Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

[Yora]

Alright, I said I'll do this and people have been bugging me to get started.

I've already covered Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5, two of my all time favorite shows that I've seen pretty much start to end many times. I guess covering The Expanse will be quite different, as I've never seen a single episode before and basically know nothing about it other than the premise that it has realistic physics of motion. I usually get interested in new movies, shows, and games only after they've been out for a few years and the hype still has not died down. That's when I get curious and start taking a peek at what the fuss is about. Great side effect is that I pretty much only watch or play stuff that is exceptionally good.
Somehow The Expanse never really crossed my radar, but recently I saw an in-depth video of the very first episode of the Expanse (tvtropes will ruin your life, and so does youtube) and that convinced me that it's probably a kind of show I would enjoy. Though I already forgot what the plot discussion was about. So this is blind as I've been going into anything for quite a long time (other then Metro Exodus and Sekiro),
Though I have to say that the one thing I know about the story is something that I think is pretty big.

Spoiler

Show

I know that at some point they encounter some kind of strange alien life form and everyone is pooping their pants because of it. I know it's blue and can infect people, but that's really it.

So let's see how this goes.

S1E1: Dulcinea
(I've seen enough images of the show to know that this is it's color. )

Okay, so Earth is unified but Mars is independent and there's asteroid miners. Simple enough. Reminds me a bit of Babylon 5.

So we start with a woman in an empty room on a space ship and we hear sounds of people getting ready for battle nearby. I thought she was in a cell, but apparently the door opens with a bit of banging. She goes exploring and there's dead soldiers floating around. She comes to a big room with a big blue glowy ball inside it, and there seems to be corpses getting pulled into it.
So much about having seen a major spoiler for later seasons.

Switch to asteroid miners on Ceres. A voiceover narration gives us some background on resource mining, which I guess is relevant exposition if you not just happen to be to be an astronomy nerd with an interest in space industry. It seems some miners are concerned that Mars is dependant on the resources they deliver and will try to take control of Ceres away from Earth (they are also much closer). But the guy speaking to a crowd thinks that being ruled by Earth or Mars would make no difference to them and they should just go independent.

We then go to two Earth cops looking at a dead hooker. Classy. Apparently it's of no importance for the story and just for shock value, as they leave immediately. Lots of dialog that all establishes that everyone is angry and looking for a big fight. Cool Cop with an old-timey hat returns to the station and gets a new job to find a missing billionaire's daughter.

We see two ice miners handling ice, and one block shatters, causing a shard to cut one of their arms off. This is apparently the crappy life of ice miners.
Then we get space sex. Still classy. The ship starts it engine and they fall to the floor/slam into the wall. The man excuses himself that he has to go to work.
Some man, I am assuming the ice miner who just lost his arm, gets checked up to prepare for getting a prosthetic arm and they bicker about how on Earth they simply would grow you a new one, which is much nicer. But the guy is happy without fancy Earth stuff.

Space sex dude is named Holden. I've seen his face before, I think he's a protagonist. It seems their ship is in marginally better repair than the Milennium Falcon. He goes to see his boss and when he doesn't open the door, Holden pries it open with a crowbar he already borrowed from another crewman. Boss seems to have gone nuts, throwing over his potted plants and playing with a gun. Medical staff arrives to take him into custody and apparently this has been building for months, with nobody on the ship being surprised.
The captain decides to make Holden the new second in command on the ship. Holden doesn't want to, but captain doesn't accept a no for an answer. They both make it clear in their conversation that they probably also aren't the most balanced people either, and that nobody working on these ships isn't quite in their right mind. They are both called to the bridge because they picked up a distress call from a freighter. Nobody really wants to check it out because it looks like a trap and they get a pay cut if they don't arrive at Ceres in time. Holden is with the Captain to pretend they never saw it. Since they are now at Saturn and headed to Ceres, they must be on their return trip from the outer system. Guess that would explain why everyone is in poor mental shape.

During the night shift Holden goes to the bridge to take over for the officer on watch and scrapes match heads into his coffee. Probably not for the taste. They also got rats on the ship. He plays around with the distress signal that wasn't properly deleted and manages to clear it up to hear a woman asking for help.

On Earth a very fancy looking woman is playing with her grandson when a shuttle arrives to pick her up for important work in New York. Government people have caught a man from the Belt from a rebel group and torture him by keeping him upright in Earth's heavy gravity to make him talk.

Back on Ceres, Hat Cop goes through a slum section where people are coughing because the air filters broke down.

On the space station, Captain is very upset that someone send a message to Earth about the distress call. Now they have no choice to go and investigate. Holden is putting together a search crew with his girldfriend and a guy named Alex, who I assume is a technician because he wears a wool cap and has a beard. Also a woman with crazy hair named Naomi who is not happy about that. I know three of their faces and I now know their names. That's not looking good for Miss Number 4.

First thing they have to do is break. Which is a very fancy maneuver in which everyone gets strapped in, the engines are turned off, the ship switched around, and the engined turned back on. Which is very unpleasant for everyone on board and doesn't seem to be entirely healthy to the ship as well.

The search team goes on a shuttle and Naomi is really pissed because she think's Holden's girlfriend made the report. (Still not using her name, this isn't looking good.) He tells her that it was him, and she's even more pissed but keeps quiet.
Apparent misunderstanding on my side, girlfriend stays on the ship and does not go on the shuttle. This looks even worse, actually.

Hat Cop on Ceres seems to be a total **** to everyone and proud of it. His iphone, that is 100% screen, has a broken screen.

Holden, Naomi, Alex, and two other guys (reshirts?) reach the frighter, which has a big hole in it. Holden wants to go inside in a space suit. The others hate the idea but one vounteers to come with him. They look at the hole up close and think the ship got boarded. Inside it's completely dark with no power. Nothing appears to be stolen, so it wasn't pirates and all the doors are wide open. Holden tells Naomi and another guy to come help them searching. Strangely there a no corpses anywhere, and Holden wonders how the ship is sending a distress call when the power is out. They find a small transponder stuck under a table and think it's indeed pirates setting a trap.
Right that moment the Captain calls the shuttle that a ship appeared from nowhere near the freighter and they should come back immediately. Alex thinks the only people who could have stealth ships are Mars.

Hat Cop apparetly is not a total **** to children. Small birds in low gravity fly in an odd way. Nice detail. He sees children coghing outside his home and goes to grab a guy he talked to earlier to throw him out an airlock. He lets him back out after a while and reminds him to do his job and keep the air filters working.

The stealth ship fires missiles and the shuttle tries to dodge behind an asteroid, but they are just a little to slow. The missiles shot past them anyway and continue to the big ship. Holden tells them to drop their ice cargo and let the Martians have it, but the missiles hit and the ship is destroyed. So long, disposable female love interest.

--

Alright people, here me out. I can explain!

This is not a good episode. This is not meant as a big complaint, but I think it's actually quite bad.

However, this is the first episode and a lot of great shows have really bad episodes. I thought the first episode of Deep Space Nine was not very good and the first episode of The Next Generation is famously dreadful. Generally speaking, most first seasons are pretty bad compared to how good they get later. A bad start does not have to mean anything for a show. But still, I think this episode is bad.

What does a first episode have to do? I think there are three things. Introduce us to the setting, introduce us to the characters, and also tell a decent story.

Introduction to the setting is done quite competently, I think. We know there's Earth and Mars, and they are competing over resources from the Belt. The Belters think both are *****. From everything we've seen, they are correct in that assumption. Earth is the fat cats and Mars has scary stealth ships with fancy missiles. Belters aren't good with handling gravity and their main station on Ceres is pretty crappy. There are also pirates.
This was easy enough to grasp from what was shown on screen. It's the most basic stuff you can have about a setting. It's also a very small bite that is given plenty of time to be digested. The setting still doesn't really seem interesting, but I can totally respect this approach. Start small and simple and gradually build from there.

I think I already know who the protagonists are. There's Holden, Alex, and Naomi on the shuttle near Saturn, and there is Hat Cop on Ceres. I've seen all of these in pictures before. There is also fancy lady on Earth, who I am also quite sure appears in lots of pictures. Somehow I was under the assumption that she's the president of Earth, but her introduction makes her look not quite that important.
I like Holden. Maybe because he looks very attractive, but I think he also got more screentime than all the others combined. People have an instinctive tendency to sympathise with the protagonist, simply on grounds of it being the protagonist. He still seemed a bit like a jerk. Alex seems okay, but he didn't really do or say anything. Naomi also seemed unpleasant to be around, but the only thing she did was being upset about having to go to the freighter, which is absolutely legitimate. And I dare say, that hair is a very "brave" choice by the costume department. I can see myself be interested in the adventures of these people.

On the other hand, Hat Cop on Ceres was just completely unpleasant. He seems like an awful person. I don't really know anything about him other that he seems to be intent to make everyone he meets hate him. I guess this was kind of a buildup to make it seem meaningful when he said hi to a little child instead of kicking her in the teeth, and then he threatened to murder a guy when he heard her coughing, but that whole thing felt way too blunt and obvious.

Which brings me straight to the next point, which is storytelling. I had no problem understanding Holden's story with the wrecked freighter. Not really a fan with the random in media res introduction on the cargo ship, but you quickly get a very clear story of who is who, what are they doing, and what is the issue they are dealing with. That was fine.
I have absolutely no idea what the story with Hat Cop is. There is a dead hooker, naked in a bed with plenty of blood, something about air filters breaking down, and he gets a job to find a billionaire's daughter who has run away. I admit I did not catch most of the dialog, but in the interest of just watching the episode and experiencing as it happens, I did not pause and rewind every two minutes to figure out what's going on. I was assuming it was exposition to establish the scene, but I remained confused for the whole episode.

