Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The Expanse is genuinely the best TV science fiction I've seen in years. Four episodes in and so far I literally have no complaints about it. For a TV show about a book that I really enjoyed, it's hard to describe how unlikely that is. The show doesn't treat you like an idiot. It's willing to start multiple plot threads with multiple characters and expects you to trust that they'll eventually intersect. There is some "as you know, [explanation of thing that everyone in this situation would already know]", but some of that is reasonable I think. It isn't constant, and it's mostly just there to explain things that are both important and would otherwise be extremely confusing. The first episode throws a lot at you at once, but if you trust the show and keep with it, you learn all the major characters pretty quickly. The effects are far, far better than anything I'd expect from the Syfy network. I've seen some people complaining about the zero-G effects being crappy, but those people must be picky as hell. It might not be all blockbuster movie level effects, but they're extremely good. (The one caveat I can think of is Ceres, which is supposed to have very low gravity. This is usually ignored, because the amount of CGI required to make entire sets seem as if they were in low G would be absurd. The few times they do try to show off low gravity, it looks a bit iffy. Although I did really like the bird.) The ships need to thrust to move, and to slow down they flip around and thrust the opposite direction. I literally don't think I've ever seen that mechanic on TV. (Babylon 5 did that somewhat with the Starfuries, but that was only quick maneuvers in battle. In general, when a ship cut off its engines, the whole ship would slow to a stop.) "Gravity" in space is directly an effect of thrust: ships under thrust have gravity, ships without thrust don't, ships under heavy thrust and undergoing extreme maneuvers have hard, erratic gravity that requires drugs to stay conscious through. The ships are set up so that "down" is towards the engine, the way it should be. Ceres (an asteroid habitat) has low gravity that it gets by spinning. There is sound in space, but it's not super jarring. Most of the time it seems like it's the sound you'd hear from inside the ship, almost. The show is full of little things that I just really like. In the most recent episode, they gave someone a strong sedative and he didn't immediately fall unconscious. It took a second or so. The vast majority of time in movies or TV, when someone is injected with something, they immediately slouch over and go unconscious. The fact that this had just a half second or so of delay was just really impressive. At first I didn't really like the casting choices for a few characters, but I no longer care much. I still think Miller should look older and more grizzled, but meh. Extremely minor complaint, and the rest of the show is so good that I can't bring myself to really care whatsoever. I'm a fan of the plot structure so far, as well. The first episode immediately hits you over the head with a huge mystery. Then it backed off. Since then, the two major groups of characters have slowly become aware of the mystery and have been finding more and more hints to point at something big going on, but they don't know what yet. It's well done, because the viewer also doesn't know what's going on, but they know something big is. This is also quite possibly the closest to the book I've ever seen a movie/TV-show come. I'm only four episodes in, so it's always possible this is going to go way off the rails later on. But so far I'm extremely impressed. When reading this series, I noticed it wasn't quite as "hard scifi" has some reviews were talking about it being, but it was still on that side of the scale. I actually thought about how the books were plotted almost as if they were made for TV, and how it was far more "hard" than any other TV scifi. And so far the show has lived up to that. It may not be perfectly hard science fiction, but it's closer than anything else I've seen on TV. So far, this has been absolutely delightful. Anyone who likes science fiction should be watching this. If it's canceled, I'm blaming you all personally.