2 characters: Five, Paul
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Five (40 lines, 508 words, 24.33%) - [espeak] Ambassador Five is a Centaurian. They communicate non-verbally, so in order to be understood by humans they wear machine translators.
Paul (39 lines, 1580 words, 75.67%) - [Paul] Self.
Script format: Margined | Marginless (for phone viewing)
Listen along as you read:
1 SOUND: series theme music, shortened. Maybe repeat shortened theme behind each subsection title for separation
2 Five: The Making of Two Fifty-Three Matilda season two. A documentary by Ambassador Five.
3 Paul: Where's ambassdor one?
4 Five: His Microsoft Azure neural voice free credit ran out, making him far too expensive to have around.
5 Paul: Lucky season two took him away from the asteroid so he won't be needed again.
6 Five: Indeed. Care to give us a quick summary of what else happened in season 2, to refresh the minds of our listeners?
7 Paul: It begins 22 years after the first season, with 253 Mathilde approaching the Tau Ceti system. Salish Peters gets in trouble while testing the deceleration ship that's meant to take a special someone into the system to study its worlds. Meanwhile, a strange alien artifact is discovered deep in the mines and it zaps Detective Ahmadi. As Ahmadi recovers he begins to behave oddly, engaging in sabotage on behalf of an approaching alien ship whose species buried the artifact thousands of years ago. Marcus Flint is selected to explore Tau Ceti and sets off, discovering too late that Ahmadi stowed away with him. They explore the exomoon Eddington where they meet halucinations, and the super-earth Miranda where they meet plant people. Meanwhile back on Mathilde, aliens invade and take much of the crew with them when finally chased away. Their parting gift of a relativistic kill vehicle can only be stopped by the mayor making the ultimate sacrifice.
8 Five: You make it sound so simple. The season brought us a lot of new characters, did it not?
9 Paul: From the abrasive Jim O'Hara to the cheerful Apprentice Tojo, the insightful astronomy chief Lawrence and the unfortunate Eva Hernandez.
10 Five: Any you were particularly pleased or surprised with?
11 Paul: I enjoyed writing O'Hara, a chance to have somebody who doesn't fit the mold of everybody getting along respecting each other all the time. But Tojo is the one who surprised me, because it felt like a small utilitarian role when I was writing but then I was really happy with how the performance brought out more personality than I was expecting.
12 Five: Let's hear from Gwenith Knight, who played Apprentice Tojo. [insert Gwenith Knight]
13 Paul: For the record, I was thinking generally of the eagerness and innocence of youth and didn't consciously base Tojo on Kaylee... but I like Kaylee, so it absolutely works for me. And I'm sure Tojo would love to be Kaylee, tinkering with a little ship all the time. [insert clip of tojo talking about the marvel of a spaceship in ep 19]
14 Five: With 22 years having passed, a lot of the returning characters became rather old. Aging seemed to be a recurring theme?
15 Paul: When I set out to do a series that'd span 40 years, one of the things I was looking forward to was getting to explore different stages of the lives of the characters, and how they cope with age. As we open season 2, the ex-mayor is struggling to deal with being past his prime. [clip from early in ep 8] We see him find ways to make himself useful again, and ultimately volunteer himself to try to help the people he cares about escape, setting an example for his daughter in the process.
16 Five: On the other hand we see Salish Peters seeming content as he ages.
17 Paul: Because he's still useful.
18 Five: The notion of being useful, or used, comes up a lot.
19 Paul: Yes. It's also part of Arash Ahmadi's journey. He becomes a helpless tool carrying out actions he despises, betraying his wife especially and everyone else as well. [insert clip from ep 15 about being used]
20 Five: Hey, you stole that last line from Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan.
21 Paul: The ultimate novel on the subject, in which Malachi Constant learns his whole life has been manipulated in service of a petty task. But at least he was useful to somebody for something, and that's better than not being useful at all.
