"The Expanse": series review

L to R: Cara Gee as Camina Drummer; Shohreh Aghdashloo (Chrisjen Avasarala); [top] Steven Strait (James Holden); [bottom] Cas Anvar (Alex Kamal); [bottom] Burn Gorman (Adolphus Murtry); [middle] Dominique Tipper (Naomi Nagata); [top] Wes Chatham (Amos Burton); Frankie Adams (Gunny Bobbie Draper)

"The Expanse" is a six-season sci-fi TV/streaming series that ran from 2015 to 2022. It is based on a nine-book series of SF novels (plus short stories and novellas) by James SA Corey, who published his stories from 2011 to 2022, spanning more than a decade and overlapping with the TV production. The show began life on the SyFy Channel, where it went for three seasons before expensive production costs and sagging ratings meant it had to be handed off to Amazon, where it went on for another three seasons as an Amazon Original Series. The episode count for each season (and not counting the parallel webisodes, which I haven't seen) is: Season 1, 10; Season 2, 13; Season 3, 13; Season 4, 10; Season 5, 10; and Season 6, 6. An oversimplified summary of the series might be that it's "Game of Thrones" in space, i.e., a sprawling story in which distinct human factions have been fighting and vying for power and control while an unearthly mystery/threat, initially looming off to the side, makes itself more and more deeply felt. The visual style of the storytelling is probably most reminiscent of "Battlestar Galactica," with which "The Expanse" shares a lot of creative DNA in terms of its themes, tropes, and aesthetics. The series is brave enough to end with open questions and unresolved plot points. This may have been necessary given the show's budgetary constraints, but I see it as a ballsy artistic choice by the showrunners, who didn't feel the need to solve some of the show's core mysteries (as also happened with "Galactica"). That said, Season 6 inevitably felt a bit hasty in its conclusion given its six-episode length.

The cast of "The Expanse" changed over the course of six seasons, what with characters dying and new ones being introduced. Some characters left this mortal plane of existence but came back thanks to alien technology, partly or mostly retaining their original personalities. Among the main cast were Steven Strait, Dominique Tipper, Frankie Adams, Wes Chatham, Cas Anvar, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Thomas Jane, Cara Gee, Keon Alexander, and a host of others.

The story takes place in the distant future. There are three principal factions as human civilization has expanded throughout the solar system: Earth/Luna (the United Nations), Mars (the Martian Congressional Republic), and the OPA (the Outer Planets Alliance). The OPA includes the Belters (inhabitants of the Kuiper Belt), who are the most vocal faction of the OPA. Earth has by this point become a flooded, over-urbanized world in decline, but it still holds great power and is respected as the cradle of human civilization. Mars, meanwhile, has become an up-and-coming power motivated by the dream of terraforming. In the series's present, Martians still live in sealed domes, but they've been terraforming for generations, riddling the surface of the Red Planet with pressurized domes, cities, and other aspects of human civilization. Mars's harsh environment has spurred great advancements in technology, with Mars having the best-equipped military fleet, and Marines who train extensively in a one-gee environment so as to be able, if necessary, to fight on Earth's surface. Most Martian civilians, by contrast, live in Mars' 1/2.7 gee and suffer the consequences of the lighter gravity. Earthers and Martians are known by many names to the Belters and other OPA members, who call them "Inners," collectively referring to the inner planets of the solar system (but Venus and Mercury are not colonized). Martians are also called (offensively) "Mickeys" and "Dusters," and Earthers refer to Belters as "Skinnies." Since many Belters are born and raised in almost zero gee, they can grow tall and brittle-boned ("bones like chalk," as one character says), but because human physiology really hasn't evolved that much since humanity began to colonize the solar system, one Belter fear is that, if a generation of Belters were to be born on a planet with substantial gravity, those children would no longer really be Belters. Belters show their identity by dressing in scruffy ways, and they almost all sport body tattoos that may or may not reveal certain local affiliations. Belters also speak a heavily accented "standard" English as well as a Belter-native creole with words like beltalowda ("We Belters," the Belter people), baratna/sesata ("brother/sister"), inyalowda ("Inners"), copeng (from French copain, i.e., "buddy, friend"), Bossmeng ("boss, chief"), sasaké ("capisce?"), no sasa ("dunno"), welwala ("traitor to the people"), etc. For the show's purposes, Earthers all tend to speak some sort of clearly accented English, often American but sometimes British or foreign-tinged. Martian speech is basically like Earthers', with some characters sporting anything from a Texas twang to a Kiwi accent, a possible legacy of the homeworld. Belters, meanwhile, often sound Jamaican when they speak in "standard" English. Other languages like Chinese appear in writing or as spoken PA announcements, and a couple scenes even show some Korean chyrons scrolling by. In terms of space travel, there are no Star Trek-style inertial dampeners to allow people to stand upright during ship's maneuvers; people have to strap into g-seats and be injected with g-tolerance fluids in order to survive high-g maneuvers without fainting or stroking out (always a danger). Also, there is no hyperspace or subspace, so humans must take time to cover large distances (often with the help of something called an Epstein Drive), and they cannot communicate instantaneously with each other across the solar system: they are limited by the speed of light, which means people use a form of email to record and send video messages to each other. Holographic projections, though, are commonplace, as is haptic manipulation of images (3D rotation, magnification, etc.) via hand gestures.

