#MAINS CALL. ( chrisjen avasarala. )

[kadytimberfox]

Kady's Expanse (Re)Watch Blog

Episode 1.01 - "Dulcinea" (Pilot)

And here we go for my...fourth time I've watched this episode I think? It's a really wonderful pilot that does so much work with introducing you to the world, our cast of characters, and setting up the threads of the main plot and does it all perfectly in a very tight 45 minutes. It reminds me a lot of Deep Space Nine's pilot "The Emissary" which is similarly a masterclass in tight storytelling and how to properly kick off a new series.

And speaking of kicking off a new series, hey! I'm watching this show that I absolutely adore again and I'm going to take the time to spout my thoughts about it on the internet because that seems like a fun idea! I really enjoy thinking about media critically but I've never taken the time to write down my thoughts before. It's a style of writing I've always wanted to try so where better to do that than a Tumblr blog? I'll try to keep these Brief and Not Boring but no guarantees on either. Especially on this one. It's the pilot, after all.

I also want to keep this as light on spoilers as possible; again though, no guarantees. Also if you haven't seen this show yet just go fucking watch it it's so good.

Later in this post is a description of torture that happens in the episode. I marked it with a TW and formatted the text to make it distinct from the rest of the post.

With that out of the way, there's nothing left to do except pick apart this pilot!

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Summary

We kick off with a bang (and then some more banging) as we see a young woman named "Julie" fight her way out of a locked compartment, explore the darkened hallways of her Completely Fucked Spaceship, and watch her friends get eaten alive by some evil blue space goop. Surely none of that will be important later.

Cut to the adventures of hard-boiled Belter detective Joe Miller and his new Earthling partner Dimitri Havelock. They're private cops for an Earth corporation who theoretically maintain order on Ceres Station in the Asteroid Belt, the biggest shithole this side of pretty much anywhere. They go to a murder scene and do basically nothing, antagonize and then arrest people minding their own business at a bar, and take a bribe to half-ass a health inspection. Y'know, classic cop stuff.

Back at the precinct, Miller gets an off-the-books job from his boss to find one Juliette Andromeda Mao, daughter of megacorp magnate Jules-Pierre Mao and coincidentally the spitting image of "Julie" from our opening scene. Apparently, her pro-Belter activism is starting to piss off dear old dad and they want her to come home before she embarrasses the family any further.

In the middle of his investigation, he finds out that those air filters he "inspected" earlier crapped out and poisoned some children. Instead of taking accountability for not doing his job, he decides to throw the sleazy air filter guy into an airlock and only lets him out after he promises not to fuck it up next time. And also to pay Miller double. I'll let it slide though because Sleazy Air Filter Guy is an asshole.

Back on Earth, United Nations Undersecretary Chrisjen Avasarala shows up for about five minutes in this episode. The only thing she does is torture a guy. End scene.

Meanwhile, the good ship Canterbury is on its way to Ceres with a big haul of space ice that the station needs to turn into water. Second Officer James Holden gets immediately promoted, much to his dismay, because his previous boss Mike Ehrmantraut went insane from being out in space too long.

Mystery strikes when the gang gets a weird distress signal from a ship called the Scopuli. Captain McDowell, probably having watched enough Star Trek episodes to know that this can't be anything good, decides to ignore it. Holden just can't stop himself from doing a good thing, though, and secretly reports the signal, officially making the Canterbury Legally Obligated™ to investigate.

He picks his away team (unknowingly also picking the people he's going to spend the rest of this show with) and takes a shuttle to investigate the drifting Scopuli, where they find everything shut down except for the beacon that brought them here. "Pirate bait", or so it seems.

Suddenly, McDowell advises the away team that a very scary ship has appeared out of nowhere and that they need to get the hell out of there. The gang gets back on the shuttle just in time for the mystery ship to fire not just regular torpedoes, but nuclear torpedoes at them. The torpedoes close to zero...and then continue streaking towards the Canterbury.

Holden tells McDowell to eject the space ice to form a protective barrier, but he refuses, apparently willing to die rather than lose his payday. The payday (and everything else aboard) is lost anyway, however, as the Canterbury erupts into the most beautiful supernova I've ever seen.

"She's gone. They nuked her. She's gone."

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My thoughts

So this is where I actually have to do the analysis thing. Since the beginning of this show is split into three primary subplots that all deal with a different piece of the Julie puzzle (a narrative device that I fucking love, by the way), I'll divide things up by talking about each one individually because that just makes sense.

Before I do that though, I just want to briefly say that that opening scene with Julie on the Scopuli is just the perfect opening to this show. It immediately gives us a very brief glimpse inside the puzzle box that our main cast is going to spend all of this season (and most of this show) trying to open. It's quick, it's tense, it's completely terrifying, and it's unforgettable if you've seen it.

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Miller on Ceres:

And we follow up that perfect opening scene with a perfect choice for which of these three main threads to start with. The thing that's great about dividing up the characters like this is that each of them only has a piece of what's going on with Julie and the Scopuli, but no one has the full picture. Miller, though, gets the most information off the bat and is the only person in the main cast who's looking for Julie specifically, so it's only natural that we should start with him.

His story is also the inspiration for the title of this episode, "Dulcinea". For those of you who aren't big Don Quixote fans, it's a reference to Quixote's fantasy lover that he invents because he styles himself as a knight and, of course, every knight needs his damsel. He describes her in excruciating detail; she's royalty in a far-off land who is the epitome of feminine beauty, the ideal of Womanhood Incarnate--or his vision of it at least.

And the deeper Miller goes in his investigation, the more quixotic he gets with his idea of who Julie is. He's never met or spoken to Julie, but as he unravels her activities prior to departing on the Scopuli, he becomes increasingly obsessed with her, imagining what kind of a person she must be, picking apart every little detail and transposing it onto his vision of what her life must be like. I'm sure he would call it "being a good detective", but it's much more than that to him.

Throughout Miller's jaunt around town with Havelock, they banter back and forth, and through their conversations, we get a great sense of their personalities. Whereas Miller is the grizzled veteran who's had his morality thoroughly beaten out of him, Havelock is a by-the-book rookie cop who seems genuinely interested in learning about Belters, if only so that he can police them more effectively.

It's a very tried-and-true buddy cop pairing, but it works really well here. Havelock gets to be our audience surrogate for this story as we learn more about how Ceres and Belters operate.

This thread has the biggest worldbuilding burden out of the three and it pulls it off so well. We get so much about life in the Belt, the politics of the Solar System, the Outer Planets Alliance, or OPA (who will definitely be showing up later), and the logistics of maintaining a huge population of humans on a space station. And none of it feels clunky or awkward in the slightest. It's exactly the style of worldbuilding I loved in "The Emissary" from Deep Space Nine.

Ceres itself also has huge DS9 vibes, and not in a good way. The set design team did such a good job making this place look old, weathered, and completely falling apart. Except, of course, for the nice apartment buildings where the cops, off-worlders, and everyone else rich enough to ignore the seedy underbelly get to live.

There are a ton of fantastic, evocative lines in this arc, but I think my favorite is Miller's deadpan proclamation that "There are no laws on Ceres, just cops." A perfect summary of everything we see on screen about how power is wielded in this place.

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Chrisjen on Earth:

This is the shortest thread where the least happens, but it will grow into one of my favorites. We don't get too much additional insight into what's going on, but we do get two important things: 1) Chrisjen Avasarala is a stone-cold bitch who thinks the OPA are terrorists, and 2) the OPA are apparently trying to get their hands on illegal stealth technology, which doesn't help with the whole "terrorism" thing.

This links up to both Miller's and Holden's subplots: we know about the OPA from Miller, and the ship that eventually blows up the Cant was using Martian stealth tech. Of course, since Holden and crew have no idea about the OPA, they immediately start thinking that Mars is out to get them, which will continue to play into the story going forward.

!-- TW: DESCRIPTION OF TORTURE --!

Also important to note is that Chrisjen is getting this information through the most brutal torture I've seen on TV in a long time: forcing a Belter whose body can't handle Earth's gravity to stand for hours on end by holding him up with hooks under his arms. After Chrisjen goes on and on about his "weak Belter lungs and brittle Belter bones", she coldly turns around and tells them to hold him up for another 10 hours. "If he survives, call me."

!-- TW ENDS --!

Fucking ghoulish, and definitely not a good look for Madam Undersecretary's first appearance. You're gonna have to trust me now when I say that she becomes one of my favorite characters in the main cast. This is about as bad as she gets, but she continues being manipulative and cold-blooded for most of this show. That's just who she is. To me, it's part of what makes this subplot of scheming at the UN so engaging.

We'll be seeing a lot more of Chrisjen going forward, and she'll get much better. At the very least, she will stop torturing this guy. But only because someone will tell her not to.

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Holden on the Canterbury:

If Miller's story shows us life in the Belt and Chrisjen's shows us the politics of the Solar System, Holden's thread is all about life onboard a spaceship, which is important because we're going to be spending a lot of time on spaceships. This is also the part of the episode that has the most CG and honestly it holds up really really well. I know it's less than a decade old and they probably got a lot of money for the pilot but still! It looks great!

I'll drop a brief shoutout here as well for the ship designs in this show. They knocked it out of the goddamn park with the Cant's design: it's a big, boxy, dull gray, ugly thing that looks designed to haul ice and do literally nothing else. Everything is so practical and, above all else, plausible. They look like humans from the near future built them and that's the highest compliment I can give them.

There are shades of the first act of "Alien" here as we are essentially dropped into the Cant in the middle of its mission and get to see the camaraderie and hierarchy between all the members of the crew. We also get to know more about Holden, and immediately he begins showing us his defining character trait: he wields a lot of authority and respect, but he hates being in charge.

