Yora watches and reviews The Expanse

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Random fun fact: that random medic who got his head blown off in the Martian prison cell? In the Traveller campaign that inspired The Expanse's initial story, he was a player who had to exit the campaign early, so they'd written his character out of the game like that.

I haven't checked out the second season (the first season of the show landed as "some stuff I really liked, some stuff I was eh on"), but the first season was enough to intrigue me into reading the books.

[Rakaydos]

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.

Concerning miller particularly, I think it's clear at this point that Dawes has known about Julie Mao all along. There might be a bit of the left hand not talking to the right hand, but Julie Mao was hardcore OPA, and left from Ceres. When it looked like miller might have found something, OPA snagged and questioned him, then tried to toss him out the airlock before he found anything else. Because Miller wasnt OPA. And Dawes isnt sending out a rescue mission to the Anubis... Johnson is, from Tycho station.

Spoiler: Minor spoiler: Dawes and Johnson history

Show

Minor spoiler, but years ago, Dawes was the one who recruited the Butcher of Anderson Station and turned him into the OPA big shot we see Holden interact with. And Johnson's assistant, who watched it all happen, still isnt able to answer your question here.

Edit: ooh, I forgot. The kid thrown out the belter's airlock after being harassed by the martians? That was the leader of the street kids who were stealing water from the govenor's lawn on ceres. "Stay away from de aqua!" as hat-cop let them go.

Apparently the new job isnt working out so hot.

[factotum]

This is the thing with the Expanse TV series (I really want to get around to reading the books some day)...it's often quite slow paced, but nonetheless, the story is interesting enough to keep you along for the ride. It helps if you do what I did when I watched the earlier seasons and just binge watch them, so the plot points aren't as spread out. As for Fancy Lady, I personally am quite happy for any additional chances to see Shohreh Aghdashloo in action, so I'm not complaining!

[EDIT] And I've just binged the rest of season 4 (episodes 4 to 10), and hooboy, no spoilers, but that was one heck of a cliffhanger they left it on...

[Yora]

S1E7: Windmills

Again with the Don Quixote.

Miller goes home on the train and seems to be actually upset. He's recording a message to send to the parents of Julie Mao that he can't continue to search for her. He sees Dawes on a TV screen and decides to go to docks.

The Martian ship in the area is on edge after they had a fight with a Belter (that drunk miner they bullied and then sped off after throwing out his nephew?) and Naomi is greatly worried that they will be discovered to be flying a Martian gunship with a fake registry, just after another Martian ship was destroyed in the area. Holden once again tells them not to worry and just keep going. It will all be fine.
Naomi makes sure that the Rocinante's transponder isn't identifying itself to the Martians as a friendly ship, but Alex discovers that the ship is sending out some signal anyway. Amos goes down to see what's sending that signal when Naomi tells him to, but he looks like he's suspecting something. He finds a man in a space suit with Tycho Station insignias fiddling with something and smashes his head against the wall to crack the glass.

Fancy Lady walks on foot through the snow to a Farming Collective in Montana, I assume to have a talk with Holden's family. Her people are not happy about her going to that place alone, but she reminds them of their order to stay away to not provoke a fight. The place is much smaller than I expected. She finally introduces herself as (looking up the spelling) Chrisjen Arasavala to one of Holden's mothers.

The prisoner on the Rocinante claims that he's gotten in trouble with the OPA and tried to get away on a ship leaving Tycho Station and was trying to reach his friends to pick him up. Unfortunately the Martians saw his signal and are launching a boarding ship to investigate. Holden tells Amos to put the guy into the airlock and he wants to cooperate with them to get away from the Martians, but Holden doesn't want to hear it. And for once, Amos seems to completely agree with him.

Miller walks into some bar in the docks where lots of OPA people are hanging around with badges on their sleeves. He punches out the first guy who approaches him, which makes Dawes come out of his corner to deal with the situation. Dawes tells everyone that Miller is his friend, and to put all his drinks on his tab. Now that Miller is no longer in the police, he's no threat to the OPA anymore. And even though he just had his goons trying to throw him out into space, he is hoping for a fresh start and again offers Miller to join them. This man is persistent.

Chrisjen tries to be friendly with Miss Holden and notices some books in the living room. The one she points out being Cervantes, who I believe didn't write anything important other than Don Quixote. The conversation doesn't go very well, of course, but she comes clear that she wants to understand what Holden's motivations are in the situation he is involved with.

Miller breaks into Julie Mao's apartment to search them again, but doesn't find anything. He sees a bird outside the window, which in some way seems to be meaningful. He gets a message on his phone that the ship Anubis never arrived on Eros, but one of its shuttles did and is still in the dock. And then the bird is gone. (Is that bird perhaps a camera drone that has been spying on him the whole time.

The prisoner did something with the console inside the airlock and quickly covers it up again when Amos comes to take him back out. Holden and Naomi want to know what he wants to suggest, and his opinion is that they are using the wrong cover story. Instead of trying to pretend to be a fuel tanker, which they are obviously not when you get close, they should pretend being Martian special forces that have disguised their ship as a fuel tanker for a secret operation. And the Martians have a code to signal that to each other. He admits to being a spy and claims to be wanted both by the OPA and the Martian, so he really doesn't want to be captured now.
Alex remembers an incident when he was a pilot in the Martian Navy when his captain was having a conversation with a freighter that ended with the word "donkey balls", at which they let the freighter be on its way. They go searching for a safe that has the list with Martian Navy phrase code and Holden pulls out a key card that Lopez gave him before he died. The safe accepts it, but still asks for a 24 digit security code.

Miller fills a sock with casino chips he had in his apartment to cash them in and have the money transferred to his account. He also decides to leave his hat behind. Lady Cop passes him on the street and is happy to see him alive, because she got a message from him and was suspecting they had to clean up his corpse from his apartment. He tells her he's going to Eros and that she shouldn't go with him if that's what she's thinking.

