Nicely done. I’ve been waiting for the SyFy channel’s adaptation of James S. A. Corey’s Expanse novels with a lot of anticipation and a certain amount of anxiety…could the makers of Sharknado do justice to what’s probably the best hard sf / space opera written in the last twenty years?

The answer is absolutely. The story follows the first novel, Leviathan Wakes, and it does it with minimal paring down of the scenes and characters. You can’t fit an entire novel into a movie format, even if it is ten hours long, the length of the first season, but they’ve managed to be true to the story without being handcuffed to it.

The production values are as good as anything you’ll see on the big screen, with the possible exception of the sound mixing. The voice audio is muddy in places, typically when we’re listening to suit radios or Belter patois. The book has the advantage of everything being clear, but in space, no one can hear you talk. This may be by design, just as Kubrick’s sterile 2001 feel was done to evoke a sense of alienation, they’re using it to establish that this is an environment with a high noise to signal ration…and you’re got to work at it. Fortunately it’s worth the effort. Besides, you can turn on the subtitles. Too bad that they don’t include the comments in Belter lingo, which just say “Belter Creole.”

George R. R. Martin was quoted on the book jacket saying it’s the best space zombie book he’s ever read, and while that comment gets a bit ahead of the first episode, it’s clear that the whole thing has a deliberately Game of Thrones in Space vibe. Earth, Mars, and the Belters form an unstable compound and we’re just waiting for the catalyst to show up.

And it will.

If you thought the freighter in Aliens was gritty, you haven’t seen the interior of the Canterbury, which comes off as completely authentic in its scarred and beat up way.  So does the interior of Cere’s and all together they’ve done an impressive job not just with Zero G effects, but with selling the fact that gravity isn’t just on or off, it’s all over the place depending on what’s going on. Maybe you’re growing up in a little gravity, maybe you’re about to be mashed into your seat by an emergency burn. Depends.

I wasn’t sure about Thomas Jane as Miller, the burned out detective, but I’m totally good with it. An older Miller was my first reaction when I saw the trailers, but Thomas Jane is making the part his own and doing a very nice job of it. The adaptation of a book depends on both the writing and the chemistry of the cast to sell it, and having seen the first episode I’m actually happier with the feel it’s got than the one that I conjured up in my mind’s eye reading the books. My characters were all a bit too predictable, and theirs have just enough dissonance to surprise me into seeing it all again for the first time.

Holden played by Steven Strait, Namoi by Dominique Tipper and everyone else, I’m good with it.

This isn’t the book, and it will have its own vibe, although I’m starting to feel it overwrite my internal notions of who everybody was from reading the series. Fortunately, Jason F. Brown (Exec Prod) have done a solid job bringing The Expanse to life. To have wasted such a good story would have been criminal.

Hang on. It’s going to get bumpy in the episodes ahead.