Is anybody else watching The Expanse?

"Set in a future where humanity has colonized the Solar System, it follows police detective Miller (Thomas Jane), ship's officer Jim Holden (Steven Strait), and his crew as they unravel a conspiracy that threatens peace across the System and the survival of humanity."

Reasons to love:

1. Thomas Jane's character is a hopeless dickhead and nobody likes him. By the last episode I watched (ep 5 - ep 6 aired tonight) I felt like the only person rooting for him, and only because I want to find out the answers! I love an irredeemable loser antihero, once in a while. And everybody calls him out on his stupid PUA hat. Which I think he wears mostly because his haircut is even worse. Good stuff.

2. Jared Harris speaking in a completely made-up space person accent (that no other character has?!?) and being an ice cold asteroid gangster! I should not have to go on!

3. Hard sci-fi space combat that resembles submarine warfare but with lots of slug weapons! Ship "gravity" entirely dependent on constant acceleration! People surviving limited exposure to vacuum! People with sort-of-visible deformation* and musculoskeletal issues due to growing up in low-G!

4. the Martian Congressional Republic Navy, is a thing

5. a pretty important main character named "Fred Johnson" - science fiction, everybody

6. OK I guess the big draw is the space political thriller angle but you know what? Spaceships and crappy space detectives and gangsters in space. The UN and Mars and Belter Independence stuff or whatever is just kind of background noise imo.

*basically as far as I can tell they accomplished this, to the extent possible, by casting stocky folks as "Earthers" and rangier folks as "Belters." A for effort.

I can't be the only one watching this, you people are nerds

OK, I'm intrigued. Is the writing and acting any good?

Really uneven, but serviceable

this is pretty exciting so far, though i agree it works better as a sci-fi noir than as a political thriller

also it has Space Mormons

Oh yes who could forget the LDS contracting to build a gigantic colony ship!

Why does Athena Karkanis' character care so much about Miller? Are they going to explain that at some point?

definitely the most promising SyFy series in a good while, although the pilot held my attention a lot more than the subsequent episodes

i read and remember nothing of the book (first in a series i believe) except that it felt like screenplay bait. one of the pseudonymous authors is one of george r r martin's attendants

https://36.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lj11ztijdh1qhhbv2o1_500.jpg

show is good tho, sometimes it feels pleasingly cheap (drinks in a space bar that looked chintzier than ten forward, a future montana ranch house that looks a whole lot like a 21st century montana ranch house)

Started the book, solid B so far

most recent episode was super tense, v good imo

i just started watching this --- i like it for all the above reasons

I got kinda bored midway through the pilot (soooo much exposition) can I jump in a bit later or

nah it moves pretty fast except for maybe one ep in the middle of the season i forget which. if you didn't like the pilot then idk

maybe moving fast is the wrong way to say it since the 2 main plots for most of the season are detective investigation and space survival neither of which involve a lot of direct conflict, but i never got the feeling of it being stretched out like i do with a lot of shows

I've been watching it... really enjoyed the most recent episode, promises to be a good finale

Feels more like Chinatown In Space than anything

Mr Veg & I joked the other night about "the mystery of why people mumble in space, and who is giving everyone bad haircuts"

in space, no one can hear you

Mr Veg & I joked the other night about "the mystery of why people mumble in space, and who is giving everyone bad haircuts"

― Flamenco Drop (VegemiteGrrl), Sunday, January 31, 2016 11:23 AM (55 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thomas Jane went to the space barber and said "give me the Gary Oldman in Fifth Element"

lol

Make me look like I used to own a skate shop

lolol

i admit that I got a bit bored with all the worldbuilding, and that fake southern?/texan? dude who talks to spaceship computers like they're truckstop waitresses was almost a bridge too far... but I appreciate having a halfway decent scifi show on SyFy again so I am not complaining

the books are good n' popcorny. kind of a shame that the TV series starts w/ the first novel, which is definitely the worst of the whole shebang.

So the second-to-last episode of Season 1 spends a LOT of time inside a derelict and it is great creepy television. I loved how they mixed the soundtrack low so you're really just listening to magnetic boots on metal gangplanks almost the entire time, which you then realize is also the only thing any of the characters can hear.

