The Expanse season 5 trailer reveals that they are following the story arc of Nemesis Games rather closely.

Last week, The Expanse season five trailer dropped. For fans of the books and in particular, Nemesis Games, there were some great one second glimpses of incredible events that take place in that story. If you haven't read Nemesis Games or you are behind on The Expanse and want to catch up, then this is your <<SPOILER WARNING>>

Nemesis Games is the book that starts a whole new story arc for The Expanse. Interwoven into season four, you got your introduction to the big bad villain, Marco Inaros, who also happens to be Naomi's ex. In Nemesis Games and I expect season five of The Expanse...Marco and his group of extremist followers wage war on Earth by sending asteroids covered in stealth paint to bombard the planet. Earth in the time of Nemesis Games has a population of 40 billion. If I remember correctly, after Marco's attacks there is only a population of 10 billion who manage to survive. Just think about that a moment, and you can imagine what season five is going to have in store for us.

The book describes cataclysmic tidal waves, earthquakes, starvation...you name it. The storyline pushes all of The Expanse crew to the limit. Amos actually gets trapped on Earth, because he goes there to take care of some personal business and to visit Peaches (Clarissa Mao) who is in a high-security prison there deep underground. It actually ends up being the only reason they survive.

Meanwhile, in space Naomi gets caught up in a reunion of sorts with Marco and she has to confront full-on that her ex is a mass-murdering psychopath and terrorist. The struggle she goes through just to survive this, much less to try and save her son from being sucked into Marco's world, is some riveting reading.

And then there's Avasarala. Nemesis Games and Babylon's Ashes are at the core of her story. She is going to be involved in so many scenes as the crisis just keeps amping up for Earth, and the leadership of the U.N. and all of Earth is in tatters. There are so many edge-of-the-seat "nail-biting" scenes involving Avasarala, I just hope they can do this thing justice (I have no doubt that I will be pleased, truthfully). To give Amazon credit, they created a spectacular season 4 on the alien planet of Ilus. Anyway, if you haven't watched the trailer yet, please check it out below.

The Expanse Profiles: Detective Josephus Miller

At right is a picture by an artist called "Acedhampir" of Detective Josephus Miller, who is a crucial character in James S.A. Corey's The Expanse. If you like the art, you can see more of it HERE. 

You first get introduced to Detective Miller (who is described looking pretty much as the artist as pictured here) in the first book of The Expanse called Leviathan Wakes. It also happens at about that same point in the television adaptation.

As far as heroes go, he's a bit of a Sam Spade (from The Maltese Falcon). He's a tough talker straight from the pages of a 1930's noir pulp fiction. He's got that same kind of tough personality that you get from Humphrey Bogart's character (in that famous film), and in a different time, he'd be smoking cigarettes constantly and calling women by the names "dame" and "broad."

Pretty early on, he gets hired to track down a missing rich girl by the name of Juliette Mao. In doing so, he ends up falling in love with her even though he's never met her. Going through all of her private things gives him a mental image of this "ideal woman" and he kind of tortures himself trying to unwind what exactly happened to her. Because of this, he starts seeing her when he's alone and even has conversations with her "ghost."

Eventually, he tracks Juliette to an apartment on Eros station, and in so doing he also joins up with Captain Holden of The Rocinante. This sets off a chain of events where they are attacked by forces friendly to a corporate interest that is doing experiments on the alien protomolecule (of which Julie is an unwilling participant). When they find her in her apartment, the protomolecule has already overrun her body and is exploding outward in black tendrils that quickly endanger the station. But (unbeknownst to Holden and Miller), the corporation has determined that Eros station and its fifteen million inhabitants would be a perfect test area for the protomolecule. Miller and Holden barely escape the station alive while most of the other inhabitants suffer the most gruesome deaths at the hands of the protomolecule (which turns them into a kind of undead).

Shortly after that, Miller returns to Eros Station and convinces what remains of Juliette Mao (which is at the center of the station and in control of the entire thing through the protomolecule network) to crash the station into Venus instead of Earth. In a strange kind of dream, Juliette Mao was going home and taking the protomolecule with her, which would have wiped out all life on Earth.

