I hear Jonhny Depp is looking for a job.
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I’ll never forgive them for that last season.
Not to my dying day.
The Expanse is incredible. I’m a hard sci-fi junkie, and The Expanse is about as hard as it gets.
Easily the best sci-fi on TV right now, for my dollar. I was among the very relieved when Amazon rescued it.
I’ll put my nickel down and say it was great until the last scene of the final episode. That ending was one of the stupidest things ever. I actually stop watching before that now, on each rewatch of the series that I do from time to time.
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You are correct and I apologize. I have some personal trauma tied to the film and I sometimes don’t know when to let it go.
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The Wormhole X-treme! episodes were absolute gems!
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Yes!
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This is likely to be a terrible idea unless they simply jettison everything and start over, in which case why bother. I think what made the show work better than average was in the interplay of a lot of specific stuff about the characters and if that’s changed it won’t work.
Curious how Disney feels about characters that advocate for the dignity of sex workers.
And the movie? It was fantastic.
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It’s not a 1-to-1 comparison but there are a lot of parallels between the premise for Firefly and The Expanse.
- Interplanetary drama series (at least initially) confined to a single solar system with no faster-than-light travel
- Story centers on a small crew of misfits with their own ship trying to pay the bills with odd jobs of questionable legality while occasionally getting caught up in system-wide government conspiracies
- Two of the crew members are a couple
- One crewmember is a big, brawling emotionally stunted criminal still working on growing a conscience
- One late addition to the crew is a young woman who has been modified into a living weapon (book spoiler)
ETA almost forgot:
- Certain space colonies have a lot of cowboys for some reason
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On our last rewatch before this week, I figured out the reason I really really like Amos is that he is the not asshole version of Jayne.
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I agree. For me mostly it is the sense of family that builds over the years with the main characters. A lot of good scifi/fantasy has that as a foundation; Farscape, Star Trek, Cowboy Bebop ( 
), BSG (dysfunctional family), Stargate, LoTR, Buffy, Xena, etc etc. What made Firefly so exceptional to me was how mind-bogglingly quickly they built that feeling, despite Jayne’s best efforts.
Some call it a form of “social surrogacy” for the nerdy reader/viewer, and it could be. I have certainly found a lot of happiness in it. I think a lot of my distaste for the ‘reality tv’ model scifi, like Lost, comes from the purposeful lack of that vibe.
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Jayne is a total asshole, pretty stupid and -mildly put- questionable in his loyalities…Amos on the other hand may be my favourite male character in the expanse…even if he is sometimes a massive dick;
unlike jayne…always with style, fearless of authority.
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They both serve the same role in the dynamic of the crew. I call it the “amoral compass.” Firefly needed it as a balance to Shepherd Book; The Expanse needs it to balance Holden’s naïveté.
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I have come to believe that Amos is the most “good person” of everyone in the stories. For others it is emotional, instinctive. For Amos it doesn’t come naturally. He has to actually choose to be kind and loyal, and spends a great deal of effort being the person he thinks he should be.
Imagine if everyone did that. In the most recent book that really shines.
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Remember though that back in season 1 Amos was once ready and willing to put a bullet in the back of Holden’s head to stop him from sending a transmission. He’s a much more complex character than Jayne to be sure but part of that is because he’s had more time to develop.
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My Dad knew this was coming when he took me to see it in '77. He told me to cover my eyes, but of course I peeked.
It started out strong, and I liked how the reboot stressed how much PTSD the survivors onboard the ships would be going through given that they lost their homes and nearly everyone they knew in the Cylon attack. That’s something that rarely gets brought up when planets get destroyed in SF. The original series hardly mentioned it, and Leia hardly seems fazed by the destruction of Alderaan in Star Wars.
But later seasons seemed stuck in the “Who’s a secret cylon?” game that just got tedious.
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Granted, if it is the time I am thinking, Holden did start a war with that transmission. Holden has a bad habit of starting wars…
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Still, it’s clear (especially in the books) that Amos doesn’t quite have a fully developed sense of right and wrong. But he also has the unusual capacity to recognize that about himself, which is why he instinctively gravitates toward figures like Lydia and later Naomi and Holden to help guide his actions like some kind of Jiminy Cricket analogues.
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I’ve not read any of the books but those two together on screen is a delight to watch, however brief, so i hope there’s more of that.
The Heinlein-like world building in The Expanse just seems effortless though, especially with the cash they now have to do it justice but it’s all so matter of fact, understated and not shoved in your face - as an example, the scene of Amos arriving at Luna base in a shuttle that transitions to an elevator is the sort of scene you watch several times to marvel at. Or Naomi and Sakai (i think) walking through Tycho and engineers walking upside-down relative to them, just great seeing that stuff. They put real thought into it even if the gravity or lack-of is inconsistent at times but that stuff is difficult to do, though i did notice the liquid in the glasses on Luna reacting to 1/6 earth gravity so that was a nice touch.
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