The confusing storytelling with Hat Cop is my main complaint about the execution of the concept. But there is also my other big complaint which is much more soapboxy. And it's something I absolutely did not expect to see in this show. What's with this show and dead women as plot devices?! WTF?!

We first get introduced to Holden with a space sex scene with lots of nudity. How is this relevant for the story? It isn't. But look, nudity! Aren't we edgy?! Not that I have a problem with nudity, but in this case it felt blatantly gratuitous, exist solely for the purpose of making some monocles drop. That's cheap and immature. But it gets so much worse:
Look, we have a naked dead prostitute in a bed. How is this relevant for the story? It isn't. But look, dead naked hooker! Aren't we edgy?!
What is Hat Cop's motivation? Missing young white girl.
What is Holden's motivation? Hearing the voice of a woman begging for help.
Then we aren't introduced to the characters with speaking roles on the ship and learn their names. Holden, Alex, Naomi, and Captain. And girlfriend. I think her name was mentioned once, but I think only once. When people talked about her, it was primarily about her being Holden's girlfriend. And then three of our four main characters all go on the same ship, but girlfriend stays behind with all the redshirts. Already foreshadowing exactly what happens. They all die and only our heroes survive. So why does this character exist in the first place? In part as an opportunity to give us space sex and nudity. But most importantly so that she can die and Holden grief for her. Great. Now dead girldfriend will be his driving motivation?

I don't care that fancy woman might be President of Earth or something, and that Naomi looks like a reasonable character. Everything in this episode revolves around women in distress with men having to save them and alternatively grief for them or be unfazed by their murder. This was pretty dreadful. I really hope the show can get over this.
(But still how does this happen in this day and age?! Is this 1950?!)

At first I paused to look it up, and thought it was neat that the episode title Dulcinea is indeed the name of the lady whose heart Don Quixote tries to win with his deeds even though he never met her. Hat Cop is looking for a woman he only has a picture of and Holden goes searching for a women he only heard a bit of her voice of. I thought that was neat and clever, but looking at the treatment of women as objects in this episode I find little joy in this discovery now.

Space Nerd Review:
I feel this might be a frequent segment with this show. I just happen to be a space enthusiast who's been quite interested in the practicalities of space industry and intra-system travel in the near future. And apparently so where the writers of this story.

So apparently the asteroid belt was used to mine ice to send to Mars (and maybe Earth) but by now they have run out and have to send ships to the Kuiper belt to get more? Now the total amount of material in the asteroid belt is actually not that big, and it probably might not be enough ice to cover Mars in water for terraforming or something like that. But it's still a really huge amount of ice, and the amount of mining that would have to be done to get it all out in a few centuries would have to be stupendous. I find that hard to believe.
Even if you say they got all the really big ones and trying to go after the small ones is not economical, I think going to the outer solar system instead would be even more inefficient. Also, aren't the rings of Saturn made of ice? Why was Holden's ship out there for over half a year to get ice and now they pass Saturn shortly before reaching Ceres? That doesn't seem to line up.

The other thing I found odd was how hard they are breaking when they decide they have to send the shuttle to investigate the freighter. They were breaking so hard the ship was starting to shake itself apart. I know that the ship was meant to be a bit creaky and leaky, but I think in this situation they could easily have afforded to slow down more gradually. It's not like they were trying to dodge missiles at that moment.

I really liked the bird on Ceres flying like its almost in no gravity. Nice detail. But then why are all the humans moving like in normal Earth gravity? It's a nice effect, but it only shines a spotlight on how the gravity for humans is wrong. I was completely willing to suspend my disbelieve about this thing, even though I always notice it every time shows and movies show people on Mars moving with the wrong gravity. And I actually had been hoping that this show might put some effort into it. But hey, that would be really hard and probably very expensive, so I can let that fly.
But it really wasn't necessary to shine a light on it with that bird. I suspect the only people who know what was up with that bird flying like that are exactly the kind of people who also know that the gravity for humans is wrong. Weird choice of effect resources.

Let's hope the next episode gets better.

[bguy]

My question is why are humans operating in the Belt at all? Wouldn't it be much safer, cheaper, and more efficient to use robots for asteroid mining?

[Rakaydos]

My question is why are humans operating in the Belt at all? Wouldn't it be much safer, cheaper, and more efficient to use robots for asteroid mining?

Robots break, workers breed. We'll get to the Butcher of Anderson Station later.

@Yora
Yay! It's starting!

I didnt really like the Ceres plotline in my first watchthrough either. Having just rewatched it, I feel it gets batter with more context, but I fully understand your concern. (Also, you're calling Amos a redshirt? Amos would agree.)

As I understand it, They arnt returning from the Kuniper, they are actually mining the rings of ceres, have just fully loaded the ice hauler, and are FINALLY returning to ceres with a full load of water. Constant thrust drives are great at long haul, but going from rock to rock to rock is still a tedius buisness. And needing a multi-g braking burn to rendivus with pirate-bait (when usually they operate at mars-G) and presumably the same to get back on schedual afterward, is not the way to earn crew morale.

Another note. This season is about chasing the mystery of that girl who broke out of the cell in the opening scene. Expect a LOT of open questions hanging from episode to episode. Hat Cop does a lot of putting the pieces together, as the other characters run into the aftermath of her escape. There will be a recap episode that explains what was going on, but feel free to speculate what it will look like. Here's a freebee- The "battle" she heard in the cell was the torpedos fired at Holden.

[Psyren]

Just chiming in to say this is one of my favorite modern space opera series in recent memory. Whatever reservations you might have, stick with it, it's good.

Aghdashloo in particular steals every scene she's in.

[Dire_Flumph]

As much as I love the Expanse (the series), partway through season two I broke down and just read the books. Suddenly the setting made a lot more sense. It seems there's a lot of stuff that just didn't translate well in adaption.

[bguy]

Robots break, workers breed. We'll get to the Butcher of Anderson Station later.

Workers also break. (As well as requiring food, water, sleep, shelter, oxygen, gravity, pensions, safe working conditions...)

[Rakaydos]

Workers also break. (As well as requiring food, water, sleep, shelter, oxygen, gravity, pensions, safe working conditions...)

[corporate management] Fixed that for you. [/corporate management]

Also, food and oxygen can be recycled, wit any losses being replaced by cracking water into Oxygen and fusion fuel, so it's really just Water.

[Corvus]

I've not seen the show, but have heard a bit about it.

One thing that doesn't make much sense to me is that the belt is seen as this poor, downtrodden region. If anything it should be ludicrously rich, but it almost seems a staple of sci fi for the belt to be this place of basically slave miners.

[Yora]

Here's a freebee-

Spoiler

Show

The "battle" she heard in the cell was the torpedos fired at Holden.

Well, lots of thanks for that spoiler. Why did you feel the need to do that?
Why do you think I, or anyone here who hasn't seen the show yet, would want to know that?

[factotum]

This is part of what I was getting at when I mentioned in your B5 review that the Expanse tends to have multiple major plotlines going and switches between them on the fly. The stuff on Ceres would probably be easier to understand if it wasn't being intercut with the happenings on Holden's ship, IMHO. Incidentally, you said the two cops were Earth cops, but as far as I'm aware they're both Belters?

It has to be said, I think the Expanse is at its best when it's in space. The bits on planets or on stations just aren't as entertaining.

[Yora]

I think there was talk about not pretending they are Belters because everyone will see through that lie and only make them more unpopular.

Maybe one of them is from Earth and one from the Belt. I was never really sure what the Ceres scenes were about.

[Eldan]

Interesting space nerd detail: the author of the original books actually chimed in about the amount of ice found in the belt, and especially on Ceres. Apparently, when he wrote the books, the official position of science was that ice is relatively rare in the asteroid belt and it's mostly rock. Then we got pictures of Ceres just a few years later and it turns out it's almost entirely ice. Like, miles and miles and miles of ice over a small rock core.

But he didn't want to go back and change the books, so water is now rare in the asteroid belt in that universe.

As for the nudity and dead hookers, I found that gratuitous too. I guess this show was made around the same time as the early seasons of Game of Thrones, were you needed some Sexposition every episode to keep people watching? It was annoying. I think it gets better, it'sbeen a while since I watched the Expanse.

[Yora]

My impression so far is that the "hard science" part is mostly about the way space ships are moving. The rest seems to be more space entertainment. Which is entirely valid for science fiction. I just think that paying great attention to this one detail might perhaps got people to oversell how hard the science really is. It's still a lot more than in Star Trek and Babylon 5. Or basically any sci-fi TV show I can think of.

[GloatingSwine]

This is part of what I was getting at when I mentioned in your B5 review that the Expanse tends to have multiple major plotlines going and switches between them on the fly. The stuff on Ceres would probably be easier to understand if it wasn't being intercut with the happenings on Holden's ship, IMHO. Incidentally, you said the two cops were Earth cops, but as far as I'm aware they're both Belters?

It has to be said, I think the Expanse is at its best when it's in space. The bits on planets or on stations just aren't as entertaining.

Miller's a belter, his partner is from Earth. To say more is spoilers.

Spoiler: Miller

Show

Miller is a burnt out ****heel cop and everyone knows it but him. He got the Earther as a partner because nobody likes him. He gets the no-hoper missing persons cases off the books because nobody cares what happens to him and he's easy to throw under the bus if they go wrong.

