The Expanse is getting a sixth and final season

So good news/bad news.

There will be a sixth season of the series, presumably covering the events in Babylon’s Ashes. However, this will end the TV series (the books have three more in the series).

It’s sad, but at least they have a set stopping point, rather than getting cut off mid-story. Book six has a clean(ish) stopping point (the books are basically three arcs tied together in nine books).

Honestly, I was wondering how they were going to handle the time jump at the start of Persepolis Rising. Maybe in 20 years we’ll get three more seasons of the show.

8 replies on “The Expanse is getting a sixth and final season”

  1. I gotta say I like when shows have definitive endings and can wrap things up nicely.

    However, to finish out I’m gonna have to get the final three books. Oh, well.

    • The final book is due out next year, and (like most books) there’s a LOT more depth to them than the TV show, even though the show has mostly stuck to the plot in the books and even covered some of the novellas/short stories. I’d definitely recommend looking out for a complete box set – probably including the novellas and other short stories as well – if you’ve not already got any though.

      • Jefferson Mays narrates the audiobooks and does a masterful job at it. The authors like him so much, a ship is named after him in the TV series. I swear they used his narration as a baseline for the Belter’s patois.

  2. I always figured that The Expanse would end in a “and events continue” manner. Which is to say that however settled the major season plots end up, or multiseason arcs as the case may be, there will still be a large amount of stuff left unresolved. That is, no nice neat bow.

    It is nice that they know they need to wrap things up, though.

    • My guess is pretty similar. The “Ultimate Big Bad” put back in the box, although not necessarily defeated outright, with the human survivors then looking out over all the expanse they have inherited and you can already see the signs that they are going to end up making a complete mess of it, no matter how well intentioned their leaders might be.

      For a TV series though, I think the audience is somewhat different and, while you can definitely have an open-ended series conclusion, you definitely can’t keep fans happy if you stop on a typical end-of-season cliffhanger. If they’re stopping at Book/Season 6, then my guess is that they are going to drop the live alien threat angle and Laconia arcs entirely and just focus on defeating current Big Bag, Marcos then wrap there. That works for me.

      • Yeah. That’s why it’s nice they know it’s ending so they don’t end up adding in the setup for the next big plot as a major component of the story line.

        It really irks me when a show gets cancelled on one of those cliffhangers. Or, worse, gets unrenewed after one of those cliffhangers.

        I actually wonder if stopping after season 6 has a largely creative aspect to it. If the source material (which I haven’t read) has a reasonable stopping point there, it might make sense to do that and avoid potential complications related to contract renewals, Amazon sticking with it, etc.

        • Yep, irks me too, so it’s good to see when studios recognise that and give show runners enough of a heads up to deal with it. As to the reason, it could be creative, but I suspect it’s also financial, but nothing to do with Cas Anvar being dropped from season six has anything to do with it as that’ll be a done deal by then. The combination of the time jump. which *could* be tackled by aging the characters with make up, etc., and what would likely be some very FX heavy seasons, even by Expanse’s standards, would probably make production costs take a significant jump.

          It’s also a good place to wrap up. In the books there are three main arcs left at this point; Marcos, which we’re already into on the show, Duarte/Laconia which hasn’t really got started yet unless you have read the books and know what to look for, and the mystery of whatever wiped out Ring Builders, which has only been alluded to on the show. Use the remaining two seasons to wrap up Marcos, don’t even touch on Duarte/Laconia, and you’d have a pretty good finishing point at the conclusion. The mystery and implicit threat of whatever killed the Ring Builders could potentially be turned into a message about looking before you leap, harking right back to the initial experimentation with the Protomolecule, or could be glossed over entirely for a happier a “brave new world” type conclusion, amongst other options.

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