We see this in the very first scene onboard the Cant when one of the ice haulers, Paj, gets his arm severed while working outside the ship. He seems completely unfazed by this, though, since the company will send him a prosthetic and he's been working for them long enough to get a really good one.

Not only does this happen often enough that the company just buys prosthetics as a cost of doing business, there are literally tiers of coverage depending on years of service. What an optimistic future this is turning out to be.

Paj pleads with Holden to make sure the company doesn't send him a "used" arm (a frightening thought), to which Holden replies with something that he will continue to say, in so many words, over and over: "I'm just another clock-puncher like you." Holden knows he has authority on the Cant, but all he wants to be is a clock-puncher, which he makes very clear to pretty much everyone he talks to, including Captain McDowell when he essentially forces the XO job onto him.

Later on, we get our first glimpse at Holden's other primary personality trait, that being that he is The Main Character and therefore the most kind-hearted soul that can exist in this cold, selfish world. He logs the distress signal they received from the Scopuli, thereby ensuring that they'll have to divert from Ceres (and lose their on-time bonus) in order to investigate.

He shares this privately with Chief Engineer Naomi Nagata before the shuttle mission, to which her only reply is to tell him to keep that to himself. Fair play, considering she was just talking about how she wanted to strangle the little fucking do-gooder before she realized it was her new XO. Excuse me, Acting XO.

Before the shuttle launch, we're briefly introduced to the rest of the away team: the aforementioned Naomi; her mechanic Amos Burton, whose defining character trait is doing whatever Naomi tells him to do; ship's pilot Alex Kamal, who we previously saw being an annoying blabbermouth on the Cant; and Med-Tech Shed Garvey, who sewed up Paj's arm and wants everyone to know that he does not want to be here. Yes, his first name really is Shed.

Most of this part of the episode is setting up what'll happen next so we don't get a lot of time with any of these guys, but we'll have time for some great character work in the coming episodes.

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And that said, what a great setup for what comes next! Nearly all of the people we just got to know on the Cant are vaporized by a mysterious ship, there's a cloud of space debris hurtling toward Holden's little shuttle, and we have a hell of a puzzle box to dig into. Did Mars blow up the Cant? Did the OPA? Why would either of them want to? What does it all have to do with Julie and the Scopuli? And what the hell was that fucking space goo??

Despite covering so much ground in this pilot, The Expanse makes it very clear that we've barely scratched the surface. And even though I've already seen this whole show and know where it's going, it took everything I had to not hit the "next episode" button.

I will be doing that very soon though because I had a blast writing this up and I definitely want to keep doing it! Apologies that this one ran so long -- I assumed I was going to write a lot with this being the first episode and everything but I had so many thoughts that didn't make it into this post. I'm sure I'll be refining the format as we go along as well.

If you read all the way to here, I'm genuinely flattered and I hope you have a wonderful day.

~ Kady <3

[romilly-jay]

Upon Seeing a Portrait of a Fine Young Lady and Realising That I Would Really Rather Like to BE Her (// and then reading her bio and realising i) this instinct was correct and ii) she was 1000% more badass than I'm constitutionally likely ever to be)

This portrait was in the final room [I think!] of Tate Britain's recent exhibition of art by women in Britain, 1520 - 1920.

Isn't she marvellous? Well, I think she is, anyway. I either want to BE her or be WITH her, either way (neither possible, of course, but hey).

This is the description of the portrait given in The Guardian's review of the exhibition (didn't realise it referenced this image but perhaps it's so startlingly True to the person that the nod was inevitable?)

‘Modern bravado’: The Music Room, 1912, Ethel Wright’s portrait of the suffragette Una Dugdale Duval. Photograph: Private collection

As mentioned, Guardian reviewer Laura Cumming calls out the Una Dugdale Duval portrait in her review of the exhibition so hurrah for unexpectedly having overlapping taste with a Proper Connoisseur (this almost never happens to me as I'm wired to be Scandalously, Unapologetically Lowbrow). Also, found that my experience of the exhibition lined up very closely to LC's main point, which is that the story rather overwhelms the art. [I can't comment on the observation that lesser works are chosen to represent the artists in qu, due to being unfamiliar with the full oeuvre of the women in general, which might possibly be because they're not well known but is certainly also to do with my being SUL, as outlined above.]

This is the closing extract from LC's review, link also provided:

Only rarely do women’s art and women’s history spark together in this show. You see it in Ethel Wright’s fabulous 1912 portrait of the suffragette Una Dugdale Duval, in an arsenical green dress beneath a wallpaper of ludicrous fighting cocks, where Wright’s modern bravado exactly meets that of her sitter. And you see it in Gwen John’s immortal 1902 self-portrait*, small and distanced, light catching her eyelashes in an atmosphere of hushed stillness, so direct and yet so self-contained: the momentous assertion of reticence. That epochal image appears on the exhibition posters, perhaps promising too much. [*AND the self portrait in qu is the landing page image so should be visible in the exhibition link (??).]

For even the best of the artists here are occasionally represented by the least of their works, quite apart from the mystifying omissions.

The theme of Now You See Us is undoubtedly riveting.

The captions (and the excellent catalogue) are superbly written. But art is trumped by social history too often in this show, words overshadowing images.

Not entirely coincidentally, this is the fictional (hero/person) who also came to mind as I considered Una Dugdale's portait - The Expanse's uber politician and genuine badass, Chrisjen Avasarala, as portrayed in the TV series by Shohreh Aghdashloo:

[I googled to check how to spell the name and found this thread on Reddit, which if the link works, caught my attention because it made a pretty much immediate link between CA and her use of fashion, including one contributor referencing the following snip of dialogue:

"How'd she look?" // "Fine." // "No, I mean what was she wearing?" ]

Read via the following online profile that Una also bought a second portrait from Ethel Wright and that this is in the National Portrait Gallery. The bio where this is mentioned doesn't reference the Wright portrait of Una herself, which is a shame bcz IMO it's notably better.

Mind you, having looked up Una Duval (her married name), turns out that the family has held onto the portrait (theirs is the "private collection" mentioned in the attribution) and gave away the OTHER one and 100% that's the decision I would also have made.

[Perhaps it's hard to make a "charismatic leader" look like a real human being when presumably the point of the image is to make her look like a divine messenger of some kind, her message blessed.]

This is an extract (link to full bio follows).

Quote

"-"  Una Dugdale when asked if she promised to obey her husband.

On 13 January, 1912, Una married Victor Duval at the Savoy Chapel. She scandalised society by refusing to include the word obey in her vows. She was advised that if she did not, the marriage would not be legal. However, at the wedding, she did not repeat obey after the clergyman spoke.  He said that he hoped there would be an amended form of the service created.  The Mirror ran the headline, ‘The Bride Who would Not Promise to Obey.’

Una’s husband set up the Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement. Una wrote about her wedding in a pamphlet ‘To love, honour, but not obey.’

Una planted an Araucaria Imbricata on 7 February 1911.

Later Life

After the First World War Una brought up her two daughters. She was a co-founder and treasurer of the Suffragette Fellowship, an organisation to preserve the memory of the militant suffrage struggle. Una also bought a full length portrait of Christabel Pankhurst by Ethel Wright, which she later gave to the National Portrait Gallery. [Looks like the gift is attributed to a later descendent - it wasn't given to the NPG until 2011 - a death duty deal perhaps?]

Una died in St Stephen's Hospital, Chelsea, London, on 24 February 1975.

[prophecyread]

like and or reply to this post if you would like to be considered a main go to for writing and scheming and plot ideas that i come up with for this character.  i would prefer that we’d had some ic or ooc interactions but honestly if you just really love this character and want to do something, feel free to hit the heart.  

i do require that we be mutuals.  if you are following me and or a side blog and i don’t follow you you can always send me a politely worded message asking me to check out your blog etc. but please be patient and respect my right to not follow or write with someone if i am not comfortable for any reason!  

being a main means i will randomly poke you with ideas, might drop starters, memes, make aesthetics, gif sets etc. for us and that you will be among those i go to first with any new plot arcs that i come up with.  if at any time you are no longer interested in being a main, simply let me know and i will remove your name from the list below.  

if you are a multi please reply or send me an inbox or im message with what character(s) of yours you see as being best compatible with CHRISJEN so that i can make notes accordingly.

if you don’t know the character but would like to get more info on them to make a decision about whether you want to be a main you can check out my master navigation post HERE or the character list HERE which has primary links to info here & on the web.  some of them don’t have a lot of info up here yet but wiki links should be semi helpful for the basics.  you can also check out bio, headcanons, verse write ups if there are any.  videos i post here can be incredibly insightful for basic overview / dialogue / syntax / personality / general clues about the characters and whether you think yours is compatible.  you are always welcome to send specific questions you have to my inbox.  there might be a few with very little info actually available, or none at all, and i apologize for that - i am working on getting some basic info up for everyone but i am crazy busy with real life responsibilities right now and sometimes i just want to focus on ic writing rather than blog organization & info.  

MAINS for Chrisjen Avasarala.

tbd

tbd

tbd

tbd

tbd

[amhamwrites]

Saw this going around so I made my own list. In no particular order, here are my favorite female characters from different fandoms.

1. Minerva McGonagall - Harry Potter

Probably because I used to be a teacher. McGonagall is no nonsense with a heart, and I love that.

2. Princess Leia - Orig. Star Wars

Feminine and strong.

3. Mara Jade Skywalker - Orig. SW EU (because I won’t call them Legends because that’s stupid)

Mara is Luke’s perfect foil. While the rest of the galaxy worships the Jedi Master, Mara’s always testing him and challenging him. She’s tough, pessimistic, and fierce.

4. Ainsley Hayes - The West Wing

Constantly dropping nukes on people’s expectations of her.