With Miller's death, the protomolecule somehow co-opted his image and his personality and mixed it with its technology and used the image of Miller to contact Holden and give him advice and instructions. These came in particularly useful in Nemesis Games, even though a lot of what happened in Nemesis Games was a direct result of The Rocinante having a small amount of protomolecule on board (that the crew didn't know about). This small sample started to awaken all the alien technology on the planet Ilus, to the point that it endangered the lives of every living thing on the planet.

In The Expanse television adaptation, Detective Josephus Miller is played by actor Thomas Jane. He's pictured at left. I think the actor does a great job of portraying Detective Miller, because he successfully channels the 1930's gumshoe detective pretty well. 

Coming up on Monday: Profile of Clarissa Mao

The Expanse Profiles: Bobbie Draper

At right is a fanart picture drawn by JujuFei on DeviantArt of the character Bobbie Draper in The Expanse series. HERE is a link to the page where I took the art from. In the book, the authors describe Bobbie Draper as being of Samoan heritage, and they use this as one reason for her being incredibly tall and strong. I guess we are all used to thinking of Dwayne Johnson whenever anyone says "Samoan" so it's a pretty effective racial stereotype as it leaves little need to explain anything. I'm also not positive on how "true" it is, but it definitely works for the character as she's a kind of female version of all Dwayne Johnson's roles wound into one.

Bobbie is a Martian marine and former Gunnery Sergeant. The low gravity of Mars hasn't affected her because of the intense training that she puts herself through. Additionally, the books go out of their way to point out that Bobbie wears an older model of the Martian power armor because it fits really well (unlike the newer ones). It seems somehow appropriate in this particular illustration that she be wrapping her hands with the kind of tape you see boxers using. Her character is essentially about fighting and killing and she's a weapons expert as well as a damn good detective and overall leader. She spots everything. When she goes to work for Chrisjen Avasarala, she figures out pretty early that Chrisjen's assistant is up to no good, tracks him to a clandestine meeting, and then exposes him to Avasarala who promptly fires him.

The actress who plays Bobbie Draper in the television series is Frankie Adams. I think she does a pretty good job of playing the rather stoic and incredibly athletic Martian soldier, and she does come across as a badass, which (I think) is the most important aspect of this character. In Persepolis Rising, there's a fight between Amos and Bobbie that almost kills both of them when Amos turns to Bobbie and says, "Babs, when did you become such a pussy?" She promptly begins to put the smack down on Amos (who is trying to kill her) until he's bleeding and has got nothing left to even pick himself up off the floor.

In The Expanse books (and some in the series), Bobbie is either in the right place at the right time, or she accomplishes some incredible feats. Here's a rundown of things I noted:

1) She faces down and destroys single-handedly a protomolecule monster.
2) She takes over as Captain for The Rocinante when Holden retires, and later she becomes captain of a Laconian ship stolen from Medina Station.
3) She beats up Amos, which no one has ever been able to do.
4) She's the person who first realizes that Fred Johnson is dead during the high G maneuvers in Nemesis Games.
5) She saves Chrisjen Avasarala's life when the yacht she's in (owned by Jules Pierre Mao) takes her prisoner.

I look forward to seeing what Bobbie Draper does with her new "protomolecule" designed space ship when the next book in The Expanse, called Tiamat's Wrath, comes out in March.

Coming up on Friday: Profile of Detective Josephus Miller

The Expanse Profiles: Chrisjen Avasarala

In the Expanse television series we meet the diplomat Chrisjen Avasarala in the first episode. However, she doesn't actually make her appearance until book two of the Expanse published works entitled Caliban's War. I was kind of surprised by this, as I thought she would have made an appearance in the story much sooner.

Chrisjen is light on description, as are most of the details in The Expanse books. The dialogue does all the heavy lifting, which ends up being a decent tool through which to visualize people as it allows your imagination to fill in the details. The things that we do know about her are that she's 1) a skinny and short grandmother, 2) she's Indian by decent, and 3) she swears like a sailor (preferring the "f" bomb to just about any other swear word). You kind of need to get used to seeing it on the page in any chapter that you read.