Miss Holden comes around to talking with Chrisjen and tells her that they had planned for Holden to inherit the land that his eight parents own as part of their conservation project. She later realized that it had been a terrible idea to put the future of all their lifes' project on the shoulder of one child, and told him that he should leave and find a life for himself.

Naomi and Amos are trying to break into the safe, but it's taking way too long. So Amos goes down to the airlock to set up an ambush for the two customs officers and shot them the moment the door opens. Holden wants to capture them alive and not attack any Martians, but Amos thinks that's just not an option. Alex tries to stall the other ship when it attempts to dock and Holden pulls a gun at Amos and tells him he will shot him if Amos doesn't put away his rifle before the ship docks. Amos isn't impressed and doesn't care.
Naomi manages to crack the safe open and they pull out the code list, which turns out to be really complicated big words. Alex has no idea how to use them in a conversation and just blurts them out, but fortunately the patrol ships accepts it and pulls away.

When Chrisjen leaves, she gets a call from her boss who isn't pleased with her just running off like that. She tells him that she thinks Holden is bit messed up and feeling like he was born to save the world, but he certainly is not a terrorist. But her boss tells her that the spy they had on Tycho Station has gone silent, but the last information they got from him was that Holden is working with Johnson from the OPA and they converted a stolen Martian gunship to fly to Eros. That looks very much like major terrorist activity and he has send orders to have the ship destroyed immediately once it arrives at the station.

Holden tells Naomi that she either has to get Amos back under control or off the ship. They are getting close to an asteroid that Johnson said one of his men is hiding on, who is the only one who survived from the Scopuli. (Which I think is a story only Johnson has told and we have not seen any other mention of.)

--

How can this show be this entertaining with nothing happening?

So now Miller is going to Eros. Which I looked up and is an asteroid between Earth and Mars. With past space stuff taking place in the Asteroid Belt and near Saturn, I think it would have been worth mentioning that the story is now moving right into the civilized parts of the solar system.
There's also a military ambush waiting for the Rocinante waiting at Eros. Even though the Rocinante isn't actually going there. So either Miller is going to run into people waiting for Holden, or the Rocinante will go to Eros next after they found what Johnson wanted them to pick up.

This was fine enough to watch, even though there's not much real story. But I've been looking at various ratings of the episode, and all the lowest rated episodes are now already behind me. Everything that follows from here on is rated similarly high or better than CQB, which was a really great episode. Really looking forward to what will be coming next. They can't spend another episode waiting to get to their destination, with it already being visible on the screen?

[Cikomyr2]

Season 1 of the expanse is really all about whether or not you buy into the mystery and the setting until the story/character get some traction.

The season is certainly a lot better the second time you watch it. The whole is better appreciated than the sum of its part.

[factotum]

It's like I said--really slow moving but it makes you want to keep watching to see what happens. At least, up until this point--it goes up a gear from here on and doesn't really slow down again much until the end of season 3. There's still plenty of moments of quiet introspection, don't get me wrong, but it feels like the plot really starts to get moving.

[GloatingSwine]

I think some of it is that Leviathan Wakes is decompressed to form season 1 and about 1/3 of season 2, whereas Caliban's War makes up the rest of season 2 (though the start of Caliban's War and the end of Leviathan Wakes stream together rather than it being sequential).

Then Abbadon's Gate and Cibola Burn are just a season each, which makes the pace of those seasons quite a bit better.

Spoiler

Show

Also, Abbadon's Gate has its weakest element almost completely rewritten, giving us a much improved character and necessary sympathetic OPA face in Ashford.

[Rakaydos]

S1E7: Windmills

Miller fills a sock with casino chips he had in his apartment to cash them in and have the money transferred to his account. He also decides to leave his hat behind.

Goodby, "Hat cop." Hello, Miller.

Spoiler: The Investigator (season 3-4)

Show

It's notable here that Holden has never seen the hat, and the Investigator represents a part of Miller that Miller gave up on, here. Which makes the Miller/INVESTIGATOR switchups in season 4 interesting.

[Cikomyr2]

I think some of it is that Leviathan Wakes is decompressed to form season 1 and about 1/3 of season 2, whereas Caliban's War makes up the rest of season 2 (though the start of Caliban's War and the end of Leviathan Wakes stream together rather than it being sequential).

Then Abbadon's Gate and Cibola Burn are just a season each, which makes the pace of those seasons quite a bit better.

Spoiler

Show

Also, Abbadon's Gate has its weakest element almost completely rewritten, giving us a much improved character and necessary sympathetic OPA face in Ashford.

Actually, season 3 is part Caliban's War and the entirety of Abbadon's Gate

[Yora]

S1E8: Salvage

I am having high expectations now.

Some guy from Earth tries to get into a conversation with Miller on the transport to Eros, and turns out to be one of the Mormons who will be participating in their big interstellar colonization project. Miller is of course not really interested, but still feels like he needs to express his opinion on that matter. He thinks the Mormons are crazy and most likely will only find more dead empty rocks when they reach their destination, and then they won't have the means to come back. The man agrees with that, but thinks they are on a sacred mission and it is a matter of faith, which doesn't mean anything to Miller. But when you looks over to a TV screen with the latest news, he ponders that perhaps the Mormons have picked exactly the right time to leave the solar system and hope for a future elsewhere.

The Rocinante reaches the asteroid Johnson had send them to to pick up a survivor from the Scopuli, but they don't get anything on the scanners. Alex takes them around and very close to check the asteroid visually and Naomi spots a small stealth ship wedged inside a crack, which they barely register on the scanners even when they are right on top of it.
Holden gets the spy from his room and asks him what he knows about the ship, being an industrial spy after all. Looking at the scanner readings, his first assumption is that it's Martian, but Holden tells him he's sure it's not. The spy figures out that Johnson had send them to salvage it, but Holden insists that they are looking for survivors. He's going to try get inside, and the spy is coming with him. He's going first to check for booby traps.

