[TV] The Expanse

Haven't read the books. Ottomaton in this thread said he loved the books and is re-reading them now.

 

Ok thanks.

 

I envy people who find good shows (especially sci-fi/fantasy) after their runs on TV have ended. Binge-watching a really good series you don't have to wait week to week is the best.

The only shows I've found on Netflix that I've missed on TV are StarGate, X-Files, Parenthood, Black Mirror, and Breaking Bad (first 3 seasons I caught up to the live airings).

 

Just watched up to episode 8. 2 hr season finale is next. I think episode 8 is the best so far... Since they seemed to have moved the story the most and brought together some major story lines.

It certainly requires attention. But it's very well done and even believable. Maybe that last part changes since they seem to have added some other life form type thing here.

Point is - quality kept me watching despite the slow burn and I think it's paying off.

 

Weird that I haven't seen this yet. I'll have to do that soon and binge watch the whole thing. The series of novels are simply outstanding, for those who are wondering about them. James S.A. Corey are really two people, which is why, I suspect, that they've managed to crank out these long and superb examples of science fiction so quickly. It's some of the best I've read, and I've read a hell of a lot of the genre. If the TV effort is half as good, it should be outstanding. Guess I'll have to see for myself! -

 

I enjoyed the books, though they aren't mind shattering or anything. By nature of the medium, they have to approach everything much more directly on TV for the sake of narriative, a a whole bunch of things are detailed out in the plotting that are obliquely referred to in the books.

There are five books (6th comes out in April, I think?), and season 1 of the show ends about half way through the first book, so if the show continues they should have a whole lot of additional material to work with, as long as they are interested in doing so.

The books very much are derivative of the early Robert Heinlein space mining stuff from the 1950s and 1960's, up through The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress but modernized, and missing a bunch of Heinlein's quirky political free love libertarianism, which is why they aren't "mind shattering" with new ideas, but they are definitely well put together and plotted for light reading.

I'd bet one of the two of the authors was a fan of those early Heinlein books growing up. A bunch of the plot points about Earth oppressing the spacers and the continual resource problems is space are a mainstay to those books. Heinlein and Larry Niven were my childhood SciFi diet. I haven't read them in years, so they may be more dated than I remember, with people piloting with astrolabes instead of computers, for instance - anachronisms that wouldn't have stood out to young me if I read them today.

There is a recent three book series by Alastair Reynolds that in my minds anyway, is somewhat similar thematically starting with a book called Blue Remembered Earth that deals with some of the same situations.

 

I've been roped into the shows and am looking forward to the season finale. I really like the gritty vision of the future that they present. Not as a beautiful hopeful future but at the same time not as a complete dystopia either but a very complex middle with a range of different interest groups at different levels of success. The idea of low gravity Belters seems very interesting and how gravity and other parts of the environment ties into class struggle is fascinating.

 

Did anybody watch the season finale yesterday? Best two hours of sci-fi on TV I've ever seen. I liked the Julia Mao segment in the beginning that tied up a lot of the loose ends. This show has so much potential. I'm glad they're renewed for season 2.

 

I watched the finale and it was good. It cleared some stuff up since the opener. The show itself is a total trip. I happen to have the Phillips Hue LED lights/hub setup in my HT room...so I use the Syfy Sync app that synchronizes the light colors to the show. I'm not sure how synced it is but it's a trip as it sets the mood. There was a part when someone was murdered and all my lighting went to blood red. That was cool. I'm glad the show got renewed for another season.

 

This is almost HBO level production quality. Everything from the set pieces to the OST is top notch.

BTW, the opening title credits along with the music is absolutely stunning.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/krqqqgixNq8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

The "Battlestar Galactica" comparison that got thrown around probably messed with people's expectations. However, I think it is true in one respect - the visual effects team is a company called Atmosphere VFX, who were the team for Battlestar Galactica, and another show that was compared briefly to Galactica, Stargate Universe.

Some of the visuals in space in all three shows distinctively look like they are from the same source, at least to me. They do little things with moving around POV and messing with focus to make it look more like remote camera footage, and other such things that seem distinctive, like a signature.

 

I read the first book about a year ago. After watching the series, it seems to me the season ended about where the first book ended. But maybe with a change to the story at the end. Maybe I'm wrong. I'll put it in a spoiler.

Spoiler

I thought Miller died at the end of the first book. But in the TV series he lives. Is that right? I may have to go back and read the ending of the book again if I'm mistaken.

 

Spoiler

Miller's fate was ambiguous. The second book clears it up a bit.

 

That's always struck me as gimmicky... But after reading this now it sounds cool as ****

I saw the Phillips internet connected lightbulb thing at a store and was really tempted... But the cost and setup is really high right now. Got to buy a starter kit, more plugs, Internet things, then the bulbs themselves are costly. But I was contemplating getting it for the wife for Christmas. Figured she'd appreciate being able to go with a calm soothing hue when stressed then change to a bright hue when needing lots of light, etc.

Haha

Anyway The Expanse is a bad ass show. Even the main cop character i really like despite his hair.

 

After a rocky start where Syfy did a very poor job of introducing the characters and plot, The Expanse improved and the finale set the hook for me. If it hadn't been so hard to follow at the beginning, the show would have been more successful IMO.

I think it can go to another level next season now that some sort of a foundation is laid.

 

I just re-read the book about 3 weeks ago. I'd put completion of the first season at about 55% of Levithan Awakes. Here's what's left in the book from my memory. There's quite a bit there. Spoilers from hell, obviously. Don't click if you don't want to know, but maybe it'll jog your memory some?