[Yora]

S1E2: The Big Empty

Holden remembers how his girlfriend showed him the matchhead coffee, which supposedly is done right with extra lemon juice.

We jump right back into the presence and Alex is trying to get the shuttle away from the debris from the ship exploding at full speed. They get hit and start to tumble badly, but he gets it to stop. There's a hole in the airlock, causing air to leak out, and Holden has to manually seal up the inner door. Once the ship is back under control, Holden order that they pursue the ship that attacked them, but everyone else thinks that's only going to get them killed too. He tells Alex to let him at the controls, but Naomi shuts off the engines.

Hat Cop is taking a shower but he takes too long and his water runs out. He goes to start working and searches the quarters of the woman he is looking for. He got her voice patterns on file and used his all-screen iphone to to synthesize voice commands to her private computer. Fortunately her water tank has filled up so he can properly rinse out his hair.

On Earth, Fancy Lady goes to the UN Headquarters where some man in a suit tells her they know she was torturing a prisoner and that their boss is not happy about that and she has to stop doing these things. She does not seem too concerned about it, but complies and has the prisoner put in a water tank to deal better with the gravity. She then resumes questioning him and wants to know who had send him to transport a very important thing that he was carrying. If he doesn't tell her, she threatens him again to torture him even more.

On the shuttle, they have no communications and very little fuel left, and worse of all very little air. Holden wants to go outside in space suits and try to see if the antenna can be fixed, but since the outer airlock door is destroyed, they will lose all the air that's still inside the shuttle when they get out. They try it anyway, and it turns out the antenna is completely wrecked.

Hat Cop and his Earther partner are called to the fancy administration section of Ceres because their fancy lawn is drying up and think someone is stealing water from the irrigation system.

Holden and another guy try to see if they can get any communication going. At one point he lets go off his tool and it's immediately zipping away into space. The other guy doesn't care, because he's certain they are dead and nobody is going to find them. Especially not before their air runs out very soon.
Inside, Alex isn't doing so well and the others notice he's already running out of air. Without any other option, the medic on the team plugs his own air supply into his suit. This buys Alex a bit more time, but now they are both not doing that well.
Holden gets the antenna working with some percussive maintenance and back inside, so they can close the airlock again and fill the cabin with their last air reserves, but the medic guy seems to be already dead. They try to revive him but it doesn't work. Then he suddenly wakes up again anyway. Guess that means I still have to try learning his name.

Fancy Lady is back in the offices and the man in a suit mentions that she's one of the most powerful people on Earth and can basically do whatever the hell she wants and doesn't have to play by the rules. They are also talking about the very worrying possibilities that the Martians and Belters could team up to attack Earth. She thinks her enemies are certainly planning something.

Naomi takes charge on the shuttle and tells the men to find anything they can on board to give more power to the radio transmitter. Holden doesn't try to fight her about it.

The Ceres Cops are inspecting the plumbing with a worker and find that someone has indeed tapping the water pipes. They go to catch the thieves and warn them that they are really stupid using the taps of the local gang, but the kid they arrested tells them the gang is gone. Usually they don't bother with small times criminals, but stealing water is serious business. But he lets the kid go anyway.

Fancy Lady gets a call that her prisoner has killed himself when he was transported on a space ship by slipping out of the clamp that inject fluid to deal with high G-forces while the guards had their needles in their neck, and instead of leaning back in his seat, he tipped his head forward and broke his own neck.

Naomi checks out the transmitter they picked up on the bait freighter to drain its power into their batteries and identifies it as Martian military equipment.

Hat Cop (why is nobody using names?) asked around for the missing woman and some dock worker recognizes her immediately for having beaten up some guy who was being unpleasant. He still remembers her leaving on a freighter.

The shuttle picks up a signal from a ship that is responding to their emergency signal. Though it's pretty far away and they don't have much air left. Soon after the ship is identified as Martian, but there's really nothing they can do about that.

On Ceres, there are news that water rations are reduced again because the ice hauler that was supposed to bring new supplies has disappeared. We see Earth Cop going to the brothel where they saw the dead hooker last episode I think, and Hat Cop pouring a glass of water in a very fancy way. (Cool detail, more on that later.) He's also fliping through men of some brothel, but quickly flips back to the page of the woman he's looking for, who apparently also worked there.

Holden thinks the Martians are never going to let them go with knowledge of their stealth ship blowing up an ice hauler. So he thinks his best bet is to broadcast as message in which he explains the attack. If they are released, they have no proof that they made up silly rumors. If they are never seen again, that makes this message seem more plausible. Alex thinks it won't matter, because the Martian ship was already in jamming range. The shuttle gets pulled in and soldiers arrive to arrest them.

--

Alright, I'd say this was better. Still not very impressive, but a lot better.

Holden, Naomi, Alex, and Redshirt and Blueshirt on the shuttle continue to have a decent story, but there's not actually much happening with them. Redshirt is getting some personality, but I think nobody has said his name yet. Blueshirt still feels very expendable.

Fancy Lady on Mars has a bit more scenes this episode, but it's still mostly sprinkling some light exposition. Apparently there's something about a Belter Rebel group trying to smuggle something to Earth, but no real story developing yet. And it seems that people on Earth are seriously worried about Mars being a real major threat to them.

Hat Cop on Ceres is a lot nicer this episode. Not actually nice, but he doesn't come across as deliberately trying to make everyone hate him. And I still don't see if there is any story to his scenes? Some of them relate to searching for the missing woman, but most seem to have nothing to do with that. Or with each other. Still not a fan.

Space Nerd Review:

When Holden lets go of his tool outside the shuttle it speeds off into space. For that the engines would still have to be running, in which case they could not be walking on the outside of the ship. Either the engines are running and the only place they could stand and walk on would be the nose, or the engines are off, and the tool would be moving in the same direction and speed as the ship and the people.

If they still had enough air in the air tanks to fill up the whole inside of the shuttle, couldn't they give Alex a quick refill from those tanks? There is a possibility that the tanks for filling up the ship are incompatible with the system to fill up the suits, but why would anyone design such a system? A situation exactly like this is absolutely a likely scenario. Using the last supplies from the ship to only supply the suits of the crew should be a feature of every single vehicle in space.

Hat Cop pouring water into a cup in a fancy swirling arc is a fun detail.
Ceres is so small, that when you're standing outside on the surface, the gravity you feel is not even 3% of what you have on Earth. You couldn't throw a ball so hard that it flies away into space, but if you shot a bullet from a gun into the sky, it would never fall back down. So what they apparently did was to hollow out the inside of Ceres and (somehow) put the thing into a fast spin. If you get it spinning fast enough, you would fly off the floor and into the ceiling, and then able to walk around on the ceiling like normal. Which seems to be what we see in the show.
However, I did a quick calculation and to simulate a gravity that would match Earth, Ceres would have to make one full rotation every 22 minutes. That's really damn fast and I don't know how much energy that would take. But the bigger problem is that Ceres may be a sphere, but it's still pretty much a big asteroid, and asteroids are pretty fluffy and crumbly. Getting this thing to any spin speed in which the outward pull is greater than the gravitational inward pull would probably just make the whole thing fly apart.
But assuming you could. Then the simulated gravity that you are experiencing inside a spinning cylinder would not feel completely the same as actual gravity when standing on the surface of a planet. The pull to the floor (which is really a push to the ceiling) depends on how fast you are circling around the axis of rotation. Your head is closer to the axis than your feet, so your head is making a smaller circle than your feet. And therefore you feel a lower simulated gravity on your head than on your feet. Also, when you are moving in the same direction as the rotation, you are adding your own speed to the speed of the floor, so you complete the full circle around the axis faster. Which means the simulated gravity feels stronger. If you move in the opposite direction and against the rotation, you complete the circle at a slower speed and simulated gravity feels lighter. The larger the circle gets, the smaller the differences from these effects become. Ceres has a radius of 470 km and if they want to get only half of Earth's gravity they would have to make one rotation every 30 minutes. At this scale, I think the effects would be impossible to detect. But on a much smaller space station these effects would be much more noticeable.
Which brings me to that water. When water comes out of a bottle, it moves in an arc that first goes almost entirely sideways but then curves until it goes only straight down and not sideways at all. So the water changes its sideways motion from maximum to zero, and it also changes its height above the floor between the bottle and the glass. This means while a water droplet is falling, its simulated gravity is constantly changing throughout the whole movement. I'm not sure how that path would look exactly (which would also depend on which direction the bottle is facing relative to the axis of rotation, but I think it could be looking somewhat similar to this.
(Basically the same in 2D can be seen here. And it looks just as weird.)

Like the bird flying in a weird way last episode, this is a nice detail showing off a real (simulated) gravity effect. But what they show requires impossible circumstances. Again, that is all fine for an entertainment show. But I was really under the impression that this is Hard Sci-Fi. Maybe it comes across better in the books. Having people move around on Ceres in a very floaty way is trivial to do in a book, but just not technical practical for a TV show of this scale. (Would be fun in an animated show, though.)
But I still think Ceres would rip itself apart.

We already talked about Ceres running out of water being a highly improbable scenario because of faulty background research. I am absolutely willing to let it slide that in this fictional setting, there is not much ice on asteroids. But that still leaves the question, where does all the water that currently is in circulation on Ceres go? Are they turning it into steam and venting it out into space? Because Ceres may be very small, but it is still a closed system, and the conservation of mass and energy still applies. When water is used up, it does not vanish into nothing. All that hydrogen and oxygen is still on Ceres in some form. They are bringing in these huge blocks of ice to supply the habitats with running water, but how does it leave the planet/dwarf-planet/asteroid? (Classifications of stellar bodies are arbitrary.)
Most of the water that goes through humans comes out through exhaling or pee, which is really quite easy to recapture. All the water that goes through plants either comes out through evaporation or remains inside the plant's cells. It's still inside Ceres. Unless they get rid of water in huge quantities, bringing in haulers with more ice would actually just flood Ceres in too much water.

