at the top of the food pyramid. And history is a match of human rationality towards ever greater. Just. That is one form of, of utopianism. The critique of that is. Well, actually the other thing humanism has been associated with is sort of dividing humans amongst themselves. And the Haraway's argument was a feminist argument. So it's also associated with patriarchy. It's associated with dividing people into different races and classes.
- [49:43]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Domination.
- [49:44]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Yeah. And these things had to be critiqued and overcome in any sort of realistic utopia. So that's one way I think those, those shows can kind of speak to each other. Yes, that's, that's a really interesting point. And another big idea I thought was in the show, Jeff, was an idea of. I don't know quite how to, how to explain it, but thinking it through. As a political scientist, I know you've done a lot of work on kind of rights and kind of how they're inscribed in legal orders and maybe have to be pursued both inside and outside of legal orders. You've got a really interesting territorial juridical framework going on on the Mars colony in that you have, you know. Well, there's. Now there's two bases, but there's one, there's one main base and then there's a North Korean annex. The people on the main base are carrying vestiges and the names of their nationalities and their cultures. But then you've got a governor who's a Soviet governor, but he's actually kind of in this liminal space between his Soviet loyalty and his Martian loyalty. And then you've got an incipient in the Sons and Daughters of Mars new political identity and political framework. And then overlaid on that is what's obviously see an economic and political conflict on earth between the M6 and the ISN group. And that's where the prisoner has been spirited away to at the end of the episode. And then on top of that, again, you've got these kind of dueling mega corporations in Helios and what are they called? Kuragin? Is that it? And the Kuragin Corporation. And each of them are exercising. Each of these judicial forms, are exercising sovereign authority at different, you know, at one point. Dev. Is it. You know, Dev, can you protect Lee Jong Il? Can you authorize this. This mission? Another point, you have to go to P of. At another point, it's the sheriff. You've got a sheriff in. In town. It's really a really interesting conglomerate.
- [51:33]
Professor Jeff Dudas
There are these kinds of plural legal orders in a certain way, all of which are attached in more and less obvious ways to, as you say, a kind of sovereign authority. And the other thing that happens is that the subjects themselves, the individuals appear to be engaged or enmeshed in these overlapping legal, plural legal orders. But I. I will admit I don't quite understand the status of our North Korean original astronaut who's, you know, accused of Lijiang Ill, I think. Right, yeah, Gil. Gil, Yeah. I don't quite understand his status and I don't. I don't quite understand why he is this kind of rightsless subject.
- [52:17]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Well, he defected. That's what happened. And I think it might have happened in the. In the time gap, but he. Definitely from North Korea.
- [52:23]
Professor Jeff Dudas
He defects. But then. So I guess I. What I mean to say is I don't understand the nature of something that we might call citizenship in Mars.
- [52:30]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Right.
- [52:31]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I don't understand who's in and who's
- [52:33]
Professor Stephen Dicey
out because it's a liminal space. I mean, this is often true of the colony. Right, right. That's a precise point. That you have these. Sorry, I don't mean to talk over you, but you have these contingent or removable rights when you're this kind of subject in this space.
- [52:49]
Professor Jeff Dudas
But I get. Yes, that's. That's correct and that's clearly what's happening here. But. And maybe this will develop. Maybe we'll get a better sense of this as the season goes on. But I don't quite understand what the metrics for inclusion or exclusion are. The metrics for this, that kind of subjectivity. What makes you. Excuse me. What makes you a subject of rights in this Mars colony? And what puts you outside of that? So, yes, he's a defector, but I mean, but what does that mean in Mars? Right, right.
- [53:23]
Professor Stephen Dicey
And to where did he defect? To the United States. Right, right.
- [53:27]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Like what. What's the new nation that he has defected to? Or how do we understand these nationalities as they exist on Mars? So I. Right. I hope that we get some better development of those kinds of social and political dynamics as the season goes on, because right now it feels very elliptical and hard to hold on to. I'm not, as I say, I'm not sure. I'm not sure why. So what has he done at the end? Has he sought sanctuary now? Does he become a kind of a political prisoner who's seeking sanctuary or asylum? Or what is the right? So it seems to me that there's a lot of as yet undeveloped, potentially interesting lines of connection and jurisprudence that we don't really know how Mars society works.
