Sci-fi hit, with its accent on realism, returns
Let's just get one thing straight right at the top. “The Expanse,” beginning its sixth and final season today on Amazon Prime, is not just the best science-fiction series at the moment. It has been one of the best series of any type since its 2015 debut — though you'd never know it from the lack of Emmy and Golden Globes love.
It's not just the intriguing casting choices over the last six years: the Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo (“House of Sand and Fog”), David Straithairn (“Nomadland”), Thomas Jane (“Stander”) and Jared Harris (“Mad Men”) among them. It's not just that it is, relatively speaking for TV sci-fi, regarded as scientifically accurate. It's not just that, in a six-year run of many highs, season one's explosive first five episodes are examples of worldbuilding and scene-setting at their best.
And it's notable for its portrayal of space not as a place where perfected men boldly go where no man has gone before, but a place where damaged men and women tread, burdened with all the emotional and political baggage that encumbered them on Earth.
What really distinguishes “The Expanse,” based on a series of novels by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (under the pen name of James S.A. Corey), is how it explores the birth of a new culture, including a brand-new language.
How it started
First, a little background: “The Expanse” — which was canceled by Syfy after three seasons and then rescued by Amazon, partly because Jeff Bezos is a fan — is set roughly 300 years in the future, a time when Earth and Luna (the moon) are united under the U.N. flag, while Mars and the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter have been colonized.
But distance does not make the heart grow fonder. Mars and the Belt bristle at Earther control. Militarist, industrious Martians, intent on terraforming their dry, dusty home, see Earthers as weak decadents who destroyed their own environment while the Belters, working-class laborers at the bottom rung of a resource-extraction economy from which both Earth and Mars benefit, grow to despise both of them. They derisively call the planet dwellers “Inners” (as in inner solar system) who look down on them and launch an uprising through the OPA (Outer Planets Alliance).
Race and nationality have receded as issues 300 years from now, and the Earthers, Martians and Belters are all a glorious mix. The show's reluctant warrior heroes — a multicultural crew featuring Earthers James (Steven Strait) and Amos (Wes Chatham) as well as Martians Bobbie (Frankie Adams) and Alex (Cas Anvar, who left after season five) and Belter Naomi (Dominique Tipper) — represent what this brave new world could look like. But hate and suspicion run deep.
The Belters aren't just evolving politically, a process culminating in the growing power of the charismatic Belter leader, Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander), and his hot-headed son, Filip ( Jasai Chase Owens), who dominate season six. Their bodies are shape-shifting, too. Being raised over successive generations in low-gravity environments means that Belters are taller, thinner and bear more brittle bones than their Earthbound compatriots. This trait is exploited by one of the Earth government leaders (Aghdashloo), who uses the heavy weight of Earth's gravity to torture a suspected terrorist.
Rise of Belter Creole
The Belters are also changing how they talk, hatching a language that binds them together as a symbol of community and resistance. Because the Belters originally came from a variety of backgrounds — American, Western European, Russian, Arabic, African, Asian, Latin — the way they talked began to become a Creole language each could understand.
Alternately called “Lang Belta” or “Belter Creole,” it was devised by an actual linguist and polyglot, Nick Farmer, who fleshed out what was in the books. He looked to existing Creole languages, like Haitian Creole, for inspiration but also rummaged through other tongues from the Romance, Slavic, Indic, Japanese, Germanic, Chinese and West African language families. The result is something that, to an American ear, sounds like some blend of Caribbean Creole, Mandarin, Russian and Afrikaans.
Of course, it's not uncommon for science fiction and fantasy stories to feature invented languages. But often they are not supposed to be of contemporary human origin — think Elvish in “Lord of the Rings,” Klingon in “Star Trek” or Dothraki in “Game of Thrones.” Farmer's task was more strict: What might an Earthderived culture talk like in 300 years time?.
As Wired wrote in 2017, “Farmer knew how he wanted Belter to sound to the ear — like everything and nothing at the same time.” And, soon enough, some linguists were praising it, Reddit threads were born, and fans began throwing around such Belter words as “beltalowda” (people of the Belt), “copeng” (friend), “bosmang” (bossman), “oyedeng” (goodbye) and “taki taki” (thank you).
Belters, who often work in the silence of space where vocal language is not possible, also use gestures to get their points across. According to space.com, Farmer hired an Italian choreographer to work on body language.)
This gives “The Expanse” a jolt of cultural realism that a lesser series might forsake. Unfortunately, there's been less of an emphasis on this distinctive language in more recent episodes, and that carries over into the final season, which is more about the hunt for Inaros and less about the culture that gave birth to him. The characters more often get by using English with a Belter accent instead of utilizing many of their own phrases.
That's too bad, but that doesn't lessen the power of what Abraham, Franck, Farmer and showrunner Naren Shankar created.
And, as the series gets ready to say “oyedeng” for good, we can only say “taki taki.”