The Expanse #6: better to go down swinging than rolling over

[Arakasi]

Yeah I don’t think a number of friends of mine who liked Star Trek (also including my dad) would be into the expanse. It’s pretty unrelenting dark and not a lot of really likeable characters. I’ve got like four of the books and have been waiting for the show to end to start the books and I’m curious if the books are also this dark.

[mcbigski]

2 hours ago, Arakasi said:

Yeah I don’t think a number of friends of mine who liked Star Trek (also including my dad) would be into the expanse. It’s pretty unrelenting dark and not a lot of really likeable characters. I’ve got like four of the books and have been waiting for the show to end to start the books and I’m curious if the books are also this dark.

No idea how old you or your dad are.  But thinking about my dad, who was a TOS fanatic but as far as I know not really into the later stuff, and his younger (retired) neighbor, who was way into Dune and Ellison and 70s sci fi, neither seemed that interested when I described The Expanse. 

Though there are plenty of likeable characters.  First read through I got sick of Holden by about his second or third crisis, until I realized he was supposed to come across as an asshole even if well meaning.(tilting at windmills does show a certain lack of perspective in the larger sense)  The whole button thing.... But I liked the setting and really liked Miller, and later Chrisjen and Bobbie, and (once I sorted out the two A named guys) Alex and Amos.  Holden and Naomi both you come to love over the scope of the series but they both show more depth after more trials and each seem a little too competent than likely early.    

Side question, maybe a book spoiler, what decisions did Holden make that turned out wrong in the long run, and what ones did Naomi get wrong?  (during the period in question obv)  She's hyper competent and he's the luckiest luck box that ever lucked.

Spoiler

Maybe I'm getting mashed up from the books and show, but Naomi making sure Fred and the Belt had a sample really didn't work out well.  In the longer run, someone would have eventually made a magnetar type weapon to piss off the Goths anyway. But if Duarte and Marcos couldn't close their deal, and someone would have figured out the transit bandwidth/dutchman limits anyway, maybe the problem would be a lack of conflict with increasing stakes.  Good storytelling as recieved.

 

Edited December 30, 2021 by mcbigski

[Corvinus85]

9 hours ago, Arakasi said:

Yeah I don’t think a number of friends of mine who liked Star Trek (also including my dad) would be into the expanse. It’s pretty unrelenting dark and not a lot of really likeable characters. I’ve got like four of the books and have been waiting for the show to end to start the books and I’m curious if the books are also this dark.

What exactly makes it so dark? Yes, there is a lot of drama, and the characters struggle and stumble, but the good guys do win a lot. It's just that the story arcs are much longer than typical Star Trek, for example, so enough attention is given to things going bad first before they get better. 

It's nowhere near as dark as Battlestar Galactica (2004) were things just go from bad to worse for the characters, with minor victories here and there.

[Annara Snow]

10 hours ago, Arakasi said:

Yeah I don’t think a number of friends of mine who liked Star Trek (also including my dad) would be into the expanse. It’s pretty unrelenting dark and not a lot of really likeable characters. I’ve got like four of the books and have been waiting for the show to end to start the books and I’m curious if the books are also this dark.

I'm not sure that The Expanse is even darker than Deep Space Nine, let alone most of today's fiction. And how much people like the characters or not is a personal thing, but I would certainly not describe The Expanse as a series with unlikable characters. There are plenty of characters that people can potentially like/love.

[sifth]

1 hour ago, Corvinus85 said:

What exactly makes it so dark? Yes, there is a lot of drama, and the characters struggle and stumble, but the good guys do win a lot. It's just that the story arcs are much longer than typical Star Trek, for example, so enough attention is given to things going bad first before they get better. 

It's nowhere near as dark as Battlestar Galactica (2004) were things just go from bad to worse for the characters, with minor victories here and there.

I mean the books are very dark. If anything the show holds back, by removing a lot of the body horror, that usually comes from the protomolecule.

I will say it's nowhere near as dark as the BSG remake, which is a show that's basically so dark, it's become unwatchable for me these days.

[briantw]

2 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

I'm not sure that The Expanse is even darker than Deep Space Nine, let alone most of today's fiction. And how much people like the characters or not is a personal thing, but I would certainly not describe The Expanse as a series with unlikable characters. There are plenty of characters that people can potentially like/love.

I'd argue that most of the characters are likable.  I don't really care for Holden, even more so than in the books because I don't like Steven Straight all that much, but the rest of the Roci crew is likable, and then you've got non-crew or later crew members like Bobbie and Clarissa, Avasarala, Fred Johnson, Miller, Ashford, Drummer, Elvi, Anna...no shortage of characters to like.

