The second season of The Expanse makes improvements from the first season, but still shares some of the flaws, all wrapped in a continually interesting story.
*Light spoilers for this season in the review, one big spoiler at the end*
The best thing about The Expanse is just how watchable it is. The show’s second season made me do everything from exclaim aloud in interest and joy to severe eye rolling. I never felt the want to stop, despite the show’s flaws. In fact, as someone who never binge watches shows, this series got an unprecedented 3 or 4 episodes in a row, which for me is unheard of. It takes the things that made the first season great with stride. The mystery that the main plot follows stays at the forefront, and it’s incredibly entertaining to connect all the dots. The introduction of a spy subplot spices things up and picks up some of the slack that the politics have in the latter half of the season. The inclusion of a series of flashbacks detailing how space travel became so advanced through the Epstein Drive is a good way to flesh out and explain the means of travel without having Naomi recite forced exposition. The crew of the Rocinante have the heart of the show, as usual, and their story takes the audience through the effects of a system wide space war through the eyes of the everyman, which means quite a few cool locations. The VFX in the show are great, although the broader vision and more frequent use means some of the short VFX shots suffer in quality. While some shots do suffer, the creativity shines in a lot of scenes. Particularly a scene where blood gets exposed to the vacuum of space and becomes a blood crystal, and the space combat stays engaging with unique ideas and solutions for the situation.
The show combines cool space stuff with character in a meaningful way, which is great a lot of the time. Sometimes, it’s not as great. Miller still lacks good dialogue, and his relationship with Julie comes off as more creepy obsession than anything else, yet they still kiss even though they just met in that same scene. Alex raises moral questions that could make the scene more interesting, and most of the time it gets played off as a joke. Amos goes through a massive character change, and at the time of editing this, I am beginning season 4, and they still haven’t addressed it! Naomi has a lot of forced backstory that comes up in a few scenes out of nowhere, and conflict seems to still arise for the sake of conflict within the group. I think I still have whiplash from all the major character changes that Errinwright went through in this season with little to no explanation, wasting an incredibly interesting arc by not inserting enough connective tissue. That being said, this season was at its best when the new characters were introduced. The spy in the aforementioned spy subplot, Cotyar, is just the right mix of sass and testosterone. The Martian marine, Bobbie ‘Gunny’ Draper, while sometimes leaning on the stone faced marine too hard, is incredibly endearing and had one of my favorite character moments this season. Prax, a refugee botanist from Ganymede station that joins the crew of the Rocinante on their adventure, is far and away the best addition to the show. Terry Chen brings such a hopeful, loving man to life in such a human way that it’s believable and understandable when he has his moments of darkness. These characters are what makes this season really come alive, and are the foundation which keeps the grand scope of the story grounded. Even though some of the character choices frustrated me, I loved that there were consequences for what happened in last season’s finale, I adored the ingenuity that they used for even the smallest things, and the big space Mormon ship was used a lot this season, so I enjoyed that too. The thick geopolitical tensions between Earth, Mars, and the Belt were confusing at times, but kept bringing the story to interesting places consistently. The power dynamics between the three groups are so intriguing that I don’t mind that the show has a habit of setting up four plotlines and only following through with 2 of them. (Okay, maybe I mind a little bit…)
What the second season of The Expanse comes down to is a show that gets so good at some points, that it feels like a completely different show in the moments that it makes poor choices. What keeps me watching are the endearing characters, amazing scope and mystery of the story, and of course, cool space shit.
God damn it, Miller died without a good haircut.
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