Back when I first saw The Expanse I decided to try something different. Instead of watching the whole series and doing a general write-up, I would just post my comments after watching each episode. I had some basic ground rules:
- Here be spoilers. I don’t plan to filter much.
- I’ll write up the comment for every episode before watching the next.
- I’ll probably post one bit a day.
Here are the collected posts, unedited from the original, soon to be followed by the article on Season 3.
Dulcinea (S01E01)
Netflix’s The Expanse has two strikes against it going in. First, it’s a Netflix series, and I’m rapidly losing my faith on them. Second, it stars Thomas Jane, who in the last few years has become as much of a red flag as Christopher Lambert used to be 15 or 20 years ago.
Episode 1 is too early to tell if it’ll lead anywhere, or to make a long comment, so let’s just highlight some bits…
- Is this going to pull an Event Horizon?
- Ugh. We get it, the colonies have been at it for a while. You don’t need to spout so much creole early on to separate the people who were born near the asteroid belt from those that were not.
- CGI is not going to win any awards. I really wish they’d avoid it for walking humans.
- You can tell Detective Thomas Jane is noir and conflicted because he wears a fedora.
- You can also tell it’s the future because some characters have weird hairdos.
- Shohreh Aghdashloo shows up from Star Trek Beyond to provide a wee bit of class, along with some weight to her caricature of a stately torturer grandmother
- Then they forget about the creole. Maybe they realized American viewers don’t like subtitles.
I wonder how good Netflix is getting about producing these things on the cheap. Their hiring Thomas Jane to play the perennially unshaven and drunken cop shows more of an appreciation for budget than for performance. Then again, the series has at least three (I expect eventually converging) storylines. Maybe they are banking on him not being on the screen too much.
The Big Empty (S01E02)
Two episodes into The Expanse and there’s already one major mystery looming: how many monkeys do they have banging out the dialogue, and what sort of barely-potable home-made unfiltered bathtub hooch are they giving them?
- Next episode starts in media res. That’s probably one of the reasons they’re easy to binge on.
- Ooh, rich people acting like they’re royals, ground-level new kid being all egalitarian. Entirely unexpected. Uh-huh.
- “Nobody else dies today!”. Come on, writers. We have no idea who most of these people are yet, much less the interchangeable grunts in the capsule. You haven’t earned any attempts at drama with them. We give zero fucks about them being killed off.
- So Naomi can tell an unmarked black box transmitter is made by Martian military because of a six digit serial number. Eyeballing it while locked up in a capsule, mind you, not even using Space Google. Is she former military? A savant? Nobody bothers to ask.
I may give it a third episode. I don’t expect I’ll last much longer.
Remember the Cant (S01E03)
It took them two episodes and a more fumbling around than a drunken, blind octopus, but it looks like The Expanse has found some writers!
I could pick some nits with the dialogue, sure. They handle some situations in a more haphazard manner than a series warrants. But this is the first episode where I actually feel like holding back to let people enjoy how it develops.
Let’s see…
- Finally, the disparate plot threads start coming together.
- Creole returns. With a vengeance. Although creole is supposed to be a mixture of languages, and as far as I can tell this is completely made up.
- When I said Thomas Jane was becoming this generation’s Christopher Lambert, I think it was spurred by his character looking like MacLeod Noir with The Kurgan’s haircut.
- Shohreh Aghdashloo’s brief moments on screen remain the highlight of the series.
- Mormons, in Space!
- Wait, is this episode going to actually be decent?
- Surprise appearance of Jared Harris playing Space Harvey Keitel.
- It’s the future, so everywhere looks like different facets of Hong Kong.
Remember the Cant bought them a stay of execution. I may end up watching one more, after which point it’ll take some major dumbing-down for me to rage-quit it. The Expanse might just be a reverse Netflix series, starting iffy yet becoming better as it progresses.
CQB (S01E04)
CQB is the first episode of The Expanse that I’ve started with some expectation: will it remain good?
- MacLeod Noir is talking about a dead body with a coroner. The coroner eyes him for a moment. He asks what happened.“Nothing. I’m sure you’re younger than you look”
- Wouldn’t you know it, Martians are people too. On episode 3 Franklin said that he liked Martians because “they still dream”. It shows here. The show had made them look like Nazis before, but they are starting to come across as hard-working idealists.
