Review — The Expanse, Season 3

The best sci-fi show in years just keeps getting better.

I have a habit of allowing too much time to pass from the time I finish a season of a TV show to the time I’m ready to write, so I have to talk about season three of my current favorite show before so much time passes that I forget everything that happened this season. 😂 And truth be told, The Expanse is the best sci-fi show of this decade and I want everyone who is a fan of sci-fi TV to watch it!

It was actually canceled by SyFy after the third season, leading fans to launch a massive “Save The Expanse” social media campaign. Fortunately, Amazon swooped in an agreed to pick it up for a fourth season, which is scheduled to air later this year. For now, you can binge the first three seasons if you have an Amazon Prime account.

If you’ve read my review of season one, you know the basic premise of the show. But basically it’s set in a future in which Mars and the asteroid belt are colonized by humans. Earth and Mars are in a state of cold war, and there’s growing unrest among the working class Belters who feel that the inner worlds have exploited them.

Worth mentioning too, since I’ve devoted so much of my writing to the awful Star Trek: Discovery lately, that this is the antithesis of Discovery in nearly every way. Discovery wins in the special effects budget department, but that’s it. Discovery wants to hang a lantern on the fact that its cast is diverse. It’s practically shouting at you at every second, “Don’t you see how diverse our cast is? Celebrate us!!!” Meanwhile The Expanse just has a great cast of well-written, well-acted characters who happen to be quite diverse, but isn’t trying to win political correctness brownie points for it.

And they really are GREAT characters. The four core characters the show follows are all great, particularly Amos, the tough-as-nails, never-phased-by-circumstances pragmatist muscle of the group. This season two other characters really got the opportunity to shine: Cara Gee’s Drummer and David Strathairn’s Ashford. This season also saw Elizabeth Mitchell join the cast. Now here I must say that I can’t stand Mitchell’s characters. Ever. She’s probably a lovely person, but I can’t stand the scolding, perpetually disappointed mom character she plays in everything. So when I tell you that The Expanse actually made me like her character that’s about the highest praise I could give a show, but it’s true! She did a fantastic job embodying what I would imagine a future Methodist minister would actually be like.

This show is an adaptation of a series of novels which I haven’t yet read, and they sometimes break up the books in odd ways. The first six episodes of season three close last season’s story arc, and the second half of the season introduces a very different one. Of the two I enjoyed the first half the best. It really leaned into the solar system-wide politics that I find so engaging in this show. We got to actually see Earth and Mars go to war. Episode five in particular gave us some incredible Crimson Tide-esque moments with an attempted mutiny aboard one of Earth’s warships. And the ending of that story arc in episode six was fantastic. Amos’s “I am that guy” moment at the end was some of the best TV I’ve ever seen.

The second half of the season gave us some of the truest hard sci-fi that I think has ever been dramatized for TV. You kind of have to see it for yourself. While I didn’t find that section as engaging as the first half of the season, it was still extremely good and set the show up for an interesting fourth season.

If you haven’t watched the show, you’ve gotta watch it! If you’ve watched a few episodes of season one and haven’t gotten hooked yet, stick with it. I hate to be the guy that says, “it gets better after season one,” but I think it really does, and you’ll appreciate it a lot once you get to seasons two and three.