Screenshot: Amazon

The fourth season of Amazon’s The Expanse will debut in December, but even before that date arrives, production has begun on the series’ fifth season.

The show’s official Twitter account marked the occasion with a short video showing off the crew raising a trio of flags above the show’s sets in Toronto, Ontario. It’s an exciting moment for fans of the series, who’ve endured the ups and downs of a favorite show being cancelled and brought back to life.

Set centuries in the future, the series follows the adventures of the crew of a spaceship called the Rocinante amidst a massive conflict within our solar system. The crew — Captain James Holden (Steven Strait), pilot Alex Kamal (Cas Anvar), engineer Naomi Nagata (Dominque Tipper), and mechanic Amos Burton (Wes Chatham) — have to navigate hostilities between Earth, Mars, and the inhabitants of the outer planets and asteroid belt, all while someone is trying to spark a war to cover up the discovery of an alien substance known as the protomolecule.

And the journey continues… #TheExpanse season 5 production begins today. 🎬 pic.twitter.com/0VtmnhhZ1l — The Expanse (@ExpanseOnPrime) October 22, 2019

There have been plenty of those ups and downs in the last year. In May 2018, Syfy announced that it wouldn’t renew the series, prompting its production studio, Alcon Television Group, to shop the show elsewhere. It quickly found a new home: Amazon Prime Video, which announced that it would bring the series back for a fourth season. Production on the show resumed, and Amazon revealed that the show would return in 2019.

In July, Amazon brought the cast to San Diego Comic-Con, and after debuting a first look for the season, revealed that the season would debut on December 13th, and during this summer’s Television Critics Association press tour, announced that not only would the series return for its fourth season, but it would return for a fifth.

When the series ended its run on Syfy, it did so at a point that could have served as an adequate ending for the story: the protomolecule had opened up a massive ring gate that opened up access to hundreds of other planets, and most of the big storylines had been largely wrapped up. Now, with Season 4, the crew heads out beyond the ring gate to a distant planet known as Ilus, where settlers are coming into conflict with massive corporations that have claimed the planet’s resources. This season adapts the fourth book in the series, Cibola Burn, and presumably, the upcoming fifth season will begin to tackle the fifth book in the series, Nemesis Games. If so, that’s particularly exciting: the book pushes its characters to the edge, and upends the balance of power in the solar system. We’ll be in for a treat, whenever it begins streaming.