Spoiler

In the book after leaving Eros, they head back to Tycho and confab with Fred Johnson. Much hand wring occurs.

Everybody's looking for the "bad guys" who F'ed up Eros, but with little luck, but eventually Miller gets his old partner from Ceres, (the guy who got skewered in one of the first couple of episodes) in the TV show, to give him secret information about weird stuff at at a place called Thoth station. (In the books the guy has moved on from Ceres and taken up a job with what he describes more or less as "scary people" somewhere on a gas giant moon (Ganymede?) where he doesn't have to deal with anti-Earther discrimination).

The Roci and Miller team up with a Fred Johnson led OPA strike force to invade Thoth with where the bad guys are running the whole "protomolecule" thing from. They have to shoot the **** out of everybody, because Mao-Kwikowski has performed brain surgery on all their scientists to turn them into psychopaths. Once they take over the station, the local Mao-Kwikowski big muckety-muck, Antony Dresden is oblivious and acts like a total dick, acting like he can buy off everybody and what he did was no big deal. There is much hand wringing about what to do, and Miller walks right up to Dresden and executes him point blank, bullet to the head with no warning.

This causes a major rift with Holden, who doesn't approve of Miller's wanton violence. (They are going to have to do something not exactly like the book with this, because in the book a lot of groundwork is laid previously on Eros with Holden getting pissed at Miller being wantonly violent.) In the book, this is the last straw, and Holden kicks Miller of the Roci. Much depression and heavy drinking ensues for Miller (Miller in the books is much more of a depressed, alcoholic, unhappy guy than they've shone on TV thus far - he seems like a guy always just short of putting a bullet in his own head), mostly because there was a whole bunch of stuff about Holden embracing Miller, implying he was now part of the Roci crew, and that made Miller feel all weepy. At the same time, a bunch of the OPA guys seem to view Miller with something between ambivalence and outright gratitude and hero worship for what Miller did by killing Dresden.

After the breakup with the Roci, Miller begs a job from Fred Johnson and the OPA and leaves with them back to Tycho station. Roci goes to Tycho, too. There is a very exposition-rich series of passages where everybody second guesses their decisions.

Weird radio transmissions start coming out of Eros. Holden/Fred Johnson think Earth or Mars will try to take Eros, and they think it is too dangerous. Roci goes to Eros and blockades it to keep anybody from landing, which he has to do thanks to a confrontation with an Earth team. OPA/Miller get a bunch of old freighters together to land on the surface and rig the reactors to blow up, which would make it to radioactive to try and get in Eros. There's a bunch of stuff about Miller hanging with the young OPA soldiers and feeling awkward. The OPA then "commandeers" the Navoo, the giant Mormon Space Ark, they've been building in order to bang it into Eros and send the nasty crap into the sun to burn up, thus removing the danger of someone trying to take the protomolecule.

After the teams that set up the booby trapped ships start to evacuate, Miller decides to stay and die on Eros at Julie Mao's final resting place (he's much more depressive in the books). Throwing things for a loop, and in a show of inconcievable technological prowess, Eros suddently starts heading for Earth. Everybody freaks. Holden tries to follow. Miller, still standing on the surface of Eros, hears stuff in Eros' radio transmissions that makes him that Julie Mao's consciousness is part of the weird radio transmissions from Eros.

Earth comes up with a plan to launch eleventy billion nuclear space missiles at Eros to evaporate it before it can infect Earth. Miller begs Holden to buy him time. Holden and Fred Johnson hack into the nukes and reprogramming them, sending them off course, effectively stealing them from Earth, causing Earth to crap its pants.

Miller crawls deep into infected Eros, with much many pages devoted to the process. Eventually he finds Julie's consciousness, which is really only semi-lucid. He learns the protomolocule was sent to infect Earth about a billion years ago by aliens but an accidental encounter with Saturn's gravity well trapped it, preventing it from finishing its job. The protomolocule is trying to fufill its original programming. Nobody knows exactly what that is, but it seems like a side effect will be a very bad day for the people of Earth. Much discussion here is given to what I would call the main reoccurring theme of the series - the Aliens have super powerful technology that can do all sorts of nasty things but they are distant, and really without malace. It is only through the intervention of amoral super-rich human beings that it truly becomes a horror.

Miller begs and cajoles Julie into pushing the protomolocule towards Venus instead. Eventually Miller and whatever Eros have become crash into Venus. Miller is dead. The protomolecule, starts doing really weird, incomprehensible massive engineering projects on the surface of Venus. Everybody is freaked out. The book ends.

Honestly, until I reread the books I would have agreed with you. The ****-storm on Eros seemed like the peak of the plot of the first book to me, too. But there really is a whole lot left in terms of total words before the first book comes to a close.

 

Thanks. Yes, are correct, there is a lot left. I remember it now with your help. I never go back and re-read books, but I might go back and re-read this book before the next season of the show.

How are the other books in the series?

 

Yea...at one point I was kind of frustrated because I didn't understand these characters, their overall intentions, where they come from, etc. ...so I went out and started reading the bios on the characters on the website. That helped me out a bunch and I recommend it even if you think you know all the characters. I'm sure they were dropping little details about each character I probably missed but I still don't think they flushed out every character in detail. To me, it felt like reading the bios of each character going in was almost a prerequisite and they should have almost plastered it on the pilot episode to do that before you even started getting into it.

 

I read the first and second book in the series and enjoyed both.