For Sci-Friday, here’s an appreciation of The Expanse (TV version), in listicle form. The series is based on the nine-book series by James S.A. Corey (aka Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham). The show ran from 2015 to 2022, first on the SyFy Channel, then on Amazon Prime Video. The story takes place three centuries from now, when humans have settled a good part of the solar system and have divided into three camps: Earthers, Martians, and Belters (colonists living in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter).
These are 10 reasons I think it’s great.
1. Biggest fan protest ever
The show started off on the SyFy Channel but was cancelled after the third season. After a huge fan protest, Amazon picked it up (with rumored input from the Bezos himself, I guess because he imagined himself as Jules Pierre Mao?). That lasted for three more seasons and the series found a natural concluding point at the end of Book 6. Fans are still hoping for more, maybe this time from Apple TV.
2. Realistic orbital physics
Forget the Millennium Falcon dodging through space like a jet fighter whooshing through an atmosphere. Forget every TV show or movie with mysterious artificial gravity or “inertial dampeners.” In The Expanse, ship-board gravity is available only when the ship is under thrust; when it’s “on the float,” so are its passengers. To solve this problem, they wear mag boots. And if the ship is accelerating (or decelerating) really fast, then the passengers need to be in their crash couches, where they receive injections of “the juice,” a drug that keeps them from stroking out under high g.
This is just one of many examples where the show gets it right. Others include ships needing to decelerate just as much as they accelerate to reach their destinations, the omnipresence of space as a threat to organic life, the importance of filtering and recycling everything from air to water to organic waste (including human bodies), and more. It even has the seal of approval from several physicists and science communicators.
Of course, every sci-fi show has to have some amount of space woo. For The Expanse, that’s the protomolecule, a bit of extra-terrestrial technology that’s just starting to wreak havoc in the solar system at the beginning of the show. The mysteries surrounding the protomolecule propel the story for the first three seasons. You might also say that the Epstein drive, which allows humans to zip around the solar system in commercially — and fictionally — viable time-frames, is another bit of space woo. But the engine is based on fusion, which, as we all know, is just 20 years away.
More objectionable might be the sound these ships seem to make in space, but I guess a space battle in total silence would just be too strange.
3. Space ship design
The shape of ships in The Expanse follows from the physics of traveling through an empty, zero-g environment. Instead of being laid out like cruise liners or airplanes, they look like buildings. To get the effect of gravity while under thrust, the floors of the ships need to be arranged perpendicular to the direction of propulsion. That means the ships look something like fat sky-scrapers, with the engines at the bottom and “up” being the direction of travel. They certainly don’t look as sleek as the Enterprise or the Millennium Falcon, but I find them far more varied and interesting.
4. It’s a brilliant mash-up
Sci-Fi is known for its mashups, from the horse opera in space of Star Wars to the hardboiled detective in a dystopian future of Bladerunner. The first season of The Expanse goes further, blending three genres: Space-Age Hardboiled Detective Noir, Tense Political Spy Drama, and Action/RPG Adventure.
The first is anchored by Detective Miller, a cop on the asteroid-city Ceres, who’s been assigned to find the missing heiress, Julie Mao (a character who completely redefines the trope of the femme fatale).
The political spy drama takes place on Earth, where Chrisjen Avasarala (the incredible Shohreh Aghdashloo) connives to prevent the Belters from acquiring illegal stealth technology and then strives to prevent a war between Mars and Earth, which is being fomented by mysterious actors.
And the Action/RPG Adventure, probably the core of the show for most fans, forms around four survivors of the Canterbury, an ice-hauler doing a run between Saturn and Ceres when it’s blown to smithereens by a mysterious stealth ship. The survivors — XO James Holden, engineer Naomi Nagata, mechanic Amos Burton, and pilot Alex Kamal — initially don’t like each other much. Is Naomi a member of the Outer Planets Alliance, a Belter group known for terrorism? Is Amos a homicidal maniac? Is Alex a spy for Mars? It’s not until episode five or so that we begin to see this group begin to gel. This slow-burn team-building is part of the show’s great character development.
In later seasons, the show throws other genres into the mix, including a return to space westerns, but from a more revisionist point of view than Star Wars.
5. Diversity
Yeah, I know, diversity is supposedly passé. But it’s great to see a show set in the future that looks like humanity, and not Elon Musk’s dream of white folks in space. To hear Ty Franck tell it, the representative nature of the show’s cast took quite a bit of work with casting agents. I guess this is what the nay-sayers call forced diversity? Kudos to the producers for putting in the hard work.
