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kadytimberfox · 1 year ago

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Kady's Expanse (Re)watch Blog

Episode 1.02 - "The Big Empty"

Hey all -- doing the second episode writeup quite a while after the first one I did (sorry about that giant delay but I've been quite busy recently!). This one and the ones going forward are hopefully going to be a bit shorter now that all of the table-setting is more or less out of the way.

I'm going to go ahead and limit myself to the summary and then highlight one or two of my favorite/least favorite things about each story thread. Once again, I'm intending this to be a companion rather than a comprehensive look at the show as a whole, so we're keeping spoilers light.

Strap yourselves in -- this is going to be a REALLY long summary.

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Summary

We open on a very sweet scene between Holden and his girlfriend on board the Canterbury as she teaches him how to make the perfect cup of coffee. He's quickly wrenched back into reality as the crew of the shuttle Knight, the only survivors from the Cant, fight their way through the storm of debris peppering their little ship in the aftermath of the ice hauler's destruction. An infuriated Holden has to be talked down from shooting his own crew as he's forced to watch the mystery stealth ship disappear from view, gone forever after getting away with the mass murder of everyone he's ever loved.

Meanwhile on Ceres, Detective Miller has much worse problems: his water ran out in the shower and now he has dried shampoo in his undercut. Since Julie Mao's off the station, Miller can use her shower to wash out his hair and look for more clues about her disappearance while he's there, I guess. He deepfakes Julie's voice in order to hijack her Alexa and finds some scathing messages between Julie and her father Jules-Pierre, who's apparently fed up with sponsoring her racing career.

While Miller scrubs all the shampoo out of his hair, we get our actual introduction to Chrisjen Avasarala, who gets told off by Undersecretary Sadavir Errinwright for torturing that guy from the last episode. "No, Chrisjen! Bad!" he says, wagging his finger at her. "No war crimes! Put him in the tank if you want to talk to him!"

Chrisjen begrudgingly agrees and, amazingly, her prisoner is actually starting to talk now that his lungs aren't being crushed. He decides he doesn't have to tell her shit about the OPA and whatever connections they might have to Mars, which he is correct about. She says she can send him somewhere much worse than this. He says do your worst.

Back on the Knight, the crew take stock of their situation. Drifting in a leaky lifeboat with no radio, a blown airlock, and bleeding more atmosphere every second, things look sufficiently dire. Holden quickly takes charge -- the thing he hates doing, remember? -- and makes a simple calculation: no radio, no rescue, and everyone slowly suffocates to death. Since the airlock is busted and opening the door now would suck all of their oxygen into space, the crew vent the cabin, don their space suits, and Holden and Amos take a nice walk outside to fix the antenna while Naomi takes charge of the repair job inside.

Miller has finally finished his shower and links back up with Havelock to jump on a top-priority mission: some rich Earth guy's lawn is turning brown. Miller thinks it's a local gang, the Greigas, who've stolen water before but aren't usually this obvious about it. It ends up being a bunch of upstart kids selling water out of a warehouse, and Miller gets his third shower of the episode as he's drenched by a falling water barrel. He captures the lead kid, but decides to let him go after telling him to stay away from Da Akwa!

While being stranded in space is terrifying, it does give everyone onboard the Knight time to get to know each other better. Holden asks Amos what the hell is up with him and Naomi (valid question), and Amos replies by telling him that the only thing keeping him from ripping Holden's helmet off and kicking him into space is that Naomi wouldn't like it. He then calmly asks Holden to pass him a drill.

After a lot of swearing, a lot of suffocating, and a lot of kicking, the radio finally crackles to life. All they have to do now is sit around and wait to be rescued by someone who's okay with losing their on-time bonus. The irony is not lost on them.

After her failed interrogation of her OPA friend, Chrisjen tells Errinwright that she needs to move him from her Top Secret Torture Chamber to an Even More Top Secret Torture Chamber on the moon. She shares her fears that Mars is supplying the OPA with stealth tech, but Errinwright is skeptical; the cold war helps Mars more than Earth, so they have little motivation to rock the boat. She tells him to keep an eye on their weapons facilities anyway.

