April 16: The Expanse 3x07

[kinetic_elaboration]

Back to the Expanse. I thought this episode was pretty good but I think that comes mostly from my appreciation for (reasonable!) time skips and the show kind of needing, or at least benefiting from, a refresh.

Stuff I liked:

Chrisjen’s outfit in the opening. Not enough Chrisjen in general but she is looking good at least.

Alex and Bobbie getting to chat Martian-to-Martian. That was really cute! I like a good chat between characters that actually makes them seem like real people and develops relationships.

The documentary concept. This could still go sideways but I’m interested so far. I don’t know how I feel about the Roci being sort of famous actually… I guess it would be but…. Something something about how the universe of this show is developed. I’m not sure how I would do it better or even differently but something about it doesn’t gel for me. But yeah, sure, they would probably be making headlines, and the idea they’d now be litigating how they got their ship and so on, being normal after all the emergencies and chaos, and being less isolated/having someone around to see them through more objective eyes, is compelling enough.

Amos. A great Amos episode. I miss Prax and I miss Amos & Prax, and I love Amos getting to, like, show some emotion about his very bestest friend ever. (Way better than that weird little existential journey he took last season for like 2 episodes? Does anyone remember that? What happened to that?) Amos is definitely top 3 for me, maybe my favorite character. Also—bisexual vibes. (Another sidenote: I tried to look this up and immediately ran into Biphobia. You can’t go anywhere on the internet these days.)

 

The return of stuff about the Belt. I really find the Belt the most compelling world building on this show and that wretched bait and switch where I was pulled in with Noir Mystery on the Belt and then left with Boring Ass War Between Two Very Similar Societies is a sin I will never forgive this show for. I do feel like this story is still warming up and I’m not sure what it will look. I don’t care for Drummer to be quite honest. I know she’s the fave of a lot of people and hey, Bobbie grew on me, so it’s all possible. But so far, whatever. But I’m very open to moving more plot to this particular society. I don’t fully get WHY they’re… more of an independent nation (?) now? But they seem to be. So, good for them.

Exposition. Thank you Lord finally some dialogue-based summarization of the plot.

Stuff I didn’t like:

Honestly, nothing specific per se… I am glad the war story is over but I feel like the whole thing was rather anticlimactic to be honest. The most specific I can get with this is that we see almost all of it from the perspective of the Elites—there’s that bait and switch again! And it also made the actual suffering and… I dunno… war of it all feel very distant and hypothetical. And the only times we left the UN building were to be on the Roci, whose inhabitants are also, if in a different way, far removed from the war on the ground, as it were. So to be honest it all felt very low-stakes and distant and boring, and I never got into it. And now it’s just over. I mean the last ep did tie things together in a pretty satisfactory way, across all the stories, and I liked that. But the entirety of the story line just feels like… we talked this up for 2 seasons and it’s kinda come to… that. Okay. It just lacked the human element of, say, Prax’s search for his daughter. And no, Anna, the most annoying character on Earth, did not provide it with her little speeches and moralizing.

I don’t really know what would have helped though because this show DOES try to pull together all of its settings and storylines and to humanize big, general plots by using specific characters with small arcs. It does this all the time, quickly throwing us in with one small ship or one small group. And I wish I could say it works for me but it just doesn’t because I don’t really care about any of these people and I don’t expect most of them to stick around for very long—like this… racing…Belter guy today. I don’t know what was up with him but he’s dead now. Glad we spent 15 minutes out of 45 on him. Or remember that really, really long one-episode-long story about that guy who like invented or discovered something, which he himself narrated even though this show has almost no narration? Yeah, what was the point of that?

I realize I’m disagreeing with… my whole dash on this but I’m not really into most of these characters. I think the character-building is mid at best. There are definitely some I do like (Chrisjen, Amos, Alex, and increasingly Bobbie… also Prax but I suspect he’s gone now… end of list?). But even most of the mains are just kind of…. there. I don’t know. I think the way to enjoy this show is to really care about the plot and the set pieces because not even the main characters get a whole ton of time (or, may I say, depth?) and there is really no particular continuity of place outside of the Roci. There’s nothing to really settle into and feel comfortable in, at least for me.

But the show is also obviously at an inflection point here and I’m interested in the second half of the season and curious where it will go.