With that as the sociopolitical background, we can focus more closely on the story. As with most series these days, there are several large and interweaving plot lines as well as plenty of side plots and, especially in the final two seasons, parallel storylines whose relevance to the main stories is not always obvious. The main focus is on the crew of a "salvaged" Martian fighting vessel originally called the Tachi (lit., "great sword"/太刀, a type of samurai sword) but renamed the Rocinante in honor of the tired, lame horse used by Don Quixote. The Roci's captain is Jim Holden (Strait), a man who got booted from Earth's military; his crew includes the Belter engineer Naomi Nagata (Tipper), fellow Earther and burly goon-factotum Amos Burton (Chatham), and Martian pilot Alex Kamal (Anvar, with a Texas drawl). Another major plot line involves UN bigwig Chrisjen Avasarala (Aghdashloo), who eventually becomes the UN general secretary. A third major plot line involves the adventures and misadventures of Roberta "Bobbie" Draper, a tough Martian Marine gunnery sergeant who ends up working for and with both Avasarala and the Rocinante crew.

The appearance of an alien phenomenon called the protomolecule has left humanity scrambling to understand it, find uses for it, and even to weaponize it. Is the protomolecule dangerous? Does it spread like an infection? Can it communicate with itself and others? Does it have a purpose? At first, the protomolecule appears as something between a blue goo and radioactive pixie dust. Certain Earther tycoons, like Jules-Pierre Mao (François Chau), have been experimenting with fusing the protomolecule with humans—especially unsuspecting children—because the substance has shown itself to have mutagenic properties, thus opening up whole new avenues of research. Meanwhile, Detective Joe Miller (Jane) has been tracking down Mao's rebellious daughter Juliette "Julie" Mao (Florence Faivre), an Earther idealist who has joined the Belters' independence movement: the Belters have long felt oppressed by Earth and Mars, for whom they do so much asteroid mining, and from whom the Belters have gotten very little in return—an issue of hate and distrust that fuels much of the overall plot of the series. Miller feels drawn to Juliette, and he eventually finds her as an altered being after her human body had been infected and killed by crystalline protomolecule outgrowths. Miller, still feeling that bizarre, spiritual pull, ends up on Eros Spaceport with this protomolecule-infused Juliette; together, they crash on the surface of Venus, and Miller dies, but he too is transformed into a new sort of being, one that is somehow able to communicate with James Holden, both as a representative of the civilization that had created the protomolecule, and as someone still retaining enough of his human free will to warn Holden of certain alien dangers. The protomolecule itself seems to be operating according to some sort of program or agenda; from the wreck of Miller and Juliette's crash on Venus arises a gigantic, jellyfish-like structure that lifts off the Venusian surface and proceeds out into space. But this isn't the end of the protomolecule's activity: the jellyfish eventually constructs or becomes a gigantic ring beyond the Jovian system, soon to be known as "the Sol ring," into which ships may pass, but only at a certain speed. Inside the gateway that the ring represents is a huge, spherical space called "the ring space" whose inner surface is dotted with many more rings, each a stargate or wormhole leading to a completely different solar system, many containing habitable planets as well as a plethora of unknown hazards ranging from weird diseases to new alien life. This reminded me strongly of "God's anteroom" in the Narnia series by CS Lewis: in Lewis's scenario, there's an interstitial space that looks like a forest clearing with many pools of water in it. Each pool leads to a completely different universe with a completely different Earth, and Narnia—where magic exists, and time flows differently—lies beyond one of those pools. 

