Thoughts On Season Three And Four Of The Expanse

• Space is scarier than any serial killer, real or imagined.
• Serial killers generally only murder people in one way.
• Y’got your stranglers, your stabbers, your poisoners, etc.
• Specialists.
• Space, on the other hand, is a generalist: it has a thousand different deaths for you, each more bowel-loosening than the last.
• You could suffocate, decompress, cook, freeze, or take a micrometeroid going 1% of the speed of light to the forehead; it is worse than Camden, New Jersey.
• The reason for this is simple: human beings are not supposed to be there.
• No.
• That’s not true.
• The human body is not supposed to be in space.
• Human beings go everywhere.
• It’s our nature.
• “What’s over there?”
• “I dunno, but I bet there’s stuff.”
• “I love stuff.”
• “It’s the best. Let’s go.”
• Such is humanity.
• And such is The Expanse, seasons three and four of which I plunged up my asshole over the past day or so instead of bringing joy to the world or feeding a hungry child or culling some pythons.
• (Burmese pythons have infested South Florida; they have no natural predators and ample prey, and so have flourished. The local governments have responded by organizing hunting parties. That’s right: I live in a state with a Whacking Day.)
• Anyway, you know those marathon losers?
• I watched 23 episodes of a scientifictional teevee program in two days.
• Top that…
• Uh…
• I can’t think of a famous marathon runner.
• I wanna say Haile Salassie, but I think that might be racist.
• Fuck it, I’m doing research.

• HAHA!
• SEE?
• NOT RACIST.
• I was a little off, but I mostly got it.

Excuse me.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. You can’t just drop us out of the Bullet Points like that.

I can. I did. Accept the new reality and move forward. 

I feel violated.

This is supposed to be about The Expanse. Write about the program, please.

I was getting to it. The path to Mars runs directly through Haile Gebresalassie.

That sentence has never been written before.

Yay me!

• As I was saying, The Expanse is about the spaceships in the same way the Fast & the Furious series is about the cars: not at all.
• They’re both about family.
• Sadly, The Expanse does not contain a scene in which the crew of the Rocinante gathers round a table with some Space Coronas and toasts to Fam-blee.
• That’s how Vin Diesel says “family.”
• I don’t get why that fucker’s famous.
• He’s like a troll for a shitty bridge; the Throgg’s Neck, maybe.
• The Rocinante is the good guy’s bitchin’ ride.
• Okay, The Expanse is a little bit about the spaceships.
• Y’got the blocky, truncheon-shaped Roci, which is a gunship our heroes stole (sorta) from the Martian Navy, and the Behemoth, a massive hollow drum built to generate spin gravity, and the Guy Molinari, which is named the Guy Molinari.
• If you create a fictional world in which a United Nations warship is named the Guy Molinari, then I will be interested in that fictional world.
• That’s the kind of attention to detail I prefer in my entertainment.
• And everybody zips and boings around the solar system shooting at one another and stroking out during hard braking maneuvers.
• Physics are very important in The Expanse, except when they’re not.
• At one point in season four, the magical aliens from beyond the stars literally turn the physics off.
• Oh, yes.
• Magical aliens from beyond the stars.
• They always pop up.
• And they’re completely incapable of having a normal conversation.
• Always with the inscrutable technology appearing out of nowhere, and mindgames.
• It’s always mind games with magical aliens from beyond the stars.
• NO ONE KNOWS WHAT YOU MEAN, SPACE BABY.
• Are you telling me that immortal fourth-dimensional beings can’t learn English?
• I learned English, and I’m a moron.
• Surely, they could take a course, or download that Duolingo app.
• Nope, Space Babies and dream sequences.
• Infuriating conversationalists, magical aliens from beyond the stars are.
• Anyway, the show was cancelled by SyFy Network despite a positive critical response and solid ratings after three seasons; a bunch of nerds protested and yelled, and Amazon picked the production up.
• The taxonomic name for a bunch of nerds is a “con.”
• You can tell, too.
• SO MANY EFF-WORDS.
• Space cursin’.
• The accents are delightfully all over the place.
• Pretty much everyone from Earth speaks uninflected middle American, also known as Broadcaster English, except for the Secretary-General, who has the upper-class Indian accent her spectacular saris suggest.
• And that’s where the cohesion stops.
• Mars is a mess.
• One actor’s got the thickest New Zealish accent on teevee, another’s clearly from California, a third is a black guy from Philly using his natural voice.
• One of our heroes, the pilot of the Rocinante, is from Mars, and he has a Fake Texas accent.
• Straight-up calling people “Hoss” and tipping his imaginary Stetson to ladies.
• This comes from the books, by the way.
• Apparently, the residents of Mars’ Mariner Valley are really into cowboy shit, so everyone sounds like John Wayne.
• The Belters are the best, though.
• They alternate between English and Lang Belta, which is called a creole by the dominant culture, and a language by those who speak it.
• (A creole is neither a dialect nor a pidgin. A dialect is a subspecies of a language, generally based on location, that shares a grammar with the parent tongue. A pidgin is a simplified combination of two languages, generally used for trade. A creole has vocabulary from two or more lexicologies, but its own grammatical rules.)
•  And this Belter language comes with an accent.
• More precisely, several similar but not quite identical accents.
• The delightful Jared Harris, who excels in doing ludicrous voices, chooses a mutant Cockney for his character.
• Many of the other players go with what could be called Vaguely Samoan.
• Except for these two magnificent bastards:

• She sounds like a Dragon Lady, and he sounds like a Drunken Yorkshireman, and half the time they’re not even speaking English.
• It’s like the Wookiee segments of the Star Wars Christmas Special, but with more eye makeup.
• That picture isn’t doing her mascara any favors.
• Look at this bullshit:

• What’s hotter than a Space Goth chick?
• Nothing, that’s what.
• To balance out the sexism: the dudes take their shirts off, and they are muscley beefcakes with no body hair at all.
• How, precisely, one gets swole in low gravity on a diet of protein paste and vitamin supplements is not explained.
• I haven’t even told you about the main characters yet.
• How rude of me.
• Four heroes on the Rocinante; they voyage among the stars getting into scrapes and learning lessons and enjoying friendship.
• Your traditional scientifictional character slots are filled.
• The Hotshot Pilot, who is played by an actor who looks so much look Taika Waititi that eventually I stopped correcting myself and now think of him as Taika Waititi.
• The Redemption-Seeking Brute.
• The Scotty.
• The Captain.
• And it is here, Enthusiasts, that I’m going Full Woke.
• I’m making it about race.
• The Scotty should be the Captain, but the Scotty is a black lady, and even in space, black ladies get fucked.
• All of the events of the series–events in which millions of people died–are precipitated by him walking into an obvious trap.
• Plus he’s just bad luck.
• Captain gets on a ship, ship gets blown up; Captain visits a settlement, settlement comes to life and hurls itself into Venus.
• You ‘ll never guess what Captain did when he found an impossibly ancient megastructure abandoned by extinct aliens and/or elder gods.
• Of course he touched it.
• Began fiddling with it immediately.
• Bare-handed, too.
• Jesus, man.
• At least keep your damn gloves on when you start fingering the extrasolar object.
• Scotty would’ve kept her gloves on.
• Scotty knows better, and also Scotty had just got her nails did.
• SPACE IS RACIST.
• Okay, go watch the show.
• (And the first one’s free, just like those mythical drug dealers we were warned about as children. I spent half my life looking for that guy.)