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In Space, No One Can Hear You Abuse Refugees. The Expanse: “Pyre”

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In Space, No One Can Hear You Abuse Refugees. The Expanse: “Pyre”

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In Space, No One Can Hear You Abuse Refugees. The Expanse: “Pyre”

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Published on March 16, 2017

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If last week’s episode of The Expanse was all about how “important” people deal with the aftermath of trauma, this week’s was all about trauma on the ground. We get to see the Ganymede refugee crisis from a different angle, as well as the Belters’ perspective on Fred Johnson’s rule of Tycho Station.

We don’t go to Earth or Mars this time, but remain in the Belt for the whole heartbreaking episode. I’ve recapped the highlights below—join me, won’t you?

Remember last week, when the tragedy of Ganymede was made into a political football by Earth and Mars, and Bobbie Draper’s testimony was demanded? And how, out in the Belt, we saw scenes of Tycho Station welcoming refugees, with Alex even taking the time to perform magic tricks for the kids?

This week we get the refugees’ side, and it’s horrific. A group from Ganymede is packed into a cargo ship, huddled together on a bare floor. A botanist named Praxideke Meng wakes up from an induced coma. He was dreaming of his daughter, Mei, and he begins calling for her as he wakes up. His one friend on the ship, another scientist named Doris, has to tell him that she didn’t make it. Mei was at a doctor’s appointment across the station, and that section was completely destroyed—no survivors. He is lost and in agony. He opens a small glowing thermos, but quickly hides it again before anyone else can see what he has.

refugees

Each time we cut back to the refugees their status is more tenuous. There’s no money in transporting them, so the Belters resent having them on the ship. There are few supplies, but when squabbles break out the guard just kicks at whoever’s making noise until they submit. There is no help, no safety net, no comfort. No one cares that people have lost loved ones. It’s a terrible limbo.

And then it gets worse, far worse. The refugees are told that a ship has come to transport the “Inners” back to Earth and Mars. Doris tells Meng that he can come with her to Mars—they’re looking for botanists, so there will be work, and she can help him as he deals with his grief. For a moment there is hope. But the same guard stops Meng at the door to the airlock. Only Inners are allowed through, no Belters. He was born and raised on Ganymede. She’s pushed through the door and it closes in front of him. He calls that he’ll join her later, after he’s been processed at Tycho.

They cut the gravity so the Inners can float over to the other ship, and for a moment Meng and Doris float on their respective sides of the door, giddy with weightlessness despite everything. It’s a lovely, quiet moment.

doris

And then the airlock opens and they’re all spaced.

The camera shows us Meng’s shock and horror as he realizes what’s happening, but then it follows Doris out into the void as her air runs out.

expansespaced

The guard tells him he’s a lucky Belter and leads him back into the holding pen. So the show runs us through the horror of being stopped at a border and separated from family and friends, only to top it with the ultimate horror of being at the mercy of an indifferent or hostile force.

The refugees have no recourse, no justice, no planet, no country to advocate for their rights. They’re not truly people, as far as their captors are concerned, and they’re treated as objects.

This is complicated further when Meng finally gets to Tycho. He tries to report the crime but since he was knocked out when they brought him onboard, he doesn’t have the ship’s name. He (obviously) didn’t ask the guard for any ID after he watched the man murder an airlock full of people. He has lost everything, and rather than being allowed to grieve his daughter in dignity and peace, cannot even bring his friend justice. Alex hands him a comm device and pats him on the shoulder in welcome, but this is an empty gesture. It means nothing to Meng.

I thought this was all brilliant. A perfect way to talk about the plight of a refugee in a foreign, uncaring land. I’m of two minds about the resolution of this arc. For a few minutes, I hoped that that was it. Tycho has set up a memorial wall for the people of Ganymede, and we see Meng add Mei’s picture.

Mei

 

She is part of the wall:

expansememorialwall

 

And his mourning process is able to begin.

expansegrief

And part of me hoped that the show would leave us here, with this moment. But this is sci-fi, and of course there’s a larger plot to unfold. It turns out that Meng is connected with Dr. Strickland… who is also connected to the protomolecule… which has just been traced to—you guessed it—Ganymede. And when Meng checks a security feed he sees that Strickland left his office with Mei.

Mei might still be alive.

So now Meng is going to be at least a semi-regular as he joins the Roci crew to search for his daughter, and the Roci crew is no longer welcome at Tycho, because Fred Johnson is taking their search for more proto-molecule on Ganymede as a personal affront.

