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On Expanse season 5
You know, that post I made about season 3 (and especially the comment discussion) is helping me figure out why I'm having the issues I'm having with season 5.
As of writing this, I haven't seen the final episode of the season yet, so it obviously could change things. Okay, I've seen the latest episode now!
But the discussion over there made me think about how everything I liked about season three - the teamwork, the rewarding of kindness over selfishness, the search for nonviolent solutions - is pretty much the opposite of what season 5 has been.
I hated Drummer's arc this season from the start. I like that she's heading out to self-actualize away from the powerful men that she's shaped her life around, but I absolutely hate that where her self-actualization took her was piracy. After she spent most of season four being an agent of positive change, trying to enforce peace between Belters and Inners, I fiercely hate that her arc ended up taking her to preying on Inners, robbing and killing them instead.
I feel as if this is at least partly because she's not a book character so the show has been dropping her into other characters' plotlines, which imho worked GREAT in season three, but in season five they needed her to be a space pirate and essentially remapped her character to get it to work. I think I could deal with it better if it was framed on the show as a kind of tragedy or at least a symptom of desperation - with the Belt in the grip of corporations and strongmen, the only way to have an independent existence without being under someone else's thumb is piracy. That's tragic! But on the show it's framed as her happy ending and just ... my do-not-want for that is A LOT.
But it hadn't really occurred to me until writing out my thoughts on season three that it's not just Drummer's storyline and it's not just being disappointed in this season after the vividness and fun of the spacegate/alien planet arcs in past seasons and it's not even watching week to week in realtime that's dragging my enjoyment down. It's that this season is a repudiation of season three's theme of winning through mercy and kindness. Because everything that's happening right now goes back to Drummer letting Marco go in season four. Essentially the show has gone from an entire season singing the praises of victory through nonviolence, to setting up a situation in which mercy is framed as weakness and failure; Drummer has gone from someone who uses her strength to protect others to someone who preys on the weak; and the entire season has been framed around a situation that can only end in Marco's death because we've already seen where not killing him gets us.
Like I was talking about in the comments over there, too, with Marco the show has introduced a new flavor of evil, with a guy who manipulates and gaslights people close to him, and I'm finding that aspect of it deeply unpleasant to watch. It's not like the show has never had unpleasantness, awfulness, and evil before; it's not that Marco is fundamentally worse than people like Errinwright or Mao or Murtry (or several of the protagonists for that matter). (Edit: See below.) But I'm finding him really unpleasant to watch, and I haven't enjoyed his effect on the plotlines around him either.
So basically I am just crossing my fingers that the damn Marco plotline wraps up this season and we can move on to something else that is less Everything I Don't Want.
Edit: About Marco not being worse than people like Murtry or Errinwright ... he's not, but he's a human villain on a scale we haven't had before. Previously, the show has been very much about power in aggregate and people embedded in power structures, doing good or evil according to their nature and ambitions. But it hasn't been about Big Man evil, Lone Villain evil. It's been more about power structures in general, and people pushing back against them or leaning into them according to their natures.
Murtry is a company cop, a small-time thug who turns into a violent dictator when he's put in a position where all his worst urges can come out, isolated on an alien planet with a bunch of survivors he's responsible for, and no one to stop him. Errinwright wanted power and climbed through Earth's political ranks to get it.
Marco, though ... I think what feels different about Marco is that for maybe the first time in five seasons, the show has set up a situation that is clearly about Overcoming Evil By Killing This Guy, which is way more simplistic, typical space opera plotting than the show's moral conflicts in the past. Even with someone like Murtry, it's thematically appropriate that Holden & co. ended up using the system to beat him rather than giving him the blaze-of-glory death he would have preferred: Murtry's whole thing was that he thought civilization was weakness and the only power lay in physical strength, so it felt more apt to send him to be tried for his crimes rather than letting him have a big apocalyptic fight to the death. (And it's not that the show isn't critical of the justice system - I mean, we've seen Bobbie get trampled by it, and essentially it's the system that created Murtry in the first place. But the whole point was that Murtry's way - strong men trampling anyone who can't fight back - wasn't better.) In Marco's arc, though, all the dominoes have been set up so that killing Marco would solve most of their problems and all signs point to that actually being the solution. It's not different from how other shows handle that kind of thing, but it feels to me like a direct repudiation of the show being critical of that kind of thing in the past.
But the discussion over there made me think about how everything I liked about season three - the teamwork, the rewarding of kindness over selfishness, the search for nonviolent solutions - is pretty much the opposite of what season 5 has been.