6. It’s filmed in Toronto (which means great acting)
Toronto, like many states and cities, offers incentives to film and TV, but in return the producers must hire a certain percentage of local actors. And Toronto and the nearby Stratford Festival are home to a lot of really talented actors (think Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black or Colm Feore of Umbrella Academy). That means that the smaller parts are portrayed by some wonderful character actors. Standouts include Terry Chen as grieving father Prax and Greg Bryk as Martian Naval officer Lopez. And Cara Gee acted her way into a larger role as Camina Drummer, becoming a fan favorite.
7. A completely new culture, the Belters
Oye, Beltalowda! This is the rallying cry of the residents of the asteroid belt, who are oppressed by the “Inners” (Martians and Earthers), and especially by the mining corporations that treat the belt like any other colonial frontier. Here again, the reality of life in space has a big impact on the story-telling. The low-g or zero-g environment in which Belters live has all sorts of effects on their bodies, allowing them to grow unusually tall while also giving them brittle bones and other maladies. When they visit a planet with “real gravity,” the weight of it tends to crush them.
All this plus the time-lag in communication means the Belters have developed a unique culture, complete with its own patois or creole language created from a variety of Earth languages. This was present in the books, but the show’s producers hired linguists to flesh it out. The actors playing Belters received language training so they would sound like they all came from the same culture.
Because of their underdog status, the Belters quickly became fan favorites. But one of the strengths of the show is that there are few typical good guys and bad guys. Aside from James Holden, the archetypal hero, it’s all just flawed human beings looking out for their own interests (and those of their immediate crewmates/families). By Season 5, under new leadership, the Belters take to extreme and devastating measures, showing that just because you’re oppressed, it doesn’t make you moral or good.
8. Beautiful shots of space
I love all the artistry that goes into the shots of space, whether it’s the Rocinante slingshotting around Jupiter’s moons or the interactive 3D maps the pilot uses to plot those trajectories. (Although this particular slingshot scene, according to the description, might not be that realistic.)
And then there are the shots of people in space, either spacewalking or after they’ve been “spaced” (the space version of walking the plank).
9. The music
Every Expanse fan gets shivers down their spine with the opening notes of Clinton Shorter’s theme song. This credit sequence features both the music and the stunning visual imagery I mentioned earlier. Why not give it a look?
Other standout tunes include a version of the old sea shanty “Captain Kidd,” reimagined for 24th-century space pirates, and “The Wave.”
10. A cautionary vision of space futurism
It’s telling that the tagline on the poster for The Expanse reads, “WE’VE GONE TOO FAR.” This is not the futuristic utopia of Star Trek, and neither does it have the “space exploration will solve everything” vibe of current space futurism. Humanity doesn’t unite around a shared goal of exploring space, it carries all its messiness, divisions, and war-mongering with it.
The one exception is racism: the three groups of humans have left behind their old prejudices — which is great! — but they’ve found new ones. To Earthers, Belters are “skinnies,” while to Belters, Earthers are “shorties” or “squats.” This kind of othering leads, as usual, to brutality on all sides.
Like our present society, billionaires pretty much run the show, but even more so, right down to the air people breathe. As someone said in a comment somewhere, I believe as a dig at Bezos, “Why would you look at this show and then decide that’s a future you want to create?”
For a sci-fi show set in space, it might be surprising that it has this brilliantly articulated anti-space colonization monologue. You can read it below, or hear it spoken in Belter patois by the great Jared Harris as Anderson Dawes:
Earthers get to walk outside into the light, breathe pure air, look up at a blue sky, and see something that gives them hope. And what do they do? They look past that light, past that blue sky…. They see the stars and they think, ‘Mine.’
Still, the thing about fictional dystopias is that no matter how awful they are, we still fantasize about living in them. A lot of Tolkien fans have the same kind of fantasy about living in Middle Earth. Really, and have to deal with Sauron, not to mention orcs who want to eat you for dinner? Yet, as bad as life seems in the 24th century, I could see myself enjoying at least certain aspects of this universe.
Those are my 10 reasons. Are you a fan of the show? What are yours? What did I leave out? I could have devoted a whole point to Drummer, obvs. Leave a comment and let me know!
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I only got up through Season 2, but it seemed like the early commitment to hiring unusually tall actors to play Belters was already gone by that point.
Hi!
Any idea where I can find it? I'm only finding the 2nd season. No other seasons.