The other plot threads are good, but somewhat less compelling. Something’s happened to Amos, whether he went through some sort of mind-altering procedure, or if he’s just had a mental break of some sort we don’t know, but he once again almost kills Alex.

More disturbingly, a coup builds up and nearly overthrows Fred Johnson. This is tense enough, but it comes as a culmination of so many tensions that the coup actually works as character development. The Belters have begun questioning Fred Johnson’s authority; Dawes has riled many of them up; Dawes’ own hunger for power is framed as being a “true” Belter, where Fred Johnson is an Earther, and thinks like an Earther. Finally, Fred Johnson’s second-in-command, Drummer, has to actively choose Johnson over Dawes. She tries to stop the coup when the insurrectionists burst into the command room. She refuses to give them the codes so they can take control of Tycho’s nukes, and then she takes a bullet when they don’t want to take no for an answer. After a lot of build-up, this episode shows the true steel core that makes her stand up to them, and it’s fantastic.

Best of all? After the Roci crew saves the day, Alex bandages Drummer’s gunshot wound and starts helping her to the medic. She pushes away from him, grabs his gun, and calmly shoots the insurrectionists without even breaking stride, then walks to the medic under her own power.

That’s character development.

drummer

Random Thoughts Floating the in Void of Space

  • OK, show. I like you. I like you a lot. But we’ve had the conversation about how much I hate watching people get spaced, and then you give me a goddamn five-minute long BALLET of people getting spaced.
  • Can I take another moment to talk about how much I loved Drummer? Her whole arc, that feint the show pulled where it seemed like maybe she had turned on Fred Johnson, all to culminate in her capping those two idiots at the end.
  • I appreciated that this week the show stuck with the view from the Belt, rather than hopping all over the system.
  • I was hoping that Miller wouldn’t be replaced quite so soon, but I do like Meng already.
  • What the hell, Amos?
  • Ugh.

soybean

  • And finally, my favorite moment from this week: How great was the reveal of Meng’s soybean?

So what did everyone think? Why is it always the nice people who get spaced?

Leah Schnelbach may never forgive this show, yet she is still compelled to watch. Come talk to her on Twitter!

About the Author

Leah Schnelbach

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Intellectual Junk Drawer from Pittsburgh.
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primart
8 years ago

Leah you were right with me and your reiteration helped me put the episode into a kind of perspective. You are so right on, keep it going. Thanks.

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Orion Blade
8 years ago

Leah and at least one viewer/reader, ChristopherLBennett, have commented on the social sytems and human behavior on display, as have others.Seems the writers believe, as I do, that 200 years will not bring much change to the essentially human qualities that Shakespeare observed 400 years ago..as did writers of the Bible 1600 years before him.  Ugly Humanity is in The Expanse and I’m glad the show resumed its SyFy plot-arc after acknowledging the Ugly of spacing refugees. Why? Because there’s little track record in human history or in the Expanse’s backstory to make a case to where Ugly human behavior gives pause to much of anything. Roddenberry did pull that trick off but most SyFy doesn’t tread there. BTW, I shared CLB’s comment on how all the decision-making power is in the hands of men, with a new viewer who had just wrapped up Season 1 and he reminded me that Avasarala oversaw torture of a Belter suspected of terrorism.  I had completely forgotten that in my recent cheerleading of Avasarala’s good qualities.  But no, Im not getting “soft”; I cheered when Drummer decided to be Judge, Jury & Executioner (JJE) in one theatrical swoop at the end of this episode.  JJE is more believable in those two than in Holden, yet, that was a nice touch of having him confess his JJE side to Naomi and ask her to be there to reel him back into being a human again…after he sates his JJE jones.

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Felix
8 years ago

The Expanse just got renewed for Season 3. With Book 3 coming, things will be getting more crazy.

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8 years ago

I’m both excited and a little anxious about how much the Expanse is starting to diverge plot-wise from the books.  I feel like it followed Book 1 pretty closely (for a TV show), which I enjoyed, and I understand some of the changes that have been made, but it is starting to feel like the series’ plot arcs are just being painted in broader and broader strokes until we’re left with something unrecognizable, albeit entertaining.

A lot of people probably have no issue with this, but given that I _have_ read the books (and given the show’s previous fidelity to the first act), I’m starting to get an “uncanny valley” vibe.  These are people I _mostly_ recognize doing things I _mostly_ expect, but the uncertainty level keeps rising.

