Sami on The Expanse 1.6

The Expanse airs at 10pm on Syfy Tuesday nights.

Just past the half-way point, and it feels like the Scrappy Survivors are just getting started! As was tweeted to me:

@pirategirljack It's a big story. #TheExpanse

— Daniel Abraham (@AbrahamHanover) January 13, 2016

This week, they dock at super-awesome-looking Tycho Station, where they're met by someone who is known for not being super on their side--the guy given credit for blowing up those kids last week. He basically takes over: they'll never be able to hide a Martian ship from all the Martians coming through the station, so he's gonna take over the ship and the mission.

They say no; Holden says this is all his fault, all these dead people and exploded ships, so he's going to be the one to take the info about the mysterious new ships to where it needs to be himself. Of course, the rest of the Survivors go with; they're a team. But along the way, they have to come around to it. Alex and Amos go to a bar, where we find out that Amos apparently grew up in a brothel, though he doesn't say in what context. Alex was married but loved space more*. Both of them are more complicated than they first seemed, and are much more likable now that they are.

Naomi and Holden get drunk and toast Shed, but they don't notice they're being watched by a creeper with a bionic eye. The tech looks fancy, so someone from Earth?

And Fred finds the little chip with the new ships' specs on it, that Holden didn't know to look for and would really help his mission. He doesn't mention it to Holden, and he seemed to know exactly where to look for it.

Meanwhile, on Ceres, Miller gets seriously beat up by the rebel leader / mob boss Jared Harris With An Accent, and they have a really great philosophical discussion about life in the Belt. He killed his sister, but he thinks it's a mercy killing, not murder, because she was so damaged by being born and raised in the Belt that she couldn't survive and her existence was a burden. He didn't say what she thought about it. Miller says "everyone dies for the cause but you". They argue over whether Julie Mao knew what she was getting into or not.

And Jared Harris With An Accent realizes that Miller is in love with her. All he says is "Yeah," in a totally hopeless tone of voice. I'm a sucker for longing and pining and it's amazing. They did that scene so well.

He then gets dumped in an airlock and half-spaced, but his old flame saves him--by killing the thugs when she'd never killed anyone before, and when she freaks and he comforts her, and she tries to go back to old ways, he turns her down. She's confused, and he looks like he's sick of himself, and it's also a great scene,

Miller takes all his pieces of info to his boss--and she locks up the files, strips him of all his clearances, and fires him. On the spot. Because she's on the take and he's too close to the truth. She doesn't kill him, though, so there's that.

And back on Earth, the Ambassador is still pulling strings that look a lot like burning bridges, trying to figure out what all of this means.

The episode ends with the Scrappy Survivors heading off to their next mission on their new (and newly renamed) ship, and it literally feels like everything until here has been prologue--which is amazing. This is the start of the second half of the season, and the first half was amazing, so how much more amazing will the second half be?

The Expanse is so cool. It looks great, it's complex, it's packed with politics but not boring because of it, and I think that's because the characters are so flawed and solid and real. Miller falling for someone half his age who he's never met, and because of wanting to know what happened to her, uncovering a crazy plot to destroy everything. Holden trying to do the right thing and getting himself and his crew right in the middle of the crazy that's starting a war. Rebels trying to get a little of what they work for for themselves and their families. And who knows what Mars wants, or Earth. It's stunning. It looks gorgeous and so very real. It's exciting. And it's about hope and loss and mystery and desperation.

I didn't expect to love this show and these people so much.

What did you guys think of this week?

Tweets about #theexpanse from:pirategirljack, OR from:sineater_danyi, OR from:kiddle, OR from:trincynna, OR from:ohgress, OR from:manisandmakeovers, OR from:acciolacquer include:retweets

• Sami on The Expanse 1.5
• Sami on The Expanse 1.2
• Sami on The Expanse 1.1

*Amos apparently isn't as straight as he's seemed, based on how he reacted to the people in the bar. And Alex didn't say whether it was a wife or a husband he had and lost. These are character things to think about and I hope they come up again!

Sami on The Expanse 1.5

The Expanse airs at 10pm on Tuesday nights on Syfy.

You guys. This show is so great. I can hardly believe how this channel has suddenly jumped from, like, 100% dull or crap to this whole new world of awesome and well made and really gorgeous new shows.

This week:

Holden and the Scrappy Survivors have successfully (mostly) not been killed in two ship explosions and are trying to figure out what to do, but they're aware of how it must look--all this not dying as things explode--and that leads to limited choices. They get a call from someone on Tycho Station that shouldn't have been able to find them, and he offers them safety if they go there. Naomi is flat against it, but Amos sways her; she's got a past she's not talking about and it has to do with people like the guy who called them.

Meanwhile, they find out that Holden is the Mockingjay for the riots breaking out on Ceres, and none of them know what to do with that information--and not being arrested as terrorists is more pressing. And they rename their ship to claim it as their own.