As humanity becomes aware of the ring space, the political winds shift: Earthers longing to get offworld and live somewhere clean and less crowded now have the chance to start anew on another planet. Martians begin to abandon the dream of creating a new Earth on Mars so that they, too, may colonize these new worlds. The Belters, meanwhile, are miners and traders less interested in worlds with gravity than in gaining control of Earther and Martian ships' access to the Sol ring, and it's in this environment that the series's big bad finally makes his appearance over the final seasons: Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander), a cynical and charismatic Belter, paradoxically also an idealist, who thinks that now is the time to attack both Earth and Mars to gain the Belt's independence. Marco is Naomi's former lover, and before Naomi left her life of crime and rebellion long ago, the two had had a son named Filip (Jasai Chase Owens), who feels abandoned by Naomi and has been raised exclusively by Marco. Naomi's current lover is James Holden; her meeting with the young-adult Filip begins to complicate things and evoke old loyalties as well as a once-slumbering maternal instinct.

How does all of this come to a head? What mysteries about the "protomolecule civilization" get revealed? As I mentioned above, the series doesn't come to anything like a neat conclusion; a bit like life, the ending leaves us in medias res and with many unanswered questions.

I throughly enjoyed "The Expanse" and am almost persuaded to go and read the novels, novellas, and short stories. The plot is intricate and well written; the characters are all generally compelling and well acted, and the series's themes are of the kind to make one think. This is a nicely inhabited and thoroughly built-out world, dimensional and profound. As with "Battlestar Galactica," one of the central questions is about humanity's collective wisdom or stupidity. "Galactica" dealt with this issue via the motif of the eternal return: "All this has happened before and will happen again." While "The Expanse" never states this theme explicitly, the show evokes human history on multiple occasions to show both how wisdom from the past can be applied to the future, and how human imbecility, venality, and frailty have not evolved out of us, even when we have the chance to start again. We learn some tantalizing facts about the protomolecule civilization as well: it had died out millions or billions of years earlier, killed by yet another alien civilization that even now seems to inhabit the interstitial, extra-spatial regions defined by the various alien rings. Passing through any ring in a ship is a dangerous, risky experience because each passage brings with it the potential to evoke these entities' anger—something James Holden becomes aware of as he interacts with the ghostly projection of Detective Miller.

Very exciting and evocative. That said, I have a few complaints. One thing I'd heard about "The Expanse" was that it was among the best sci-fi series in terms of its respect for real-world physics. True, the show does a good job of showing ways of handling in-ship zero gee, high gee, orbital mechanics, and realistic spaceflight, but I couldn't help noticing that it was making the same rookie error as all the Star Wars movies and "Battlestar Galactica" by depicting sound in space. The only show I've seen that ever got that right was "Firefly." How "The Expanse" dealt with planetary gravity was also a bit cheap and fake: Mars and the Moon both seem to have the same one gee as Earth except when we see a liquid being poured or a liquor bottle accidentally falling from a height. We also get only one clear example of a super-tall Belter; every other Belter character we meet looks like a normal Terran human, not like a string bean. When people get blown out of an airlock, the result isn't nearly as visceral as it was on "Battlestar Galactica." I also occasionally found myself annoyed by Steven Strait, the actor playing Captain Jim Holden. Strait has, unfortunately, the sort of hangdog, slappable face of a young Ethan Hawke. Like Hawke, he'll eventually age out of that look, but for the moment his face, his Backpfeifengesicht, just rubs me the wrong way, and there's nothing I can do about that. I also initially found Frankie Adams as Martian Marine Bobbie Draper hard to believe: the actress is supposed to play a woman who is phenomenally strong for a Martian, but Adams struck me as a little too cute and covered in baby fat to appear strong. That said, I did eventually get behind Adams's portrayal, mainly because Bobbie's character arc is one of the most interesting on the show, revealing her to be both vulnerable and human. (One thing that did surprise me, though, was that I was sure Bobbie and Amos, both bruisers, would lock eyes and fall in love at first sight. Aside from one inconclusively flirtatious scene in Season 6, though, Bobbie and Amos never seemed to become anything more than friends and comrades in arms.) A few other characters didn't have much of a character arc, either: Holden and Naomi remained basically the same people they'd started out as—both principled and trying to act with integrity. Same with Marco Inaros, a villain who generally lacked complexity, and who appeared too late in the series to be much of a final boss. I was also disappointed by the lack of imagination regarding the exoplanets: New Terra (a.k.a. Ilus) has a breathable atmosphere and about one gee of gravity; the same goes for Laconia, another world that has recognizable trees (pines, etc.) and alien life resembling birds and dogs (admittedly, the dogs turn out to be radically different from terrestrial canines). Still, there might be in-universe explanations for the above: maybe the protomolecule gains an awareness of a solar system's life forms and only creates gateways to other worlds that can sustain such life. It's possible.

