The Expanse

I don't even recall there being any martial arts in this show. The characters are essentially blue collar space truckers (like the Nostromo crew in Alien 1) that got pulled into something massively above their pay grade and had to adapt and fight to survive. They remade themselves into a mercenary group of sorts. There are characters that are professional soldiers, but like Monsieur X said, weapons and basic brawling is their preferred combat style.
 
There is no martial arts in this series, the closest we got to see some was very briefly when Holden used an 'arm bar take down' on one of the Martian soldiers who was going after some weapons to help take over the Roci.
 
That article title got me excited thinking the fourth season was premiering on Feb 8.:argh:
 

Gilmore will play Lucia Mazur, one of the Belter refugees who have staked their claim to a new Earth-like planet on the other side of the Ring Gates. Trained as a medic, Lucia doesn’t hesitate to help friend and foe alike when disaster strikes. Alexander plays a wily and charismatic Belter faction leader. Salgueiro portrays a cynical corporate security officer.
 
gohei_ said:
Great news! Now lets make season 3 available for streaming. I'm looking at you Netflix!
Click to expand...
So it took almost a year, but season 3 is finally open for streaming around here. I don't know what to say.

Anyway, this show is hands down one of my fave ones, easily. This season has been firing on all cylinders and I finished the whole thing in 3 days.
I honestly did not except the "happy" ending that we got so I was a bit surprised at that. Now theres nothing left to do but sit and wait for season 4, whenever that happens.
 
I wasn't aware they'd drop the episodes all at once. That's Awesome. I never watch Amazon Prime so i didn't know they were similar to Netflix.
 
I started this close to maybe two weeks ago. Getting into the closing stretch of season three. A VERY rough first season and early on in season two I was very close to stopping but I do get why this has fans and each episode has drawn me in to the point I was enjoying how much season two was going and was wondering when I would get to season three when I looked and I was already watching three. I had just slid into it without noticing.


Gonna finish up and then give my full review when I am done.
 
Good to hear, I might do a re watch of it soon, as I just started book 6 (Babylons Ashe's)
 
Don't get excited @flickchick85 this isn't getting bumped because of actual news about the show.


So I started this very recently after making a deal with resident Hypester and man for all seasons @Perfect Cell that if he finally got around to watching John Carpenter's The Thing that I would in return watch The Expanse's first season, all ten episodes. As we are both men of our words we both lived up to our sides of the bargain. Now, I had been trying for a few months to get into the show before this actually. I would bring it up on Amazon, get to about episode three and then just forget about it. It wasn't grabbing me all that much and I thought it was muddled at best so I put it aside and got into other things thinking I would get back to it... Then a few months would pass and it had been so long that I would need to watch it again from the start. Once more I would get to episode three and just start to go "Why am I watching this? This isn't grabbing me." Once again I would put it aside with hopes to getting back to it and the cycle would begin anew. Did that maybe in total for about four times. Started it, got to the end of three and just was bored and unengaged and just slightly confused. So... When Perfect Cell gave me the challenge I thought this was a good excuse if nothing else to power through the first season at least, again fulfilling the bargain, but I was in the thick of it now so went forward with the rest. I got through the first season in a little over a week and then slid into season two... Which I came close to quitting at the mid-point after a certain episode, thinking something would happen... And it didn't... Only for it to happen the next episode. This got me to wondering if I even wanted to continue... But I did anyway. Now I finished the third season, after having started it without even realizing. So, here I am now and this is my take on the show as a whole up til' now as we get closer to the new season to come.

I had never read of or heard of the books. So I'm not coming from a place comparing the show and what it does to the source material, though as the show progressed I did some cursory looking into the information about the books late into my season 3 watch.

I had a very hard time getting into this show it's first season. While there was a lot to admire right from the jump I am not one to think this show was all that great from the start for a variety of reasons. Now that doesn't damn a show always. First seasons are usually rough even for legendary TV series.Two that come to my mind are Star Trek: The Next Generation, which would likely have been cancelled in today's cutthroat ratings environment. It honestly took until season 3 for that show to achieve the heights it did. Another was the incredibly fun old school SciFi show Farscape, which went from a watch that I did out of a sense of duty to support any kind of original Science Fiction/Fantasy shows at the time, to one of my all time favorite shows. I didn't even like the lead at the start, but by the time season two started Ben Browder was in my view truly one of the greatest leads in a TV show ever, period.

So, I am used to it taking some period of time for a show to find it's footing, which is why even though I couldn't get past the 3rd episode of season one I kept trying to see it through. I'm thankful to Perfect Cell for handing me this challenge since it lit a fire under my ass.

