The Expanse - S1 E9 E10 - "Critical Mass" and "Leviathan Wakes" OAD 2/2/16

Sorry, because of the 2 hour finale I ended up watching Agent Carter; might have to leave this one for the weekend (watching 2 hours on a week day is not a simple task). I actually started watching this last night but at about 10 minutes in I realized I had no idea how long I had been nodding off so figured I'd better watch it when I have a little gas left in the wakey-wakey tank.

 

overall, a great finale, i'm looking forward to next season.

 

I was disappointed in the finale. And it's a shame, it was actually one of the best episodes of the season. But somehow I was expecting more from the season. More answers. More story. More closing the circles. So what I should say is I was disappointed in the season.

We had characters pop up all year, who had little to no role in the ultimate story. We also had characters appear who it seems we should know, yet had no idea who they were (do I need to take notes to watch this?). We had story lines cross episodes, that could have been resolved in half the time (with no loss of expositional power).

I feel like someone took an interesting story/season, and gave me half of it. And I have a feeling, if I stick around for S2, that by the end I'll feel I just watched a good series strung over two seasons.

So... I liked it mostly, but felt pacing & editing were a problem. And the problem is, with so much great stuff to watch, shows like this get pushed off my queue.

 

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Ditto.

My biggest disappointment is that we have no more idea what we saw in the first scene of the first episode than we do now.

 

Maybe it's all a ploy to drum up some book sales.

 

It was awesome to see Miller and Holden team up.

Good to know that they can cure radiation sickness. Was it worse for Miller because he's a belter? Seemed like he got sicker quicker.

What was the deal with using Julie's body to get the virus? At first I thought they were making a cure, but then it seemed like they were just spreading it. And why did they need the disease if they could just fry everyone with radiation? The more I think about it, the more questions I have.

Overall it was a good show. I'll probably re-watch it all before the second season starts. Hope that's in the summer...or sometime sooner than next January.

 

The virus was "hijacked" when Julie's ship was captured and all hell broke loose. They were simply trying to recover it, and Julie had some live virus in her body.

They could fry people with radiation if they could convince the people to go into the rooms set up with radiation blasters. But the virus can spread anywhere. They wanted to test it out on the station (and perhaps further incubate it?), but apparently they didn't need all the residents for the test, so they killed the excess.

(It looks like they herded everybody, or almost everybody, into the radiation shelters, then killed some of them with the radiation and let loose the virus on others.)

We don't know yet what they want the virus for. I'm guessing it's not good.

 

a 2 hour Finale that ended up being 40 minutes of show and an hour twenty of commercials

I didn't see why we needed to see the flashback to what Julie did...we didn't learn anything we couldn't surmise already.

Overall, despite my complaints, I liked the show and liked the season.

 

I'm not sure what you mean here: do you mean we don't fully understand what the virus is about? Because they basically replayed the entire first scene again in episode 9, with a lot of context to explain what happened.

I don't think this is quite how it happened: Julie's ship (Scopuli) was trying to intercept the ship which had the virus, Anubis, which was coming from Phoebe. The Belters thought it was a science ship carrying a secret weapon.

However Anubis turned out to be well-armed and instead boarded and captured the Scopuli. All the Belters on the Scopuli were killed and dumped out into space, except for Julie who was taken to Anubis and locked up. Then the Anubis crew faked the distress call from the Scopuli, and blew up the Canterbury when it responded.

However, some of the Anubis crew were already infected with the virus (the tech woman had a fever when they put Julie into her cell) but didn't realize it. While Julie was locked up, after the Cant was destroyed, the virus got ahold of the entire rest of the crew of Anubis. Julie gets free (this is the first scene in the first episode, recapped in the 9th episode). She finds the virus-thing and gets infected although she doesn't realize it. She hides Anubis where Holden and the Roci found it in the last episode, takes the Anubis shuttle to Eros, holes up in the hotel in room 22, and dies. The people running the experiments (Julie's father) get very lucky that Julie is (a) not infected with the rest of the crew, so she's not dead, and (b) is able to get to Eros so that they could recover the virus. If she hadn't been there then Anubis would have been lost forever most likely, unless they had some way to track it after everyone on board died.

 

The show actually follows the books very closely. There are a few minor differences: a few that come to mind from these two episodes (no spoilers beyond where the show ended):

Spoiler

Holden and the Roci crew meet up with Miller on Eros first, then from there they discover where Anubis is hidden and go find it.