- [54:20]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Right. And they've also got. And I think it's. I mean, I may be wrong, but I suspect it's deliberate because another big storyline that's going through this season is these craters, these people who essentially undocumented migrants who are stowing away on pressurized craters and are then arriving on Mars and they're classical refugee or stateless persons, which, which is in. You know this better than me, but in, in political philosophy and legal studies, these are hugely significant liminal cases. Right. Because what. You know, because it gets at precisely the core question of these kind of rights frameworks, which is what rights adhere to you as human qua human, and what rights are only available to you as citizen of, Of. Of a state. And to have these liminal cases is precisely where it's. It only. It not only, it doesn't only apply to the person in the liminal space, it's absolutely crucial for the person who believes they have secure rights by virtue of just being a person or by virtue of being a citizen of a country. And what you often find is these are a lot more contingent in reality than you had hoped. Yeah, in theory.
- [55:24]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Exactly. And, and along those lines, we also don't really know how government works on Mars. They make references to local hearings, but by whom? Who are the magistrates in this society?
- [55:39]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Right.
- [55:41]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It appears that in some ways the governor almost has almost unchecked authority.
- [55:50]
Professor Stephen Dicey
And there's a sheriff, There's a sheriff.
- [55:52]
Professor Jeff Dudas
What is that? We don't really understand. We presume that the sheriff operates under the ambit of the governor's authority, but that may not be true.
- [56:02]
Professor Stephen Dicey
And it's also. So, so you're thinking it's like deadwood or whatever, right? Like there's a, there's a. That's what, that's when you hear sheriff and you know that you're thinking it's all right, it's this incipient but where there's going to be a lot of like law of the frontier order, you know. Yeah, but, but, but it's also highly bureaucratized. So it's this weird hybrid system of the. Or combination of what seems to be the arbitrary or the locally controlled and the, the bureaucratized, heavily regulated and, and
- [56:27]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I hope that those are the kinds of things that they explore and develop as the season goes on, because as of right now, for me, it's hard to kind of find my way into understanding how these dynamics are working out in Mars society. Yes. You're here to help in a way.
- [56:45]
Professor Stephen Dicey
It's explain a confusing show in a way. Yes. So that I thought was really, really interesting. Dev is in this episode here he is, he's not just a sort of striking figure on the COVID of Men's Health. He's resplendent before the model of his new dream city of Meru. Right. And he's going to build this again, what seems like a utopia on Mars. A million person city with all mod carnage.
- [57:18]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It reminds me of, you know, this is it in Saudi Arabia they're trying to build this huge engineering project. The line.
- [57:25]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Yes. Right. Yeah.
- [57:26]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It sort of has some real world resonances. It seems like to.
- [57:29]
Professor Stephen Dicey
That is really interesting in a resource. Resource driven economy itself. Yeah, that is really. And of course in contemporary terms, what it had always looked like. I don't know if you follow any of these influences who go and live in like Dubai is the common one or you know, place in Saudi Arabia and so forth, but they obviously live in the extremely affluent. It's designed for them kind of Instagram realities. And you do have these, these weird situations of these in the middle of essentially a desert, this, this sort of utopian technologized metropolis. And I follow a guy like bodybuilder guy, Mike Thurston, and he's got, it's. He lives in the best tower block and then he goes in the best gym and the, and the beach is the, the best beach. And of course it's just this hugely artificially constructed bubble of unreality and it has sci fi kind of connotations to it. And then of course, tragically, you know, you do find that that's hard to sustain when reality does Intrude, as I'm afraid it is in many of these places at the moment. Right.
- [58:30]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And it'll be interesting to see if Dev's vision is realized. Like does it become a kind of a Total recall Mars Bubble City. Right. And all the sort of the nightmarish elements that are associated. Given the nature and the trajectory of the show. I suspect it has not turned into that.
- [58:45]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Yes.
