Holden isn’t full of shit, he just suffers from Player Character Syndrome.
Seriously, this show since season 1 has been the perfect representation of someone’s scifi RPG campaign. There are two groups of PCs who get shuffled around between groups sometimes, and this year almost everyone had to have solo adventures because of COVID.
I was thinking more that bull would be telling Holden he is full of himself or some such in a similar way that Holden and Amos had some conflicts in the earlier seasons, so holden will have to work at aligning and bringing the crew along.
Good points; of any character to lose, Alex’s will be missed least. I can’t recall if it was touched on in the tv show, but in the book, it was made very clear that a lot of what the Roci and crew did was possible because Alex was a very, VERY good pilot. It will be interesting to see how they replace him.
I would watch a spin-off centred around Avasarala, Bobby, and Amos. 
Extremely minor book spoiler:
The solo adventures are directly from the book (Nemesis Games). Nothing to do with COVID.
Yeah, COVID wouldn’t really change anything. If anything, they interacted with a lot more people. If they were concerned, it would’ve been just the four on the ship together.
I’m aware of the books and figured the “solo adventures” were not due to the show adjusting for COVID (though I haven’t read the books yet, I do plan on it!). I was continuing the analogy to an RPG game where players might find it easier to play solo games over Zoom than getting everyone on a call at once.
I should have also mentioned that killing off a character because the RL player had to leave is also something that happens in RPGs - you had Shed, the doctor from Season 1, who played for a handful of sessions but didn’t mesh well with the group so he quit early on and was unceremoniously killed; and this is now repeated with Alex. And he’s replaced with a new player, a friend of the PC playing Amos, who took over an NPC for Amos’ solo adventure but liked the game so much they decided to join the party.
The Expanse would make a perfect comic strip in the style of DM of the Rings or Darths and Droids, is what I’m getting at 
I’m confused by the softballing of Marco’s attack on Earth. Having the attack be far more devastating, even crippling to Earth, would’ve worked a lot better narratively. It’s certainly plausible that an asteroid attack on Earth could’ve caused as much damage as you’d want to imagine.
Earth is clearly the most powerful player of all the factions. I can buy that Mars is in a perpetual cold war with Earth and can hold their own due to a weapons of mass destruction standoff, having humanity’s best and brightest go off to colonize Mars, the Spartan militaristic culture, etc. Their conventional power and resources should not really be able to challenge Earth, but winning local skirmishes and having a cold war - okay.
And the Belt works as sort of a frontier with terrorist/hostile forces, they have little resources but the other factions can’t just openly declare war on them as they rely on exploiting their resources, and the Belters fight asymetrically.
But Earth has billions of people, resources, infrastructure. There’s no way it’s not the big kid on the block.
A massive attack on Earth, one that significantly disrupted the Earth economy/infrastructure/population, would’ve been a bigger game changer. Say, 20-30% of the population dead, and significant chunks of Earth basically ruined and helpless. That would’ve massively equalled the power imbalance between the factions, giving more room for interesting manuevering between relative peers.
Additionally, it works narratively. The impact of the great attack that Marco does is even more impressive and horrible and devastating if it’s much larger in scale. He’s more of a betrayer of humanity if he kills a significant fraction of the human population and cripples the homeworld. His crimes more grand and more villainous. It makes the Martian complicity by supplying him with the stealth tech all the more devastating and a bigger betrayal.
What’s weird is that the Earth storylines acted like Earth was in shambles, like the attack was 10 or 50 times bigger than it was, but the show only really indicated localized problems with a few million dead. An emergency government convening on the moon, Amos and the Baltimore crew feeling like they need to escape the planet - that would’ve made perfect sense in a devastated Earth scenario, but not really the one we saw.
And there’d be a lot more room for drama. What does Earth do when they find out that Mars was complicit in the attack? How does the Earth’s government stay afloat? Should they attack and destroy the belt on a large scale to make sure another attack doesn’t come? Do they fire WMDs at Mars? How does Earth respond to such an incredible humanitarian disaster? How does Earth cope with losing its huge resource/infrastructure/population/power advantage relative to the other two factions?
