The Expanse cast and crew came to SDCC and gave fans a new trailer, some enticing hints at the upcoming season on Amazon and a December premiere date!
Fans of The Expanse have certainly been on a wild ride this last year. The show ended its fantastic third season on SyFy, which then promptly cancelled it to the heartbreak and outrage of fans worldwide. Fans rallied — sending cakes to Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, raising money to fly banners over the company’s headquarter that read “#SaveTheExpanse,” and even getting George R.R. Martin to pen a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to save the show.
And it worked!
The Expanse, thanks to the hard work of the loud and proud Screaming Firehawks, was saved! The show said goodbye to its home of SyFy for three seasons and moved over to Amazon, a studio which gives the show more freedom in terms of budget, content and runtime. In fact, showrunner Naren Shankar said it felt like coming home rather than moving to a new place.
I’m a huge fan of the show, so having the opportunity attend the panel and sit down with the cast and crew was the thing I was looking forward to the most at San Diego Comic Con and I’m happy to report that both the panel and press room more than lived up to the hype.
After months without any footage or scenes from the upcoming season, The Expanse fans were treated to two separate looks at season 4.
The first was a 5 minute scene of The Roci landing on the new planet, and we get to see a stunning performance (that nearly brought me to tears in the panel) of Belter Naomi Nagata stepping on a planet for the first time in her life.
It’s an emotional scene that speaks to just how much this new planet means to not only Naomi, but to the hundreds of millions of individuals out there in The Belt who have never experienced having a planet to call home.
It also brings to light the physical toll that a planet’s gravity has on someone raised in the Belt, as we see how difficult it is not only for Naomi to simply walk, but to not get lost in the first real horizon and sky she’s ever seen.
Wrapping up the panel, fans were then treated to a short teaser trailer to the upcoming fourth season of The Expanse, one which not only previewed the upcoming conflicts and characters, but gave fans a long awaited release date of December 13th! Watch the preview below and get hyped all over again (or for the first time) for season 4!
Humanity has been given access to thousands of Earth-like planets which has created a land rush and furthered tensions between the opposing nations of Earth, Mars and the Belt. Ilus is the first of these planets, one rich with natural resources but also marked by the ruins of a long dead alien civilization. While Earthers, Martians and Belters maneuver to colonize Ilus and its natural resources, these early explorers don’t understand this new world and are unaware of the larger dangers that await them.
After the panel, I had a chance to sit down with the core characters of the show — Steven Strait, Dominique Tipper, Wes Chatham, Cas Anvar, Shohreh Aghdashloo and Frankie Adams — as well as showrunner Naren Shankar and show writers/book authors Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham.
Everyone was absolutely thrilled to be back and talking about the show, and it was so obvious to see the enthusiasm and excitement for the upcoming season from both cast and crew. Given what we learned in both the panel and press room, there’s clearly so much to talk about and be excited about with the new season .
Here are our top five takeaways for the upcoming fourth season of The Expanse.
It’s a messy human narrative
One of the things that The Expanse does a great job with is in making sure that there are no real bad guys or evildoers — there are only differing points of view.
When speaking to Naren Shankar, Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, one of the things they stressed was “not having anyone in there who is just evil for the sake of evil. Everyone is in conflict because they all think they’re doing the right thing and that’s not going to be different moving forward.”
Steven Strait expanded on this, talking about the different “ridiculously complex” questions that the new planet and solar system brings to the forefront:
What is the ethical outcome of what is allowed to happen? We’re preventing people from moving through these Rings because we have no idea what’s out there, but is that really anyone’s place to say that? Earth has 50% unemployment and Mars has been trying to Terraform for 300 years and now there’s a thousand planets that already have an atmosphere. Are you gonna allow the kids not to have that? What about the Belters, who have been disenfranchised for generations — why do we not allow them to have what they deserve?
As it is with The Expanse — and the thing which makes it such a wonderful show and allegory for real world issues — there are no easy answers to these questions because these are questions having to do with the inherent complexity human nature and chaos of humanity.
“There are no monoliths on this show,” Strait went on to say. “Mars isn’t one thing, Earth isn’t one thing, The Belt isn’t one thing. There are subsets of subsets of subsets, and they all conflict with one another in a messy human narrative.”
Chaos brings people together
With everyone now able to travel to different places in the universe and with a new planet bringing new conflict, doesn’t that mean that all our favorite characters — many of whom spent lots of time apart last season — will now be driven further away?
Well — not exactly.
The core crew of Roci — Steven Strait, Dominique Tipper, Wes Chatham, and Cas Anvar — spoke at length about how strong the Roci crew are this season.
“It’s the first time you’ve seen them as a family — settled into who they are and their relationship with each other,” Dominique Tipper explained.
Cas Anvar agreed, saying that the Roci crew have “been through hell and back as a family and as a team. We’re really working well together.”
