I can appreciate how returning him to his Baltimore roots underscores just how much Amos (Wes Chatham) has grown as a person since climbing aboard the Rocinante way back in Season 1 (a shit-ton), and I can compare Avasarala’s desperation to first serve all of humanity, now that she’s stranded on Luna, to her ambition to prioritize Earth back when the story was just getting started (conclusion: it’s good). I also could not marvel at one Naomi Nagata’s (Dominique Tipper) ability to survive not just being kidnapped by her own son, but also watching that same son commit mass murder, failing to pull him from his father’s psychic sway, and having to abandon him all over again in order to save Holden (Steven Strait) and everyone else in her Roci from dying in the Chetzemoka-shaped trap Marco laid out for them-nevermind the feats of brute mental and physical endurance she displays for the three episodes she’s locked inside that trap-now I can do it all. Coleman) at the hands of one of Marco’s sleeper agents (Bahia Watson). Whereas I couldn’t grieve, then, with Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) over the indefinite loss of her husband in those attacks, or reel from the shocking murder of Fred Johnson (Chad L. Whereas I couldn’t, in my initial Season 5 review, even allude to the fact that charismatic Belter extremist Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander) manipulates his and Naomi’s teenage son, Filip (Jasai Chase-Owens), into executing the most devastating terrorist attack in human history by bombing Earth with stealth asteroids at the end of Episode 3 (“Mother”), now I can publicly register the full psychological horror of the situation. With this week’s long-awaited release of “Nemesis Games,” all of Season 5’s tensest story arcs are wrapped up. And that can be a bleak takeaway even when the season’s central antagonist isn’t a narcissistic populist whipping up his impressionable base to commit shocking acts of violence against people they perceive as sneering moral elitists, or when the Roci’s crew doesn’t spend the entire season isolated from one another, scattered across the solar system and trapped in increasingly dangerous situations, or when the audience, itself, isn’t watching from the depths of one of the darkest, loneliest winters in modern human history. Mankind may last long enough to make intrasolar travel quotidian enough that even the poorest Belter can hop on the spaceship equivalent of a Megabus to get from planet to planet, The Expanse has determined, but we’ll never last so long that we’ll shed the darkest parts of our species’ nature-we’ll survive, but survival will often be the best we can hope for. On the other hand: All of the ego, greed, xenophobia and petty resentments that have been so many albatrosses around humanity’s neck since the dawn of time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |