Review: The Expanse – Strange Dogs s06e01

The excellent series The Expanse returns once again to Amazon Prime for its final, and truncated sixth season. This first episode, Strange Dogs, works as a healthy recap and summary of the state of play for all the main characters. *Warning! Spoilers Ahead!*

While there are some serious developments that occur during this episode, essentially, we get to see where everyone is, and their current situation as regards to the war.  Marco (Keon Alexander) continues his barrage against Earth sending asteroids on a regular basis to impact on the surface, causing mass destruction, almost like a nuclear winter. Earth for its part continually seems to be spending its time fending off these attacks and not making any headway in an offensive manner. This frustrates Chrisjen (Shohreh Aghdashloo) who as Secretary-General wants to be more proactive. Alongside her Bobbie (Frankie Adams) equally finds her role stifling and more than a little dull.

The Rocinante seems to be spending its time tooling around space getting into scraps with the Free Navy, while at the same time coming to terms with Alex’s (Cas Anvar) death. The presence of Clarissa (Nadine Nicole) on the ship has yet to become a smooth experience and there is still a lot of tension. Naomi (Dominique Tipper) is also struggling after her experiences from last season and there is clearly psychological damage that she has yet to address.

What’s great about The Expanse is that they do not shy away from any of this and they almost revel in each of the characters trying to work through their conflicts. Some of this is subtle and some of it occurs more as broad strokes but it is always sensitively and cleverly handled. Most of the ships operate like families and dysfunctional ones at that.   You can see for instance the difficulties for Drummer (Cara Gee) with underperforming crew members, and for Marcos with a conflicted son acting out, causing them no end of concern.

Alongside the elements that are essentially recapping or re-establishing the show, we do get the beginnings of a new mystery with Holden (Steven Strait) intrigued by what looks like a very strange transit through the ring.  It definitely does look strange and this tallies in with the opening scene where we see a young girl on Laconia, a planet that colonists have moved to through the ring and somehow you know this is all going to tie up together. We can expect that it will no doubt have something to do with Mars new acquisition of the protomolecule and some nefarious plot.

What they do really well in this episode is show how fallible each of the characters is and how the strains of recent events have hit them all badly. Holden for instance is reckless at times and takes unusual chances, being more gung-ho than usual. Allied to Naomi’s uncertainty and they’re definitely a couple that needs to find a new equilibrium between them. With some of the battles won Marcos is also showing a different side and relaxing a little, maybe too much, while he establishes Ceres as his new capital and tries to plot his next move. Alongside him the excellent Kathleen Robertson appears as Rosenfeld, who looks set to be a fantastic addition to the cast. At the very least it looks like she will be one character who isn’t afraid to try and burst the bubble of Marcos pompous attitude.

Strange dogs for all its relatively gentle entry to the season works exceptionally well getting things going and delivering the high standards were used to. Sadly, this season is only six episodes long so they need to use every minute affectively, but there are definitely no complaints so far.