Parts of the book read like a 500-level course on genetic diversity, with a weekend seminar on advanced particle physics. Even though it contains enough oxygen to keep them upright, the atmosphere slowly begins to take its toll on the Belters and the RCE alike. Human beings aren’t well suited to breathing the same air as other extraterrestrial species, and trying to make a life on Ilus is foolhardy. At its core, Cibola Burn is a tale of conflicting biologies. The anchor around the neck of season 4 is all of the hard science going on in the background. Strangely, their sexual banter gives the season its best laughs. Their relationship is complicated by the fact that their bosses very much want to kill each other. He spends most of his time in season 4 cavorting with Murtry’s second-in-command, Wei, played by actor Jess Salguiero. His work as the laconic gunman Amos has been inspired from the start, with a weirdly sensitive take on the muscle-bound killer present in the novels. Along the way, she turns in some of the series’ most heartfelt moments, dealing with issues of depression and suicide.Īnother bright spot is Wes Chatham. She’s clearly setting the groundwork for the later half of season 4 and season 5, which will bring the Belters into conflict with the rest of the human race. Nearly every scene where she opens her mouth, she’s up against proxies for Earth and Mars, holding her own and clearing the way for her kind. Tipper’s every movement onscreen speaks to the pain of trying to walk around under planetary gravity after a lifetime in space. There’s a literal weight as well, as she’s among the first of her kind to try and live “down the well” on the surface of a planet with more than the force of Earth’s own gravitational pull. As the Rocinante’s only Belter, Naomi has a lot of symbolic weight on her shoulders. The real bright spot of these early episodes is Dominique Tipper’s performance. Unfortunately, his character rapidly devolves into a mustache-twirling sociopath. A recent accident that killed members of the RCE field team might have actually been a terrorist attack, and security chief Adolphus Murtry (Burn Gorman) wants some answers. While Holden and Amos ride into town to diffuse the situation, Naomi and Alex move some boxes around and generally tend to the wounded. The face-off between the two factions is a powder keg that sometimes looks more like a mob hit than a proper negotiation.īut the next few episodes continue to meander. On the other side of the table is a group of Belters - humans who grew up in space - trying to eke out a life mining lithium on a hostile world. They use it as often as they can to show off their legal rights to everything on the planet. Ilus is also known as New Terra, the nomenclature the scientific team at Royal Charter Energy (RCE) prefers. The planet Ilus itself is the anvil on which all of these topics are bent into shape. Season 4 continues the series’ obsession with politics, dives deeper into questions of who owns stellar bodies and the materials derived from them, and follows through on overarching themes of transhumanism. What follows is, for all intents and purposes, a page-by-page adaptation of Cibola Burn, the fourth book in the Expanse series.įun fact: Daniel Dociu, who does all the cover art for The Expanse novels, was the face model for Father Grigori in Half-Life 2. The crew of the Rocinante - captain James Holden (Steven Strait), first officer Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper), engineer Amos Burton (Wes Chatham), and pilot Alex Kamal (Cas Anvar) - don’t actually get to work until the final moments of that first episode, when they finally set down on an alien planet called Ilus. It all adds up to about five hours of table-setting before the main course is served. The main characters are exploring a new setting and a new situation, but that amounts to a slow start for a series that kicked off in season 1 by pumping them full of amphetamines while they accelerated away from a nuclear explosion. That gap between seasons may explain why it takes six full episodes for the new season to finally pick up momentum. The only thing the show lacks at the outset is a sense of urgency. You’d be hard-pressed to tell that someone new is footing the bill, outside the fact that the show is now only available on Amazon Prime. The crew of the Martian gunship Rocinante is present and accounted for, along with all of the show’s supporting characters. Corey (pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), picks up right where it left off. The epic space opera, adapted from the novels by S.A. The entire first episode of season 4 of The Expanse is more or less dedicated to getting fans back up to speed with a series that went off the air when Syfy canceled it in May 2018.
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