AKA: Knight in Rusting Armour
An entire week since I did a proper review. That’s very naughty of me. That’s very naughty! As punishment, I shall tear myself away from Stellaris and write another. Please forgive me, dear readers!
OVERVIEW
Media type: TV show
Streaming service: Amazon Prime (paid)
Genre: Sci-fi, Drama, Mystery, Thriller
Content warnings: Gore, body horror, cosmic horror, violence, sex scenes, coarse language
SUMMARY
Aboard the Canterbury, Ade explains the matchstick in coffee trick. She lists off the benefits before handing it to Jim. Jim hates it. But, apparently it’s an acquired taste. They exchange names, and Ade says her very mysterious thing again…
We return to reality, and Alex trying to get Jim’s attention. There’s a debris field coming up, and those are serious business. The next couple of minutes, weird audio stuff aside, is a delightfully tense piece of cinema. The Knight, a tiny shuttle, turns to pass through the debris field, presumably attempting to match velocity – which isn’t going to happen in this glorified tin can. The Scopuli, in the background, is utterly shredded. One of the Knight‘s drive cones takes a bad knock, leaving the already-underpowered shutte with no chance to avoid further damage, as well as breaching the airlock, starting a decompression that’s not instantaneous but still threatens to eat all the air in the little can very quickly. Fires sprout, sparks fly, respite only coming from the tumult as Alex announces that they’re through.
Jim almost immediately asks if the shuttle still has visual sensor capability. It does, fortunately, so he orders Alex to follow the Mysterious Shape. That’s not going to happen in their little tin can, with minimal atmo and even more minimal thrust capacity, but Naomi tries to talk some sense into him – the only thing that happens if they follow the strange stealth frigate is their deaths. Basically everybody’s against this wild plan, but Jim insists, to the point of throwing poor Alex out of his chair. Only Naomi initiating an override on the engines prevents him from doing something very stupid. He still makes a move at Naomi, only barely defused when Alex implores the group to take a moment to calm down. In the background, a crushed can floats in microgravity…
Unlike the utter delight of the title sequence in the pilot, we are given a very brief “THE EXPANSE”, before we cut to Ceres. Miller’s showering, when the computer rather rudely interrupts, accusing him of overspending his water ration. What a terrible world to live in, where one must even be careful with how long they shower for, lest they overextend available resources. What a terrible world, indeed…
Irritated and not at all clean, he steps out of his apartment and onto the main concourse, where a random man on the street shares his theory with Miller – the Inners are holding back Ceres’ vital water supply, to weaken it for a full takeover. Miller proceeds to Julie Mao’s apartment, where he starts his investigation in earnest. A slick little voice-changing tool on his space cellphone allows him full access, including Julie’s files – in particular, her last exchange with her father, Jules-Pierre Mao. Jules continues to completely misunderstand his daughter, and Julie responds by roasting him so hard that he probably felt the heat from the screen. Whatever the case may be, it’s all data to Miller.
Rooting through her closet, we discover a racing uniform for the “Razorback“, presumably some kind of racing ship. He may have continued his investigation, but for a little fact: nobody’s been in here for days. Weeks, even. Nobody’s been using the water. He avails himself to the unused ration by finishing his shower in a sink.
Earth! The UN! A man! A man who knows Chrisjen quite well, apparently, by the way he directly approaches her for questioning – but not well enough to know that she would definitely torture a guy. Chrisjen skips the denial and goes straight to justification, but Errinwright’s having none of it, telling her to show some basic human decency and put her Belter suspect in a water tank so he can actually breathe.
She does so, and immediately engages in that nasty little profiling habit. This guy’s not an OPA member, he’s just a citizen of the Belt. Carrying extremely restricted stealth materials. Yeah, mate, pull the other one. The entanked Belter calls out her claims of “threatening the power balance of the system” – either way, his people are getting screwed, so why should he care about that balance? I bet a lot of folks in so-called “third world countries” would love to say that to the Vice President of the US today. Chrisjen talks more shit about the OPA, claiming they haven’t earned legitimacy through anything other than violence (man, the parallels are going hard today), but our Belter friend calls her on her shit – Earth has created an underclass, so why shouldn’t such a thing go unanswered? It’s clear that we aren’t getting any information from him, though, as a thinly veiled threat does nothing.
Back aboard the Knight, Naomi sums up the situation: bad. No radio, four hours of oxygen, and enough reaction mass to get them a third of the way to Ganymede. They’re basically screwed. Holden tells Naomi to see if she can throw together a replacement control board for the radio, while he heads outside to check on the transmitter, doubtlessly thrashed in the debris field – except as Alex points out, the airlock is fried. Ain’t no way that thing’s opening again. Jim, the madman that he is, suggests venting the ship, to the horror of everybody involved. To be fair, when you have four hours of breathable air left, you don’t want to flush half of it out the door. Shed really doesn’t like this suggestion, falling into a panic attack over it, but Jim manages to calm him down.
