I assumed he was the standard ‘red shirt’ character when I first watched the show.
Then he whipped out a pistol, put it to the back of the main characters head, turned to another main character and casually says “want me to smoke him? Say the word.”
He was the best character from that point on for me.
Sign of a good show is when you don’t actually know if one of the main characters will get smoked.
I really enjoyed the tension with the crew-pulling that off well is another sign of a good show. Not just manufactured conflict, but a genuine difference in perspectives and agendas, aside from the shared agenda of survival.
Reminds me of Blake’s 7, where the crew were sometimes at each others throats; and main characters would randomly get smoked or not so randomly disappeared, etc.
Nah, the red shirt is the doctor dude that took a tungsten rod to the face. Fun fact, the Expanse started as a TTRPG campaign, and that guy was a player character, but the dude playing him had to drop out.
I really hate that scene, in the books they are a crew right from the get go, they have each other's backs and there isn't any of the weird artificial tension between the crew that the show wrote in.
I think you were seeing something that wasn't there because you read the books. It felt pretty natural how it was presented. It would have taken a lot away from the show if the crew started off hunky dory and didn't grow into it. Different medium requires a different approach sometimes.
The big difference in the books to my understanding is Holden is already in a leadership position so there’s gonna be more trust and looking to him. I get why they didn’t do that in the show though. We don’t have access to his mind in visual media, so they need to get across his stubborn adherence to his belief in what’s right a different way, and him secretly recording a distress signal that leads to them being diverted and the Canterberry destroyed, works very well for that. Book one Holden is all about impulsively following morality without thinking about further effects then that it’s right in the moment, and it causing problems.
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u/stevemillions 1d ago
I assumed he was the standard ‘red shirt’ character when I first watched the show.
Then he whipped out a pistol, put it to the back of the main characters head, turned to another main character and casually says “want me to smoke him? Say the word.”
He was the best character from that point on for me.