Hey, man, I'm Kevin Smith,
and today I wanna tell you all about "The Expanse."
Now, it's a sci-fi show
that's written by some of the smartest people out there, man,
so it makes sense that they hired a very not smart person
to come in and recap it for you in layman's terms.
Now this show is emotional. It's full of action...
Alex, go around the asteroid. Run 'em, now!
...and super scientifically accurate.
So when I was asked to recap the first three seasons,
I said I'm only gonna do it
if I can get with the same high-caliber effects
that they use on the show.
You guys are gonna make me look like I'm in the show, right?
You're gonna put in the effects?
Like I'm not just standing on a green screen for nothing, correct?
Yeah, we'll add some graphics.
Some. All right.
Just... replace the green.
I don't wanna look like an asshole here.
So anyway, using the same effects that they use on the show,
this is gonna allow me to conjure hyper-realistic models.
Look at that: a planet, asteroids, and even zero G.
Bring on the juice!
So strap in.
Spoilers, just putting that out there.
All right, man, you got three factions.
You got Earth, Mars, and the Belters.
Now first let's talk about Earth.
Earth you've probably heard of,
but in the future, shit has changed, man!
Earth is kind of a bummer due to things like climate change and overpopulation,
so they start colonizing other planets for their resources and their land.
And they're all governed by a single government,
a 'roided up version of the United Nations.
So a bunch of engineers, they go to Mars to make it humanity's second home.
It's like a fixer-upper.
But you know, the solar system is just really gentrifying at this point.
They advance technologically, building cool spaceships,
and decide they should secede from Earth,
becoming their own sovereign planet.
Shit.
Now after that, you got yourself the Belters, man.
They live in the asteroid belt, hence the name.
They got their own special language.
They got badass helmets.
They got obligatory neck tattoos. They are so metal!
Man, when you see 'em it's like...
Helmet, helmet.
But Belters have it pretty rough.
Water is way scarce, so they're all thirsty as hell,
and most live in poverty,
while the fruits of their labor are dragged back to Earth or Mars.
So a bunch of Belters are like, fuck this...
This some real bullshit.
...and form the Outer Planetary Alliance, or the OPA, to battle inequality.
You and I both want the same thing: to do right by our people.
But now it's devolved into a wishy-washy network
of criminals and fucking terrorists.
So, yeah, shit is volatile.
One spark could ignite an interplanetary war
between Earth, Mars, and the Belt.
Season 1.
Okay, this guy, Joe Miller, he's a Belter detective.
And you know he's a detective
because look at the hat. See the hat?
What's the deal with the hat?
Now who's Joe Miller?
Here you go.
So he agrees to track down a missing girl named Julie Mao
for her very rich parents.
Say no more.
But in New York, Chrisjen Avasarala, U.N. bigwig and diplomacy ninja...
With all due respect, madam, where are you going with this?
Wherever I goddamn like.
She interrogates an OPA operative about contraband stealth technology.
What was it for?
Meanwhile, an ice hauler...
that's a ship that hauls ice, go figure...
named the Canterbury, gets blown up...
...by a mysterious stealth ship,
stranding a bunch of important characters, man:
the inconveniently moral Executive Officer Jim Holden...
...genius engineer, Naomi Nagata...
I didn't exactly sign on to the Cant to make friends.
Why did you sign on?
So I wouldn't have to have conversations like this one.
...space cowboy, Alex Kamal...
I just decided to come on down and rescue y'all.
...and pragmatic mechanic, Amos Burton.
There you go. Now you just walk around like you're in pumps.
How do you know what it's like to walk in pumps?
I didn't always work in space.
They're rescued by Fred Johnson, the leader of the OPA.
I don't know who you are.
You have my solemn promise that you will not be harmed.
He's building a generation ship for the Mormons.
There are Mormons in the future!
So it's like floating Space-Utah.
The crew of four agrees to work with Johnson and the OPA,
but this makes them targets for the U.N.
So, to literally fly under the radar,
they name their new ride the Rocinante,
which is Spanish for inconspicuous spaceship.
The Roci crew discovers the stealth ship that blew up their OG ice hauler
and finds its reactor covered in some weird-ass goo,
which is called the protomolecule.
Also, one of its shuttles is missing. Say what?
Somebody got away.
A distress call makes it seem like it's some guy named Lionel Polanski.
Whoever was on this ship was headed to Eros.
