Ever since I got early access to season five of The Expanse, I’ve been waiting for the Amazon release schedule to drop “Hard Vacuum,” the eighth episode. Now you’ve finally seen the hour I’ve been dying to talk about for weeks. Let’s take a look at a television installment that deserves a place in the science fiction history books.
In “Hard Vacuum,” there are various plotlines playing out that we’ve spent the season building to. On Earth, Amos and Clarissa go to try and persuade Erich in Baltimore that their best chance to get away from the ravaged planet is to grab a personal shuttle from a wealthy enclave. On Luna, Avasarala finds herself one of the lone voices advocating against bloody strikes on innocent Belters—that’s called character development, people. Drummond and her “scavengers” are grappling with mixed allegiances and the dangers of crossing Inaros. Still aboard the Razorback, Alex and Bobbie discover the simulated distress call from Naomi on the ship Chetzemoka. Unaware that the ship has been wired as a bomb to lure the Rocinante to its doom, they forward the call to Holden, who has been desperate to find his missing lady. Marco Inaros couldn’t have planned for a better sequence of events to advance his deadly trap.
But if we’re being honest, there’s really only one storyline in “Hard Vacuum” that matters. This episode belongs to Naomi, and to Dominique Tipper, the actress who plays her. Tipper’s solo performance, as Naomi goes through absolute hell on the Chetzemoka in a desperate attempt to communicate with the outside world, is show-stopping, visceral, wrenching, and absolutely floored me the first time around. Watching the episode again this week, and now armed with the foreknowledge of what Naomi was working towards, I got goosebumps every time that looping message played.
“This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. If you get this message, please re-transmit. Tell James Holden I am in distress. Comm link’s not responding. I’ve no nav-control. Please re-transmit.”
Tipper, carrying these scenes alone, is doing the heavy lifting (sometimes literally) of both physical and emotional acting. Naomi is in a poor state after she desperately spaced herself in order to escape Inaros’s clutches. Not only is she suffering the effects of having traveled suitless through the vacuum of space, but it also cost her a beloved old friend, Cyn, who tried to stop her. Then she has to labor under the knowledge that it is Holden and her friends’ love for her that will draw them to their doom if she can’t find some way to communicate that the Chetzemoka is a trap.
“This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. If you get this message, please re-transmit. Tell James Holden I am in distress. Comm link’s not responding. I’ve no nav-control. Please re-transmit.”
Naomi is a brilliant engineer, and even under these harsh conditions, she manages to try a few things to break through the locked-down ship—like hacking together a transmitting device from a suit’s comm, but there’s no sign her new outgoing message was relayed. When she realizes the simulated message’s transmission is coming from the ship’s depressurized hull, this is when her real trial begins. She forces herself to go in and out of the depressurized area, wearing a suit but having no access to oxygen. She can only stay for a few minutes each time to work on the panels there, in agony without proper air, the pursuit harder and harder and taking a toll on her already-ravaged state.
Bruised, bleeding, gasping, and yet still refusing to give up, Naomi continues to toil away. The audience isn’t aware of what she’s trying to do at the time, as she, too, murmurs the message over and over again to herself like a mantra:
“This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. If you get this message, please re-transmit. Tell James Holden I am in distress. Comm link’s not responding. I’ve no nav-control. Please re-transmit.”
It’s only in the episode’s last minutes that we come to understand what Naomi did. She used her engineering expertise and sheer force of will to interrupt the message’s transmission, forcing it to broadcast with some of the words cut out. Her only real means of communicating with the outside world—and her only hope for preventing disaster for those she loves (and herself)—came through altering the existing message’s content. What is now being sent on a loop is the following:
“This is Naomi Nagata … Tell James Holden I am in … Control.”
I got shivers again even writing these words. What a stunning tour-de-force performance from Tipper and a true crucible for Naomi. Having seemingly failed in her quest to save her son Filip, she will do anything she can, even endure the heights of sheer torture, to try and save her found family on the Rocinante and the Screaming Firehawk. The undertaking required every bit of her intelligence and physical grit, and Tipper’s dedication made the scenes with Naomi convincing and heartbreaking. Also turning in a bravura performance is our perennial favorite Cara Gee as Drummer, whose grief at being told that her friend Naomi is dead boils over to consume one of the most fascinating female characters on TV.
If you’re attempting to convince a friend or family member to watch The Expanse, I think you can start them on this episode as encompassing many of the reasons we love this show: strong, vital, accomplished women who refuse to compromise themselves, realistic depictions of physics and conditions in outer space, multi-layered, always-complicated politics, found families providing a real sense of home, clever writing that both obscures and reveals, and actors who always make you come back, eager to see what they’ll do next.
“This is Naomi Nagata … Tell James Holden I am in … Control.”
We don’t know what impact, if any, Naomi’s altered message will have on those who are coming to try and save her. It’s impossible to imagine Holden or the Razorback folks changing course. But if they take some time to think about why Naomi’s message changed, it may at least slow them down or cause them to take a different approach.
I can’t stop thinking about how Naomi actually reclaimed control over the situation, after being subject to her ex Marco Inaros’s cruelties. He’s attempting to use the idea of Naomi, appropriating her very voice, in order to hurt everyone she cares about. But Naomi would not rest until she found a way to counter him and used her skillset to fight to the end. This is Naomi Nagata. Tell James Holden. I am in control.
I don’t think I’ll ever be over “Hard Vacuum,” and the reveal of Naomi’s solution was masterful. What did you think about The Expanse this week?
(image: Amazon Studios)
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