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EP. REVIEW: Astra Lost in Space


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DuskyPredator



Joined: 10 Mar 2009
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 05, 2019 7:46 pm Reply with quote
Nice to see a similar theory to what I have, of an alternate false history put forward and a not real WWIII with a taught non interest in history to hide that they failed to save half of humanity from death. Creating clones to put you body in to avoid death, practically sounds like an end result of a culture that placed an only look forward mindset, and maybe the abolishment of spirituality.
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 05, 2019 10:23 pm Reply with quote
So in a roundabout way, I guess my "aliens are involved" thesis was sorta right, if you squint real hard. Very Happy

My biggest problem right now is that the dates seem really out of whack. If we're on two different timelines that somehow converged inside the wormhole, then I guess that doesn't matter. But the wormhole tech was only from Polina's timeline. So how did the Astra timeline get it?

That suggests they're right that after Polina's crew was sent out, Astra was discovered and people sent there via wormhole. But as they also noticed, if the exodus was complete by 2057, it's obviously not possible for them to get a civilization up and running with several generations of kids by 2063, no matter what they're covering up. The elderly woman in the spaceport in episode 1 was reminiscing about her space camp, clearly decades before. Which points back to the two timelines and the question of how the wormhole tech got transferred between them.

Could the Astra timeline have been the ones to create the wormhole tech, and while using it for exploration found Earth and secretly gave it to them to save their people, perhaps inviting them to come to Astra? Because Polina's crew never got there, so which Arkship found it as a colonization target? Maybe the coverup was to help the newcomers assimilate without bringing the Earth's warlike ways with them. Maybe they didn't invite everyone... Ack, more wild mass guessing.
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Fred Lougee



Joined: 01 Oct 2018
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PostPosted: Fri Sep 06, 2019 5:30 am Reply with quote
Gina Szanboti wrote:
So in a roundabout way, I guess my "aliens are involved" thesis was sorta right, if you squint real hard. Very Happy

My biggest problem right now is that the dates seem really out of whack. If we're on two different timelines that somehow converged inside the wormhole, then I guess that doesn't matter. But the wormhole tech was only from Polina's timeline. So how did the Astra timeline get it?

That suggests they're right that after Polina's crew was sent out, Astra was discovered and people sent there via wormhole. But as they also noticed, if the exodus was complete by 2057, it's obviously not possible for them to get a civilization up and running with several generations of kids by 2063, no matter what they're covering up. The elderly woman in the spaceport in episode 1 was reminiscing about her space camp, clearly decades before. Which points back to the two timelines and the question of how the wormhole tech got transferred between them.

Could the Astra timeline have been the ones to create the wormhole tech, and while using it for exploration found Earth and secretly gave it to them to save their people, perhaps inviting them to come to Astra? Because Polina's crew never got there, so which Arkship found it as a colonization target? Maybe the coverup was to help the newcomers assimilate without bringing the Earth's warlike ways with them. Maybe they didn't invite everyone... Ack, more wild mass guessing.


People seem to be assuming that not everyone made it off the Earth. People also seem to be assuming that it took a long time to get everyone off the Earth. If the spheres were invented right after Polina and her crew crashed and Astra was discovered and deemed suitable at about the same time then with a large number of spheres practically the entire population could have been sent in short order along with requisite building and construction materials. It would have been a massive logistics feat, to say the least, but with enough teleport spheres it could be done.

Of course you would have those who would not want to go for sundry reasons. Those might total between 10-25% of the population. Trust me...the species as a whole wouldn't miss them.

So then what? They fabricate a new "history" to teach in schools but don't go into depth on it, encouraging kids to look forward, Per Aspera Ad Astra, and everyone just goes along with it because that's the new Party line. Okay. I'll buy that one if you toss in an order of ramen from that vendor just across the street from the southwest gate of the Mitsubishi Shipyards in Yokohama...because I am feeling charitable.
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
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PostPosted: Fri Sep 06, 2019 12:23 pm Reply with quote
I wasn't assuming either of those things. But it's 2063 and they speculate the migration was completed by 2057. It doesn't have to have taken a long time for them to move, but it does take time to have teenage children - certainly longer than 6 years! Were the Astra kids brought from Earth as ten year olds, memory-wiped and given false yet traumatic childhood memories, and the entire adult population is meticulous about keeping this secret? That's a bit far-fetched, even for this series.
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DuskyPredator



Joined: 10 Mar 2009
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PostPosted: Fri Sep 06, 2019 12:58 pm Reply with quote
Fred Lougee wrote:
People seem to be assuming that not everyone made it off the Earth. People also seem to be assuming that it took a long time to get everyone off the Earth. If the spheres were invented right after Polina and her crew crashed and Astra was discovered and deemed suitable at about the same time then with a large number of spheres practically the entire population could have been sent in short order along with requisite building and construction materials. It would have been a massive logistics feat, to say the least, but with enough teleport spheres it could be done.


