Checking In with the Other Characters

Since The Expanse, the TV show, is based on The ExpanseThis series is set in a future where humans have colonized the Solar System, but then have to contend with alien tech that upends their whole civilization., the book series, there was a lot of material to cover and a ton of characters to work into and adapt into the series. In most cases, those transitions worked really well. Sure, some changes are weird when you know the context of the books, such as Camina Drummer on the show essentially being an amalgamation of three different characters slapped together to make a single role for the actress Cara Gee to play across multiple seasons. But then you get to characters that didn’t appear in some books at all, and that’s where the tricky parts really lie.

Bobbie Draper isn’t in the fourth book of the series outside its prologue. She does have a novella that runs parallel, which the series uses to give her something to do during that time, but it’s pretty clear, when watching the series, that the show doesn’t really know what to do with her. There’s a lot of time spent table-setting and spinning wheels, putting her in a story that barely connects to anything going on around her. And then when the fifth season starts, her plot has transitioned a bit, going from her working for bad guys to make money and figure out what she wants to do with her life to working with Avasarala full time digging into what’s going on with Mars. It feels like a piece is missing, that there should be more that we know about her mission, but the series doesn’t quite get us there. It’s not a massive deal-breaker, since Bobbie is a great character, but we really could use more to understand where Bobbie was at and why she made specific decisions.

Unfortunately, this second volume of The Expanse comics doesn’t really give us that. Instead it strands Bobbie and Chrisjen Avasarala in a story that feels like more generic table setting and wheel spinning. Did you know that Bobbie was working for Avasarala and that she was on the verge of breaking a whole conspiracy about Mars, Earth, and the future of the ring system wide open? Oh, you did? Because you watched the fifth season of the show? Oh, well, this story won’t really tell you anything you don’t already know. But hey, more Bobbie! That’s good, right?

The story opens with Bobbie trying, and failing, to make headway on her investigations into the black market of Mars. She knows that important tech (stealth tech, weapons, vehicles, and more) is getting stolen from Martian warehouses, and she knows some big group has to be behind him. However, every time she gets close to a lead that could break the case wide open, all her threads come up empty and suddenly she’s right back where she started with no evidence and nothing to prove.

And then along comes an old friend of Bobbie’s, offering her a new job on a new world.The deal sounds too good to be true, but might be just what she needs since her task to dig into Mars, set on her by Avasarala, seems to be going nowhere. Bobbie is frustrated and upset, in need of some big win to prove she’s on the right track… otherwise she might just take the offer given. But when agents for a mysterious group come for both Bobbie and Chrisjen, it might just be the proof they both need that they’re on the right track… assuming they don’t die in the process.

A major problem The Expanse comics have had is giving us bits of stories we kind of already knew, especially in ways that didn’t really add anything to our knowledge of the events as they already played out. This is frankly an issue with just about any prequel or interquel (of which The Expanse: Origins was the prequel and The Expanse Vol. 2 is an interquel), how to give us something new and important that we haven’t already seen before. The television series even took the issue one step further, adapting much of the ancillary material from the various short stories and novellas in many of the episodes. That leaves the comics, which also want to explore side events and different perspectives, with far less material to cover. How can you do effective side stories when all the important ones have been told?

The Expanse Vol. 2 doesn’t have an answer for that. In fact, it doesn’t really have an answer for a very basic question: why does this exist? While the transitions between seasons for Bobbie and Avasarala may not have been the smoothest, with season four ending with Bobbie ready to work for Chrisjen while the former UN Secretary of State quickly ends up out of power while season five sees the two working together from Earth and Mars some time later, we can still easily infer that there’s stuff going on and the two found a way to make their arrangement work. Both have to work off the radar, monitoring what’s going on down on Mars, and… well, that already gets covered in season five, at least a little. So, what is the point of this story?

It’s weird to call a comic that comes out after the television show it was based on, set in the middle of seasons of that show, as table setting, but that was entirely the vibe I got off of this comic series. If, somehow, you have no clue what was going on in the series past season five, and if you decided to read this comic (which came out long after) between seasons four and five, then maybe you’d get something from the tale of Bobbie and Chrisjen stumbling onto a conspiracy they can’t understand. But reading this tale when it was published (or after), long after the series is over, it loses whatever appeal it was meant to have.

Again, this isn’t a knock against the characters of Bobbie or Avasarala. I like them a lot and I think this comic writes them well. But these are pieces moving around a board that, we know, has long been set. They’re grasping around in the air to figure out what kind of conspiracy they’re even looking at when we know the answer is Laconia and it flashing them in the face. They just can’t see it. They don’t know the long game, like we do, and they don’t understand where everything is going while we’re already well informed of the whole plot. We’re five steps ahead of them, along with all the people working for Laconia, and it’s kind of annoying seeing the character stumbling around in the dark on a mission that we’ve already seen the conclusion of.

There’s a telling line in the book from Avasarala. She laments that there’s a conspiracy here, she knows it, and she wishes she had the piece that would make it all fit together. That piece is Laconia, and she’ll get it very soon, in the next couple of seasons, but she doesn’t know that. If she’d then turned to the people reading the comic and stared directly at them from across the page it wouldn’t make the moment feel any weirder. The writers are trying to fit a story into a conspiracy that, by the time most read this, has already been solved, and they don’t add anything useful to the conspiracy to give it any better context. Again, it’s just table setting.

The goal, clearly, was to give more time to Bobbie and Avasarala, both of whom were underserved by the fourth season of the show (because that season is based on a book where both characters barely appear at all). I appreciate the effort, but it would have been nice if there was more for these characters to do than go through motions that we know, long run, they’re all going to go through again in the fifth season of the series. The comic doesn’t add anything to our understanding of the characters, their situation, or the greater plotline as a whole because we already know where it’s going. The authors wanted to tell this story… and then didn’t really have anything to say after.

I like The Expanse a lot and it’s not that I think this story is necessarily awful, it just doesn’t really do anything. Had I read it between seasons like it’s clearly now intended, instead of being one of those people that kept up with the show as it aired and then came to the comics after they were published later, then probably I would enjoy this story for what it is. But as someone that has deep dived into everything the show and books have done, I really just wish this comic were more important to the series. It’s not, and that really holds it back.