It’s like someone asked ChatGPT to turn the book into a dumb anglo sitcom.
-Every character is emotionally immature, spiteful, and sassy. None of the ‘friends’ act like friends. None of the characters talk like real people. They’re constantly insulting or hitting each other. It’s just embarrassing. The actors have nothing to work with.
-All the major twists/reveals are shown in the first two episodes. No suspense, no build-up, no pay-off. Rushed is an understatement.
-Single characters from the book have been unnecessarily split into multiple new characters adding nothing to the story.
-The story is a cosmic horror but comedy and romance have been forced in for no reason whatsoever except as filler, which is even more mind-boggling because they’ve essentially rushed all of the good stuff in the book to make room for unfunny jokes.
-Apparently they could barely afford any sets and extras, so scenes and locations that are supposed to be bristling with sights and people just feel oddly empty. Even the special effects feel muted. The budget is just weirdly limited, and the show looks much cheaper than the Tencent series.
-Almost all of the science (which is the interesting stuff) has been gutted from this science fiction.
I hate anglo slop. Where is the kino. Tencent pls adapt The Dark Forest.
That’s the thing that annoys me most whenever I talk to someone who can’t shut the fuck about the dark forest and wants to frantically shut down all attempts to communicate with possible aliens.
And it’s not even just the radio waves. Apparently they become too diffuse and garbled to detect easily after a few hundred light years anyway. The real problem is the fact that any alien civilization with both the will and resources to take us out from thousands to millions of light years away would have already known about life on Earth for the past billion years. It’s no secret. Whenever the Earth passes in front of the Sun, anyone within that line of sight observing with a sufficiently powerful telescope will clearly see spectroscopic evidence of both methane and oxygen in the atmosphere. That sort of atmosphere just doesn’t exist naturally in equilibrium without life constantly replenishing it. It’s what astronomers call a bio-signature. So these potential omnicidal aliens have had more than enough time to throw a rock at Earth at 99% the speed of light, and that rock has had plenty of time to get here.
Maybe they only want to kill technological civilizations? Well, in that case they’d be monitoring planets known to support life, waiting for something they consider a threat to evolve. Clearly Earth would have been one of those planets on their watch list for a very long time, and by now their spectroscopy data is showing them all of the weird shit we’re extremely suddenly dumping into the atmosphere, an obvious techno-signature.
So hiding from them is very clearly not a productive use of our resources. If the dark forest really is the solution to the Fermi paradox, then we have a near light speed rock with our name on it no matter what we do or don’t do. Stealth does not exist in space. So we might as well just try to be friendly and open to any other alien civilizations that might be out there.
I’ve gone through like three different periods of trying to understand why everyone is so jazzed with tbp and my opinion of the story drops each time i try to figure it out. I have now arrived at the conclusion that it’s science fiction for people who lurk on next door and call the cops on kids wearing hoodies.