I hated Drummer's arc this season from the start. I like that she's heading out to self-actualize away from the powerful men that she's shaped her life around, but I absolutely hate that where her self-actualization took her was piracy. After she spent most of season four being an agent of positive change, trying to enforce peace between Belters and Inners, I fiercely hate that her arc ended up taking her to preying on Inners, robbing and killing them instead.
I feel as if this is at least partly because she's not a book character so the show has been dropping her into other characters' plotlines, which imho worked GREAT in season three, but in season five they needed her to be a space pirate and essentially remapped her character to get it to work. I think I could deal with it better if it was framed on the show as a kind of tragedy or at least a symptom of desperation - with the Belt in the grip of corporations and strongmen, the only way to have an independent existence without being under someone else's thumb is piracy. That's tragic! But on the show it's framed as her happy ending and just ... my do-not-want for that is A LOT.
But it hadn't really occurred to me until writing out my thoughts on season three that it's not just Drummer's storyline and it's not just being disappointed in this season after the vividness and fun of the spacegate/alien planet arcs in past seasons and it's not even watching week to week in realtime that's dragging my enjoyment down. It's that this season is a repudiation of season three's theme of winning through mercy and kindness. Because everything that's happening right now goes back to Drummer letting Marco go in season four. Essentially the show has gone from an entire season singing the praises of victory through nonviolence, to setting up a situation in which mercy is framed as weakness and failure; Drummer has gone from someone who uses her strength to protect others to someone who preys on the weak; and the entire season has been framed around a situation that can only end in Marco's death because we've already seen where not killing him gets us.
Like I was talking about in the comments over there, too, with Marco the show has introduced a new flavor of evil, with a guy who manipulates and gaslights people close to him, and I'm finding that aspect of it deeply unpleasant to watch. It's not like the show has never had unpleasantness, awfulness, and evil before; it's not that Marco is fundamentally worse than people like Errinwright or Mao or Murtry (or several of the protagonists for that matter). (Edit: See below.) But I'm finding him really unpleasant to watch, and I haven't enjoyed his effect on the plotlines around him either.
So basically I am just crossing my fingers that the damn Marco plotline wraps up this season and we can move on to something else that is less Everything I Don't Want.
Edit: About Marco not being worse than people like Murtry or Errinwright ... he's not, but he's a human villain on a scale we haven't had before. Previously, the show has been very much about power in aggregate and people embedded in power structures, doing good or evil according to their nature and ambitions. But it hasn't been about Big Man evil, Lone Villain evil. It's been more about power structures in general, and people pushing back against them or leaning into them according to their natures.
Murtry is a company cop, a small-time thug who turns into a violent dictator when he's put in a position where all his worst urges can come out, isolated on an alien planet with a bunch of survivors he's responsible for, and no one to stop him. Errinwright wanted power and climbed through Earth's political ranks to get it.
Marco, though ... I think what feels different about Marco is that for maybe the first time in five seasons, the show has set up a situation that is clearly about Overcoming Evil By Killing This Guy, which is way more simplistic, typical space opera plotting than the show's moral conflicts in the past. Even with someone like Murtry, it's thematically appropriate that Holden & co. ended up using the system to beat him rather than giving him the blaze-of-glory death he would have preferred: Murtry's whole thing was that he thought civilization was weakness and the only power lay in physical strength, so it felt more apt to send him to be tried for his crimes rather than letting him have a big apocalyptic fight to the death. (And it's not that the show isn't critical of the justice system - I mean, we've seen Bobbie get trampled by it, and essentially it's the system that created Murtry in the first place. But the whole point was that Murtry's way - strong men trampling anyone who can't fight back - wasn't better.) In Marco's arc, though, all the dominoes have been set up so that killing Marco would solve most of their problems and all signs point to that actually being the solution. It's not different from how other shows handle that kind of thing, but it feels to me like a direct repudiation of the show being critical of that kind of thing in the past.
no subject
With the other storylines, I think the theme for the season is having to face your past (at least, for Amos and Naomi), and dealing with unfinished business (Alex), so Drummer's storyline sort of fits in (in terms of searching for Ashford's ship, but also dealing with the fallout of letting Marco go), but I think it's not so much a repudiation of the "do the nonviolent thing if you can" but a highlighting of how doing the violent thing (i.e., Inners treatment of the Belt) only leads to more and ever-escalating levels of violence, with Marco's act as the nadir (apex?) of that both in terms of the overall political plot and the personal plot with Naomi. (I didn't enjoy Naomi's plot in the book, either, though I don't recall much of what else happens, big-picture-wise.) So that everyone involved (even maybe Amos) will reevaluate that calculus going forward - see how Avasarala is arguing that responding with overwhelming force is just going to radicalize Belters who aren't yet aligned with Marco. It's both the politically smart and the humane answer.