That said, ultimately my feelings on the show are very mixed. Yes, the first season is rough and yet it gets better as it goes along. Still, there are lots of issues that are there from the start and some were improved upon while others are kinda baked in. Some are a result of what is obviously an attempt to adapt a very layered and dense narrative from books into episodic TV which I get and am forgiving of. Others are just, in my view, bad choices by the show runners, which seem to include the authors of the source material as well as, oddly enough, people like Naren Shankar, who worked on DS9 and... Farscape.

Season one's issues for me are:

1. There's a mystery afoot... And I don't feel it was paced or breadcrumbed out very well. I get that a mystery can't spoon feed the audience everything. And that's actually something I usually admire about a show, if it doesn't underestimate the audience's intelligence. But for this first season they kinda dropped the ball. Far, far too much was opaque. The Ceres station setting with Miller (whom I immediately loved from the start) and what he was doing was for me, just hard to track exactly what any of it meant or what I should care about any of it. And again, that's with me taking a shine to Jane's Miller right away. Even with this advantage it took until after this section of the plot's "mystery" was solved to a degree for me to even care all that much about it outside of Jane's outstanding performance. This brings us to the other side of the mystery and another issue with the show in season one...

2. Our main cast... Such as it is. I can tell this is going to rile some but I'm being honest and not just trying to be contrarian... Our main cast of "heroes" on the Roci... They don't grab me for the most part. When the show starts the characterizations and the performances leave a lot to be desired. Later on, while they are no longer as grating they and the performers as well as the writing for the characters gets increasingly frustrating, for the rest of the show's run they just are kinda there. They become serviceable towards the overall story but also all kinda dull. In season one, especially the early episodes EVERYONE of our nominal lead characters outside of Shohreh Aghdashloo, Frankie Adams (starting in season 2), Jared Harris and Francois Chau are doing this terrible pseudo-tough guy put on voice BS that I don't buy in the least, or worse, makes me laugh out loud at how terribly cliched and inorganic it comes across as, like the pilot Alex's constant "You got it Hoss" TVLand Country/Western accent thing. Yeah, I've seen it before, and I'm sorry... It was done better and felt more true in the setting of Firefly/Serenity. And it's not necessarily that this is a totally untalented group but that layer of "this is how blue collar workers in the future sound" feels very forced and just doesn't fit the way these characters come off to me. Steven Strait's Holden is this awesome leading character according to the show... But that guy is at best mediocre as a performer. I don't buy it when he's tough. I don't buy it when he's supposedly obsessed. And I REALLY don't buy it when I'm supposed to be caring about his "love" for Naomi. Tipper as Nagata is... She's okay. Nothing bad but nothing good. While I don't have to squint as hard to see the character the show and it's creators obviously want me to think I am watching like with Holden, I feel like she's still just kinda there. A prop for the plot more than anything. Anvar's Alex grew on me considerably but he's even more a utility character than Nagata. Sure, once in a while we get something, a tid bit of development, but it feels like the show does that occasionally because it is obligated to flesh him out over there being anything compelling being done with him. And then there is Wes Chatham's Amos... Lord I have zero idea what they are doing with the character outside of them pretty clearly positioning him to be the Jayne Cobb of the show that we are supposed to, again, just love... But I don't feel that way. If anything, taken on face value the literal ONLY thing I think of each time he's on screen is that I don't think they know what to do with him or how to do it, neither does Chatham because Amos half the time feels like a man that has made conscious decisions about how to approach life and it's based on a dog eat dog philosophy, which would be fine. Except that the other half he feels like he's got Asperger's or some related condition and I realistically think that whatever good he does as muscle is probably outweighed by how dangerous giving such a person not only a gun but THE role as the group enforcer would be. And then the show itself seesaws with either teasing out his backstory or forgetting they laid these bread crumbs out in the first place. At this point neither writing or performer has made me give a **** what happened back in Baltimore with the character nor why I should care. Again bringing up to space based shows with ragtag bands of misfits at the center of them... Farscape and Firefly this group is not. They ain't even Cowboy Bebop level.

Again, outside of few actors I already listed, the rest are either being written or performed in a way that makes them boring, one note, inscrutable or just perfunctory. Daniel Kash as Dresden? Boring. Andrew Rotilio as Harari? One note. Doyle as Errinwright? Inscrutable because as a villain he's nothing but perfunctory. A lot of these performers and their characters carry over to the future seasons so that's why I stated that some of these issues are just baked in. This again leads to some other issues that were holding this show back in it's first season. There's certainly other members of the cast that pulled me in enough that I don't quite mind having at best, merely okay central characters and performers as the show's go to group to move the story forward. Jane as Miller does his pseudo-tough guy schtick with aplomb and grace and ingratiating charisma to spare. Aghdashloo as Avasarala is another ball fun and compelling as a layered, flawed but magnetic political player. Jared Harris does great work as a heavy with an understandable agenda, despite having to do so through the sometimes incomprehensible Belter patois (more 0n that next).