They find an empty padded locker that had been broken open from the inside (which we saw in episode 1) and an empty space suit of the type the Belters use. And it does have insignias from the Scopuli on it. Holden feels certain it's the same ship that destroyed their ice hauler.
Alex sends out a scout drone from the Rocinante and discovers that all the airlocks on the ship are open. There also is an empty docking point for a shuttle.
Amos and the spy go to the flight deck and find a lock safe, and also the controls to restart the ship's reactor. Holden and Naomi go to check on the reactor and find that it had been properly shut down, but the access airlocks had been forced open. Inside the reactor they find some blue stuff growing all over it.

On Earth, one of the admirals tells Chrisjen's boss that it's a really bad idea to have an Earth Navy ship board and search Tycho Station. Theoretically they have the authority, but in reality the Belters have been under their own control for some time now. Chrisjen still wants to tell him not to have Holden killed, but he doesn't want to hear it. Holden will be killed in some street fight on a violent Belter station. (Just like the information dealer on Ceres.) The boss then sees a message that someone killed himself. Which purely based on context, I assume was the Earth ambassador to Mars from several episodes back. They really should not assume we remember names when they never use them.

Alex' drone is searching the inside of the stealth ship and there's more blue stuff on the walls, but he doesn't spot it on the cameras. Naomi thinks it might be some stealth tech liquid that spilled out of damaged systems and froze. While Amos is trying to crack the safe, the spy goes looking at the computer and discovers the ship is named Anubis. Amos takes a look as well and calls Holden that the ship was travelilng from Phoebe Station to Eros. Holden remembers that Lopez said everyone on Phoebe was dead, possibly by some kind of toxic spill. Which perhaps might have to do with the blue stuff. And now that the reactor is back on, the stuff starts to unfreeze and move. Naomi quickly shuts it down again and the stuff stops moving. Holden says they rip out the computer core and get away as quickly as possible. Just to be sure, they decontaminate their suits in the airlock and store the computer core and the safe in a place that they can vent out into space.

The spy thinks the guy Polanski they were looking for left the ship on a shuttle, and he thinks he might be able to track him down, in exchange for his freedom. Holden agrees to it and asks if anyone has objections to blowing up the space ship. The spy does. "Except you!" The others have no problem with that and they blow it up with a torpedo.

Miller arrives on Eros and has no problem finding the shuttle the moment he steps out of his transport, as the Anubis A1 is listed on the public display for docking bay occupations. He goes to a small dock administration office and says his daughter arrived on the Anubis and he's looking for her, and he would like to know if she's still there or traded the ship for something else. The guy doesn't care and so Miller offers him a bribe, but it's just a distraction to give the guy a knock on the head so he can get at his computer. He finds out that the docking bay was rented by Lionel Polanski, but then security shows up and throws him in jail.
His friend in Eros Security comes to see him and Miller tells him he's no longer working for the Ceres police. His friend tells him to come with him to hear that whole story. Miller asks him to help him find Julie Mao, but Sammy tells him the new security service on Eros makes that too dangerous. He also thinks she might well be a terrorist and kill him the moment she finds out he's searching for her. Sammy eventually gives in and show Miller a security video of Julie Mao being on Eros, telling him she used the name Lionel Polanski to park her ship, and the name is listed in the register of a cheap apartment place. Miller immediately runs of to look for her.

On Tycho Station, Johnson is being informed about an Earth Navy ship approaching and claiming to require emergency repairs, but the damage to their engine looks very obviously fake. He goes to one of his technicians who is working on the SD card he got from Lopez' suit, which is containing all the scanner readings from the battle between the Donnager and the stealth ship.

Holden and company have also arrived on Eros and are also headed to the place that Lionel Polanski rented. On his eye implant, the spy is getting a notification that a special forces team is read and security informed to ignore the area. They walk up to the guy in the loby and make a determined impression, and the guy doesn't want a fight and tells them the number of Polanski's room. Meanwile the spy is getting super nervous, waiting for the assassins to show up. Amos notices and reaches for his gun, and two people nearby pull out their own, but he manages to shot them both first. Two others get out guns and start shoting as well. One of them pulls out a grenade, but in that moment Miller comes through the door, knocks it away, and shots him with his own gun. Amos uses the distraction to shot the other.
Everyone comes out of cover and can't believe it. It's Mister James Holden again.

They all head together to Polanski's room and find it empty and smelling horribly. They find a jacket from the Scopuli crew and Naomi notices someone destroyed all lamps and electronics in the room. In the bathroom, Miller finds what looks like the rotting body of Julie Mao, I think covered in blue stuff.

--

Alright, not as exciting as CQB, but still a really nice episode.

One thing I noticed throughout this episode is that it isn't as chopped down into small pieces and then spread out evenly. It stays a lot longer with one group of characters before switching to another. I hope they will be sticking with that.

Having Miller meet the other guys like this is great. And also weird. They clearly have been in the same events and in the same setting, and to the audience everything they learned contributed to an overall stories. But their individual stories were completely separate. And when they suddenly cross, seemingly completely at random, and Holden's crew having no idea who Miller is, is just rally quite strange. I love it.

Something I noticed about the spy last episode already, but continuing in this one, is how he totally does not look like an actor with an important role in a fancy TV show. He's just a guy. Which for a spy is perfect! Writers often like to write characters they describe as looking terribly average and unmemorable, but you never get that when it's put on a screen. I don't know if that's just like how the guy looks, or if there's some deliberate effort from the costume and makeup department, or if its his acting. But he actually is that nondescript guy you often read about.
Similar thoughts about the Earther assassins. Their cover is perfect. And here I am completely certain it's the work of the costume and makeup teams. Again, often scripts say the assassins look unremarkable, but when they are shot they are made to look hardcore dangerous and menacing. Or you get shots of people who look like they possibly might be hitmen but then turn out to be just regular pedestrians because the hero is feeling paranoid. I was thinking about these things when the first two junkies showed up and sat down on one of the couches in the back. But because of this I was also feeling quite certain that they are not the assassins. But they actually were! It doesn't come as a huge shock because they are just extras in just one scene, but I appreciate the effort.

