“They made their own clouds,” a man from Earth says in the fourth season of The Expanse, as he looks down at a terraformed Mars. “Brings to mind the people who built the great Gothic cathedrals. Knowing they’d be long dead before their work was finished, trusting their great-grandchildren would lay the final stones. We’ve lost that kind of generational thinking on Earth. Here, you see it in everything they do.”
It’s easy to get swept up in the big ideas of The Expanse. Based on the books by James S.A. Corey, it breathes gritty, grimy life into a future where humankind has colonized Mars and the asteroid belt, and now, thanks to a mysterious but probably insanely dangerous stargate, can reach a dizzying array of other star systems. There’s a Sagan-sized vastness to its perspective, where structures that are billions of years old loom on alien horizons and Lovecraftian terrors—given sci-fi names like “the protomolecule”—lurk both among the stars and, for some unlucky bastards, inside our guts.
