I know I said I was hoping to write a review of Severance and I also said that I was looking forward to the second season of Girls5eva (and I still am!) but what wound up taking up my tv time this month was The Expanse. It has a cult following like Firefly, although its fans managed to get it renewed when it was canceled in a way that Firefly fans didn’t. It doesn’t reach the scale of Battlestar Gallactica (doesn’t need to), and what I really enjoyed about it are four really well-written, well-cast, and well-acted female characters.
A bit of context to start: The Expanse tv series is adapted from a set of books, with some character adaptations to suit the format. It aired for three seasons on tv, then was canceled, but a fan campaign (and the fact that Amazon was looking for original programming) got it picked up at Amazon for another three seasons. The show is well-known for being remarkably scientifically accurate in its depiction of how most things work in space.
The premise of the show is that our solar system has been colonized, with Earth as the colonizer, Mars a colony that has declared independence and is in military conflict with Earth, and space nomads called Belters who live and work on the outer planets of Jupiter and Saturn and the like, mining the planets and asteroids for minerals and resources to trade for air filters, clean water, and food. In the books, their physical characteristics are shaped by the gravity where they live (e.g. Belters who live in space are longer-limbed), but in the tv version, everyone looks human (there was one Belter in the pilot with exaggerated limbs to make the point, but everyone else looks human).
As is typical with sci-fi, there is a lot of political and social commentary going on, and I imagine many happy hours could be spent discussing the intricacies of war, colonialism, discrimination, and power but for this appreciation post I’m going to focus on the character arcs of four key women we get to know over the course of the series.
SPOILERS FOLLOW and the rest of this post won’t mean much if you haven’t watched the series, so be warned.
Chrisjen Avasarala (played with great presence by Shohreh Aghdashloo) is a politician on Earth. When we first meet her, she is extremely nationalistic and puts Earth first at the expense of everything else, but over the course of the series she becomes much more tolerant and develops a greater appreciation for the rest of humanity spread out over the solar system. She still has hard choices to make, but it’s telling to see how a little bit of exposure to diversity and seeing the bigger picture changes her decision-making framework. It humanizes her, which causes her to wrestle with whether it also makes her a weaker leader.
Bobbie Draper (played by Frankie Adams) is a Martian marine, who is just absolutely pure in wanting to live a life of purpose. She’s introduced as a tough soldier who will kill people for the Martian cause without batting an eye. Initially she comes across as just being indoctrinated into following orders, but she soon learns that the people giving orders may not always have moral authority to do so. Her journey is one of learning to question tradition and norms and figure out who the real enemy is, and of not becoming jaded in the process.
Naomi Nagata (played by Dominique Tipper) is a wicked smart Belter engineer trying to come to terms with and atone for her past. She’s presented as having made some mistakes in her youth that had far-reaching and painful consequences. We watch her figure out how to move on from her past without disconnecting it from her identity, and coming to terms with what she can control and fix, and what she has to leave behind.
Camina Drummer (played by Cara Gee) is a Belter who does a little bit of everything. In the tv series, she’s a composite of several different characters from the books and as a result she gets a lot of plot that would otherwise have been spread out over a few characters. The main point is that she is a Belter through and through, principled and utterly unable to compromise on her principles. Yet when she is pushed to the brink, she does some really incredible things.
She’s first introduced in season 2, where she is the head of security on a space station. When a mutiny occurs, she takes a bullet for her boss, then while heading to get medical treatment for the wound, summarily executes the two lead mutineers. It’s badass.
In season 3, she’s the captain of a very large spaceship and, in the aftermath of a disaster, sacrifices herself to save her first officer, so that the ship doesn’t lose both of them. She survives, barely. Despite being paralyzed while she regrows her spine (thanks to magic medicine), she has another opportunity to sacrifice herself, this time for Naomi, which she does, but thankfully Naomi is smart enough to find another solution to the problem so only the minor villains die.
In season 4, Drummer makes a very bad decision that will come back to haunt her but without which there is no plot for seasons 5-6. Then when she’s asked to toe the line, compromise and play nice with the people oppressing her and her people, she refuses and quits her job. I support this.
Season 5 sees her striking out on her own and building her own community and a life for herself, but, because this is a tv show with a limited cast of characters, she gets sucked back into the political drama. Faced with a Sophie’s choice, she picks a side and has to deal with the fallout of her decision.
Finally in season 6, leading her own little rebel fleet, all her choices and losses push her to a moment of desperation in which she makes a big decision to stand with the lesser of two evils against the greater evil. The payoff is everything she deserves.
These are four of the individual stories The Expanse tells, and I appreciate that they are not only stories of growth and maturity, but that the roles are played by four women of colour. That’s a show done right.