Five Major Reasons Season 6 of The Expanse Falls Short, Grading Season 6 and the Series Finale

**SPOILERS for The Expanse (all of Season 6/series)**

Season 6 of The Expanse is a short and mediocre conclusion to a show that at its height was a good, if not very good, series.

It’s time to take a look at five major issues with Season 6 of The Expanse.

Laconia Planet Girl Storyline

It’s only fair that we start this off the same way every episode of Season 6 started out—by devoting time to a little girl on a planet inside the rings. The little girl, Cara, spends her time in a CGI forest where she meets some CGI creatures that have the power to resurrect the dead. Almost immediately after realizing this, her younger brother is killed and she has to get the creatures to resurrect him. There’s also a somewhat menacing leader of the colony, Admiral Duarte, but we don’t get much of him in these five or so minute bits at the start of each episode.

The goings on at Laconia may be very important in the book series that the television show is based off of, but in the universe that the show has created it doesn’t fit. By the time we get to Season 6 in our story, we’ve followed our core cast for 50 plus episodes. Now we get just six episodes to wrap things up and we’re wasting time on something that doesn’t relate at all to the main story. What’s worse is that Cara and her brother’s story is left completely unresolved.

It seems like the creators of the show have banked on the idea that there will be some sort of spinoff to The Expanse. Spinoffs are fine. I have nothing against the idea of a spinoff taking place in the same universe as The Expanse, and I’ve heard there are more books that take place after a time jump at the point we’re at when the television series ends. What I do have a problem with though (a huge problem) is that the Laconia planet story doesn’t fit in with the story we’re being told at all. If you can tell a good story and include parts of it that are left somewhat unresolved that can lead potentially into a spinoff one day, that’s great. This isn’t that.

You’ve done something very wrong if people finish watching your series and one of the first things they think is, “What was that one part at the start of each episode all about? How did that connect at all?” before taking a trip to Google to try to find out what was going on. Making a cohesive series that stands on its own should have been more important than following the books or leading into a potential spinoff project.

Lack of Character Depth 

We definitely needed more than six episodes to conclude this series. What suffers the most from having so little time to tell the rest of our story (as is often the case in short TV show seasons) is the characters. It feels like the writers had a checklist of all the plot points they wanted to hit and were just quickly checking them off one by one. There is no time for our characters to breathe—no time for them to develop further.

In Season 6, our characters are cardboard cutouts of their archetypes. Holden is the hero, he always does what’s right. Amos is the tough guy. Bobbie Draper is the badass female character. There is no depth here. We get a few brief scenes of Holden and Naomi, but no real further development in their relationship. Holden is concerned about Naomi. Naomi is justifiably traumatized by her experiences in Season 5. This is just surface level stuff being explored.

The one real character scene we get in the finale is an extremely cliché “let’s have the crew all have a nice dinner together” moment. It’s as paint-by-numbers of a character moment as you can get. “Can you pass the potatoes, Amos?”

CGI Space Battles

This is a big issue with the finale— massive CGI space battles and gunfights where it’s not even super clear what’s going on. At the start of the episode, characters gather around a table and decide how they’ll attack. Again, there’s some super cliché stuff here with our hero offering up the long-shot plan that is of course deemed too crazy and optimistic to ever work.

When we finally get into the thick of it, it’s a lot of ships in space firing space blasts at one another. Then there’s a part where our main crew heads down to destroy some guns. It seems like the odds are stacked against them until Bobbie Draper just runs at one of the guns and fires some missiles at it. Don’t worry though, she’s fine. Every member of our main crew is fine. The plan worked! Hooray! The final part of our space battle leads into my next major complaint with the show and that’s…

Marco Inaros

Marco Inaros is a mostly lame villain. He seems like he’s trying to act intimidating most of the time without actually being intimidating. Marco is basically a poser and the fact that he’s our main antagonist in our final season is disappointing.

What’s worse is that there’s no big fight between Holden and him. There’s also no final confrontation with him and Naomi, the mother of his son. Marco Inaros just disappears because if the good guys fire all their weapons at the right time then the space ancient aliens (or whatever they are) are triggered and disappear him. This is what we call anticlimactic. I’m not saying I need a fist fight between the hero and villain for it to be a satisfying final battle, but something more than the villain just vanishing would be nice.

Another critique centered around Marco is that, when you look at how we’ve been shown his character, I don’t buy that he’d simply allow his son, Filip, to sneak out of the ship and escape him. Marco is super controlling of his entire crew, but he just let’s Filip leave the ship without confronting him? We at least need a scene of Marco realizing someone’s left the ship, learning it’s actually Filip, and then scanning the other ship and talking with Filip. Will Marco blow his son’s ship out of the sky for defying him or will he let his son go? We don’t get this, which I think would’ve been a good moment of closure for the relationship between father and son.

Wasted Opportunities

For a show that spent most of its run revolving around the protomolecule and explaining how dangerous and important it is, it’s largely absent from our final season. We never get to learn much more about the ancient civilization that built the rings or created the weapons that are disappearing ships like Marco’s. Instead the final season is a simply a war story.

There are a lot of interesting elements established in The Expanse universe that differentiate the show from other space television programs, but the generic war storyline could pretty easily be replicated on a version of a show like Star Trek without really changing too much.

So would I recommend The Expanse to someone who hasn’t seen any of the show yet? Well, probably not, and that’s disappointing to me because I think a lot of it is pretty good. The Expanse was never really a great show, but wrapping it up with six episodes that barely clears the bar of being “not too bad” is definitely a letdown.

Finale Grade: 4/10

Season 6 Overall Grade: 4.5/10

Overall Series Grade (Seasons 1 through 6): 6.5/10