If this Lionel Polanski is gonna be anywhere, it's gonna be there.
The Rocinante crew heads to Eros,
an asteroid in the Belt, to find this Polanski guy.
While tracking Polanski,
Holden and his team are ambushed by U.N. Black Ops.
It's a firefight!
Things look really bad, man, but they're rescued by...
You guessed it...
the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Shit just follow you around, don't it, kid?
I mean, Detective Miller...
who has figured out that Polanski is Julie Mao!
Together they find Julie dead.
It seems like she's been infected by the protomolecule
from the stealth ship.
Miller and the Roci crew go, "Aw, rats," and they just leave.
A group loyal to Julie's father finds her body,
and because he's like dad of the year,
they harvest her infected blood
and place the whole asteroid on lockdown
and infect its population with the protomolecule.
Aw, shit!
Back on Earth, Avasarala works her diplomatic magic
to figure out what the hell is goin' on, man?
Season 1 ends with Mao and company turning Eros
into the most infected thing ever, man,
and the crew barely escapes with their lives.
Holy shit, that's intense, man. I need a minute.
Can I get a coffee, in zero-G?
Cover me!
Okay now, in Season 2, the Cold War heats up,
despite Avasarala's best efforts.
The Roci crew, the good guys,
decide someone should do something about protomolecule-infected Eros.
Space honor demands it!
Doing nothing is just as bad as doing the wrong thing.
But how do you neutralize an entire infected asteroid, man?
Why, you'd need to plant demolition charges
to implode the asteroid, then push it into the Sun,
with some kind of massive ship the size of...
...I don't know, Space-Utah?
But when Miller goes down to place the charges,
one gets damaged, man.
Get to cover immediately!
Goofin' the whole dang plan.
Miller nobly decides to make a hero's sacrifice
and stay on Eros to ensure the charges go off as planned.
He bravely watches as Space-Utah approaches and then...
...glides right by.
What the hell just happened?
Except Holden and the crew confirm that Eros somehow maneuvered
to avoid the impact. The fuck?
And now, infected-ass Eros is on a collision course, with what?
- You guessed it. - With Earth.
So they shoot missiles at it, man, but it goes stealth.
Yes, an asteroid infected with space goo has made itself stealth.
- Earth is... - More or less fucked.
Or is it? Because Miller decides to blow Eros up from the inside.
He carries his bomb to the core,
gets ready to meet his maker, and discovers what?
Julie?
Julie Mao, holy crap!
What the fuck?
So Miller has one of those heart-to-infected-hearts with proto-Julie,
convincing her to direct Eros away from the Earth
toward uninhabited Venus. Fuck Venus!
Damn!
Okay, with Miller and the protomolecule destroyed,
the Roci crew launches the final remaining protomolecule sample
- into the sun. - It's done.
And that's the end of that.
Maybe.
Meanwhile, on Jupiter's moon Ganymede,
U.N. and Mars communications inexplicably go dead...
...just like that. Each side blames the other,
and the situation devolves into a full-fledged battle, man.
After the battle, a Martian Marine named Bobbie Draper,
the number one badass,
awakens to find her entire team massacred...
and looming over her is a goddamn proto-monster, man!
Never good!
While everyone blames each other for this clusterfuck,
the Roci crew learns of a protomolecule signal
that came from Ganymede.
There's a protomolecule on Ganymede station.
We go there, find it, and shut it down.
Information that would have been helpful before the brutal massacre of thousands.
Yeah.
Holden sneaks into Ganymede and makes a huge discovery, man.
Mao and his evil buddy, Dr. Strickland,
are infecting Belter children with the protomolecule,
to create human-proto hybrids.
Now that's a villain, man! Bravo!
For screenwriting, not for his activities, man.
Boo on that.
Avasarala confronts Mao,
and Mao asks her to meet him on the ship.
Everyone knows it's a trap, man.
This guy knows it's a trap.
Hell, this guy knows it's a trap.
But she goes anyway and takes Draper with her.
Okay, the Roci crew is psyched to get the hell out of Ganymede,
until they discover there's a proto-monster
stowed away in their cargo hold.
What the fuck is that?
Aw, shit!
Now the crew realizes that the proto-monster
feeds off radiation, man,
so they lure it out into space
by exposing the core of a nuclear warhead,
as you do, and they roast it!
Fry!
Avasarala's meeting with Mao goes about as well as expected.
Get down!
But she's saved by Draper in her awesome battle suit.
