Watching ‘The Expanse’ in quarantine: is the show scarier during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Wes Chatham, Steven Strait, Cas Anvar, and Dominque Tipper star on The Expanse.

We’ve probably all had the feeling of having a movie or TV watching experience changed by the circumstances involved. Some people might find it cathartic to watch a romcom after a breakup, or maybe you’re less likely to enjoy a crime drama if you’ve just lived through a break-in at your home.

But if there’s ever been a mood changer that might influence how you watch something, it would be the COVID-19 pandemic. In the early days of the lockdown, Twitter was full of people commenting that everyday moments in a movie scene like handshakes and hugs gave them chills, now that those things carry such a different significance. Stranger still, Steven Soderbergh’s well-researched pandemic movie Contagion, which wasn’t super successful during its initial 2011 release, was suddenly topping the Netflix leaderboards. Clearly, people were either looking to the movie for answers or just trying to get the most thematically appropriate, immersive experience possible.

I wouldn’t have expected this to apply to a series like The Expanse, which originated on Syfy in 2015 and then hopped over to Amazon for its fourth season. After all, the show is true “hard” sci-fi. It takes place in our solar system, hundreds of years in the future, after humanity has successfully inhabited Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Typically that would be an evergreen subject matter, featuring space battles and interplanetary politics instead of lines at grocery stores and overflowing hospitals.

But it just so happens that one of the recurring plot lines on the show has to do with the spread of an alien pathogen. Known as the protomolecule, the glowing blue organism is discovered by a corporate venture from Earth and is eventually weaponized. Over the course of all four seasons, the protomolecule is one of the main drivers of the show’s action, and it was remarkable to see how prescient the show was about how a society might respond to a large-scale pandemic, albeit with the added layer of a sci-fi setting.

Cara Gee as Drummer and David Strathairn as Ashford, two leaders from the outer planets.

The show’s protagonists are the crew of the Rocinante, a former Martian warship salvaged by James Holden (Steven Strait), Naomi Nagata (Dominque Tipper), Alex Kamal (Cas Anvar) and Amos Burton (Wes Chatham). They’re a team of misfits who find themselves bouncing between jobs in deep space, until they come across a conspiracy to unleash the protomolecule on unsuspecting populations. Despite wanting to stay out of the fray and not caring about the political tensions between Earth, Mars, and the outer planets, the crew of the Roci are both uniquely skilled and compassionate enough to cut through the noise and help out.

One of the persistent themes on the show is compassion, almost to a fault. Holden is often painted as a Christ-like figure, perpetually heaping responsibility on his shoulders for the faults of others. His crew are often seen rushing to help interplanetary refugees, sharing medical supplies and performing rescue operations. Given the bizarre properties of the protomolecule, it’s a worthwhile strategy: the pathogen hijacks the human body, changing its DNA and eventually killing its host. In one arc on the show, a space station built inside the asteroid known as Eros is entirely taken over by a protomolecule outbreak, granting the rock some truly weird and dangerous abilities.

There’s plenty of moments that, in the era of COVID-19, seem all too familiar. The characters are hypervigilant around sources of infection, frantically double-checking their suits and disinfecting everything. They soon develop an effective blood-based test for the virus, and in the fourth season, part of an episode revolves around performing community-wide tests to determine if someone’s been exposed. One nice thing about visions of the future: testing is universal and not a source of dispute.

But as we’ve seen in our own real-life experience, politics is never too far away. The second and third seasons devote some of their storytelling to which factions have control of the protomolecule. Characters throughout the solar system vie to get their hands on a sample, and the Rocinante crew initially sets itself on a mission to destroy every scrap. Holden has to eventually admit that when dealing with such an infectious organism, there’s a limit to how long it can be contained - eventually everyone will have it, either intentionally or not. It’s a little bit chilling to think about how the writers on The Expanse in 2016 or 2017 anticipated some of the exact discussions we’d be having as a planet only a few years later, as we moved from closing borders to treating the patients within them.

Thomas Jane as Joe Miller, running a mission to eradicate some protomolecule.

It helps that The Expanse is one of the most science-conscious sci-fi shows ever made. As YouTube channels like Because Science have pointed out, the production team on the show puts an almost fanatical amount of detail into everything. This includes the physics and biological effects of zero gravity environments, the tactics of space warfare, and the often-forgotten requirement in sci-fi to decelerate when you’re travelling in space. Of course, the glowing blue alien stuff on the show is pretty far beyond our current scientific knowledge, but it’s still approached by the writers as though it obeys certain natural laws. It needs a host to spread, it’s often distributed unintentionally, and it can be destroyed, given enough time and the right approach.

I can’t decide if I’m lucky or not to have blasted through the majority of this show in the past few months. On one hand, the very real pandemic happening in 2020 adds a layer of immersion, accuracy, and familiarity to the material on The Expanse. It proves that some of the poor decisions by our leaders are not unique; the psychology behind them could be predicted by science fiction. On the other hand, we’d all prefer that the pandemic remained purely a narrative on a TV show, without the dreadful human cost. 

With season 5 of The Expanse in development now, it will be fascinating to see how COVID-19 affects where the characters end up. Not to put too much pressure on the writing staff, but if they were able to anticipate this, maybe they can give us some inspiration on how to beat this thing for good.

All four seasons of The Expanse are available on Amazon Prime Video.