Later, she gets a message on her iPad that her prisoner killed himself on the way to the moonbase by denying himself an injection of medication designed to keep him alive through the hard G's he pulled during the ascent. A message to Chrisjen after she used that very same gravity to torture him earlier. As far as ways of dying go, that's pretty badass.

Back on Ceres, Miller chases down the last of his leads and goes to the dock master to try to find the Razorback, Julie's racing ship. The dock master doesn't know anything about the Razorback, but he does remember Julie fondly; he tells Miller how he saw her kick some creep's ass after he hit on her. He also tells Miller that Julie shipped out on the Scopuli, giving Miller one more key piece to the puzzle. He ends up scrolling through her Space Tinder in a definitely-not-creepy way and finds someone she matched with, which is basically what qualifies as a lead for him right now. His ex-partner (in both senses of the word) Octavia finds him and clearly thinks he might be a little too invested in this case, which she's right about.

After some tense waiting on the Knight, the crew's distress signal is picked up. Unfortunately, it's received by the big, badass pride of the Martian Navy, the MCRN Donnager. Given that the Cant was lured to the Scopuli using a Martian beacon and blown up by a ship using Martian stealth tech, Holden and company are less than enthusiastic about their rendezvous with the Mickies.

Holden flexes his home video skills with a desperate recording explaining everything they know about what happened, saying that their deaths will only confirm that Mars was responsible for the attack. He broadcasts the signal only to learn that the Martian warship's jammers were in range, leaving it unclear if anyone even heard his transmission.

As the Donnager tractors the beat-up shuttle and Martian marines cut through the hull, the crew try to make peace with their apparently impending deaths as a swarm of laser sights find their chests.

"You are prisoners of the Mars Congressional Republic. Move and you die."

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Unless it wasn't clear from the size of that summary, HOLY SHIT SO MUCH HAPPENED IN THIS EPISODE. Miller basically has two full separate story arcs, there's plenty of character moments and good tense action in the Knight crew's fight for survival, and Chrisjen's story finally gets started in earnest. There could've easily been two full episodes' worth of story here, but the pacing doesn't feel too fast, either. It's just delightfully dense. Let's dig in!

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Holden and the Knight

In any show about space, space needs to be really scary. You can say "life in space is hard and dangerous" all you want, but unless you show the audience the perils of space travel, they'll never take it as a serious threat.

This part of the episode is about establishing that threat. Most of the danger happens after the stealth ship leaves and before the Donnager arrives, when the crew is alone with nothing but the titular Big Empty to contend with. And we spent a good chunk of the last episode getting to know a bunch of characters who just got nuked, so the audience knows that no one here has plot armor (except for maybe Holden). It makes for an absolute rollercoaster of a sequence as the crew jumps from one crisis to another.

Easily my favorite scene from this episode is Holden and Amos' conversation as they're trying to fix the radio. Amos is one of the most fascinating characters in this show, and we get our first good look inside his head here. What we seem to find, initially, is that he's a sociopath, but it's more complex than that. He simply appears physically incapable of comprehending morality or ethics. It's not that he doesn't care about people; it's that he lacks the ability to think about people in anything except purely rational or practical terms.

He doesn't think that it would be "wrong" for him to kick Holden off the shuttle, just as he doesn't think it would be "right" not to, because his brain isn't wired to think about things in terms of "right" and "wrong". The reason he doesn't do it is because of Naomi's disapproval. He's aware that he doesn't have a moral compass, so his solution is to use Naomi as a barometer against which to measure right and wrong behavior.

And suddenly, so many things about him click into place: why he listens to everything Naomi tells him, his deadpan demeanor, even why he might take a job as a mechanic on an ice hauler; less of a chance of doing something wrong if you interact with other people as little as possible. Naomi being his direct superior is also a plus.

This will come up again and again as we continue to dig into Amos and as he begins to form relationships with the rest of the crew. What I love about him is that a set of less capable writers could've easily written him as a character who struggles with a lack of humanity because of his mental illness, but he's one of the most fundamentally human characters I've seen on television.

It's not even necessarily framed as a bad thing; it just makes him different from the rest of the crew and creates some fascinating relationship dynamics with Holden, Naomi, Alex, pretty much everyone he interacts with. For mental illness to be treated with this level of care and nuance is so rare on TV and it's wonderfully refreshing.

