My sister and I watched season 4 of the Expanse at our childhood home back during the holidays in 2019 (if I'm remembering when it came out correctly). My dad, despite being the one that got us both into sci-fi in the first place, seemed turned off by the darkness of the narrative, calling it "that depressing Mars show," which I find kind of funny given how, of the three major factions in the solar system, Mars is the one that spends the least time in the spotlight.
The show has never had a hugely optimistic view of humanity's future - things are functional but we've managed to export tribalism and exploitation to the rest of the solar system, and lofty ambitions are always set back by greed, hatred, and a failure of empathy.
Things got particularly dark in the last season, when Marco Inaros, a renegade faction leader within the Belt's OPA, launched a sudden surprise attack on Earth, coating asteroids in a stealth composite so that they could slip past the planet's defenses and unleash terrible devastation on humanity's cradle. Meanwhile, he'd secured allies within the swiftly-deteriorating Martian government - after the discovery of inhabitable worlds through the ring gates, the central animating ambition of the Martian people became totally moot - turning a single, somewhat unpopular factional leader into the most powerful man in the solar system.
When we catch up at the beginning of this season, Marco has been consolidating his power - we saw Fred Johnson assassinated in the previous season, but we're told off-hand that Anderson Dawes was killed as well (I guess Jared Harris has a new science fiction show to be on). And a lot of Belters have suffered enough under colonial exploitation and have had the "inners" so dehumanized that they see the devastation on Earth as a reckoning to be celebrated.
But one person within Marco's circle is not feeling so righteous - and that's Fillip, his son with Naomi. Though she was forced to abandon him when it became clear she couldn't talk him into leaving his father's side, and Marco has encouraged Fillip to write his mother off as a liar and abandoner, Fillip's role in killing so many civilians has been eating away at him - and everyone's celebratory attitude on Ceres just makes it worse.
Thing is, lest we decide to sympathize with Fillip too much, the way he deals with these conflicted emotions is not exactly endearing. He tries to screw every woman he meets (and doesn't seem to be willing to take a no for an answer) and, when his friend tries to get him to sober up and calm down, a fight breaks out and he shoots the guy.
I think it's worth noting that Marco isn't really doing much in the way of providing for the Belters - his administrators scoff at the idea of dedicating any of their resources to helping the citizens on Ceres, content to merely rally support through their war efforts and ride the wave of Belter grievances.
Meanwhile, all our heroes are exhausted.
Drummer has been going around rescuing Belter dissidents who have been under attack by Marco's "Free Navy," while evading bounty hunters. The realities of their one-ship war against the bad guys has been wearing them thin, and Drummer sees the poly family she built on this ship falling apart.
Meanwhile, the folks on the Rocinante aren't doing so great either. Losing Alex has them all grieving, not to mention that Naomi is still getting over the trauma of being rejected by her son, not to mention a suitless space walk. Recon missions are becoming combat missions. With Clarissa Mao on board thanks to Amos, there's new tension between him and Naomi, even while his relationship with Clarissa grows closer (or maybe because it's growing closer would be more accurate).
The Roci crew discover that the rocks that keep getting hurled at Earth (and taken out by railguns, reducing casualties to mere hundreds, as opposed to the millions the stealth rocks had killed) seem to be set up with actual ship engines built onto them, and Holden nearly gets himself killed after he accidentally starts up one of these engines. However, the misadventure gives them a lead - they discover the likely orbit of a spotter-ship that the Free Navy is likely using to trigger these rocks, which have forced the UNN to remain near Earth to shoot them down.
The hope is that if the spotter ship is destroyed, Marco won't be able to operate freely across the system anymore.
On Earth, Avasarala, now UNSG once again, watches as Earth undergoes similar climate effects to a nuclear winter - she visits a farm on the Mediterranean that is now covered in snow. While fears of a climate death-spiral plague her, she also has a war to win.
But amidst all of that, we haven't actually touched on what is the first scene of the season. And it is one with huge implications.
We see a girl in a strange forest - recognizably, it has trees with green leaves, but the girl encounters animals that are alien in nature - little bird-like reptile things, vines that have coiled spring-like tendrils that occasionally pop back up, and an odd, mammalian creature with a head that kind of resembles a snake's. The girl is totally at east amongst these alien creatures, even deciding to name the little flying creatures. But then, one of the bird/dinosaur things seems to be distressed, and the girl looks up into the sky and sees something odd. When the camera follows her gaze, we see some kind of vessel up there with a spiraling coil wrapping around it, or maybe growing out of it. And then, a caption tells us that this is the planet Laconia - the one that the Martians were heading to at the end of the last season when that strange red energy seemed to erase them from existence.
