When I saw the artwork on the Facebook page, I saw fit to wax witty about it. The suggestion came that it would only appropriate to take a stab at reviewing it. To be quite clear, reviewing other’s creative endeavors is not a thing I ordinarily do. I prefer to improve my own craft. For now, I will only look at Episode 1, called “Dulcinea.” I could devote the rest of the article to the title alone. I won’t, and you can thank me for that later.
First on the list of science fiction tasks is world building. The universe of The Expanse is three centuries from now. Earth and Luna are governed by the UN. Mars is independent, and has its own military. Resources for Earth and Mars come from the asteroid belt and beyond, supplied by a population called Belters. While the inner planets rely on belters for water, none of the water stays there. It all ships out, making water and also air the most precious commodities in existence. This is the basic problem posited by the story.
Tension has been building between Earth/Luna, Mars, and the Belt. At the start of the show, the Belt, with Ceres as its principal place, is a vassal state, serving Earth. Speculation is that if Mars takes over, the Belt will simply change masters without improving their situation. According to the blurb at the beginning of the program, the three entities are on the brink of war. All it will take is a single spark.
The episode opens with a prologue, of sorts. All the current opinion in the writing world is that nobody should use prologues. Still here is a prologue, and the show is a hit. A girl is locked in a small compartment, with noise outside. The noise abates, but nobody lets her out. She finally breaks out into a weightless environment, but one where there is still air. In the engineering area, she sees something that makes her scream.
On Ceres, there are areas that look opulent, but in the area with the workers — the slums, if you will, there are protests. Those running the show make sure the protests don’t get out of hand by throttling the supplies of air and water until the protestors cave in to whatever demands are made. There is no government, with all decisions made by the corporations owning everything that matters. While there is no rule of law, there are private security performing the duties of cops. One of these, Detective Miller, is a belter now doing corporate dirty work along with maintaining a semblance of order. He gets an outside contract to find a missing heiress, Julie Mao. Pictures of her look like the girl in the prologue. He starts nosing around Ceres to get a lead on where she might be.
Meanwhile, near the rings of Saturn, the mining ship Canterbury has finished collecting ice, and is returning to Ceres. The second officer, James Holden, has enough ability to get above the basic working end of the ship, but not enough ambition to go any further. The captain wants him to be the new executive officer (XO) when the current one goes crazy. They get a distress message from another ship, identified as the Scopuli. Holden is sent with some of the crew in a smaller ship to check the situation. Closer inspection discloses a hole in its hull. Inside, they find no air and no bodies. What they do find is a transmitter planted on the bridge of the derelict. The whole thing is a trap.
With that episode, I do want to see what happens next. The episode was well-written, and the actors were believable. The challenge will be to keep up the promise of this episode as the story unfolds. In spite of my nearly nonexistent internet forcing me to restart the program a number of times, it was more than worth the effort. At the same time, I have some problems with both the overall situation as well as several details. To get into them, however, I’ll have to exercise due diligence and advise there will be spoilers in the following discussion.
//SPOILERS FOLLOW//
They do a decent job of showing slums on Ceres. However, if air is such a precious commodity, why is there so much open space? They have apartments going up a number of levels, but there is a significant open area between facing apartment complexes, and a transparent dome above. That represents an enormous amount of air which must be pressurized and circulated. The situation also applies to the mining ships.
Considering the corporate attitude, that refitting a spaceship is expensive, but paying off a few widows is cheap, the amount of space given to those crew members is truly astonishing. The expectation would be more along the lines of a WW II submarine, as well as military surface ships, where crew members didn’t even have a private bunk. They would “hot bunk” with somebody on another shift. Privacy would be nonexistent.
They portray the Belters as being incapable of enduring Earth’s gravity. At the same time, the Canterbury does a ‘turn and burn,’ possibly hitting thirty gravities. Granted, the crew are all in special acceleration couches, with special fluids being pumped into them.
There is also the financial aspect of it all. (Required disclosure: I was a bean counter in a previous life.) Why would a corporation that is so interested in the bottom line hang such a huge amount of power on a mining ship? Air and water may be the new gold standard, but fuel cannot be free. What a thirty-G acceleration would do to a poorly maintained erector set (and that’s what the ships resemble) can only be imagined. No, wait, it would be better not to imagine that kind of carnage.
So as not to end on that note, while The Expanse had elements of Bladerunner, Firefly, and Fifth Element, it also reminded me a bit of Red Dwarf. Both shows had an episode where they’re in a shuttle watching their ship disappear.
I'll start gathering scattered bits of bandwidth, and with any luck, will have Episode 2 in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, I'm writing horseback.
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