Expanse showrunner Naren Shankar revealed new details about the show's upcoming fifth season, including that the plot was inspired by elements from books five and six in the James S.A Corey book series.
"You know how it's worked over the years. It's like certain story lines get pulled forward, other stuff gets pushed back sometimes," Shankar told Entertainment Weekly. "Character elements get combined into other stuff. There's definitely some elements of book 6 in this season, I would say, but it's largely drawn from book 5."
The fifth book, Nemesis Games, found the Rocinante crew struggling to survive while ships around them started disappearing without a trace and private armies were being secretly formed. Babylon's Ashes, the sixth installment in the series, picked up after a group of Belters in black-market military ships had crippled Earth and begun a campaign of violence among the outer planets.
Shankar went on to explain that the overarching theme of Season 5 is "sins of the past" and "connecting all of the things that we have done in our lives to the moment of the present that we are in."
"To one extent or another, that's every single story line," Shankar continued. "Whether it is Naomi personally confronting the fact that she had a son with this very charismatic, and now quite violent, revolutionary-type leader. Whether it's Amos connecting to his past, or going back to Earth for reasons that we're not quite sure of. Whether it's Holden's past with unleashing the protomolecule. Whether it is the past geopolitical history of the Belt, and its relationship with the inner planets, which we see through Avasarala."
Season 4 of The Expanse ended with a shot of Belter villain Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander) sending cloaked asteroids hurling toward Earth. According to the plot description, "Season 5 of the series picks up as multitudes of humans leave the solar system in search of new homes and vast fortunes on the earth-like worlds beyond the alien Ring, and a heavy price for centuries of exploitation of the Belt finally comes due and a reckoning is at hand.
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. Season 5 premieres Dec. 16 on Amazon Prime Video.
Source: EW