At first I was a bit disappointed with the first scene with Miller and the Mormon. On the one hand, I like that this show that is set in the near-ish future solar system acknowledges present day religions on Earth, which sci-fi shows usually don't do. But I also felt like how the guy was talking to Miller about finding Christ and Miller brushing him off felt way too contemporary for a show that otherwise makes an effort to make everything seem familiar but different. But towards the end of the scene, they share a few words that indirectly imply a search for life elsewhere in the universe, and Miller opening up about his personal feelings that space is empty and scary.

Spoiler: The point I am getting to

Show

I know that the blue stuff is not some high tech-nano-grey goo but alien in origin. Basically the only thing I know about anything in this story from this point on. I also knew that it does affect human bodies, which I believe the ending of this episode was supposed to show us so that's also not a secret anymore.
I feel like the opening scene with Miller is meant to gradually introduce the idea of the unknown of outer space being scary, as well as some people having faith that making contact with other life is ultimately good.

Spoiler: Speculation time what happened so far

Show

In the middle of the episode, Alex tries to piece together what happened with the Canterbury and the stealth ship, and concludes that all the things they know just don't make any sense. I am assuming that they will be sharing their information with Miller next episode. Here is what I think they will piece together.

Scientists on Phoebe were studying the blue stuff. Then something happened and someone tried to stop it by burning all the bodies. Some survived and tried to get away on the Anubis to go to Eros, but they also got blue stuff on their ship as well. Somehow Dawes learned about the exact course of the Anubis (otherwise they would not find a stealth ship) and send the Scopuli with Julie Mao to intercept the Anubis. Then the Anubis destroyed the Scopuli but captured her and put her into a locker, and also removed all the corpses in case of blue stuff contamination. Then people from the Anubis used a Martian transponder to lure the Canterbury to the Scopuli and blew it up too. And I have not the slightest clue why they would!?!?!
Then the Anubis or another stealth ship blew up the Martian warship Donnager and the Anubis went to hide on that asteroid. The reactor was powered down and everyone on the ship vented out into space to stop the blue stuff, but somehow Julie Mao escaped on the shuttle. She then send a message to either Dawes or Johnson, but only giving the cover identity Lionel Polanksi, but not her real one. When she reached Eros she found out she was also contaminated, destroyed all the electronics in her room, and tried to wash off the stuff in the shower, where she died.

Spoiler: Blind shot into the blue

Show

What if the blue stuff merged with the Anubis and has the intelligence to use the wreck of the Scopuli as bait for its alien blue stuff purposes?

Very interesting.

[Rakaydos]

The opening crawl of episode 1 told us that earth, mars and the belt stood at the brink of war, and that all it would take was a spark... followed by a teaser of Julie Mao breaking out of that locker and discovering the goo-wraped reactor.

The Caterberry was clearly planned to be the spark that distracts earth, mars and the belt with war, while our unknown stealthship friends do... something... with the alien goo. Possibly something involving Eros, since that's what it's course was.

[factotum]

I also like the way that what appeared on the surface to be two entirely separate stories (Rocinante and Miller) neatly dovetail together here, and in a way that seems entirely natural and unforced--it turns out the two groups were chasing the same information but from different directions. There's not many shows that would have the guts to do something like that.

[Yora]

S1E9: Critical Mass

Starting with a flashback (really not a fan of that storytelling method) of the Scopuli sitting in Ambush for the Anyoubise. Julie Mao tells one of the other OPA guys that she thinks the cargo on the Anubis is a weapon owned or made by her father's company. One of the guys tells the others to not harm the crew, but Julie feels certain that they won't surrender without a fight. It turns out to be a trap, with the Scopuli chasing after a decoy and the stealthy Anubis sneaking up on them from behind and sending a boarding craft. And some guy gets ejected from an airlock without a suit.
The officer in charge of the boarding recognizes Julie and tells her men to take her prisoner and deal with her later. While she's locked up, she sends out her message to the OPA to rescue her. The Anubis then destroys the Canterbury. Apparently some hours later she breaks out from the locker she was put in and finds the Anubis deserted. She finds glowing blue stuff leaking out of a hose and on her coveralls, breaks into the reactor room and restores power. She sends another message to Dawes that the Scopuli was destroyed and everyone on the Anubis has been consumed by the blue stuff in the reactor room. She sets a beacon to find the asteroid where it's parked later and takes the shuttle to Eros to wait for someone to get her.
So basically confirming what I pieced together so far.

When she gets to Eros she already looks pretty sick. Her skin turns slimy brown and then starts to glow blue, and she realizes the lamps in her room make it worse. She sees Miller coming to her room before she dies. (Does the blue stuff have psychic powers?)

Miller and the others find her and Holden tells her not to touch her. They also got to leave before the police shows up. Fortunately it's Miller's friend Sammy, who lets them go, but tells Miller they have to talk about this whole mess later. Some other important looking people show up at the hotel who tell Sammy they are also looking for Julie Mao.
The guys go to deal with the body and seem to know perfectly what they are dealing with. One of them takes a sample of the blue stuff and seems quite relieved that they got some, presumably because all other samples on Phoebe and the Anubis were destroyed. The blue stuff is called Protomolecule, but blue stuff is easier to type. He then calls Mister Mao to give him the news and is confident that they can continue their project. He also says "We can only learn if we let it learn," When he gets the message, Mao gives the order to continue.

Holden and Miller are exchanging their information and there's some kind of explosion, with an announcement saying there has been a radiation breech and everyone has to go to the shelter rooms. Alex checks space twitter and reads that a ship exploded in the hangar and all ships are locked down until the mess is cleaned up. Holden's fist instinct was that someone just blew up their ship again, but it turned out to be a different one.

