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“Strange Dogs”: Nobody Is Having a Good Time as The Expanse Begins Its Final Season

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“Strange Dogs”: Nobody Is Having a Good Time as The Expanse Begins Its Final Season

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Published on December 10, 2021

Screenshot: Amazon Studios
Screenshot: Amazon Studios

We’re in the home stretch—the final six episodes of The Expanse, at least in its current form and on Amazon Prime—and everyone is miserable. Exhausted, grief-stricken, traumatized, and miserable.

Well, almost everyone. Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander) is fine, because Marco Inaros doesn’t really care about much of anything so long as Belters are still chanting his name. At the end of season five, they were chanting his full name. Now, it’s just “MARCO! MARCO!,” a fact which is not lost on Marco’s troubled teenage son, Filip (Jasai Chase-Owens). It’s not family that matters in the Free Navy. It’s just Marco.

But every family is struggling with the post-season-five new world order.

Spoilers for episode one, “Strange Dogs,” follow!

In The Expanse’s previous season, the crew of the Rocinante and their allies in the Belt, Earth, and Mars weren’t facing down an entire murderous planet, or a protomolecule-human hybrid, or a deadly slow zone, or even a self-piloting asteroid. They were just facing other humans: Marco and his Free Navy, who threw a whole bunch of very large, stealth-tech-coated asteroids at Earth and did incalculable damage. At the end of this episode’s opening, which includes an info-heavy news montage about the state of Earth, a Belter says, “Now Earthers know what it feels like to be Belter.”

He could mean so many things by that, but at least part of it is that Earthers are living with a new kind of uncertainty. Belters live in the void. Anything could fail: air systems, water systems, a ship’s hull, food supplies. Earthers have long had the illusion of stability, solid ground under our feet and a wide open sky full of air. But he also means that power has shifted. The Inners, the citizens of Earth and Luna and dying Mars, are playing defense. Their homes are failing, and they aren’t in control.

Is Marco, though? He’s leading by avoiding, ignoring the problems that have always faced the Belt—all the more so with Earth’s biosphere so damaged that crops are failing. Where will food come from? Where will they get supplies? How will the Belters who Marco claims to fight for continue to survive if he is indifferent to their survival? Practical concerns—like those of the Ceres Station administrator—are beneath him. 

Screenshot: Amazon Studios

The person who seems most aware of Marco’s indifference is Filip, who is a hot mess, ricocheting between casual sex (that he acts like he’s entitled to) to arrogant posturing to trying to claim a place at Marco’s side. He’s messed up by his role in the killing of Earth and well on his way to becoming his own kind of monster. The scene where he goes back to the bar to harass the bartender who rejected him is horribly, masterfully written, a precise distillation of an experience too many people have had with entitled men. And that weary bartender has obviously tried to defuse more than one of these situations in the past. 

She’s not the one who takes the brunt of Filip’s rage, though. That’s his friend Yoan, poor guy, in his fake alligator-skin vest. In the books, Filip murders a security guard, which poses a slightly bigger problem for Marco. The choice to change the victim to a friend makes the aftermath more emotionally destructive for Filip. He’s an immature teen who’s been radicalized and manipulated by his own father, who long ago drove Filip’s mother away—and then did it again and tried to make the fallout Filip’s fault. Chase-Owens plays him like a powder keg, so tense and full of rage, he seems physically uncomfortable even when he seems to be lounging. All that anger is going to need somewhere to go.

Screenshot: Amazon Studios

On the Rocinante, Holden (Steven Strait), Amos (Wes Chatham), Naomi (Dominique Tipper) and Clarissa “Peaches” Mao (Nadine Nicole) are almost six months into a recon mission that leads them to a discovery: The rocks Marco is still throwing at Earth have drives attached, and those drives are triggered by a signal from a spotter ship. If they can find that ship and stop it, it’ll put an end to Marco’s continuous attack. 

It sounds straightforward, but the situation on the Roci is bitterly complicated. Everyone is worn thin and testy. Naomi is struggling with the trauma from her kidnapping and incredible escape, and with the knowledge that she’s hunting down Belters—her own people. Clarissa’s presence doesn’t help—there’s that little matter of how she tried to kill Holden—and since Amos never explains himself, it’s not clear to anyone why she’s there. But it’s clear to Naomi that he made this decision without her. She’s not his moral guidance system anymore.

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Sisters of the Forsaken Stars

Sisters of the Forsaken Stars

The tension in their relationship is a little bit crushing. I love these two, Naomi with her tempered idealism, Amos with his ever-changing understanding of people. (I have a whole working theory about how Amos Burton represents humanity at its worst, best, and greatest potential.) Last season, they were the twin lenses through which we saw Marco and his plan: Naomi was part of his past, and Amos dealt most directly with the repercussions on Earth. Naomi, who always needs to fix things, had to face the immediacy of her own situation; Amos, master of doing what needs to be done, found he could help people using tools other than his physical strength. More than anyone, Amos has been on an accidental quest to reorient himself. To find another way to be. Which is what people need to do, over and over again, in this story.

Holden and Naomi are also struggling, and it has a lot to do with his delusional optimism and her trauma about loss. After he almost dies trying to dismantle the drive on the rock they find, Holden admits, “I think sometimes I convince myself the worst can’t happen. It’s a way for me to get through things. I’ll be more careful, for all of us, I promise.” But this is not how Naomi gets through things, and she’s had so many losses that watching him almost blow up leaves her painfully brittle and shaken. It’s all in the way Tipper moves about the Roci without any of her usual Belter grace. Her whole body is a big slump, folded in on itself below her exhausted face.

