Farewell (for now), The Expanse
general details follow, but I’ve avoided specific character or plot details
When The Expanse first aired at the end of 2015, I was there on night one — eagerly. I’d seen the trailers, and picked up on the hype that had built among fans of the books; but even then, I could’ve been sold sheerly on my desperation for some good science fiction to sink my teeth into.
Then I saw the first episode, and lost pretty much all interest.
That premier felt tragically in line with any number of other long-forgotten ‘SyFy originals’ — shows that burn bright with a flashy opening, but quickly reveal themselves to be stale trudges through unsubstantiated melodrama. Between the jarring Black Keys needle drop, off-putting digital sets, and headfirst dive into an odd flavor of self-serious noir, it felt destined to become another one-or-two-season flop in the bin of mediocrity that the network is known for.
So, I moved on.
It wasn’t until the fourth season was announced in 2019 that I decided to finally give it another go, figuring if it was still around, someone had to like it. I think back on those early hours with a sort of fondness now, because by the show’s fourth episode ‘CQB’ (as is a common sentiment), I came to realize just how unflattering an introduction it had put forward; how earnestly it stumbled in establishing what I now know to be one of the richest science fiction settings ever filmed.
When I get into something, I really get into it. So now, as the sixth and final season has wrapped up the better part of a decade later, I’m confident in telling you that despite what I once dismissed it as, The Expanse has come to solidify itself as far and away my favorite show — ever. It’s thematically dense, it rewards every ounce of attention (and every rewatch) you give it, and it upholds an impressive commitment to nuanced and engaging character work. It also happens to deliver one of the most plausible and relevant depictions of a spacefaring future we’ve yet seen, with action that manages to outdo itself in both spectacle and wit time and time again.
Minor flaws aside, The Expanse stands out as a confident and affecting study on humanity’s unending cycles of conflict; juxtaposed with the belief that collective reckoning with the failures of those that came before — along with the systems they built — can still lead to something better, and something worth struggling to one day see.
There has long been a trend in popular science fiction to use the future as an excuse to sidestep (or depict idealized versions of) humanity’s deeply-entrenched material and sociopolitical issues. In the future, they often suppose, the human race will become truly one — a unified group in a post-prejudice society that instead faces conflict from other species or civilizations. Of course, those ‘others’ (as with elves and dwarves in fantasy) often stand in as analogues for marginalized groups, but it’s less common to see this genre truly commit to sitting down and projecting our longstanding flaws centuries out — and beyond Earth itself.
The Expanse takes place in the relatively near future, around the 24th century. Much of humanity has moved beyond Earth and colonized our solar system; on Mars, Luna, various asteroids, moons, and manmade stations. ‘Colonized’ is intentional here, as the central struggle lies in the protracted state of cold war between those left on an overpopulated and resource-stricken Earth, a heavily-militarized and unitary Mars, and the asteroid belt; a home to millions of Belters who, in order to survive, take on the arduous task of mining water and resources that the inner planets inevitably seize.
Belters are, much like the workers of present-day capitalist nations, second-class citizens. They see practically none of the benefit or profit born of that which they spend their lives laboring away for, and access to already-scarce air and water are held at arm’s length by the ‘inners’ as a way to keep the belt subservient. Inferiority has only solidified itself in the eyes of their oppressors with time, as generations spent living in zero or inconsistent spin-gravity have seen Belters physically change, standing out against those born within the gravity wells of planets.
Belters grow tall and thin, with comparatively low bone and muscle density. A Belter entering the atmosphere of Earth would scarcely be able to stand, and prolonged, untreated exposure to the atmosphere’s pressure would likely turn fatal. Even Martians — whose smaller planet exerts one-third of Earth’s gravity — require significant preparation and a reliance on medications to acclimate themselves.
This is already getting into territory beyond where many science fiction shows put the pen down, and consider their worlds sufficiently built. Yet The Expanse is — forgive the cliché — not like many other shows. Belters, as with all the major players in this story, exist upon a bedrock of substantial history and ever-elaborated-upon intricacies both as individuals, and a common people. They have established customs and gestures, and a genuine shared culture; not cues merely appropriated from our time, but ones thoughtfully built as extensions of where we are, contextualized by all the hardships that their lives away from terrestrial accommodations entail.
