Is anybody else watching The Expanse?

But did wonder if this weird humanoid that pops up elsewhere was tied in. Only I'm not sure where the elsewhere is related to Venus.
Also not getting the drive thing that they cut back several decades to. Is it a standard feature of contemporary travel once discovered?

1. I think the weird humanoid on Ganymede is a sign that they haven't found ALL the research Protogen was involved in. Note: spoilers abound, so FYI do not google anything about this show, for reals - Sanpaku is like the least of our problems what with the immensely detailed, overlapping book/tv wiki pages that show up in results

2. The Epstein drive story was good world-building to give us background on Martian society and how the Belt was colonized. I don't know that it had a lot of other significance, I figure the guy just died and his "yacht" wound up drifting endlessly through space, out of the solar system, at 5% of the speed of light or whatever they said he got up to.

The writing room adores Jared Harris's Anderson Dawes (and Diogo played Andrew Rotilio), so we're seeing things that weren't hinted at until last year's book. This season, there's enough liberty taken with timelines that, for better or worse, the series may be approaching a fork between book and adaptation like the last couple of seasons of GoT. Readers may know the shape and dramatis personae, but can only speculate on how the jigsaw will be reassembled.

Holy cow, Jared Harris is Warhol in I Shot Andy Warhol...

Yeah, when he was in Mad Men I had one of them "he/I have gotten quite old" moments.

no series two for me yet so i am watching series one again, this time more carefully

I fully endorse this strategy. It turned out I missed a lot of stuff in the first few episodes. References sort of whiz past, like the expect you to just know the milieu already.

interim report: miller's hat annoys me even more the second time

Lol it is ridiculous.

I had forgotten that Miller was genuinely crooked - taking bribes, looking the other way. Unnecessarily violent. Kind of a nasty piece of work. Avsarala too starts off as a total villain.

He'd look a lot better with a classic trilby, that thing looks like something that would come with an Indiana Jones costume from a fancy dress shop. I liked the episode and follow up where the god-botherer mistakes his questions for some kind of benign curiosity.

had to look up the name of the guy everyone -- justifiably imo -- kept calling "anus"

hat was egregious

feel more inclined to forgive it now that he's not around :(

i'm not going to say NO SPOILERS as it's my fault for being in the thread at all when i know yr all halfway thru series two (and i already picked this plot point up)

i really think there's a lot of terrific stuff here -- i only started binge-watching about ten days ago, my first run through, and i'm finding it even more watchable the second time

It certainly rewards a second run through. Looking forward to doing that with this season although now I'm Expanse Trained I doubt there will be as much missed detail to pick up.

Miller's hat is there to help him store important clues and hide his phenomenally terrible haircut. In season two he resolves both issues.

honestly I've warmed to the haircut. Miller doesn't play by your ~space rules~ maaaaaaaaaaan.

love the, idk, "shades of the IRA" I'll call it, running through the Belter rhetoric in that standoff between Fred & the Jared Harris dude

There was some good fanwank in this episode but I'll keep Schtum.

Second watching of the first series is a must (or a 4th if your my wife). I loved the nods to how belters are different in the first episode that I don't notice at all first run through.

boyscout captain is treading a pretty thin line now, feel like it's gonna pretty splintered here pretty quick if he doesn't watch himself

minor thing i like: that everyone's mastered liquid-pouring in gravities where earth-style DOWN is a long way off

ha that is true!

hottest of takes: i am pro the accents

I f hated them at first, but Dutch S African/Caribbean belter dialect seems about right now.

I've been thinking about trying a Miller haircut.

jared harris in the latest one is fucking magisterial. the writers went to town on his discourse - this is the right word - with johnson and holden. straight outta the marc antony playbook.

observation: when there's an interraction between two (or more) CGI spaceships, esp.a hostile one, there are no visual clues what relative sizes they are

this doesn't happen with models i don't think

Personally, I think they should have gone with the Battlestar Galactica (recent) documentary style rather than a more cinematic style for ship interactions. BSG established shots for its battles as though a lone camera drone occupied a distant still point in space, and the camera would zoom on individual ships, pan with them as their relative position moved across the starfield, and shake with action. This provided distances, relative scales, motion, and energy. It brilliantly used the audience's familiarity with camera zooms to give context and verisimilitude.

The VFX head is a subreddit regular, and his justification for his style is aesthetics and comprehensibility, but scale is lost when the camera is flying in formation with the ships, always framing to keep everything in frame. The VFX team also doesn't have much knowledge of our solar system, Jupiter was turned 90° on its axis in Ep. 206 and will return in the wrong orientation later in this season. Ganymede felt like it was only one Jupiter diameter away from the cloud tops, whereas its really roughly 7. They could take inspiration from real imagery and gain tremendously.

i am now pro accents - i think it just takes a while to absorb the alot-ness of it

jared harris in the latest one is fucking magisterial. the writers went to town on his discourse - this is the right word - with johnson and holden. straight outta the marc antony playbook.

