From the beginning, The Expanse has been a show that captured sci-fi fans' hearts. When it was canceled by SyFy after three seasons, fans rallied and it was soon revived by Amazon Prime Video, where it has just started its fifth season. It's a unique season that sees the crew of the Rocinante pursue independent adventures, but that doesn't make their stories any less potent. In fact, the season deepens the characters fans know and love while presenting an overarching story that feels relevant to our current times.
In an exclusive interview, CBR spoke with executive producers and co-writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who also wrote the book series the TV show is based on, as well as executive producer and showrunner Naren Shankar. They discussed the theme of the characters' stories in Season 5, how history inspires the narrative and the upcoming sixth season, which will be the series' last.
CBR: What was it like breaking Season 5 of The Expanse?
Ty Franck: Our process is the same for every season. It starts out with Naren and Daniel and I having a conversation about what the season will be like. And that happens many months before we actually start working in the writers room, so it has a lot of time to sort of gestate and germinate. And then we start the writers room, and Naren brings this document in based on that conversation we had months before, and then we just start breaking the season out from there. And this season is very close to the books, so we had a pretty good roadmap for what we were going to wind up doing. And this process has been working for us for five years now, so it's the one we just keep using over and over.
Naren Shankar: I think this season had the most fidelity to the book, I think, of all of them. The only significant change was at the outset, I thought it would be [best] -- just from the standpoint of a 10-episode season -- to start everybody apart, so everybody is in motion. Amos is heading to Earth, Alex is heading to Mars. The only parting that you see is Holden and Naomi, so at the end of it, Holden is alone. So […] the opening episode set the tone because the whole path is how do these people get back to their family, the people that they care about? And so that let the whole season tell that story. That was really the only significant change [from the books], I think.
Naren, you’ve said Season 5 is like a reckoning, it’s about reaping what you sow. Can you expand on that a little bit?
Shankar: Sure. Every character, every storyline in some fashion or another, is about that, is confronting the things that you've done in your past, dealing with the ghosts of the past. And like for Avasarala, what she's dealing with in a large sense, is the tone that she set as a leader that's created the hostility between the inner planets and the Belt. For Naomi, it's a personal thing about revisiting a son she effectively abandoned, however justified that abandonment might have been, and a person that she was once in love with who's now become something quite awful. Drummer dealing with who she is in the Belt, the choices that she's made, the family that she's with now and what she wants. Every story is that. And then obviously Amos going back and confronting his past directly in Baltimore.
Season 5 also has historical parallels. Can speak a little to how that impacted this particular season?
Daniel Abraham: Well, we've been using history, we've been mining history in the project since the first book. It's always been our contention that the future is going to be something that grows organically out of the past. It's going to look a lot like the past, the way that the present looks a lot like the past. And there's a lot of precedent for the rise of demagogues. There's a lot of precedent for the rage of exploited peoples. There is a lot of precedent for the kinds of issues that we're playing out on a large scale in the season. And there's a lot of precedent for the individual kinds of stories that we're seeing people going through within that. And so that's kind of the balance that we're building. We're taking those things that happened before and doing something that rhymes with them. Something that brings up the same issues that they've been seeing since Nebuchadnezzar.
It's really fascinating, given the parallels with what's going on right now in our own political history.
Abraham: We have a lot of people who think this is pointed at our present moment and forget that we came up with Marco Inaros before it was obvious who Marco Inaros was going to be compared to in American politics. We came first, that guy came later. And that's something that happens when you're really drawing from history because so much of this is stuff that happens over and over and over.
We're going through the pandemic right now, and I'm looking at: there were anti-maskers in 1918, there were people getting together at parties during the Black Death. We don't change, the organism just doesn't change. We just keep doing the same things over and over. And so it's really easy to look prescient if you just crib from the past.
It's been announced, unfortunately, that Season 6 is going to be the last one.
Franck: I don't like the word unfortunately. It's been announced, fortunately, that we're getting a Season 6.
Fair enough! That is a good thing. But why did you feel like next season is the right time to end the show?
Franck: Well, you'd have to ask Amazon. But for us, we've always had a version of this that can end after Season 6 and feel satisfying, so that's not a huge issue for us. The mechanism by which those decisions are made is an Amazon internal mechanism, it's not something we're privy to. But we're happy that they gave us a sixth season because now we can do the ending we've been planning for three seasons.
Shankar: And there's a natural ending in Book 6, and that's really where we're moving towards. And also, in this day and age, it's a miracle for a show to get six seasons. I mean, the way streamers are going, things are getting canceled one, two seasons into things. We're going to be able to tell the story. It's going to feel like a satisfying way [to end] that also leaves the door open for more.
Would you ever consider spinoffs?
Franck: Well, we’ve got three more books. We've got a bunch of stuff.
So are you doing the ending you always had planned based on Book 6, or would this be based on the ending we haven't seen in Book 9, which has yet to be published?
Franck: No, we’re not going to pack Book 7, 8, 9 into a single season. [Laughs] We're not going to do that.
Abraham: It's ambitious. It's ambitious, but probably not a good idea.
Are there specific hopes you have as we head towards the end of the series?
Franck: I hope we do a good job with Season 6, and we don't f*ck it up.
Shankar: Yeah. That's the big one.
Abraham: I think we've been doing this long enough that we have a team that's really good with each other and that's really good with the project. And I'm looking forward to sticking the landing. That's what it comes to.
Shankar: The core team’s been together since the beginning.
Franck: And it is a really fantastically talented team. I really enjoy feeling like the weak link. Because I almost never feel like that. With any other group of people I never feel like the weak link. I really enjoy the fact that with this group, I kind of feel like the weak link. It's nice to know I'm with a group that smart.
Abraham: Yeah, you never want to be the smartest guy in the room. If you're the smartest guy in the room, you're in the wrong room.
An adaptation 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. New episodes of Season 5 premiere Wednesdays on Amazon Prime Video.