Furthermore, they have an entire spoken language. ‘Belter Creole’ was developed by a real-world linguist, and combines echoes of countless different real-world languages and regional dialects. To have each and every Belter not only communicate in a consistently-applied manner but blend their own real or fictional accents in too takes a special kind of dedication for the large, circulating casts involved with television. It goes further, though; Belters who frequently live and work around inners will even code-switch (or, pointedly, refuse to) as they navigate different situations. As my favorite example of this level of consideration, Camina Drummer — the Belter second-in-command on Tycho station — first stood out as a bit (intentionally) stilted in her delivery as she was introduced in the second season. It wasn’t until I picked up on how fluidly she spoke Belter in comparison that I realized actress Cara Gee was deliberately performing English as her second language from Belter, and it’s a detail that never ceases to impress me.
This level of attention is also paid to Earthers and Martians, as well as their many conflicts between each other, and the belt. Both broader factions and individual characters feel as though they act not by following retroactively-connected dots on the writers’ outline, but by reacting to events within their own layered and evolving worldviews; something you’d hope for, but don’t find all too often in a genre so focused on events spanning entire solar systems or more. As with the rest of The Expanse, it’s rarely taken for granted that things simply are — everything has a past, and plenty of meaningful scars to show for it.
Beyond the people themselves, The Expanse also stands apart for its depiction of a masterfully well-considered world. As a core for the main players and their messy web of conflicts, histories, and interactions to be built around, the science and physics depicted in the show are — by accounts from those far more intelligent than me — rock-solid.
Of course, there are inevitable creative liberties. The schematics for the ‘Epstein Drive’ that a young Mars used as a bargaining chip to negotiate independence from Earth may not run on magic, but are nonetheless convenient as they offer constant propulsion from remarkably little fuel. Likewise, a series with this much time in space committing to an authentic silence would almost certainly grow tedious — so the thrust of engines and firing of cannons and torpedoes in vacuum are given satisfying whirrs and roars.
When it comes to so much else, though, The Expanse is flirting more with the harder end of science fiction than the hand-waves of invisible shields, laser weapons, artificial gravity, or existence of faster-than-light travel that so much of the genre leans on.
It all stems from the details; how most ships are built like skyscrapers, with floors perpendicular to the lengthwise manner they travel in order for thrust gravity to be exploited. Acceleration in space is also properly depicted as linear — while it appears odd at first, ships will flip and burn away from their destination to decelerate at the halfway mark of their journey. The forces exerted by intense maneuvers during firefights also take a toll on crews, even with continuous injection of ‘the juice’ (a cocktail of adrenaline, blood thinners, and blood vessel reinforcers); and just as well, any internal bleeding in zero-g will become lethal given enough time, since blood is unable to properly drain and clot. Even the occurrence of short, survivable (albeit still hazardous) periods of exposure to vacuum are depicted with as much accuracy as you could hope for, given how much of what we know is — thankfully — still theoretical.
As another ingenious way to pull tension from the limits of reality, travel takes real, consequential time; it can also require minutes or hours for communications to cross the void. If a battle occurs on the other side of the system, the telemetry data showing who won and the damage incurred may be on a significant delay, leaving would-be support in the dark.
There’s just a real believability to everything on screen even if you aren’t smart (like me!), and for the things that stand out as strange, you’re more likely than not to find someone online having already done the math, and concluding that it added up. That’s easy to take for granted as a viewer, but it’s worth commending both the authors of the source material, and those in production that went out of their way to maintain a level of scientific accuracy often overlooked or seen as burdensome in the genre. Especially on television, where budgets frequently necessitate that more is implied than ever truly shown. The void’s indifference towards humanity as it has stepped beyond the safety of Earth’s atmosphere is ever-apparent, and allows for action and danger just as tense and grounded in the sixth season as in the first.
That commitment is equally as strong for ship battles themselves. From diehard genre fans to legitimate astrophysicists, I’ve come across many articles and videos breaking down the incredible detail and shot-to-shot continuity that’s on display here; and the sheer number of people enthusiastic to do so gives some indication on how well they’re executed. As someone who misses probably half of what’s actually going on during a first viewing, they’re also just really fucking cool, and never fail to carry a sense of reasonable logic, and well-realized stakes. Excellent editing keep both what’s happening without and within the ships clear and immediate; while clever pans and zooms give the action a tangible sense of distance and scale, despite the frequent lack of orienting horizons or structures in space.