Through the whole episode, there's these clips of a strike on a mining platform; they wanted to get safer conditions for all their children, who were all growing up with brain damage because of how unhealthy the place was--low air, toxic fumes, etc--and they finally ran out of options and surrendered...But they were destroyed anyway. And it was the guy who offered our Survivors a safe haven.

Dun dun DUN!

Back on Ceres, Miller and his rockstar hair* are still looking for Julie Mao. He's connected that her ship was on an intercept course that fell apart right where all the other ships keep blowing up, and that her "pampered rich girl disappearance" is connected to all this war-mongering. He's also tracked down the guy who got her on a ship, and there's a really great scene with clashing badassery where he finds out she was working actively in dangerous situations to save children, and then looks all like he's totally in love with her.**

His partner is somehow not dead, despite having been pinned to a wall with a steel pipe, and he managed to crawl back to where people were so he could be saved. How awful must that have been? Crawling across all that distance to a thoroughfare with a giant stake through his chest? And how did he get off the wall? I'm going to blame it on his regular-gravity self dealing with the low-grav station. Miller is not super happy with what happened, and totally dismisses the local lady of the night who has been helping partner-boy learn the local language, which starts a fight between them.

Miller's walking a line between being a Belter and being a cop, and it's getting thinner. In the course of his investigations, he's gotten the attention of the local mob boss who wants to recruit him, and wants to take Ceres for the Belters who live and work and die there, since they see so little payback for all their sacrifice. Which is understandable, and since it's Jared Harris, it's compelling and a little creepy. It's unclear whether he's being a badguy or not this time; he does that grey-between-moralities really well.

We didn't visit Earth this week, and Mars still hasn't been visited, but the Survivors are on a sleek new Martian ship with a dead Martian (who was really cool) frozen in the infirmary. It doesn't seem like they searched his pockets, so where's that data thing his Captain gave him, and when will it come up again?

We've got ten episodes this season, and that makes this the mid-point: the place where things start falling into place and make everything look different. So good job, show! War is ever closer, the Scrappy Survivors are stuck in the middle of it, there's some third party out there*** picking on both sides and leaving almost no survivors so that it looks like Mars is attacking, the various Belter groups are fed up with getting used, and the few people who could throw light on the situation are missing or dead.

Everything should start sliding toward the finale now, probably with lots of awesome space battles, but what else will be discovered along the way? That's probably the best part of this show--it's not just awesome ships blowing up other awesome ships--it's also this complex and interesting mystery that everyone has a piece of but no one is yet connecting up, except for Miller. Which, of course, puts him right in the danger zone between all these factions as soon as he starts talking.

The Expanse started out good, but now it's addictive and impressive and hard to guess, and that makes it amazing!

What did you think of this week's episode? Share in the comments, or come talk to me on Twitter!

Here's what the Professional Fangirls had to say about this week's The Expanse:

Tweets about #theexpanse from:pirategirljack, OR from:sineater_danyi, OR from:kiddle, OR from:trincynna, OR from:ohgress, OR from:manisandmakeovers, OR from:acciolacquer include:retweets

*Someone on Twitter suggested it should have it's own name, it's so noticeable every time he takes his hat off. I kind of dig it, and the other half-shaved hairstyles going on in this show; it makes me think dangerously about cutting hair...
**They haven't even met and I ship them, damn.
***I'm voting for aliens. There's not enough aliens on TV these days. It's probably some secret faction of one government or another, but I really want aliens.

Sami on The Expanse 1.2

The Expanse airs at 10pm on Syfy Tuesday nights.

If the second episode of Childhood's End was annoying, the second of The Expanse sort of made up for it by being awesome. I wish this had been the two-hour one, and the other had been one hour!

Ep2 picks up where Ep1 left off: with everyone screwed.

The rescue ship that now needs rescuing immediately gets hit by the shrapnel left by their ship being exploded, which was awesome because that facet of reality almost never happens in scifi. They manage to barely pilot out of it, but they lose their comms and a lot of their air. Everyone has a different idea of what they should do, and no one particularly likes each other. Naomi-the-awesome takes charge, which pits her against James-the-distraught (his girlfriend died on the ship that exploded), and everyone else just wants out.

They manage to get themselves together long enough to get their emergency beacon back online, thought they can't agree on who should send the distress call or what it should say. The also manage to all not suffocate, even though two of them almost did.

And then they manage to be rescued and boarded by Martian marines who take them custody--even though it was the Martians who attacked them to begin with.

Meanwhile, Miller, who is a cop and not a gumshoe despite having all the hallmarks of being a private investigator, is still looking for the lost heiress. He finds where she's been staying in the poor part of the station, hacks her doorlocks* and accesses her files, and finds that she's been denying her dad's goals and intentions for her. She's got a scar that she could have had removed. She's living like a normal person when she could be living like a princess. She's doing what she thinks is right when her dad is doing something probably shady that she disagrees with. Miller's impressed.**

His partner is less impressed, but he's also new and inexperienced and mostly out of the loop on this case. And possibly dating a hooker? That scene happened kind of fast.