Several actors deserve praise for their work, including Cara Gee as the Belter Camina Drummer. Drummer, Bobbie Draper, and Chrisjen Avasarala probably come closest to incarnating the much-dreaded girl-boss paradigm, but each of these characters is saddled with imperfections, deeply affected by loss and conflict, prone to making mistakes, and thoroughly human. Drummer is steely and temperamental, and in the spirit of so much science fiction, she's pansexual, hooking up with women and men alike. David Strathairn plays fellow Belter Klaes Ashford, a rival, a foil, and toward the end a father figure for Drummer. Strathairn's version of Belter creole was less convincing than some of the other actors', but his character ended up being extremely likable. Wes Chatham as the initially brutish and direct Amos—the Rocinante's resident heavy—proves to have both a sense of comic timing and a positively scary war face when his character suddenly turns into a berserker (one scene involving a murderous Adolphus Murtry—Burn Gorman—will always stand out in my mind). Chatham also reminds me of a muscular version of Aaron Douglas's Chief Galen Tyrol from "Battlestar Galactica." Thomas Jane as the human-then-ghostly Miller fits smoothly into his role, first as a man of questions and then as a ghostly wisdom-figure with answers. In many ways, though, "The Expanse" was a most excellent showcase for Shohreh Aghdashloo, well known for her eerily penetrating eyes and her almost hilarious smoker's voice (I don't know whether she smokes in real life, but her voice is like a friendly croak from the pit of hell). I've seen Aghdashloo in plenty of other productions, but her character is front and center for all six seasons of "The Expanse," somewhat reminiscent of the US president in "24," with whom Jack Bauer was always in constant contact. Aghdashloo's Avasarala is the girl-boss's girl-boss: authoritative, profane, and almost never indecisive. As a leader, Avasarala can be ruthless but also compassionate, and her attitude as an Earther changes over time as she's forced to deal directly with Martian and Belter representatives of good faith, including Bobbie Draper and the crew of the Rocinante. And there are so many other actors to praise here that it's impossible to praise them all. Even the child actors in some scenes were spot-on. Lastly, I'd like to offer praise to actor Cas Anvar as Alex Kamal, a Martian pilot of Middle Eastern extraction with a Texas accent. Anvar's Alex is smart, capable, and moral; he was, for me, always a pleasure to watch—a man who took to the Rocinante and became expert at piloting it. Unfortunately, it turns out that Cas Anvar had been involved in serial sexual misconduct; over thirty complaints and accusations had been lodged against him, some of which alleged abuse that had lasted for years. I was surprised and disappointed when I found this out, and while I normally try to separate the actor from the role, it was hard to do so in this case. I don't think Anvar got jail time or anything so serious, but his character was written out at the end of Season 5 so that he wouldn't be around for Season 6. What a shame.

"The Expanse" has been influenced by a host of science fiction that has gone before. We were encountering futuristic linguistic changes in movies as far back as "Blade Runner" (cf. Edward James Olmos saying "이리와/iriwa"—"Come here"—in Korean to Harrison Ford), and in novels as old as Anthony Burgess's 1962 A Clockwork Orange. Terms like Belter and autodoc come straight out of Larry Niven's novels; the derogative term "Skinny" is a soldier's epithet from Heinlein's Starship Troopers. ("Skinny" is considered almost a racist term in "The Expanse.") As I'd already noted, the show's dark visual aesthetic, which generally respects Newton's three laws of motion and emphasizes the cold emptiness of space, owes a lot to "Battlestar Galactica." The opening theme of every episode, sung in faux/nonsensical Norwegian by singer Lisbeth Scott, also evokes "Galactica," where every episode began with a mystical singing, in Sanskrit, of the Gayatri Mantra from Hinduism. The show may also have been educational, especially with regard to how things work in zero gee. I learned that internal bleeding in zero gee is a Very Bad Thing because the blood simply collects where it is, inside the body, without flowing anywhere, leading to aneurysms, sopping hemorrhages, and vascular blowouts of all kinds. I learned that people wearing magnetic boots in zero gee, if they are shot and killed, simply stand there and float, unable to collapse upon dying. Space might be the final frontier, but it's also a lot like Australia: the environment is harsh, and everything wants to kill you.

All in all, if you're looking for a show that has well-written characters; an intriguing, propulsive, but somewhat inconclusive plot; and lots of Big Ideas, then let me recommend "The Expanse" to you. It's not without its flaws, but it's definitely a worthwhile watch. One last thing: the series did a good job of defying my attempts to predict what would happen next, except for one thing: in Season 6, there's a moment where I found myself talking to the screen, saying, "Oh, this is gonna turn into Pet Sematary, isn't it?" And I was right. If you get all the way up to Season 6, you'll immediately know which moment I'm talking about (assuming you've read Stephen King's horror novel). Otherwise, just enjoy the ride.