There simply aren’t battles in The Expanse that feel won by mere coincidence, or plot necessity. Rather, an outclassing in raw power, or outsmarting of the enemy’s tactics, awareness, or misplaced expectations lend to fights that feel solidly earned. There’s a delicate balance to be found between substance and flashiness in the easy-to-overdo-it genre of space combat, and that balance is more or less nailed here from the outset; only getting more refined and confident as the series goes on.
I would be remiss if I didn’t call attention to the handling of in-universe UI work as well. Between the countless hand terminals, monitors, projections, and heads-up displays, there is an abundance of beautifully-considered interfaces here. No aspect is truly superfluous, and pausing to take them in reveals a wealth of genuinely relevant information, clever details and foreshadowing, and/or nods to other media. Beyond the usual ‘actor waves hands vaguely’ approach to this type of interaction, The Expanse once again puts in the work, and it’s a continually satisfying bit of tactility.
It would be an achievement that The Expanse impresses so consistently under the best of circumstances, but it has endured no small amount of friction during its run. This is a show that was canceled on SyFy after its third season, and picked up by Amazon mere weeks later, following an incredible push by both fans and titans in the realm of fiction like George R. R. Martin alike. It’s also a show that filmed and produced two of its most ambitious seasons during a global pandemic, and that was forced to navigate sexual abuse allegations surfacing over one of its cast members as the fifth season was already in post production. Any one of these things could severely compromise — if not outright end — a project as large and complex as this, but the people behind it seem just as invested in seeing it done right as the viewers that helped give it a second chance back in 2018.
There’s isn’t a performance I don’t admire here — and effects that occasionally fall victim to their budget (along with some bleak early-season color grading) notwithstanding, their work is bolstered by consistently attractive cinematography and evocative scoring. Though the first season sticks out as more obviously ‘basic cable’ in nature, by the second and third, its presentation becomes far more confident; whether that be from budget, technology, or experience, I can’t say. It’s impressive during a continuous viewing, where those jumps come back-to-back in parallel with the increase of the narrative’s scope.
This is, ultimately, a series grounded by thoroughly-established depictions of class, exploitation, politics, family, revolution, and war — all forged into a lens to view our own world and future through. It justifies its parallels to real-world struggles, because it puts in the time and effort to use them not as means within themselves, but as projections of how we may succeed or fail going forward; ultimately damning in its conviction that a continued unwillingness to put the preservation of natural resources and humanity — all of humanity — above the insatiable maw of profit and imperialism will not somehow be solved by distance and hardship as we step into the cosmos, but ratified and compounded upon as those same tendencies travel the stars with us.
In that vein, it’s worth noting how committed the show has been to depicting a broad range of humanity itself at every opportunity. Nonwhite and non-male actors make up a significant amount — if not break the majority — of both the core cast and extras. There are numerous queer characters and couples both primary and incidental as well; there’s even a significant amount of time and development given to a polyamorous group of Belters living on a ship together. It’s cool to see, especially for a genre often supposing a future that has advanced in many ways, yet whose casts frequently remain trapped within the same limits of power and privilege as our present-day media landscape.
To me, that’s the real feat of The Expanse. It pulls no punches when it comes to characterization and detail in every aspect it can, and never feels like anything less than the culmination of countless people genuinely trying to make the best science fiction they can. I envy those who may just now be picking it up for the first time — and if you have yet to see it, I cannot recommend enough that you be one of them.
Finally, I want to touch on the future. There are nine books in the series, with the final having just released. Season six coincides with the same novel, and the show now finds itself with a bit of déjà vu as it has ended following three more seasons, just as with SyFy a few years ago. From what I’ve gathered, it was a decision by Amazon who (like the network before it) didn’t see the sort of viewership and return they wanted from distributing such a high-budget show. Given how winking the creators have been in their vague assurances of season six being a ‘pause’ rather than a true cancellation, I can only hope something is in the works.
As it stands, season six and its finale provide not only some of the most ambitious action the show has put forward, but a confident reckoning with the themes it has long held at the forefront — and an open-yet-satisfying conclusion to the narrative as well. That itself (see: Game of Thrones) is far from a given with shows of this scope, especially considering they managed to deliver it all rather confidently within the short six-episode run that Amazon ordered.
If this is truly the end for The Expanse, I’m sure that it will — as it already has for many — grow in sentiment over time as one of the finest shows that the genre has ever produced. And if by another miracle we’re able to see the final third of this adaptation come to pass, it’s certain to be one hell of a ride.
After all, if something refuses to stay dead once, how good can the odds really be on a second attempt?
