There’s a new trailer for The Expanse, and I am not lying when I say I shrieked at the end of it. Readers of the Expanse novels—and specifically, in this case, novellas: You’ll very much want to keep watching after the title card. It seems like it’s the end of the trailer. It is not.
But this trailer has something for every Expanse fan: Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) plotting; Bobbie (Frankie Adams) being breathtakingly competent; the Roci maneuvering; Holden (Steven Strait) being captainly; Amos (Wes Chatham) being soft and also tough; Naomi (Dominique Tipper) putting things together; Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander) being a schemer; Drummer (Cara Gee) growing into her role as leader; and a whole lot of space action.
The summary is short, but makes one thing clear: the distant planet of Laconia is part of the story, as we see in that last trailer scene, which comes from the novella Strange Dogs.
Holden and the crew of the Rocinante fight alongside the Combined Fleet of Earth and Mars to protect the Inner Planets from Marco Inaros and his Free Navy’s campaign of death and destruction. Meanwhile, on a distant planet beyond the Rings, a new power rises.
It’s hard to imagine how it’s possible to fit everything this trailer suggests into a six-episode season, but the team behind this show—including Naren Shankar, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, and authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck—have done an astonishingly good job distilling and adapting thousands upon thousands of pages of books so far. When they change things, it makes sense. And when they film things almost exactly as they happened on the page, it’s breathtaking.
There are so many good moments here! There’s a look at Kathleen Robertson’s new character, a Belter who says Marco is better with Filip at his side; Avasarala speaking to everything we’ve seen in five seasons, from destruction to brokenness to hope; Amos lightening the mood; and, in a moment that got me a little choked up, Drummer speaking to her family and crew. “I never loved you because you were fighters,” she says. “I loved you because you were builders.”
There’s a double meaning in that word: the protomolecule civilization (that we’ve barely seen since season four) is also referred to as the builders. The ring gates, the aliens, the space between the gates—all of that is likely to become much more important this season. Who else can’t wait?
The Expanse‘s final season premieres on Prime Video on December 10th.