Chrisjen went to the home of the ambassador and stole three pencils from his office. On the flight back to New York, she checks the pencils and one of them has indeed hidden data stored in the graphite. Which are plans for prototype fusion cores for gunships. Miller thinks the security service on Eros blew it up themselves to use the chaos to rob people. (That announcement on the speakers did come awfully fast after the explosion.) Miller sees Mao's men and goes running after them. Holden wants to follow him, but Naomi tries to stop him. The destruction of the Canterbury was clearly part of a big conspiracy, as was the whole mess that followed from it, so Holden doesn't need to blame himself for all that. Holden agrees, but he want's to make it his business anyway. (Guess that's how his mama raised him.) He catches up to Miller, who tells him not to get involved in this.
The Mao guys meet with two mercenaries in armored space suits, that Holden recognizes as the type used by the soldiers that boarded the Donnager. Miller somehow knows the Mao henchman and wants to shot him right there in the street but Holden stops him. Two security guys try to get to Miller while they wrestling and Miller shots one of them and disarms the other.

On Tycho Station, Johnson is recording a public message. A UN Navy ship is on route to come and arrest him for the destruction of the Donnager, but his technicians have decrypted the SD card with the Donnager's battle recordings that the captain gave to Lopez to reveal the truth about the Canterbury to the public. He promises that the Belters are not able to build stealth ships of this type and appeals to everyone to not let this situation to turn into a war. But the sensor readings from the Donnager show that the stealth ships were build in an Earth Navy shipyard.

Miller questions the guard he captured who tells him that the security company hired all the gangs on Ceres for easy work on Eros. (Which is why some kids helped themselved to the water tap of one of the gangs that suddenly disappeared.) Their job on Eris consists mostly of installing cameras all over Eros, and Holden wants to know why they are pushing everyone into the emergency shelters.

Holden, GTFO!!! Get on your ship and shot out the hangar doors if you have to! This is the first field test of blue stuff! I have played Mass Effect and Halo!

Naomi tries to call Holden but there is no connection on the station, and they figure out this is no accident. The guards start beating up people who don't movie and Sammy shows up to stop them, which turns into a gunfight. Amos happily jumps in.

Miller and Holden get into one of the emergency shelters and find everyone very sick on the floor. The whole beam gets swept by a light beam and they quckly run out, but Holden thinks they just got hit with a lethal amount of radiation.

--

Interesting episode. Really quite different from the feel of the show so far.

But seriously? Is Mister Mao trying to turn everyone on Eros into husks? Certainly looks like it. Though I have to admit that prospect actually feels to me more disppointing than exciting. I thought this would be a different and new type of sci-fi, but bringing in my own reference frame, it is starting too look very generic and predictable right now. But we've not been given a clear answer yet, so nothing of that is a certainty at this point.

And so the blue stuff is called protomolecule? From what I know about chemistry and physics, this word makes no sense. Smells like technobabble to me.

I am not sure how I feel about the very long Julie Mao flashback at the start. On the one hand, I feel it is needed. I more or less had all of that figured out at this point, but that's from someone who is deeply familiar with the tropes and plot elements of this type of story. I would assume that in the average TV audience there are still plenty of people who don't have gotten the full picture at this point, and you don't want to lose them for the rest of the show. So you got to put it all together in one clear story before continuing into the next arc.
But I also feel this is a neccessity only because of the way the story has been told so far. If it had not been deliberately unfocused in the previous 8 episodes, it might not have been necessary to have a flashback. I always feel that having an explanation flashback is an admittance of having told the mystery story poorly so far. Not a fan.

The stealth ships were build on Earth. Which makes sense, but Johnson did not tell us how he came to that conclusion. They probably belong to Mister Mao, but Johnson said they were build at a Naval Yard. Not sure if that just means a shipyard or a shipyard that belongs to the navy. In the later case, that conspiracy would get a lot bigger.

But the question is how the ambassador got plans for reactor core prototypes that look like they could be the ones on the stealth ships? Maybe he wanted to send them to Mars, but how did he get them in the first place? So apparently he shot himself in his office where his husband found him. Looks plausible, but maybe he didn't actually shot himself? Chrisjen found the plans hidden in a pencil, which is a really good hiding place that most people would never have thought about and missed when clearing his office of iportant documents.
Space Tech Nerd Time: I remember something about people stripping of layers of graphene from the surface of graphite and sticking it to adhesive tape, and that graphene layer having potential uses as data storage. You couldn't store digital files in an ordinary pencil, but I think with the right nano-technology, you could make bundles of graphene memory film that would look like ordinary graphite unless you look at them under an electron microscope. We could not do this today, but the science here sounds absolutely plausible to me.

[Rakaydos]

Chrisjen went to the home of the ambassador and stole three pencils from his office. On the flight back to New York, she checks the pencils and one of them has indeed hidden data stored in the graphite. Which are plans for prototype fusion cores for gunships.

(...)

But the question is how the ambassador got plans for reactor core prototypes that look like they could be the ones on the stealth ships?

"I thought the new job at the luna shipyards..."
"There was no job at the luna shipyards, he was paying out of pocket so I wouldnt worry, I found evidence and stayed quiet so he could keep his pride."

There was a job at the luna shipyards, and mr ambassador found something he wasnt supposed to find. The cleanup team missed the pencils, though...

[Yora]

Oh yeah, obviously. Actually fell for that one.

[factotum]

Ah, this is our first real look at Julie Mao's father, IIRC. You think he's a piece of work now, you wait until you see what he gets up to later on. As for that radiation sweep Holden just got, there's actually a callback to that in a season 4 episode...got to love a story that's internally consistent like that.

[Eldan]

I'm with you here, also having played Mass Effect (and read and played a lot of SciFi), this felt like a letdown to me.

Actually, the big letdown for me was that I was hoping this would be a purely political conspiracy, but the alien nanoweapon just felt like generic space opera to me. MacGuffin and all.

