The Expanse season 5 finished shooting before the coronavirus shutdowns

At the moment, Hollywood is dealing with a massive wave of production shutdowns thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, it being unsafe to work on a crowded set right now with the disease still spreading. Show after show has had to shut down production in the middle of shooting: The Witcher, The Wheel of Time, Supernatural, etc. It has some TV fans spooked — we’re still seeing new stuff roll out, because some shows were already shot and edited and everything before the shutdowns started, but others could be delayed for a while.

And then there are the shows in between, like Amazon’s The Expanse. This twisty sci-fi epic is set in the distant (but not too distant) future, when human beings have colonized both Mars and the asteroid belt. With people thus spread out across the solar system, new cultural fault lines form between “Earthers,” Martians and “Belters.” The show details these conflicts with a story that’s as much Game of Thrones as it is Star Trek. It’s a great watch.

The Expanse premiered its fourth season on Amazon late last year (the first three seasons ran on SyFy before the show was cancelled and revived by Amazon) to rave reviews. We know that Amazon has been shooting a fifth season, but was this one of the shows that completed production before it shutdown, or was there still more to go?

Now that’s gonna be a good-looking shot.

Anyway, star Shohreh Aghdashloo, who plays the hard-nosed Earther diplomat Chrisjen Avasarala, recently confirmed on Twitter that shooting on the fifth season did indeed wrap, and that the cast members are now safely sheltering in place:

Now, just because The Expanse season 5 has been shot doesn’t necessarily mean that the episodes are ready to air. This is probably more like the situation currently bedeviling The Walking Dead, where the cast and crew shot the season 10 finale, but they can’t air it yet because crew members can’t get into work to implement all the special effects and such. Lucifer on Netflix sounds like it’s in a similar position. The Expanse involves a lot of special effects — would that the show could actually shoot in the asteroid belt — so I imagine there are lots of finishing touches to add before the new episodes are ready for us to see them.

So when will The Expanse season 5 air? Basically, not as soon as it would have before the pandemic hit, but earlier than had shooting not already wrapped. In the meantime, we can always binge the series over again:

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