THE EXPANSE
Step through the airlock and into season five of the epic star saga.
THE WORLD IS ABOUT TO BE destroyed… and nobody even has an inkling of its imminent doom.
The Expanse’s fourth season ended with Holden (Steven Strait) and company completing their mission beyond the Rings, on the planet Ilus. After all the mayhem and social unease, the crew of The Rocinante deserve a breather, but the show’s latest antagonist, Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander), has other plans. Employing stolen Martian technology, he’s launched several cloaked asteroids towards Earth. And anybody familiar with movies like Armageddon or Deep Impact knows that such a collision will wreak major havoc, on a global scale.
“It takes rocks a while to cover that distance,” showrunner Naren Shankar tells SFX. “The events early on in season five occur under a shadow of mounting dread. The dread is really from the audience’s perspective, because they know what’s coming. At the end of season four, nobody knows that those rocks are out there. Nobody knows what Marco is doing. Nobody knows what has happened. Take that idea and run with it. Now, how that comes to fruition, or not – the consequences of it – is all the material of season five.”
Shankar calls this year the series’ most “personal and epic season”. Based on the fifth instalment in the Expanse books series, Nemesis Games, the show picks up with the calm before the storm. When the show returns, humans are journeying through the Ring gates in search of a new place to settle. In the meantime, the core four characters – Holden, Amos (Wes Chatham), Naomi (Dominique
Tipper) and Alex (Cas Anvar) – have split up to confront some of their own private baggage.
“It’s something the show has done consistently over the years,” Shankar says. “It has this unique balance of the high-epic, grand geopolitical storyline. But it’s always refracted through very personal, boots-on-the-ground individual characters. This season, that balance just seemed to hit a beautiful, sweet spot.
“Part of it is because we are paying off and illuminating things that have been in the narrative since almost the beginning, but also diving into the characters and revealing things about them that people have been really curious about,” he continues. “That balance, against the actual events of this season… It’s actually my favourite book of the series.”
It’s November 2019, and SFX is visiting the Toronto set of The Expanse. Today’s sequence – which is more dialogue-heavy than actionorientated – unfolds in an office on the moon. Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo), who previously lost the race to be elected Secretarygeneral to Nancy Gao (Lily Gao) – displays a softer, more maternal side during a video chat with her daughter. The man behind the camera yelling “Cut!” and “Reset!” and doling out praise to the actors is none other than cast member Thomas Jane, who portrays Joe Miller. This episode, “Mother,” marks his directorial debut on the space drama.
“It was something Tom really wanted to do,” Shankar says. “He had put his hat in the ring in season four. He had actually come and shadowed [director] Breck Eisner. There was one particular episode this season that felt it would be a really good match for Tom’s sensibility. And he did a great job. There are a lot of big emotional moments in it, too.”
Shankar explains that this season is about “reaping what you sow and the ghosts of your past”. For Alex, that means his wife and child back on Mars – loved ones he abandoned. Meanwhile, Holden and Naomi seem to be enjoying some domestic bliss, which doesn’t last long. A good chunk of the run will focus on Naomi’s quest to rescue her grown-up son, Filip, who has aligned himself with his radical father, Marco.
“It took Naomi almost three seasons before she told Holden about Marco,” Shankar says. “In fact, she was talking about how she had a son with somebody. Naomi had mentioned it a little bit, but not really to Holden. She had
talked about who this guy was, this charismatic revolutionary. You will get a much stronger sense of who Naomi was before she ended up on the Canterbury, and maybe what drove her to being on the Canterbury in the first place.”
Then there is Holden, the Roci’s captain, who’s been driven by the protomolecule stuck in his head. Voices and visions turned him into a prophet of sorts. But now that Holden is finally free of the protomolecule’s influence, what’s his next step?
“The last thing Holden said to Miller in season four was, ‘Wait. The civilisation that built all these machines, the Rings and the pro to molecule… they got wiped out by something else. And now we’re using their Rings again,’” explains Shankar. “Miller goes, ‘Yeah, that might be a problem for you. You should look into that.’
“Holden is left with that concern: that something out there killed this incredibly powerful civilisation, that built these incredibly powerful things,” he continues. “As usual, Holden is the one doing his best to keep his eye on the larger picture and the larger problem down the road. Not immediately, but understanding there might be some much bigger issues ahead. That can be a lonely job.”
Meanwhile Amos, the team’s resident loose cannon, is Earth-bound. Amos returns to his old Baltimore stomping grounds to wrap up some unfinished business. The trip will force him to revisit the old life he left far behind.
“The chance of having Amos come back to deal with the people and events that made him what he was, that was really attractive,” Shankar explains. “It shows a completely different side of this guy. And it’s just for the audience. They are going to get to experience him in a way that maybe the other characters on the Roci don’t get to see.”
HITTING THE ROCKS
When it comes to whether this season’s narrative closely follows that of the books, in which (spoilers!) the Earth eventually lies in ruins, with society broken down and millions dead, Shankar is keeping his cards close to his chest: he declines to comment on whether the writers’ room gleefully mapped out the annihilation of the planet. But judging by his final tease, the outcome sounds inevitable…
“One of the things we always talk about is real physics and how these impacts actually occur,” Shankar says. “If you studied asteroid impacts on Earth, these are pretty intense events. That possibility is certainly out there. We understand the threat they represent.
“As far back as season one, Avasarala was talking about what she fears is the Belters throwing rocks at Earth,” he concludes. “If the impact is significant enough… They call them extinction-level events for a reason!”
As usual, Holden is the one doing his best to keep his eye on the larger picture and the larger problem
The first three episodes of The Expanse season five are on Amazon Prime Video on 16 December, with new episodes each Wednesday.