“Strange Dogs” is a heavy start to the final season of The Expanse

Today marks the beginning of the end for The Expanse on Amazon Prime Video. The final season of the epic sci-fi saga begins today with the premiere episode, “Strange Dogs,” which kicks things off with all the inexorable momentum of a spaceship leaving port.

There are SPOILERS for this episode of The Expanse below, as well as for previous seasons. We’ll be discussing major plot points and breaking down what happened in “Strange Dogs,” so if you haven’t watched the premiere yet…why haven’t you watched the premiere yet?!

Let’s recap and review.

A glimpse at an alien world

Season 5 of The Expanse saw the solar system descend into a bloody war, with Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander), leader of the Free Navy of Belters, bombarding the Earth with asteroids, killing off huge portions of the population. The final season picks up six months after the conflict began, with the crew of the Rocinante licking their wounds while Earth and Mars gather their forces to retaliate. Meanwhile, mysteries begin to unfold beyond one of the Ring Gates.

“Strange Dogs” begins with a cold open that eases viewers back into The Expanse in a seemingly innocent way, by giving us a look at a fresh new alien world through the eyes of a child explorer named Cara. The landscape is lush, evoking the deep forests of the pacific northwest if they were filled with a variety of alien lifeforms. It’s a mysterious way to start, as our young heroine goes about saying the names of different alien flora and fauna aloud, appreciating this new location with a child’s sense of wonder.

It’s an effective technique that only begins to turn a bit more sinister when we get our first look at a slightly larger alien, the one glimpsed at the 2:26 mark of the trailer above. The alien seems innocuous, but it’s pretty obvious there’s more to it than meets the eye. As one of the other bird-like creatures that Cara was feeding collapses, she panics, picks it up, and runs off to get help…while the camera zooms out to reveal a majestic forest scape.

It’s only then that we learn where we are: a planet accessed through one of the Ring Gates, named Laconia. Presumably, this is the place where the Martians who were working with Marco Inaros last season went. But that is a mystery left for future episodes; the cold open is the only scene we get on Laconia this episode.

The final shot shows us a massive, glowing construct of some sort floating above the planet. It’s just enough to whet the appetite before we plunge into the opening credits.

The cost of war

From there, we’re launched into the first of the episode’s four main plotlines with a sobering montage that recounts the damage done to Earth by Inaros’ asteroids. Millions dead. The biosphere destabilized.

Earth isn’t wholly out of the fight, due in no small part to the efforts of Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and all the allies she’s managed to bring to her cause. With the help of Mars, Earth is able to keep some of the larger asteroids from hitting the planet, but smaller fragments are still pummeling the landscape. And even those small pieces are hastening the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem. Avasarala and her Martian liason Bobbie Draper (Frankie Adams) are touring a grain farm in the Mediterranean…which is now covered in snow and totally barren.

So…the Free Navy is literally destroying Earth, speeding its decline toward becoming an unlivable rock. Talk about high stakes.

“Strange Dogs” makes excellent use of Aghdashloo’s gravelly voice to deliver both the opening and closing monologues of the episode. The first is a chilling recounting of this farm’s decline, a microcosm of the horror occurring across the planet. The solar system has been at war for half a year, and it is taking a terrible toll. The dark score by Clinton Shorter perfectly underlines Aghdashloo’s performance.

The second monologue, delivered after Avasarala deftly evades reporters in classic foul-mouthed style, is in stark juxtaposition to the first. By this point, she’s gotten a bit of good news from her old pal James Holden. That the episode starts by hammering home how awful things are and then ends by giving us a glimmer of hope is just one example of how powerful the writing is this season.

Tilting at windmills

Onward we move, to the second major plotline of the episode: the crew of the Rocinante. They finish off a couple of Free Navy ships in an exciting firefight…but there’s no celebration afterward. Instead, there’s a feeling of overwhelming exhaustion on board the ship. James Holden (Steven Strait), Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper), Amos Burton (Wes Chatham) and new crew member Clarissa Mao (Nadine Nicole) have been on a deep recon mission in the Belt for 187 days. It’s immediately clear that it has been a grueling ordeal.

