5 out of 5

Developed by: Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby

covers season 1

Man, fuck The Expanse.  When the show, well ahead of release, hopped on the slow hype train into town, with book fans eager for what SyFy promised was going to be a “hard” science fiction show, true to the series, I was honestly excited; not bothered by the hype.  The right places (to me) had the right to of earnestness, and I was ready to get in on the ground floor of the next Something.  When it arrived, and four episodes dropped at once, I was in a bit of a fluster to catch up, but not in any way that dispelled my interest.  Alas, when the first episode started – the quiet text overlay outlining the basic resource squabble between Earth and Mars that was the show’s setting, leading to a no-context scene of a woman in Zero G discovering something spooky on an abandoned-seeming ship – I was underwhelmed, though trying to soothe my underwhelment with memories of BSG’s similarly slow start.  I continued to be underwhelmed, and Zero G woman continued to not have context.

I understood that the show was lying groundwork.  Holden (Steven Strait) reluctantly leading a crew of equally-reluctant-to-be-under-his-leadership workers in “the belt” – the asteroids mined for ice and thus water for our two planets – who are all stranded in space when their home ship is blown up by a another question mark; Miller (Thomas Jane), a police officer on a space station in the belt, tasked with investigating a girl’s – hey, it’s Zero G – disappearance; Avasaralra (Shohreh Aghdashloo), a U.S. diplomat on Earth trying to root out a potential conspiracy involving Martian stealth tech and a rebellious Belter group called OPA…  I understood, but was perplexed and eventually bored by the way the show seemed to drift around these plotlines, which flirted with each other from a distance, mentioning names and faces, promising eventual war between Earth and Mars, tonally suggesting a heft to the subject matter which I just never felt.

And then: episode eight.  Spoiler: all the plotlines come together in a boiling point explosion.  It’s not that the show is without action, but it’s “realistic” space action, quiet and gravity-slowed, like the juxtaposition of Zero G woman looking panicked in that opening sequence so long ago, whilst dreamily floating about.  But all of that pent up momentum just hits in episode eight, and I couldn’t look away from the screen.  I realized that, although I swear I hadn’t been paying attention, I knew character names.  I understood the basics of why things were crossing over.  My brain registered it, but suddenly clued my consciousness into it, which made me realize there’d been greatness here all along; I just needed to pay attention.

So fuck The Expanse.  Fuck the show you have to pay attention to to appreciate.  Because it’s not slow when you are listening, and absorbing details; little offhand comments that color the world and give weight to everything.  Subtleties of the production and acting.  The entire cast is amazing; the swirling mystery and buildup amazing.  Having gotten used to a lot of spoonfed TV, or even good shows that I can still intuit what’s what if I look away for a few minutes, I took the show for granted.  And you just can’t.  And now I’m goddamned hooked, and I’ll be that doof on the train reading the books with the “now a TV series” sticker on the cover.