Chrisjen starts out as the Deputy Undersecretary of the United Nations, which is the second most powerful position on Earth. This was a decent starting point for this character and made it so that she could ascend to Secretary-General of the United Nations in Nemesis Games after Earth is destroyed by rocks hurled by belter terrorists from outer space. An Artist by the name of TenshiRisu visualized Chrisjen Avasarala as looking like this picture (inset above and to the right). I don't think that the artist did a very good job of nailing the character. For one, Chrisjen is always described as wearing these bold and beautiful sari's. Second, she's always eating pistachio nuts, so there should have been something along those lines in the picture. If you are intrigued, you can see more of TenshiRisu's art HERE.

In the television series adaptation of The Expanse, Chrisjen Avasarala is played by actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, and I think she does a fine job of bringing the character to life. This is what she looks like on the small screen (at left).

Chrisjen Avasarala is my favorite character in the series for a number of reasons. She's incredibly smart, and she knows all the power plays to be made by the different factions in the solar system at all times, and she's able to gauge how dangerous any situation is with extreme accuracy. Additionally, she has some of the best dialogue that I've ever seen. Here's a sample of some of the things she's said.

To Bobbie Draper (a tall Martian marine): "Would you sit down? I feel like I'm at the bottom of a fucking well whenever I talk to you."

“Holden’s an idiot, but he’s not stupid. If he realizes he’s being watched, he’ll start broadcasting pictures of all our Ganymede sources or something. Do not underestimate his capacity to fuck things up.”

“It'd be a better world if there was always at least one right answer instead of a bucket of fucked."

"I feel like I went away for one day and when I came back, everyone was speaking Mandarin."

Chrisjen always has a way of cutting to the gist of any situation, and I look forward to seeing Shohreh Aghdashloo in the role (in the upcoming seasons on Amazon) as she ascends to power during the biggest crisis the Earth has ever seen.

Coming up on Friday: Profile of Fred Johnson

The Expanse Profiles: Alex Kamal

Alex Kamal is the last of the "main" crew of The Rocinante that I'm profiling here (and my knowledge is based on the books and on the television adaptation of those books). To the right, I've included an illustration I found of Alex Kamal on a DeviantArt page. It's drawn by a person that goes by the name "BlackPandaOps" and you can see more of their work HERE.

For pretty much the first three books, and well into the television adaptation, this character is kind of flat. He's basically your "hot shot pilot" stereotype that you've seen in a half dozen other space opera stories ranging from Star Wars to Battlestar Galactica. In the television adaptation, he is brought to life by actor Cas Anvar, who is a Canadian. I discovered that he speaks English, French, Persian, Arabic, Urdu, and Spanish. I thought that was pretty amazing. At left is a picture of the actor playing the part of Alex Kamal.
As you can see, the illustration by the artist above is deeply influenced by the portrayal by the actor. I couldn't really find any online that weren't influenced by Cas Anvar, which makes me believe that the television adaptation has probably brought in legions of new fans (like myself) for this series.

Alex Kamal, Like Naomi and Amos, all met Captain Holden on the doomed Canterbury, which (as I previously mentioned in another post) was a corporate ice hauler grabbing spacebergs from Saturn's rings and then making the voyage to a station where it could be used as a source of fresh water. He's a Martian, and because of this, there's a kind of "instant connection" that builds with Bobbie Draper once she's introduced in the series (Bobbie is a Martian marine and Alex is former military as well).

Alex gets fleshed out in the book Nemesis Games pretty thoroughly, with hints of his back story in the previous four books. He self-describes himself as a terrible husband and talks of the main woman in his life with glowing colors as she pretty much faithfully stuck by him, even though he spent many months away from home working as a pilot for the military. When that all ended, and he could finally stay at home, he actually didn't like being at home. So without his wife's knowledge, he went and got another job as a pilot and walked away from their marriage. Needless to say, he's not a great communicator (or even a good one for that matter). There's a scene in the books when he tries to patch things up with his ex-wife, and it realistically does not go well at all even with his apologies and whatnot. This is really how it should be, and I was surprised that the writers 1) went there and 2) that it was such a shut down with incredible finality to it. Also, kudos to the writers for Alex to get absolutely no closure on that part of his life; this kind of thing happens all the time to real people. That it happened here just makes me like the story even more.