There’s also tension among the crew. Clarissa has still not totally settled in, and Naomi clearly doesn’t trust her. Amos is conflicted about their long-term hunt for Inaros. Holden looks like he’s about to collapse even as he continues to be interested in the Protomolecule, and in a Martian ship which vanished in a fiery blaze while trying to pass through the Ring Gate at the end of season 5. The only character who seems to be in anything resembling high spirits is Clarissa, who is determined to make amends for her violent past and do right by her new comrades. It’s compelling viewing, if frustrating at times, in that way it’s frustrating to watch two friends who you know care about each other argue.

Once again, the score shines. It kicks in it at precisely the right moment to maximize emotion, while leaving enough quiet space for us to catch the feeling of being aboard a ship in outer space. Between the musical cues, the episode’s frequent cuts to black, and the weighty tone, the show feels more cinematic than ever before.

Later, Holden descends to an asteroid we learn has been equipped with a booster by the Free Navy in order to launch it at Earth. We get some extremely cool POV shots from inside Holden’s helmet, coupled with a spacewalk scored only by muffled sounds and the commander’s own breath. It’s nice to see that, even this late in its run, The Expanse is still a show that is willing to experiment. In classic Holden fashion, he trips a trap and barely making it out alive, scaring poor Naomi (who is still dealing with the trauma of her harrowing escape from Marco Inaros last season) half to death.

But it ultimately pays off when Naomi is able to use the data from the asteroid to give the Rocinante — and Avasarala — a glimmer of hope in the form of their next target, setting up exciting things to come next week.

The fugitives

Camina Drummer (Cara Gee) and her own crew/family have been on the run ever since they disobeyed Inaros’ order to destroy the Roci near the end of season 5. Thematically, the parallels between Drummer’s crew and Holden’s are really well done. We get a bit less time with Drummer, which made sense considering everything else the episode had going on.

But what time we do get is well spent. After narrowly evading yet another Free Navy hunting party, it becomes clear that not all of Drummer’s crew members are cut out for war. They were a salvage crew, after all, forced into combat by necessity. The acting of the different crew members really highlights the strain they’re under, and it’s heartbreaking.

By the end, Drummer is forced to make some tough decisions about the future of her crew.

A return to Ceres Station

Our final plotline — and the one that surprised me the most — revolves around Marco Inaros and his son Filip. The Free Navy has retaken Ceres Station, and man has the place changed since the days when Detective Miller roamed it in his porkpie hat. If there’s one thing that really gives this season the feeling that it’s tying together the past and future of The Expanse, it’s this return to where it all began.

Keon Alexander’s portrayal as the dangerously charismatic Belter leader is as solid as ever, but the performance that really shocked me was that of Jasi Chase Owens, who plays Marco and Naomi’s son Filip. He’s currently on the winning side of the war, but he’s struggling, coping with sex and alcohol and shirking his duties. Owens manages to get across the confusion and conflict that drives Filip so well. I’m curious to see where it all goes, and can’t help but hope there is some kind of redemption ahead for him. Filip has been as much a victim in this situation as anyone, carried along by his father’s plans.

It all leads him, reeling and drunk, to making a horrific mistake. He goes from enraged to shocked by his own actions in a snap; Owens performance of this moment was the showstopper of the episode for me, and I can’t wait to see what lies in store for his character.

In conclusion…

“Strange Dogs” was exactly the sort of opener I’d hoped for this season. It had plenty of action and a few shocking twists, but also spent a lot of time developing the characters, something I was personally worried about in light of this season’s reduced episode count. The ominous sense of scope is right there from the very first scene, and carried all the way through to the end of the episode. It felt like quite a bit of set up, but setup that was well warranted and necessary for the road ahead.

Next week can’t come soon enough.

Grade: A-

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