- [58:46]
Professor Jeff Dudas
But it's interesting in that way.
- [58:49]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Dev continues to play, I don't know, the vanguard, the Lenin role in utopian thought. Right. Which has always been his liminal or paradoxical status that he's on the one hand hyper elite, hyper rich, runs this mega corporation. On the other hand, I think genuinely, I think in the past you've been more skeptical, but I think is genuinely sort of a dreamer and his notion is he has this sort of effective altruism, except it's not. Well, I don't know if it is altruistic notion, which is, it's, it's fine to get like, oh, you should actually get mega rich. If you, you are then. Because then you develop more resources under your control and because you're the utopian or altruistic person, you then do the greater amount of good.
- [59:30]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [59:30]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Rather than pursuing an occupation that makes you less money but is more immediately, I don't know, charitable or other focus.
- [59:36]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I, I think it depends on how you, as you say, it depends on how you see Dev. Right. What are they going for here? Are they going for an analog to sort of our real world text overlords or as given the show's inclinations, are they going for something more positive?
- [59:53]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Right.
- [59:54]
Professor Jeff Dudas
You're probably correct in the characterization of Dev. I hope that we see more of Dev. I must be honest, at this point I'm starting to get a little skeptical that he's going to be a major part of this season, isn't he?
- [60:05]
Professor Stephen Dicey
I don't know this because I have such a sort of blinkered kind of set of. Well, it's not true. I don't have a blinkered set of popular culture that I consume, but I don't consume kind of superhero popular culture. But isn't he the star of, of some major franchise now like Mr. Something
- [60:21]
Professor Jeff Dudas
he has been cast in, in some
- [60:24]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Blu Ray or something shows or movies,
- [60:27]
Professor Jeff Dudas
but I don't know.
- [60:28]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Okay, all right. I mean, maybe people can tell us in the comments, like has it, has his, has his kind of quad exceeded what's, what's available to the show to have him on very, very regularly as opposed to just Kind of sprinkled in. Yeah, here and there. Just as an aptly fact. Is there anything else you'd like to talk about in terms of ideas or do we want to kind of step change here after. After a brief break and do kind of critic and then respond to.
- [60:50]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, let's take our break and then we'll come back.
- [60:51]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Okay. All right, so we'll be back in just a second. And we are back with our discussion of episode two of season five of For All Mankind. By the way, Jeff, episode two was called the Hard Six. Now, rolling a hard six is. I think there's two. Two things to say about that. One is it's a reference to. Is it called craps? It's like a dice game or something. And you. Craps. It's like hard to get those numbers. I think this is where the references. And you'll love this because I know you like when I talk about Ronald E. Moore and Battlestag. Yep. So the. The. The. One of the creators is Ronald D. Moore, who famously. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, but he worked on a little show called Battlestar Galactica that I occasionally bring on. He.
- [61:28]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I didn't know he had.
- [61:30]
Professor Stephen Dicey
One of the protagonists of that show, Adama, would constantly say this thing. Like, sometimes he had a very husky. Sometimes you gotta roll a hard six. And every time it was like an ongoing joke. The other characters would be like, yes, Admiral. So rolling the Hard Six was a thing that Ronald D. Moore deliberately put in.
- [61:51]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And here the grandson professes ignorance about what he means.
- [61:55]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Yeah, exactly. So it's like an in joke. I think that would be my reading of that in terms of this episode as sort of a work of drama away from the ideas and so forth. I had a couple of thoughts, Geoff. You know, I mean, I think people will know. We sort of start at different points in our evaluation of this series as a work of quality drama. But I'm gonna throw you a couple of points. There are a couple elements of this episode which I mostly found very exciting and very interesting. A couple elements that I thought were a little bit odd. One was the flatness with which they dealt with the discovery of life on other worlds, which I think was done for the reasons we talked about in the first section, that ideologically, they need it to be a big deal for humans. So they had a problem. They needed to motivate people to go search this thing out. And why are they going to go and do this without some sort of signal? And it's sort of Implausible that they would always be sending manned missions to the. You know, so they needed to do that. But also they thought it would be an anti. Climax, an anti the Show Pro human vs technology ethos to have it discovered by a little digging machine on Titan. So that meant they had to sort of rather downplay what was obviously the most important terrifying discovery in the history of humankind. Which was odd as a work of drama, as a piece of drama, but I think understandable. The other thing that it did slightly throw me out of the show was there's a scene of the three teenagers.
