I haven't seen this week's episode yet, but at this point I'm basically caught up other than that.



My thoughts on this show are strangely mixed. I think it's one of the most brilliant sci-fi TV shows I've ever seen, particularly as far as translating the general look and feel of classic sci-fi to television. In a way, the show's visual realism spoils you for other TV sci-fi. I was watching some clips of a different show earlier this week to write a fandomtrees fill, and found myself getting distracted by the superficial handwaviness of the worldbuilding and tech. Expanse just goes all-in on the realism of the space setting in a way that you almost never get with any visual sci-fi, but especially when they're constrained by the budget and timeline of an episodic TV show.

And yet, I know exactly where the possibility of the show engaging me in an emotional, fandom kind of way slipped away, and that was mid-season-two, and it never got it back.

I kinda talked this out with sheron earlier, but I feel like this show went way too hard, too early, with the characters talking about each other as family, consequently failed to show it, and (for me) never really recovered. The character relationship arcs are kinda all over the place. It's not just that they have other responsibilities and relationships outside the Rocinante, it's that they consistently prioritize those, and break up with each other at the drop of a hat, and especially with the show doubling down early on with the characters referring to each other explicitly as their most important thing or whatnot, it all ends up feeling inconsistent and like none of it means anything.

As opposed to what I would have preferred (and did actually get with certain individual character relationships on the show): a slow growth arc from not trusting each other to gradually, cautiously starting to trust, where the turnarounds of mood and the rifts in the team are opportunities for growth and change (whether toward or away from each other). Here, it feels strangely random. I think it would have worked much better for me if they hadn't explicitly started calling each other family until probably season four, after the team has been stress-bonded a bit and has come to trust each other more. As it is, they feel like they're flip-flopping back and forth between trust and distrust, in a way that never really feels like they grow or change or learn anything.

The reason why the middle of season two was where that explicitly became clear to me was because, while I hadn't really been interested in Miller in season one, in season two I actually found Miller's interactions with the crew, as an outsider coming in on them, the most interesting thing on the show and something that I could have genuinely latched onto. His death drove a stake through the heart of that and, I guess, made it clear that this was a "watch from a distance" show, not an "emotionally bond with" show. And that just brought home to me how unsatisfying and inconsistent I was finding the crew/team bonding. I was still hoping it would get better but it just never really did. It always felt like there were steps missing where you couldn't easily fill in the blanks without assuming that either something we had just seen meant less than it had seemed to mean at the time, or there was some major turnaround that happened off-camera.

Like ... you don't need to fill in every blank space, but you do need to show the touchstones, the important moments, the pivot points -- like beads on a chain, each one building on the one before. They could be leading to a happy ending or disaster, but we need to see enough of those moments to feel like we've had an entire filled-in character arc.

I'm going to use Drummer and Ashford as an example of the opposite because I thought their friendship was really well written and emotionally plausible, and we saw all the points on the chain of relationship development, as opposed to the Roci crew where they seem to skip steps every now and then, or push a reset button.

With Ashford, you can pinpoint the exact moment when he swung onto Team Drummer, and that was when she pushed the button to save his life at the expense of hers. It wasn't the point where they ended up on the same side; in fact they spend the rest of the season in even more active opposition than before. But it was the point when he stopped trying to undermine her and steal her job because he thought he'd be better at it. From there on out, he's holding onto command not because he thinks she's incompetent but because he's aimed at a specific goal that he genuinely thinks is the only way to save everyone. And then, even though she spends the last part of the season helping take him down and eventually does, you still have her little gesture of reconciliation at the end, pointing toward a warmer working relationship in the future. Which is exactly what they get.

With all those connected points on a relationship chain, you don't have to see what happens between seasons to feel that where they end up in season four is plausible. When they had their disagreement over how to handle Marco and the general pirate situation, I was fully expecting - based on the way things tend to go with the Roci crew - that this was going to result in a sudden I-hate-you relationship reversal ... but it didn't! They disagreed like adults and he even defended her decision to Fred even though he personally disagreed.

And we kept getting the little points on the relationship chain. We saw them bond in the wake of their mutual quitting/firing. We saw their goodbye. Eventually, we got to see her react to finding out about his death and grieve over him. Even the little motif of the whiskey that carries through from mid-season-three to the beginning of season five.

Meanwhile in season five, we have the Roci crew going their separate ways with goodbyes we never saw - how long are they gone for? are they staying in touch? idek? - and Naomi actively trying to sneak off to find Filip without telling Holden what she was up to (how much the rest of the crew knows about her past is also a giant question mark). Everyone ends up kidnapped/trapped/in dire peril with no one having a clue that they're in danger because they kinda just all ran off to different parts of the solar system as soon as they got back.

With the Roci crew, you don't typically have those equivalent little moments of, for example, "this is when X realized they trusted Y", "this is the moment when everything changed for X", "this was the little nudge that pushed Y back into the fold rather than away from it." I can't come up with a moment like that for a single one of them, because even if they seemed to have something like that (Alex making food for the crew, Naomi coming back after being on the Behemoth) later developments tended to undermine it, so when you look back on it you don't see it as a big moment freighted with meaning that only became clear in the aftermath; it's the exact opposite of that, something that seemed like a big change but actually turned out to be another not-especially-meaningful quasi-random reversal of direction.

