When I heard someone had described The Expanse books (to date there are 5 in the series and a few novellas) as a “science fiction version of Game of Thrones“, I knew the authors of the books must have done somersaults of sheer joy.  (The novels are listed as being written by James S. A. Corey which is the pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) .

It wasn’t all that long ago that some critic stated the then first appearing Twilight books were the next “Harry Potter”-type must-read series and you know where that went.

I haven’t read the books but I have, finally, seen the entire first season of the Sy-Fy Network produced The Expanse series and…

…I’m torn.

On the one hand, the series features many elements I really admire in good sci-fi programming: A sober handling of the material.  A complex (but not complicated) plot.  Good special effects.  Appealing -for the most part- characters.

And yet…

Having seen the ten episode season, I’m left liking it enough to justify giving a second season of the show a try while also being curiously unfulfilled.

The Expanse imagines a future society some two hundred years from now wherein humanity is divided between three solar system locations:  Earth, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt.  The relations between those on either settings is very strained and it appears war is almost certain to come.

We start the series with an intriguing mystery: A woman we soon find named Julie Mao (Florence Faivre), is trapped within a spaceship and manages to break her way out of it, only to find the crew within all dead and a very strange crystalline structure growing within the ship.

From there we are presented the three main leads/groups:

On Earth we follow the political machinations of Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) who works for the U.N. and worries recent events have pushed Earth and Mars on a course of war.  However, she’s suspicious and careful…she doesn’t want to advocate war without first investigating what is causing the perceived Martian aggression and whether it is real or not.  Mrs. Avasarala is also a political animal who is not above betraying her dearest friends in the search for the truth.

In the Asteroid Belt space station Ceres, Detective Joe Miller (Thomas Jane) is tasked with finding Julie Mao.  We follow the cynical Miller around the station and while doing his work and find there is plenty of corruption and general human wear and tear to be found out in space.  Ultimately, Detective Miller finds himself more involved in this case than he thought he would be.

Finally, we follow the crew of the ice trawler Canterbury as they pick up their latest load of ice and are heading back to port when they receive a distress call.  The Captain and most of the officers fear the call is a fake and that Space Pirates (or worse) await them and therefore chose to ignore the signal.  However, James Holden (Steven Strait), the just promoted Executive Officer of the ship, forces the Captain’s hand (without anyone else knowing) and the Canterbury sends a small rescue ship with Holden within it to check the distressed ship out.

It turns out the distress signal was a ruse and a mysterious vessel appears.  It fires upon the Canterbury and destroys it.  Because of the Canterbury’s debris field, Holden and the other four officers within the rescue vessel manage to evade the attackers but are left stranded in a nearly destroyed rescue vessel.  They believe the Martians were to blame for this provocative act and, when they are eventually picked up by a Martian Battleship, they fear the worst.

However, it turns out the Martians didn’t destroy the Canterbury.  It soon becomes very clear someone out there wants Earth to think they did.

Can war be averted?  What is Julie Mao’s role in this mystery?  And what is that strange crystalline material that took over her ship?

Most of the questions are answered in the first season of The Expanse but just because they’re answered doesn’t mean they’re resolved.

In fact, this is part of the reason the first season of this show left me so unsatisfied.  We’re given this weird and interesting mystery and in the end we kinda/sorta know all the players but we’re still left wondering why all these elements are put into place.

There are also a host of little things that, for me, didn’t work as well as the show’s creators thought they would.  For example, I never felt the fevered need for Detective Miller to push push push in resolving the mystery of Julie Mao.  His character is probably the most cliched one in the show, your “cynical” detective who suddenly finds he cannot let something bad just go by.  Perhaps because of the fractured nature of the storytelling Detective Miller’s change never felt natural.

Further, when another character tells him he pursues the mystery of Mao so feverishly because he’s “fallen in love” with her, I shook my head.  By the show’s climax it felt like the show’s creators were indeed trying to prove this was the case but to me I never felt that to be the case.  The storytelling here, in the end, was rather weak.

As for U.N. envoy Chrisjen Avasarala, her story never quite ties in as directly as that of Miller and Holden, who actually join forces together at the show’s climax.  While it is true she is seeking information that relates to the behind the scenes elements that caused Mao’s disappearance, I felt her scenes were never as clever or engaging as those of Miller or Holden.

Finally, with regard to Holden and his motley crew, they proved to be the most interesting characters in the story but even their story line had some issues.  I can buy they head to the derelict and witness the Canterbury’s destruction and narrowly escape the same fate but what follows proves harder and harder to swallow.  I don’t want to get into too many SPOILERS here, but suffice to say mega-destruction follows in Holden and his group’s wake and after a while one couldn’t help but admire their incredible luck in avoiding annihilation so many times.

Finally, and as mentioned above, we really aren’t given much of a story resolution here.  The first season of The Expanse feels like a prolonged introduction to events and people but ends without us knowing all that much as to what the heck is going on.  Sure, we find out what Mao was up to.  We find out what happened to her.  But we don’t know any of the “whys” here and that’s frustrating.  What’s up with the crystals?  Why do certain people want there to be war between Mars and Earth?  Why did they do what they did on Eros station?

It’s frustrating to spend nearly ten hours on a show and still have no idea about so many things.

Despite the negatives enumerated above, there was still enough intriguing material to warrant my catching a second season.  I just hope we’re given more answers than were provided in the first ten episode arc.  Otherwise, I might just give up.