People are assuming the not everyone made it because of the specific detail about apparently half of the population supposedly dying in WWIII. The idea that humanity also suddenly deciding that unanimously to abolish nation borders, abandoning conceptions like god, and other things that guaranteed utopia future, could be explained if certain people were given priority in starting the new world. It would almost be like a bunch of elites deciding that they could make clones and choose to be the ones able to live forward by sacrificing said clones.

But, there are indeed still some problems with exact years. Still wondering if it was feasible along the lines that the people of Astra did something like change all calendars back to start at the year after WWIII supposedly happened, and how that would have worked with the ship Astra.
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Fred Lougee



Joined: 01 Oct 2018
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PostPosted: Sat Sep 07, 2019 9:30 am Reply with quote
DuskyPredator wrote:
Fred Lougee wrote:
People seem to be assuming that not everyone made it off the Earth. People also seem to be assuming that it took a long time to get everyone off the Earth. If the spheres were invented right after Polina and her crew crashed and Astra was discovered and deemed suitable at about the same time then with a large number of spheres practically the entire population could have been sent in short order along with requisite building and construction materials. It would have been a massive logistics feat, to say the least, but with enough teleport spheres it could be done.


People are assuming the not everyone made it because of the specific detail about apparently half of the population supposedly dying in WWIII. The idea that humanity also suddenly deciding that unanimously to abolish nation borders, abandoning conceptions like god, and other things that guaranteed utopia future, could be explained if certain people were given priority in starting the new world. It would almost be like a bunch of elites deciding that they could make clones and choose to be the ones able to live forward by sacrificing said clones.

But, there are indeed still some problems with exact years. Still wondering if it was feasible along the lines that the people of Astra did something like change all calendars back to start at the year after WWIII supposedly happened, and how that would have worked with the ship Astra.


Ah, yes. There is that, which does add a great deal of credence to the supposition.

I still hold though that a large number of people would refuse the trip for their own reasons, would be numerous. Many would flat not want to bother with packing up and heading off to another planet, and thus would seize upon whatever convenient rationale was offered for staying. Obviously there would be a bunch of people claiming it was all a hoax, that would be one of the big ones, but there could also be certain religious or nationalistic groups resisting the exodus as well.

This would probably make it easier for whoever at whatever committee the UN has put in charge to make a decision on who goes. Nationalists and religious types and anyone who doesn't obey can all stay and die harshly, people who are desperate to survive go through.
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
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PostPosted: Sat Sep 07, 2019 5:12 pm Reply with quote
DuskyPredator wrote:
But, there are indeed still some problems with exact years. Still wondering if it was feasible along the lines that the people of Astra did something like change all calendars back to start at the year after WWIII supposedly happened, and how that would have worked with the ship Astra.

Unless the series actually is working with relativistic effects on time (I'm not even sure how the theoretically impossible FTL travel works with relativity), that still doesn't explain how Astra raised at least several generations in the comparatively few years since Polina's crew left on their mission, even if Astra and wormhole tech were a thing immediately after they left, and adding in her 12 years on ice. No matter how I look at it, too much time has passed on Astra for it to be the result of Earth's migration fleeing the asteroid. Astra's crew recognizes this problem too. I'm out of ideas, so I guess I'll have to wait until they solve the problem. Smile
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steelmirror



Joined: 22 Oct 2015
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PostPosted: Sat Sep 07, 2019 7:21 pm Reply with quote
Gina Szanboti wrote:
DuskyPredator wrote:
But, there are indeed still some problems with exact years. Still wondering if it was feasible along the lines that the people of Astra did something like change all calendars back to start at the year after WWIII supposedly happened, and how that would have worked with the ship Astra.