The blocking in these scenes is also lots of fun. Dawes very deliberately uses his distance, facing and direction every time he's talking to someone. Great contrast with the MCRN where everyone basically stands still while being incredibly pissed off all the time.

yeah. the way he touches people right before twisting the knife in. the whole thing is just amazing. you can see the delight he's taking in it, the coiled energy inside, sensing everyone's eyes on him, pushing just the right buttons at just the right times.

also feels like a well planned rhythm of formal echoes in terms of scenes mirroring one another? an obvious one is miller being pushed down into the airlock a couple of eps after he'd done the same to his snitch (in the exact same place), but it feels like there's many others

(i'm assuming deliberate bcz i think if the airlock business just arose twice as a function of the technical plot, the writers wd probably have worked at a non-mirroring way to do it? obviously the facts of the environment require return to the same kinds of bottlenecks quite often but this was in a largish colony city not a tiny little spaceship)

(kinda feel this point is v unclear)

I definitely get the impression that the writing and directing staff are aiming for that. Very little about the way this show is put together has felt "workmanlike" it's the golden age of TV goddamn it, SyFy Channel wants its own AMC show

are you talking about when johnson "spaced" the insurrectionist belter a few eps ago? i was thinking of that during dawes' speech. like "you're killin it dawg but um you might want to watch yr step"

Renewed for season 3.

Yay!

Yippee

*incomprehensible Belter celebratory slang*

Just got up to speed over a couple of weeks, love it! Such a pleasure to watch a sci-fi show that actually takes its world building seriously, unlike some of its predecessors (naming no names, rhymes with "Smattlebar Batactica"). None of the tropes or ideas are particularly new to a reader of hard SF, but they have been combined in a seamlessly fun and exciting way. The detail of the setting enables and enriches the story, and is never allowed to get in the way fo its telling. Season 2 has been relentless.

One downside is the underdevelopment some of the characters, particularly the crew of the Rosi. I'm not particularly fond of any of them, except maybe Amos. Naomi was cool at first, but now has become Little Miss Exposition pretty much. More peripheral characters such as Dawes and Miller tend to be better value. The kiwi chick is very well cast - though I don't know why Martians just have a bunch of different human accents. The consistency of the belter accent between actors isn't much better, tbh, but at least they're trying.

Last ep was terrific but I have a little plot whiplash. What happened to Dawes and Johnson? Psyched to find out what's happened on Venus - and how - if? - it relates to the mysterious firefight on Ganymede

The assailant without a vac suit is obviously made of protomolecule so there's a connection there - how direct a one remains to be seen.

The special effect that bothered me in this episode was the barf by that one poor martian schlub stepping out of the landing craft. I get that the easiest thing to do is just to have the extra fill their mouth with colored water and just spit it out on cue. But that's not what vomiting is. Vomiting is your stomach trying to evacuate itself as quickly as possible. Your stomach is bigger than your mouth. Screen puking should be more than a symbolic gesture, is what I'm saying, otherwise just have the actors make the ASL sign for vomit and save the mopping entirely.

What happened to Dawes and Johnson?

We are running up against the problem GoT has where these well built & populated worlds that work in a novel with chapters start to get really difficult to do in a 1-hour (much less 43-minute) block. Also as of the ep before this one it's officially Dawes and Drummer, not Dawes and Johnson, poor guy from the Wire has been completely eclipsed by his lieutenant why because she look interesting

Space Cutty is a bit po-faced.

Some of the cutting-into-chapters work in the second season made it a slog to make it through a few episodes for me. The problem with having lots of plot threads that need to play out in realtime is the inability to resolve anything at all in some episodes.

Have there been any episodes with action followed by another that follows a completely different group over the same time? I'm trying to think of examples from other series but I'm coming up blank -- basically the cliche where someone opens a door and exclaims "how are YOU here?" only for the next episode to run the same timeline from the perspective of the second party.

campaign for real space-puke

Tom i actually started wondering where they were specifically because I was like "where the hell did Drummer go, did she get killed while I wasn't watching?" Anyway yes - you're right - and it's not just the look either, her past seems just as interesting as either of those two belter marquee idols, hastily sketched as it is. MORE DRUMMER IN THE MONITOR PLEASE

I know they're not following the books very closely, but is there any chance Miller (Thomas Jane's character) shows back up in some way?

i don't know but i have to admit i miss the old kerouacky son of a bitch

I mean, having his last scene played against a woman who completely reconstituted her body via alien organism seems like the door was left open

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C7geyt5XQAYGCOt.jpg

HAPPY #TheExpanse DAY! From #Draomi @CaraGeeeee @ExpanseSyfy this is when we were shooting the handball scene and we already loved eachother

https://twitter.com/Mi55Tipper/status/844458801239609344

😍

right????????