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Miller and Ceres

Remember the conversation we had last time about Julie being Miller's Dulcinea? Yeah, this is what I was talking about.

I actually want to focus more on Miller's B plot this episode, since the Julie investigation is only the focus of about three scenes that I basically covered in the summary. Before we move on though, I wanted to point out that Julie's dating profile confirms that she is canonically pansexual! It's more of an easter egg than anything, really: the only on-screen or referenced relationships she has are with men, but it's still a nice touch.

With that aside, the main thing I wanna talk about this time around is the scene with Rich Earth Guy as he's complaining to Miller and Havelock about his lawn. My favorite tiny detail in this scene is the way Miller takes a drink of water. He takes the tiniest sip out of the glass and swills it around his mouth, savoring it for as long as possible before pouring the rest of the glass carefully back into the pitcher. The opening text of "Dulcinea" told us that water is more valuable than gold in space. Miller, the only Belter in the room, treats it as such. It makes Rich Earth Guy's complaining about his lawn water seem ludicrous by comparison.

As a good leftist, I'm definitely a sucker for anything that lets me hate on a guy who's basically the space-age equivalent of an HOA board member, but this is also a great example of the absolute disdain off-worlders on Ceres have for Belters. It's not enough that Rich Earth Guy gets to live in the only part of this station that looks like utopian paradise, surrounded by beautiful green spaces and observing his kingdom from his massive balcony; no, those filthy Belters have to know he's up there. They have to appreciate him, respect him, thank him for being so generous as to use his lawn to cycle the air that they breathe.

He's not this callous with his language, of course, but you can feel the sentiment dripping from his words. And we can immediately tell that he doesn't really care that his lawn is important to the station; he just gets off on feeling important.

Havelock, to his credit, is still naïve enough to try to call Rich Earth Guy out on his bullshit. This place you live in might as well be an alien planet to Belters. And maybe if Belters weren't down in the shit fighting for their fucking lives day after day, they'd have a little more time to appreciate your lawn. Again, he's a little more subtle than that. But not by much. Rich Earth Guy hands him a cactus and tells him, politely, to fuck off.

As we're going to find out, Earth is basically run by thousands and thousands of Rich Earth Guys. And every single day, whenever the Belt reminds them that they never get to see Earth's lawn, that they're too busy breaking their backs for Earth to ever even dream of having a lawn of their own, Earth hands the Belt a cactus and tells them, with varying degrees of politeness, to fuck off.

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Chrisjen and the UN

And now it's finally time to see what's got Chrisjen worried about her lawn. We still don't spend too much time with her this episode considering all the madness going on with the Knight, but we still get our introduction to Errinwright, who's going to be a key player at the UN going forward.

My favorite Chrisjen scene in this episode has to be her conversation with Errinwright after her failed interrogation of the OPA prisoner. As she's talking about shuffling her secret political prisoner between black-site interrogation facilities, Errinwright openly wonders how no one is keeping tabs on this woman. His answer is self-evident: he's appointed himself as Chrisjen's watchdog.

Their relationship appears mostly transactional: Chrisjen allows Errinwright to keep an eye on her and shares information in him in exchange for his support in the government. It's clear from the jump, however, that both of them are using the other to achieve their goals. Chrisjen's goals are clear: she wants to figure out what the hell's going on with Mars and the OPA. Errinwright's motivations remain unclear at this early stage, but it's clear that Chrisjen trusts him, at least as much as she trusts anyone.

Without spoiling very much, Errinwright's character is defined by his relationship to Chrisjen, and he helps develop Chrisjen's character in turn. The thing that becomes clear in this episode is that he and Chrisjen are so close to each other because they speak the same language and play the same game. I'm very much looking forward to seeing them play that game in future episodes.

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If you're here, thank you so much, again, for bearing with me through this ludicrously long post. I'm trying so hard to work on being brief, and again, there was a ton of stuff I didn't talk about in this episode that I really, really wanted to.

Happy holidays to you all! I'll be picking up the story with "Remember the Cant" in hopefully less than a month -- sorry about that delay again. See you starside!

#media analysis #sci fi #the expanse #kady's expanse rewatch blog

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