22 Five: This gets into the wider theme of a need for meaning in life. Marcus Flint is another character who struggles with that, drifting through his life until he sees the Tau Ceti mission as a last opportunity to give it purpose. [clip from marcus about looking for redemption, probably from Natural Selection]
23 Paul: Yes, different characters find their meaning in different places. The ex-mayor and Renata have a driving need to matter and to control things. Salish Peters finds meaning with his family and work. Jim O'Hara believes hard work is what matters. Sergey Kochergan thinks it's all about swashbucking adventure. Julianna Sanders rediscovers her meaning in a chance to get back to Earth.
24 Five: There's a lot of sacrifice and redemption going on. In different ways with the ex-mayor, Renata, Marcus, and Ahmadi. [clips from priest about marcus sacrifice]
25 Five: Is this a Christian message?
26 Paul: Well, you're welcome to take it that way. But the religion of 253 Mathilde is an amalgam of world religions, with a priest who's deliberately vague because he has to serve everyone. Personally I'm an atheist, but I enjoyed bringing the religious element into this world with an insightful priest who often acts as a sort of second therapist who can be more direct with people because of his role.
27 Five: Let's talk about the alien invasion. It is perhaps remarkable that even the characters being conquored and imprisoned by them acknowledge that these invaders are not bad guys. [clip about their good intentions]
28 Paul: This is a conflict where both sides have good intentions. That's how a lot of real-life conflicts are, if you can view them from the outside, so I wanted to bring that type of realism instead of the typical black and white kill the bad guys.
29 Five: Some of the aliens are killed. Is this not morally problematic? [Peters got you clip]
30 Paul: Yes, it is morally problematic. But how do you fight a war where nobody dies? You can try, and they try hard, but it's not going to work.
31 Five: Could the people not simply surrender rather than take innocent lives?
32 Paul: People have a right to defend what's theirs, what their ancestors for over a century have devoted themselves to, that's being snatched away just as they were about to accomplish the main mission goal their whole world was made for. And the aliens have a responsibility to confiscate this danger before it can imperil the galaxy. Both sides have valid reasons to fight.
33 Five: Is this galactic police your solution to Fermi's paradox?
34 Paul: I don't know if there are any large asteroids traveling at 75% of the speed of light out there. But if there are, anybody watching is going to be very concerned about the implications. Because any civilization that can do that can wipe out any other civilization in the galaxy whenever it wants to, and has to be stopped before it can. Resulting widespread planetary descrtruction and remaining species trying not to be noticed is one way to solve Fermi's Paradox. But personally I think there's simply no reason to expect other species to be visiting us because of how absurdly big our galaxy is and how short a time there's been any indications that Earth might have intelligent life. If I had to guess, I'd say any aliens out there with the capability to reach us are looking for remote indicators of a higher civilization than ours before they waste their time and resoruces on us.
35 Five: I concur that humans are primitive savages. So, what other science was involved in making season 2?
36 Paul: There were a lot more tough calculations involved this time around. Figuring out how far they could travel in 22 years at less than .1 gee. All the timings and velocities on the Peters rescue plan. Figuring out a realistic balance of survivable acceleration and reasonable time frame for the deceleration ship to Eddington and Miranda. The timings for the alien ship approach. Calculating the relativistic kill vehicles. Even figuring out what year Earth's transmissions would be from had me confused for a bit.
37 Five: So you broke out a calculus textbook and worked through all the equations by hand?
38 Paul: Well, I spent a lot of time plugging different numbers into a relativistic travel calculator I found online.
39 Five: Are you sure you got all aspects of relativistic travel correct?
40 Paul: Uh... moderately confident? I felt like I knew relativity reasonably well before I started, I've read several books on it in the past, but once I got into the details everything suddenly stopped feeling intuitive. [clip of marissa and ahmadi relativity gives me a headache]
41 Five: How real is the description of the Tau Ceti system? [insert clip from ep 11]
42 Paul: It's a real solar system. The planet called Miranda in the story is Tau Ceti b II, it's really a potentially habitable super-Earth with approximately the described gravity and other details. Eddington is more fictional, because we haven't confirmed any exomoon detections yet, let alone whether they're habitable... but the planet Eddington orbits is real. The frequent eclipses described would be real, the strange seasons would be real, if the moon exists. And it's quite plausible that a moon beyond the normal habitable zone could be warm enough due to tidal heating.
