A week late, I finished season five of The Expanse, the penultimate season of one of the greatest Sci Fi shows ever. While I'm a bit concerned about the choice to end it next season, given that there is more than one book to be adapted, I'm glad that Amazon has allowed the show to double its life expectancy after its cancellation on the SyFy channel. In a just world, this show would be getting as much buzz as Game of Thrones did, but c'est la vie.
What happens in season five, and where do we end up? Surely, the balance of power has changed utterly, but the final moments of the season introduce (or, rather, re-introduce) a threat that no one, except maybe James Holden, has been thinking about.
Let's go into the spoiler cut:
First, let's address that big old elephant in the room. A couple months back, stories of sexual misconduct by Cas Anvar, who plays Alex Kamal, surfaced. While I always liked Alex as a sort of simpler, fun member of the team, and enjoyed Anvar's performance, sadly the actor's conduct has made watching him this season a bit difficult - separating the actor from the character.
Ultimately, Alex is killed off unceremoniously, in what I'm sure was a sequence cobbled together from existing footage and then explained via pick-ups shot with the rest of the core cast. I'm given to understand that Alex is still alive (at least at this point) in the books, but rather than re-cast him, the production chose to reinforce the idea that the stuff they're doing in space is dangerous and hell on the body. So Alex dies of a stroke after a high-G maneuver, saving Naomi's life.
Setting aside this real-life writing the plot, there's a lot about this season that feels like a darkest hour.
The biggest event, of course, is the attack on Earth. Marco Inaros sends several asteroids coated in Martian stealth technology to bombard humanity's cradle. Cities are devastated as the sea-walls built to withstand the rising oceans are shattered in the impact, and it also appears that some sort of nuclear-winter-like effect might render the planet uninhabitable from the cold.
Earth was the "safe" planet, and while Mars in its most warlike moments dreamed of devastating Earth with nuclear warheads, one of the reasons they never really could was that no one could match the agricultural output of a planet on which all those things we eat, you know, evolved.
But to a narcissist like Inaros, no concerns like that could get in the way of his ambitions.
I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and my parents raised me with a strong emphasis on humanism. I realize that humanism, and secular humanism, mean different things to different people, but at the core of that worldview, I think, is a basic belief that if given the chance and the choice to be good and help one another, most people would. That people are good, by default. Of course, Star Trek is also set in an explicitly utopian future - a post-scarcity world in which a united Earth has constructed an economic system around that lack of scarcity, as a kind of democratic-socialist culture that values exploration and intellectualism in which poverty is non-existent and prosperity is universal.
The Expanse, by contrast, has no such sense of post-scarcity, and imagines a future in which many of humanity's perennial ills continue to plague us - tribalism and xenophobia, greed, and selfishness.
But is the show truly misanthropic? Is humanity in the Expanse more evil than good? I don't think I'd go that far. I think one of the most important moments on the show happens in season 2 (or maybe 3?) Bobbie, who has been a die-hard jingoistic Martian jarhead, arrives on Earth to testify about the incident with the hybrid that killed her squad. As she becomes more and more worried about how Mars wants to pin the incident on her, she breaks out of her quarters and walks around New York City.
It's there that she sees what Earthers are really like - she'd been told that Earthers were lazy, living luxurious lives on Earth's welfare system. Essentially, her government's propaganda had treated Earthers as "welfare queens," the Reagan-era canard that was used to justify the dismantling of much of America's welfare state. Bobbie discovers that, in fact, most people on Earth are just barely scraping by, and that the people she so hatefully relished turning into nuclear shadows on concrete are actually just, you know, people, who have their own struggles and ambitions, and even that Earth's actions as a government might not be so purely heartless.
In the finale to season five, Bull, the Earther who served under Fred Johnson at Tycho Station, keeps referring to Belters as "Skinnies," which is clearly a derogatory term. Despite the fact that they're about to get in a hopeless fight against a group of heavily-armed belter ships, Holden admonishes Bull to change his language. After all, dehumanization was how we got here in the first place. Holden, ever the idealist, wants to push back with all his being against the fragmentation and tribalism that plagues humanity.
Over the course of the season, most of our crew is broken up. And in fact, most of our characters don't really meet with much success. In the end, Naomi is saved and the Roci survives, but both of these small victories exact a terrible price.
Alex goes to Mars in the hopes of reuniting with his family. But that bridge has been too badly burned, and his wife tells him to stay away. Without much to do, Alex meets up with Bobbie and joins her in investigating all the Martian tech getting sold on the black market.
The situation on Mars is bleak. For generations, over a hundred years, Mars was a culture unified by the dream of terraforming the red planet. In fact, its lockstep militarism was even admired by those outside of Mars, because there was something inspiring about this grand ambition and the will to see it done.
But the discovery of the ring gate has taken the wind entirely out of the entire planet's sails. Why would you bother with this small red rock when there are hundreds, maybe thousands of worlds that you could land on today and walk outside without a suit? Mars, a system super-power, suddenly ceased to even have a point. And all the talk of discipline and patriotic duty and all that goes out the window, the rats leaving the sinking ship.
For some, it's greed, for some, it's ambition, and for some, it's just pragmatism, but the massive military hardware of the Martian war machine gets sold, and Marco Inaros is the one who buys most of it up.
Alex's attempts to reconnect with his family are a failure, and he finds that the very world he grew up on doesn't really exist anymore. Alex's sudden death is narratively jarring, a moment born of the needs to clean house when you have a problematic cast member, but in a depressing way, what was there left for him? I suppose being a badass pilot, which is how he went out.