- [63:22]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [63:23]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Kind of, you know, getting high and discussing current affairs in that they're like, did you hear about Lee Jung Gil? Well, and then having a very earnest kind of civics discussion. And I thought, I know, these are not even college kids, as I understand. They're on the cusp of like, are these the only three teenagers in the universe who sit around discussing current affairs and civics?
- [63:43]
Professor Jeff Dudas
You didn't, you didn't do that while in various states of intoxication? Well, look, I'm asking seriously. I, I did that.
- [63:51]
Professor Stephen Dicey
You did, yes. But like, with that high earnestness. No, I was like, we were just listening to music.
- [63:56]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Of course, this is, you know, this is the time for high earnesty.
- [63:59]
Professor Stephen Dicey
What, What I mostly did at that stage of my life in that. In that state was listen to music with. With deep profound appreciation that somehow escaped me when I would listen to it in. In different states of mine and then wonder, like, is. Is. Is the. Is the star? Is the. Is the kind of Indian food shop going to deliver this time of night? Is the. Can I get some, some. Can I get a kebab or some fish and chips from somewhere?
- [64:22]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Those are deep thoughts in their own mind.
- [64:24]
Professor Stephen Dicey
That's true. Deep. Deep and important. So that was my kind of thought dramatically. I mean, what, what did you make of the episode? Just qua. Yeah. Episodic tv.
- [64:32]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It is strange. The. It's going to be hard to get over the, the oddity of the discovery of potential life in the episode. It kind of comes out of nowhere and it features. It's discovered by characters that we just know anything about. Right. I don't. I don't remember them from season four.
- [64:52]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Right.
- [64:52]
Professor Jeff Dudas
That was odd, for sure. You know, I, I remain, you know, less than besotted, I suppose, with the sort of the caliber of what we see on screen in terms of the dramatic development of the characters. You know, there were a couple of things. I, I found it very strange that, I mean, I have no idea who Ed Baldwin has enlisted to help him break out, you know, to do the prison break. I don't know who those characters are. I don't know their names. One guy takes a bullet in the back. No idea who he is.
- [65:29]
Professor Stephen Dicey
I did make a comment to you before we started, Jeff, that your problem with Ed's makeup was not that he looks like an aged up Joel Kinnaman, but that he looks like a de. Aged Joe Biden. Is that, does that hit home? Is that a good comment or just a nasty thing to say?
- [65:44]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It's funny. I hadn't thought of it in that way and I can't say it resonates particularly, but it does. We did. The other thing we talked about off camera was that some of the aging certainly looks better than some of the other aging. And you know, I think Kelly's aging looks good. Ladies looks good. And maybe it's because as you, as you had responded off camera that, well, there's kind of less time and there tend to be be fewer changes, you know, in that time of life that they're supposed to be in. Right. And so there's more. There's higher resemblance.
- [66:19]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Yeah. Joel Kinnaman's having to be aged up like 40 odd years. And it is. I watched a Q and a with, with the, with the actors about a previous season as preparation for the new season. It is quite shocking to see him, you know, irl, as they say, or any real.
- [66:36]
Professor Jeff Dudas
There's a new show on. I don't know if it's new, but there's a show on Netflix right now in which he's the kind of villain.
- [66:41]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Yeah.
- [66:42]
Professor Jeff Dudas
The name of which of course I cannot remember, but my wife was watching it and. Yeah. So I mean, he, you know, in that he's. He's playing him, I don't know, late 40s, early 50s, whatever he is in real life. And so there is. It is a little shocking to see him there. I'd be more interested in seeing what, what had happened to Ed over the previous 10 years. I mean, he's now, I'm not much. It's hard to say. There's a ton of character development that happens to him in the first four seasons for the show thus far. This feels like kind of his last development, this kind of crotchety radical that we're getting late in life, which would be fine. That would be appropriate. Most people tend to stop developing as people once they reach it a certain point.