43 Five: Are the aliens real too?
44 Paul: Well, Drina -- the alien pet on Eddington -- is really a racoon sound effect.
45 Five: What about the two new intelligent alien species introduced in season two?
46 Paul: For the Mirandans, I just wanted to get as alien as possible. So my mind went to triffids. [insert triffid clip from ep 19] For the invaders, I'd caution that we don't really know much of their culture because all we see are their cops. You can't judge all of humanity based only on what you experience while being arrested by the LAPD. But arrogance is certainly one of their primary features, with some justification. [clip about 10,000 years longer, clip about seeing us as children]
47 Five: With all these aliens and adventures and incredible speeds, would you say season 2 is less plausible than season 1?
48 Paul: Each season of 253 Mathilde gets a bit less plausible than the previous. A 780 year mission is downright likely someday. A 22 year interstellar trip is pretty hard to imagine a sufficient fuel for, and .1 G acceleration of an asteroid requires some extreme measures. [clip about melting the surface] But it's physically possible. In season 3 we'll see some possible-but-unlikely, and also one plot element that isn't possible in my opinion, but I hope the carefully-prepared bed of realism will make it feel possible.
49 Five: Will I be in season three?
50 Paul: Yes, you will.
51 Five: Surely that's impossible? Considering I was saved by the kind aliens and put into hibernation for my return to my home planet? Am I the impossible element?
52 Paul: Sort of. You'll find out this winter.
53 Five: Who would you say are the primary characters in season 3?
54 Paul: I'm still writing it, but so far Salish Peters and Farah Tojo have the most lines. There's also interesting subplots developing for Larissa Flint, Chief Lawrence and Eva Hernandez.
55 Five: Besides myself, will any of the other characters who got taken to the alien asteroid appear in the third season?
56 Paul: Most of them will have brief appearances, but in a different way from Ambassador Five.
57 Five: What about Arash Ahmadi and Marcus Flint?
58 Paul: I have small roles in mind for both of them in the 8th episode of season 3... but I haven't written it yet.
59 Five: Who's mayor now?
60 Paul: Mayor Hu was elected shortly after the events of season 2 and continues to serve in that role.
61 Five: Is that the season one communications chief Hu?
62 Paul: No, different character.
63 Five: Are you sure the third season will be the final season?
64 Paul: There were always 3 distinct interesting time periods in the mission I wanted to explore, and there's really nowhere else to go after this. As we begin the third season, they're turning off the engines for the final time and will spend the rest of eternity speeding through the void at a hair short of the speed of light with no possibility of ever slowing down.
65 Five: Wouldn't that be a better place to end the season than to begin it?
66 Paul: I have my reasons.
67 Five: So what year does it take place?
68 Paul: That depends where you are. From the perspective of the people on 253 Mathilde, it's 2240 -- 20 years after the second season. But on Earth, and for the people like Marcus and Arash left behind elsehwere, hundreds of thousands of years have passed.
69 Five: What?
70 Paul: That's what happens when you fly close enough to the speed of light.
71 Five: Could they really do that?
72 Paul: Certainly, it's like Larissa said back in season 1. [insert clip] You can explore the whole galaxy in your lifetime, but since that's hundreds of thousands of light years you can't keep the planet-bound people you left behind from crumbling to dust as you go.
73 Five: The famous twin paradox. So, what are things like on Earth so far into the future?
74 Paul: Very different.
75 Five: Will we find out how?
76 Paul: Yes, Earth actually plays a much bigger role in season three.
77 Five: That seems utterly impossible given what you've said.
78 Paul: It's actually quite plausable, but I'm glad you can't see how yet.
79 Five: Is that all you can reveal?
80 Paul: I don't want to spoil anything. But as we go, let's leave you with the first teaser trailer for season three.