I get very little tv-watching time these days, thanks to a combination of rising early and kid-wrangling. I did, however, manage to stream the ten episodes of The Expanse that Amazon pushed out in mid-December, and wanted to type up some thoughts about it. This will, of course, be spoiler-filled, so here’s some filler space:

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This season covers most of the book Cibola Burn, and like that book, it represents a major change in the series, with most of the action taking place on the surface of a planet. Two groups have made competing claims to the planet and its mineral wealth, and the Rocinante is sent there to find out what’s going on. Which, of course, all goes sideways because the Rocinante is carrying a bit of active protomolecule with it, and its arrival re-activates long-dormant machinery on the planet, with disastrous results.

I don’t remember this particular book all that clear, but did know the basic beats of the story, which both helped and hurt with the tension in the usual manner when you’ve read the book the movie was based on. They make enough minor changes to keep things interesting, though, and it was cool to see what the set designers made of the planet and the protomolecule tech.

And, of course, the cast is excellent, particularly Wes Chatham as Amos. The “weirdly likeable barely restrained psychopath” thing is hard to pull off, but somehow it works, and he’s probably my favorite thing on the show. (An opinion shared by many…) Burn Gorman as Security Chief Murtry makes an outstanding antagonist, though he and Amos don’t go head-to-head nearly enough.

The Ilus/ New Terra plot is only one piece of the season, though. Where the books can more easily drop a whole set of characters for a time, the show needs to keep its fine collection of actors under contract, which means we also get a pair of plots about Bobbi Draper getting involved with criminals back on Mars, and the fabulously foul-mouthed Chrisjen Avasarala running a campaign for Secretary General back on Earth. Neither of these really worked for me, though I understand why they were there and what purposes they served. The third add-on was a little more effective, with Drummer and Ashford showing off their fabulous accents in pursuit of charismatic terrorist Marco Inaros, who’s up to something.

Anyway, everybody involved with this project is fantastic, and even the bits that didn’t quite come off were still way better than the historical average for live-action space opera. There were some slightly jarring aspects to the change from the SyFy network to Amazon streaming, mostly around the language– they can say “fuck” now, and boy, do they ever. This does at least enable maybe my favorite line of the season, namely the end of Avasarala’s charge to Holden: “Don’t put your dick in it, Holden. It’s fucked enough already.” (To which Amos replies “Good advice.”)

The one change from the books that I missed was a bit at the end of the book where, as I recall, Avasarala talks to Holden and says that she had sent him there not as a peacemaker, as she claimed, but thinking that he would end up being a chaos agent, as he’d been previously. Holden actually doing what he was told was the mission ended up throwing off her plans. That could’ve been a fun scene, but the show went in a slightly different direction with the whole thing.

I was wondering whether they would really follow the plot of the books, which takes an extremely dark turn in the next volume, but the Drummer/Ashford plotline is clearly setting things up to really Go There. Thanks to the set-up work, it’ll be somewhat less jarring when they get there than it was in the books, but I’ll be interested to see how they handle it.

Anyway, it continues to be a really good show; maybe not transcendently brilliant, but solid fun, and I hope they can keep it up.