Fwiw, I read books 1-3, skipped books 4-6, and then read books 7-9. It worked out fine; I didn’t feel lost when starting book 7, and I didn’t have to spend 100’s of pages of book time reading about Marcos Inaros and family.
Houngan
1629
That would work, I’m rereading 7 and 8 after trying 9 and realizing I remembered nothing after the railgun battle and Medina. There’s a hard, hard divide between 6 and 7, obviously.
There is nothing lamer than undercutting your biggest emotional hit with a reveal at the end.
The prisoner killed his brother because he was swept into Marcos’s orbit. “They told me it wouldn’t kill any inners.” Philip killed his own brother, his last friend, after PTSD from killing all those humans. So Phillip realized his father was a narcissist who cares for nobody else (he didn’t even care when the XO died).
conVurt
1632
I kind of disagree. I think it’s a callback to when Naomi tells him in the previous season that sometimes the only actual choice you have is to leave. It validates her sacrifice in reaching out to try and save him, even if she will never know it. (And which dovetails into her little speech to Holden at the end.) That to me is a bigger emotional payoff than Philip learning the error of his ways too little too late and mother killing son. This way he’s resourceful/belter enough to find a means to escape.
In the books that’s the end of his story anyway.
I am surprised at negative reactions to Keon Alexander as Inaros. I thought he was great, shortcomings of the plotting aside.
Overall… S6 was definitely rushed for all the reasons people have posted. But I’m glad they got to at least try and wrap it up.
I’ve never before, and probably never will again, like a show where I can’t stand so many of the main characters. Holden and Naomi both suck so, so much all the way to the very end.
One of my disappointments from books 7-9 was that Naomi apparently never gets a phone call from her son. You’d think that in the 30 years between books 6 and 7 he might have reached out on her birthday or sent a Christmas card or something.
Why The Expanse was cancelled - and the chances of a season 7 (digitalspy.com)
Not a super-insightful article, but it does contain some quotes from the authors and show-runners that I had not heard before.
Is this a book thing? I thought they were both fine, but I didn’t have any expectations. Maybe “fine” was the problem.
But there are so many great characters on that show, and most of them were not on the Roci. Except Amos, and later Bobbie (loved these two playing off each other, wish there’d been more of it).
Never read the books. Just can’t stand Holden or Naomi.
We need to become netflix buddies.
ShivaX
1639
Same. I get the “came out of nowhere” angle, but otherwise he played a psychotic dictator pretty well.
You could see how people might follow him, but since you have a backdoor to what he’s really like, you also see how utterly horrible he is and how little he cares for anyone but himself and his own aggrandizement.
At the end of the day, he’s playing a character who is one of histories greatest monsters and mass murderers.
I thought he played it well.
See they never bothered me. Holden I especially didn’t get the hate of. He’s just a regular dude at the end of the day, which I guess I can see people having problems with. But to each their own. Holden and Naomi are certainly among the weaker/less interesting characters overall, but that’s mostly because you have stellar ones like Drummer, Ashford and Amos imo.
I cannot stand characters in anything that strike me as “whiny” or “mopey” for any reason (other than the OG Eeyore, obviously). Holden and Naomi both hit that pretty hard for me. Can’t do it.
I didn’t think that the role/script for Holden was all that bad, but I didn’t care much for Steven Strait. He always seemed a little too young and insecure for the role and in later seasons he looked emaciated and sickly, which didn’t work for me.
Honestly, the portrayal of the Young Holden in the fifth “One Ship” short was a lot more like what I thought he should have been like.
I watched the after shows for season six, and it turns out the emaciated look was intentional; he was trying to show the impact of the stress he was dealing with.
Huh. Well, it backfired with me at least.
If one of the other characters had made a big deal in the show about his deterioration, maybe it would have had the desired impact. It doesn’t help that everyone else seemed healthy – Naomi was the one under a staggering amount of stress; Holden was just flying the ship around.
abrandt
1644
I think if there is one thing they did well with Holden it was presenting him as a proper leader of his crew which included taking everyone’s stress on himself and always feeling the burden of being the person who has to ultimately make life and death decisions for his crew.
It’s easy to dislike both Steven Strait and the Holden character, as, when mentioned earlier, the show has ferociously kick-ass “side” characters. I mean, a poor everyman/audience-imposter has no chance when stacked against the likes of Drummer, Ashford, Bobby, Chrisjen, Amos… etc.
In the show he’s a sort of hard sf Arthur Dent, permanently kind of bemused.
