The actors did an exceptional job breathing life and humanity to their characters.įinally there's UN diplomat/security chief Chrisjen Avasarala who does not appear in the books until the second volume. The show changes these relationships allowing the viewer to become familiar with them as they slowly discover and slowly learn to trust each other. In the book, these characters know each other well and already have a bond when the story starts. James Holden (Steven Strait), engineer Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper), pilot Alex Kumar (Can Anvar) and general badass Amos Burton (Wes Chatham). The second narrative involved the crew of the stolen ("salvaged") Martian war ship the Rocinate: Capt. From the wise cracks to owning "that ridiculous hat," Jane understood exactly how to update Sam Spade to the asteroid belt. The noir elements of Miller's ambiguous morality are one of the books' great delights and the actor Thomas Jane perfectly captures the dark, exhausted spirit of the character. On the one hand, we have Josephus Miller, a hard-nosed detective on Ceres chasing down a missing persons case that smells wrong. The first book of the series is really two stories that slowly converge. It was the characters that made the difference between the books and the show really interesting. Without characters you really love or hate, getting the physics right (or right-ish) would mean nothing more than expensive sets and a lot of CGI. So, my verdict is that the show nailed the externalities as much as the constraints of budgets and filming on Earth allowed. ![]() And without giving us a vision for the realities of a life in space, the impoverished third-world status of societies living in the asteroid belt would have become a cartoon rather than an extension of realities we know today. ![]() Without it, the internal logic of a universe where Earth and Mars are superpowers standing at the edge of war would fall apart. It's exactly this attention to detail that made the difference for the show's world building. The realism of a day-to-day world where whole populations make their homes on other solar system worlds is what sets the first books in the series apart.īut while I might have gotten more excited about these kinds of things than your average viewer - and I did calculate the spin rate required to give Ceres 1/3 Earth gravity - there is a deeper point. Set in our own solar system a few hundred years in the future, the narrative stays true to what technology might allow as humanity becomes an interplanetary culture. There are no warp drives and no aliens with prosthetic forehead appendages. The Expanse is not your ordinary sci-fi story. To unpack the assessment, let's start with a little background. In fact, it did not suck so much that it was the best and most important piece of science fiction to appear on the small screen in a decade. I am happy, so happy, to report that SyFy's The Expanse did not suck. ![]() So, let's start with the answer to the suck question. ![]() The answer, as we will see, tells us not just about the success or failure of a particular show but also about the nature of fandom in a world awash in stories. With the final credits rolled up, it's time to answer that all-important question. Just before the series aired, I wrote a post pleading to the gods of science fiction to please, please, please not let television destroy this thing of beauty I love so dearly. The smoke has now cleared on the first season of SyFy's ambitious adaptation of The Expanse books. A screen grab of the transport that takes Detective Josephus Miller from dwarf planet Ceres to astroid Eros in SyFy's Expanse.
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