On Expanse season 5
You know, that post I made about season 3 (and especially the comment discussion) is helping me figure out why I'm having the issues I'm having with season 5.
As of writing this, I haven't seen the final episode of the season yet, so it obviously could change things. Okay, I've seen the latest episode now!
But the discussion over there made me think about how everything I liked about season three - the teamwork, the rewarding of kindness over selfishness, the search for nonviolent solutions - is pretty much the opposite of what season 5 has been.
I hated Drummer's arc this season from the start. I like that she's heading out to self-actualize away from the powerful men that she's shaped her life around, but I absolutely hate that where her self-actualization took her was piracy. After she spent most of season four being an agent of positive change, trying to enforce peace between Belters and Inners, I fiercely hate that her arc ended up taking her to preying on Inners, robbing and killing them instead.
I feel as if this is at least partly because she's not a book character so the show has been dropping her into other characters' plotlines, which imho worked GREAT in season three, but in season five they needed her to be a space pirate and essentially remapped her character to get it to work. I think I could deal with it better if it was framed on the show as a kind of tragedy or at least a symptom of desperation - with the Belt in the grip of corporations and strongmen, the only way to have an independent existence without being under someone else's thumb is piracy. That's tragic! But on the show it's framed as her happy ending and just ... my do-not-want for that is A LOT.
But it hadn't really occurred to me until writing out my thoughts on season three that it's not just Drummer's storyline and it's not just being disappointed in this season after the vividness and fun of the spacegate/alien planet arcs in past seasons and it's not even watching week to week in realtime that's dragging my enjoyment down. It's that this season is a repudiation of season three's theme of winning through mercy and kindness. Because everything that's happening right now goes back to Drummer letting Marco go in season four. Essentially the show has gone from an entire season singing the praises of victory through nonviolence, to setting up a situation in which mercy is framed as weakness and failure; Drummer has gone from someone who uses her strength to protect others to someone who preys on the weak; and the entire season has been framed around a situation that can only end in Marco's death because we've already seen where not killing him gets us.
Like I was talking about in the comments over there, too, with Marco the show has introduced a new flavor of evil, with a guy who manipulates and gaslights people close to him, and I'm finding that aspect of it deeply unpleasant to watch. It's not like the show has never had unpleasantness, awfulness, and evil before; it's not that Marco is fundamentally worse than people like Errinwright or Mao or Murtry (or several of the protagonists for that matter). (Edit: See below.) But I'm finding him really unpleasant to watch, and I haven't enjoyed his effect on the plotlines around him either.
So basically I am just crossing my fingers that the damn Marco plotline wraps up this season and we can move on to something else that is less Everything I Don't Want.
Edit: About Marco not being worse than people like Murtry or Errinwright ... he's not, but he's a human villain on a scale we haven't had before. Previously, the show has been very much about power in aggregate and people embedded in power structures, doing good or evil according to their nature and ambitions. But it hasn't been about Big Man evil, Lone Villain evil. It's been more about power structures in general, and people pushing back against them or leaning into them according to their natures.
Murtry is a company cop, a small-time thug who turns into a violent dictator when he's put in a position where all his worst urges can come out, isolated on an alien planet with a bunch of survivors he's responsible for, and no one to stop him. Errinwright wanted power and climbed through Earth's political ranks to get it.
Marco, though ... I think what feels different about Marco is that for maybe the first time in five seasons, the show has set up a situation that is clearly about Overcoming Evil By Killing This Guy, which is way more simplistic, typical space opera plotting than the show's moral conflicts in the past. Even with someone like Murtry, it's thematically appropriate that Holden & co. ended up using the system to beat him rather than giving him the blaze-of-glory death he would have preferred: Murtry's whole thing was that he thought civilization was weakness and the only power lay in physical strength, so it felt more apt to send him to be tried for his crimes rather than letting him have a big apocalyptic fight to the death. (And it's not that the show isn't critical of the justice system - I mean, we've seen Bobbie get trampled by it, and essentially it's the system that created Murtry in the first place. But the whole point was that Murtry's way - strong men trampling anyone who can't fight back - wasn't better.) In Marco's arc, though, all the dominoes have been set up so that killing Marco would solve most of their problems and all signs point to that actually being the solution. It's not different from how other shows handle that kind of thing, but it feels to me like a direct repudiation of the show being critical of that kind of thing in the past.