Holden, oddly, takes a bit of a back seat this season. He's on Tycho when Inaros' forces conspire to steal Fred's sample of the Protomolecule. He fails to prevent them from doing this, and fails to destroy the sample. He fails to save Fred, one of his most important allies (and a moderating force within the OPA). Surviving, this season, is his biggest victory, and that only happens thanks to Camina Drummer.
Drummer lost Ashford last season, after she had determined that it would be too politically dangerous to kill Inaros. She spends most of the season wracked with guilt over this miscalculation, and all the death and destruction it has caused. In the meantime, though, her crew - some of whom she is romantically involved with - has become something like a new family to her. With Inaros becoming the dominant force within the OPA, Drummer is forced to play nice, allying with him lest he hunt her and her people down.
However, in the end, when she is sent to be part of the squadron of ships to destroy the Rocinante, it's too far. She strikes out, destroying some of the Inaros-loyal ships. But in doing so, she has also doomed one of her crew, who was put on Inaros' ship as a hostage. And she has shattered her found family, having put the safety of others above theirs.
Amos, perhaps, succeeds in his arc, but it's still a pretty damn bleak one. Returning to Baltimore after his mother-like caretaker dies, he reconnects with a childhood friend who has become a crime boss within the city. Leaving things reasonably ok in Baltimore, he goes to visit Clarissa Mao right as one of Inaros' asteroids hits Pennsylvania. The two of them emerge from the underground prison in which she was being held to find a world swiftly descending into apocalyptic dystopia. He, Clarissa, and Erik, his mob-boss friend, come to a disturbing realization - Earth's going to just get worse, and there's no real reason to stick around. They head up to New Hampshire to steal a shuttle from some rich family, and while Clarissa (atoning for her own misdeeds and possibly having a sense of class-based guilt) makes room for many of the innocent household workers isolated in these mansions over the winter, the delay means that they have to confront what look like the first would-be brutish tyrants of a post-apocalyptic Earth. Still, his arc ends with him bringing Clarissa on board the Roci with a delightfully silly teenager-logic argument to Holden.
Avasarala is the season's Cassandra. Following her defeat by Gao in the election, Avasarala has been reassigned to work on Luna. In the early part of the season, she starts to piece together the strange asteroid fragments that only seem to show one face to radar, but given the animosity between her and Gao in the election campaigns, her interests are dismissed. Even so, while she is on the right track, she's not actually fast enough to discover what's happening until the first rock hits off the coast of Africa.
And her warnings are not heard soon enough to save SG Gao, whose plane is destroyed with all aboard when another rock hits off the coast of Asia.
However, when Gao's replacement, the academic anti-politician who had been Secretary of Transportation, wishes to expand the response by striking more civilian targets after destroying Pallas Station (which we'd seen earlier in the season), Avasarala demonstrates the moral backbone she's grown by resigning, and leading to a no-confidence vote that actually gets her back in power as Secretary-General.
Of all the characters, Naomi's experiences this season are the roughest. Finding that her son, Fillip, is fighting alongside his father, Marco Inaros, she wishes to seek him out and try to convince him to leave. However, Fillip has spent most of his life under his father's thumb, and more importantly, hearing Marco's side of the story. Fillip has been complicit in Marco's attack, and Fillip winds up kidnapping his estranged mother and taking him to Marco's ship.
There, Marco basically plays shitty mind games with her, all the while trying to demonstrate to Fillip that he should be grateful that he only had his dad to grow up with.
Naomi eventually realizes that she cannot win, and engineers a daring escape, drifting suit-less through space to the ship she had bought for Fillip, which Marco has rigged as a trap for the Roci - an act that gets her old friend Cyn killed, and which Marco spins as yet another instance of Naomi abandoning Fillip.
Naomi, being the most badass engineer, finds a way to alter the spoofed distress call on the ship, and then makes it harder for anyone to dock with it so that they won't set off its proximity explosives. She leaps from the ship, this time with a suit, and does get rescued by Alex and Bobbie, but despite all the effort Naomi put into keeping her friends safe, Alex dies due to the difficulty of the maneuvers.
Still, on Luna, Amos meets up with the Roci, and while they are mourning Alex, there's also genuine joy that the rest of them are all back together on Luna. Avasarala praises them, this crew of folks who represent all of humanity.
And then we figure out Marco's next move - his "Free Navy," with aid from Martians who want to re-create the glory of their civilization on a new world, destroy the ships protecting the Ring Gate, and taking control thanks to allies on Medina Station (aka the Behemoth, aka the Nauvoo.)
So, that's pretty bad: the gateway to new worlds, the potential future of humanity given the abandonment of Mars and the devastation of Earth, is now in the hands of the bad guys.
Then it gets worse.
A Martian ship, en route to Laconia, another of these worlds that seems to be home to some strange flying structure in addition to the pyramids like those found on Ilus, suddenly freezes in time. And then, the red energy of whatever aliens destroyed the Builders - the creators of the protomolecule - wipes through the ship, seeming to erase what it touches from existence. We see this ship vanish as it passes through the ring gate, consumed by whatever this strange alien force is.
There's a lot to cover in the final season of the Expanse. This season has really focused on the human side of things, the politics and extremes of space. I, for one, hope that we'll get a bit more of the out-there sci-fi next season. Naturally, the show draws some comparisons with Game of Thrones, and I have to say that I feel they really underserved the supernatural plot in its final seasons. It's good to ground fantasy and sci-fi in human stories and human flaws, but I think there's also a lot of potential in taking your premise seriously and working with it - the out-there science fiction stuff can still be profound and smart (I mean, look at Arrival for a good recent example.)
Anyway, it is sad to think that we only have one more season of this show, but I'm really glad we got it in the first place.
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