Entertainment
‘Game of Thrones’ Meets ‘Stargate’ in Prime Video’s 6-Season Epic Sci-Fi Series
While The Expanse began life on the Syfy network, it was cancelled after three seasons and eventually picked up by Prime Video for three more seasons before its finale. While Prime Video has always been a home for expansive science fiction and fantasy shows like The Wheel of Time and The Man in the High Castle, picking up The Expanse did a huge service to the show, which took its time finding an audience beyond book readers who knew the series.
Like the massively successful Game of Thrones, The Expanse adapted a wildly complex series and made it accessible to the masses. While taking place officially in our solar system, the show and novels are really about the far reaches of the solar system, and the three-way struggle between the citizens of Mars, Earth, and the outer reaches of the asteroid belt (who are known as Belters). Like Game of Thrones, the worldbuilding is so airtight and efficient that viewers will rarely need to ask anything in the initial setup.
‘The Expanse’ Featured a Massive Cast and Scope
Like the A Song of Ice and Fire series, The Expanse book series relies on numerous point-of-view characters to help convey the action and information across its settings. It also benefits from being the right level of hard sci-fi. Like the Stargate film and television series and its use of a titular portal between galactic addresses, The Expanse’s universe is powered by the so-called Epstein Drive, which essentially allows for interplanetary travel. One ship capable of traveling is the Rocinante, piloted by James Holden (Steven Strait), Amos Burton (Wes Chatham), and others.
The event that kicks off The Expanse is the kidnapping of Julie Mao (Florence Faivre). If Game of Thrones found its inciting incident when Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) pushed young Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) out of a tower window, Julie Mao’s kidnapping — triggered in part by her status as a Belt operative — leads slowly to the uncovering of a conspiracy that could tear apart the fragile peace of the solar system. While Julie comes from a wealthy family, her participation in fighting with the OPA (Outer Planets Alliance) shows that in the universe of The Expanse, no amount of high-tech space travel can unravel class division. Due to gravitational changes and exploitative sweatshop conditions, the Belters suffer from difficult ailments. Tasked with locating Julie is Belt detective Joe Miller (Thomas Jane), a roughened, cynical detective on the dwarf planet of Ceres.
Across All Six Seasons, ‘The Expanse’ Charts a Unique and Timely Political Atmosphere
While the detective chase that kicks off the show wraps up at the end of the first season (based pretty faithfully on the first half of the Corey book Leviathan Wakes) when Miller has converged with the path of the Rocinante, it’s a good storytelling device that helps to introduce the viewer to the world of The Expanse. The book series, including full novels and short stories, continued to be adapted by the show until its sixth and final season, leading to the exploration of a vast universe not far off from the impressive scale the Stargate universe (from SG-1 to SGU) that goes far beyond the more basic genre thrills of Miller’s exploration. Season 2’s “Paradigm Shift” episode even goes so far as to show Solomon Epstein’s creation of the Drive that becomes the engine for the whole series.
With The Expanse, viewers get the vastness of a fully realized sci-fi universe and the political depth of a show with a great deal on its mind. Its deep dive into a solar system on the brink of all-out war made it one of the richest shows of its kind between Battlestar Galactica and Andor, and great characters like Bobbie Draper (Frankie Adams) show the lengths to which propaganda plays a part in wartime, while the extremist Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander) gave the series a wildly compelling antagonist. And thanks to the show’s Prime Video pickup, even the final book set in the initial era, Babylon’s Ashes, was adapted to a truncated last season.
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