The Expanse

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Written by KTP

The Expanse:  Fedoras in space.

If you take off the classics from the table, the extremely small genre of science fiction television sucks a big floppy one. For every Next Generation, you have Seaquest and Earth: The Final Conflict. For every X-Files, you have Cleopatra 2525 and Space: Above and Beyond. The Syfy channel (the name never stops being stupid) has been trying to hit those sweet TV bucks by pumping out their own shows. They have been more or less shitty. The Expanse is their latest gamble and it’s safe to say that it’s not bad at all.

"You see this guys? It's a clip of a dude getting kicked in the balls....What? What are you looking at me for, I don't fly the ship."

The solar system has been colonized. There is an uneasy alliance between Earth, Mars, and “Belters” who supply raw materials throughout the system. Belter’s are in the early stages of some sort of socialist revolutions as a missing girl and the destruction of an ice trawler complicate an already volatile situation. As the situation breaks down further in a conspiracy to create war between the groups, we see the events unfold through the eyes of the survivors of the trawler crew, a UN politician, and Thomas Jane in a stupid hat.

From the Punisher to a fedora. Jane is decent enough if you forget about the dumbass hat.

Take it off Jane. For the love of fucking God, take that stupid fucking hat and burn it with all the other dumbass props that got dumped in the Galactica dumpster. Other than that, the show isn’t bad at all. The political story that the show weaves is interesting without having over the top twists or a predictable path. Characters are believable enough without becoming obnoxious, and the special effects aren’t bad at all. What really stands out for me is that they don’t treat the viewer like a retard and have mountains of exposition. It follows the rule, “Show, don’t tell.”, in a competent way that I wasn’t prepared for.

There's some cool space pew pew here.

Ultimately, The Expanse doesn’t do anything bad. Sure, there are a few annoying characters and watching Thomas Jane prance around in that stupid hat is irritating, but there’s not anything completely detracting it as a whole. If you go down the checklist and grade all the aspects of the show, it seems to do everything well enough to be enjoyable. Not great, mind you, but enjoyable. Treating viewers like they aren’t retarded also works in its benefit. Add them all up, and you are left with a pretty good show. When you boil it down, I suppose not fucking up any one feature is an achievement in science fiction television…that and having a Syfy show not suck complete dogshit.