I just love that a show that focuses on left wing politics included a smart, witty, female Republican to challenge the worldview of the main characters. It elevated the show so much, and I just wish they’d kept her on longer.

5. Chrisjen Avasarala - The Expanse

Expletive-spewing, BS-intolerant, Grandma Boss of all planet Earth 💪

6. Princess Anne - The Crown

Oh, hello royal family with all your passive aggressive politeness. It’d be a shame if someone were to disrupt all that with their brutal honesty and mirth. *clutches pearls*

7. Princess Jasmine - Disney

Speaks her mind. Wears pants. Has a Tiger.

8. Rory Gilmore - Gilmore Girls

Books and wit 👌

9. Elizabeth Bennett - Jane Austen

Books and wit and epic comebacks

10. Beatrice - Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing

Wit and epic comebacks

11. Michael Burnham - Star Trek Discovery

Tough as nails 👊

So basically I love female characters who are sassy, tough, and get 💩 done. 🙌🙌

[drivingsideways]

N, s, u for the fandom meme!

Questions from this meme

N - Name three things you wish you saw more or in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice)

I’m sort of in between fandoms (despite the SPN resurgence fml) but I think in the TKEM fandom like in all other fandoms, it’s always (a) more women (b) more women in relationships romantic or not with other women and (c) more women. 

I also admit to being part of the problem here what with the way I latched on to one m/m ship like my life depended on it, but in my defense I also did spend a quite lot of time writing about the women. * slinks away *

S - Show us an example of your personal headcanon (prompts optional but encouraged)

Ah, for you, from SPN rather than Black Sails, for a change? :D 

Re: Castiel, angel of the Lord, and Naomi, who is an Angel of the Lord

Cas’s rebellions are all tiny, but they keep getting added to the pile- that time when he didn’t kill ALL of Egypt’s first born, or that time he saved this kid who was supposed to die while out hunting for food in the forest for himself and his orphaned siblings, and almost did, but oops, that’s one bengal tiger that most definitely shouldn’t have been seen in northern mongolia? and  that messed up that whole timeline in an unbelievable way right down to five centuries later, and Naomi’s entire staff was working overtime for twenty cycles to fix the fall out (and think of what that means for creatures that are basically, eternal?), and listen, call her petty, but every time she hits the reset button on him, she feels a visceral satisfaction, she’s fucking earned it, and in time it’s a game, even, on a day she’s bored, she might even do something that leaves temptation strewn right across his path, and LISTEN. It was Anael who was supposed to have saved Dean Winchester, but that one had other ideas, what was this, maybe it was infectious? But fine, the rules are she’s going to have to send in someone from Anael’s battalion, and she really didn’t want to send Cas, but then somehow this fuck had gone and gotten himself into the post of second-in-command while her attention was on 2nd century Medea, and listen, Uriel, this is a BAD IDEA, Zachariah, you fucking pompous middle management incompetent, what makes you think you know more about this stupid shit than I do, oh fine, on your head be it, and don’t come crying to me and yeah, look? SHE WAS TOTALLY RIGHT, only Zach and Uriel were dead, no loss, tbh, and hmm, did she actually have to thank Castiel for her sudden elevation in rank, sure, she’s gonna, just after she makes him kill 1000 versions of that alcoholic himbo he’s set up as God in his stupid, un-killable heart. 

U - 5 favorite characters from 5 different fandoms

Sort of top of mind! 

Chrisjen Avasarala (The Expanse)

Xin Zi Yan (The Rise of Phoenixes)

Kang Sin Jae (The King: Eternal Monarch)

Castiel (SIGH)

Miranda Barlow Hamiton (Black Sails)

Thanks for playing along @sidewaystime

[re-readingcomics]

Comics Read 12/4 - 12/2021

This week’s reading continues the the themes of reading something I received recently and am finishing things I have been following for a long time. And the reading included one series I generally wish I like more than I do, and one that regularly surprises me with how much I like it.

The first of these is The Expanse comic, which I really wish had a subtitle. The comic, written by Corinna Sara Bechko, is in the same universe as the tv show, not the books. I chose to read it now because both the final book in the books series and the final season of the tv series debuted this week. I have generally enjoyed the book series better than the tv series, though the fact that the comic stars my favorite characters from the tv show, Chrisjen Avasarala and Bobbie Draper as the main characters for this side adventure appealed to me. (I don’t like book Bobbie as much as I like tv one. Her more vocal militarism and jingoism is off putting. Also it’s going to take months for me to get to the final book Leviathan Falls.)

I want to note that the page I scanned is not indicative of most of the comic. It was selected because I really like it and it’s probably the only one that includes both main characters,. I wouldn’t call this a great story. It takes place between the fourth and fifth seasons when Avasarala is out of the Secretary General position, and using her limited power to investigate a conspiracy, while Draper does most of the leg work on Mars. In the show, the conspiracy they are investigating is about Martian Military illegally selling off their equipment to various including members of the Outer Planets’ Alliance who use it to stage devastating attack on Earth. Here they uncover one that falsely promises people power in one of the newly discovered worlds through the ring gate, but really just forces people into indentured servitude. The billionaires who have their space trips seem eager to reinvent indentured servitude, so there is some time sensitivity. But it doesn’t really add much to the world of The Expanse. The art by Alejandro Aragón is good at describing small actions, but I couldn’t help comparing it unfavorably to my memory Robbi Rodriguez’s in FBP. Though I might just be put off by the fact that these are based off the tv actors, and some of covers have an uncanny valley quality and the interiors don’t. So again, like most of the tv show, I wish I like The Expanse comic more than I did.

I have been following American Vampire since around the time I started reading comics again almost ten years ago. It was around the time Scott Snyder took over the Batman title and I wanted to read more of his work. It was instantly engaging and fun. I had no idea I would be into a Western with vampires, I don’t feel particularly interested in either on their own, but I really like this. Sure it’s problematic in it’s treatment of race and nationality (the title refers to a new breed of Vampires coming into existence in the Old West with a distinctly American powers and drive) but it tends to skirt the distinction of silly and profound in such a fun way. It was the first time I saw the art aid Rafael Albuquerque, who is so great at action and violence. A lot of his characters look like they have overbites and if their mouths are open it appears that they’re screaming, and both of those work for a cast of characters that are mostly vampires. As I end up saying in so many of these posts, I have not had the opportunity to reread any of the series before I king this up. I was kind of shocked to realize that the last time I read any, the last time there was a new collection, was almost six years ago. So much has happened in that time! Including me changing the focus of this blog from comics I was rereading to my first reads. This leads to both my first praise and criticism of the series. The issues are filled with well cited, and artfully incorporated recap, that I needed and didn’t feel slowed down the plot. However, something about Albuquerque’s art feels off. Is he transitioning his style or should I blame the colorist for making things weird? In some cases there seems to be more detail and attention to volume than I remember, but this looses some of the energy. (Some of this odd feeling has to do with President Gerald Ford being a supporting character in this arc.) But there are still some great splash pages and plays on iconic pages from earlier issues, so I can’t complain much. I was happy that the seventh issue had some guest artists for vignettes outside of the main plot. In general, I think shared universes are tiresome, but something about American Vampire makes it open to other creators’ takes on the world and I appreciate it.

The plot of the final volume involves a big show down at the Las Vegas the celebration of the Bicentennial (incase you were wondering “why 1976” this is a big reason). There is a creepy/funny variation on George Washington and the cherry tree. Some ancient prophesies. Masks that make people look like others. A meditation on what it means to be American that I’m not sure how seriously to take. It is so much fun, and I really do want to reread the whole series when I have the time.

[brigdh]