- [67:34]
Professor Stephen Dicey
He's continued to do so, which I think is the uber metaphor for the show. Right. In many ways, he is embodying that kind of journey that they're saying humanity's gone on from Korean War vet and Cold War combatant to now like the person who is pushing everyone to be more radical and to dream bigger and to think bigger. And even within just a couple of seasons, he's changed his view on one specific issue. If you remember, he had this kind of. He was very dismissive of Kelly's search for life in an earlier season. Or she said something like, you can't drill here because we haven't tested it for life yet. And he's like, screw that. We're going to drill where we want. Drill bit or whatever he said. And now in this season, he's extremely solicitous of her hopes and ambitions in this. Yeah. In this area. And it's not. It's not a commercial thing for. I mean, it's actually him supporting his daughter, I think, as much as anything else. But. Yeah, but he. He very big hearted, very radical, as you say.
- [68:27]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And he is. While the grandson says he can still be an asshole. I mean, he's much less of. He's much less. So. Yeah, right. Than. Than he was in previous season.
- [68:35]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Yes, absolutely. 100%. All right. I thought we would respond to a couple of comments from. We really valued comments that you leave. We tried to engage with each and every one of them. And one reason that we really value them is it helps us to think anew about things or quite commonly provides information on stuff that we missed or haven't understood. You know, we're not perfect viewers of the show by any means. We watch it. We call these reactions because they're not kind of long form analyses that we've done after watching each episode 10 times, we record very soon after the episode. And so we do miss things and get things wrong. There's a couple I thought we might respond to from last week. Week one is a comment I think you see on every video about the. About for all mankind at the moment, which is. Why does this show feel like a prequel to the Expans?
- [69:20]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, it doesn't to me.
- [69:21]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Okay.
- [69:23]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I think that the tone of the two shows are radically different. They, in a storytelling sense, they pose, at least with regard to Mars. They pose, pose their stories and present them at pretty radically different periods in the social development and political development of Mars.
- [69:45]
Professor Stephen Dicey
But that's the comment, right? A prequel. So, you know, in the.
- [69:49]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I don't see it. I mean, the overall effect and tone of the Expanse is much darker.
- [69:56]
Professor Stephen Dicey
I think that's the key.
- [69:57]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And I don't think any of the characters in the Expanse fit in the world of. For All Mankind and vice versa. Versa.
- [70:03]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Yeah. No, I agree with you. And the, The Expanse, I think, is very interesting. One point. I did think of writing a paper that would explicitly juxtapose those, those two shows and making the point that the, the Expanse was really a continuation of sort of power politics. And you know, the, the analogy in the Expanse is it's also Cold War ish. Right. It's like Earth and Mars is like the, the US and the. And the Soviet Union definitely has that. That militarized, bipolar, competition, securitized aspect, but it's a, it's a, it's a humanity that never escapes from that dynamic, really, in the Expanse. You know, certainly as the show begins, obviously there's a teleology to it and a sort of extra human intervention at some point, but that dynamic is never escaped from. Whereas For All Mankind is precisely about trying to escape that dynamic. The more interesting question of is it a spiritual prequel is something like Star Trek? And in the. Because it has the same, same ethos, really, progressivist kind of utopian ethos. And in, in the, the panel discussion I was just referring to where I said, well, it's really shocking to see Joel Kinnaman without the makeup. One of the questions went to Ronald D. Moore and the question was when are we going to see a starship in For All Mankind? You know, there. Some kind of schematic drawing of her. And he's like, you know, never. That's not what the. What the show is. But that I think is a better comp than a more accurate comp than the Expanse.