I dunno…hard to articulate the issue precisely without sounding like a whiny fanboy…which is not my intention.

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Wilson Goodson
8 years ago

you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land

no one burns their palms under trains beneath carriages

no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck

feeding on newspaper

unless the miles travelled means something more than journey.

no one crawls under fences

no one wants to be beaten pitied

ChristopherLBennett
8 years ago

I’m having a hard time caring for anyone or anything in this show right now. They’re making the same mistake as Galactica, Defiance, and so many others — assuming that relentless darkness and violence is the same as sophistication. It isn’t. As soon as the refugee-ship captain ordered the “Inners” into the airlock, it was obvious from the mawkish sentimentality of the two featured characters’ farewell that they were setting us up for a “shocking” scene of the people in the airlock being spaced. Except it wasn’t shocking, it was entirely, tediously predictable. This kind of relentless darkness, having everything turn out in the worst possible way, has become the cliche of TV drama. It was striking when it was new and rare, so everyone copied it blindly until it became ordinary and routine. And I’m so sick of it that I almost turned off the TV, both in the spacing scene and later on when the Belters shot up Fred’s control room. It’s all just so tiresome.

I will give them props for getting airlock physics right, possibly a television first. They didn’t have everyone immediately blown out into space by a huge gale, because there wasn’t a large enough air volume in the lock to do that. The air was gone in moments, and the people just drifted inside the lock until the ship fired thrusters to push itself in the other direction, leaving them behind.

I noticed that after Terry Chen’s character tried telling that jumpsuited Tycho Station employee about the murders and she gave an ineffectual reply, the very next person he interacted with was Alex. I can’t help thinking that if he’d passed that woman by and told his story to Alex, then something more would’ve gotten done about the murders — particularly since Alex is Martian and would have a more personal stake in it. And since he had an in with the folks running the station and could’ve tracked down surveillance or docking records to figure out which ship Meng had come in on.

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8 years ago

I don’t think the show is diverging as much from the books as you might think.  The details are different but the general arc is still the same, at least so far — Prax is now on the Roci and going to Ganymede with Holden et al. It’s one of the strengths of the show that they can tweak the details; I just hope they continue to follow the general arc as it moves along.

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8 years ago

Re: book/show differences:

Yes, there are differences in the details between the books and the show.  There’s more black & white in the characters, and less ambiguity.  There are differences in the plot details.  (In the book, Prax is on Ganymede when we and the Rocci meet him, etc.)  But those differences are minor.  In broad outlines, the show is still following the book’s plots.

With (currently) one notable exception.  Which we can’t talk about because it could very well be a significant spoiler, for the end of the season.

In many ways it reminds me of the Game of Thrones book/show differences.

ChristopherLBennett
8 years ago

I don’t see much point in doing an adaptation that doesn’t change things. If you want something exactly like the books, then the books are right there. It would be redundant to do another version that was merely a verbatim copy of the original. The purpose of an adaptation should be to reveal new things about the concepts, characters, and storyline, to come at the ideas from a different angle and thereby add something rather than just repeating what’s already there.

That said, I gather than the show takes things in a darker direction than the books did, and I don’t think that’s a beneficial change. Like I said, I think it’s become too much of a lazy TV-writing cliche to reflexively make everything as dark and grim as possible.

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Orion Blade
8 years ago

Lotsa good comment above. Re: source adaptations and taking license:  my bud and I talked Expanse and also Hollywood’s “Arrival” in the same sittings.  I loved the very hard physics and detailed linguisto-science of the source short-story for Arrival and I felt let-down when Dennis V. filmmaker didn’t retain a few crucial physics.  I did understand why he edited the linguisto-science.  My friend was shocked to learn that the filmmaker added massive chunks not in the source short-story.  For me, reading Cloud Atlas after seeing the film twice was a truly new experience where within me arose an unexpected deep admiration for what the filmmakers added that was drastically different than the novel, and a deep gratitude for their decision to not retain some exceptionally demoralizing and unsettling parts of the novel. It really made me appreciate the “art” aspect of creative entertainment. That said, I can empathize with the ambivalence of readers about the TV version of Expanse.

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Leonard Carter
7 years ago

When the airlock opened, I actually opening my mouth and inhaled sharply, like the cliche that surprised people always do in movies. I’ve never done that before in my life. And that’s not the only uncharacteristic moment I’ve had watching. This show is incredible.