- Ok, I think there is some Portuguese in the creole
- The Mormons weren’t a one-time joke! And a fourth story line. Maybe.
- Jesus fuck. Now that’s a moment.
- Surgery. So easy a lazy rent-a-cop can do it!
The first two episodes gave the impression that it was going to be just Space Coal Miners vs Earth Bourgeois vs Martian nazis. It’s become more nuanced — not like that was hard, mind you.
The last couple of episodes have felt like the future, instead of hobbling along while leaning in the crutches of weirdo haircuts and magboots. Now it feels like tech has advanced, changing everything from hobbies to crime.
The dialogue finally starts showing the world and the people in it. During Episode 3, Shed, the Canterbury’s medic, broke away from his act as Requisite Job Slot and showed some glimpses of personality. Now more of them are doing it, and the series is much better off for it.
I hope they don’t vent their writers out of an airlock.
Back to the Butcher (S01E05)
The first note I wrote for The Expanse’s fifth episode was “Miller can really be an asshole”.
I didn’t think of it. I was watching the show. Then I looked down again to make a second note and realized I had referred to him by name. Not Space Rent-A-Cop. Not Lambert Noir. Not some haircut reference.
Miller.
He’s become a character for me, not just a collection of traits. As have most of the others.
The past starts coming back in Back to the Butcher. Julie Mao has been hanging over the series up until now, but on this episode, she looms.
That quiet moment? The bit where everyone retires to relax before a big blowout? When you can hear the silence as air is sucked in before an eardrum-piercing scream?
I think we just got that.
I expect I’m in this series for the long haul now. Don’t screw it up, gang.
PS: Tee hee, Flyin’ Alamo.
Rock bottom (S01E06)
Rock bottom finally drove home what the point of the series was. We are not following would-be-heroes, or idealists, or even anti-heroes. Most of the characters we spend time with will get a taste of what they could be like if they raise themselves above the mediocre standards they have heretofore held themselves to.
- New term: sheep-dip.
- Jared Harris is fun to watch as Dawes. He does a refined version of that hammy quality that used to be fun in Pacino, before he decided to do the drunken uncle ranting routine over and over.
- At least Miller is consistently thick-headed.
- Nagata is good, but a bit too close to Superficial SuperGirl — like a Rocket Scientist Private Vasquez. Here’s hoping they develop her more.
- The “you’ve fallen in love with her!” bit? Maybe that plays better in the books because Miller never gave that impression here. All I see is a rent-a-cop who got tired of living on auto-pilot and who decided to properly pursue a lead for once.
- Chrisjen is back to being a stereotypical bulldog. Hopefully we’ll get nuance back.
- Amos shows some color. About time.
- Didn’t remember Diogo right away, even with the “back stealing water on Ceres” comment.
By the way, did Holden forget about his dead girlfriend, with everything that has been going on, or did the writers?
Windmills (S01E07)
In for a grain of Quijote references, in for the entire La Mancha. Not only this episode gets titled Windmills, Cervantes himself gets name-dropped.
Anyone still expecting subtlety will be disappointed. Luckily the dialogue has continued showing off who the characters are.
- Chrisjen, talking to a mother who lives in some sort of anti-government polyamorous (or at least poly-conceptional) commune. “He was raised by people like you and he joins the Earth navy”.
- Amos, half-longing for what he calls ‘the churn’. “When the jungle tears itself down, builds itself up into something new”.
On that note, we start with Miller all alone on the … whatever you call that pneumatic tube subway of theirs. Apparently, he used to be good at this detective stuff at one point. Could have fooled me.
He seems finally ready, however, to confront his own inadequacies.
Other notes:
- Chrisjen continues getting short-changed. This episode tries to give her a bit more depth, and that scene when she’s walking in the snow is glorious, but I wish writers everywhere found a less phoned-in way to motivate a mother than a dead kid.
- The spy is damned good at being a mixture of vulnerable and shifty. He’d kill at a roleplaying game table.
- Oh, fun. Drunken, belligerent Miller.
- Amos is a psychopath. Even if he has a point.
Small events ripple. They are just getting caught in the waves.