Reading Saturday

Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey. Book 6 of The Expanse series. "I made my name with the story on the Behemoth. Aliens and wormhole gates and a protomolecule ghost that only talked to the most famous person in the solar system. I don't think my follow-up to that can be "Humans Still Shitty to Each Other". Lacks panache." That's Monica Stuart, a journalist looking for her next story, but it makes a fairly good summary of Nemesis Games as well – though I'd disagree about it lacking panache. After five books of zombie viruses and a vast galaxy of empty planets for the taking and physics-defying abandoned security systems, Nemesis Games features pretty much no alien content at all. Instead we have humanity reacting to these events, mostly in negative ways that feature them being, well, shitty to each other. The biggest reaction comes from the Belters, millions of humans born and raised in no-gravity or low-gravity. Those conditions have led to extremely low bone-mass (among other physical adaptations), which means all those new planets out there for the taking? The Belters won't be going to them, at least not without months or years of expensive medical therapy that's out of reach for most of them. They can see the future coming, and it's going to abandon them to poverty and irrelevance. They lash out with terrorist attacks on a scale grander than any before, as though enough violence will force humanity back to where it was before the first encounter with the alien protomolecule. That might be an impossible goal, but a hell of a lot of people are going to die anyway. Meanwhile, the spaceship Rocinante is in need of repairs, which means our four main characters are out of action for a few months. They take this opportunity to split up and visit family and old friends – Amos to Earth, Alex to Mars, Naomi to the Belt, and Jim stays with the ship at the repair station. Having separate plotlines means that each one gets their own POV, and you guys, I was so excited! I've been waiting to hear Naomi or Alex's voice since Book One, and this does not disappoint. Amos's narration was particularly well-written; he's a straight-up sociopath (though one who tries to do good nonetheless) and struggles to recognize emotions either in himself or in others, often defaulting to describing social situations as a set of maneuvers toward a desired outcome. It lends his POV a curiously flat tone, but one that is really interesting to read. The four crew members are still separated when the terrorist attacks begin, and most of the emotion in the book comes from them trying to desperately make their way back to one another. Each one thinks of the others as family, as home – this is such an absolute fantastic series for those Chosen Family feels – especially Jim, and who would have thought the boring action hero of Book One could become such an adorable softie? He spends a significant portion of this book being sad that no one will do the space-equivalent of texting him back, and I love him so much. Holden could sit at a tiny table skimming the latest news on his hand terminal, reading messages, and finally check out all the books he’d downloaded over the last six years. The bar served the same food as the restaurant out front, and while it was not something anyone from Earth would have mistaken for Italian, it was edible. The cocktails were mediocre and cheap. It might almost have been tolerable if Naomi hadn’t seemingly fallen out of the universe. Alex sent regular updates about where he was and what he was up to. Amos had his terminal automatically send a message letting Holden know his flight had landed on Luna, and then New York. From Naomi, nothing. She still existed, or at least her hand terminal did. The messages he sent arrived somewhere. He never got a failed connection from the network. But the successfully received message was his only reply. After a couple weeks of his new bad Italian food and cheap cocktails routine, his terminal finally rang with an incoming voice request. He knew it couldn’t be from Naomi. The light lag made a live connection unworkable for any two people not living on the same station. But he still pulled the terminal out of his pocket so fast that he fumbled it across the room. Each character gets to star in a very different genre within this one book: Jim himself is in a political thriller, trying to find the mole hidden in the security forces; Amos is making his way through a post-apocalyptic landscape; Naomi is in a prison-break movie; and Alex gets at least two extremely cool car chases (well, spaceship chases) between being a detective following the paper trail. All of them are great, but I think my favorite is Naomi's, which is an incredible depiction of the harm and suffocation of emotional abuse (gaslighting in particular) and the depression and learned helplessness that can result, especially when everyone around you sees nothing wrong. We get a lot more about her long-awaited backstory, as well as Amos's, and there are reappearances of a lot of my favorite secondary characters: Martian marine Bobbie, failed murderer Clarissa Mao, foul-mouthed politician Chrisjen Avasarala. (Though I'm still holding out hope Prax will show up again someday; I miss him.) All through The Expanse series I've admired Corey's focus on petty human squabbling and politicking in the face of grand, universe-changing discoveries. Nemesis Games is that thread turned up to eleven. It's not a cynical series, though; for every narrow-minded failure there's an equally small but important triumph of friendship or justice or well-meaning. It reminds me of Terry Pratchett, in a way. Not at all in Corey's style of writing or type of humor, but they both have a view of humanity which is simultaneously realistic and fond and exasperated. And if there's a bigger compliment than that, I don't know what it is. Artificial Condition by Martha Wells. Book 2 of the Murderbot Diaries. A security robot/cyborg armed with all sorts of guns and other methods of killing has hacked its governor module, allowing it to do whatever it wants, and nicknames itself Murderbot. But it turns out that what Murderbot really wants to do is spend hours watching dumb sci-fi TV shows, avoid eye contact or any social encounters with humans, and not have to deal with its own emotions. Unfortunately that last one is hard to avoid. In this book, Murderbot is heading to a mining planet where it knows something bad went down in its past, involving lots of human deaths. But Murderbot can't remember exactly what happened, since its memory was wiped, and so it's off to investigate. Getting to the planet means hitching a ride on a spaceship run by a massively complicated AI (which Murderbot promptly nicknames ART: Asshole Research Transport) and then getting a job as a human bodyguard to a group of scientists heading down to the planet's surface. Things, unsurprisingly, go wrong, and Murderbot finds itself with another pack of dumb humans in need of protection. I enjoyed Artificial Condition a lot, but it's not quite as good as the first book in the series, All Systems Red. Part of that is very simply that it's a middle book of the series, and it shows; progress in the larger plot is made, but not much, and there's a feeling of spinning our wheels while we wait for big events to happen. That said, it's still an extremely enjoyable novella (only about 120 pages), which builds out the world from what we learned in All Systems Red. Now we have sexbots and ship navigators, more about how different governments interact and function (or don't), and some hints as to what's going on with the company that created Murderbot. Plus there's Murderbot's wonderful narration, which honestly is worth the price of admission all on its own. A section from where it introduces ART to trashy entertainment: I watched seven more episodes of Sanctuary Moon with it hanging around my feed. Then it pinged me, like I somehow might not know it had been in my feed all this time, and sent me a request to go back to the new adventure show I had started to watch when it had interrupted me. (It was called Worldhoppers, and was about freelance explorers who extended the wormhole and ring networks into uninhabited star systems. It looked very unrealistic and inaccurate, which was exactly what I liked.) [...] “It’s not realistic,” I told it. “It’s not supposed to be realistic. It’s a story, not a documentary. If you complain about that, I’ll stop watching.” I will refrain from complaint, it said. (Imagine that in the most sarcastic tone you can, and you’ll have some idea of how it sounded.) So we watched Worldhoppers. It didn’t complain about the lack of realism. After three episodes, it got agitated whenever a minor character was killed. When a major character died in the twentieth episode I had to pause seven minutes while it sat there in the feed doing the bot equivalent of staring at a wall, pretending that it had to run diagnostics. Then four episodes later the character came back to life and it was so relieved we had to watch that episode three times before it would go on. At the climax of one of the main story lines, the plot suggested the ship might be catastrophically damaged and members of the crew killed or injured, and the transport was afraid to watch it. (That’s obviously not how it phrased it, but yeah, it was afraid to watch it.) I was feeling a lot more charitable toward it by that point so was willing to let it ease into the episode by watching one to two minutes at a time. After it was over, it just sat there, not even pretending to do diagnostics. It sat there for a full ten minutes, which is a lot of processing time for a bot that sophisticated. Then it said, Again, please. So I started the first episode again. C'mon, tell me you wouldn't read a million pages of that, plot or no plot.

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[aion-rsa]

The Expanse Season 4 Recap: Ilus, the Ring Gates and the Cliffhanger Ending

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Warning: contains spoilers for The Expanse season 4

At the beginning of The Expanse season four, the show’s characters stood at the crossroads of a brave and expansive new world, as did the cast and crew in their new home at Amazon. It was a marriage made in heaven. The Expanse was bigger, slicker, bolder, and grittier, but just as gloriously deep, rich and complex as ever. As season five gets ready to drop, let’s remind ourselves of the ups, downs, ins, outs, fights, smites and subterfuge of season four. We’ll start with the set-up and then look at each of the main locations/groups in turn, leading up to the season’s denouement and planet-busting cliffhanger. Major spoilers, obviously, ahead.

In the Beginning

Season three ended with the opening of the mysterious ring gates, and the 1300 habitable systems beyond them. Holden feared the beginning of ‘a blood-soaked gold rush’.

It’s a fear shared by UN Secretary General Chrisjen Avarasala (Shohreh Aghdashloo), who wants everyone to stay put. The UN’s stance is backed by the Martian Congressional Republic (MCR) and many of the Belters. The balance of peace and power in the Sol system is precarious, and a mass exodus could destabilise human civilisation. Besides, no one group wants any of the other groups to rush in and gain the upper hand.

A convoy of Belter ships rushes the blockade on the Sol side of the slow zone. The Barbapiccola, containing refugees from Ganymede, makes it through and enters one of the ring gates. The Belters settle on a planet there and begin mining lithium. They name the planet Ilus.

Two ships are dispatched in the settlers’ wake. The first is the Edward Israel, owned by a corporation called Royal Charter Energy (RCE), which already had a UN-and-Mars-backed mandate to conduct scientific studies beyond the ring gates. The second is the Rocinante. Avasarala wants Jim Holden (Steven Strait) and his team to bring their knowledge and experience of the protomolecule to bear on this strange new world, and also act as adjudicators. Officially, at least. It’s not really in Avasarala’s interests for the situation on Ilus to run smoothly.  

Life on Mars

Bobbie Draper (Frankie Adams) spent seasons two and three in a whirlwind of defections, double-dealings and divided loyalties thanks to the cold war (and almost total war) between Earth and Mars, and the revelation of Mars’ role in the development of protomolecule bio-soldiers. Season four finds her somewhat adrift, living on Mars with her younger brother, David, and working for a company that dismantles decommissioned warships. She’s generally having a hard time readjusting to civilian life.

David gets embroiled in the criminal underworld, helping a gang to prepare illicit sense-enhancement drugs. Bobbie takes exception to this, so goes looking for the gang. She finds and beats down some of its members, in the process smashing up one of their labs and damaging their inventory. Her brother is kidnapped and forced to work off the debt incurred by the damage. Bobbie pleads for her brother’s release, a request to which the leader of the gang is willing to acquiesce, but only for a price: Bobbie has to leave a door unlocked at work so the gang can steal some military equipment. Reluctantly, she complies. When Bobby’s conscience gets the better of her she tries to report the gang to the police, only to discover that the high-ranking policeman who comes to log her report is the gang leader himself, Esai Martin (Paul Schulze). She later quits her job when her supervisor seems keener on getting in on the lucrative illegal action than in pursuing justice. Eventually she’s arrested for her part in the gang’s crime, and is only saved from prosecution when she agrees to accept Esai’s offer to work for his gang. Esai is motivated in his criminality by the pressing need to make enough money to secure passage off Mars and start a new life elsewhere with his family. He knows that the ring-gates, and the life and fecundity beyond them, have rendered Mars’ terraforming initiatives pointless, thereby dooming the planet to stagnation and, very possibly, extinction.  

Esai and his gang are later involved in the theft of another piece of Martian military tech, which is handed over to a team of Belters, who summarily execute the gang before retreating off-world. Bobbie witnesses this happening.  

Avasarala, Earth, and The OPA

The Outer Planets Alliance (OPA) faction represented by Camina Drummer (Cara Gee) and Klaes Ashford (David Strathairn) allies with the UN. They re-brand and re-purpose the Behemoth as Medina station, setting themselves up as gate-keepers of the rings, helping to enforce the UN blockade.  It’s hoped that this will grant them a place at the table and influence over the new galactic order.