I was gonna watch this but Hulu won't let me watch on TV. Booooo

i watched it at syfy's website

oh wait missed the "on TV" part n/m

amos and the UN lady are both super compelling actors, look forward to more of this show

One small nitpick - the action sequence towards the end (of the second to last episode) was a little choppy. I rewound it a few times and still had to just make some assumptions about how a couple things happened / who did what. Even then - how did that grenade not go off?

3. Hard sci-fi space combat that resembles submarine warfare but with lots of slug weapons! Ship "gravity" entirely dependent on constant acceleration! People surviving limited exposure to vacuum! People with sort-of-visible deformation* and musculoskeletal issues due to growing up in low-G!

also a pleasingly hard sci fi plausible-ish near future involving asteroid mining and no (at least so far) fanciful alien species or completely out there tech. like it seems like space travel actually involves orbital mechanics in this

finale 2-parter was great

xp yeah one of the things i like most about this show is that it really gives a sense of how fragile humanity in space is

Just binged. Its been such a desert for good space sci-fi that I didn't look too closely for seams. The gumshoe with the dodgy haircut was the comic relief, some good character actors in the bit roles, the sets are appropriately gritty and/or antiseptic, the effects crew clearly communicate the lonely peril of deep space, and the show runners are clearly love their hard sci-fi. And I want the actress playing Avasarala to purr in my ear.

Glad to have some episodic sci-fi to look forward to, now that Continuum has wrapped its loose ends.

Winchell Chung, creator of the terrific hard sci-fi resource Atomic Rockets, gives The Expanse his Seal of Approval. I agree with every word.

can't believe we have to wait 9 months to find out what the hell is going on

if only there was like a whole bunch of books based on the tv show but like that actually ran ahead of the tv show that we could read

wait did continuum turn out to be good? the pilot was kinda rough and i never saw more

It was better than any time-travelling cop series had a right to be, and while the budgets shranked, the writing became more interesting. I'll be frank, though: My initial attraction was Rachel Nichols in a cat suit.

guys i watched the first episode and.... really?

"UN BLACK OPS SITE"

space sex

COOL FEDORA GUY

it was like every crap 90s 'graphic novel' cliche throwd into one

only thing i liked apart from the awesome opening exposition title cards was the tense horror movie stuff p much

ok i've actually read the thread now and

People with sort-of-visible deformation* and musculoskeletal issues due to growing up in low-G!

made-up accent that no one has - it's supposed to be a kind of 'third world' Belter accent, right? to hammer home the allegory of the exploited other-class?

'flip n burn' was pretty good

GAH I DON'T KNOW

I've read (and really) enjoyed all the pulpy popcorn books & novellas and thought the first episode was pretty ropey. However, it gets much better and by the end is easily one of the best sci-fi shows in years and probably the best thing SyFy have done since BG.

space sex only happens in the first episode because there's an unwritten rule now that all tv pilots need sexual content regardless of the tone of the show

By ep 4 it starts getting really good afaict

It has been distracting seeing my doppelganger the medic

I couldn't get past the first ep of this, might give it another shot.

the other recent new SyFy show The Magicians (which is imo better than The Expanse) ALSO had gravity-defying midair sex in the pilot

I like both shows a lot, nice to see SyFy step it up

I've read all the Magicians books too and whilst I'm enjoying the show, I think The Expanse is much better.

Do they go out at different times in the States? It's noticeable that whilst Avasarala is very foul mouthed in the books, on the show she's not whereas The Magicians seems to have no problems dropping in the f-word several times each episode.

There's been a recent trend towards series that air on non-sweary networks to throw in curses they can't actually air and just blank them out. (This is especially glaring on American Crime, where - I assume as a deliberate aesthetic choice - every "fuck" is announced with a few frames of completely blacked-out screen.)

I assume it's because they know/hope the unedited versions will be available on DVD

I don't remember that much emo time about Alex but it would have been much weirder to not acknowledge the tragic death of a core character.

Yeah, this seems a deeply weird complaint. Actors and characters are actually different things.

