While my mind races with speculation about Wandavision (see earlier posts for my love of other Marvel, though not MCU, show Legion, and all its mind fuckery) I should also post about a show that has been consistently one of my favorites since its start. The Expanse was resurrected last season by Amazon Prime after SyFy cancelled it (because apparently a channel that's supposed to be all about Science Fiction doesn't want the best sci-fi show on it.) Season four was a bit of a departure, focusing our core cast of the Roci crew on their extended job overseeing a colonization effort of one of the new Ring Gate worlds. While we got other plots for people like Avasarala and Drummer, it was a weird season for a show that tends to, you know, be set in space.
Season five is also weird, but for a different reason - the core four of the Roci crew are all separated, doing their own things. And while it takes a couple of episodes to get there, at the center of it all is a devastating terror attack that, more than any prior catastrophe in the show's plot, up-ends what you might have thought of as "safe." Let's go into spoiler territory.
As foreshadowed in the previous season, Marco Inaros, the hardliner Belter extremist, has used stolen Martian stealth tech to launch several asteroids at Earth. There's a sense of dramatic irony in the early part of the season - one might expect that our heroes will gradually get wind of this plot and swoop in to save Earth at the last minute. But even as one of the asteroids breaks up after getting too close to the sun and the odd readings of it - showing that the fragments are far easier to see on some surfaces than others - as well as with the strange attack on an asteroid-watching station, Avasarala seems to only just be putting the piece together, suggesting this could be intentional, when the first of the rocks hits off the coast of Africa.
The devastation doesn't seem to be quite the Battlestar Galactica-level annihilation that occurs at the start of that other prestige show that allowed the Sci Fi channel to flirt with greatness, but billions of people on Earth die due to the shockwaves and the subsequent flooding as sea-walls built to safeguard coastal cities after the oceans rose due to climate change are shattered.
So, where are our heroes?
Let's start with Amos. Amos travels back to Earth after the woman who took care of him when he was a kid dies. While it looks at first like his time there is going to be spent dealing with a childhood friend-turned-crime-boss, the story in Baltimore wraps up rather cleanly. He then travels to a prison in Pennsylvania where Clarissa Mao is in a special prison for those with performance-enhancing implants.
He's in the cell with her when another asteroid hits Pennsylvania, and the two work with some prison guards and another inmate to escape, discovering that everything in the prison that was above the ground got wiped off the face of the earth. As it stands, the two of them are now trudging through the woods, trying to survive in what might not yet be a post-apocalyptic winter wasteland, but seems to be going in that direction.
Alex has traveled to Mars to try to see his estranged wife and kids again, but faces more resistance than he had hoped for. While there, he meets with Bobbi, who has been tracking the black market sales of Martian military tech. Mars itself is in the midst of a cultural existential crisis. Having for the past century been focused on the cultivation of Mars as an inhabitable world, the revelation of the Ring Gate and the worlds that await beyond it (which don't require nearly as much terraforming as Mars would) has let all the air out of Martian culture's tires. When they go chasing a Martian ship that seems to be running weapons to buyers out in the Belt, they discover that they're not selling things from the ship - they're selling the ship itself, creating a cutting-edge battle-fleet for the buyers - right about the time that the rocks hit Earth and someone blows up a bomb in Martian parliament.
Naomi's story, then, is the most fraught. Before the rocks hit the planet, Naomi seeks out Fillip - her son. The only problem is that Fillip's father is Marco Inaros. And as it turns out, Marco has raised Fillip to be a loyal foot soldier for his vision - the Free Navy, which will have total supremacy over the solar system and the Ring Gate. Naomi meets with old friends, but they are all loyal to Marco, and Fillip kidnaps her, taking her aboard Marco's flagship to be a prisoner.
Finally, Holden remains on Tycho Station, where Monica Stuart, the journalist who he's dealt with before, claims she's uncovered some new stuff happening with the protomolecule. Cortazar, the brain-altered scientist in on the conspiracy at the start, is taken by a group that kills his handlers, and soon, they try to kidnap Monica. The first attempt is thwarted, but when Fred Johnson and Holden try to lay a trap for the ship coming to take her, some of Fred's people turn on him, fatally shooting Fred while they send in a heavy-duty drone to steal his sample of the protomolecule, which is possibly the only remaining sample left in the system.