[Rakaydos]

On Earth, Fancy Lady goes to the UN Headquarters where some man in a suit tells her they know she was torturing a prisoner and that their boss is not happy about that and she has to stop doing these things. She does not seem too concerned about it, but complies and has the prisoner put in a water tank to deal better with the gravity. She then resumes questioning him and wants to know who had send him to transport a very important thing that he was carrying. If he doesn't tell her, she threatens him again to torture him even more.

Not just any "very important thing." "Advanced stealth composites." Stealth being "Mars's thing."

Also, it's been a week or two since I rewatched that episode, but IIRC there's exterior shots where the ship's boat they are on is maintaining thrust on two of it's 3 engines. It's standard in this setting to maintain a token thrust just to give a sense of up and down, though certiantly not full G- Only earth and martian military vessels use full G burns. This also applies to Ceres- The bird and the drink are in low G because while Ceres is spinning (and yes, that takes a lot of energy, but hey, they have this stupidly efficent space drive, so why not) it's not spinning at anywhere near full G. When thrust cuts, you'll usually see a reaction shot of everyone quickly activating mag boots to save on special effects budget.

as for where the water goes, I'd say probably cracked for the hydrogen, then fed to the fusion plants. the O2 is basically free at that point.

[factotum]

There are some areas in the Expanse where the science isn't fantastic. The spinning asteroid space stations is one, especially since you don't really ever see the things spinning from outside in the TV series and they also gloss over how ships actually dock there. As far as the energy required to spin these things up, they have the magic Epstein fusion drive (which I think is described in more detail in an upcoming episode), which can provide massive amounts of thrust for ridiculous amounts of time--this is how Holden's tramp freighter can pull multiple gees of acceleration for hours on end in order to rendezvous with the distress signal, despite being an utterly ordinary ship in every way.

Incidentally, that probably also explains why water is precious on Ceres. AFAIK, the ships use water as their fuel (they crack it into hydrogen and oxygen, put the oxygen into the air and put the hydrogen into the fusion drive), and ships will presumably be refuelling when they dock at Ceres, thus taking some of the station's water supply. Also, people will be entering and leaving the station, so it most definitely isn't a closed system.

[Rakaydos]

As far as the energy required to spin these things up, they have the magic Epstein fusion drive (which I think is described in more detail in an upcoming episode), which can provide massive amounts of thrust for ridiculous amounts of time.

Midway through season 2, unfortunately.

[Yora]

S1E3: Remember the Cant

Holden's message did make it through and is all the news on Ceres. Earth Cop is visiting his lady in the brothel again and she's teaching him to talk and gesture like a Belter. Work calls and has to leave just after he arrived. The police chief is worried about rioting or the independence group getting any funny ideas, so she wants everyone on the street in patrols. Hat Cop tells her that the woman he's supposed to find left on the destroyed freighter that was used as the bait for the ice hauler, which seems somewhat suspicious. But his boss tells him to just be happy that the case is closed so easily.

The officers on the Martian ship read out the ID chips implanted in the necks of their prisoners, and the device beeps when it scans Alex, but nobody mentions what that means. Holden keeps playing tough guy while they are taken to their cells, but it's big guy redshirt who starts getting fighty and tazed when they are separated, and I finally learn that his name is Amos. Once everyone else is in their cells, the officer says that Alex is coming with them instead.

Fancy Lady tells her superior that they should send the fleet to Ceres to ensure that there won't be an insurrection by the independence group and Mars trying to take over in the chaos. The admiral of the fleet doesn't think it's wise to provoke hostility by getting their ships close to Ceres, and the other politicians seem to be of a similar opinion.

On Ceres, Earth Cop gets the idea to tell his bosses name to a Mormon missionary instead of his own, which Hat Cops finds funny.

Holden is taken to be interrogated and the officer tries to convince him that Naomi must be one of the terrorists because her technical skills make her overqualified for working on an ice hauler. Holden does not suspect immediately that the officer is trying to mess with him to trick him into being more compliant.
We also learn that Holden grew up in some kind of farming commune and was artificially fertilized with DNA from 8 different parents. Probably unimportant to the story, but sounds perfectly plausible.

Fancy Lady has the Earth ambassador to Mars (or Mars ambassador to Earth?) over for dinner at her home outside the city, and when their men leave the room, she tells him that they caught one of the OPA terrorists from Ceres with Martian stealth tech, and that she's certain the Martians are cooperating with the OPA to take control of Ceres away from Earth. (Now that stuff starts making more sense.)

In the prison on the Martian Ship, Blueshirt tries starting a really dumb and blabbering conversation with the guard. Surprisingly, Amos doesn't tell him to shut up but joins in instead, and Blueshirt looks like he's actually having some kind of plan. But the guard gets a call to bring out Naomi.

Holden is taken to another room where Alex is moving around by himself. "Alex, it's good to see you. I think." Yeah, I was also suspecting that Alex is a Martian agent. And he's also wearing a Martian uniform now. Alex admits that he used to serve in the Martian navy but had left years ago, and it's just the style of the Martian military to give veterans special treatment. He says they denied blowing up their ship, and that instead someone is trying to frame them for it. War between Mars and Earth would benefit the Belters, and Alex also suspects now that Naomi is behind it.

Dock workers on Ceres refuse to give a Martian ship water for its return trip and beat up one of the crewmen, so Hat Cop steps in to stop them. An older guy with heavy Belter speech shouts at them to fill up the Martian ship because they should be more civilized than this. The dock workers immediately defer to him. He also happens to be the man Hat Cop was looking for with more question about how the missing woman got on that destroyed freighter. He appears to be a leader of the independence group and tries to win Hat Cop for their cause, but he doesn't seem to be interested.

Naomi is taken to the interrogation room and one of the first question is again about Phoebe. Holden already denied to have ever been there because it's a restricted area and Naomi does the same. The officer again takes some pill from a small box that is the only thing he has on the table. He already figured out that cargo ships would not report or respond any distress calls, so someone must have made the report secretly and forced the captain's hand. He doesn't think it was the Brute or the Medic, and is certain Alex wouldn't have done it either to cause trouble for Mars. He judges Naomi's reaction and concludes that it wasn't her either, so it must have been Holden. (Which Naomi already knows is correct because Holden told her.)

Amos and Blueshirt are taken to the room where Holden and Alex are. Amos says he didn't tell the Martians anything, and Blueshirt says he told them everything they wanted to know of him. He was also told that Naomi is with the OPA, but Amos thinks it doesn't matter because they were just trying to mess with their heads. He was told that Blueshirt faked his medical records and is on the run from a drug dealer who wants to kill him, and Blueshirt admits that this is entirely true. then Naomi is brought in and everyone is waiting for answers.
Holden and Naomi are accusing each other of taking their ship into the trap, knowing that they would escape in the shuttle. Holden also wonders who Amos really isn, because they know nothing about him, except that he always does what Naomi says. Amos decides to take Alex as a hostage, and at this point Holden has enough of it and calls the guards that he wants to talk to the captain now.

Leaders on Earth are getting a security briefing that they traced a call from the ambassador to Mars, which caused lots of messages to be send to stealth tech factories all over Mars. Fancy Lady admit that she told the ambassador that they caught a Belter with Mars Stealth tech and believes the factories were ordered to check if anything went missing from their stores. Which she sees as proof that Mars never gave the Belters anything. And so someone else is trying to cause a war between Earth and Mars.

The Martian captain tells Holden that she wants him to publicaly declare that the Martians did not ambush and destroy their ship. And that it was an OPA attack organized by Naomi, but Holden does not believe that.

On Ceres the natives are getting restless, and when the police tries to send everyone to their quarters they go into a full riot.

Fancy Lady goes to the ambassador because she feels bad, but she thinks it was necessary to prevent a war. He tells her the Martians banned him from ever coming back to Mars for his part in exposing secret facilities, and he really had preferred living on Mars, and now he's stuck on Earth for the rest of his life. He remembers how he met her during a diplomatic reception when she was a child and that he was worried she's too smart and ambitious for her own good, and now he knows why. Her father was the same, and he died because of that.

After the riot is over, some big guys ambush Earth Cop and pin him to a wall with a mining tool.

--

Alright, this keeps getting better. I am now starting to feel invested.

Holden and crew's story is progressing and getting more interesting now that an attack by a Martian stealth ship starts looking increasingly questionable. Alex being a Martian veteran is an interesting detail. I don't think its terrible important and believe he really has no more ties to the navy, but it means the crew new revolves around an Earther, a Martian, and a Belter. Didn't see that coming, but it matches the idea that space truckers all do the job because they don't want to go home. I also don't believe Naomi set up the trap. She still could be an OPA terrorist though.
The big question is why Missing Lady happened to be on that ship, and I doubt it's pure coincidence. Knowing that blue glowing corpses are important, I also remember that we saw glowing blue stuff and corpses on the trapped freighter in the opening of the first episode. But I guess during the original run most people would probably completely have forgotten about it.
Amos and Blueshirt also start developing characters and I don't think they are around to be easily disposable.

Earth Cop on the other hand was absolutely going to die sooner rather than later. He was just too nice compared to Hat Cop while not really contributing anything. It was clear what his function on the show was. At least he was a man and not another woman to get stuffed into a fridge.
But I am still not seeing any coherent story in the random scenes in the life of Hat Cop.