I know, it just felt weird to me that after dispatching with him and doing a bit of mourning last season, now we're back with tensions between the crew based around who is or is not feeling the loss of Alex appropriately. This is obviously something that wasn't originally supposed to be part of the plot and I think if they just skipped it the fans would be ok with that, especially since this is all taking place some months later. I can't remember what happens after the first episode, maybe this is the last we hear about this particular thing.

I honestly just wish they would have replaced the actor. Shows have pulled that off in the past, haven't they? People would have gotten used to it. Because they wrote him out of the show even if they do ever pick anything back up again, they're going to have to deal with what they did to that character, when they could have easily explained a different actor with aging or whatever.

throw Michiel Huisman in there, that's his specialty!

He dies in a similar way in the books IIRC, not at the same point but out of the blue.

now that is something I did not know, figured he just kept on keepin' on with his Texan BS

Oh no I'm misremembering, it was another character who died that way - they just cut and pasted the names.

I don’t remember Alex dying in the books?

It was Fred who stroked out at the end of a high-g chase/battle.

Xpost there

Yes: Milo has the correct answer

GOT re-cast the Mountain TWICE (i.e. they had three different actors playing him).

so i saw this article a few days ago on mashable which made me think of a post here

taken me this long to try and post and also never tried linking to an older post, so lets see if this works

original post: Is anybody else watching The Expanse?

The clear cellphone thing looks cool, but it's so ridiculous. You can see the screen from the back! Especially silly when Miller is doing police stuff on his phone and trying to be stealthy.

and in new tech stuff. https://sea.mashable.com/laptops/31413/lenovo-thinkbook-transparent-laptop-hands-on-yes-its-actually-see-through

bah why didn’t you all tell me this game came out last year??

https://www.telltale.com/the-expanse/

Oh shiiiiitttt!!

It's cool that it focuses on Drummer

S2 E6 - Holy shit.

For the Telltale game, I love the focus on Drummer but I hate how high the bar is for choosing correctly in order to avoid very unpleasant story line turns. I love hearing that actor play that character again, but right now I'm trying to decide whether to start over on the game or abandon it.

Cara Gee’s real accent is very confusing in interviews IIRC.

Rewatching the show. Just got to S2E5 “Home” about Eros, Julie and Miller. What a great episode visually and emotionally.

S3 E5 is one of the best episodes of TV I have ever seen.

Naomi's origin story.

A Tarantino-style showdown on the bridge of the Enterprise.

The last 25 minutes is edge of your seat tension.

The back half of S3 is wild - such a drastic shakeup. It feels like Holden activating the station should have been the end of a season and there was still half the season to go.

Amos and Alex are my two favorite characters. The former is the "Data" of the show, exploring his lack of humanity to show us humanity.

I love how the show is fundamentally a Star Trek show about exploration. It is gritty yet fundamentally positive.

Just finished a full rewatch. Such a good show well worth rewatching. Marco / Filip storyline was sooo tedious but S5 also had the Amos / Peaches scenes on earth which were amazing tv. They really should have just killed Marco the 2 times they had the chance. Lol I thought Bobbi died in the assault on Medina station; glad to find out I misremembered. And books 7-9 are also worth reading. The story picks up from the Laconia - protomolecule scenes in S6. As for defend the indefensible I actually liked Holden and Miller more this time through. Alex was still a waste of space -having Peaches on the Roci crew really highlighted that point.

TL;DR give it a rewatch

I'm rewatching! S5E3 right now.

I just finished reading the 6th book and realize that I don't want it to end, so will have to space out the remaining books.

I'm excited to start watching the show for the first time tonight

Started watching this for the first time a few weeks ago and just finished S2 earlier this week. I've been pulled along by the story, which I find to be compelling. At this point, I don't even notice the bad CGI. The dialog has generally ranged from terrible to mediocre, with very occasional forays into good/acceptable, but more often than not, the cast was able to pull it off. It's just been a weird watch for me, because the drama feels like gripping, prestige-TV level drama, but the dialog is on a level of something I would put on in the background while I'm cooking dinner (until they drop some incredibly detailed burst of a plot twist that requires me to rewind 30 seconds and concentrate really hard to determine what's going on).