I don’t get it. It seems like they undercut the impact and all the potential storylines on this one and I don’t see the upside making the attack on Earth relatively small potatoes.
Jumping in late here, because I just now caught up with the season. I’m glad I hadn’t read any spoilers, because, boy, was most of this season a surprise to me.
It took me forever to connect “Peaches” to Clarissa Mao, like, several episodes. Like others, I thought she was part of Amos’s backstory. It doesn’t help that it has been so long since I have seen those old seasons.
I was totally stunned by Alex’s death. In fact, I was confused by the end of that scene, because it wasn’t clear to me that he had died. I guess from the circumstances they hadn’t filmed a traditional “main character dying” sequence complete with beats and closeups and such.
I was even more shocked when I did a Google search and found out why Alex had been written off the show. How did I miss that? Of course, what happened in real life was much worse than what happened on screen.
Still, I wish that they had just recast the role instead of writing the character out. I am sure that they could have found a good actor to play that character. And I would rather they do that than have to rejigger a bunch of storylines because of Cas Anvar’s terrible behavior.
Anyway, still, I was reasonably satisfied with the season, although I felt like a lot of stuff was s t r e t c h e d o u t.
Avasarala continues to be my favorite character. I absolutely love any scene with her, and Avasarala and Amos together was hilarious.
The beginning of the season was quite devastating, with the assassination of Fred Johnson and the meteor strikes on Earth. Drummer was a standout too. I’m going to miss Fred Johnson, just like I miss Klaes Ashford, and Anderson Dawes.
Marco Inaros is a creep and a half and I’m hoping he gets his comeuppance. Boy they have great villains. Karal and Sakai too, had me majorly booing and hissing.
I’m just mad at Naomi for making so many bad choices–saving the protomolecule, going to Marco’s den. Of course, plot has to happen, and, her choices are supported by the story.
And that’s the thing about this show. The weakest character is our hero, James Holden. I have absolutely no emotional connection with him. And I don’t really buy the Holden-Nagata relationship. They have no chemistry for me.
So that is due to an incongruence between the show and the books - in the books it was exactly as you said. Massive, devastating attack - killing tons and tons on the planet. The show went less destruction and deaths, but then carried over the similar Baltimore plot. So it’s a bit of a strange dichotomy.
Yeah, it is like someone was killed in a book, but in the movie it was “only a flesh wound”–but they have the funeral scene anyway.
Holden is a bit like Seinfeld. All of the other characters are in his orbit, but they’re also far more interesting. He’s just the squishy center.
It’s no surprise Holden is boring. He’s the moral center of the crew (and the show). So all the others around do the daredevil-y stretching the rules and he’s the one that reminds everyone of how to act like a good person (most obviously Amos). He’s basically a Boy Scout and those aren’t interesting characters.
Right. The book had a scientific flaw in that the level of destruction was way out of proportion to the actual damage rocks of that size would cause. The show addressed this by making the damage less, but without reducing the impact of the damage. Either way, you have to suspend your disbelief a bit.
The feeling I got about Earth in the series (I haven’t read beyond the first book) was that Earth is somewhat unbalanced and disorganised, a fading superpower with lots of population but rampant unemployment and a limited social safety net. We see the UN and the military having nice buildings and extravagant dresses and high technology, but the scenes outside of that context usually show something less shiny and glamorous. Everybody has a transparent phone, but there are still lots of people barely getting by. We also get to see that Earth’s intelligence services are not all-knowing, and their military power is not unlimited.
Having the meteors be just destructive enough to affect everyone on the planet and topple much of the remaining economy and social order is interesting, and draws a parallel to some real-life cataclysms and pandemics. Sure, they could have turned the planet into a ball of plasma, but where’s the fun in that ?
One thing that annoyed me greatly: Filip repeatedly accusing Naomi of having abandoned them, and Naomi needing half the season before taking the time to explain what had really happened. Sure, she felt kinda guilty about walking away, but was it that hard ?
“I didn’t just walk away, Marco drove me away and kept me away from you for months, so then I had to leave. Yeah, maybe I should have called, but I didn’t think he’d let me reach you, and I suspected he’d already killed you.”
Something like that.