Though we do now have enough context to see why Fancy Lady and her work is relevant to us. Like Holden, she is trying to figure out who was behind the trap, though from a completely different perspective.
Also, was her character design and speech based on Kai Winn from Deep Space Nine? Don't tell me you don't see the similarities.

I now feel pretty certain that the Martians are not planning to provoke a war. And from everything we see and hear of Earth, the Earthers really don't seem to be able to afford a war and it's also not clear what they could possibly gain from it. The OPA believing that the Belt has a shot at going independent if Earth and Mars are busy with each other sounds plausible enough though, even if the economical realities could make that impossible. The Belters don't strike me as people who would be bothered too much by betting everything on a pipe dream.
However, there is still the possibility that there is a fourth faction involved that none of the other groups have on their radars. Narratively speaking that could make for great dramatic storytelling, but it would make any speculation pointless because we just don't have the necessary information to draw the right conclusions yet. But with the whole thing being obviously super fishy right now, I expect the next card to be played very soon. As things stand now, this fire doesn't seem like it will keep going by itself. It needs someone to pour extra fuel on it.

[Rakaydos]

Earth goverment is basically the People's Republic of Haven. Avasarala (fancy lady) is a Legaslaturist from a proud Legaslaturist family who is trying to keep them from getting into war with manticore Mars, while others on the council are far more hawkish.

The power balance is pretty similar to early honorverse, too- Mars has better fighting tech, earth/luna has more resources.

Holden and Amos are both basically Doleists, in this metaphor. Amos grew up in the chicargo slums on Basic, Holden... well, we hear more about his family late in the season.

Mars isnt quite Manticore, but they have the "we know they've wanted to invade reconquer for a century, and if they start it, we'll finish it" attitude. Which of course earth interprets as a threat.

[factotum]

The chap in question is Earth's ambassador to Mars, but he's very fond of the Martians generally (as you can tell from his dialogue), so Avasarala counted on him leaking the information she gave him in order to check the Mars-Stealth Ship link. It won't be the last time she uses someone who might even consider her a friend for her own nefarious ends--she's that kind of person. And nice to see my theory about the water being used for ship fuel is confirmed in this episode, I'd forgotten about that.

[Yora]

I actually had other stuff that I could have been doing this evening, but keeping going with The Expanse won out.

S1E4: CQB

In Metal Gear Solid, CQC is the Close Quarters Combat style of the heroes and villains. Not sure what B stands for, but I am expecting some fighting.

Now-Only-Cop is at the morgue and looking at the corpse of a young man he found after the riot. (And keeps flipping through profile pictures on his iphone, which I am still not sure they are. Maybe regular citizen records?) The coroner apologizes that things are a bit busy around there right now and mentions that life expectancy on Ceres is barely half of Earth and Mars. The dead man has no religious affiliation in his files, so the coroner asks if he can have the body for making fertilizer, but Cop tells him to wait and plays with his phone.

The prisoners on the Martian ship are wondering what Holden is talking about with the captain. Holden still does not believe that Naomi set the trap, even though being in the OPA is a possibility. The interrogator tries to reason that he should blame her anyway to deescalate the public tensions, but Holden refuses to do that. Meanwhile the ship is tracking an unknown vessel that they believe was send to pick up Naomi. As it gets close, the captain tells the ship to stop or they will open fire, but the other ship simply responds by jamming the communications. It then launches fighters or shots missiles (hard to tell with black ships in space), but the Martians are not really impressed by it and casually go to battle alert.
Alex recognizes the signs of battle alarm and the sound of lots of missiles being launched, so they decide its best not to wait for someone to tell them to strap themselves into chairs.

The Earth navy is observing the fighting on their sensors, but they can't get any clear images of what's going on because of the jamming.

On Ceres, people are cleaning up after the riots, but some people are already out with smart spray cans that can print pre-programmed images on surfaces. Our cop guy goes looking for the place of the dead guy he found, but apparently he was using a fake name of a racing pilot.

On Tycho Stations, some Mormons are having a fancy colony ship build for them by Belter workers. Their representative talks with the project leader that they want someone else to be in charge because of his ties to the OPA. The manager tells the Mormon that they can do that, but without him they will also be losing the best workers. The ones who can build ships that are really reliable. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. And that's the end of that discussion. Once the representative of the Mormons is gone, he project manager tells his people to use the ship's sensors to get them a good view of the space battle, and he happens to know the name of the Martian ship.

Meanwhile the unknown ship keeps getting closer and the battle switches from missiles to close range rail guns that can't be shot down. Holden would kindly request to be taken back to his cell with the others, but the captain just tells him to stay in his seat and be quiet. As the computer is getting a scan of the unknown ship, Holden recognizes its design.
The engines of the Martians get damaged and have to shut down, making everyone on the ship start floating around. Alex is getting really worried by this and Amon tells him to stop being a baby. Alex replies that he was only a transport pilot and didn't even have real combat training. Blueshirt tells him to calm down and throws him some pill or candy to help with the stress, but before it reaches his hand, its pulled away by a rush of air as two holes appear in the wall.
Oh, and Blueshirts head was blown off. I never even got to learn his name.

Fortunately they only strapped themselves into their seats without having been chained up, so they get out and grab steel plates and sealant that happens to be readily available on the walls to fix the holes. Amos clenches his jaws and goes to fix the hole next to Blueshirts still strapped in body that merrily bubbles out a stream of blood. On the other side of the room, Naomi is fixing the other hole with the manual for emergency repairs. Not reading it, just slapping it on the hole

On the bridge, the security guard is knocked out by Star Trek's Exploding and Sparking Console (TM) and drops his gun. Holden gets out of his seat while the creepy first officer watches, but he happens to ignore the gun and look after the soldier. (What would he be doing with a gun on a Martian warship anyway?) Holden says the unknown ship looks like the one that had laid the trap for them. The other ship stops firing and instead sends boarding crafts to the Martian ship. The captain tells the first officer to try getting Holden to the Martian headquarters, together with a record of the battle.

In the prisoner room, air pressure is not returning back to normal and stays very low, and they are probably running out of oxygen soon. Naomi thinks they should sedate one of them with the first aid kit so the air will last a bit longer. Naomi volunteers, but Amos thinks they will need her skills to make it out. Also, Amos is strong enough to carry Alex, so that makes Alex the obvious pick. (Alex also seems to be the one most freaked out, so that's even more air consumption by him.) Alex can't argue with that and goes ahead, but tells them not to leave him behind.

Holden is put in his space suit and taken to a shuttle, but they run into hostile boarders. As the fighting starts, he runs away and his guards are busy with fighting.

On Ceres, Hat Cop calls Lady Cop to the morgue to take a look at the dead man. Because every time he checks his ID, he gets a different name for the same face. Lady Cop says it's a fancy expensive implant used by rich and powerful criminals. He wants her help to figure out who the dead man really is, but she tells him to ask his buddy Earth Cop. But he doesn't answer the phone or come to work, which Hat Cop doesn't think is anything to worry about.
Lady Cop goes through the autopsy scans and find a data storage implant in his leg. She wants to get the coroner to extract it, but Hat Cop tells her he can do that himself. Only takes him three tries. They check the content and believe that the man was trading in government information, and Hat Cop thinks that someone deliberately murdered him for it. Lady Cop tells Miller to stop being like this all the time, and we finally get a name for him. Hello Miller Cop. Or just Miller from here on. He calls Earth cop and talks on his mail box.
A woman in the slums hears the phone call and finds Earth Cop, planning to loot the corpse. But he turns out to still be alive and she calls for help instead. (What an unexpected plot twist, I should have paid attention when they said his name.)

Holden finds a dead boarder with an unmarked space suit and when he checks him, he also turns out to still be alive and tries to grab Holden's air hoses. The Martian soldiers arrive and shot the guy's arm off save Holden. They start interrogating the man and also ask him about Phoebe station, but he doesn't talk.
Holden again asks the Martian officers to let him save his friends as well, which he thinks Martians soldiers would respect more than anyone else. They get Naomi, Amos, and Alex and the officer tells them they will all get evacuated from the ship and in turn they will publicaly declare that their ship was not attacked by the Martians. Which at this point really has become very clear.
As the others get into their suits, Holden talks with the officer to ask what the whole deal is with Phoebe Station. He says their ship was send to investigate after communications went down, and when they arrived everyone was dead and burned and the computers destroyed, with no sign who did it. The Martian soldiers then get a signal from the bridge that the captain has decided to destroy the ship instead of letting it fall into enemy hands.

Holden and company make it to the hangar but are getting ambushed by boarders. Amos drags Alex to a martian shuttle even though he gets shot in the leg. As Holden and Naomi try to make the run, the engines go out again and they start floating halfway across the hanger. Holden puts a tow line on Naomi's suit and then pushes himself off her body to drift back to the railing of the bridge they were crossing. Once he gets a grip on it, he used the line to pull Naomi back in as well. Only the first officer of the Martians makes it through the bullets and to the shuttle to unlock the controls.
Unfortunately, the only one of them who can fly is Alex, who is still completely drugged up. And he's never flown one of these things. But in a little stroke of luck, the martian shuttle is also a gunship and the targeting computer automatically short at everything that is seding bullets their way.
With the shuttle away and boarders already at the door of the bridge, the captain and pilot are blowing up their ship.

--

This one was actually really good! The season had a very janky start, but it's getting on track really quickly.

Fancy Lady has two very short scenes, and like the first episode isn't really in this one.