However, last night I started watching S3E1 and it felt like the show reached a new low for terribly-written dialog and acting. My feeling is that no one knew what to do with the weak-ass dialog? I stopped the episode about 20 minutes in because it was getting on my nerves so much.

I've been trying to avoid outside influence about the show, so I haven't read the thread above or checked any other message boards about it. But I just need to know - do other people feel this way about that episode in particular or the show in general?

oh it’s definitely pulpy - that’s one thing i like about it, that it’s NOT prestige TV, or at least not as we know it

Yeah, I agree - it's kind of a relief for me to watch something that tells an extended story without worrying about multiple layers of meaning and feeling like "oh, I guess I need to read Immanuel Kant if I want to get everything I can out of this season..."

I think the dialog and plot are better than 90% of what is considered "prestige television". There are some moments of hard framing when they reset at the beginning of a season (like S3E1), but little of that GoT feeling that the characters are just chess pieces being maneuvered where the plot requires.

What was wrong with the CGI? I thought the show looked amazing for it's age and likely budget. They were relatively judicious with it which helped.

I also really liked how the crew of the Roci are fundamentally people trying to do good, but are confronted with terrible choices and make mistakes that change them without altering their goodness. It's an optimistic but realistic show.

I think the dialog and plot are better than 90% of what is considered "prestige television".

What was wrong with the CGI? I thought the show looked amazing for it's age and likely budget.

I also really liked how the crew of the Roci are fundamentally people trying to do good, but are confronted with terrible choices and make mistakes that change them without altering their goodness. It's an optimistic but realistic show.

i was honestly never really bothered by the dialogue. certainly i'm not tuning in expecting every conversation to be dripping with meaning, but as far as science fiction goes i think they do everything pretty well imho; even if most the dialogue is either people reacting to events or explaining how to not die in space (which i honestly love).
i read the books after the series wrapped up - and again, it's science fiction so my expectations are a little lower – the characters etc are obv better fleshed out and (i am currently rewatching the series) i think the job they do of cramming what's in the books into the show is a little clunky at times. Miller's relationship with the crew, for example, is more interesting and his fascination with Julie Mao is better explained. might even re-read the books after i'm done the series rewatch.

The dialogue is fine, the CGI never looked too ropey to me. It's one of those shows I'm looking forward to re-watching after awhile. Which is increasingly rare these days, so many TV shows for me are strictly one and done.

IIRC upthread we griped about a couple of the actors, the Belter accent, and Miller's hat but not really about the dialog (well with the exception of the Marco/Filip story). Having done a full rewatch recently, i love the show unreservedly. xpost, great point from PBKR that the Roci crew doing their best in the many difficult circumstances the show throws at them.

https://www.jamessacorey.com/introducing-the-expanding-universe/

As reported in Variety, the team behind The Expanse has announced a new multi-platform content company called Expanding Universe. The first project will be an adaptation of The Captive’s War by James S. A. Corey. Read on for the official press release!

ok, well

the expanse video game was trash fwiw

The Telltale game? Their first Walking Dead game was great and then it seemed like the half assed everything from then on.

I'd be more excited about a new book in a new universe. So tired of extended universe stuff.

If the Captive’s War and Expanse are in the same universe it’s a real stretch.

the writers definitively said they're completely unconnected.

“Expanding Universe is focused on developing sci-fi narratives with sweeping world-building and elevated storylines, geared toward multi-platform expressions in filmed entertainment, gaming, and publishing."

This makes me want to never pay attention to them ever again. At least they didn't use the word, "properties".

ew

I'm perfectly content to ignore all of this nonsense and move on.

I’m not going to immediately begrudge someone trying to get a paycheck but that smacks of “we are not trying to do another Expanse but want a better than Expanse paycheck”

so that probably means we get another expanse book in a few

First three (SyFy) seasons leaving Prime tomorrow apparently

Don't know if they'll then be available elsewhere?

They’re available on my hard drive

shit I recently started rescreening and I'm only 2/3 of the way through S2

I gotta get the Blu-ray set

Creating a fan edit of S5 that cuts out 80% of Marco's screen time and 90% of Filip's.

poor fiwwip