If anyone else but me comes through that door,
you put them on the ground.
Naomi confesses to Holden
that she never destroyed the protomolecule sample.
She faked the launch...
...and gave the sample to the OPA
to level the playing field between Earth and Mars.
What did you do?
I gave the protomolecule to Fred Johnson.
Maybe they should teach the ship engineers about hubris.
Quick timeout!
Can I stretch or something?
Like, my mouth is tired.
All right, now in Season 3...
one of the proto-infected children tells Mao and Dr. Strickland
the work on Venus is almost complete.
What are you building?
Work, finish soon, soon, soon!
Meanwhile, the OPA is officially recognized
as the legitimate government of the Belters.
Johnson makes his second in command,
the incredibly badass Camina Drummer,
the captain of their new flagship, the Behemoth,
which is actually Space-Utah with a major upgrade.
AKA, it's got guns now.
Meanwhile on Venus, a humongous protomolecule structure
lifts out of the crater...
...flies out into space...
...and settles past Uranus.
That is some sweet parkin' job.
And everyone's all like...
- What? - The fuck is that?
There, it unfurls and forms a gigantic glowing ring called...
...the Ring.
Kinda makes me want a donut.
Holden starts having visions of our old hero, Miller.
He's back, man! Miller calls himself the Investigator now.
Which is confusing, because he still has the same detective hat.
Mao's other daughter,
sick of not being talked about for like two full seasons,
frames the Roci crew for destroying a science ship.
What in God's name have you been doing?
I have to do this.
Belters are the only legitimate benefactors of the Ring.
- What the fuck did you do? - It's not me, Alex.
This makes them the Nickelback of the galaxy,
and tons of missiles are fired at them.
In a desperate move, the Roci heads into the Ring,
even though it's super dangerous.
This is our only way out.
The only other time a ship entered it,
the pilot got turned into a salty pudding.
But Investigator Miller tells Holden they'll be fine, man...
...if they aren't going too fast.
Time warps as they approach the Ring,
bringing the missile behind them to a near standstill as they enter.
So now everybody heads into the Ring... Mars, Earth, and the OPA...
because the only force stronger than gravity...
...is FOMO, man.
There's only so much booze and fuckin' you can buy.
Holden heads to the station at the center of the Ring
to investigate what the hell is goin' on, man.
He gets fired on by Martian Black Ops Teams,
which the station registers as a threat.
And as a safety measure,
The Ring slows everybody down even further.
Classic Space Ring.
Now that's great for Holden,
but bad for a bunch of people on the ships
not wearing their seat belts,
including Drummer, who gets pinned under a piece of equipment
with her first officer.
She takes the bulk of the weight so someone could command the ship.
That someone is Ashford,
which sucks for reasons we're gonna learn about in a second.
Holden explains what he learned in a vision,
that the Ring was created by a mysterious civilization,
as a sort of celestial freeway.
But then this mysterious civilization was wiped out by something.
The Ring doesn't mean them any harm.
But Ashford takes this as cause for a preemptive strike
because he's the kind of guy who gets bit by a dog
and then nukes a petting zoo.
Anyway, it looks like the station
is about to wipe out the whole solar system.
The station will kill everyone and everything
on both sides of the Ring.
Ashford thinks they just haven't blown it up good enough yet.
He fires off a laser, but it misses.
And right before the station kills everybody in the system,
Mao's other daughter swoops in and saves the day...
...powering down Ashford's ship
and winning for team "Let's not piss off this giant Ring thing."
The station decides humans aren't a threat to it at all,
'cause, yeah we're mostly a threat to ourselves.
Guess it worked.
The station then reactivates the alien transit network,
bringing 1,300 Rings online.
But, and I ask this in the most scientific way possible,
what the fuck is on the other side of those Rings, man?
Is it whatever killed the aliens?
Can the Roci crew trust their new friends?
And will Avasarala make a good secretary-general of the U.N.?
I mean, yeah, probably.
That one isn't really such a mystery, man.
Let's give them a push.
- Hey, hey! - What did you do?
Oh, boy! There it is.
That's barely scratching the surface
of the first three seasons of "The Expanse."
So now you're ready to jump into Season 4,
which drops on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, December 13th, man.
Which, not gonna lie...
the date doesn't sound great for the Roci crew.
But check out this scene which has a real surprise.
You'll see what I'm saying.
You know what, guys? I'm good. I'm going back in the ship.