![]() Scenes involving the tremendously likable Wes Chatham as the warrior-like mechanic Amos are always winners, and Shohreh Aghdashloo is fun to watch as the aristocratic politician Avasarala, even though the shtick of her constant swearing wore thin a few seasons ago. When the show isn’t showing us space battles or futuristic landscapes, with understated but evocative computer graphics, the entertainment value of its human interactions depends on the performers involved. ![]() (And, perhaps, reminding you that the “Expanse” novels were inspired by a tabletop role-playing game.) The show handles these plot threads with its usual efficiency and intelligence, but straying from space action and big ideas has the effect of exposing the thinness and predictability of the show’s characters. The protomolecule is still around in Season 5, but a human villain moves into the foreground, perhaps temporarily, and a fair bit of time is spent early on tracking the Rocinante crew members while they scatter to take care of personal business. ![]() (The series devotes a lot of thought to the whimsical names of spaceships.) They always manage to be where the action is, largely because of a semi-mystical and narratively expedient bond between the protomolecule and their captain, Holden (Steven Strait). In its facelessness and inexorability, it was a decent stand-in for the cylons of “Galactica.”įighting to save the system is, as you would expect in this sort of story, a small band of outcasts, the crew of a rogue ship named the Rocinante after Don Quixote’s horse. Into this setup, the show introduced a golem-like alien substance (called, with a notable lack of imagination, the protomolecule), which across the first four seasons threatened to destroy the solar system, forcing the different factions to cooperate for their survival. Beyond the ships themselves, technology is reassuringly familiar: dune buggies, microwaves, communications devices that operate like souped-up cellphones.Įarth, which exploits the mineral resources of the asteroid belt, is the developed but fading first world, locked in a superpower rivalry with warlike Mars, while the oppressed Belters represent a colonized third world. Space travel is fast but not faster than light, and close attention is paid to the potential for catastrophe at every moment. ![]() It’s contained within our solar system, where humanity has managed to colonize Mars and push out to the asteroid belt. Set about 300 years in the future, it doesn’t imagine ships zapping among star clusters. “The Expanse” operates on a smaller, more intimate scale than “Galactica,” though, which is both a large part of its charm and a reason that it isn’t, at the end of the day, as viscerally exciting as its predecessor. The 9/11 connection becomes even stronger, if anything, in the new season of “The Expanse,” where a series of undetectable asteroids aimed at earth by an off-world zealot suggest the hijacked airplanes bearing down on New York and Washington. 11, mid-climate-crisis associations with terrorist violence and existential dread are the same. “Galactica” had a more drastic premise - a handful of surviving humans chased around the galaxy by exterminating cyborgs - but the post-Sept. The series capably fulfills the basic requirement of speculative science-fiction: It keeps you guessing about where the journey’s going to end. But it was pleasurable, in a pandemic-doldrums kind of way. I was not tempted to go back and redo any Top-10 lists. It was not, I’ll say upfront, a transformative experience. So with Season 5 of “The Expanse” - announced as the show’s next to last - premiering on Prime Video on Wednesday, I went back and caught up with the 42 episodes I’d missed since that initial piece, and tacked on the nine (of 10) episodes of the new season available for review. “Hello? ‘The Expanse’? Anyone?” an anonymous commenter asked, plaintively summing up the frustration of that popular space opera’s fan base every time we fail to give the show its due. Our most egregious omissions this year, according to readers, included new shows like Netflix’s “Queen’s Gambit,” Apple TV+’s “Ted Lasso” and HBO’s “How to With John Wilson.”īut right there with them was a durable Amazon Prime Video series that we’ve mostly been ignoring since 2015, when I gave a ho-hum review to its first four episodes (then on the Syfy channel). Every year at this time, I and my colleagues on the television beat publish our lists of the year’s best shows and wait, with much interest and some resignation, to be told what we missed.
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