Is anybody else watching The Expanse?

yeah. the way he touches people right before twisting the knife in. the whole thing is just amazing. you can see the delight he's taking in it, the coiled energy inside, sensing everyone's eyes on him, pushing just the right buttons at just the right times.

also feels like a well planned rhythm of formal echoes in terms of scenes mirroring one another? an obvious one is miller being pushed down into the airlock a couple of eps after he'd done the same to his snitch (in the exact same place), but it feels like there's many others

(i'm assuming deliberate bcz i think if the airlock business just arose twice as a function of the technical plot, the writers wd probably have worked at a non-mirroring way to do it? obviously the facts of the environment require return to the same kinds of bottlenecks quite often but this was in a largish colony city not a tiny little spaceship)

(kinda feel this point is v unclear)

I definitely get the impression that the writing and directing staff are aiming for that. Very little about the way this show is put together has felt "workmanlike" it's the golden age of TV goddamn it, SyFy Channel wants its own AMC show

are you talking about when johnson "spaced" the insurrectionist belter a few eps ago? i was thinking of that during dawes' speech. like "you're killin it dawg but um you might want to watch yr step"

Renewed for season 3.

Yay!

Yippee

*incomprehensible Belter celebratory slang*

Just got up to speed over a couple of weeks, love it! Such a pleasure to watch a sci-fi show that actually takes its world building seriously, unlike some of its predecessors (naming no names, rhymes with "Smattlebar Batactica"). None of the tropes or ideas are particularly new to a reader of hard SF, but they have been combined in a seamlessly fun and exciting way. The detail of the setting enables and enriches the story, and is never allowed to get in the way fo its telling. Season 2 has been relentless.

One downside is the underdevelopment some of the characters, particularly the crew of the Rosi. I'm not particularly fond of any of them, except maybe Amos. Naomi was cool at first, but now has become Little Miss Exposition pretty much. More peripheral characters such as Dawes and Miller tend to be better value. The kiwi chick is very well cast - though I don't know why Martians just have a bunch of different human accents. The consistency of the belter accent between actors isn't much better, tbh, but at least they're trying.

Last ep was terrific but I have a little plot whiplash. What happened to Dawes and Johnson? Psyched to find out what's happened on Venus - and how - if? - it relates to the mysterious firefight on Ganymede

The assailant without a vac suit is obviously made of protomolecule so there's a connection there - how direct a one remains to be seen.

The special effect that bothered me in this episode was the barf by that one poor martian schlub stepping out of the landing craft. I get that the easiest thing to do is just to have the extra fill their mouth with colored water and just spit it out on cue. But that's not what vomiting is. Vomiting is your stomach trying to evacuate itself as quickly as possible. Your stomach is bigger than your mouth. Screen puking should be more than a symbolic gesture, is what I'm saying, otherwise just have the actors make the ASL sign for vomit and save the mopping entirely.

What happened to Dawes and Johnson?

We are running up against the problem GoT has where these well built & populated worlds that work in a novel with chapters start to get really difficult to do in a 1-hour (much less 43-minute) block. Also as of the ep before this one it's officially Dawes and Drummer, not Dawes and Johnson, poor guy from the Wire has been completely eclipsed by his lieutenant why because she look interesting

Space Cutty is a bit po-faced.

Some of the cutting-into-chapters work in the second season made it a slog to make it through a few episodes for me. The problem with having lots of plot threads that need to play out in realtime is the inability to resolve anything at all in some episodes.

Have there been any episodes with action followed by another that follows a completely different group over the same time? I'm trying to think of examples from other series but I'm coming up blank -- basically the cliche where someone opens a door and exclaims "how are YOU here?" only for the next episode to run the same timeline from the perspective of the second party.

campaign for real space-puke

Tom i actually started wondering where they were specifically because I was like "where the hell did Drummer go, did she get killed while I wasn't watching?" Anyway yes - you're right - and it's not just the look either, her past seems just as interesting as either of those two belter marquee idols, hastily sketched as it is. MORE DRUMMER IN THE MONITOR PLEASE

I know they're not following the books very closely, but is there any chance Miller (Thomas Jane's character) shows back up in some way?

i don't know but i have to admit i miss the old kerouacky son of a bitch

I mean, having his last scene played against a woman who completely reconstituted her body via alien organism seems like the door was left open

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C7geyt5XQAYGCOt.jpg

HAPPY #TheExpanse DAY! From #Draomi @CaraGeeeee @ExpanseSyfy this is when we were shooting the handball scene and we already loved eachother

https://twitter.com/Mi55Tipper/status/844458801239609344

😍

right????????

The most recent ep is just extraordinary. Possibly the best episode yet? (in related news, lots of Amos Content)

Terry Chen as Prax has quickly become one of my favourite dudes.

