What made The Expanse’s third season its best one yet
By Drew Koenig
The Expanse just wrapped up its third season and it was its best season yet. Here’s why.
When the third season began, The Expanse was already a fine and decent show in its own right. It had done the cool thing at the end of its first season into its second that Game of Thrones has only recently truly started doing, which is disparate storylines crossing into and interacting with each other.
It has been fairly successful at this and served to make the series more interesting and engaging. This third season, however, took all of the things that the previous two had been proficient to an entirely new level. On a purely structural level, the construction of this season is one of the smartest things that it could have done.
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Rather than taking a storyline and stretching it to fill an entire season, it knew when its current arc had run its course and when it was time to move onto the next novel to pull from. What results is two mini-seasons masquerading as a full one and it’s simply a savvy move.
A simple time jump and a new book and it’s practically a brand new show with all kinds of fresh air breathed into it. It proved that it’s a show that truly understands what its limits are and knows when to enter a new and different groove.
Beyond that, this a season where each episode got progressively better as the season went on. This feels more and more rare in the current television landscape, especially for one as heavily serialized as The Expanse.
A thing that really made this season stand out is just how interesting it decided to make straight man lead that was in many ways The Expanse‘s answer to Jon Snow. What this show did is something we hardly ever get to see, which is making the lead increasingly erratic and insane to the point that sometimes you weren’t sure that he wasn’t. It’s a fascinating twist on a character type that we’ve seen so many times in genre television into something that we practically never see.
More than anything, The Expanse became a show in its third season that would be an utter shame if we never saw more of and also one of pure excitement now that we will be able to on Amazon now.
Next: The Expanse season 3 finale recap
Let us know what you thought of this season of The Expanse in the comments below.