(Holden is also curious about the strange light in the ring gate when the Barkeith passed through. He is right to be curious! That is a very bad situation!)

Screenshot: Amazon Studios

On the Tynan, Drummer (Cara Gee) and her family are on the run from Marco, who has raised the bounty on them (and the Rocinante). When we last saw Drummer, she was turning on Marco and stopping an attack on the Roci—a choice that led to Marco murdering one of their family. Grief has undone Michio (Vanessa Smythe), who was key in the mutiny but now is all shaking hands and tears and mistakes. Drummer is as gentle as she can be when she says she’ll drop Michio off at a safe port, but it’s clear she doesn’t really want to make this choice—that keeping her family together is more important than the logical “right thing.” 

Drummer has long been one of this series’ most fascinating characters, an amalgam of book characters transformed, by the scripts and Cara Gee’s intense performance, into an icon of steely but strong-hearted leadership (and stunning eyeliner). She’s been shot during a different mutiny; she almost died on Medina Station; she’s argued with her commanders and mourned their deaths; now, as the only other Belter captain we see, her role is as a sharp counterpoint to Marco. Her every decision requires considering the potential for loss, for grief and harm to her family. The right thing might be the painful thing. She leads because she must, not because it feeds her ego. 

Screenshot: Amazon Studios

On Earth, Chrisjen Avasarala (the luminous Shohreh Aghdashloo)—with the help of Bobbie Draper (Frankie Adams)—is trying to stop Marco’s rocks and hold what’s left of Earth together. When journalist Monica Stuart (Anna Hopkins) pushes her on the idea of a peace treaty with Marco, it sounds almost logical: Everyone is suffering, on the inner planets and in the Belt, so why not look for a way to end it? Who cares if you lose face, so long as people are safe and fed? But Monica doesn’t know what we know: Marco doesn’t care. The only thing he seems to care about is heard in a conversation that seems almost offhand. He tells Rosenfeld (Kathleen Robertson) to give Medina Station whatever they need. 

One of the things I love so much about The Expanse is how carefully it’s layered. You can watch for the overarching plot, for the space battles and protomolecule hybrids and planet-sized catastrophes, and you can also watch a very intimate drama about how we live with each other in times of stress and trauma, and how people do worse and do better, and you can watch a show that layers these things on top of mysteries and families and the technical aspects of life in space, with even tertiary characters who have full arcs and lived-in personalities (goddamn Diogo!). There are details in chyrons on screens, dropped references that come back to huge payoffs, costumes and settings that have so much to say about each world or ship or person. 

Marco’s interest in Medina is one of those details, layered in throughout last season so that when his “knife in the dark” came, it made sense even as the action itself—the attack at the Ring—was shocking. Medina controls the ring space, so Medina controls the way to the 1373 other systems. And one of those systems is key: Ring 673, Planet 2: Laconia. 

There are only two scenes in this episode that don’t take place in space, which says so much about how power has shifted. The contrast between the two is striking: On Earth, it’s grey and glum and crops are failing. On Laconia, the world is lush and full of life. But it’s not life we’re familiar with. And when a curious little girl feeds a bit of her snack to a native species, it’s only minutes before the poor thing is on the ground, crying piteously.

Screenshot: Amazon Studios

Readers have been wondering, ever since it was announced this would be the last Expanse season from Amazon, whether the show would get to Laconia. The final three Expanse novels are largely set 30 years in the future on this distant world, which is ruled over by High Consul Winston Duarte, a defected Martian to whom Marco traded the last protomolecule sample. The end of season five showed the horrible scientist Cortazar (Carlos Gonzalez-Vio) on Laconia, speaking about his work with the sample before the camera panned up to show something very large and clearly not human-made floating above the planet. 

“Strange Dogs” takes its name from a novella set between books six and seven, Babylon’s Ashes and Persepolis Rising. It’s about that little girl from the opening sequence, and it has vital connections to the rest of the Laconia story. But there are only five more episodes. Is it even possible to wind up the conflict with Marco and get to an ending point with the protomolecule? Why show us that orbital platform if nothing is going to come of it? Is this just a tease tied to the possibility that this is only the end of The Expanse at Amazon

I have a good deal of faith that the showrunners know where they’re going. I’ve been rewatching the first couple of Expanse seasons and noticing the way they seed things: Avasarala’s first-season concern that people will throw rocks at them; the first mention of the Inaros faction; how early it is when Naomi first mentions her son (to Prax, who is desperately trying to find his daughter). In a recent event for the final Expanse novel, co-author Ty Franck said, “Adaptation is compression.” This show (on which Franck and co-author Daniel Abraham are producers and writers) has been smart and clever about what it compresses, what it simply leaves out, and what it brings to life in glorious detail, straight from the page. This premiere is a stage-resetter, like late-season premieres often are. But because it’s The Expanse, it’s full of rich and vivid character work that turns the gears of space politics. 

No matter what happens, I’m going to want more, though.

Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.

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Molly Templeton

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Molly Templeton has been a bookseller, an alt-weekly editor, and assistant managing editor of Tor.com, among other things. She now lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods.
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