[Rakaydos]

Just remember, life, uh, finds a way. Even alien life. While humans try to figure out how to threaten each other with alien bio weapons, The so-called alien weapon just came here to do a job, and dammit it's going to do so.

[Eldan]

Just remember, life, uh, finds a way. Even alien life. While humans try to figure out how to threaten each other with alien bio weapons, The so-called alien weapon just came here to do a job, and dammit it's going to do so.

Sure, I was just disappointed that after I heard about how this was a political hard-sci-fi show, the plot seemed to boil down to "glowing blue thing bad". Which is every bad sci fi game/movie.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

Have to say, I too was sorely disappointed when the blue alien thingy turned out to be the big plot engine, especially as it developed further.
It felt so jarring! One minute, you're watching a hard sci-fi show about interplanetary intrigues, class war and cold war tensions, the next minute... it's all pseudo-science silliness and "because aliens" excuses.

Having said that, once I settled back down to watch it, accepting that the show wasn't what it had pretended to be at first - I've really quite enjoyed it. It manages to give you both a hard sci-fi story, and a space opera aliens silliness story, all in one handy package.

Still, I kind of wish Holden would misplace his plot armour sometime soon. He's my least favourite character - so dull, so dreary, so not fun at all.

[Yora]

I actually like it. But seeing the story now for the first time, it did feel very predictable.

Spoiler: for Mass Effect 3, related to Mao

Show

I made the connection to Henry Lawson from ME3, but I didn't continue that thought to the end.

Mass Effect 3 came out 26 months after Mass Effect 2, and 9 month after Leviathan Wakes. Given how rushed and unfinished ME3 feels, it seems entirely feasible that ideas from Leviathan Wakes inspired parts of the game.

And the level Sanctuary is actually exactly like Eros. Eccentric tech billionaire who works with/for an extremist group that researches alien hive-mind technology sets up a refugee camp. Which in reality is just a front to get subjects for a giant experiment to deliberately turn them into hive mind zombies and learn how they work.

It's really just confined to that one level, without being really that critical to the overall story (which is a mess anyway). I sense plagiarism.

[factotum]

Sure, I was just disappointed that after I heard about how this was a political hard-sci-fi show, the plot seemed to boil down to "glowing blue thing bad". Which is every bad sci fi game/movie.

Not really, though...as Rakaydos points out, the protomolecule is not intrinsically bad. It's humans who are behind its appearance on Eros, after all. If it had just turned up there under its own power and started messing with stuff then I'd agree it would be "glowing blue thing bad", but its portrayal in the Expanse is a lot more nuanced than that.

[Eldan]

It is. I meant that that was my initial reaction. After that revelation, I stopped watching the show for... two or three weeks? Before finishing the season.

[Yora]

Guys, I am stopping reading half of your recent comments during the first sentence because it feels like you are talking about events and motivations in future episodes. Put it in spoiler boxes and you can knock yourselves out with that.

[Aedilred]

So now Miller is going to Eros. Which I looked up and is an asteroid between Earth and Mars. With past space stuff taking place in the Asteroid Belt and near Saturn, I think it would have been worth mentioning that the story is now moving right into the civilized parts of the solar system.

This is one of the things that bothered me a little about it. Although I know where all the planets are relative to each other and the names of some of their major moons I'm not that hot on smaller bodies and where they all are. So the - for want of a more immediately available word - geography of the show could have done with a bit more hand-holding at times.

Though to an extent it is my fault for not knowing this stuff, and it wasn't hard to look up when I realised I had to. But if you don't already know that Eros is a long way from Ceres and just assume Eros is also in the asteroid belt it's not necessarily something you'd think to check.

[Yora]

100% Space Nerd Stuff



While it's often convenient to display the planets like this, it's actually not super useful to divide the solar system into sphere's of influence. Everything is moving all the time and and different speeds, being at some times closer and at other times farther away. Some orbits are close to circles and others are really not.

While the average distance from the sun is 1 AU for the Earth, 1.4 AU for Eros, 1.5 AU for Mars, and 2.7 AU for Ceres, this does not mean that it's 0.1 AU from Eros to Mars and 0.4 AU from Eros to Earth.

At some times Ceres can be 4 AU from Earth and 1 AU from Mars.
At other times Ceres can be 1.5 AU from Earth and 4.5 AU from Mars.

Eros gets even wonkier because its orbit is very much not a circle. Sometimes it gets quite close to Earth and at other times it can even be behind Mars. Or Earth and Mars are both on one side of the sun and Eros on the completely opposite sun.

21st century space travel has pretty weak engines and requires extremely high fuel efficiency. And since any craft is orbiting the sun when it leaves Earth and orbiting the sun when it reaches its destination, it's also orbiting the sun during its entire journey. So in the present day, satellites are really moving from orbits near to the sun to orbits farther away from the sun, and we also time launches to take place right when the planets are in such positions that simply moving to a "higher" orbit will be enough to get to the destination. It's very fuel efficient but takes forever. I that context it makes sense to focus on the distance between planets and the sun to get a sense of "where" they are.
In The Expanse, that's no longer the case. They have very powerful engines and since they no longer have to lift of from planets with all their fuel, they can be much more cavalier about their fuel efficiency. (I think when we launch a satellite today, it consumes over 99.9% of its entire fuel in the first hour, just to get off the ground.) They go whatever way they want and it makes no longer sense to think of sections of the solar system being "Earth territory" or "Mars territory". I would assume there's simply a common rule like "everything that gets closer than 100.000 km follows our rules or gets shot at.

