I just finished Seasons 1-3, and am now starting Season 4. Trying to avoid spoilers so I’m not reading this thread too closely. While I like the show and the story/plot, I just have to get this off my chest:
Sick to death of hearing Shoreh Agdashloo (Christjen Avasalara) mushing her dialogue. She showed no range at all.
Cara Gee (Camina Drummer) voice projection is affected and annoying.
Thomas Jane (Joe Miller) not that good of an actor in this role, actually.
That said, I like sci-fi and this is one of the better shows in recent memory. So overall, it’s good and I’ll probably miss it when it’s done.
The Christjen Avasalara character overall is not that interesting except when she and Bobby were working together. The political side though is absolutely not what I’m watching the Expanse for. But what range is she suppose to show? She plays angry, annoyed, confident and competent.
I think Cara Gee is doing fine as someone who grew up in a very different culture that seems to rely on pigeon English. Her delivery reminds me she is well removed from being a Terran.
I think you could just leave it at Thomas Jane is not that good of an actor. The only thing I ever thought he was good at playing was Mickey Mantle in 61*.
She’s just such a crap actor that it’s hard to watch her, especially in season 4.
I finally started to like her more in this season. She stopped trying to project her voice through her chest.
Yeah, I was being kind. I like his character. Just not his acting.
Can’t help but like Amos, too. He gets some pretty shitty lines from time to time. You can see them coming. But he does a better job of them than most in the cast.
Looking forward to seeing how they develop Bobbi’s character/plot.
I like all of the actors, actually. I thought the season was great. They tweaked the storylines from the books, but they do a good job pulling it all together.
Just finished watching, not read any of the books. I liked both Detective/Investigator Miller and the actor playing him.
Favorite line from the final episode, when Dr. Akoiya is asking the mobile Miller if he’s a truly independent sentient being and he replies “Either that or I’m acing the Turing test”
Season 4 ended up feeling really small. In the previous seasons, we had politics that spanned the entire solar system - in comparison, this season we mostly had a conflict between two groups of dozens of people.
And the mystery of the machinery on the planet and Miller didn’t really work. It didn’t feel like anything was really revealed or anything came together. The planet started with mysterious machinery and ended up with mysterious machinery. Miller did something, but we really have no idea what, or what the machinery was for. There wasn’t really a story arc there - the whole plot can be summed up as “giant mysterious machines are still on this planet, they might hurt our colonists, Miller figured out some way to shut them down”
Entertaining for the character moments here and there (I really liked Burn Gorman), but by far the weakest season.
I finally finished it this weekend and thought it was great. While the Mars storyline wasn’t too exciting, it does a nice job setting up future seasons.
SenorBeef, I get what you’re saying about the smaller scope. It definitely is. The fourth book is by far the most localized in the series, and things expand immensely after that. And you’re right about Miller and tha machines. None of that made much sense in the book either. It’s best to not think about it too much.
I am jealous of the future watchers that can just go episode to episode. I find myself lost for a few episodes at the start of each season until things get focused.
As for Miller and the proto-molecule devices, it was clear enough that the glowing orange “eye of an angry god” thingee was an artifact from what ever destroyed the proto-molecule civilization and Miller used it to wipe himself and what ever was left on the planet out. Clearly that didn’t seem to affect the ring station, but the angry god eye is still sitting there to be studied/used in the future. We didn’t get any real explanation of how all of the proto-molecule tech works so not yet knowing how the angry god eye works isn’t out of character.
I think my upcoming summer reading is going to be the novels…
The thing is - the history of the conflict between the protomolecule civilization and the one that wiped them out has a lot of storytelling to be mined. And while we spent a significant fraction of the season on it, we learned almost nothing meaningful or entertaining or informative about it. Mystery objects do mysterious stuff, Miller does mysterious thing to stop them, mystery objects stopped. Almost no info about their purpose, how they worked, how it played into this galactic conflict, didn’t tell us anything about the protomolecule civilization or the other one - that’s just bad storytelling. They could’ve told the same story about the same machines but actually gave us some insight as to why they exist, why they’re attacking(?) the new settlers, what could be done to stop them, what it meant to the overall alien civilizations plot, but instead we got none of that.
The other inconsistent thing I found about the protomolecule was it’s presence aboard the Rosenante. It didn’t grow or spread. Just sat there behind the bulkhead, alive but inert, despite having taken over an entire asteroid, and built the ring. Why?
Not that I caught, nor why it was Miller chosen as the investigator. One can speculate that because Miller chose to join Julie even though she was proto-moleculized, and that he was by inclination a digger after answers that he was best suited out of the thousands of others absorbed. And perhaps it was from Miller’s assessment that Holden was willing to go to almost any length to save people that decided the proto-molecule that he was the best person out of the limited number available inside the ring station bubble.
From a narrative point of view, I’m inclined to agree, but then again, isn’t that pretty much just what contact with the artifacts of an advanced alien civilization in all probability would be like? I mean, think someone from the Byzantine empire transported aboard the ISS, into a nuclear reactor, or hell, a modern automated factory—inscrutable, half-alive seeming mechanisms performing incomprehensible tasks, fraught with invisible dangers, for unknowable purposes. And then add a few thousand, million or even billion years, plus the baseline difference in aesthetics, psychology, motivation and goals between us and a putative alien species, and ‘mysterious’ kinda seems like a good guess.
As per Arthur C. Clarke “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and J. B. S. Haldane “My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we can imagine”, I find an SF story that doesn’t try to explain certain things to be a refreshing change.
I haven’t read any of the books yet, so I don’t know if the authors go down that path or not.
This is one area where the books are better, in that they do give a bit more insight into the protomolecule, via scenes with Miller as the Investigator.
The thing to remember is that the protomolecule is a tool, that was designed for a purpose. It’s primary job is to take over existing biological materials, and use that to build up a Ring Gate to contact its home civilization. To that end, it has a life cycle, which starts with basic building blocks, but which ends up with a complete system. Once the basic blocks are available, it doesn’t need to scrounge for every single bit of biology at hand, as it has moved on to the next stage of its life cycle.
So, yeah, at first, we had horror shows like Phoebe, the Anubis, and Eros, but once it’s reached the critical mass it needs to build a ring gate, it becomes much less voracious.
Again, from the books, the highlighted is pretty much it. The protomolecule works with what it has, and Miller was the best tool it had on hand to do that job.
But we did find out, eventually and in very general terms, what the protomolecule does. Surely we can understand some other stuff, right? Your hypothetical Byzantine may not be able to comprehend what all those modern things are, but I think that if he’s smart he’ll eventually grasp that the ISS is some sort of ship or house flying very high in the sky, that a nuclear reactor can provide light and warmth to peoples’ houses, and that a factory converts raw materials into finished products. I agree there’s no way to solve all the mysteries, but we can still get a basic idea what’s going on.