Given the animosity between Earth and the Belt, particularly after the Inaros attacks, it’s telling that one of the most radical gestures made in Season 6 is a simple handshake between two political figures: U.N. The crew of the Rocinante-James Holden, Amos Burton, and Naomi Nagata, who are joined this season by Clarissa Mao and Bobbie Draper-live up to that ideal by being from Earth, Mars, and the Belt. But even in its darkest moments, the show has an underlying optimism in the power of the collective and good triumphing over evil when characters set aside their differences.
Throughout its run, The Expanse never shied away from the kinds of atrocities human beings can commit in the name of power, prejudice, or corporate greed: In addition to Inaros’s attacks on Earth, we’ve seen refugees tossed out of airlocks and children experimented on with protomolecule samples. Time and again, characters are so narrowly focused on where a person comes from, rather than defining them by their actions. What’s brilliant about The Expanse is how it can elicit genuine sympathy for each faction-the Earthers lost millions of lives to Inaros’s asteroid attacks the Martians’ long-held dream of terraforming Mars was extinguished after the discovery of habitable planets like Laconia the Belters have long been oppressed as the solar system’s working class-while at the same time introducing power-hungry villains from each group. Much of The Expanse’s final season finds Earthers, Martians, and Belters clinging to a history of tribalism that prevents them from rallying against a common enemy.
#The expanse series series#
It focused on its ragtag heroes trying to usher in an era of peace for the solar system by stopping the Belter terrorist Marco Inaros, who successfully killed millions of Earthers through a series of asteroid attacks in Season 5. In its final season, The Expanse traded protomolecule-related conflicts with big-picture implications. And while both series have a massive scope, The Expanse showed a greater ability to reel in its story-even as it teased out events on Laconia that serve as the foundation for the final three novels in the series after a 30-year time jump.īut for all the intrigue surrounding the protomolecule, The Expanse has always been more invested in humanity and how mankind’s three factions-Earthers, Martians, and Belters-treat alien technology that can be used (and abused) to consolidate power.
For one, The Expanse isn’t being afforded the opportunity to adapt every existing book of source material, which delves even further into the protomolecule and its origins. (In retrospect, maybe that would’ve been better than how it actually ended.) But for all the DNA they share, The Expanse is not Thrones. The doom that underlined each scene never materializes a looming threat disintegrates into a whisper.įor a show that is frequently compared to Game of Thrones, this resolution (or lack thereof) would be like if the HBO series ended without addressing the White Walkers. The last vignette sees the little girl and her zombified brother, who was struck by a vehicle earlier in the season, running deeper into the Laconian wilderness toward an uncertain future-one that is unlikely to ever be resolved on-screen.
And anyone familiar with Stephen King’s Pet Sematary-let alone the countless times that meddling with the protomolecule has nearly led to extinction-level events on The Expanse-can assume that using “dogs” to resurrect the dead probably won’t end well.īut while The Expanse’s final episode dutifully closes the loop on many of its lingering plot threads and political conflicts, the protomolecule-influenced events on Laconia amount to nothing more than an ellipsis. It’s clear to the viewer that this scientific miracle is the work of the protomolecule, the mysterious alien substance that has propelled The Expanse’s expansive (sorry) story line farther into the cosmos. The vignettes center on a little girl interacting with alien wildlife and making a confounding discovery: a dog-like species that can seemingly bring the dead back to life. Each episode of the sixth and final season of The Expanse opens on Laconia, a newly colonized planet in the far reaches of space.
0 kommentar(er)