That's about the inner solar system (Earth, Mars, Eros, Ceres), though. When you go further out, things are at a considerably different scale. Pheobe is a moon of Saturn, which is 9 AU from the Sun. At any point it's 8-10 AU from Earth and 7.5-10.5 AU from Mars. Whether Saturn is on your side of the Sun right now or on the opposite side really doesn't make a big difference. As Saturn is concerned, the Earth, Mars, and Eros are basically places on the Sun. I tried looking for a map that shows the orbits of all planets at their actual scale, but pretty much all of that are actually two maps at different scales. If you tried to draw the orbits of the inner planets on a map that shows the orbits of the gas planets, all the inner planets and the sun would look like a single blob,

That the Canterbury was hauling their ice from Saturn to Ceres was just because Ceres needed a water delivery. When you bring ice from Saturn, you could head straight to Earth and Mars without having to get anywhere close to Ceres, unless it just happens to be the time where it's on that location on its orbit.
When the Anubis went from Phoebe (at Saturn) to Eros, the Scopuli actually had to travel for quite some distance to intercept it, because Ceres did not just coincidentally happen to be on that spot at that moment.

I had to look up where Tycho Station actually is, and apparently it's right next to Pallas, which is another big round asteroid very similar to Ceres. If you look at the solar system from the top in 2-D, Pallas has more or less the same orbit as Ceres and I think everything that applies to Ceres applies to Tycho Station as well. But when you look at the solar system from the side, Pallas actually goes way up above everything else for half of its orbit and then way below the other planets for the other half. So there's really only two points in their orbits were Ceres and Pallas could come very close, and it's very unlikely that they happen to be in that spot at the same time. So if you look at the locations as the simple 1-D lineup like at the top, Ceres and Pallas would appear to be right next to each other and very close, but in actual 3-D they are almost always in completely different areas of the solar system.

[factotum]

Guys, I am stopping reading half of your recent comments during the first sentence because it feels like you are talking about events and motivations in future episodes. Put it in spoiler boxes and you can knock yourselves out with that.

Sorry, but in your review of this episode you said quite clearly you already knew Eros was a first test of the protomolecule, so I'm genuinely not sure what in my comment is classed as a spoiler? It's only covering stuff you've already figured out for yourself from this episode.

[Yora]

I don't know. There were several posts by different people, which I stopped reading after a sentence or two. And I am not going back to check which ones had which sentences that sounded spoilery to me.
Maybe yours wasn't.

At this point, I really don't know anything. I am having assumptions based on storytelling conventions and my familiarity with the genre, but these are really all speculations. I don't know what anything is, anything does, or anyone wants.

[Cikomyr2]

I don't know. There were several posts by different people, which I stopped reading after a sentence or two. And I am not going back to check which ones had which sentences that sounded spoilery to me.
Maybe yours wasn't.

At this point, I really don't know anything. I am having assumptions based on storytelling conventions and my familiarity with the genre, but these are really all speculations. I don't know what anything is, anything does, or anyone wants.

I just want to reassure you: the show didn't just become a whole "alien goo tries to conquer the world" b movie plot. So keep watching and enjoy the ride.

[Yora]

S1E10: Leviathan Wakes

I knew it. They are making a Reaper on Eros!

Naomi, Alex, and Amos team up with Sammy once the streets are empty. Naomi is certain things will get much worse soon and they have to make it back to their ship. Alex is confident that they break out of the dock wit the Rocinante. Sammy says there's no way to get to the docks, but Naomi knows there are old tunnels they can use because the OPA is using them as smuggling routes on every asteroid station. Alex and Amos share a look at this.
Sammy says he can get their ship unlocked with his security codes, and a family running nearby asks to take them away as well. Amos is for it.

Miller and Holden raid a medicine locker for radiation meds, which Holden thinks will buy them some more time before they pass out. Holden thinks there might be better stuff on the Rocinante, but they have to make it there before Naomi leaves without them.

Science henchman is taking more samples from Julie Mao's body and tells his bodyguard that she might by the one who saves humanity. (So maybe they didn't create the blue stuff, and Eros is a test to see if can be contained and cleaned up after an outbreak?)

Miller already seems to be spewing out his dead stomach lining. There's gunfire nearby and he and Holden quickly hide. A bunch of mercenaries arrives in the square they are in and begins assembling some kind of machine. Miller thinks they don't have time to wait in their hiding place and wants to go out and take on six mercenaries with his six shot revolver. Holden convinces him to try looking for another escape route.
Miller tells Holden how he and Sammy grew up as thieves, until Sammy got the idea that they should become cops, which Holden finds surprising. As Miller puts it "Do you want to be an ass, or do you want to be a boot?" Which seems like a callback to when Lopez interrogated Holden, and he said "When Earth is stomping down on the Belters, I don't want to be the boot."
Miller is hallucinating Julie Mao being with them, also asking him which one he really wants to be.

One of the mercenary comes over to the gambling machines where the two are hiding and they manage to take him down silently. The other mercenaries think he ran away and don't come looking for him.

On Earth, Chrisjen is meeting with her boss and the admiral again. Her boss got information that the fusion cores were build on Earth, but had all been delivered to Tycho Station where Johnson is in charge. Intelligence was already investigating about the fusion cores for several weeks, which somehow seems to disturb Chrisjen, but she doesn't say why. The next step for Earth is now to take back full control of Ceres and Tycho Station and destroy the OPA. Which her boss approves of.
This doesn't sound like her. This seems to be exactly what the conspiracy was trying to achieve all the time. I think she's just saying that to make her boss happy because she thinks he in on it.
Then Mao joins their little group and her boss and the admiral seem to be good friends with him.

Naomi leads their group through the old tunnels and when she isn't certain which way to go, she scrapes some dirt of a wall to reveal a crude map. She says the maps were used by the workers when the stations were build, but the OPA is marking the best routes to get to the docks.

After the mercenaries are gone, Holden checks the machines they set up which turn out to be more cameras and sensors. The alarm system has turned off and the public transit goes working again. A tram arrives, which is full of dying people covered in blue stuff.

To automated lasers that were set up in Julie Mao's bathroom and beam energy into her body. (Totally going to be husks.)

The man Naomi picked up gets covered in goop from a corpse. The girl runs away in fear and Naomi runs after her through the tunnels like Ellen Ripley.