[Arakasi]

Yes BSG was also very dark. Also I’m only colored by the show and not the books. But in the show Holden and Naomi are not particularly likeable. Partly it’s their actors but everyone is a dick. Even Amos who is likeable is nearly a psychopath. Bobby is probably the only really nice main character. (Well Alex too before he left)

I find the big difference between new and old styles is the friendship and bonds between the crew. Sure DS9 had a dark overall plot with the dominion but the crew liked each other and the lightness of that balanced out the dark.

In expanse here we’re six years in and main characters are still at each others throats and being in general negative. In an older style series even if they were against something crazy well they were still a team and worked together and found happy moments. You see this in both DS9 and B5. Here we go from scenes of intense stress with the belters to intense stress with Drummer to intense stress on both earth and the Rocinate. There is just no let up. Everyone is always fighting, there is very little humor (unless we count Amos threatening people) and no time that the characters get to relax a bit. Because of that we don’t get to relax either and I think that cuts off a lot of viewers.

Edited December 30, 2021 by Arakasi

[Corvinus85]

2 hours ago, sifth said:

I mean the books are very dark. If anything the show holds back, by removing a lot of the body horror, that usually comes from the protomolecule.

Apart from the vomit zombies and Bobbie's team getting ripped apart by the Caliban hybrid, I'm not sure what the show has held back in terms of gore and visceral moments. We even got to see how it looks like when someone dies in the vacuum of space.

[briantw]

I recently finished my rewatch of the first five seasons.

This scene is just solid gold:

 

 

Edited December 30, 2021 by briantw

[Corvinus85]

Amos is nothing if not consistent. He tries to use the same argumentative logic with Naomi in this season's first episode, but Naomi would have none of it.

[Kalbear]

42 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Apart from the vomit zombies and Bobbie's team getting ripped apart by the Caliban hybrid, I'm not sure what the show has held back in terms of gore and visceral moments. We even got to see how it looks like when someone dies in the vacuum of space.

The big one that comes to mind is the random body parts running around the Eros station when Miller is going through it at the end. 

They made up for that in spades when the guy got absolutely pulped trying to go through the ring space.

[sifth]

2 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

Apart from the vomit zombies and Bobbie's team getting ripped apart by the Caliban hybrid, I'm not sure what the show has held back in terms of gore and visceral moments. We even got to see how it looks like when someone dies in the vacuum of space.

Just saying the way the books describe people exposed to the protomolecue, it makes it seems as if they're turned into Cornenberg type monsters. Holden himself seems very different in the books as well. He seems like a much more silly character in the novels, compared to the tv show.

Edited December 30, 2021 by sifth

[Ran]

Holden's sections were the main reason I couldn't get past the first book in the series, as I've remarked before. I think partially because it was a new writer's part of the work (Ty did the first pass on the Holden chapters, Daniel did the first pass on Miller), but partially because he really was just insufferably rigid and unreal-seeming. I know he's supposed to be the setting's James T. Kirk, but it was about as charming as Karsa Fucking Orlong being Malazan's Conan the Barbarian. Which is to say, not at all.

I think the show benefits here because in the first season, Holden's actions may well have been exactly the same as the book Holden, but we're never inside his head actually being carried along by his stream of self-righteous consciousness so it doesn't wear as much.

 

Edited December 30, 2021 by Ran

[Kalbear]

As I've said before, the expanse is mostly optimistic. Earth survives and humans spread across the system, Mars becomes a massive world of its own, the belt has tons of different places, all people of earth have at least some basic food and meds and democracy isn't entirely dead yet. And when they run into something horrible humanity (mostly) does the right thing. 

It's definitely not Star trek levels of utopianism, but it's decidedly not as dark as GOT and given how the world actually is right now is pretty sunny.

[karaddin]

I think I'd frame it as "dark stuff happens, even terrible calamities, but ultimately hopeful" - it's not tonally dark.

[Poobah]

Fucking hell I need more Camina Drummer.

[Corvinus85]

When HBO finally gets around to making that Nymeria show, we know who needs to play her. 

[Lord of Oop North]

Great episode. Overall plot didn't move much, but I like when this show doesn't rush and let's its characters work. Lots of good scenes.

Bobbie/Amos with the music, good touch.

Holden/Naomi scene was excellent.

Camina Drummer. Belta lik pashang!

No idea how they will resolve Laconia.

[JGP]

I enjoyed it as well, despite grinding my teeth a bit. Like, it seems like they’re driving towards the confrontation with Inaros as the end of the series, so I’m a little, just a little bit, annoyed they’re giving so much screen time to the dogs plot on Laconia and thus undermining the ramp up to conclusion. I get they’re trying to elude to the open ended part of the story to drive a possible continued interest with another distributor or whatever down the road, but… but.

[Kalbear]

I like it, but holy fuck have something happen. 

Drummer rocks and I appreciate that she's the sand snake that we didn't get in GOT, but the rest of the show still feels treading in water. Really hope they start showing more of the war going on soon.