Fans of The Expanse will be delighted by the show's innovative fourth season. The series was cancelled by Syfy after three seasons and then picked up by Amazon Prime Video. And although the show is still adapting the books of the same name -- with Season 4 largely following the fourth novel, Cibola Burn -- the series returns with an entirely new look and feel.

On a recent visit to the set of The Expanse, cast and producers spoke about what makes Season 4 unique, from new locations to themes that reflect human history.

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Cas Anvar, who plays Alex, the pilot of the Rocinante, noted, "Seasons 1, 2 and 3 is like an anthology, like a movement in an opera, and then Season 4 departs from that. It’s a whole different feel and vibe and energy.”

Many in the cast and crew described the fourth season -- which centers on the characters' adventures as they follow a desperate group of refugees through the newly opened Ring to an alien planet that is far from passive -- as a Western. Anvar explained, "They really did approach [Season 4] like a wild Western, kind of like going into new territory, landing on the planet. They used different shooting techniques, they used different lenses, there’s a lot of beautiful panoramic widescreen. They had a very strong visual aesthetic they wanted to achieve with the Roci crew landing.…"

However, as otherworldly as the planet of Ilus may look onscreen, the real-life location required very little enhancement. "We found an extraordinary location for Ilus, which is a quarry about an hour outside of Toronto….,"executive producer Andrew A. Kosove explained. "An active, working quarry with several lakes and the water in these lakes are spectacular because of the sediment that’s running off of the rocks… so you get different minerals into the water and it causes the water to turn these wonderful colors. So literally when you look at this, you look like you’re on the landscape of what [an alien] planet would be.

"The show has always had tremendous production value, we’ve had amazing visual effects and all of those things, but Season 4 is the first time we’ve had tremendous in-camera production value because of this location. It’s not tricks…. That’s actually what’s there."

Producer and writer Ty Franck, who is also a co-writer of the original novels with Daniel Abraham (they jointly go by the pen name James S.A. Corey), noted that the themes of the fourth season lent themselves to the Western genre because the story is reflective of the real history of the settlement of new lands.

"We didn’t have to make much up, we just borrowed from the real world," Franck noted. "The Western expansion in the United States and the settlement of Australia and the Spaniards showing up in South America [were all inspirations]."

"Think of it as the discovery of new worlds," showrunner Naren Shankar added. "Suddenly, everybody knew that [there] was a place that they could go and make their fortune. And so how do you control that?... And that’s essentially the problem that they’re looking at at the beginning of [Season 4] because no one’s sure what’s quite on the other side of the Ring, no one’s sure about what might be out there…. There are monsters out there. Maybe that’s a problem.”

And this deadly situation is one of the new challenges the show's characters will be confronting in Season 4. Yet, unlike the typical Western, there are no black hats or white hats on The Expanse. Dominique Tipper, who plays engineer Naomi Nagata, observed, "...what’s nice is where it’s not like a Western is that you get all the perspectives and it’s all very grey and it’s not just like the Westerners are heroes and all the natives are weirdos and savages.”

Within that grey, however, are a group of people struggling to create a civilization in new territory that could change their lives for the better -- if they can figure out how to survive. According to Franck, this struggle will challenge the characters' sense of control. "Season 4 is about learning the limits of control, and people starting to see what that’s going to mean, and that people who have largely been powerless making a move to become powerful."

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Kosove credits Amazon for allowing the show the creative freedom to change tone and format in Season 4. "[The Western feel and natural locations were] not something we were doing in the first three seasons. That’s really a credit to Amazon and their… allowing flexibility to try different things."

“Exactly," agreed Shankar, "because that’s a thing you never would’ve been able to do on basic cable.”

An adaption of the novel series of the same name by James S.A. Corey, The Expanse stars Steven Strait, Cas Anvar, Dominique Tipper, Wes Chatham, Shohreh Aghdashloo and Frankie Adams. Season 4 arrives Dec. 13 on Amazon Prime.

NEXT: The Expanse Recap: Where Each Faction Was Before Season 4