The Expanse Season 3 Open Thread
By Since I caused a bit of a stir in the spring when I discussed The Expanse and the limitations of its political storytelling, I thought we could have a thread about the just-concluded third season.
My take: overall, meh. But a more entertaining meh than the first two seasons, to be sure. The smartest choice made by season 3 is to finally ditch the weird, bifurcated structure imposed by the decision not to adapt all of the series’s first book in season 1. So season 3 gets to the end of book 2, Caliban’s War, and rushes through book 3, Abbadon’s Gate, thus setting up future seasons of the show to cover one book per, a much more sensible and dramatically interesting arrangement. I also enjoyed the Abbadon’s Gate arc a great deal more than the show’s previous two stories. Against their never-particualrly-well-handled sprawl, I thought it offered a story that was smaller and more tightly-structured. Not to mention, one that downplays the perennially uninteresting James Holden and his crew, in favor of more engaging new characters (who are also mostly women).
After I posted my Expanse piece, it made its way to the show’s creators, and the James S.A. Corey twitter account (which I’m told is maintained by Ty Franck), tweeted this in response:
That was a singularly poor analysis in that post. The entire point of the show is that the people who wind up saving the day are the ones who abandon faction first mentality.
— James S.A. Corey (@JamesSACorey) April 9, 2018
As I said at the time, this was very amusing to me. I had spent 2,700 words trying to articulate my frustrations with the show’s political storytelling and its limitations, and he just… tweeted it out. It should go without saying, especially to the crowd at this blog, but dismissing anger over labor exploitation, entrenched class prejudice, and even the genocide of oppressed populations, as a “faction-first mentality” that needs to be risen above—and implicitly, that the exploited are just as responsible for as the exploiters—is not a meaningful political statement. Especially in 2018, it felt hopelessly naive and irrelevant.
That said, this is Corey’s show, and his tweet was completely accurate in summing up its approach. The first half of the season wraps up the Caliban’s War story by largely abandoning the greater politics of the system and concentrating on action storytelling. The dramatic season 2 cliffhanger of Naomi giving OPA leader Fred Johnson a sample of the protomolecule ends up going nowhere. Johnson is barely seen during the third season, and his access to the protomolecule ends up having no effect on either of its stories. The massacre on Eros is barely paid any lip service. Its architect, Jules-Pierre Mao, is ultimately brought to justice, but by people who are clearly more strongly motivated by the affairs of the inner planets—Mao has been instrumental in fomenting war between Earth and Mars—or by personal concerns—one of the children that Mao’s scientists have experimented on in their attempts to learn the protomolecule’s properties is the daughter of recurring character Prax.
In the second half of the season, the protomolecule achieves the final stage of its development and creates what appears to be a stargate at the edge of the solar system. Representatives of Earth, Mars, and the newly-formed Belter nation send ships to investigate the ring and what lies beyond it, ending up stuck in a pocket universe where the rules of physics don’t apply. This Weird Alien Shit story is much more in show’s wheelhouse than any of its previous, more strongly political plotlines, but I want to focus for a second on the concept of a “Belter nation”, which is introduced offhandedly in the arc’s opening moments and never really explained. In principle, this is of course what a lot of the characters have been working towards, but in practice it feels like a way of sweeping a lot of the issues inherent to the Belt storyline under the rug—see, we’ve given you political independence, what more do you want?
Realistically, there are a lot of questions raised by the existence of a Belter nation that the show seems eager to avoid. Most obviously, the fact that every man-made structure in the Belt—everywhere where people live, trade, or produce—was owned by either Earth, Mars, or corporations based in one or the other. Have these resources been nationalized by the Belter nation, an action that tends to spark wars? Is the Belt now in a kind of post-colonial bind, where it’s forced by stronger nations to accept most of its resources being owned by outside entities? Or worse, is it being forced, Haiti-like, to pay “reparations” that will bankrupt it for generations to come? These could all be interesting issues to explore, but instead, the sense I get—from the show as well as Corey’s tweet—is “let’s not get hung up on who exploited who”. That the existence of the Belter nation is meant to settle questions, not raise them.
That impression is only strengthened by the end of the season, in which the UN, Martian, and Belter fleets have to work together to survive and make it back to the Solar System. The message here is obviously that humans must set aside their differences (abandon faction first mentality, as Corey puts it) in order to survive in the broader universe to which they’ve now been exposed. It’s nice message, and one that I appreciated very much when I was nine years old and it was the moral of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. But in a show being lauded as “the best science fiction on TV” in 2018, I expect a bit more.
Still, I am, as established, very much an outlier as far as this show is concerned. What are your thoughts?