The Expanse is not Game of Thrones, but there is a common theme here in which human conflicts distract from larger crises - and just as the wars over the Iron Throne left Westeros ill-prepared to face down the army of the undead (something I imagine/hope will be better-handled if and when the actual books come out,) I think that the the hate-fueled war Marco has launched will (and already has) weakened humanity's ability to face down an alien threat.
What I find really interesting about the opening scene is that, up until this point, any alien life we've seen has been utterly, truly alien. To be fair, the protomolecule wasn't so much a life form as a piece of technology. I've always interpreted that the crazy body horror behind it was all a misunderstanding - that there was no malice behind the protomolecule, but that it didn't have the context to identify our biochemistry as intelligent life that maybe wouldn't like to be fused into some kind of portal-machine.
The point is, the life forms that made the protomolecule and the ring gate seem like they could be totally unrecognizable as life. But the beings the girl sees on Laconia, while alien, seem very analogous to existing Earth life - to a staggering degree, in fact. This could imply that there was some alien hand guiding life's development on Earth, and that there was a similar gameplan on other planets.
But the red aliens - the ones who likely killed the Builders - seem to be purely hostile. The scene felt like a very bright red pin to stick into the board to remind us all that some weird stuff is happening on the periphery.
Regarding Drummer's story - it's frustrating, because Drummer is one of my favorite characters on the show. But her arc for last season and maybe this one has fallen flat, in large part because her poly pirate crew don't really feel like individual characters. There's a sense that there's this group of people she cares a lot about, and that this war has been forcing her to sacrifice the happy relationships she had developed, but those relationships developed off-screen in the first place, and I want to see her with the characters that the audience actually cares about.
Fillip is in this odd space - on one hand, he does seem to feel remorse for taking part in what might be humanity's single greatest war crime, but the fact that he rejected Naomi's offer to take him away from that and the fact that he's dealing with this by sexually harassing a bartender and then shooting (likely fatally) his friend makes me think that this kid is beyond a point of no return. I just wonder if his "redemption" involves patricide - which would, honestly, solve a lot of problems.
Marco as a villain has been a bit of an issue with the show. On paper, he's a charismatic, manipulative heel. But I guess I don't really buy him as the brilliant puppet-master. The notion that he had Anderson Dawes killed feels a bit like the old trope of having your new villain kill off an old villain to show how much the stakes have been raised, but I think Jared Harris always sold Dawes' ruthlessness and masterful control of the situation in a way that I don't buy with Marco. I don't know if it's the writing or the performance. He is the sort of character the audience easily feels a visceral hatred toward, but he's struggling to fill the shoes of some more compelling villains from earlier in the show's run.
I am very curious to see what happens with Alex in the books. His character was pretty transparently killed off due to the allegations of inappropriate behavior by actor Cas Anvar - a delicate situation for any ongoing production, of course. I find it interesting that the show actually dedicates a couple of scenes, or at least parts of scenes, to addressing his loss - making something out of that loss rather than avoiding the topic. My sister pointed out that there was a sense of real danger for the characters in the first season, especially after the very sudden death of Shed in the second episode, and that, even if this was clearly not planned, it did reinforce that notion that these characters are always putting their lives at risk just being in space.
Sadly, this is the last season of the show, and the season is a mere six episodes. There are, I believe, three more books in the series, so there have been a lot of questions about how they plan to wrap up the story so quickly. I am given to understand that there's a significant time-jump after the current plot wraps up, which might make this a reasonable stopping point.
I guess I'm just sad to see this gem of a show depart, even if six seasons is a very decent run. It always seemed to me that The Expanse deserved to be a much more popular show, with the kind of public discussion and debate that other shows of its epic scale have garnered.
I think, also, that after seeing the rushed conclusion of Game of Thrones, there's a part of me that's still really sore. I want this show to have the time to breathe and finish out its story in a satisfying way, and six episodes for a final season seems very tight.
I did hear one rumor (though my source is "some comment on the AV Club review of the season," so take it with a massive grain of salt,) that they might have worked out a deal to do a few feature-length movies for Amazon Prime to cover the events of the last books. While I'd prefer full seasons, of course, I can appreciate that that might be a more viable way to make this happen. Hope it does.
Anyway, glad to hop back into the Roci one more time.
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