Miller ambushes two mercenaries and shots them to get their armor as disguises. For a man who said he only shot someone once before, he really has no problem with killing now.

Naomi and gang run into other survivors. Two of them want to come with them and will show them the way to the docks, but the others want to go to the hospital and tell the girl to come with them to their family.

Holden runs into the spy, who is also on the way to the docks. He says he can help them getting their ship out of the hangar, but Holden tells him to get lost. He won't shot him right there, but also not help him get off Eros.

Chrisjen is watching the stars with her husband and tells him to get their grandchildren and go the moon for a while. She's quite certain that the ambassador was killed and it was probably her boss.

Naomi's group is reaching the Rocinante and she realizes that one of the survivors is no longer with them. Sammy tells her he's gone, which is better for them because he might be infected. Amos agrees.

When Miller and Holden get to the docks, the professional mercenaries are telling the hired thugs that the ships taking them away are parked on the opposite side of the docks than had been planned.

Sammy wants to leave immediately but Naomi say they will wait until the end of the three hours that Holden said he would be back by. Amos agrees with Sammy that they should leave right now, but Sammy pulls out his gun to force Naomi to leave. So Amos shots him.

Miller uses his native knowledge of Belter language to make an OPA style speech to rile up the Belter thugs against the Earther mercenaries, and they are all to happy to fight their way onto the mercenary ships. The thugs are loosing but allow Miller and Holden to get to the elevator to the Rocinante. Miller spots the guy who tried to kill Earth Cop on Ceres and holds the elevator door open and shouts to him to come with them. But then shots him in the head just before he makes it.
They reach the airlock and Amos pulls them inside. Miller wants to know what happened to Sammy and Amos tells him he shot him. Without Sammy they can't unlock the docking clamps, but Alex simply rips off the tanker disguise they are attached to.

As they leave, there's also a stealth ship speeding by. The ship sends a signal about the trial presumably to their headquarters, and Alex manages to track the destination of the beam.

The spy is wandering around on Eros and comes to a huge room full of blue stuff that snatches him with a tentacle to absorb him.

--

Alrighty... I guess that wraps up the prolog of this story?

This show went into a very different direction very quickly. If we have been introduced to the real main threat for the rest of the story, then I think 10 episodes to get here was a good amount of time. Enough to get a good understanding of how the world works and starting to get comfortable in it before it begins to all go to hell. Don't want to linger for too long or people get upset when they got too comfortable with the known world and then have it ripped away.

Interesting blue stuff? Is the depiction in the show based closely on the books? Because the way it looks here, it really does have the Husk color palette from the Mass Effect games.The first book came out 4 years after the first Mass Effect game, which is well enough time to be influenced by it.
I think the Maoists have not actually invented the stuff, but discovered it. They tried to study it safely away from everyone else on Phoebe, made some real progress, and then had an accident where it escaped and the whole lab had to be burned. The Eros test probably had already been planned by that point, which is why the survivors headed there on the Anubis instead to another secret lab. Though the gangsters from Ceres disappeared about the same time as the Scopuli was intercepting the Anubis, so the Maoists might have been improvising with that.
But either they spilled the stuff again, or more likely someone who was contaminated on Phoebe wasn't detected and spread it over the Anyoubies.

I wonder if the blue stuff has any relationship with the stealth ships, or if the group that is studying blue stuff is just insanely rich and thought developing stealth ships would be neat. Julie Mao saw some blue stuff leaking from a damaged pipe on the Anubis, so it could be used in the stealth systems, but I think it's more likely it just spread through the pipe as a way to travel through the ship.

The scientists who was extracting the blue stuff from Julie Mao's body said something about "she may save us all" and "we can only learn if we let it learn". We later see floating blue stuff imitate the face of the spy, so it's clearly able to collect and process information. As I see it, there are two options: First one is that the Maoists are afraid more of the blue stuff will show up and they will need to know how it can be contained and purged after it appears in the wild. And the people of Eros are simply a sacrifice to get some idea how a large scale outbreak would look like. They only had a small sample on Phoebe, but it it is a hive mind, it would be much more complex when it consumes everyone on Eros. Hence "letting it learn".
The other option is that they are afraid of something else and believe the blue stuff can be a weapon to fight against it. Curious to see where this will go, but since we see Mao and the scientists talking quite openly about what they are doing while we are listening in, I think the show probably isn't going to hide their activities from us either.

Now Miller really has changed a lot since he literally hang up his hat. Unless I am mistaken, he said to Lady Cop on Ceres that he only had to shot someone once himself. Which seems quite believable. As rough as Ceres looks, he always seemed to work as a local sheriff in personal contact with the public instead of a soldier of an authoritarian oppression force.
Shooting one of the four assassins at the end of S1E8: Salvage was still completely justified. But after he finds Julie Mao, he really gets mean. First he wants to shot the scientist (though I still have no clue how he knows him) in the middle of the street and then shots one of the hired thugs who tells them to move along. Then shots the other one to serve as a distraction and leaves him somewhere to die. Killing the guy in the gambling hall seemed reasonable, but shooting the two hired thugs to steal their armor really was not necessary at all. Just convenient. I can understand his idea to make the thugs start fighting the mercenaries, as the mercs were knowingly engaging in genocide and the thugs unknowingly helping them, though they are of course not people that anyone would miss. And shooting one of them in the firefight was part of that. But telling the bald guy from Ceres to come with them and escape on the elevator and then shooting him in the face was exclusively for his own enjoyment. That guy would almost certainly have died anyway, but still. Miller, what is wrong with you?!

After the Donnager was destroyed, Holden said they could not go to the Martians because they are the only four people who survived the Canterbury and the Donnager. And now they are also the only people who survived Eros (plus three or four civilians). This just keeps getting worse. And in this episode it really seems to be getting at him and he's not holding up so well anymore. Still keeps going of course, but he's reaching his limit.

Great episode. Looking forward to see more.