Also, in the books

Spoiler

it's Holden that releases the information about the stealth ships, not Anderson. Throughout the books Holden has a very what I would call "free software" attitude, because of his upbringing: "information wants to be free". He always, at every turn, chooses the path of broadcasting everything to everyone as soon as possible and never keeping secrets. It's one of the main tensions in the books between Holden and most everyone else.

In the series you can see it a little in the first few episodes when Holder broadcasts his message after the Cant is blown up, and you can see the downsides of that as well when people use that information to foment riots, without knowing what it really means.

However, the big thing is that this season of the series barely covered the first two thirds or so of the first book. There is so much that happens in the first book after the "Eros Incident", which is where the series leaves off.

 

Yes, that's why I put "hijacked" in quotes...hijacked in the sense that it didn't get where it was supposed to go, and needed to be reclaimed. So I just said "all hell broke loose," because I was trying to avoid a long explanation.

 

I don't care about the steps she took in the beginning. That added nothing. We already knew that it was a setup to get a war started. I meant why the ship became a ghost ship and what she saw at the end. That was the real mystery and we got nowhere closer to that. Not one inch.

 

I haven't even seen anything (beyond the cold open) and already I learned more about the opening scene. I'm still not clear how she got to the Anubis. They put here in some holding cell on the Scopuli, I thought, then she stayed there the rest of the way. If that "holding cell" was actually some enormous container that they somehow moved from the Scopuli to the Anubis I certainly missed that. Why would they do that, it's not like she was dangerous. If they wanted here off the Scopuli wouldn't it make more sense to get her out of that holding cell/container?

 

True. But I think this is a pretty common thing in TV and even movies these days; have the beginning scene grab you but not explain it for a long time.

Maybe. The thing is, the books all have pretty decent ending points (IIRC). The end of the first book certainly doesn't leave everything explained, far from it, but it was a sensible ending place and there was a natural space between the end of the first book and the start of the second (if I remember right there was even a bit of a time gap between them). So it just seems weird to me if they take a few episodes of S2 to finish book one then jump right into book two. But, can they do a full 10 episodes on the rest of book one?

In the first book in particular the narrative does jump between Holden and his crew, and Miller and his investigation.

Yeah... but it seemed like a longer explanation might be helpful

We know why it became a "ghost ship": at least one of the people on Anubis, coming away from Phoebe where "something happened" which we can assume is related to the virus, was infected. The entire crew got infected or transformed or whatever while Julie was safely locked up. Julie and the Roci crew both discovered the same kind of thing in the Anubis engine room that we saw at the end of Ep 10 on Eros, which sucked up Avasarala's spy guy. That's what happened to the Anubis crew and why it was a ghost ship. Since Julie shut down the engines when she left it was dormant on Anubis and so didn't attack the Roci crew.

I agree that the central mystery, which is what the heck the blue glowing thing(s) is(are), is still pretty much unknown. By the end of the first book we had a much better idea of what was going on, which is why it's too bad the first season ended here.

They clearly did get her out of there and move her to Anubis, because that's where she was when she escaped from her cell. In the first episode they kind of tricked us into thinking she was on Scopuli so when Holden shows up we're wondering if he's going to find her or find whatever she saw right at the beginning of the opening scene. In Ep9 we discover she was on Anubis for that whole scene and not only that, it actually happened a reasonable amount of time AFTER the first episode: after the Cant is blown up etc.

I don't see any reason to believe they moved her inside a container: they could have just frog-marched her out of there (or, this being zero-G, just tossed her down the middle of the hallway). I agree they didn't show this at all and in their attempt to be cute with the surprise it was a bit confusing as to what was happening. But I think it was pretty clear by the end.

 

Absolutely...and nicely done!

On the other hand, the show was already pretty dense (so much so that, judging from the response here, it is already losing people); cramming yet more into it might have made it impenetrable. Given how well I think they did with what they've done (I haven't read the books yet, although they're now at the top of my read pile), I will assume that they thought carefully about the break point and that after the second season we'll see why they did it the way they did.

 

Maybe. But the point of story telling is to engage the viewer. They are doing the opposite as you point out since they are losing people.

 

Well, it engaged the hell out of me!

Different strokes...

 

I don't mind a show that involves a little work. I really like to have to re-watch episodes to get into it. Assuming it's worth it, which this is. Plus I have you guys to keep me up to speed.