On SyFy and the Canadian Bacon of an Always White-Led Future World, Part II
The Expanse is expansive (pun intended), but its “humanity” is still chained in Whiteness
This is the third of three Substack on the limited imaginations of sci-fi and futuristic creators working off white/Western-dominated scaffolds in Hollywood and Hollywood North (this one I began in November, by the way). My focus here is on the series The Expanse. Like with Dark Matter and Killjoys, I watched this series in real time between 2015 and 2022, first on SyFy, then on Amazon Prime Video. A reader sent me an email last week proclaiming that The Expanse breaks the pattern I’ve been describing in essays and on Substack for the past couple of years. Sadly, it does not. From Beavertails and Japadogs to oatcakes and yes, my favorite indulgence of curds, fries, gravy, and other accessories (poutine), Canada is still Canada, but Canadian-based shows still sing loudly about white-driven futures.
Yes, The Expanse was also a take on a Western-led and white-bred future with multicultural superficiality sprinkled in. Yet it was also the best-written and best-acted of the three, and easily so. It relied heavily on the nine-book The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey, the pen name of co-writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (they won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2012 and for Best Series in 2017). It was an American production in Toronto, so not quite as Canadian bacon as Dark Matter and Killjoys (at least in Seasons 1 and 2). It played to all the common themes of a futuristic sci-fi thriller with a bit more than a small helping of space western, though. Only the setting is just two centuries’ ahead, a 23rd-century Earth under one world governance, with 40 billion people and an unemployment rate of nearly 60 percent. One hundred million humans live on Mars in the midst of terraformation, and millions more live outside the orbits of Earth and Mars as the descendants of those who mined the Asteroid Belt or lived on far-flung space stations on moons orbiting Jupiter or Saturn.
Of all the Canadian-led or Canadian-filmed series I have watched since the turn of this century, I have enjoyed this one the most. Actor Wes Chatham impressed me best, as he played his socially-awkward and at times homicidal character Amos Burton and his character’s arc so well at times I rooted for him. It’s too bad Cas Anvar damaged the last two seasons of the series with his on-set and ComicCon sexual harassment of actors and fans (what a tool!). Anvar should have taken a page from Chatham’s Amos when he said, “I don’t shit where I eat” on back-to-back episodes (S3:E7-8) to two potential sex partners documenting the Rocinante crew (makes you wonder if lead actor Steven Strait and Chatham would have condemned Anvar so quickly if he were a white guy, though).
First Nations actor Cara Gee as Carmina Drummer, along with Iranian Shohreh Aghdashloo as Chrisjen Avasarala, were among the few actors of color who managed to imbue their authentic selves into their characters without question. Having actors David Strathairn, Jared Harris, and Chad L. Coleman hammed it up as Outer Planets Alliance (OPA) faction leaders, and Shawn Doyle and Bryon Mann as warmongering Earthers made this show a must-watch for sci-fi thriller fans Seasons 1-3.
Yet even with the good acting and the sometimes wonderful characters, The Expanse is basically the Western-dominated world two centuries later with more advanced technologies without any advances in curbing the Western tendency to lead the world into one chaotic crisis after another. Somehow, this civilization survived the impending climate change apocalypse and pandemics and the threat of nuclear war and still made it to space to colonize it? Yeah, sure!
The future is close enough in time to be relatable and yet extremely predictable as a series. More sentient alien stuff is involved, this time an ice-blue particle/goo/crystal/plasma/glowing light, a “protomolecule” an advanced civilization created 1.5 billion years earlier. Somehow the trillionaire Jules-Pierre Mao (François Chau), his daughter Julia (Florence Faivre), the Earth-born malcontent and eventual captain of the pirated Mars space warship Rocinante James Holden (Strait), UN Deputy Undersecretary and later UN Secretary-General Avasarala (Aghdashloo) and a “Belter”-born detective on the asteroid Ceres in Joe Miller (Thomas Jane) are all swept up in this solar system-shattering series of crises.
