The Expanse season 6 is a satisfying end that leaves the door open for more

The hour draws near for the sixth and final season of The Expanse on Amazon Prime Video. Soon, we’ll all be back aboard the Rocinante alongside James Holden (Steven Strait), Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper), Amos Burton (Wes Chatham) and the rest of the crew.

We’ve had the chance to check out The Expanse season 6 ahead of time, and boy do we have thoughts. Obviously, as the final season hasn’t even started airing yet, this is a completely spoiler-free first look. That said, there will be spoilers from preceding seasons, so if you’re not caught up on those, go do that. Then come back, so we can geek out on the awesome final run of the show together.

What happens in The Expanse season 6?

The Expanse‘s final season picks up directly after the adrenaline-fueled finale of season five, with the crew of the Rocinante licking their wounds and the solar system at war. Marco Inaros, leader of the Free Navy, succeeded in his brutal plan to bombard Earth with asteroids. Huge swaths of the planet’s population died in the ensuing calamity. Earth and Mars gather their forces to retaliate, while Inaros’ victory inspires the people of the Belt to bolster his own forces. Meanwhile, something ominous brews on a colony world beyond one of the Ring Gates.

As setups go, season 6’s is the strongest since the Ring Gates first opened back at the end of season 3. Virtually every character we’ve come to know and love is embroiled in the system-wide conflict. And unlike season 4’s relatively contained plotline on Ilus, this season’s story feels much more like a direct continuation of the previous run of episodes.

Which is great, because the final season is the shortest in the show’s history, only six episodes. To be honest, I was pretty nervous when I realized how few episodes there were. Maybe it’s Game of Thrones PTSD, but it was hard to imagine how the show could manage to wrap everything up in such a short span of time.

Did it succeed? Yes…and no. But was it satisfying? Absolutely.

The inspiring final message of The Expanse

One of my worries about the shortened season was that we wouldn’t be able to spend enough time with the characters; that the sweeping emotional arcs that the show done so successfully would get flattened by the need to fit everything into the condensed run time.

That fear, thankfully, was quickly laid to rest. The final season of The Expanse has as much weight as ever, and is equal parts heart-wrenching and heart-warming. Despite the shorter run time, the characters still feel like they had all the room they needed to breathe and grow. All our major players have full arcs, and not one of them felt rushed. In fact, there were plenty of characters who got more screen time than I expected, as well as all the throwbacks to previous seasons that you would expect in the final run of a show.

The Expanse ends on exactly the kind of emotionally intelligent note that has made the show so powerful. It digs into the heart of what makes this war between humanity’s different factions so compelling, finding the common truths that have made such conflicts so horrible and unavoidable throughout the history of our species. And more than that, it finds a way to show the light in those dark hours in a way that doesn’t feel contrived. It hones in on the struggles of specific people and how they react to the horror of war.

As Daniel Abraham, co-author of The Expanse novels, recently told Gizmodo, “[T]here’s a quote from Camus that is something very much along the lines of, ‘there’s more to admire in humanity than to despise.’ And that’s what we’ve tried to do with The Expanse, both versions of it—the books and the show look at humanity and find it worth loving, warts and all. With all of the violence and the prejudice and the tribalism, to see that we’re still a pretty amazing species. We’ve done some amazing stuff. And for all of the horror, kindness is still more common. For all the tribalism, the tribes keep getting bigger. If there’s a message that comes through from [it], that’s what I hope.”

It’s a beautiful sendoff to a show that has repeatedly defied the odds. The Expanse has refused to go quietly into the dark, not unlike the crew of the Rocinante itself. Its original three seasons aired on the SyFy channel before the show was cancelled. Then it was picked up by Amazon Studios, which gave it another three seasons. That it made it this far is a testament to the resonance of its story and the care with which it’s being told.

That care is evident in every level of The Expanse, and it really shines during these final six episodes. The writing is sharper than ever, and the impressive cast delivers on every single scene. The score is on point, building on existing themes while adding new ones at key moments. The effects are the strongest they’ve been in the show’s run. There are a couple of specific scenes that left me gasping and wide-eyed, including one of the best spaceship chase sequences I’ve ever seen on the small screen. And don’t even get me started on the action in the series finale. We will certainly be discussing that in detail when it airs.

It’s often said that a show is as strong as its weakest link…and here, there is not a single weak link to be found. It’s almost as if every single person involved in this production was aware of just how special this last season is, and brought their A game to it.

Is The Expanse season 6 really the end?

There is a caveat. We’ll be discussing some slight book SPOILERS here, so consider yourself warned.

The Expanse book series by James S.A. Corey (a pseudonym for authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) spans nine novels, the last of which, Leviathan Falls, released just over a week ago. The final season of the television show adapts book six, Babylon’s Ashes, which provides a kind of internal ending to some of the series’ major plot arcs; afterward there’s a 30-year time jump before the next book.

It’s a natural end point…but obviously, that still leaves three books’ worth of material untouched. Rather than try to cram all that material into the final season of The Expanse, the show tells the story of Babylon’s Ashes in a way that satisfyingly ends this immediate tale…while leaving the door very much open to tell the rest of the story should that opportunity come up. To be fair, the open-endedness is primarily restricted to one particular plotline…but it’s one that feels pretty important, which it is…in future novels.

The result left me a bit conflicted. On the one hand, the season felt like a perfect ending to the show. Given the chance, I wouldn’t change a single thing. On the other hand, it’s still setting up future plotlines, even in the final episode. It didn’t feel like a total end to The Expanse…because it’s not, not truly. The showrunner and authors (who are also on the show’s writing staff) have been pretty open about the fact that there are still more stories to tell in this universe. So the entire time I was watching the show’s final moments, I was also imagining what shape the next iteration of The Expanse might take.

On the whole, the final season of The Expanse feels like it achieved exactly what it set out to do. It’s an ending that leaves you wanting more, while also hitting all the right notes to make it feel like this wild, incredible journey has been a trip worth the taking.

And that, just maybe, humanity learned something along the way.

The premiere of The Expanse season 6 comes out Friday, December 10 on Amazon Prime Video. Keep an eye out for our weekly reviews of each episode.

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