Upsettingly, the first three seasons of my favourite sci-fi show, The Expanse, are reportedly about to be cruelly removed from Prime Video and it’s happening this Friday (February 7), giving you just a few short days to binge-watch them all!
I’m sure that there will still be a way to watch the first three seasons on one of the best streaming services somewhere eventually (I hope), but if you’re a Prime Video subscriber then this will be your last chance to watch it as part of your subscription. That’s according to reports from Prime Video subscribers who have seen a message appear next to the title saying that it’s ‘leaving soon’, but these messages are no longer available at the time of writing (we have contacted Prime Video asking for clarification and will update this article as soon as we hear back).
If you’ve never heard of The Expanse before, then let me fill you in on some essential lore of the finest sci-fi series you haven’t watched yet. Firstly, it’s based on the superb series of books (not to mention short stories and novellas) by James S.A.Corey, which is the joint pen name for two authors, called Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, that starts with Leviathan Wakes, and ends with the ninth and final book, Leviathan Falls.
As always, the books are better than the TV show, but the TV series is still mostly faithful to the books and astoundingly good, even if it doesn’t cover the entire story – it stops at book six. The original TV series was produced by The SyFy Network and got canceled after its first three seasons. After that Amazon acquired the rights and produced three more seasons – you can see the bump up in budget this produced on screen – and it’s those original three seasons that are supposedly about to disappear from Prime Video for good.
The show begins at a point in time when humanity has already colonized the solar system, including Mars, the Moon, and most importantly, the Asteroid Belt and beyond, but that’s as far as we can reach – for now. Given our limited range and scant access to resources, things like water and air become incredibly valuable commodities, especially for the inhabitants of planets and asteroids that don’t have their own supplies of these things.
Series one focuses on a detective (Miller) and his search for a missing girl, but that’s just your way into the universe of The Expanse, which soon expands to dizzying proportions. Episode one starts with the crew of an ice miner called the Rocinante, or Roci for short, making a run from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the belt when they discover a derelict ship called the Scopuli, which holds a terrible secret that has the potential to change the destiny of humanity.
Throughout The Expanse we see the tensions between the different factions of humanity, the Earthers (that’s us), the Martians (or Dusters), who have gained independence from Earth, and the Belters, whose bodies have had to adapt to life in a low gravity environment, play out in a way that contains all the political intrigue and machinations that you’d find in wars between the Seven Kingdoms in the writing of George R.R.Martin. Several things stop The Expanse becoming simply ‘Game of Thrones in space’ though, but the main one is, surprisingly, physics.
Unlike most sci-fi shows which throw up get-out-jail-free super technologies (dilithium crystals, I’m looking at you) or fantasy TV shows that can always fall back on magic to explain how things happen, The Expanse, does a great job of providing plausible explanations for how space ships can travel such long distances in a relatively short period of time, in this case, the Epstein Drive. And when we see battles between space ships (and there are a lot!), the beam weapons, like the rail gun, they use don’t cause massive explosions, instead they chop through the hull of a ship like a wire through a block of cheese. And the tactical manoeuvres the captains pull off (having to flip their ship because of a forward mounted rail gun) feel real. In fact, The Expanse feels more like it belongs to the Three Body Problem universe than the Star Wars or the Star Trek ones.
But it’s not all about the physics. The characters are all excellently drawn. Mainly, it’s the ragtag crew of the Rosi, who keep you hooked. Along with James Holden as captain we have the XO, Naomi Nagata, pilot Alex Kamal and chief engineer Amos Burton, who has the strange ability to channel meanness into a super power when he needs to, but is loyal to a fault. Throughout the series we get additional crew members, particularly gunner Bobbi Draper, but the core group somehow manage to stay together, emotionally, even if not physically, in all the turmoil that follows.
The universal constant in The Expanse, however, is space, – the big nothingness that surrounds our tiny struggles. We humans feel like silly creatures compared to the vast unforgiving blackness. The universe doesn’t care if we live or if we die, and the real message of the show, if there is one, is that it’s up to us to care for each other because the universe doesn’t care about us.
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