Not all Belters are on board with this new paradigm, perceiving it as selling out; a capitulation to those who would still demean and exploit them.  Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander) is the most vocal and militant voice of opposition. Marco is Naomi Nagata’s (Dominique Tipper) ex-beau and father of their child, Filip (Jasai Chase Owens), and while these days he styles himself a freedom fighter, it wasn’t always thus. When he was with Naomi, he tricked her into writing code that he claimed would merely disable other ships, allowing their faction to come to the rescue and extort payment for their time and trouble. However, Marco used the code to overload the reactor of a docked ship, killing hundreds of people. When the distraught and guilt-ridden Naomi left the faction she was prevented from taking their son, Filip.

Marco is apprehended by Drummer and Ashford for his part in capturing the UNN colony ship Soujourner and executing its crew. While aboard the Behemoth, Marco tries to win Ashford over to his world view, reminding him that the Belt will suffer a terminal decline of profit and influence owing to the exodus, and, besides, very few Belters, due to their space-bound physiology, will be able to take advantage of the brave new worlds beyond the ring gates. The heads of the various OPA factions assemble to decide whether or not Marco should be spaced (ejected into space sans suit) for breaking the fragile truce between the inner and outer planets. It’s Drummer who breaks the tie, reasoning that killing Marco would make him a martyr, and propel into action those factions loyal to his cause.

On Earth, Avasarala faces a leadership challenge from Nancy Gao (Lily Gao) who, in contrast to the incumbent, is a fierce advocate for embracing the change, opportunity and adventure that the ring gates represent. Avasarala’s campaign takes its toll on her ethics and her personal life, especially her marriage. She resorts to smears against Gao, and isn’t above attempting to use the problems on Ilus to her advantage. 

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OPA bigwig Fred Johnson (Chad L. Coleman) reveals Marco’s location to Avasarala, who wastes no time in dispatching a team of marines to the Pizzouza spacecraft to extract him. Marco, however, isn’t on board, and the resulting firefight between marines and Belters results in grave loss of life. The fallout critically damages Avasarala’s image, reputation and election chances, and moreover plays right into Marco’s hands. 

Fred Johnson visits the Behemoth, receiving from Drummer both a punch in the face and news of her resignation. Ashford vows to track down and kill Marco and wants Drummer to accompany him, but she declines on the grounds that she’s sick of politics and its machinations.

Ashford’s pursuit of Marco through the Belt leads him to a Martian naval officer, who reveals under interrogation the existence of a conspiracy involving Martians and Belters. When Ashford finally tracks down Marco, on an abandoned asteroid mine in the belt (from which there are also some asteroids missing) he’s prevented from killing him by the appearance Marco’s and Naomi’s son Filip, who emerges from the shadows to tip the balance of power in his father’s favour. Ashford is spaced, but before he dies he broadcasts a secret recording that incriminates Marco and will alert whomever receives the transmission to the conspiracy – even if Ashford never learned its exact purpose or shape.

On Earth, Avasarala is defeated by Nancy Gao. Avasarala dictates a conciliatory message to Nancy Gao, which ends thusly: “As for policy and the direction you’re taking the earth and all her peoples. Well, we disagree. One of us is wrong. I think it’s you… but I hope it’s me.”

Ilus/New Terra

When the Rocinante arrives on Ilus – or New Terra, as the UN would have it – there is already palpable tension and mistrust between the Belters and the crew of the Edward Israel. The RCE’s shuttle was downed on its way from orbit, resulting in deaths and injuries. Survivors of the crash include the group’s leader, the merciless Adolphus Murtry Burn Gorman); RCE security officer Chandra Wei (Jess Salgueiro); and exo-biologist Dr Elvi Okoye (Lyndie Greenwood). Violence is halted when everyone is swarmed by alien bugs, soon confirmed as protomolecule-based.

The planet is home to large structures that were built by the long-dead beings responsible for the protomolecule. Proto-Miller (Thomas Jane) appears to Holden and makes him go to one of the ruined structures to remove a root that’s blocking a connection. This turns on the structure and, it would appear, the entire planet, shaking loose forks of promethean lightning from the dark, oppressive clouds. Holden fires a torpedo at another of the structures when it too appears to activate.

Amos (Wes Chatham) and Murtry play detective for a time, discovering that the planet’s landing pad was blown up deliberately. In the ensuing stand-off between the Belters and the RCE group, Murtry shoots and kills one of the Belters. This violent act kills the potential bromance between Amos and Murtry. Both men are killers, but Amos, despite his shallow affect, follows a more honourable code of ethics, one that puts him at irreconcilable loggerheads with the ruthless Murtry. Amos is taken into custody while Naomi – still having trouble adjusting to terra firma, despite the help of acclimation drugs – helps a Belter woman named Lucia (Rosa Gilmore) escape the RCE’s clutches. She’s being pursued by the RCE because they know she was involved in blowing up the landing pad. Lucia explains to Naomi that it was only supposed to be an act of sabotage to buy the Belters more time. When it became clear that this act of sabotage would coincide with the arrival of the RCE’s shuttle, Lucia tried to abort the action, but was prevented from doing so by her co-conspirators. Holden and Alex (Cas Anvar) come to Naomi and Lucia’s aid as they’re hunted across the encampment, bringing some of the Rocinante’s firepower to bear. Alex takes Lucia and Naomi into orbit aboard the Rocinante, leaving Holden behind to plead with the two factions to evacuate the unpredictable, proto-molecule-soaked planet, with a little time left over to punch Murtry in the face and demand Amos’s release.

Neither faction wants to abandon the planet, or their claim to the lithium, but soon the planet itself renders Holden’s exhortations irrelevant. An island explodes, precipitating a shockwave and tsunami that threatens their survival. Worse still, the fall-out has somehow rendered the fusion drives on the orbiting spacecraft useless. There’s no prospect of escape or rescue. Everyone has to flee for refuge in one of the alien ruins.

Structures, slugs and synthesised drugs

Once inside, the survivors split into two factions, RCE on one side, Belters on the other, with Holden and Amos somewhere in the middle. They quickly discover that the structure is teeming with countless thousands of neurotoxic alien slugs and hostile micro-organisms. Everyone except Holden starts to go blind after being infected by the micro-organisms. Many others succumb to the fatal touch of the slugs. Murtry, becoming more unstable by the moment, reveals to his group his true objective on Ilus/New Terra. It isn’t the lithium he’s after, but the proto-molecule tech. He also wants to kill Holden and Amos.

Above the planet, Alex and Naomi devise a plan to tether the Rocinante to the Barbapiccola to prevent its decaying orbit from dragging it down onto the planet’s surface. Murtry keeps things interesting by ordering the Edward Israel to fire on the Rocinante.

The exo-biologist Dr Okoye works out – just in the nick of time – that Holden is immune to the micro-organisms because of the anti-cancer medication he’s been taking ever since he and Miller were exposed to radiation on Eros. She synthesises a cure, and the effects are reversed. In time, the waters recede enough for the survivors to leave the structure.

Meanwhile, proto-Miller again appears to Holden. The ‘real’ Miller is now battling with the protomolecule for control of the Miller ‘avatar’. In a moment of lucidity, Miller explains to Holden that the hat-wearing Miller he’s been dealing with is The Investigator, whose mission was to bring Holden and a dose of active protomolecule through the ring gates to activate the structures on Ilus. Miller, however, has identified a place on the planet where the protomolecule can’t go, where in fact all trace of it can be destroyed.       

Holden heads off in search of this weak spot. He’s led to a portal which transports him to another structure elsewhere on the planet, swiftly followed by Murtry and Chandra (with whom Amos had a brief ‘romance’), who are intent on killing him. Amos and Okoye follow. Amos fatally shoots Chandra, then Murtry shoots and disables Amos. Meanwhile, Okoye and Holden find a mysterious circular rift that Miller refers to as ‘the bullet’. While Holden rushes to aid Amos and incapacitate Murtry, Okoye stays behind to help Miller with ‘the bullet’. Miller merges with items strewn around the room to give him the corporeal form necessary to enter and plug the rift. His self-sacrifice not only saves Okoye, who is almost swallowed by the phenomenon, but returns everything to normal. All vestiges of the protomolecule are removed, the planet is ‘deactivated’ and fusion engines can function once more. The Belters and some of the RCE scientists decide to stay behind on Ilus. In orbit, Holden ejects the only piece of protomolecule that’s still aboard the Rocinante into Ilus’ sun. Murtry is a prisoner aboard the Rocinante, but the crew decides to let Lucia go.    

The Beginning of the End

Bobbie reaches out to Avasarala to tell her about the criminal conspiracy between Martian and Belter criminals/terrorists. Ashford’s message, which lends weight to this intel, is out there in the ether somewhere, but no one has yet detected it. Bobbie and Avasarala are now working together.

It was Filip who was with the team of Belters on Mars that stole the piece of military tech before eliminating Esai’s gang. The hardware taken was stealth tech, which we discover that Marco Inaros has used to cloak eight asteroids that are currently hurtling their way towards Earth.  

It’s going to be fascinating and harrowing in equal measure to see what a few million tonnes of space-rock will do to the tentative peace that’s barely holding the Sol system together, and how the various factions will make peace – or war – with the atrocity to come.

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Roll on season five.

The post The Expanse Season 4 Recap: Ilus, the Ring Gates and the Cliffhanger Ending appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[whenimaunicorn]

the depths that pass between us

Fandom: the Expanse Pairing: Arjun/Chrisjen Avasarala Rating: Teen Words: 808 Notes: part of The Expanse Valentines Day Exchange, gifted to @birdymary Summary:  Arjun tries to ease Chrisjen’s mind as much as he can before he says goodbye. Set after she asked him to take the family to safety on Luna at the end of season one.