Hat Cop Miller is slowly starting to get some momentum going. Even though I still don't know what his story is. How does the dead information dealer connect to the missing woman? I absolutely did not see it comming that Earth Cop survived! When you look like a redshirt and then get pinned to a wall by a gang of big scary looking guys, there usually is no expectation to survive that. And looking at his injury, his survival doesn't even seem that improbable. He got impaled by a spike maybe 2 or 3 cm across, and it went through him in a place that looks like it could be just between the lungs, under his heart, and above the liver. If he's even more lucky, it went through at an angle to miss his spine. He also seemed to have fallen off the wall with the spike still in him, and landing on his side. This could be survivable, even when lying on the floor for the whole night before being found.
Miller casually jamming a giant syringe into the leg of a corpse to extract an implant and then not hitting it was funny. He then actually trying carefully and still not getting it on the second try was great. I think he needed that.

But this episode is really all about the Martian warship. And that one really got a great story. I really like the Martians. The first impression of Space Nazis appears to be completely unfounded. The slightly creepy first officer (I think his name is Lopez) was making a bad first impression. They are not exactly open and offering a warm welcome, but neither does anyone else in this world. At least they seem to be disciplined and well behaved. And as people are having more time to talk, Holden is also becoming a lot nicer. Though I think this might at least to some degree be the result of the actor and director(s) getting a better feel for what works and what not. I think he started out as a rude Han Solo wanabe, not just with the Martians when they first met, but even his own people. And it honestly felt a bit much. The performance now feels better.
I really love how this episode is working with stress and tension. My expectation for this show was some kind of combination of casual detachment and angry overacting that failed at making the characters feel cool, like I was used from Star Trek and Babylon 5. I am not a big fan of both Captain Sisko and Captain Sherridan for precisely this part of their actors' performances. It either feels uninspired or obviously fake.
The battle in this episode is completely different. Everyone is getting extremely tense as the battle keeps getting worse, but nobody starts to panic or tries being macho cool. With all the characters, both Holden's crew and the Martians, you consistetly get the impression that they are thinking "this is starting to get a bit too much, but I got to keep myself under control". I don't know how real people are behaving in real combat, but from all the many ways I've seen it portrayed in movies or shows, I would put my money of this episode comming the closest.
The first shot when Blueshirt gets his head has a certain humorous component to it, simply because of the pacing of the cuts. There are the people's faces and the realization that there's a hole in the wall and that air is escaping. And only then do we get to see that their scared faces are not because the hole in the wall, but because one of them just got his head blown off. It's not portrayed as a joke, but there is a certain black comedy component to it. But after that moment they continue on straight serious and they do it without any overblown drama. Amos isn't too disturbed to be half leaning over a decapitated body while fixing the one hole and he concentrates on the task, but he does show that it's still unplesant to have it next to his face and blood slattering over his hands as he works. Naomi does very well too, acting at the same time quite similar and also very different.

I praised Babylon 5 for how odd it always felt when major plot developments happened in other parts of the galaxy and the protagonists only hear about it on the news. It's very different from how movies and TV are usually made, but also very realistic, which always made it feel very refreshing. I felt something similar with happening here with the way the battle played out. It started with the assumption that the huge nasty Martian warship was getting close to some rusty OPA transport coming to pick up Naomi or whoever their agent was. And there was no single point where there was a dramatic reveal and some character looks right into the camera with a grim face while the music stops and says "We're screwed!"
Instead the whole battle begins with the assumption that it will all be over in a minute without any trouble. But it doesn't. Alex hears missiles being launched and they keep launching and launching and launching. And then it doesn't work and they switch to rail guns. And that still doesn't work. That's when people are really getting concerned. And it keeps very slowly getting worse and worse until you have the captain and the pilot with their keys in hand to blow up the ship.
And you never really get a look at the enemy ship. There was a close up shot, but it was super dark and I couldn't make out anything. Yet at the same time, everything we see of the Martian ship makes it feel like it's a super badass dreadnaught and not just some regular patrol frigate. And they still get shot to pieces.
I'm not saying Severed Dreams has been dethroned as my favorite space battle on TV yet. But with this being the first battle scene on this show at the start of the first seasons, I suspect that will only be a matter of time.

Space Nerd Thumbs Up:
Having well established after the first two episodes that this is a casual space show with real science elements, I feel its pointless to pick at things that are incorrect. You could do it, but what gain would there be in it? We don't do that with other shows either. But there's still a good amount of things that are way more realistic than ususal space show, that I find really cool to see.

This episode's honorable mention goes to the air escaping through the holes. I have not tried to make the calculation, but I feel that scene was written by someone who did.
The important thing about pressurized fluids (that's both liquids and gases) escaping from a confined container are not absolute pressure but the pressure diifferences between the inside and the outside. Normal air pressure on the surface of Earth is about 1 bar, while a perfect vacuum is at 0 bar. Which is actually not very much. The air inside a baloon taken 10 meters below water would be at 2 bar.
Now I don't really know about the different behaviors of air and water, but let's assume you have a cube the size of that room (say 5 meters at each side) here on Earth, and it's completely filled with water. And now you put a fist sized hole into the bottom and let the water drain out. It would take quite a long time for that whole tank to drain. And I think with the same amount of air draining into a vaccuum, it would take even longer. Even with two holes.
The holes look really quite big, and in lesser works people have been sucked through such holes into space, but it's correct that there would be barely any wind from it. Their biggest problem was that the door was sealed so no new air from the corridor outside could come in to replace it. If the door had been open and there been no other holes on the ship, it probably would probably have taken days for anyone to notice they are losing any air.

I also like the use of missiles and rail guns. Both ships shot swarms of missiles at each other, but both manage to shot them down without much difficulty. Space is big and very empty. You see missiles from a long way and have plenty of time to aim at them. Rail guns on the other hand shot a small piece of metal at extremely hig speeds, which are pretty much impossible to shot down. But once fired, they can't make any more course corrections, which gives the target plenty of time to dodge before it hits. Therefore, you only can really hope to hit anything that is dodging at relatively close range. Close Quarters.
I also really like how there was basically no fire and flames. Kinetic penetrators actually do cause explosions when they hit something on Earth, but I believe those fireballs are mostly from the surrounding air getting extreme hot, so you wouldn't see that in space. Only sparks. But I do wonder how that one projectile that killed Blueshirt stayed in a single piece and punched cleanly through several walls. It should have completely disintegrated on impact, killing everyone inside the room but not going out through the other wall. I now this is starting to get nitpicky again, but currently the best known way to "armor" space craft against small and fast projectiles is to have two walls with a bit of empty space between them. Any projectile will shatter and blow a big hole in the outer wall, and the fragments will be much smaller and slower when they hit the inner wall, quite likely not causing any damage. But who knows what would happen with solid tungsten balls the size of fists? I don't.

It's said that the damaged ship self-destroyed. I was really hoping to see how the show deals with a ship getting destroyed by enemy fire. Usually in sci-fi they explode, but actual space ships would not have anything to explode. Ships disappear from sea battles because they sink at some point. Space ships don't sink in space, so no matter how many holes you shot into them, they remain a space ship. In very rare cases it happens that a ship is hit in a way that makes all the ammunition explode, and when that happens and there's still plenty of stuff in the magazine, it can indeed be instantly obliterated. But that's a rare event. In sci-fi, it happens every time.
Usually the explanation is something about reactor cores exploding, because on a coal powered steam ship, the boiler can explode in a spectacular fashion. We also know that some nuclear fission reactors can overpressurize and burst, resulting in quite a big bang. But most space ships don't run on extremely high steam pressure. (Maybe if your ship runs on magnetically contained antimatter, but in that case you deserve to blow up the first time there's a minor electrical problem.) I assume ships in this world are powered by fusion reactors and fusion reactors can not explode, and even if they could catastrophically fail it would only make a mess in the engine room. So a real space ship getting shot would simply turn into swiss cheese until its power turns off, and then it would just keep floating like that. Hopefully we get to see that later.
(How the Martians blew up their own ship, I don't know. But they strike me as the guys who would have a thermonuclear bomb on their ships for just that purpose.)

The gunship shuttle automatically shoting at anyone who's shoting at it is already technically possible. Modern navy warships have had systems that can automatically detect, aim, and fire at incoming missiles for years. A similar system that aims at muzzle flashes from rifles wouldn't be a problem if you accept a certain risk of accidetal friendly fire or collateral damage from misindentifications. Shoting at targets is not the difficult part. It's teaching the computer when not to shot at anything that moves.

[Rakaydos]

Hat Cop Miller is slowly starting to get some momentum going. Even though I still don't know what his story is. How does the dead information dealer connect to the missing woman?

When Miller was going through the missing ladies' files, she swiped right on that sherpa guy. Known associate, and it appears he isnt really a "sherpa", so they might learn something even now that's he's in the morgue.

I praised Babylon 5 for how odd it always felt when major plot developments happened in other parts of the galaxy and the protagonists only hear about it on the news. It's very different from how movies and TV are usually made, but also very realistic, which always made it feel very refreshing. I felt something similar with happening here with the way the battle played out. It started with the assumption that the huge nasty Martian warship was getting close to some rusty OPA transport coming to pick up Naomi or whoever their agent was. And there was no single point where there was a dramatic reveal and some character looks right into the camera with a grim face while the music stops and says "We're screwed!"
Instead the whole battle begins with the assumption that it will all be over in a minute without any trouble. But it doesn't. Alex hears missiles being launched and they keep launching and launching and launching. And then it doesn't work and they switch to rail guns. And that still doesn't work. That's when people are really getting concerned. And it keeps very slowly getting worse and worse until you have the captain and the pilot with their keys in hand to blow up the ship.

