Review: “The Azure Dragon” is The Expanse at its best

Things are getting more intense in this week’s episode of The Expanse, “The Azure Dragon.” The final season of the sci-fi epic on Amazon Prime Video is now in full swing, with the second of its six episodes dropping today, and the solar system war reaching a critical new turning point.

As always, there will be SPOILERS for this week’s episode of The Expanse below, as well as for last week’s. We’ll try not to go into too much detail on the really critical things, but it’s going to be impossible not to talk about some of them, because this episode has some pretty cool turns right from the start.

Laconia

“The Azure Dragon” opens on Laconia, picking up where the opening scene of the premiere left off. Our young explorer Cara is racing through the forest, small bird-creature in hand, when she’s nearly run over by a car and yelled at by the driver. Because even on a remote colony in far-flung outerspace, human impatience for traffic issues endure. Cara gets back to her house, shouting out for her scientist parents. I really like the design of the living space here, the pervasiveness of the plantlife on Laconia and how it’s incorporated into everything. As with last week, the production and sound design are next level good pretty much out of the gate.

What happens on Laconia, though…all I can say is that it left me wondering why Cara’s parents suck so bad. We find out that the protein bar she fed the “bird” — which really looks more like a small dinosaur — actually poisoned it, since the chemistry of every living thing on Laconia is so different from anything in our solar system. The colonists have to grow their own food rather than eat anything native to the planet despite it being extremely lush.

After Cara processes this bad news (with some great acting by child actress Emma Ho), her parents basically just peace out. News has come in that the soldiers running Laconia have called a colony-wide meeting, and all adults have to attend. Which just means they leave their kids. Home alone. On an alien planet. Clearly nothing at all will go wrong.

Cara takes the body of the bird and runs back out into the forest, hoping to bury it and help the bird’s orphaned hatchlings back into their nest by using a drone. What follows is a chain of events where one thing after another goes wrong, ending with one of the dog creatures from the previous episode — which are clearly pretty intelligent — snatching up the body of Cara’s bird before she can bury it. I do love the theme of a human trying to do the right thing here, but just being so ignorant about the environment that everything she does just makes things worse. You can’t help but feel for Cara.

But as with last week, this cold open is all we get of Laconia. It’s starting to feel like a trend, and I’m pretty okay with that for now. Considering how grounded in the solar system war the rest of the episode is, it’s nice to get this short break at the beginning to remind us that their are still far-reaching alien stakes.

The Expanse lays groundwork for what’s to come

Back in our solar system, that conflict is about to hit a few serious turning points. First, Camina Drummer’s plan to offload her crew member Michio (Venessa Smythe) hits an unexpected snag. It turns out not all is peachy within the Free Navy camp, and there are those who don’t view Marco Inaros quite so favorably. Newcomer Stuart Hughes kills it as Golden Bough captain Liang Walker, and Cara Gee is as riveting to watch as ever. The two have great chemistry, and even though their scenes are quiet, they left me really eager to see what’s to come in next week’s episode.

There are further hints that the Free Navy’s control is fraying in the scenes with Filip (Jasai Chase Owens), Marco (Keon Alexander) and second-in-command Rosenfield (Kathleen Robertson). Despite the fact that Filip murdered his best friend in a drunken rage last week, consequences are few and far between. This doesn’t sit well with the Free Navy crews, nor with Filip himself. Jasai Chase Owens continues to do a great job with the very deep material he’s being given, showcasing how torn Filip is between his own grief and the outward image of poise that the Free Navy — and his father — require him to project.

The best part of this sequence was a long dialogue between Marco and Rosenfield, with some really excellent cross-cutting to Filip going through his friend’s belongings. This plotline continues to feel like it’s sowing the seeds for something powerful to come down the line.

The Azure Dragon

But the highlight of the episode is the assault on the titular Azure Dragon, a spotter ship responsible for steering all of the Free Navy’s asteroids at Earth. Despite the fact that it was Holden, Naomi, and rest of the Roci crew that found the Azure Dragon’s location last week, the mission is soon commandeered by Avasarala. She sends an old friend back to the Rocinante, along with instructions that alter their original mission to destroy the spotter ship. Now they have a far riskier mission that involves seizing the data on board.

Everything about this sequence is fantastic, from the tension among the crew caused by the return of a familiar face to the eventual assault on the Azure Dragon itself. Things go pretty immediately pear shaped, and what was already a risky plan becomes about as high-stakes of a mission as the Roci has yet taken on, with very little room for error. There’s a feeling that no one else would be able to pull off what they do here, and it does a lot to finally break through some of that tension that’s been boiling beneath the surface among the team since the premiere.

But the real star of the set piece are the effects, which bring to life one of the best spaceship chase sequences I’ve ever seen in any film or television show. The Expanse has always had great spaceship effects, but this really feels like the show at the top of its game. Even on re-watch it’s just as exciting as the first time, which is no small feat.

On top of that, the writing deftly manages to give each specific member of the crew their own moment to shine, and each actor capitalizes on it. Add that up and you have what might be one of the strongest episodes in The Expanse‘s entire run.

By the end, the small crew aboard the Rocinante has once more managed to change the trajectory of solar system-wide events. It’s been a long, hard road for all involved in the war, and we finally get a glimpse of how things could start to turn around.

Although Marco Inaros doesn’t seem horribly concerned. In the episode’s closing moments, he basically shrugs off the fact that one of his largest assets has been torn away. So that doesn’t bode well. We’ll just have to wait until next week to see what it means.

Conclusion

“The Azure Dragon” is The Expanse at its best. It has high tension and stakes while still managing to work in the powerful character moments that have helped build the show such a fervent fanbase. The only thing it was missing was the protomolecule…though we do get some ominous hints that there may be more to come on that front.

Grade: A

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