BEST OF 2018 - THE EXPANSE GETS WEIRDER AND BETTER AS IT EXPANDS

7.  THE EXPANSE (SYFY)

For as wide and deep as our streaming and cable options have gotten over the last decade, quality hard sci-fi offerings have been few and far between. I love the stuff, and yet I’ve been starved for a proper gritty space opera since Battlestar Galactica went off the air 10 years ago. Given that, I shouldn’t have drug my feet so long on checking out The Expanse. But drag I did, because while the first season impressed me with the level of thoughtful world-building necessary to create a plausible intrastellar society functioning without the benefit of faster-than-light travel options that most sci-fi takes as given, it also took its sweet time setting up its multiple narrative strands. I didn’t start feeling the need to catch all the way up until they started weaving them together at the end of the season. Once the plots and characters did start intersecting, though, things go much more interesting and exciting. Mixing up the character combinations turned out to be especially vital, since the show definitely suffers from the common genre show malady where the tangential members of the ensemble are much more interesting than the main protagonists; give me any scene with Amos or Drummer or Bobbie over Holden and Naomi any day.

It wasn't quite Game Of Thrones in space, but the second season edged closer to earning that title, and the third closer still as it finally pulled all its most interesting characters together and a proper star war finally boiled over.  It doesn’t have quite the same narrative sprawl as GOT, but does have a similar knack for dramatizing its fictional politics, the intricate plotting that maintains a sense of purpose thanks to working from literary source material, the resistance to simple good guy/bad guy labeling, unpredictable pacing and overarching mythological mysteries that generally take a backseat to the political scheming.  Most especially, it also has the flavor that comes from grounding its milieu in a grittier sense of realism than the genre is known for. This year put that realism to the test, as it cranked the conflicts up to truly cosmic levels, and the more outlandish elements were confronted head on. But even as it took us into weirder and weirder territory, the show felt surprisingly safe from drowning in these sci-fi conceits, still grounding them in the brutal realities of space travel and the characters’ reactions in plausible political and emotional convictions.

It’s still space opera, which is absolutely my jam. bBt there is no other series of that type where when a spaceship takes off, a carelessly unlocked drawer can be as much of a threat as an unkillable alien stowaway, and either can be the basis of a major setpiece where the characters fight for their lives. Mutinies are a bigger threat than evil space wizard overlords, you don't have to fire a photon torpedo into the reactor core to destroy a space station when some incidental shrapnel damage is enough to cause its delicate life support systems to collapse, and the season’s Big Bad is ultimately revealed to be rapid deceleration. It’s crazy how well all this esoterica works as drama, and given the cliffhanger it ended on, and Amazon’s timely intervention to save it from SyFy’s cancellation, the craziest parts appear to be still to come.

Watch It For: The uncanny disconnect when you hear Cara Gee speak like a normal Socal girl after getting so accustomed to the basso Belter patois she affects on the show.