If I had to point to a single moment, it was when the weapon's officer catches the captians attention, and says that the enemy missiles are REALLY good. Then it just keeps ramping up.

But I do wonder how that one projectile that killed Blueshirt stayed in a single piece and punched cleanly through several walls. It should have completely disintegrated on impact, killing everyone inside the room but not going out through the other wall. I now this is starting to get nitpicky again, but currently the best known way to "armor" space craft against small and fast projectiles is to have two walls with a bit of empty space between them. Any projectile will shatter and blow a big hole in the outer wall, and the fragments will be much smaller and slower when they hit the inner wall, quite likely not causing any damage. But who knows what would happen with solid tungsten balls the size of fists? I don't.

Whipple shielding (the two layer stuff) is fine for debris, particularly microscopic debris you cannot be expected to dodge, but it is trivial to design a penetrator that'll go straight through both layers, particularly if it doesnt need to explode at any point. Literally "Armor piercing rounds."

[factotum]

The cannons on board the Martian gunship are meant for point defence (e.g. shooting down incoming missiles), so it seems unlikely they'd have a special program in there for "Shoot bad guys who are shooting rifles at us"--under what circumstances would that ever be a likely thing to happen? Other than that, I agree, this is a fantastic episode and the entire battle is extremely well done.

Going back to your earlier comments about Ceres, by the way, I had a thought about that and went and checked the wiki--apparently, the spin gravity provided there is only about 0.3g, not 1g as you thought, so the tensile strength needed of the asteroid is not as high as you'd think. This also matches up with something we find out in season 4 (minor spoiler):

Spoiler

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Belters like Naomi really can't handle being under Earth gravity for very long without using drugs to boost their cardiovascular system. If they're generally born and raised on stations with 0.3g spin gravity then that explains why this is the case. Oddly, though, the same doesn't seem to be true of Martians, despite their planet only being 0.38g.

[Rakaydos]

The cannons on board the Martian gunship are meant for point defence (e.g. shooting down incoming missiles), so it seems unlikely they'd have a special program in there for "Shoot bad guys who are shooting rifles at us"--under what circumstances would that ever be a likely thing to happen? Other than that, I agree, this is a fantastic episode and the entire battle is extremely well done.

Going back to your earlier comments about Ceres, by the way, I had a thought about that and went and checked the wiki--apparently, the spin gravity provided there is only about 0.3g, not 1g as you thought, so the tensile strength needed of the asteroid is not as high as you'd think. This also matches up with something we find out in season 4 (minor spoiler):

Spoiler

Show

Belters like Naomi really can't handle being under Earth gravity for very long without using drugs to boost their cardiovascular system. If they're generally born and raised on stations with 0.3g spin gravity then that explains why this is the case. Oddly, though, the same doesn't seem to be true of Martians, despite their planet only being 0.38g.

Spoiler: Dem bones dem bones... (season 2)

Show

Martians grow up with nearly .4 G their whole lives, and even Bobby is given supplementals when she visits earth, despite training in 1g thrust gravity her whole carear as a marine. Belters, on the other hand, work for a living, often on the float (zero G), and cant always take 9 months off (let alone 16 years) to live on a spin station. And even the spin stations have cheaper quarters closer to the core, there the gravity isnt the full .3g

Edit: also Miller was said to have gotten the "cheap bone juice growing up" which is why he has an easilly concealed spinal disfigurement, as seen in one of the first few episodes. (when he's telling his earth partner how to tell a belter at a glance) The Mars Congressional Republic is economically on the same playing field as earth, they probably have universal pediatric care that prevents that from being a problem.

[Yora]

S1E5: Back to the Butcher

Miller goes to visit Earth Cop in the hospital and finds him to be pretty well patched up and looking like he's going to back on his feet very soon. As you do when you've been lying in a trash heap for a night with a giant spike through your chest. His prostitute friend is also there and Miller accuses her of having lured Earth Cop into the ambush. Earth Cop is not pleased about that.

On the gunship they are trying to fix Amos' leg with similar fancy space medical trickery. Alex thinks he managed to hide their engines in the explosion of the Martian ship and shut them down soon enough to make them look like a piece of debris on any sensors, and so nobody should know that they survived and escaped. But Amos points out that one of the consoles says they have an incoming message. When they play the message, it's from the boss at the Belter shipyard at Tycho Station, who offers them help if they call him back. They know he's an OPA leader, but since they have nowhere else to go, Holden thinks it's worth a try. Alex prefers to try reaching the Martians and explain everything. Amos wants to go to Ceres, but Holden says the four of them are the only people who survived the destruction of the Canterbury and the destruction of the Donnager, and that sounds like an unbelievable coincidence that nobody will buy.
Alex sees Holden's point, but Naomi doesn't want to go to the OPA guy, and Amos is with her as always.

Miller tells Lady Cop that he thinks the whole rioting situation is connected to the missing woman he's supposed to find. The potentially murdered information trader had the secret flight path of a ship named Anubis that had left Phoebe, and the woman left Ceres on the Scopuli. And right when the paths of the two ships were meeting, the mess with Canterbury and the Donnager started. The Scopuli was probably taking something very important that the Anubis had picked up on Phoebe, and this whole approaching war situation is because of that.
Lady Cop thinks that's actually sounding really probable and that this is way bigger than a missing person case he was assigned to. He should tell their superiors about this, but he thinks he can solve this by himself.

Somewhere on Anderson Station, Belters seem to have taken control of the facility and an Earth warship is coming to force them to surrender. The leader of the group thinks they have no hope to fight the Earth military and wants to give up, but the others think the Earthers are bluffing and won't shot on civilian squatters. The ship shots out their generators and that seems to make the Belters reconsider their position.

On the gunship the Martian officer has died and gets bagged up by Alex. Naomi is unsettled by the ship because it seems to be entirely automated and there is nothing for her do do. Amos asks why she doesn't want to respond to the offer of Johnson from Tycho Station and she says people like him are dangerous. (I am having a feeling the scenes on Anderson station are flashbacks.)
Amos goes to Holden and tells him they should go to Tycho Station, though he doesn't say if Naomi changed her mind or just him.

The OPA big wig on Ceres finds Miller in a dinner and tries to tell him that the people who attacked Earth Cop have nothing to do with them. The OPA currently has the leader of that gang in one of their places. And he's willing to give him to Miller as a friendly gesture, once again making an offer to consider joining their team. He also would like to share what they know about the missing woman Julie Mao, as she was working for him and he wants to know what happened to her.

Alex is getting a signal of a TV station and sees the news about the situation on Ceres Holden caused. Holden comes up the stairs and Alex and Amos tell him that he's famous now.

Miller goes looking for the guy who had a fight with Julie Mao at the docks that got recorded by cameras. He said she worked on his ship once but left when she wanted to help people after an industrial disaster and he wanted to take his ship away from the danger. When he saw her again on Ceres he was acting inappropriate and she punched him, and that was all of it. Miller tells her she was on the Scopuli when it was made a bait for the Canterbury, and he thinks the guy really got punched because he knew she was getting into trouble and tried to stop her. The guy says she was getting involved with the OPA and she also asked him to find her an information trader. Miller already has his picture and asks where he can find the trader, and the guy is worried that he'd get killed if he told the police. Miller tells him the man is already dead and there's something big and dangerous going on, so the guys tells him to go to a place named Tech Noir (the night club form The Terminator) and talk to someone. (About what, though?)

The Belters on Anderson station try to surrender but get no response from the Earth Navy ship (or is it?). They can only communicate short range by laser link because the radios are being jammed. The leader tries to get a laser link to a nearby asteroid and use its radio antenna which is outside of the ship's jamming range. He is sending a message that the workers have gone on strike and occupying the station to protest their living conditions that cause developmental disorders in their children. They have agreed to surrender but the Earth Navy is not responding to them. The station is then blown up, and it turns out to be indeed a flashback, with the Earther commander being Johnson who now leads the OPA on Tycho Station.

Naomi is trying to hack the transponder of the Martian gunship with instruction that were attached to Johnson's message. She asks what name she should type in for the ship and Holden wants to call it Rocinante. (Which is the horse of Don Quixote.) The computer takes it without the tempering protection blowing it up.

Miller decides to throw away the phone OPA leader gave him to find the guy who stabbed Earth Cop. But he does keep a photo of Julie Mao that he found in the captain's hideout. He goes to a video/game-store (?) and has the clerk take him to the backroom where the information trader was doing his business. He looks around and then leaves when the camera shows a half-disassmbled robot rat, like the one he saw in Julie Mao's quarters.

Amos is looking around the Rocinante and finds a bottle of some drink. At the controls, Alex is looking at a picture of what looks to be Naomi and another woman. (Did he have a mission to spy on Naomi?) And Holden finds a big stash of coffee in the kitchen.

Miller goes to look at the Robo-Rat in Julie Mao's home and finds an SD card hidden inside, which he hides in a small pocket inside his head. As he leaves the building he's jumped and kidnapped by two people.

--

My first instinct was to say "decent episode". But I feel not much has actually happened.

The gunship was renamed to Rocinante and probably has the transponder signal of a freighter or something now. The Martian officer died but fortunately forsaw this happening and had the computer register the other four people as users with full access right. Nice, but no story development really, and not much character moments either.