No matter how I look at it, too much time has passed on Astra for it to be the result of Earth's migration fleeing the asteroid.
AFAIK, the only reason that the crew thought that 12 years had passed for Polina was because they informed her that they year was 2063, and she remembered it being 2051. So the theory is that the planet Astra started its own calendar, made it to 2063 years later, and then the events of the show started. So Polina hasn't been on ice for a little more than a decade, it's been a little more than 2 millenia.

That still seems unlikely for language reasons (how alike are English today and any language spoken 2,000 years ago?), but it's a possibility that sort of fits the known facts.

As a random aside, I do think it's interesting that, canonically, the crew of the Astra has been speaking English this whole time!

I'm still going with my theory that cloning technology is tied in with the history of the settlement of Astra. Maybe Earth couldn't be evacuated in time, but the wormholes allowed enough industry to be taken off-planet that humanity could survive. But in order to repopulate Astra quickly, they had to clone new people from DNA taken from people on old Earth, and they thought that would be a horrible secret or something that people couldn't bear to know, so the solution was to lie about it and purposely obscure their history so that people wouldn't ask too many questions. In essence, almost everybody on planet Astra is actually a clone of someone who didn't make it off of Earth in time to escape the disaster (or at least, the first generation of Astrans were such). WW3 is a lie to explain the huge drop in population that occurred from settling the world with clones.

Then the crew's parents discovered this secret, and decided they could combine cloning tech with memory implantation in order to live forever, and the wheels of plot were set in motion.

My best guess anyway. Even though Astra is admittedly silly and melodramatic, that exact melodrama and scifi camp is making it tons of fun to guess about from week to week!
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DuskyPredator



Joined: 10 Mar 2009
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Location: Brisbane, Australia
PostPosted: Sat Sep 07, 2019 9:27 pm Reply with quote
Gina Szanboti wrote:
DuskyPredator wrote:
But, there are indeed still some problems with exact years. Still wondering if it was feasible along the lines that the people of Astra did something like change all calendars back to start at the year after WWIII supposedly happened, and how that would have worked with the ship Astra.

Unless the series actually is working with relativistic effects on time (I'm not even sure how the theoretically impossible FTL travel works with relativity), that still doesn't explain how Astra raised at least several generations in the comparatively few years since Polina's crew left on their mission, even if Astra and wormhole tech were a thing immediately after they left, and adding in her 12 years on ice. No matter how I look at it, too much time has passed on Astra for it to be the result of Earth's migration fleeing the asteroid. Astra's crew recognizes this problem too. I'm out of ideas, so I guess I'll have to wait until they solve the problem. Smile


That is why I put forward the idea of Astra pushed its calendar back to WWIII supposedly happened. This supposedly happened around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, 1962, making a random guess of the nuclear war lasting a year, when they reached Astra they may have changed their calendar from 2051, to 1963. Marking this as the 100th year since the migration to Astra, and Polina was in stasis for 112 years. Or round about that in terms of when the asteroid was supposed to be hitting Earth and when the migration would have happened. In particular I wonder if there is anything relevant to how I think there was an old lady in the first episode talking about her camp when she was their age, which otherwise presumed space camps were already available in 2000's (double digits, not the single).
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
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PostPosted: Sat Sep 07, 2019 10:29 pm Reply with quote
steelmirror wrote:
AFAIK, the only reason that the crew thought that 12 years had passed for Polina was because they informed her that they year was 2063, and she remembered it being 2051. So the theory is that the planet Astra started its own calendar, made it to 2063 years later, and then the events of the show started. So Polina hasn't been on ice for a little more than a decade, it's been a little more than 2 millenia.

I would buy that except that the wreckage on the crash planet (not to mention the damaged Arkship), and the dog tags, didn't show 2000 years of corrosion, or even 112 (the dog tags probably would last ok for a century, but 20?). But that could be a plotpoint the writers overlooked (or I could just be wrong about corrosion speed), which would make these theories still possible.

Speaking of the tags, I assume the crewman was an American. But US tags don't have DOB or place on them (assuming the date and Seattle meant those things). They have name (last and first on separate lines), an ID number (depends on the branch whether it's DOD or SSN), blood type, maybe innoculations, and religion. I guess that could've changed after 40 years, but age and place of birth are irrelevant if you have their ID no.