Alex's piloting skills, kind of like the protomolecule whenever it shows up, are kind of a deus ex machina. If the situation looks hopeless, he can kind of fly them out of it. Although to be fair, he's also the one that killed Fred Johnson unintentionally, because the incredible forces he generated while making banks and turns while trying to outrun rail gun armaments and torpedoes were too much for the old guy (who ended up stroking out in his crash chair). I'm really looking forward to where they go with this character once Tiamat's Wrath gets published in March. Bobbie Draper is now captain to a ship built with alien technology, and I bet Alex gets to fly it. That's going to be a lot of fun to read about.

Overall, Alex Kamal is that one character that always seems to pop up in these types of stories: he's a broken man whose only true love is being in the pilot's chair, but who also is attractive enough that women end up in his bed for a short while, but a relationship just never works out.

Coming up on Wednesday: Profile of Chrisjen Avasarala

The Expanse Profiles: Amos Burton

When I'm explaining the character of Amos to friends who ask me about The Expanse, I refer to him as the lovable but psychopathic engineer. Because The Expanse authors (they write under the name James S.A. Corey) are kind of light on description preferring instead to let the dialogue and other people's observations of a character carry through in their point-of-view, I've got a simultaneously vivid idea of what he should look like and a vague-ish idea of what he should look like. At right is an artist sketch, and it differs from what you'll see of Amos in the SyFy/Amazon television adaptation. However, he's got the crazy eyes, which (to the credit of the artist) is pretty amazing. The artist, by the way, is named Tabitha Drambel and you can see her DeviantArt page HERE.

In the SyFy series (and I assume they are keeping the same casting for the Amazon series) the role is played by actor Wes Chatham. Here's a picture of him so you can see that he also channels the "crazy eyes" rather well. So who is this guy? Well he's a really good engineer and he knows how to keep The Rocinante in really good shape as it flies through space going from place to place and getting into dogfights with other ships depending on where you are in the storyline.

The authors are careful to describe Amos as "the last man standing." What they mean by this is that in any catastrophe, Amos is so tough that he would be the last one still alive while everyone else is dead. He also knows that he's a monster, having little or no feelings about anyone or anything, and he latched onto Captain Holden, because he is smart enough to know that on his own, he is capable of doing a lot of evil. Captain Holden has a very strong moral compass, and Amos willfully acquiesces to Holden's judgement because he knows (and believes strongly) that Holden will always do the right thing. Thus far in the books, he has not been wrong.

Amos really starts to shine in the book Nemesis Games. This is where I first noticed him getting a lot of his own chapters, and they are used to follow him as he visits Earth (where he hasn't been for many years) and to honor someone that he cared for that had died. He also reconnects briefly with some thugs and a drug kingpin that he worked alongside in Baltimore many years prior (Amos still has a formidable reputation). The drug kingpin is holed up in a sizeable arcology, which is a futuristic structure that supports a city-sized population all within one building.

While on Earth, Amos also visits with Clarissa Mao in prison (his nickname for Clarissa is "Peaches.") It isn't really clear if he loves her, but I kind of think that he loves Clarissa just about as much as a psychopath is able to do. To you and I, it wouldn't seem like love. But it's written in such a way as to hint rather strongly that there is a tremendous bond between them that goes beyond respect. In many ways, Clarissa is just as much a monster as Amos (if not more so), so maybe it's a bond that comes from being a fellow psychopath. When the rocks start falling on Earth, and the apocalypse starts, we get to see how Earth is affected through Amos's point of view. Escaping Earth is harrowing and there are many edge-of-your-seat moments that I can't wait to see in the television adaptation.

I think the funnest Amos chapter, however, happened in Persepolis Rising. Late in the book, Amos calls Bobbie (a Martian warrior) a "pussy," and it starts off a fist battle between the huge Samoan woman and Amos that is clearly "to the death." But she's so powerful and strong that he can't kill her no matter how hard she tries, and she eventually beats the crap out of him to the point that he can barely move. It's super therapeutic for Amos, because he realizes that maybe he's not the last one standing in any fight. Additionally, it pretty much solidifies Bobbie Draper as the incredible character that she's built up to be throughout the entire series. Yeah, I love Bobbie Draper. She's just too cool.

Monday: Profile of Alex Kamal