Along the way, they discover that someone has been stealing water from the rich parts of town and leaving the perfect green gardens there to turn brown. They're selling it off to people who need it more, but in irresponsible ways, and they're only there because the gang that controlled that area mysteriously pulled up stakes and left a power vacuum.***

And back on earth, the diplomat finds out that her captive Belter is only part of the story she's trying to figure out, and then when she's shipping him off to holding on the moon, he uses the g-force to pointedly and publicly commit suicide, so she can't get any more info out of him.

All of which is to say, things are heating up quickly, and I really want to read these books now.

The show continues to be well-done and tense, even in the quiet parts. People take time to talk things out without it getting boring, and something is always happening to each of them, so that the story is always complicating up. And Syfy seems to be really getting behind this show--they've released the next two episodes online for those who can't wait for weekly viewing, and to keep up the buzz during this awkward-for-TV time between seasons.

Here's my hope: Mars isn't a one-dimensional faceless enemy, but something neater and more complex, which greys up the morality of both the Belters and the Earthers. They're the only ones we haven't seen any first-hand story from, and it would be cool if we get their lives and views the same way as we've gotten the other two.

And this show is addicting. It feels something like Dark Matter, but more High Scifi and less Criminals In Space. It's delightfully complex without being annoyingly lacking in answers, so far, and it's really great to watch.

Bring it, next episodes!

What did you guys think? Are you loving it as much as I am? Comment below, or come talk to me on Twitter!

• Episode 1.1

*These phone-things are so neat.
**Must not ship two people who have never met, must not ship two people who have never met, must not ship two people who have never met...
***Also, they waste a lot of water in their fight and no one tries to clean it up, which is distressing. Since the smashed ship was bringing their water supplies in, and they're aware that it's missing, you'd think they'd be more careful even in their rebellion against the water-rations.

Sami on The Expanse 1.1

The Expanse aired at 10pm on SyFy Monday night.

Something like six months ago, Hank told us 12 Monkeys fans on Twitter that SyFy was making a new space opera, and I was immediately intrigued. Then Danyi saw the first ep at NYCC and said it was amazing.

It wasn't oversold--it IS amazing. It's so cool, you guys.

In the 23rd century, Earth and Mars are colonized and not super friendly at each other, and both are dependent on the resources dug out of the asteroids in the Belt--which means they treat the Belters like crap and the Belters are getting tired of it. Dissent is brewing and people are standing on soapboxes trying to gather support.

Meanwhile, the down-on-his-luck space-gumshoe hired to find a missing rich girl doesn't much care about it, and she's lost somewhere creepy and full of secrets with what looks like a devouring purple star inside a ship.

Also meanwhile, a mining ship is coming toward Ceres station and stops to answer a distress call that goes super wrong when they find out that the whole crew is missing and the power core is off, so the transmission was a lie--and a trap. A Martian ship attacks and destroys their home ship, leaving them only a shuttle that's not in great repair, and the derelict they were investigating.

Back on Earth, a diplomat is interrogating a Belter who literally can't even stand up under Earth's gravity, and it letting that gravity torture him without having to lift a finger.

It's a literally explosive start to an awesome new series.

They've put a lot of detail and effort into building a futuristic world that looks real and lived-in--which seems to be a new standard for the channel, in light of Dark Matter and Killjoys and 12 Monkeys. The ships look great*. The moral and ethical issues raised already are very scifi and seem to be being handled in a good and powerful way. The space shots are amazing. There's a lot of characters, which gives the story a lot of scope for action, different points of view, multiple sides of the plot.

And the details! The comm guy wears headphones. The PI's phone is cracked. There's neat housing that looks like it was once nice and is now a slum. There's a lot of diversity. The ship has dirt on it because the XO misses land. People complain about the lack of light--which is literally the first time I've seen that ever on a dimply-lit show. And the range of tech between the upper and lower looks like a real spread you'd actually see in a situation where not everyone has the same access to funds.

It's a really good set up. I can't wait to see what happens next.

What did you guys think of it? Are you onboard** for the space opera? Share in the comments or come talk to us on Twitter!


NOTES:
*#SamiWantsASpaceship again
**See what I did there?

What the Professional Fangirls have to say about Childhood's End and The Expanse

Childhood's End:

Tweets about #childhoodsend from:pirategirljack, OR from:sineater_danyi, OR from:kiddle, OR from:trincynna, OR from:ohgress, OR from:manisandmakeovers, OR from:acciolacquer include:retweets

The Expanse:

Tweets about #theexpanse from:pirategirljack, OR from:sineater_danyi, OR from:kiddle, OR from:trincynna, OR from:ohgress, OR from:manisandmakeovers, OR from:acciolacquer include:retweets

Look for other talks from individual Fangirls as we all process the wonder and remember how to use our words!