The point isn't that characters can never disagree or have priorities that aren't each other. Drummer and Ashford clearly do. They don't have to end up permanently in each other's corner, either. Fights can push them farther away from each other and lead to irrevocable trust rifts. You just have to see the key points that got them there, and feel like it's leading them along a plausible relationship trajectory instead of a series of random, wild shifts where we never see all the intermediate steps.

Let's take Naomi's relationship with the team in season three, say. Everyone declares their undying Family Loyalty in season 2, then Naomi lies to them and the whole team ostracizes her. They go through various near-death experiences, she wins her way back and seems to be close with Holden again, then six months later she's suddenly on the Behemoth and doesn't seem to be staying in contact with the Roci. How'd that happen? And after all of that, in season five she's still dealing with her family/personal issues without even considering letting the crew in on it.

(You can have a one-step-forward, two-steps-back relationship dance with trust. I like those! It's just that it feels more like a ping-pong ball that bounces randomly between "trust" and "no trust" and never really settles anywhere.)

And then there's Prax, who showed up and bonded with the crew, became friends with some of them, and then simply vanished and, beyond one episode in which Amos misses him, he's never mentioned or seen to contact them again. So I guess when Amos refers to Prax as his best friend, that's just Amos misinterpreting human interaction again?

Whether or not the changes draw them closer together or further apart, you ought to be able to see each reversal or change point as a) a plausible outgrowth of what came before, and b) leading plausibly to the next one. Do the characters on the Roci trust each other more in season five than they did in season two? Are they closer? Uh ... it's sort of hard to tell.

And the moments that would touch on those relationship changes and suggest where the characters stand with each other, like the characters thinking about and calling each other when they're not there even if they're not in actual trouble, or saying goodbye to each other before they go somewhere ... are the things we don't see. I think you actually see more of the team going out of their way to stay in touch with people off the crew - Naomi calling Drummer, Alex staying in touch with Bobbie; even Amos contacting Clarissa.

You can fill in the gaps in your head, but you shouldn't have to, especially since the show actually is perfectly capable of showing that kind of thing when it wants to.



In spite of all my complaining about that, I do really like the show! Seasons three and four were absolutely riveting and probably the high point of the show for me. I watched probably the entire last half of season three in one day because it was so compelling that I just couldn't stop. CAMIIIIIINAAAAA. Spacegates! Peril! It was fabulous.

Season four was a little less engrossing but also, ALIEN PLANET, and it totally had that old-school sci-fi 'exploring a strange planet with weird alien architecture where all the rules are different' feeling. And I liked the new characters a lot, especially Elvi and the Belter family. Burn Gorman was fun to watch even if he was terrible. Miller's overall arc was really great - I love that he got to go out one final time taking that thing down.

So far, I have been much less taken with season five. I'm finding the Marco plot a huge letdown after the wonder and excitement of the spacegate and alien planets, and I absolutely hate Drummer's storyline this season. I appreciate the canon queer, but Drummer going Full Criminal and embracing Belter piracy is the exact opposite of the trajectory I wanted for her. I hate it so much that it makes me rage every time I think about it because I loved her so much in seasons three and four. On top of that, I'm glad she's found a place she's happy but I don't care in the slightest (yet?) about any of the new characters with her because, once again, all the development with them was completely off screen. So basically they've stuck my favorite character in a plot I hate with people I don't care about. I hope that whatever they do with her by the end of season five will win me back, but all I really have right now Drummer-wise is GRRR. RARRRR. HOW VERY DARE.

On the bright side, Chrisjen and Bobbie both have interesting storylines again! I like both of them as characters, but in previous seasons, my interest instantly tanked whenever the plot shifted to the Earth-Mars political arena, so their parts in the last couple of seasons in particular were by far my least favorite; I was just like CAN WE GET BACK TO THE BELT WHERE THE INTERESTING STUFF IS. But in a complete turnaround from the previous seasons, most of the interesting stuff this time around is actually happening on Earth/Mars - I already feel like I've gotten waaaayyyyy too much Marco and regrettably he's not dead yet - so the Belt parts are probably my least favorites and most of the interesting stuff this season is going on with Mars/Luna/Earth.

So yeah, those are my thoughts on Expanse. New episode later tonight!


Edit: new (spoiler) thoughts after watching 5x05.



5x05 spoiler update:

• Marco can die anytime plz. The thing where he's trying to manipulate/gaslight Naomi by having everyone pretend to like her favorite food, and the scene where he's casually talking about cementing Filip's loyalty by making Filip murder friends for him! Marco, you are the worst. It also really bothers me that Naomi is so passive in that storyline. You're a technological genius who was given the run of the ship, come on! Fingers crossed she'll get a little more proactive in future episodes.

• I love that Drummer's reaction to the latest news horrors was a) to worry about Naomi, and b) to defend Fred posthumously even though the last time she saw him, she punched him in the face. I think one of the main reasons why she is my favorite is because she's so loyal to the people she has become attached to - even when they're at odds, even when they're on opposite sides. I still hate the Pirate Camina storyline, but I hope this season ends with her and Naomi teaming up to stab Marco a million times and shove him out an airlock.

• Amos hasn't been a character I was particularly interested in since the first season/early season two (as soon as the show mostly dropped Amos and Naomi's weird friendship as a thing, my interest in Amos bottomed out), but to my own surprise I'm loving his storyline this season. The prison escape was great. I loved that the sympathetic prison guard survived. (Yay!) Looking forward to seeing what happens with Clarissa, who I like.

• Alex and Bobbie are wonderful together and the cliffhanger was full of NOOOOPE. Only having one episode a week is so hard!