At New York Comic Con today, Amazon Prime Video released a new trailer for the forthcoming fourth season of its space opera series The Expanse, showing off a new series of challenges for the crew of the Rocinante.
The new trailer gives us a good idea of what to expect from the next season, which will see the crew of the spaceship Rocinante dispatched to a distant planet, with a President John F. Kennedy -esque speech about the challenges that humanity will face in space and beyond.
The series picks up in its new home on Amazon after the Syfy channel canceled it after three seasons. In that initial run, we followed the crew of the Roci as they navigated a brewing war between various factions of the solar system, and contended with a deadly alien substance called the Protomolecule. That substance was ultimately responsible for creating and opening a ring gate at the far edge of the solar system, opening up hundreds of new worlds to humanity.
What we see in the teaser is a good look at the Rocinante’s destination: a planet called Ilus, located on the other side of the ring gate. In the books, they’re dispatched to the planet to mediate between a group of colonists and a corporation that’s laid claim to the world, only to discover a massive alien construct that poses its own dangers.
Some other cool things that we’ll see in the upcoming season:
- Tons of scenes from the planet Ilus. Given that much of the series has taken place in space, it’s nice to see the crew on the ground.
- Lots of very pretty VFX shots of Ilus, Earth, and Mars. The show’s CGI budget hasn’t gone down.
- It looks like Ilus will face some serious disasters (holding to what we read in the novel this season is based on, Cibola Burn): there’s plenty of scenes where it looks as though the settlement has been destroyed or attacked.
- There’s some serious tensions between various factions on the ground on Ilus — with Adolphus Murtry (Pacific Rim‘s Burn Gorman) at the center.
- Bobbie Draper (Frankie Adams) is back, even though she didn’t really appear in the original novel.
The show’s fourth season will debut on Amazon Prime Video on December 13th, 2019.
