![]() ![]() The Expanse is definitely the first show in television history to juggle one story line in the Chesapeake Bay with one about horny space pirates collecting scrap metal beyond the asteroid Belt. If the trailer felt a bit all over the place, that’s because the early episodes of this season are setting up an overwhelming number of chess pieces throughout the solar system. So how does this relate to The Expanse? Please don’t throw me out of an airlock for belaboring the point, but it’s true: Season 5, which premiered its first three episodes on Wednesday, operates on a scale that neither the series nor the rest of the post- Thrones television landscape has attempted before. The Best TV Shows of 2020 The Best TV Episodes of 2020 (In fact, the show went downhill once it started narrowing its scope for the endgame.) With few hiccups, Thrones made all these story lines compelling, even if it took hours of actual viewing between various character check-ins. At its peak, Thrones somehow seamlessly balanced myriad conflicts across Westeros-from the political machinations in King’s Landing to the impending threat of ice zombies beyond the Wall to Daenerys Targaryen and her dragons literally roasting slave owners a continent away. Granted, comparing a series to Thrones isn’t as, uh, complimentary as it was before the show’s terrible final season, but to dismiss its standing as an essential piece of TV monoculture because of a bad ending would ignore what made it a sensation in the first place. If you took a shot every time The Expanse was mentioned in the same breath as Thrones-including several times on this very website-well, let’s just say you’d be doing a stunning reenactment of Mads Mikkelsen’s latest film. Like Thrones, this space opera soars when establishing its immaculate and highly detailed worldbuilding.Ĭomparing The Expanse and Thrones isn’t exactly game-changing, or particularly original. But rather than focus on superficial spectacle-which would be quite easy to do given the interplanetary space battles and a mysterious alien technology capable of mass extinction at play-the show’s expansive (sorry) scope has always conveyed thoughtful ideas about humanity. Like Thrones, The Expanse has large-scale ambitions: It’s set 300 years in the future, as humankind colonizes the rest of the solar system and splits into three main factions on Earth, Mars, and the asteroid Belt (Belters, for short). ![]() ![]() As a vocal and perhaps slightly overbearing fan of The Expanse, the Amazon science-fiction series that’s been pound-for-pound one of the genre’s best for the past decade, I’ve found the quickest way to pitch the show to newcomers is by comparing it to Game of Thrones. ![]()
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