January 27: The Expanse 5x06

[kinetic_elaboration]

Another perfectly functional episode of The Expanse. I didn’t hate it; I didn’t love it.

Most of the run time was made up of the Amos and Clarissa story, which I found to be kind of the definition of serviceable. I’ve seen this type of story before: a quasi-bottle story, two characters against the wilderness, taking the beat to simultaneously be extremely concerned with their mere survival but also Talk Stuff Out. Honestly, it reminded me of the Pine Barrens, and my first thought after I realized that is that it’s very bold to imitate one of the best and most famous episodes of TV ever lol. And it definitely wasn’t as good or as interesting but it was perfectly fine by the standards of this show.

I realize this is damning with faint praise, it’s just… I feel so whatever about this. Even Amos is kind of boring me now, I think because his whole thing—his stoic, violent, lieutenant vibe—works better when he’s not at the center of the narrative, even his own side narrative. I think he’s best as a side character. I get why he’s being put more in the center and given more of his own thing, since I suspect he was a fan favorite while the show was on, but I don’t think it’s his best use. I did find it funny that he ended the episode saying out loud what I’ve been thinking this whole season: we gotta get the band back together, because when the show splits them up and then tries to follow all of them, it just isn’t as good.

I guess probably Marco/his crew and Drummer were the next biggest story. I feel a lot of lost potential with Marco and the whole Marco & Naomi & Filip family in general and my frustration about that takes over my brain during their scenes. Nothing really new here. Similarly, Drummer’s ship of polyamorous pirates sure should work well on paper, and maybe part of the reason it doesn’t work for me is that I’m not paying enough attention when they are all on screen, but it’s just too many new characters and too distant a story line to be introduced with such little screen time overall. I can’t keep up with them, which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.

I did think that Drummer was the first character to make Marco interesting by actually talking back to him and being funny. Not a lot of funny people on this show! She’s not funny most of the time, either. But the bar is low so lines like “where’s your throne?” worked. There were also hints, in their conversation, of something almost-interesting in the Marco story, like where he talked about Earth controlling the Belt through agriculture, and the Belt finally being almost ready to compete using new tech (although if it will take 10 years maybe now is a little early to start literally dropping bombs…), and the line “We were already at war, you just couldn’t see it because they were killing us slowly.”

I’m interested in Chrisjen’s story line probably the most but she was only in one scene, which was sort of a bummer. Really teasing me there, honestly. I think, in addition to her just being great, her story is the most familiar political-suspense story in the show, and I feel comfortable in it. I’m also interested in the world building around Earth, which has always been sort of spotty, but intriguing.

Similarly, Holden was in this for a hot minute, and I don’t really know what he was doing other than that that journalist was there. And Alex and Bobbie got one action-adventure scene I didn’t really pay attention to.

I can’t believe this season is halfway over. I kinda feel like nothing’s happened in a while? Like what really happened in this episode? I feel like all of the story lines were treading water other than Drummer meeting Marco, and that the Amos and Clarissa plot line was sort of a standalone, character study type thing more than anything else. Which, like, isn’t bad necessarily. It’s just weird to look around, realize the season is more than halfway through, and it kinda feels like the plot could have happened in one efficient episode?