I loved the loooooong wordless moment with Draper when she finally got to the end of that drainage tunnel and saw the ocean. How do you even write that in a script? (I was slightly worried about the effect of the presumably ruined water on her bare skin but she didn't flinch.) How fucked is she now tho :(

I kinda want to watch it again. There were a ton of amazing little moments that couldn't have been written down in the script that they just "found" by looking through the camera lens, by editing. Hot stuff.

SPOILER.

I wondered what was in the water but you see that she's on a beach when the Indian ambassador lady talks to her.

I know, but the beach of an ocean that's been polluted beyond repair by earthers, right? Hence the necessity for ice-mining? I mean it's a small detail maybe but I'll admit it added a note of tension to the scene for this guy

Bobbie Draper always looks so worried.

Amos' Weapons Training Course Syllabus for Beginners:

1) This is safe
2) This is fire
3) Don't shoot us

when does this start again in the uk?

>:(

It's on PB if you need it.

supposedly will hit UK Netflix once the run finishes on SyFy (about three weeks time, possibly?)

I buy the DVDs to support good shows, but watch via www.space.ca/show/the-expanse/ and a VPN to participate in the conversation.

Jim is starting to realise where Miller's mindset was at when he iced the evil scientist at the research station, if he could go back now he probably wouldn't be such a prissy moralist and go into such a big huff about it with him.

A major problem with the series is that there isn't enough time spent watching Holden go from idealist to angry pragmatist. The competing plotlines and characters with more foreign backgrounds always catch the camera's eye.

It was more forgivable in the books, where half the first book and about a fifth of subsequent ones are from his viewpoint.

draper feels like the star of this season. it's bold (or crazy) to not only have a first season with two equal protagonists, but then essentially ditch them midway through the next season

xp: That's to say, in the broadcast series, it isn't really clear at all why the other crew would stick their neck out for Holden. This isn't Starfleet, where there are social norms, or Firefly, where the core have a history, or even Farscape, where there's a common enemy.

was anything else been heard of the tagalong guy who was like the first contact with the alien force in the first series. Was he just killed outiright? I thought at the time there might be something more made out of taht, had some idea of a hybrid form appearing or something.

THink he had attached himself to the crew of the Rocinante somehow and seemed to be a rather underhanded type, then he gets ditched but you see something happening to him. & from the amount of time spent setting up the character t seemed like something more would come out of that.
But i was thinking something more would happen with the pair who crash into Venus, though that might still occur over the next couple of shows.

Didn't he get chomped by the protomolecule?

Apparently his name was Kenzo Gabriel: http://expanse.wikia.com/wiki/Kenzo_Gabriel

I liked him. Thought the actor was great.

I have to give some respect to shows that build a character up just enough to seem fleshed out before unceremoniously killing them. Avoids the whole "meaningful death" plot point while still showing that the loss of life can happen to anyone at any time.

xp Holden refused to give him a lift off Eros so he was indeed chomped by the protomolecule

yes.. holden's hardening does stretch back over quite a few episodes. it's been pretty clearly telegraphed,
Sanpaku. some might say overly so!

Holden is the blandest character in this regardless, really.

I still get the sense that most decisions are by crew consensus, we needed more moments where Holden's tells off a naysaying Naomi/Alex/Amos, "Here's where you're wrong, and why". We just have Holden's gut instincts, which usually result in worse global outcomes, and the crew (prior to the last ep) still follows. As a book reader with access to internal monologues, the motivations are clear, but as a series viewer, we just see Holden as less gentleman and more well-meaning brute.

I didn't question why crews followed John Crichton (Farscape) or Malcolm Reynolds (Firefly), and it isn't the quality of acting, its the script.

I feel like such a Holden in life, sometimes. His decisions don't necessarily seem heartfelt; in fact, the script really hasn't given him a deep heart. The character development has been perfunctory, the actions logical but with any internal conflict being familiar guideposts. I'd guess he's going to fuck up majorly at some point, if the story needs it, otherwise he's going to fuck up in a relatable if enraging way and the polarization of others will be our engagement.

John Crichton was thrust into a battle that wasn't his and Mal on Firefly was always fighting battles that weren't implicitly his but he carried this weight of responsibility as the competent man

Holden is in search of a cause. I kind of wrote him off as a self-righteous twerp before I even started this thread, I think. The rest of the leftover Canterbury crew bought into his hero act for a while, I can understand that.

This was a very good episode. I really liked the gravity-assisted approach sequence.
I hope that one day Amos and Draper get to go to punch-out prom together.

Is anyone else warming to Alex? He's such a ridiculous character at this point that I can't help but like him a bit.

guilty!

Could be just that it was the last thing that happened in the 1st series but I was thinking that once the protomolecule had assimilated Gabriel it would use what it found in some way. Looked like it was going to be a strand for further development.
But not seen anything of it.
Thought it was more being taken in to examine thoroughly than ate but not sure.

Alex's generally annoying fake chirpy demeanour and naff cowboy patter is fairly bad, but against the odds he is alright!