Outside, things are not good. The antenna array looks like it’d do more good as weird cutlery at this point. Amos responds to Jim’s tempting of fate with “it can always be worse”. It is worse, the damaged array emitting a little crackle…
Miller and his partner, Havelock, are in the greenest space on Ceres – the UN-appointed governor’s office. The governor’s assistant is not happy about Miller apparently being late, but gets down to business soon after – dead patches have been appearing in the Rich Section. He blames a local gang – evidently they don’t respect the role of the green spaces in the station’s life support, also engaging in a little casual profiling. Havelock calls him out for hogging the nice part to himself and his rich Earther friends, to which he responds by handing him a little cactus! Now he can make his own view. Miller points out that he’s probably telling Havelock to shove it up his ass.
Things are still not looking great on the Knight, Jim getting elbow-deep into the control boards and wiring for the transceiver. He releases a wrench, which goes flying away. Oops. Looking to relieve some stress, he tries to engage in conversation with Amos. Amos is very confused by this, revealing his motivation for doing things in the process: “Naomi told me to”. Inside, Alex is not doing particularly well either – moving slowly and unsteadily, distractable, not really listening until Naomi all but shouts at him. He claims he’s fine, but any experienced spacer can tell something’s up.
Holden asks about Amos’ relationship with Naomi, another mistake. Amos makes the claim that he’s not very smart – while he’s a good mechanic, he can’t answer moral questions such as “why you shouldn’t kill people”. Personally, I think he’s selling himself way short here – not only does he have great mechanic skills, he also recognises his inablity to judge morality in a situation, and seeks out an advisor to compensate.
Alex really isn’t doing well, starting to get delirious, nearly sending the Knight for Ganymede – uselessly. Shed almost immediately identifies the symptoms of hypoxia. The medic, unable to answer a medical question, flounders until Naomi tells him to put on his big boy shorts. With no rebreather spare, he hooks up his rebreather to Alex, in a sort of buddy-breathing system. Holden insists that nobody dies today, but Naomi gives him a good telling off – without that radio, everybody dies today. Unfortunately, it looks like the damn thing just doesn’t want to cooperate, and now both Shed and Alex are running out of air. Annoyed, he engages in some percussive maintenance, giving the damned thing a stern kicking. This works! Holden and Amos rush back in, the damaged airlock is resealed, and oxygen floods back in, just in the nick of time for our buddy-breathers. As soon as it’s safe, Holden engages in mouth-to-mouth on Shed, desperately tring to bring him back from the brink… and as these things always go in TV, he comes back only after Holden stops, in a blatant violation of how CPR bloody works. Alex is grateful for Shed’s intervention, and the two hug it out.
As a fun fact, I’ve done first aid courses, and one of my instructors told me about the time he broke a dude’s rib performing CPR on them. Wouldn’t be surprised if that happened here.
On Earth, Chrisjen discusses her Belter with Errinwright – she thinks he needs to go to Luna, but Errinwright is sure that the team here will “break him”. So much for publicly disavowing torture, huh? Chrisjen shares a terrible portent of this smuggler being part of some wider OPA plot, to Errinwright’s mild annoyance. She floats the possibility of the OPA being in bed with Mars, but Errinwright immediately shoots it down – a cold war is a bloodless war, according to him. I’m sure Vietnam and Korea would have something to say about that. Chrisjen thinks there’s something to her idea, and so directs Errinwright to put every Martian weapons lab under intense scrutiny. Apparently somebody who must get the last word in or else she’ll literally die, she states definitively that this seeming Martian-Belter cooperation marks the end of the UN-Mars cold war.
Despite their valiant efforts in repairing the transmitter, the Knight‘s radio signal is too weak to get a signal out to anybody. With the antenna cut from the power grid, there’s no hope left. Holden suggests rigging some kind of amplifier, which is enough to spur Naomi into action, ordering everybody to take apart anything that might possibly contain some kind of battery, evidenly hoping to create the mother of all jury-rigged power cells.
Shed points out that, even if the distress call gets out, everybody’s going to assume they’re pirates. Alex hopes that somebody like Ade is out there listening. Shed disagrees, and Jim gives him a mild admonishment – annoying Naomi, gives everybody a telling off, before giving Jim a special telling off: unburden yourself when we’re not all about to die, don’t bring your problems into it!
In the guts of Ceres, Miller and Havelock are searching for the pipe being siphoned by the local gangs. They follow it to a warehouse deep in Ceres, where an amateur greywater gang siphons off a few drips of aqua nasty. This little pain in the ass claims that it’s good (it almost certainly is not, you need to do a lot of filtration to make that properly potable), just in time for Star Helix to bust in. Most of them scatter, but this one little shit can’t get out, tipping a barrel of perfectly good water onto Miller trying to shake off the pursuit. Miller picks himself up with gusto and goes immediately for him, zip-tying him after a half-baked suicide attempt involving hitting his head against the wall, lecturing him on how to properly steal water, and what the Greigas would do to him if they caught him on their turf – except, apparently, the Greigas are gone. Just up and left.