The flashback of why Johnson used to be a nasty dude that Naomi doesn't trust doesn't seem to add anything to the plot. Naomi could just have said that he blew up a space station that already surrendered. Perhaps the idea is to get the audience more familiar with this kind of stuff happening in this world, but even then it feels kind of superflous.

Miller learned that Julie Mao's ship met with a ship from Phoebe Station just before the whole crisis started (and we know the Martians were all on edge because Phoebe station got mysteriously whiped out). But we learned that in one of the first scenes of the episode. After that, not really much else actually developed. And as has been the problem with Miller's story since the start, Miller just suddenly declares things that he knows, without really communicating to the audience how he learns these things or why he goes to talk to the people he does.
I very strongly suspect that in the book, his whole storyline consists almost entirely of reading his thoughts. Yet here we see it only from the outside with no way of comprehending what's going on.

This episode really didn't feel bad. But I almost suspect you could skip this episode and never notice that you missed one. And that's pretty bad writing.

A minor thing that I remember: When it was clear that the Martian officer had died, Alex put him into a bag, and we then got a long close up shot of that bag being inflated. What was the point of that? I would have assume they would vacuum seal their corpses, but apparently they are storing him in some kind of gas. If this was supposed to show some science about dealing with corpses in space, it would have been nice to know what gas that would have been.

At no point during this episode did I feel that it was bad or poorly done. But in hindsight this seems like a complete waste of time.

[factotum]

I'm 100% sure that's not Naomi on the photo Alex was looking at...from memory, the duskier of the two is far too young to be Naomi. I do actually know who they are, but not sure if it would count as a spoiler to say, so, just in case:

Spoiler

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It's Alex's wife and child back on Mars. Note that the child is actually a boy, despite appearances!

[Yora]

S1E6: Retrofit

Fancy Lady takes her grandkids to the aquarium as a cover to meet with some man who has a spy on Tycho Station because she needs someone in that place to tell her what Johson is doing. The man doesn't want to help her, but she reminds him that his son is in prison and has a parole hearing coming up soon. He thinks that's cheap, even for her, but she really doesn't have the option to negotiate right now.

The Rocinante arrives at Tycho Station and they are personally greeted by Johnson himself at the airlock. Holden tries to bluff that there's a whole Martian crew on the ship, but Johnson doesn't buy it and correctly assumed that there's only two-three more people on board and none of them are Martians. Because there would be no reason for them to send Holden to talk on their behalf. I kind of feel like this scene is supposed to show how super smart Johnson is, but his deduction is simultaneously not very impressive but also very accurate and quick. It's not wrong or unbelievable, but it just feels very "convenient", so that you can instantly see that this exchange was put in for a specific purpose. It feels artificial.

Miller is taken to some store room and tries to fight his captors, but is just getting tazed again. The OPA leader (Dawes?) arrives and tells them to stop it. But he's also really not happy with Miller that he decided not to pick up the criminal they had presented to him on a plate.
They want to know why he's still snooping around in Julie Mao's quarters and still try getting him to join their side.

After a lot of posturing and making threats with Holden, Johnson comes clean and tells him that he needs his ship to go to the Scopuli and rescue one survivor. They need something fast and heavily armed for this, and they don't have anything like that themselves. Holden agrees to make the trip, but he will command the ship himself and not hand it over to Johnson's people.

Meanwhile some asteroid miners are getting bullied by a Marian patrol ship.

Holden tells the others that they can stay on Tycho Station and don't have to come with him to go back to the Scopuli. He also reveals that he was the one who reported the Scopuli's emergency signal. Amos seems quite pissed at that, but is even more disappointed that Naomi knew the whole time and didn't tell him. Alex also isn't happy that Holden waited this long to tell them, but leaves it at that.

The OPA guy tries to use Miller's interest in Julie Mao to make the OPA more attractive to him, since she was dedicated to their cause. Miller tries to antagonize him by saying he killed his sister when they were young. He doesn't bite and says she was deathly ill and their family was starving and unable to care for her anymore. And that's why he is dedicated to getting a better life for the Belters.

One of the two miners who ran into the Martians got drunk and decides to throw his nephew out of the airlock with his suit and helmet.

Fancy Lady gets some words from her superior because the man she tried to blackmail made an official complaint. But she's also told to keep working on her investigation about that stealth ship stuff.

Amos and Alex hang out in some bar and having a somewhat pleasant conversation. With I think an implication that Amos used to work as a prostitute. Alex says he always wanted to fly gunships like the Rocinante but was not considered qualified as a combat pilot. Holden and Naomi also go drinking in a more upscale place, where someone is recording them with his eye implant.
Meanwhile Johnson takes care of the body of the dead Martian on the Rocinante, but also gets a little SD card out of his armor.

The OPA goons throw Miller in an airlock, but while they are pumping out the air they get shot by Lady Cop. They get Miller to his home where he gets fixed up, and Lady Cop is still feeling queasy. Miller tells her also only killed someone once. Miller gets the SD card out of his head that the OPA people didn't find even though they went through all his clothes.

Johnson's men have disguised the Rocinante as a tanker and when Holden comes back, the other three have all decided to go with him. Naomi tells Johnson that they will try what they can to get his guy from the Scopuli, but in return she wants him to remember that she will come back one day to ask him to find someone, and she expects him to do it with no questions asked.

Miller goes to his boss to tell her what he has found. Julie Mao's SD card had a recording about some kind of bio-weapon on Phoebe. He thinks she gave a copy to Dawes, who then send out the Scopuli (to catch the Anubis that left from Phoebe), and then the whole space battle stuff started. His boss wants to know if he told anyone about it and if there are copies of the recording, and he says he didn't and it's copy-protected. And I feel pretty sure he's lying. She puts the SD card in a safe and tells the computer to remove Miller from the security force and delete all his files. Miller thinks she's working for Dawes and she doesn't make any attempts to deny it.

And the Rocinante leave Tycho Station. (And with a better look of Alex' photo, it seems to be his ex-wife and son.)

--

Getting a bit better again, but this is another episode that is treading a lot of water. For the length of the episode, very little actually happens.

Holden, Naomi, Amos, and Alex get a few character moments together, but I feel the average TNG episode has more of that than this show does so far. We learn very little and after the initial hostile meting with Johnson they just work together without any issues. Though even the episode brings this point up, I am still a bit unclear about the motivation. Holden feels like he has some kind of obligation to figure out why their old ship got destroyed after he reported the abandoned freighter. But with the other three I really don't know. Alex likes flying the cool ship, but he really doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would get involved in other people's wars for that privilege. I guess Amos still simply does what Naomi does, but I am not sure what her interest is.

Miller has again some pretty decent scenes, but there's still a lot that feels like padding that doesn't really contribute anything. It's been six episodes so far and I feel like all of Miller's stuff could have been condensed to just three episodes. And without cutting to other storylines, I think he now has enough material to put together a single 45 minute episode with only himself. On the other hand, the Rocinante story probably could fill three episodes, but that's to a great deal because the episode on the Martian ship was much better than anything else so far.
As with Naomi and Amos being under high stress after Blueshirt was killed, I really quite liked the scene after Lady Cop saved Miller. Sufficiently tense without being either either overly dramatic or casually cool about it. I don't know who was writing and directing these episodes, but these scenes are always really well done.
I like Dawes, I hope he keeps playing a great role. Very charming guy. I'd probably join his team if he asked me this nicely. Though it does seem a little much. In every scene since he first appeared he has taken every opportunity he had to make Miller another invitation to come over to the OPA. At first it seemed like he's just being nice and thinks everyone on the Belt should unify behind their cause. But then he just kept trying over and over and over. Does the man not take a hint? Or does he perahps have a very specific interest in Miller personally? I doubt he would go to such length for everyone. Though then, maybe he actually is a nice guy and knew the whole time that they could not allow Miller to stay alive with his knowledge unless he's on their side. Unless he got Miller to join them, he would have to kill him, and he really didn't want to do that.
Or alternative that man is a total bastard who can pull of a really convincing show. Either way, I am looking forward to see where things are going with him.

Fancy Lady gets way too much screen time. She's in almost every episode, but I think in only two she had anything like an actual story instead of just two isolated scenes that don't fit in with the other plot lines.

I criticized the Rebellious Workers scenes in the previous episode and I have the same complaint with the two miners in this one, but even more so. One, these scenes don't connect to anything (yet?) and don't even tell a discernible story of their own. Two, they are chopped into very small pieces that are apparently scattered throughout the episode randomly, which makes them feel even more disjointed and pointless.
I assume this is some kind of mistaken attempt to stick to the books that have SOIAF-style random side stories with lots of random characters. I hope they get this figured out as the show goes on.

At the very least, it looks like next episode should be interesting with big things happening again very soon. Dawes told his goons to kill Miller and the police chief is also working for him, as are many of the other cops. Unless Dawes changes his mind about it, Miller would be very much dead now. The Rocinante still has to make it to the Scopuli, but I am hoping that the next episode will not just consist of them talking while waiting to arrive there.

[GloatingSwine]

Fancy Lady gets some words from her superior because the man she tried to blackmail made an official complaint. But she's also told to keep working on her investigation about that stealth ship stuff.

This is a consequence of her not actually having been in the first book.

So all her scenes are added partly to show what Earth was up to and partly to include the character.

[InvisibleBison]

I assume this is some kind of mistaken attempt to stick to the books that have SOIAF-style random side stories with lots of random characters.

No, it isn't. The first book only has Miller and Holden POVs. In the book, the stuff with the miners and the Martians is just one of several incidents mentioned in passing to illustrate the increasingly hostile relations between Mars and the Belt. I don't know why they decided to make such a big thing out of it in the show.