It’s a good thing, too, as Wes Chatham said that this season The Roci “as a group and as a family…are presented with some challenges that the only way to overcome them is to get together and come together and bond.”
And what about fan favorite (and my personal favorite) duo Chrisjen Avasarala and Bobbie Draper?
“I think that Bobbie really trusts Avasarala — probably the only person that she really, really trusts,” Frankie Adams said, after explaining she couldn’t really go too much into it for fear of delving into spoiler territory. “So it would be a shame for them not to end up back together.”
“She better get back to me — it’s too scary out there!” Shohreh Aghdashloo added.
When pressed for more details, the two ladies just looked at each other. Finally, Shohreh Aghdashloo turned to us and said, “Chaos has a way of bringing people together — let’s put it that way.”
And from the looks of it, there’ll be a fair amount of that in The Expanse this season.
The Roci fam gets to start the season in domestic bliss (but it doesn’t last)
After the constant turmoil and trouble of the last three seasons, the beginning of the season seems to cut our favorite crew somewhat of a break.
“Everyone’s settled” is how Dominique Tipper described it. “Jim and Naomi are settled into their relationship and we start off with them in this lovely family dynamic that we haven’t really seen before.”
Alex and Naomi, in particular, have what Cas Anvar describes as “a very nice evolution in our relationship between our characters that we get to share that has to do with the huge shift that we’re taking going to the planet.”
Unfortunately, as this is The Expanse, that bit of domestic bliss doesn’t last.
“You know it’s gonna go downhill from there,” Cas Anvar said, laughing and bursting our bubble of Roci domesticity and fluff.
He went on to say that “if the stuff that happened in season 4 happened in season 1, [The Roci crew] wouldn’t have made it — we weren’t experienced enough and the characters hadn’t worked together enough. In season 4, we really have to work together as a team. Those 3 years of experience that we have together is really necessary to get through the experiences that we go through in season 4.”
We get to see everyone in a new way
When asked to preview their arc for the upcoming season, nearly everyone talked about how season 4 allowed each of their respective characters to show a side of themselves that they hadn’t been able to play before.
Cas Anvar explained that each cast member got “to do different things than we got to do before…everyone got do different things than what has been their lot in the last three seasons.”
For Cas specifically, that meant having Alex involved “in some pretty hair raising action sequences” where he “gets to get his hands dirty and do some of the stuff that has normally been reserved for other people to do.”
For Wes, you’ll see why Amos prefers the regimented, busy and enclosed nature of space life. Once we see him spend an extended amount of time on the openness of a planet with an undefined threat, it will start to bring out much of his past and who he was.
Something else that we’ll see from Amos?
“He is going to have relationships in this season,” Wes revealed. “One that also reveals an inner life to Amos that we haven’t seen yet.”
Likewise, Shohreh Aghdashloo and Frankie Adams both told us that we’d get to know Bobbie and Avasarala more in depth — what their triggers are, what their insecurities are, what their fears are.
Shoreh Aghdashloo spoke about viewers getting to see more of Avasarala’s personal life — “her relationship with her husband. She’s a politician, a mother, a wife — you get to see how multilayered as a character she is.”
While Frankie said how while we’ve seen Bobbie be an absolute badass, this season we’ll really get to “see her grow and be independent in the way she thinks and the decisions she makes. It takes her on a really big journey that no one will ever guess.”
She gave us a big smile and laughed a bit.
“You really won’t be able to guess what Bobbie will be doing this season.”
‘The Expanse’ Season 4 has a different flavor
The Rings (literally) opened up the story to a brand new world, and that new world brings with it a new tone and flavor to the show.
In fact, it’s that new tone which Dominique Tipper is most looking forward for fans to see.
“It’s still the same Expanse,” she reassured us, “but we’re really changing this up. It’s a really fresh take. I’m excited for everyone to see the scope of what we’re doing this season — all the new characters and the way they come in and affect all the characters we know and love, and how the world unfolds.”
Steven Strait echoed that sentiment, saying that the fourth season offers a gear change and a different flavor, one which the show approaches both on a technical level and in terms of the intimacy we’ll get with the crew of The Roci.
He described the newest season as one in which “the world gets much larger, but it also gets far more intimate at the same time.”
So what exactly is that new tone and flavor?
Well, if you guessed something akin to a Western — what with Ilus/New Terra (whatever you wish to call it) representing a new frontier, of sorts — you’d be correct.
“There’s definitely that panoramic spaghetti western flavor,” Steven Strait said, describing the setting as a “new and lawless place.”
However there is one thing season 4 of The Expanse won’t share with the Western genre. While many Westerns operate with the clear understanding of a white hat and a black hat — a clearly defined ‘good guy’ and ‘bad guy’ — Wes Chatham let us know that that wouldn’t be the case in season 4.
However lawless and dusty it may be in the new frontier, the season isn’t interested in figuring out who the bad guy or good guy is but rather in exploring “the complexity of the question of: who has a legitimate claim [to the planet]?”
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