Trying to figure out what to do with this little punk, he pulls a knife, at Havelock’s frustration… only for Miller to cut the kid’s zip tie and set him running, with a warning: “stay away from the owkwa!” He’s going to regret letting him free in a couple of seasons. Havelock expresses surprise, to which Miller replies with a rude gesture. That, he saw coming.
Chrisjen takes a call from a rando somewhere in the UN hierarchy, with annoying news – the Belter she sent to Luna managed to kill himself on the shuttle up, by not drinking his milk or something. To be fair, I wouldn’t want a cocktail of blood thinners and fucking meth running through me either. This was a statement, though: we tried to use Earth’s gravity to hurt him, and he turned around and said “you wanna hurt me with Earth’s gravity, ke? Watch dis!”
Aboard the Knight, Naomi examines the distress beacon pulled from the Scopuli, identifying it as high-end military hardware – not pirate garbage. Alex thinks this is nonsense, but Holden things it’s allsense – the Mysterious Object wasn’t hiding behind an asteroid, it came from nowhere, like sneaky bloody Romulans. Only Mars can do that. Alex questions why the MCRN would blow up a civilian freighter in plain sight, and Holden gives an answer to make the anarchist in me proud: “because they can”. Alex rejects this out of hand, while Shed wonders just what tangled web they’ve stumbled into. Amos is having none of it though, preferring to focus on the immediate problem of not dying. And, to that end, the transmitter is fixed, sending a good signal!
Miller visits the Ceres dockyards, investigating the lead he found in Julie’s apartment: Razorback. No such ship exists in in these docks, leading Miller to ask if there’s some kinda special hangar for pleasure yachts and other such needless expenses. There isn’t one. The dockman does, however, recognise Julie Mao, relaying a story of her smashing a guy for trying to feel her up. Apparently she shipped out a couple of weeks ago, aboard a vessel called the Scopuli. Have we heard of that ship before?
The Knight‘s crew sits in their shuttle, laying back and waiting for rescue. Surely enough, it comes – their beacon is acknowledged, and they’re given a rendezvous vector, about 80,000 kilometres away. This is about as far away from them as a geosynchronous satellite is away from the Earth, raising about every alarm bell in my head. And, sure enough, the ship is identified… as Martian.
Not just any Martian ship, either: the Donnager, one of their biggest, baddest, most modern battleships – and the flagship of the MCRN, to boot. Everyone agrees that this is very bad news.
Back on Ceres, we follow Havelock as he visits the brothel where the murder happened in the first episode, the prostitute we met in the first episode, and he’s giving her… a cactus? Weird courting ritual, but okay.
Miller, meanwhile, pours himself a stiff drink as he goes through Julie’s dating profile (creep), until he finds a particularly odd one, which Julie apparently accepted.
Miller disapproves. Octavia wanders in, questioning his progress, which has been little. As soon as Julie went aboard the Scopuli, it went dark – a week of vanishing ships, with the Scopuli and then the Canterbury. Octavia points out what looks like a birthmark on Julie, but her parents surely would have had that fixed before she was even a person. No, it’s a scar, a symbol of her defiance of her father’s will. Octavia is mildly creeped out by this insight.
Back aboard the Knight, Holden lays out the situation: it’s obvious that Mars destroyed the Cant. The Knight‘s motley crew are the only ones that know. If they board the Donnager, they’ll only be leaving in body bags. Nobody disagrees, and Holden talks to a shady insurance broker – space internet. He begins a message that will destabilise the system, squarely placing the blame for the Cant on Mars. Everybody else is not happy with this, demonstrated best by Amos, who puts a gun to Holden’s head. This man is a brave, brave idiot, and I don’t blame Amos one bit for wanting him shot, just so he doesn’t have to deal with six whole seasons of Holden’s bullshit.
We end the episode with a perfect bad guy introduction: a monolithic ship coming out of nowhere to a heavy bass industrial beat, an arm reaching out and grabbing the shuttle, drawing it into a hangar bay bathed in red. Martian forces cut through the bulkhead and immediately take aim, laser pointers illuminated by the smoke from the welding torches. They are given a message: “you are prisoners of the Mars Congressional Republic. Move and you die.”
End episode.
DEE’S THOUGHTS
Wow, another hell of a ride. Right from the start, we’re treated to some slick space action, presented not by another ship, but by the remains of one – as it turns out, dead spaceships don’t stop being a threat! Throughout the episode, the nature of space in this show is made clear, and it is not a friendly thing. We’re also given some insights on the political system at work on Earth – while it maintains a front of disliking torture, they still maintain blacksites with menacing interrogation techs.
Some more information about the Martians is also doled out – given their access to stealth technology, it’s implied that they’re rather technologically advanced, and Holden’s insistence that the Martians would definitely dust a civilian freighter for shits and giggles says that they enjoy throwing their weight around – a militaristic nation, maybe. Combined with their ominous intro, they’re definitely the bad guys, here.
I loved this episode, in case you can’t tell. Overall, I think I’d give it… one of the coolest spaceships I’ve ever seen in sci-fi out of ten.