3. World building: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Now I don't want to just come down like I'm just ****ting on the show. There's lots to admire. While I think there's a big handicap with just a so-so ensemble at the core, some other aspects were handled well or were at least quite admirable in their attempt. But then... I don't know, sometimes it's as though the show is presenting itself as this thing that should be praised just for what it's attempting and not whether it succeeds in the attempt. Some of this is again due to what I suspect is strong fealty to the source material. So, we have a nominally "hard sci fi" setting. Hundreds of years advanced but we aren't dealing with travel outside the solar system, hand held laser or charged particle or plasma weapons. Nothing like widespread use of force fields, or rampant genetic engineering. They in the first season went to great lengths to point out the precariousness of life outside of the embrace of mother Earth. This was and is good stuff. Taking into account how the rigors of space would shape so many contours of human existence factors into a lot of the show. Now, they don't always seem to keep the implications in mind, but that doesn't bother me too much. I think they bring it up enough that I don't dock the show too many points for seeming to forget things sometimes (That said some of those details sorta disappeared after a time. The whole differences between the Belters and the Inners physiologies? Not really seen past season one. Really, look back on season one and then look at the casting in season two of the main player Belters or even the background characters... It's kinda disappears.) . The show, already very expensive, would probably cost twice as much if they went full on Cuaron's GRAVITY with attention to detail. Of course a big head scratcher is they go to all this length to tell me how much they are hewing to real world physics... And then every space scene has Star Wars and Star Trek styled in the vacuum sound effects. I guess they just figure that such a thing is expected by now? It's an odd thing to bend to after doing so much to point out how much real world detail they are highlighting. And speaking of making artistic choices... What was up with the color pallette of season one? This was something that bugged the hell out of me and as soon as I finished season season three I went back to confirm my thoughts and there it was as plain and color corrected as digitally enhanced day. There's a stylistic choice made in the first season to drain the color out of most scenes, especially the ones in space, though there is still an odd thing going on with the Earth scenes' colors as well, but it's very noticeable with Holden and crew and with Miller on Ceres. Even in places like where Miller lives with brighter light and more "color" things are strangely flat. I'm not usually one to even complain about such things, but here, with the plot being opaque for such a long stretch, the crew on the Roci not blowing up my skirt and the Miller mystery moving at a snail's pace the choice to go "artistic" with the color scheme made so much, well... flat. In this case I honestly found it making it hard to even want to continue or follow things. The flat colors sort of made keeping who's who apart a bit of a chore. No joke, I had a hard enough time distinguishing some characters from one another, even when they had different racial features that should have made them distinct because of this visual tic. Making what starts off as murky already on paper "murky" visually was a gamble that I don't think payed off. I get what they were going for but I don't think it helped and if anything they seemed to grasp this because visually it's a different story by the time season two gets into the thick of it.

Thick is also the operative word on the general history of this world and I don't think the show ever really did justice to the scope of what it was trying to accomplish. It's aim was laudibly high but in the end they never really reached the brass ring of a detailed and full picture of the setting. I am sorry but while understandably claustrophobic in the Belt, even there the scale of it all seemed smaller than it should have been. Worse even on Earth it all seems so strangely small, cheap even at times. And I'm sorry but did we ever really get a good look at Mars at all? Was there any scene other than Bobbie and her platoon training that even took place on the surface of that world? The result is that we barely get more than the absolute barest of context of the politics, or what the everyday life is for most in these two clashing civilizations of humanity. There's some odd tidbits dropped but we don't get much more than than that, tidbits of the whys, hows and whens for how society has developed. I mean Holden's family backstory... What was that all about exactly? He has multiple parents or some such, but he was carried and raised by a solo mother, who acted as his only mother... Where did like the 8 other people come in, and why? What was that all about it coming down to who owned the land they were on or something? It's not clear to me, and it should be crystal clear since our nominal lead character springs from all that. Also, this is a setting on the brink of all out war where huge battles are intimated to have already taken place. The biggest indication of this? Sometimes we get a shot of some refugees. Big crowds milling about a space station set. That's about it. I get that the show is about our main cast, and they aren't usually on the front lines, more often than not they are skulking about the periphery of this conflict that might see the end of the species and I don't think it ever registers as such. Oh, sure the broad strokes are there, but there's not a lot of texture.