If everybody on Astra is already a clone, then what's the point of the DNA tests? Just to catch duplicates that are living concurrently? Ok, I could buy that, I think.
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steelmirror



Joined: 22 Oct 2015
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PostPosted: Sat Sep 07, 2019 10:47 pm Reply with quote
Gina Szanboti wrote:

I would buy that except that the wreckage on the crash planet (not to mention the damaged Arkship), and the dog tags, didn't show 2000 years of corrosion, or even 112 (the dog tags probably would last ok for a century, but 20?).
FWIW, I agree with you. If it turns out that more than a century or so has passed, I'll accept it but chalk it up to the writers lacking a real sense of time. But I'm hoping the amount of time elapsed since Polina's time is in the couple of centuries or less.

Polina mentioned that she was born in Russia but was speaking English, I took that to mean that the crew was probably multinational but with English as the common tongue, in much the same way that English is pretty much spoken in international flight traffic control because everyone has to be able to talk to each other somehow.

Aries is the one I'm still the most clueless about, and what Charce's plans for her are. Come to think of it, we only have his word that he really is a prince. Maybe all of that was a lie? I mean given narrative logic, some of it would have to be based on truth, just so a twist doesn't come out of completely nowhere. I'll have to go back and watch the ep where we get his backstory, and see if anything that happened there is more suspicious now that we know more about what is going on with Astra...

And I still haven't 100% given up on the possibility that Aries is the traitor, just purely based on shock value!
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John Thacker



Joined: 28 Oct 2013
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 10, 2019 9:37 pm Reply with quote
steelmirror wrote:
Aries is the one I'm still the most clueless about, and what Charce's plans for her are. Come to think of it, we only have his word that he really is a prince. Maybe all of that was a lie? I mean given narrative logic, some of it would have to be based on truth, just so a twist doesn't come out of completely nowhere. I'll have to go back and watch the ep where we get his backstory, and see if anything that happened there is more suspicious now that we know more about what is going on with Astra...


My theory is that he is a clone of the king, and as expected Aries is a clone of Seira, but the story about the prince who had the commoner friend Seira, while based in truth, isn't really something that happened to Charce, but is something that happened to his original, the king. It doesn't make sense for Aries to be a clone of Seira if Seira were Charce's friend, because Aries is the same age as Charce. (The cloning technology doesn't appear to include ways to rapidly age up someone.)

So the original that Charce is based upon had the whole experience with Seira and going in a coma or whatever, and then he arranged for both his own clone, Charce, and a Seira clone, Aries. (And possibly planned a meet-cute with them later, which got disrupted by the law being passed.)
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Gina Szanboti



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PostPosted: Tue Sep 10, 2019 11:01 pm Reply with quote
Or maybe they do have rapid growth tech, or recently acquired it. That would explain why it's necessary for Aries to have perfect recall (so she can be brought quickly up to speed knowledge-wise, along with false memories of learning all that stuff normally) and yet she isn't quite fluent in the local language, as a child would be. Since she doesn't seem to have Seira's memories, she could be the result of different secret tech peculiar to Charce's kingdom.
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steelmirror



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PostPosted: Fri Sep 13, 2019 10:47 am Reply with quote
So I think that all the weird twists and turns this week were pretty twisty, but in a way that, in retrospect, seems to satisfy all of what we've known about things from the beginning. In that sense, it was pretty fun!

Unfortunately another episode of exposition and flashbacks made for pretty dull viewing, despite the raw melodrama on display. I was sort of bored by the middle of the episode, and didn't feel the emotional impact of the events as I probably wanted to, up until the very end with Kanata's actions. That part I thought was really well done!

I hope that this week's reveals about Aries are building up to a bigger moment of crisis and catharsis for her in the show's finale, because other than seeing her sobbing, I didn't really get a sense that these shocking truths will really affect her all that much. She has a good mom, and knowing that her mom isn't biologically related is surprising, but I have zero expectation that she won't be able to get over that and embrace her mother once again. It doesn't speak to any weaknesses or insecurities in her character that I've seen, so it doesn't seem to really hit her where she lives like it did the other kids when they got their various focus episodes.

The one thing I am definitely looking forward to is seeing all these kids confront their parents when they all get home!
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whiskeyii



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PostPosted: Fri Sep 13, 2019 12:10 pm Reply with quote
steelmirror wrote:

The one thing I am definitely looking forward to is seeing all these kids confront their parents when they all get home!


Likewise! Let's get these kids home in one piece, and then unravel the lingering mystery of how Astra's history is tied up with Earth's. >D
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