“Let me help you with that,” Arjun said, stepping up behind his wife and laying both his hands softly over hers.

Today Chrisjen had chosen the heavy necklace of gold and rubies that had the most complicated clasp. She never asked for his help with it, always stood there cursing under her breath as she fiddled with the mechanism awkwardly behind her neck. Arjun plucked the delicate hooks from her fingers and matched them carefully, as he always did. He watched his breath stir the fine hairs that had already escaped her coif as he bent closer to better see the tiny hooks and loops.

He supposed that she would not be wearing this one again for a while.

The children would be meeting him at the spaceport soon. In unspoken agreement, Chrisjen and Arjun had changed nothing about their routine on this, their last morning together for who knew how long. But his eyes lingered on her as she moved through their home, trying to memorize every moment.

He had made love to her last night the way he had when they were young: slow, thoughtful, savoring every inch of her skin. His hands said the things his lips would never speak. I cannot bear to be apart from you. Save yourself; run away with me. He would not burden her with the aching of his heart. He knew as well that the words would be fruitless. If she ran from this, she would become only a shadow of the woman that he loved. Chrisjen could never abandon Earth and keep her self-respect.

So he kept silent, and busied himself making certain she would feel his absence as little as possible. The bags of tea were topped off; the kitchen was programmed to brew her a carafe of the lapsang souchong at 0500 when she would awaken, and a ginger and chamomile blend at 1900 when she was due to arrive home. And to keep it warm for her when she would inevitably be late.

His body was heavy with the things he would not say.

He would not be there to rub her feet at night, forcing her to relax a while. He found the little foot bath one of the children had gifted to Chrisjen years ago, the one that bubbled jets of heated water, which she had never used. He set it out on the coffee table in hopes that she would take the hint. On his way to the spaceport he would call her assistant and make sure he scheduled an appointment for their favorite massage therapist to make a house call later in the week. And to make the man promise not to let her cancel it.

“Call me every night,” Arjun said, standing before his wife in the kitchen, having reached the end of his list of things to prepare before he left her to face her enemies alone. “I need to know that you are at least coming home in the evenings, and remembering to take the mask off for a while.”

“They will be monitoring our communications. I will not be able to share my burdens with you.” Chrisjen looked up at him, finally letting him see her apprehension, and her sadness. “That will be hard on me. They can only think that I still fear the usual things: Mars, the O.P.A… I will not be able to show you how much it hurts to not be able to trust my own people.”

“But you will know that I know the truth, my love, and that will be enough. When you call and speak of safe and small things, we will drink deeply of each others’ eyes, and they will not know the depths that pass between us.”

Chrisjen smiled weakly, her eyes still sad. “What am I going to do without you, dear one.”

“I could stay,” Arjun pointed out. He was not afraid.

His wife shook her head. “I need to know that you are safe. I need to reduce the chances that you could be used against me.” Arjun nodded. “Just do one last thing: kiss me,” she said, unexpectedly maudlin.

Eagerly, Arjun folded her into his arms and pressed his lips over hers. Chrisjen melted into him for only one brief, shining moment. Then she straightened, pulling back into herself. “I won’t make you late,” she said against his mouth, sliding her hands down his sides.

“My love, for you I would be late for a meeting with the Creator.” He made one eyebrow jump as he gazed down at her. “Or perhaps miss it entirely.”

Chrisjen’s smile reached her eyes this time. “Keep that silver tongue in your mouth and save those lines for when I am really going to need them. Go. And don’t forget to hug the babies for me.”

Reviews are my main food source

[prophecyread]

               CHRISJEN AVASARALA.  primary / default verse is the expanse syfy / amazon series with gradual influx of book source material as i have time to read & headcanon influence.  other verses available on request / to be added as the blog gets under way.

MISCELLANEOUS TAG NAVIGATION.

ABOUT. AESTHETICS. ANSWERED. BIO.  BODY CLAIM. CHARACTER INFO.  CHARACTER STAT SHEETS. DASH GAMES.  DESIRES. DRABBLES.  EDITS.  FACE CLAIM. HEADCANONS. IC POSTS.  ISMS.  NAVIGATION.  OPEN STARTERS.  MAINS.  MAIN CALL. MEME CALL.  MEME REQUEST. METAS. NOTES. PERMANENT STARTER CALL. PLAYLIST. PLOTTING CALL. PROMOS.  RELATIONSHIP.  RESOURCES. SHIPPING CALL. STARTER CALLS.  STARTERS.  VERSES.  VIDEOS.  WARDROBE.  WISHLIST.

[bonesingerofyme-loc]

in which what the fuck happened

so i’ve finally gotten around to watching season 4 of the expanse, everyone’s favorite science fiction tv show. i shall not call it a space opera because i actually know what a space opera is.

i’ve just finished episode 8 and what precisely the fuck happened though

this season is a mess

in no particular order, we have

* the Ilus plot, in which it appears the Bezos Bux weren’t enough to afford a larger cast, so there’s three belters with speaking roles and a really, really bad rebellious teenager plot that makes me feel like i’m watching a fucking scalzi novel (which is not praise). The Ilus plot in which murtry swings between being a Bad Man with Justifiable Reasons to being a mustache twirling villain, where Holden doesn’t just hold the idiot stone, he fucking swallows it along with Elvi and also the TV show does that TV show thing where they make really, really stupid design choices that leave you scratching your head. more on this all later

* the earth plot, in which Chrisjen Avasarala is never wrong once but everyone around her acts like she’s executing her political opponents in the streets and trying to sacrifice babies to satan

* the mars plot, in which bobbie has a nervous breakdown over the course of about three days and resets all her character development to her first introduction

* the belter plot in which Dummer continues to be a national treasure and Not-Ashford is still very enjoyable and they prove they are the only competant fucks in the entire fucking Belt but the writers do their level best to sabotage every second of it

Right, so, specifically

Let’s start with Ilus

I think my overall issues here can be summed up with this statement

“The set design, knowing that the heroes would be riding out a world spanning tsunami and flood, decided the optimal way to adapt the descriptions of the shell buildings from the novel to be THIRTY FEET UNDER THE SURFACE OF THE FUCKING PLANET THAT IS GOING TO BE FLOODED.”

My brother and I looked at each other and burst out laughing at the end of the episode in which Holden gets yote across the room by the deluge of water. The deluge of water from the planetwide tsunami. The deluge of water from the planetwide flood that placed the water a good forty feet ABOVE the interior rooms.

The planetwide flood that did not begin to recede for days. In a building riddled with holes and also one big giant one they made. 

This encapsulates to many of the problems in this season in a single example. Writing choices and design choices that appear to be conceived of in the moment without any thought to the rest of the plot. Drama for the sake of drama. Convenient reveals after the fact to patch holes set up by the previous lack of foresight. 

We later see the entry area is flooded, appearing to imply that the room they descend into initially is just a lower area that totally flooded and that they are at ground level in the rest of the complex. As if to acknowledge that, oops, yes, maybe having this complex be situated forty feet under the water level with holes all the fuck over means everyone would drown, so here’s a solution - except, except

When everyone got in right before the flood, they were all standing packed like sardines down in that low entry room. Which started flooding due to the fucking firehose deluge that came in because hello a piece of reinforced sheet metal isn’t going to be watertight in the slightest. So you’ve got water pouring into a small contained space packed with about forty people and supplies - that’s going to be ruining supplies and equipment because it’s saltwater and people are going to be panicking. How do they climb out the other side? There’s no ropes or lines there, it would seem, since everyone was still shuffling around in the entry area when the flooding started. How do they managed to get ropes or lines up to the higher areas in the building before people are trampled or drowned or all their supplies ruined? Why the fuck didn’t the goddamn building just have openings on the ground level leading into a bunch of interior rooms like it fucking did in the fucking novel because the fucking authors despite their other fucking flaws at least fucking planned ahead and had fucking editors that fucking made sure that things were fucking intelligently designed?

Oh, right. So that we could have a fucking scene where Holden has to escape from a closing door or be smushed. Because Holden definitely was in danger of dying and everyone believed it. Fuck. PLAN MORE THAN ONE EPISODE AHEAD.

Related to that - I’m loving the insistence that TV and movies have to make everything related to the main character, and not even tangentially. Directly, directly related. Remember how Ilus fucking asploding was a major oops that wasn’t anyone’s fault? Now it has to specifically be Holden’s fault since he can’t stop sticking is dick in things, so all the deaths are directly on his shoulders. Great job. Really, really great. 

A nitpick here that doesn’t matter - remember when the moons were described as low-albedo and the nights were super dark? Pepperidge Farms remembers.

The Felcia plotline is awful too. Some random teenager stows away to orbit and then becomes instrumental in saving the Barbapiccola despite no experience and completely overriding the actual crew on board. Come on. Come on.

Also - thanks Holden and Elvi, you utter mouthbreathing nonces for not once thinking ‘Gee, maybe I should ask/tell about the MEDICATIONS THAT I AM CURRENTLY ON.’ It doesn’t make it an epiphany moment or a revelation when they realize his oncocidals are the cure, it makes them looking like absolute idiots. Holden, you shoot up daily. DAILY. You told Elvi about being a genetic hybrid. You didn’t think to tell her about the eighty gorillion rads you ate like soup on Eros and the fact that you’re swimming in anti-cancer meds?

Come the fuck on. Come. The. Fuck. On.

Stop making characters idiots to make the plot work. 

Leaving Ilus, there’s Earth.

Fucking Earth.

