The Rocinante will keep flying just a little longer: The Expanse has been renewed for a sixth season, but that season will bring the show to a close.
“You can’t stop the work.”
Season 6 is a go. pic.twitter.com/ayk93DChGm
— The Expanse (@ExpanseOnPrime) November 24, 2020
Season six will also go on without Cas Anvar, the actor who plays Alex, who was accused of sexual harassment and assault this summer.
Book six, Babylon’s Ashes, is a turning point in the series and therefore fitting to end on; the following book, Persepolis Rising, is set 30 years after the end of Babylon’s Ashes, which would make it a challenge to film with the current cast. We can, of course, dream of a separate series, but given that the show has already risen from the dead once… I’m not going to hold my breath. (But I will cross my fingers.)
The fifth season of The Expanse is set to arrive on December 16th, with the first three episodes available at premiere and the rest of the season released weekly. As the trailer makes pretty clear, season five will dig into the fifth book in the series, Nemesis Games, and the threat Marco Inaros aimed at Earth at the end of season four.
Earlier this year, Orbit announced the title of the final book in the Expanse series: Leviathan Falls. There’s no release date yet, but it’s expected to appear sometime in 2021.
On the one hand, it’s sad they won’t finish the whole story. On the other, we don’t know yet whether the book series will stick the landing.
I didn’t much like the 30 year time jump. It was done more for plot reasons, so the Laconians could build up as a threat. And we were expected to believe that these six people live din close quarters on the Roci with simmering resentments that had to wait three decades to boil over.
Also: Dammit, Cas! Guess they’ll just leave Alex on Mars.
Based on the trailers they’ve released, it looks like they’ll be using the main story from Books 5-6 and the subplot from 7-8 and combining them over two seasons to complete the TV version of the story.
It’s an interesting move. The alternative would have been to put the regular cast in make-up for ~30 episodes, which would be a stretch or keep the timeskip but say they have some anti-aging tech which keeps them looking relatively younger, which might be cheesy. In both cases you also have to roll the dice and hope you get to 9 seasons when almost no show ever goes more than 6 or 7 seasons unless it’s a cheap and cheerful CW show, a sitcom, or the biggest show on television. I suspect they decided that the gamble wasn’t worth it.
It might also have been that writing out Alex for 1 season was preferable to writing him out for 4 and having to find a brand new character not in the books.
I’ve got a feeling that the authors deliberately wrote the books in three somewhat distinct trilogies with this sort of eventuality in mind. And while it’s ending, there’s still the possibility of a future series covering the last three books in 5-10 years time.
Either way we get to look forward to book 9 coming out next year :)
Definitely mixed news for sure — yay 6th season but boo final season. I’ll be interested to see what they do with Alex… in the books I find the character kind of meh but I’ve liked Cas Anvar in the role. Too bad he turned out to be… not great.
THE EXPANSE, SERIES 6
FADE IN
INT. ROCINANTE BRIDGE
HOLDEN and BOBBIE are strapping into acceleration couches
HOLDEN
Okay, Bobbie, fire up the drive.
BOBBIE
But, Cap, where’s Alex?
HOLDEN
He was sending dick pics to Naomi. Amos pushed him out the airlock.
BOBBIE
Roger that. Off we go!
“I am that guy.”
@Nomad: Bobbie is a fine pilot in her own right. We may get to see that this season. I’m thinking of the piloting she does during the conflict with the Free Navy, the one with Fred Johnson on board the Roci. Not sure if that’s Book 5 or 6. We’ll be fine pilot-wise.
I can imagine the series ending without more than a passing reference to Laconia, in which case it’d be a semi- or partial cliffhanger – where the series ends with the strict control over the gates (one of the plot points of season 4 and Ilus is that humanity is pushing to colonise even against top-down restrictions, right?) being essentially lost, and humanity spreading out uncontrolled, with “some” gates being “closed off” to outsiders by the people who went there because they wanted to be alone for some reason, who knows what they found or are going to do there but oh well that’s the future of humanity for you.
It essentially captures the beginning of Laconia but without need to really dive into it…
How they’re going to resolve the issue of the Goths, though … I mean, that’s the entire point of the final 3 books right, “explain the Goths”. Considering how much it’s been built up (the true “core” of season 4 is entirely about “what happened to the builders?” after all) it really seems difficult to do without a massive reworking of the story we were “expecting” for seasons 5 and 6 … I guess there’s no way to really understand how it can be done without the final book being out, since we don’t know what the story of the Goths is.
I’m just glad they will have enough seasons to reach a natural stopping point instead of having to cram all of the show’s plans into a single final season like often happens.