And when there is texture... I kinda want the show to dial it back sometimes. The Belter patois is one such case where less would have been a lot more. Sometimes it works well. And it makes sense. I doubt if I dropped any body that speaks any dialect of modern English into the past over 200 years ago that they would be easily understood in Colonial America of the Pre-Revolution era. Language and expression change over time. So it makes sense for the Belter's too under those circumstances develop a language and communication method all their own. But... Just cuz it makes sense doesn't mean it was something from the source material to have been so readily adapted into the show. Look, despite my misgivings about the cast earlier, there are as noted some good performers here. And in later seasons other really good actors joined up and did what I though was really solid and compelling stuff... But some had to do so while sounding pretty silly to my ears and I doubt I'm the only person to think so. The Belter speak totally is plausible if not likely, but not everyone in the cast, whether main player or background can sell it. Add in either techno babble or us trying to get a lay of the land via the history of the wider world or the characters and this is muddying the waters big time. Harris' Dawes is a great character despite this mush mouthed dialect they are having him do. It's taking all that guy's talent for me to not laugh at some of those line readings. I get that such dialects are realistic even in the real world. If I see a Jamaican speaking in that accent, it works. Even if the performer isn't Jamaican, but is instead African-American, if they have a handle on it, I can still roll with it. Now... Imagine a white performer doing a whole part in that accent. Whether he is ****, or whether he ****ing nails it... It's still always going to be odd. And that's something on the show that always jars me. Imagine if on Star Trek: TNG about half the cast randomly had an Afrikaners accent when speaking dialog in English. And less than half did it well, and even when it was done well, impressive as that might be, it still meant you catching maybe half the words they were speaking. Done well or poorly it just comes off rather forced, and worse, makes me concentrate more on trying to figure out what's being said than what the dialog means or is trying to convey. I'm sure the authors are proud of their creation of this language, and I am guessing that on the printed page it works, but on the show it is an unneeded hurdle to my enjoyment. I have accepted it as part of the mix, and some like Harris and Cara Gee actually still deliver really good performances with those accents and syntax. And I get how it's supposed to immerse us, the audience in the setting, as though we were ourselves "Inners" visiting the Belt and not always sure what was being said around us. Still... It's a complication I don't think helps the show overall. Once more, a rare time when I think they could have held back on texture and it would benefit a TV show or film.


Does all this add up to me hating this show? Of bad mouthing it to others who might be interested?

Not really. Actually I found myself getting more engaged and interested as time went on and each episode linked up to the next and so forth. The show crept up on me in a surprising way. By the time we get to the meat of the Eros plot I was 50-50. Then came my tipping point. It looked like Miller was going to bite the big one and I didn't know if Holden alone as a main protagonist would have been able to hold my attention if Jane was no longer on the show. I honestly figured I would just drop the show at that point... But then Miller lived. Well, at least for one more episode and then the show actually did off him. And while I can't say the writing of Miller's obsession with Julie Mao ever really made me feel what I suspected the creators wanted me to, I was impressed that they would even so out of the blue kill Miller like that after pulling that fake out off, as well as the way in which it all went down. And in the end you just knew that the crashing of Eros into Venus wasn't going to be the end of the story. In two episodes the show had righted itself enough, had delivered the unexpected and instead of Miller's death being my jump off point it became the point I committed to seeing the story through until the end. While I did find the original cast of season one to be lacking and serviceable at best outside of some exceptions, starting in season two every addition has for the most part been a compelling performer with enough charisma to sell me on both their part in the story and the story as a whole. Cara Gee as Drummer? Badass. Frankie Addams as Bobbie Draper? Totally sold me as the hubristic youth itching for combat who learns how horrible a battle actually is. Nick E. Tarabay as the mysterious but obviously efficient and deadly Cotyar? His teaming with Avasarala is sublime and his ultimate death made me sad, but I enjoyed that the show could now evince such reactions out of me. And honestly, the additions of Elizabeth Mitchell and David Strathairn always makes anything better. And then, suddenly out of nowhere Jane as Miller is able to be in the mix again? Okay show... You win this one.

While a mixed bag, the weight of the pros actually does add up to a greater sum than the cons overall. This is well done science fiction TV with eyes on a host of implications of their conceit and the creators are doing a Herculean task in attempting to execute it all, that is undeniable. And now with the way the third season ended they have opened up a wider canvas to paint on with more implications to explore. The series is also jumping to Amazon with a direct patron in the form of Jeff Bezos, so I can assume in terms of budget as well as content that the dog is mostly off the chain here from now on. I think what I listed as the weaknesses are still apparent but they don't overwhelm the show as a whole. Let me wrap it up this way... I am trying to sell this to my buddy right now and I am more compelled given how and where the last season went and that the new fourth season is nearly upon us.


So... There you have it. May the fourth season's drop date get here sooner than later.
 
Last edited:
They cut off Naomi's hair...

giphy.gif
 
Just finished 'Tiamat's Wrath'(2nd to last book of the series) last night, might be one of my top 3 books of the series.
 
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