So Arjun is now Avasarala’s campaign manager and a completely different person. The lack of chemistry between the two actors is so profound that scientists are considering writing a thesis on it as quantum mechanics actually should forbid such an extreme effect. He’s also not Arjun, since he’s alternating between unctuous and judgmental about as often as Naomi switches between an English accent and a butchered attempt at Belter. So that’s swell, we have to deal with a new actor and a brand new character who is awful and should never have been because Arjun was a chill lad and didn’t deserve this.

On the poitical side is Avasarala, who literally cannot stop being right all the time. Seriously, why is everyone up her ass about THE MEANS AND THE ENDS AND YOU LIE AND ITS ALL ABOUT YOU.

I mean sure it is all about her but she hasn’t been wrong yet. And a person can be both selfish and helpful. I couldn’t believe with Arjun got asspained about Avasarala leaking confidential footage of ancient inimitable alien machines that melt moons and blow up hemispheres of planets when the 0 and 1s are switched as a completely reasonable attempt to instill a very healthy and very justified caution in the general populace over the gigantic alien relic that was made out of a hundred thousand people ground up into blue gatorade and marinated on Venus after it broke the fucking laws of physics several times to link up to a pocket dimension that casually rewrites it’s own rules. 

Like what the fuck Arjun, where do you get off judging Avasarala for releasing information about the extremely unpredictable and dangerous two billion year old alien doom machines that are scattered around the galaxy. Is it totally to her own benefit? Absolutely. Is it also totally the right thing to do? Also absolutely because you’ve got Gao hot under the collar about wanting to yeet every willing body through the ring gates into a hotbed of who-the-fuck-knows and acting like it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

Fuck.

Then we’ve got the marine raid. Avasarala is approached by her military advisors and generals who present to her a plan of action to go after a known terrorist who just attempted a direct attack on Earth’s defenses, defenses that I might add are not like ‘to keep people out’ but are actively existential defenses. So they bring a plan to her, lay it out, and she approves it, then when it goes tits up, the fucking General who planned it, brought it to her and executed it has the gall to blame HER for it failing (what) then resign because he can’t serve someone who plays loose with his soldier’s lives (WHAT) and then everyone gets assmad at her for costing like twelve marine’s lives in an attempt to capture a terrorist responsible for several hundred deaths already (WHAT) and then, and THEN siding with the OPA for Avasarala ‘breaking the peace’ when the UN went after a terrorist the OPA is known to have let go???

What the FUCK was going on in the writing room.

Meanwhile on Mars, Bobbie is going batshit insane. After btfoing a bunch of druggies to save her nephew she gets roped into some illegal stuff and then has a moral conundrum about it for maybe five seconds and then it like yeah nvm let’s steal this shit Y E E T. The very same Bobbie that was willing to go AWOL from her command, run to her own nation’s enemy during a cold war and refuse to ever budge on her testimony because the truth and honor meant that much to her.

Yeah.

Okay.

Then she meets a dude on sunday, goes on a date with him monday and tuesday, they bang on wednesday, then on friday he gets a job on Europa and is gonna leave and they have a fight as if they’d been seeing each other for months.

Uh.

Unless this show is doing completely different time scales for different plots, which they’ve failed utterly to communicate, we know how much time has passed. Bobbie met the dude like a fucking week ago, why is this full bore romantic drama as if they’d been in a committed relationship for months? They’ve literally banged twice in a hotel room and not even stuck around for cuddles.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

I don’t have much to complain about with Drummer and Ashford. I really like them both and both are fun to watch. They’ve also been treated the most reasonably too in terms of not acting like fuckwits or being dealt retarded hands by the plot thus far.

This season is awful. The Expanse was always subtitled ‘The Expounding’ because of how characters could, at the drop of a hat, produce a minute long monologue about anything, but this season it’s taken that and cranked it to eleven. Every other sentence is an ingratiating platitude about ‘hopeful we’re hopeful future happy live we’ll live yay see each other again strong be strong and brave firm strong and hopeful’. Fuck. Naomi exists to look sad and give brave monologues to people, especially the now lobotomized Lucia who apparently did die and came back without agency. Alex sort of just exists, drifting from scene to scene as if saying ‘I’m still here, guys. Guys? Guys...’ every antagonist takes three minutes to lay out their life story and evil beginnings and rationale only to suddenly flip the tables a few episodes later only to play a reverse uno card and be mustache twirlingly diabolical right after. 

Oh yeah, and because this is my personal autism button:

NO, ELVI, THAT IS NOT HOW LIFE WORKS. LIFE MIGHT NOT ‘JUST AS EASILY’ BE BASED ON SOMETHING ELSE. THAT IS NOT HOW FUCKING PHYSICS WORKS. OTHER ELEMENTS ARE NEITHER AS PREVALENT NOR AS USEFUL IN FORMING BONDS AS CARBON. YOU COULD SAY ‘LIFE MIGHT RARELY AND EXTREMELY DIFFICULTLY BE MADE OF SILICON’ BUT DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE SAY ‘JUST AS EASILY. ALSO IRON. IRON. ARE YOU REALLY, REALLY GOING TO SAY IRON COULD BE USED AS A CHEMICAL BASIS FOR LIFE, BECAUSE HOLY COSMIC BULLSHIT BATMAN.

IN THE WORDS OF HERMIONE GRANGER: ARE YOU A HARD SCIFI OR NOT??

[hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff]

https://ift.tt/2LR9hJt When last we left the crew of the Rocinante and The Expanse’s other characters–a full year and a half ago, in June 2018–humanity was united in wonder at the opening of the “ring gates” and the expansion of the accessible universe to include countless previously unknown, fully habitable planets. That’s a giant leap for mankind, but in The Expanse Season 4, the characters we love will take just one small step: They’ll explore a single new world on which much of the new season’s story will hinge. Humanity may have access to thousands of new worlds in The Expanse Season 4, but Ilus (or New Terra, depending who you ask) is highly contentious new territory due to the bountiful deposits of lithium the planet hosts. In the Season 4 premiere, two separate groups make landfall there and stake their claims: a group of Belter refugees searching for a new home, and representatives of an Earth corporation with a UN charter that they believe gives them dominion. When the crew of the Rocinante arrive in both groups’ wake, they’re forced to play sheriff and try to keep the peace. The Expanse executive producer Naren Shankar calls Season 4 a “blood-soaked gold rush.” “For the first time in the history of the solar system, there are other habitable Earth-like planets on the other side of the ring, and that is a hugely destabilizing element in the world of The Expanse,” Shankar said during a recent visit to the show’s set in Toronto. “Think of it as the discovery of the ‘New World.’ Suddenly everybody knew that that was a place that they could go and make their fortune. How do you control that? How do you put a finger in the dike? How do you keep that thing from bursting?” Read more: How Being Saved By Amazon Has Changed The Expanse This may sound like a story that could be plucked out of space and dropped into the wild west, and that’s because it is. Whereas The Expanse Season 1 borrowed gleefully from the noir detective genre, Season 4 is as much a space western as it is hard science fiction. “The show is set in the future, but it’s not really about the future,” said executive producer Andrew Kosove. “In a way, it’s about the past, and human history, and how human desires, hopes, and foibles repeat themselves–humans’ desires for a better world, more wealth for themselves and their children, a better life, so on and so forth, has always driven humanity to try new things and to take risks–to visit new frontiers.” Kosove, who’s the co-founder and co-CEO of The Expanse production company Alcon Entertainment, said Season 4 is stylistically unique compared with the first three seasons. Season 4 is based largely on Cibola Burn, the fourth novel of the Expanse book series by co-authors Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, who write under the joint pseudonym James S.A. Corey. The authors are heavily involved with the show, practically omnipresent in the writers’ room. During GameSpot’s set visit, Franck told reporters that the writers’ inspiration for book four included historical context like the American gold rush and the European settling of Australia, as well as concepts like manifest destiny and eminent domain. “It’s pretty evident that we pull a lot from that history of the Western expansion in North America, how damaging that was to the people who already lived there,” Franck said. “This idea that it doesn’t matter what you have, if I think I have a good enough reason to take it, I can just take it. The railroad going across the West just got a hundred yards on either side of the railroad tracks–that was just theirs. It didn’t matter that you had a farm or whatever, if they rolled through, they just owned that now.” One of the main new characters in Season 4 is Adolphus Murtry (Burn Gorman), the head of the security team that arrives on Ilus/New Terra with the UN charter claiming the planet. Murtry quickly comes into conflict with the Belter settlers who arrived there first. “That’s the colonization conflict played over and over and over throughout history,” Franck explained. Naturally, this being The Expanse, it’s nowhere near as simple as “Murtry=bad guy” and “Belters=good guys.” The Expanse loves to play with moral archetypes and expectations, and Season 4 is no exception. Murtry has plenty of justification for the actions he takes on the new frontier, and although the Belters may be right in some ways, they’re not always sympathetic. And the planet itself is no paradise. Franck referred repeatedly to the book The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, which describes the founding of Australia by unwitting British convicts. “Everything in Australia wanted to kill [them],” Franck said, from the spiders and snakes to the shellfish they tried to eat. “Dropping people into that alien biology…you’re a big bag of moisture with high-energy atoms in it–something’s going to try to eat those, because that’s delicious, right? Of course that’s how it’s going to work. We didn’t have to make much up; we just borrowed from the real world.” The Horrifying and the Mundane The Rocinante’s crew has their work cut out for them on that new frontier, but they aren’t the only characters with problems in Season 4. Back on Earth, Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) contends with a threat she’s never had to face before: a political rival who forces her to run for office for the first time. This is a storyline that’s not present in the books, but that Franck and Abraham have considered exploring, according to the former. “The whole election of Chrisjen Avasarala was a thing we had always talked about for the books, but had never done,” Franck said. “She is a politician who’s never been elected; what is that like, when somebody who has never been elected has to run for office for the first time? We talked about that many times, so we got to do that here, and that was a lot of fun–just watching her put up with the indignities of having to answer to anyone.” Aghdashloo said she’s frequently amazed by how topical the show is. “I wish it was a daily show, so we could work in the morning, show it to the people in the afternoon, and they would see how timely and relevant this show is to what is going on, especially now,” the actress said during the set visit. “When I was 11, I saw Alien, and it was like, 'I’m a janitor on a spaceship, oh, and then an alien ate me.’ I’ve been trying to write that story ever since.” Meanwhile, disgraced Martian marine Bobbie Draper (Frankie Adams) has her own storyline set on Mars. When her nephew gets involved with some shady dealings, Bobbie finds herself being swiftly dragged into the criminal underworld that’s flourishing on Mars (the new worlds now accessible through the ring gates have made the planet’s multi-generational terraforming mission irrelevant). This plot, too, is not from the novels–not directly, at least. “We had a novella called Gods of Risk that Bobbie Draper appears in, and we used that as the launching point for a Bobbie story this season, which was a lot of fun to write,” Franck said. “I read Gods of Risk, but it’s kind of all about the nephew, and then [Bobbie’s] not in book four,” Adams said. “So I sort of was like, 'Oh, maybe I’ll just do like one episode, who knows?’ And then I read [Season 4] and I loved it. I was like, 'Oh, this is exactly what we should do with the space.’” And, of course, it wouldn’t be The Expanse without the protomolecule. The driving force behind much of the show so far may have been largely explained in Season 3–it’s an ancient alien creation designed to build the ring gates and fight some still-unknown threat–but its presence is still felt during Season 4, especially as Holden and crew explore Ilus/New Terra. “We’ve seen how we view the protomolecule. We’ve never seen how the protomolecule views us,” said Shankar, one of the executive producers we spoke with. On the new planet, the characters quickly discover a set of mysterious structures that appear to be ancient alien ruins somehow connected to the protomolecule. As they explore the ruins, bad things start to happen. “One of the things Daniel and I like to do, and winds up being in the show a lot too, is take the awe-inspiring and mix it thoroughly with the mundane–that you’re in billion-year-old alien ruins, and that should be amazing, except they’re really just kind of dark caves, and your eyes are getting eaten by monsters,” Franck said, half-joking (we think). “There’s a lot of that kind of thing–we take sort of the awe-inspiring and the horrifying and the mundane and mix them all together. "It’s because when I was 11, I saw Alien, and it was like, 'I’m a janitor on a spaceship, oh, and then an alien ate me,’” the author continued. “I’ve been trying to write that story ever since.” The Expanse Season 4 is available on Amazon Prime Video starting December 13. from GameSpot - All Content https://ift.tt/349OlDW

[hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff]

When last we left the crew of the Rocinante and The Expanse's other characters--a full year and a half ago, in June 2018--humanity was united in wonder at the opening of the "ring gates" and the expansion of the accessible universe to include countless previously unknown, fully habitable planets. That's a giant leap for mankind, but in The Expanse Season 4, the characters we love will take just one small step: They'll explore a single new world on which much of the new season's story will hinge.

Humanity may have access to thousands of new worlds in The Expanse Season 4, but Ilus (or New Terra, depending who you ask) is highly contentious new territory due to the bountiful deposits of lithium the planet hosts. In the Season 4 premiere, two separate groups make landfall there and stake their claims: a group of Belter refugees searching for a new home, and representatives of an Earth corporation with a UN charter that they believe gives them dominion. When the crew of the Rocinante arrive in both groups' wake, they're forced to play sheriff and try to keep the peace.

The Expanse executive producer Naren Shankar calls Season 4 a "blood-soaked gold rush."

"For the first time in the history of the solar system, there are other habitable Earth-like planets on the other side of the ring, and that is a hugely destabilizing element in the world of The Expanse," Shankar said during a recent visit to the show's set in Toronto. "Think of it as the discovery of the 'New World.' Suddenly everybody knew that that was a place that they could go and make their fortune. How do you control that? How do you put a finger in the dike? How do you keep that thing from bursting?"

Read more: How Being Saved By Amazon Has Changed The Expanse

This may sound like a story that could be plucked out of space and dropped into the wild west, and that's because it is. Whereas The Expanse Season 1 borrowed gleefully from the noir detective genre, Season 4 is as much a space western as it is hard science fiction.

"The show is set in the future, but it's not really about the future," said executive producer Andrew Kosove. "In a way, it's about the past, and human history, and how human desires, hopes, and foibles repeat themselves--humans' desires for a better world, more wealth for themselves and their children, a better life, so on and so forth, has always driven humanity to try new things and to take risks--to visit new frontiers."

Kosove, who's the co-founder and co-CEO of The Expanse production company Alcon Entertainment, said Season 4 is stylistically unique compared with the first three seasons. Season 4 is based largely on Cibola Burn, the fourth novel of the Expanse book series by co-authors Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, who write under the joint pseudonym James S.A. Corey. The authors are heavily involved with the show, practically omnipresent in the writers' room. During GameSpot's set visit, Franck told reporters that the writers' inspiration for book four included historical context like the American gold rush and the European settling of Australia, as well as concepts like manifest destiny and eminent domain.

"It's pretty evident that we pull a lot from that history of the Western expansion in North America, how damaging that was to the people who already lived there," Franck said. "This idea that it doesn't matter what you have, if I think I have a good enough reason to take it, I can just take it. The railroad going across the West just got a hundred yards on either side of the railroad tracks--that was just theirs. It didn't matter that you had a farm or whatever, if they rolled through, they just owned that now."

One of the main new characters in Season 4 is Adolphus Murtry (Burn Gorman), the head of the security team that arrives on Ilus/New Terra with the UN charter claiming the planet. Murtry quickly comes into conflict with the Belter settlers who arrived there first.

"That's the colonization conflict played over and over and over throughout history," Franck explained.

Naturally, this being The Expanse, it's nowhere near as simple as "Murtry=bad guy" and "Belters=good guys." The Expanse loves to play with moral archetypes and expectations, and Season 4 is no exception. Murtry has plenty of justification for the actions he takes on the new frontier, and although the Belters may be right in some ways, they're not always sympathetic.

And the planet itself is no paradise. Franck referred repeatedly to the book The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, which describes the founding of Australia by unwitting British convicts.

"Everything in Australia wanted to kill [them]," Franck said, from the spiders and snakes to the shellfish they tried to eat. "Dropping people into that alien biology...you're a big bag of moisture with high-energy atoms in it--something's going to try to eat those, because that's delicious, right? Of course that's how it's going to work. We didn't have to make much up; we just borrowed from the real world."

The Horrifying and the Mundane

The Rocinante's crew has their work cut out for them on that new frontier, but they aren't the only characters with problems in Season 4. Back on Earth, Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) contends with a threat she's never had to face before: a political rival who forces her to run for office for the first time. This is a storyline that's not present in the books, but that Franck and Abraham have considered exploring, according to the former.

"The whole election of Chrisjen Avasarala was a thing we had always talked about for the books, but had never done," Franck said. "She is a politician who's never been elected; what is that like, when somebody who has never been elected has to run for office for the first time? We talked about that many times, so we got to do that here, and that was a lot of fun--just watching her put up with the indignities of having to answer to anyone."

Aghdashloo said she's frequently amazed by how topical the show is. "I wish it was a daily show, so we could work in the morning, show it to the people in the afternoon, and they would see how timely and relevant this show is to what is going on, especially now," the actress said during the set visit.

"When I was 11, I saw Alien, and it was like, 'I'm a janitor on a spaceship, oh, and then an alien ate me.' I've been trying to write that story ever since."

Meanwhile, disgraced Martian marine Bobbie Draper (Frankie Adams) has her own storyline set on Mars. When her nephew gets involved with some shady dealings, Bobbie finds herself being swiftly dragged into the criminal underworld that's flourishing on Mars (the new worlds now accessible through the ring gates have made the planet's multi-generational terraforming mission irrelevant). This plot, too, is not from the novels--not directly, at least.

"We had a novella called Gods of Risk that Bobbie Draper appears in, and we used that as the launching point for a Bobbie story this season, which was a lot of fun to write," Franck said.

"I read Gods of Risk, but it's kind of all about the nephew, and then [Bobbie's] not in book four," Adams said. "So I sort of was like, 'Oh, maybe I'll just do like one episode, who knows?' And then I read [Season 4] and I loved it. I was like, 'Oh, this is exactly what we should do with the space.'"

And, of course, it wouldn't be The Expanse without the protomolecule. The driving force behind much of the show so far may have been largely explained in Season 3--it's an ancient alien creation designed to build the ring gates and fight some still-unknown threat--but its presence is still felt during Season 4, especially as Holden and crew explore Ilus/New Terra.

"We've seen how we view the protomolecule. We've never seen how the protomolecule views us," said Shankar, one of the executive producers we spoke with.

On the new planet, the characters quickly discover a set of mysterious structures that appear to be ancient alien ruins somehow connected to the protomolecule. As they explore the ruins, bad things start to happen.

"One of the things Daniel and I like to do, and winds up being in the show a lot too, is take the awe-inspiring and mix it thoroughly with the mundane--that you're in billion-year-old alien ruins, and that should be amazing, except they're really just kind of dark caves, and your eyes are getting eaten by monsters," Franck said, half-joking (we think). "There's a lot of that kind of thing--we take sort of the awe-inspiring and the horrifying and the mundane and mix them all together.

"It's because when I was 11, I saw Alien, and it was like, 'I'm a janitor on a spaceship, oh, and then an alien ate me,'" the author continued. "I've been trying to write that story ever since."

The Expanse Season 4 is available on Amazon Prime Video starting December 13.

from GameSpot - All Content https://ift.tt/349OlDW