I think Marco's response to mercy is more on Marco than it is on Drummer, and I think the show reflects that? But I could be reading into it because of how much I love Drummer.
On the more personal scale, Clarissa's journey is the one that carries that though-line forward - she killed a bunch of people, but she's still trying to reach out and not kill people, even when it might be safer for her to do so (and of course, she does kill both the survivalist dude and those security guards who were threatening her and Amos).
no subject
No, that does make sense, and I agree! I'm thinking more on a thematic level than on an individual-mistake level - I mean, I don't think Drummer letting him go was the wrong decision, I understand why she did it, and I think her reasoning was laid out well. I also don't mind characters fucking up, making bad decisions, etc - that the characters are all fallible and make mistakes is one of the things I like about the show. And, just looking at that storyline in isolation, there's a kind of painful irony that having taken the merciful option in that case (as opposed to maintaining order by killing people in previous seasons) is coming back to bite her so hard now. Ugh. It just bugs me on a big-picture thematic level.
But I like your point about this season being themed around characters confronting their pasts - I think you're right about that, and I also really love how it's handling Clarissa (I'm really amazed how much I've come to love her!). There's a lot about the show I'm still enjoying, just not as much as the previous couple of seasons.
no subject
For Drummer, I feel like it's definitely meant to be tragic that she made this one decision to be merciful as Naomi might have wanted her to be, and it's had the worst possible consequences for billions of people, including Naomi (very personally including Naomi) and her own crew.
no subject
see how Avasarala is arguing that responding with overwhelming force is just going to radicalize Belters who aren't yet aligned with Marco. It's both the politically smart and the humane answer.
i really enjoyed that bit myself!
no subject
no subject
Oh right, I forgot to respond to this - yeah, this is a really good point, and I do think this is well done!
no subject
Maybe it's just the last five years talking, but this description of Murtry strikes me as a much more believable form of evil than your description of Marco, because while terrible, awful, catastrophically destructive individuals do exist in real life, generally they need systems to support them while they do their terrible, awful, catastrophic destruction, and if the show has been dealing in knotty, thoughtful critiques of systems for years, then it sounds like a major regression to shape an entire season around a character where his personal badness is enough to get the harm done—and where stopping him personally is enough to make it stop.
Even with someone like Murtry, it's thematically appropriate that Holden & co. ended up using the system to beat him rather than giving him the blaze-of-glory death he would have preferred: Murtry's whole thing was that he thought civilization was weakness and the only power lay in physical strength, so it felt more apt to send him to be tried for his crimes rather than letting him have a big apocalyptic fight to the death.
That's very clever and I suspect I still don't want to watch this arc, but that's a very trickster kind of takedown and I approve of it.
no subject
I didn't realize Drummer wasn't from the books, and that suddenly makes a lot more sense of her arc here—that we've in one sense switched characters, and that's why we find her in such a different place. I understand her regrets about not voting to kill Marco. I wish they had been able to imprison him. (I have to think that a few years ago, I might not have been willing to believe so many Belters would follow this ego-driven, murderous tyrant, but I'm now very much afraid they would.)
I love how much Avasarala has grown. I can't imagine seeing her a couple of seasons ago arguing for the measured response she does here. I felt that she didn't resign in the hopes of getting her power back (though I do wonder now if she thought of that; I didn't, but I can't even do departmental politics well). She felt so strongly that it was the right thing to do. So I don't think they've entirely turned their backs on mercy and non-violence. I do think they're showing that it can be risky and costly—but then, so is the alternative, as we've seen.
I felt pained by every scene with Naomi on the Chetzemoka, but I loved seeing her engineering genius and heroics! I was so relieved that they were able to save her! At least I got some payoff from the episode there.
I loved the scene where Amos gets Holden to say they have each other's backs and then shouts, "We're good!" and just walks away while Clarissa carefully walks over to poor Holden. It was so wrong and yet so right!
I also really appreciated that most of Amos and Clarissa's band made it out alive, especially the staff who'd been trapped on that island.
I wish we had ended with the happy scene where Avasarala says that this is what they want to destroy. I could have waited for the next problem through the season break contentedly enough!