Another warm body

you know, its creepy enough that when michael woke up, his face wasnt his own, but it must have been downright horrifying for him to meet the actual guy whom he was fashioned after, like a genuine heart-dropping, blood-chilling moment to realize that that old, dying millionaire guy (who youve slowly been discovering has left behind quite a mess for you and your friends thanks to all the weird dark secrets he took to his grave) didnt just steal your life from you and give you a random different face for identity fraud purposes—he specifically modeled you after his estranged son, a man who is your total polar opposite, someone with barely any personal morality or convictions beyond gaining as much money and power and control over others as possible, and purposefully did not tell you this information, maybe thinking that somehow you two would never ever cross paths, that you could just seamlessly replace his son in every single way without ever knowing it, that garthe could just wither away and die in prison alone as if he had never existed in the first place. and of course, garthe, the man who you were intended to replace, the man who has just come back from an extended vacation in a brutal prison to find that his father is dead and he has given his entire inheritance to his newer, better, custom-made "son", absolutely wants to throttle you. He NEEDS to throttle you. because you are the epitome of his deepest, most poignant inner fear, the one thing that torments him endlessly: the fact that his father had never truly loved him, had always wanted him gone, had always wished that he had been someone else, and had now well and truly replaced him with someone he could actually love as a son. and michael never wanted that in the first place, he never asked to be the surrogate, but here he is looking in the mirror feeling his skin crawl with disgust because hes not just someone different after all, he is someone else. Someone who is still alive, and who had looked back at him with the same stricken horror, now turned to blinding, agonous rage. what an insane weight to carry! just when he begins to get used to this face, just when he finally thinks that maybe he could really fit himself into this new identity, his whole world is turned upside down again!

fuck health issues fr. i should have a little screen that tells me exactly whats wrong and whag to do about it

i don't think we can really comprehend what rocky went through. his star is dying, his planet is cooling—something that is directly deadly to his people. they build a ship to travel the stars, everything is going well, they have hope! except... things are going much faster than they planned for. it's strange. and his crew mates, they're slowing down. they're getting tired faster, sleeping longer, working less. they don't wake up. he can hear their worker cells stop moving, their colonies die. not slowly or one by one, but in staggered groups. their pilot, their craftsman, their navigator. more and more, until it's just rocky. tau ceti is right there, staring at them, the petrova line in their grasp, but rocky. rocky is an engineer. rocky is an engineer, his job is to make sure the ship stays up and running. so he does that and he does that and he does that and he does—nothing. he cannot save his planet. he can't go home empty handed either. he is stuck in limbo with the corpses of his crew and no idea why they died. no idea why he didn't die. alone, alone, alone, your planet is dying you are useless. until—a ship.

I find it so strange that Stratt's "yeah, after the launch I'll end up in prison until the end of my life, no big deal" wasn't included in the movie. Like, Grace does ask her what her plans are for the next twenty years. Why isn't the answer there. It's great that she has a prison tattoo when she gets the beatles, it's great that we have the director's confirmation that she was in prison and escaped (?), but. a) it's very much Not Obvious if you just watch the movie and don't know what prison tattoos look like. b) I feel like this is such a significant part of her character? her being absolutely ready to sacrifice it all and knowing from the start what the price of saving the world will be? it hits so hard in the book, along with the "oh, I will [go to hell]. you three are going to Tau Ceti, the rest of us are going to hell". Why wasn't it there. Give me the woman who is readily and willingly tying herself to those trolley tracks and refuses to see that as a big sacrifice or be pitied about it. I love her so much.