Earth and Mars eventually go to war over the protomolecule and all the secrets around it, as if Earth is the US and NATO and Mars is the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. The war began because the protomolecule took over the asteroid Eros after the senior Mao and his team unleashed it on the Belter population there, with Earth and Mars blaming each other for this unbelievable event. Acting through the junior Mao, the sentient goo then turned Eros into a spaceship and hurled the giant asteroid to the surface of Venus (with some coaxing from Miller and Holden). A year later, the protomolecule took off with Eros again, this time toward the Kuiper Belt, and used the materials from the asteroid to create a gate/wormhole to more than 1,300 Earth-like planets across the galaxy, where Holden and his crew go to survey the viability of human colonization (not a good idea!).
Because both Earth and Mars have treated Belters as mere serfs and not equals, an even more radical segment of the already radical OPA rose up and began hurling smaller asteroids with stealth shielding at Earth, hoping to begin a war of annihilation. In the end, the combined forces of Earth, Mars, and the remaining Rocinante crew (the showrunners killed off Anvar’s character Alex Kamal at the end of Season 5) hunt down Marco Inaros and his son Filip. Peace then reigned between the Belters and the Inners (inner planets), and Holden became the ever reluctant hero of the era. Strait’s Holden, by the way, was the closest to an anti-racist white guy any viewer has seen on screen. Yet even Holden is too self-righteous and privileged at times in his willingness to save everyone he encounters.
Except that like with Dark Matter and Killjoys, The Expanse also required the use of either biracial or ethnically ambiguous actors in so-called blind-casting yet stereotypical ways. It seemed that every person of color on the show either served in the military or had been part of OPA at one point of time or another in the series. Actors like Persian-Canadian Anvar or Samoan-New Zealander Frankie Adams as Bobbie Draper or Black Canadian Martin Roach as UN Admiral Souther made up a large proportion of the military characters for The Expanse. OPA, OPA-adjacent, and ex-OPA Belters and Earth folk like actress Gee as Carmina Drummer, the American Black actor Coleman as ex-UN Marine Col. Fred Johnson, and Black British actress Dominique Tipper as Naomi Nagata (Nagata is a Japanese surname, after all) filled out the ranks. Race-blind casting seemed to work because this apparently will be “the future” (and because the actors for The Expanse were top-notch in making viewers believe the overall story).
But with Persian-Canadian actor Keon Alexander (Marco Inaros) and the racially ambiguous Jasai Chase-Owens (Filip Inaros), they had the roles of stereotypical, Arab-looking-enough planetary terrorists, using asteroids as weapons of mass destruction to kill Earthers and Inners in avenging a century of oppression against the Belters. That Nagata was Filip’s mother was interesting, but only because the character became a one-note wet ball of dog fur for a good portion of the final three seasons. She was unable to survive on a distant Earth-like planet because of her low-gravity Belter body, crumbled once she realized the son she had abandoned to save herself from Marco’s abuse was too much like Marcos, and spent countless scenes crying about it all. Tipper’s role became stereotypically white feminine. It was as if The Expanse’s writers decided to jettison the first three seasons of a tough but caring engineering genius for someone more relatable and less intimidating. It makes one wonder if they had cast a Japanese or Japanese-Canadian actress as Nagata, would they have scripted her quite as demure and as frail as they cast Tipper.
The Expanse, as good as it was, shared similar themes and copycat dispositions on doing sci-fi thrillers with at least a touch of the futuristic US-Western-in-space motif with Dark Matter, with Killjoys, and really, with every major sci-fi futuristic series since Firefly and Continuum. So much so that by Season 5, even this series eventually became yawn-inducing. It certainly did not help that in Season 5, viewers finally got to see Baltimore, Amos/Timothy’s growing-up city, and in stereotypical fashion, the series portrayed Baltimore as if it was straight out of the 1997 HBO miniseries The Corner or the HBO series The Wire, a place of poverty and crime. Add to this the insistence of showrunners and show writers to graft people of color and biracial characters on a Western civilization-based model of “the future.” For all the hype, the incredible acting and special effects, the overall intriguing story lines, The Expanse was at best a top-of-the-line series continuing the old business of sci-fi futurisms since Star Trek: TOS first aired in 1966. There are no futures for humanity without the West and white people leading it.