Holden is gearing up to capture the sample, but is delayed after Naomi sends him a dire warning that the Roci's been sabotaged to blow up on launch.
Drummer, meanwhile, has been making it as a somewhat ethical pirate (she keeps other pirates from murdering the people they steal from) but is also planning on taking revenge on Marco for killing Ashford. However, as Marco announces the creation of the Free Navy, he invites all the other faction leaders to come join him (not so subtly implying that death will be what they get if they refuse.) She meets with Marco, and Fillip inadvertently reveals that Naomi is aboard their ship.
Finally, Avasarala, after her warnings (which, admittedly, were coming too late) are initially ignored, witnesses a third rock hit Earth, landing off the coast of South East Asia and destroying the plane on which SG Gao is riding. With the UN leadership in chaos, Avasarala is asked to join the provisional cabinet by the former Secretary of Transportation, now Secretary General.
To sum up - things are crazy.
For a long time, Naomi has hinted at having escaped something very dark and dangerous, and Marco certainly seems to live up to the build-up. Of course, the hardness of the Expanse's sci-fi has always run counter to the somewhat contrived way that the Roci crew all seem to be mixed up in such enormous happenings of the System (the fact that the world of the Expanse was originally created for an RPG actually makes a ton of sense - the Roci crew feels very much like the player characters at the table of a tabletop RPG, and they've got a GM who's doing a great job of making their characters' backstories tie into the overall narrative).
Another thing I always find sort of shocking is the disregard for the sanctity of Earth among the Martians and Belters. In early season two, when Bobbi is still a die-hard jingoist, she seems to revel at the idea of leaving Earth uninhabitable. Marco might actually have achieved that (even if the effects will take a while to go into effect.) Indeed, some fellow Belters seem horrified at what he has done - not that there's any love lost for Earthers, but that a naturally life-sustaining world is unparalleled in agricultural production. Marco seems confident that the Belt is actually getting to a point where it can out-produce Earth, but it does seem like a hell of a risk.
I wonder what people watching the show tend to identify with. Naturally, as a human living in a distinctly earth-bound era (at least for the vast majority of us) but also one who has grown up fairly privileged in what was until about four years ago a stable and prosperous country, I find myself sort of thinking that if I lived in the speculative future of the Expanse, I'd be an Earther.
I think we're meant to feel sympathetic toward the Belters as the exploited masses - the Third World, in a more literal sense than what that term meant during the Cold War. But the world of the Expanse is a fairly unforgiving one. Even on Earth, which is the prosperous, first world (both literally and metaphorically) is one in which most people live in poverty, sustained by a strong social safety net, but still clearly divided into haves and have-nots. The resentment that the Martians and Belters feel toward Earth is clearly directed more at people like the villainous Jules Pierre Mao - whose greed and callousness are what they've come to associate with Earth, ignoring that people are just people.
Mars, I think, is the faction that the show seems to focus the least on. It's also the one I tend to find the least sympathetic. I would hesitate to call them fascistic, given that I think that's a more specific form of violent authoritarianism (linked specifically to the glorification of a particular ethnic identity,) but it is still militaristic, regimenting society around a goal. That regimentation is seen as admirable early in the story, but we also see how once that goal falls through, the Martians turn out to be not assholes with a mission, but maybe just assholes.
Belters tend to be rougher, but the world they live in is a lot rougher. The danger, of course, is that some might take that roughness as a license to inflict pain and death on others. Bobbi's experience walking around New York, meeting the regular Earthers who are just struggling to get by, is an illuminating experience for her, revealing that the "enemy" that was fed to her by the Martian military establishment is just as human as she is. Of course, the greatest evils of history have been committed by people whose angers and frustrations are aimed at the wrong targets.
I think you could read the Expanse as being either misanthropic or humanistic, depending on your attitude. I suppose my own humanistic tendencies push me to interpret it as a show about how people are people, no matter where they are, and that seeing the humanity in others is the only way we're going to survive as a species.
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