This essay contains mild spoilers for Season 1 of The Expanse.
The cold opening to episode 1 of The Expanse revealed a woman, who we later came to know as Julie Mao, bashing her way out of a storage locker to find herself aboard an empty ship. She floats her way towards the reactor chamber, only to discover something very weird. The scene cuts. For almost the next eight full episodes, that opening scene is the only hint we get that something very strange is driving the action in this otherwise realistic model of the future. With yesterday’s finale, though, that balance changed. The Expanse has given us a solar system to care about; now here comes the havoc.
This kind of storytelling takes patience and faith in the quality of one’s show. It would have been so easy for the show creators to just hand-wave wildly at the setup and demand that the plot unfold with speed and fury. I can imagine a version of this show with the Cant’s explosion in the first 5 minutes, followed quickly by the destruction of the Donnager before credits roll, the naming of the Rocinante in episode 2, Miller’s expulsion from Ceres in 3, and so forth. We’d be at Eros in no time, but I suspect we wouldn’t really care about the people or the worlds as they began to fall apart. Instead, The Expanse took its time and brought us slowly to its second act. We’re ready. We’re also going to have to wait for Season 2 to see how it all plays out.
The Expanse portrays a possible future, assuming the development of a fusion drive to get us quickly into the solar system. The show commits not only to the laws of physics, but to giving screen time and dialogue over to economics, politics, inequality, language, religion, culture, and the complexities of surviving in space. The seriousness behind this commitment has paid off. With one small exception, which I’ll get to, the show simply achieves what it sets out to achieve. The show creators have aimed high and hit their mark, a rare feat even in this era of Peak TV. That’s why it’s the best space show we’ve seen on television in a long time. Given time and funding, it could come to show the possibilities of space fiction the way that Game of Thrones, for all its flaws, has revealed the potential of fantasy. There’s an audience for high-quality speculative storytelling with compelling and deep narratives.
Here are some examples of the way the show has committed to its premise. The asteroid Eros is in the correct orbit. The language of the Belters, created by Nick Farmer (who runs a “Belter word of the day feature”), both deviates beautifully from contemporary language but provides each word with a like etymology. The golden Angel Moroni towers over the Nauvoo, the generation ship intended to take Mormons to the stars. Nauvoo, Illinois, was the first Mormon home city, before violence killed their founder and drove them to the West. The colonial relationship between Earth, Mars, and the outer planets, the latter yearning to be free, feels plausible. Gunshots hurt, even as future tech can heal more quickly. Battles in space are dark and largely silent, because for all we like the sound of blasters cascading through vacuum, we all know that in space no one can hear you scream.
How did this happen? My theory – it was built in from the start, when Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, the executive producers, decided to bring on board both halves of novelist James S. A. Corey, the pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, as writers. It’s not that Abraham and Franck are the sole reasons the show is so good; rather, their inclusion in the process is a symbol of an attempt to make a different kind of show.
I spoke to Abraham over the phone about the experience so far. He told me that traditionally, the moment that authors sign over their rights is when TV people “run screaming from the author as quickly as you can.” Instead, Fergus and Ostby invited the authors in to play, teaching them how to use the “new toolbox” of TV writing. That speaks well of all parties. The TV folks took the leap of faith that the novelists would be assets. The novelists showed the humility to let their creation be retold in a new medium. The results speak for themselves.
Abraham also seems to be having fun. As any fan of the show on social media recognizes, he regularly tweets his own thoughts on episodes and RTs everyone from official show accounts, those of the actors, to random fans. He told me that the network asked him to do it, but also joked that it was an excellent way to procrastinate from writing the books he’s supposed to be writing. This is not a George R. R. Martin situation, though. There are many years of Expanse books already published, with more in the pipeline.
His engagement on Twitter allowed me to bring up, first on social media, and then in our conversation, the one downside of the show so far. The show, like Leviathan Wakes (the first book of the series), revolves around the two white male protagonists James Holden and Joe Miller. I asked Abraham about diversity, and he had some good answers. First, he agreed that it’s a problem. Diversity was always “baked” into the world building, as he put it. He and his co-author envisioned a “rich future,” with “characters coming from a lot of different cultural, and ethnic, and racial backgrounds, and a lot of mixture,” but it turned out that “our protagonists in Book 1 at the very least code white.”
Abraham made it clear that this will change as more protagonists come forward, and that they decided to include the wonderful Shohreh Aghdashloo’s character, Chrisjen Avasarala, from the very beginning, in part to reflect that diverse premise. Avasarala doesn’t appear until Book II, but Abraham told me it’s not like she wasn’t around during Leviathan Wakes, she just didn’t show up in Miller’s or Holden’s experiences. By including her from the start they not only get a strong female character, but are able to give the audience a window into the high level political machinations that inform this future vision.
Furthermore, on television, as Abraham pointed out, because there’s a camera and an actor you can’t help but notice that Admiral Yao (Jean Yoon) is Chinese and Fred Johnson (Chad Coleman) is black. Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper) emerges during the finale, too, seizing her rightful position as an equal lead in the show.
As the first season ends, it’s hard for me to think of a recent show with similar upsides. New shows like Jessica Jones and Mr. Robot, two of my favorites from 2015, were fantastic, but also spent a lot of their ammo telling more or less complete stories. The Expanse, on the other hand, is just getting started. It’s going to be a long wait for season 2.
David M. Perry is a freelance journalist. Find his work at thismess.net. Follow him on Twitter (@Lollardfish).
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