Salvage (S01E08)
I’ve been waiting for a good Thomas Jane role ever since Magnolia and The Mist. He’s mostly done dreck. I think I may have had him pegged wrong. He’s just not someone who works well as a star — he needs to be part of something larger.
Miller might just be the kind of role he was meant for all along. Hopefully The Expanse won’t be his Highlander. Hopefully, he’ll continue to do good parts in larger casts.
- Ugh. TV Series is talking about encryption.
- If Miller is Han Solo, the series finally gets its Lando Calrissian.
- “It’s a flophouse, but it’s not a good place!…”. As opposed to all the other nice flophouses in the crime-ridden asteroid. What sort of hell did Semi and Miller grow up in?
- “Please shut your word hole”. Hah.
- So nobody but Mars can afford stealth tech. Why is that? Is Mars richer than Earth for some reason? Do they have more advanced tech, or can produce it cheaper?
Meanwhile, I’ve hit on what I didn’t like about Chrisjen. She’s a force of nature, but those you can only measure by the walls they bash themselves against. So far most of her opponents have been people she can either steamroll or outsmart.
In Salvage we are starting to see that she might not be happy with the implications of her own strength. I wonder if she’ll start pulling back, hesitating. Maybe, lacking a capable opponent, she’ll oppose herself.
Critical Mass (S01E09)
The language in The Expanse is not a creole, it’s mostly English pronounced with a wonky accent. You just don’t notice until you hear it spoken by a bad actor, as amply demonstrated by an extra at the start of Critical Mass. His lack of finesse makes it clear that komang kutegow is supposed to be command, good to go!.
Spoken by Jared Harris, the same lines might as well be a mixture of Afrikaans and Portuguese.
Then again, considering how much of a linguistic patchwork English is, you might as well call any mispronunciation a creole and be done with it.
On other notes:
- Yukon archipelago was a fun throwaway joke.
- Amos is a psychopath. He has decided he’s going to follow Naomi, for some arbitrary reason, but his behavior beyond that is barely human. His looking like Thug Dexter doesn’t help.
- Chrisjen will have to deal with the bullshit she’s engendered. I had her pegged wrong. She’s not a rottweiler — she’s a piranha. She’s going to have to start retreating after a bite.
Now that we have found Julie, left to die by herself, all broken skin and neon purulence, it’s clear the series was not going to pull an Event Horizon like I thought from the first glimpse. This is closer to sci-fi Prince of Darkness.
Which makes me fear that they’re going to be tripped by the same thing that trips most science fiction series, where given enough time they end up coming down to one of two things: gods or zombies (or, if you are Star Trek, both).
We’ll find out soon enough.
Leviathan Wakes (S01E10)
End of the first season. Julie no longer looms. Now she haunts.
Finally the Chrisjen character gambit pays off. The story recognizes that she can’t just be left unopposed, and puts her in a situation that she can’t just trample over. Maybe we’ll now see that cunning, rule-breaking brat that Franklin kept talking about.
- Is Netflix aiming for one book, one season?
- “Do you want to be an ass, or do you want to be a boot?” Looks like Miller’s friend Semi was the smart one when growing up.
- For someone who had heretofore only killed one guy during his career, Miller sure gets used to it pretty quickly.
- Miller collapsed on top of an airlock. Now there’s a recurrent image.
- Maybe one day they’ll explain how Naomi knows all this stuff.
- One day your hand gets too big and you get caught.
- It’s full of stars.
The show ties up most of its dangling threads by the end of this episode, including one I didn’t expect — Filat Khotari. Now that Miller has joined the Rocinante gang, we may have a much more focused time, with our major characters being split on only two locations.
I do wish I knew what was the deal with Holden’s forgotten girlfriend, or what happened with the Portuguese kid we last saw floating in space. I expected the Rocinante crew to have picked him up by now. Maybe they needed to have Miller on board, so he can recognize him from the tunnels.
The Expanse was a pleasant surprise — specially after the shoddy, terrible, not-very-well-written start. The characters grow on you. The situation is less straightforward than it seems. The narratives are well tied up. There’s a bit too much “authority figures can’t be trusted, period” going on, but I imagine the source material is to blame there. They’ve even managed to dodge the zombie-or-gods bullet so far.
I’m now expecting Season 2. Don’t screw it up.