This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1368800.html with
comments.
As of writing this, I haven't seen the final episode of the season yet, so it obviously could change things. Okay, I've seen the latest episode now!
But the discussion over there made me think about how everything I liked about season three - the teamwork, the rewarding of kindness over selfishness, the search for nonviolent solutions - is pretty much the opposite of what season 5 has been.
I hated Drummer's arc this season from the start. I like that she's heading out to self-actualize away from the powerful men that she's shaped her life around, but I absolutely hate that where her self-actualization took her was piracy. After she spent most of season four being an agent of positive change, trying to enforce peace between Belters and Inners, I fiercely hate that her arc ended up taking her to preying on Inners, robbing and killing them instead.
I feel as if this is at least partly because she's not a book character so the show has been dropping her into other characters' plotlines, which imho worked GREAT in season three, but in season five they needed her to be a space pirate and essentially remapped her character to get it to work. I think I could deal with it better if it was framed on the show as a kind of tragedy or at least a symptom of desperation - with the Belt in the grip of corporations and strongmen, the only way to have an independent existence without being under someone else's thumb is piracy. That's tragic! But on the show it's framed as her happy ending and just ... my do-not-want for that is A LOT.
But it hadn't really occurred to me until writing out my thoughts on season three that it's not just Drummer's storyline and it's not just being disappointed in this season after the vividness and fun of the spacegate/alien planet arcs in past seasons and it's not even watching week to week in realtime that's dragging my enjoyment down. It's that this season is a repudiation of season three's theme of winning through mercy and kindness. Because everything that's happening right now goes back to Drummer letting Marco go in season four. Essentially the show has gone from an entire season singing the praises of victory through nonviolence, to setting up a situation in which mercy is framed as weakness and failure; Drummer has gone from someone who uses her strength to protect others to someone who preys on the weak; and the entire season has been framed around a situation that can only end in Marco's death because we've already seen where not killing him gets us.
Like I was talking about in the comments over there, too, with Marco the show has introduced a new flavor of evil, with a guy who manipulates and gaslights people close to him, and I'm finding that aspect of it deeply unpleasant to watch. It's not like the show has never had unpleasantness, awfulness, and evil before; it's not that Marco is fundamentally worse than people like Errinwright or Mao or Murtry (or several of the protagonists for that matter). (Edit: See below.) But I'm finding him really unpleasant to watch, and I haven't enjoyed his effect on the plotlines around him either.
So basically I am just crossing my fingers that the damn Marco plotline wraps up this season and we can move on to something else that is less Everything I Don't Want.
Edit: About Marco not being worse than people like Murtry or Errinwright ... he's not, but he's a human villain on a scale we haven't had before. Previously, the show has been very much about power in aggregate and people embedded in power structures, doing good or evil according to their nature and ambitions. But it hasn't been about Big Man evil, Lone Villain evil. It's been more about power structures in general, and people pushing back against them or leaning into them according to their natures.
Murtry is a company cop, a small-time thug who turns into a violent dictator when he's put in a position where all his worst urges can come out, isolated on an alien planet with a bunch of survivors he's responsible for, and no one to stop him. Errinwright wanted power and climbed through Earth's political ranks to get it.
Marco, though ... I think what feels different about Marco is that for maybe the first time in five seasons, the show has set up a situation that is clearly about Overcoming Evil By Killing This Guy, which is way more simplistic, typical space opera plotting than the show's moral conflicts in the past. Even with someone like Murtry, it's thematically appropriate that Holden & co. ended up using the system to beat him rather than giving him the blaze-of-glory death he would have preferred: Murtry's whole thing was that he thought civilization was weakness and the only power lay in physical strength, so it felt more apt to send him to be tried for his crimes rather than letting him have a big apocalyptic fight to the death. (And it's not that the show isn't critical of the justice system - I mean, we've seen Bobbie get trampled by it, and essentially it's the system that created Murtry in the first place. But the whole point was that Murtry's way - strong men trampling anyone who can't fight back - wasn't better.) In Marco's arc, though, all the dominoes have been set up so that killing Marco would solve most of their problems and all signs point to that actually being the solution. It's not different from how other shows handle that kind of thing, but it feels to me like a direct repudiation of the show being critical of that kind of thing in the past.
This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1368800.html with
comments.