For once I have found sci-fi audiovisual entertaiment I can honestly praise. (Haven't read the books – yet.) It's got big spaceships! It's got politics! It's got mysteries and romance and space fights and moral dilemmas and interesting characters and a satisfactorily plausibly built near future. And it's got Chrisjen Avasarala's fantastic wardrobe. All of it looks gorgeous and it also makes sense as fashion. Her outfits are definitely classically Indian, heavy embroidery and silk/gold weaves, but subtly different from current fashions. The way her sarees are draped...

Anyway. I haven't enjoyed a tv scifi series this much since Star Trek the Next Generation back when I was a kid.

And did I mention how much I adore the way gravity or lack of portrayed quite realistically (at least as far as I can judge)? Very science-y, without stooping down to explain too much. The only fault I've been able to catch was in Paradigm shift, when pieces of space mirror and shot-to-crumbs spaceships fell straight down to Ganymedes... but now that I think of it. probably it was just a portion of the debris, which was scattered by explosions in all directions. Yeah.

Possibly hostile and certainly dangerous alien lifeform is a great motivation to spark a large-scale conflict in already strained geo-political situation, and a good excuse to involve some random belters in high-stakes situations with all the major powers. I like to think finding proof of non-Earth life would throw humankind into a collective feeling of existential vertigo, everyone would stop what they are doing and contemplate the meaning of life etc., but I guess the reaction to this super profound discovery is portrayed in Expanse is way more realistic. Is it a threat, can we destroy it, can we use it for something. Non-Earth life is a strange, philosophically challenging category only as long as it does not exist, when it exists it immediately is just like any old life we are used to. If one is prone to contemplative bouts about life, existence etc., any smudge of bacterial goo growing in one's own kitchen sink should be enough to launch those.

If I absolutely have to complain about something, it's Miller's and Julie Mao's rather one-sided "love story". I suppose guys find it super touching if a brooding man follows a woman who knows nothing about him, to the ends of the Solar system, and they only actually meet like 5 mins before both die. She has about zero agency in the relationship, but his devotion makes up for it? Ehh, I say, but to each their own, and heck, romance aimed at solely female audiences has its own weird issues, so I'll let this one pass. At least there was heroic death etc. IF they died, instead of infecting Venus with protomolecule. Now that would be an ineresting development! Imagine if in season 3 or 4 or something Venus sudenly started to move. A killer planet on the loose!

It's been strictly local adventure for now, but let's see how it goes. Protomolecule came from somewhere far away, and Solomon Epstein ended up somewhere far away, and Solar system is getting too small for all the players... Season 1 title animation showed flight paths all over our galaxy, so I'm pretty confident the series will at least end with humankind expanding their sphere of influence to the final frontiers.