Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Science fiction fans have been patiently waiting for the next BSG. Is their wait over with The Expanse? Maybe, maybe not, but this epic new series will at least scratch some hard to reach itches. What we have here is the beginning of something with real potential to last a half-dozen seasons or longer, thanks to the prolific and ongoing prose of two authors known as James SA Corey, and to Syfy's apparent ambition to issue a classic that'll lift us out of the fog we've been drifting through while waiting for the next "big one." Since reviews that bash a movie or TV series for not dogmatically following the source book(s) are frankly tiresome, I'll spare you the disparaging remarks and leave that to someone else. The Expanse includes the important details from the books, such as a crew "going on the juice" for a high g burn (the juice being an injected cocktail of drugs to [optimistically] keep the pilot et al. from "stroking out"), but it also does surprisingly well with the unimportant details from Leviathan Wakes, such as Captain Shaddid's favoring a forced-air scent of coffee and cinnamon in her office via that diffuser on her desk. Cast: Solid. Of the major players, Cas Anvar as Alex, Thomas Jane as Miller, and Shohreh Aghdashloo as Chrisjen Avasarala are the seasoned actors. Dominique Tipper as Naomi Nagata is the wildcard, but so far, so good. I was expecting Amos to be more imposing than Wes Chatham, but he still looks enough like the muscle of Holden's fantastic four. Chad Coleman (aka Tyreese, former tank on The Walking Dead) was well cast as Fred Johnson, and Jared Harris (David Robert Jones of Fringe / Lane Pryce of Mad Men) was an incisive pick for the Ceres OPA bigwig. Effects / CGI: Fair to excellent. Obviously the show's sizable budget is going to be revealed in some scenes more than others, but thankfully they chose to pour money into what matters most for this story: the off-world spacecraft and no/low g scenes. They've done a proficient job of conveying physics (varying degrees of gravity, etc.) Story / Dialogue: Characters in the SA Corey books spend a lot of time sharing their thoughts with the reader, and it's difficult to convey enough of that through a visual medium. The Expanse tries to compensate for this drawback by keeping the story moving along at a brisk pace, with tons of visuals to gawk at. The dialogue is acceptable, with plenty of the lines verbatim from Leviathan Wakes. Final thoughts: Not as good as the books, but did we expect The Expanse to surpass the source material? Since several are published now, the screenwriters are able to draw upon the larger world of James SA Corey (i.e., not confining story details to Leviathan Wakes), which is turning out to be a boon. If you haven't read them, at least watch The Expanse through episode 4 ("CQB") before drawing premature conclusions.