Better casting choices would've certainly helped.

The acting of several lead actors is really bad. Avasarala (the "undersecretary"), Bobbie (the "marine"), Jim Holden - they all portray characters in a way that is utterly unconvincing. Every scene with Avasarala is a scene that can't end quick enough. She looks like a bad impostor. Bobbie is miscast so severely it's on par with the "bitchy teenager" Anakin from Ep2 and Ep3. Holden's facial expression for determination is that of a man about to cry. In fact, he looks like his dog just died in most of the scenes.

The story and the universe is excellent, the rest of the cast is really good, but it's not enough to balance it all out.

> Holden's facial expression for determination is that of a man about to cry. In fact, he looks like his dog just died in most of the scenes.

Hahahaha, this is too true. Bobbie is also terrible. But Avasarala I thought was really well cast.

But in general it felt like we got straight-to-dvd type D-level actors (think about crappy movies like The Human Race) in a B+ level setting (writing, CGI, set design etc). I was really confused at first as to whether this was a serious series with a relatively big budget for science fiction, or something that evolved out of a college film project.

Never really knew what to think. Like, I enjoyed Miller as a character. But I also cringe everytime I see his fedora. It feels like they do a lot of the hard things right, but somehow go out of their way to mess up some of the easy things.

I will agree about Bobby but Avasarala is by far one of the best characters. The best casting decision obviously is Thomas Jane's character.

She looks like she's in a Bollywood movie. Over the top cocky confidence that's not really justified by anything that she is conveying through acting.

Jane - yes, agreed. Excellent choice. Alex, Amos, Naomi are all good too.

I've only partially watched the series so far, but I have read the books. It's a key point of Avarasala's character that she is pretty competent (and lacking patience) as shes basically portrayed as the one running the show on Earth. That said, without the monologues and the comparison to the public power in the book, I can see how that goes way too far into arrogance.

I also found the casting of the show underwhelming. The sci-fi is terrific, but the casting made it hard to get into. The storytelling I found good enough. I bet it's hard to get a cast together that can work well enough in all those close quarters scenes with lots of choices

They did the same to Firefly and Farscape, cancled them too soon before they could develop the characters more and close up loose ends.

I like The Expanse and I will miss it.

I've been meaning to write my own scifi books to be turned into movies.

The Expanse was no Star Trek or Star Wars but it had a realistic feel to it.

It's one of the only space based sci-fi shows with mostly realistic physics.

Only at the beginning. As soon as the protomolecule shows up, all the weird stuff comes back. Like, stargates, force fields, telepathy...

Well, for something extraterrestrial that has been sent to our system billions of years ago by an advanced civilization that cannot really be understood by humans, I guess artistic license is okay. The human stuff still works with mostly realistic physics (with the Epstein drive the main exception, which is needed to actually enable the world).

And even with the epstein drive they still show acceleration and deceleration changing at the mid point of the journey. They don't have inertial dumpers like star trek invented to work around the issue.

What do you mean? It's not like the ships "stop" when the drive is turned off.

It's implied they generate gravity on the ships by burning the engines* and the engines seem to burn all the time, so you can assume for half of every trip they are accelerating towards destination and the other half they are decelerating again.

Orbital mechanics seems to only apply when convenient, e.g. an orbital mirror around a moon is damaged and "falls" straight down. I don't think that is accurate, even assuming the loss of atation-keeping thrust.

* Not real gravity, but you can't tell the difference between gravity and acceleration. And they also account for high-G manoveurs being difficult/deadly for humans.

Ah, I thought he was giving an argument why the Epstein drive was unrealistic, since his tone was agreeing with the parent.

Protomolecule stuff, though a key to about 1/3 of the plot points, is pretty much the only "out there" stuff in the show. So sure, it seems to break a few laws of physics, but the whole story is about humans using realistic technology confronted with the unknown and the impossible.

Beyond that, the books are pretty hard. The only one physics-bending technology used by humans is the Epstein drive, and as a drive it doesn't really violate any laws of physics (it's a fusion drive) - the unrealistic part is its absurdly good fuel efficiency.

And even that was self-aware as in they did background scenes on its development (eg not just arm wavey)

Force fields are plausible, but FTL (including telepathy and stargates) are what ruins it. However, it's one big exception that almost all space-based sci-fi allows.

You can try requesting Netflix have them on for season 4 https://help.netflix.com/en/titlerequest

netflix have ruled themselves out already: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/comments/8iyzrs/amazon_i...

Amazon has the rights Netflix would want, and Netflix isn't going to subsidize a property that is a competitive advantage for Amazon in the key market (and, conversely, Amazon would rather let the property die than let Netflix have the streaming rights.) So, if SyFy isn't going to carry the load, it's probably either Amazon taking over or it dies.

I think the problem with that is that Amazon already has the US streaming SVOD rights, which Netflix would also need.

That IMO makes Amazon the more likely party to purchase the US rights that Syfy had.

Bit of a chance there they might, considering they have the rights to it in at least Australia

See how that turned out for the Browncoats. Worst case scenario, at least there's awesome source material that you can read :)

Firefly was 2002 / 2003, which was a bit too early for the online production companies.

Netflix introduced streaming in 2007, and started content production in 2012.

Something like Jericho or Firefly being cancelled today is much more likely to get picked up.

Spam Amazon. They seem to be the only major player who still could pick it up, given that Netflix apparently ruled itself out.

Hell, spam Bezos himself. They're cancelling the show that literally explores the world Bezos wants to create.