The Expanse Season Two

Season Two of the Expanse has been fantastic - the world-building and forward momentum of season one has payed off with the characters growing and the plot thickening.

One odd thing about the season, however, is the way that the first part felt like the real conclusion to season two. There are going to be open spoilers in this post, so if you aren't caught up on the show, scroll away.

Season one ended with the reveal of what was really happening on Eros, but not a resolution to that plot. There was definitely a big cliffhanger - a horror show of just how evil the people experimenting on the Protomolecule were - but the end of the season was more about the shock of that evil and the strong hints that the thing was alive than actually about how to deal with this reality.

In season two, we see Holden become, I think, more formally "the captain," even if his crew is only three other people (with Miller joining temporarily as a fifth Roci member.) Miller was probably the best character on the show (even though her plot is still isolated a bit from the rest of the cast, Chrisjen is also such a badass that you can't help but like her too - though I do feel a bit uncomfortable that part of that badassness came in the form of her being willing to torture a guy in the pilot.)

One of the things I've liked about the show is that it really tries very hard to create a lived-in universe. These are people who have all lived in a human-colonized solar system their whole lives, and a lot of the things that we take for granted in space-based sci-fi are called into question: biggest being I think the disregard that Martians and Belters have for Earth - the planet, not just the people on it.

The parallels with the Cold War are hard to miss - during the Cold War the First World and Third World terminology was created to talk about geopolitics (the Second World was the Communist one, though I feel like you never see that term used as much.) In The Expanse, these terms are pretty much literal. Earth is of course the first world, Mars is the second, and the Belters are trying to build their own identity.

The OPA (Outer Planets Alliance) is their stab at legitimacy - their golden vision of the future is one in which the OPA is right up there with the UN and the MCR as an equal partner. But there are big problems there. One is that Earth and Mars benefit from the Belt remaining subservient. It has even been a kind of buffer on their own relations, as both planets need the resources of the belt and cooperate to get them.

The other big problem is that there isn't any one particular capital for the OPA. The Belters are scattered across the Asteroid Belt and the outer planets and there are a hundred different factions that each have a different vision of how things should go. And of course, some have more realistic plans than others. Those who are looking for legitimacy, to be able to sit down at the table and see their interests represented, are constantly undermined by gangs and thugs that think that negotiating is weakness.

I think one of the really clever things the show does is make all of these factions a mix of races. So much of national identity is tied to race (sadly something that is seeing a resurgence these days,) with the "First World" in real life often being conflated with whiteness, and with the Third World being conflated with color.

But it does sort of make sense that with the massive space-based diaspora of all of humanity, these old signifiers (mostly based on how much sun your ancestors got at their latitude) are no longer relevant. In fact, new physical differences are emerging, like the Belters' elongated limbs and Miller's poorly-fused spine.

One might feel inclined to "root" for Earth on the Expanse, but of course there's no actual guarantee that your descendants in this hypothetical future would still be on Earth. Earthers, Martians and Belters are all us in the future.

And that's interestingly disorienting. Our sympathies may jump around and make us realize that everyone's flawed but no one is evil for evil's sake (though the guy who spaced all the "Inners" on the refugee ship was pretty close to that.) Even the people doing that stuff on Eros are theoretically trying to defend humanity (though seriously, you couldn't come up with a less awful way to study this thing?)

That makes things tough for a guy like James Holden. He always wants to do the right thing, but in a universe where villains don't just twirl their mustaches and hatch intentionally evil plots, it becomes a lot harder to know what is the right thing to do. For his crew? For one faction or another? For humanity?