- [71:24]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [71:24]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Okay. Other question or other comment that came in was responding to what we'd said last week about why are there no. Why is there no artificial intelligence in the show? That if technology was proceeding at this pace, you would imagine it was a sort of fairly uniform wave and it would have dragged along or brought forward the development of our current models of artificial intelligence certainly into the 2010s, which is where we are now. And the comment was made. The history of the Internet is very different in the showing that the US government retained a lot more control role well into the 90s and early 2000s. Tim Burners Lee is portrayed as an activist for a freer Internet rather than the creator of the World wide web. Because LLMs rely heavily on the Internet as a source of mass amounts of data to learn from, it's likely that research in that form of AI might be just as slow, if not slower in our timeline, which I think is a smart comment. Right. And that does sort of. I think there's two things I want to say to that. One is good on the show for doing that because that does provide a plausible explanation. You know, it helps the coherence of the world building that they've developed that. The other is I think they've done that deliberately, not just for narrative consistency in show universe, but because of the earlier thing we talked about, that they're trying to retain a world in which humans are control tools rather than are mastered by other intelligences or technologized intelligences, whether it's Internet, social media or nowadays LLMs.
- [72:47]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I think that that's right. Although it does create a strange wrinkle in this storytelling universe. It's really difficult, and you had mentioned this offhandedly off camera, it's really difficult to imagine how it is exactly that government keeps control of this technology. And if it does so that implies a very different posture between governmental power and citizen activity. Then I think the show wants us to take away.
- [73:23]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Require enormously authoritarian efforts.
- [73:25]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yes.
- [73:26]
Professor Stephen Dicey
In countries that we, we are led to believe are more free than they
- [73:31]
Professor Jeff Dudas
are in our time and none more so obviously than in the United States. So that would be interesting to think about. Right. To what would an alternate history for all mankind look like? Right, right. And this, this could be a way. And that actually, this is all. This is actually quite darker, much darker of a reality and much more authoritarian than the show is putting on screen. And one of the bits of evidence, maybe one of the primary bits of evidence is the fact that actually technology is not in. Is not openly available. There isn't transparent capacity to engage from something like a private sector. Right. So that would be interesting. Right. To kind of what would happen if you reran for all mankind. And I suppose that in some ways they're sort of doing that with the spin off on the Star City. But if, if you reran the show on its kind of on its own terms. Right. Looked inside of its own wrinkles, could you tell a different story than the one that they are actually trying to tell?
- [74:32]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Yeah. And this, this was the great genius of Philip K. Dick's great alternate history novel. The man in the High Castle, which is the man in the High Castle actually contains multiple alternate realities. And you're shown at one point in the novel, you know, you think you're being shown a glimpse or return to our reality, but actually there are multiple ways you know, there's one in which Churchill is still British Prime Minister and Britain is the major superpower alongside. You know, there's all sorts of different configurations of the ways things could have gone. It's. We don't have time to get into it now, but as you're speaking about, you know, potentially more authoritarian in United States at least as regards the Internet and that kind of exchange of information. It also would maybe explain something I think they are doing in the show which is an increasing paralleling between the Soviet Union in the United States. We'd said in the previous season, it's really weird that the Soviet Union not only persisted but experienced tremendous economic growth, but became no less authoritarian, maintained a strong authoritarian security state and so forth. Maybe that's the argument the Soviet Union, some dimensions became more American, America in some dimensions became more Soviet. Maybe that's what. What's going.
- [75:42]
Professor Jeff Dudas
But also, as you had also said off camera, it's because. It's also why we don't see China really at all. Is that the, in the show's imagination, the Soviet Union is playing the China role.
- [75:52]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Right? Yeah, right. Yes. Yes, exactly. The, the role that China plays in our current kind of politically economic development
- [75:59]
Professor Jeff Dudas
without the accompanying political freedom.
- [76:01]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Right. And. And strict control over the Internet.
- [76:04]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Right.
- [76:04]
Professor Stephen Dicey
Yeah. Okay, good. So anything else you'd like to discuss in this episode? All right, good. So thank you for watching. We appreciate any feedback you might have. Please leave us your comments. We always try to engage in them. We do genuinely find them really interesting spurs to thought and it's good to hear from you. But on that bombshell,
- [76:30]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Foreign
- [76:34]
Professor Stephen Dicey
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Professor Jeff Dudas
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