June 18: The Expanse 3x11

[kinetic_elaboration]

Returned to The Expanse after quite a break and completely unsurprisingly I literally have no idea what’s going on. This show is SO hard to get into from a standstill, it’s like the only way it can be comprehensible is if you’re watching it episode after episode. I feel like part of this is the lack of exposition I always harp on but this episode did in fact have some exposition. It’s probably also that I just literally do not care enough and zone out all the time and find a lot of it dull. But I think it’s probably something else, too. I don’t know what.

Not a lot really… happened in this ep. But then does anything ever really happen? Maybe it’s because there are so many storylines or maybe I just have too high a bar for ‘something happening’ but it’s like every episode is either Big Action Scenario for a whole 45 minutes or else just water treading or aftermath. Also I think there are often too many stories per episode. Like in this one, even the characters who appeared got, what, 2 scenes each other? Except for Drummer and Belter Guy with Scars who got half the episode to be stuck in some machinery, talking.

I also realized pretty late that almost no characters I cared about were featured in any way today, when Naomi found Alex and then Amos and I was like ‘oh yeah, the Roci crew, huh, forgot they were the main characters allegedly.’ I did like getting to see Bobbie. Yet again she just sort of carries everything around her and is so obviously more interesting and dynamic than almost anyone else. That Chrisjen is entirely absent from the whole back half of this season is a literal crime.

Also I can’t believe Tilly, one of the few characters with any humor at all, was killed off. And I STILL need to deal with Anna. Counting down the episodes until she exits stage left.

Eh. I’m just bitter because I didn’t feel like I could follow anything so I paid less attention so I followed less and thus a downward spiral.

I just wish this show was so much tighter and that either its characters were better or it focused on a smaller group of the more strongly drawn ones. There are some I do really like! But so often they either aren’t appearing or they’re getting like 1 scene in an episode, and even if a character gets a storyline, there are so many that it just… doesn’t come out to much. I don’t think the show works basically at all unless you’re really invested in the overall plot and care mostly equally about all of its dimensions and I am so far from being in that position.