Nevertheless, be a good person, do good deeds is legitimate fairy tale, “moral of the story” territory. Similarly helpful has been the fact that Holden-in beautifully efficient counterpoint to the series’ prolix final villain, Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander)-has never not been almost clinically taciturn*. Meanwhile, the various frustrations, doubts, and mixed allegiances felt along the way by Amos (Wes Chatham), Naomi (Dominique Tipper), Alex (Cas Anvar), Bobbie (Frankie Adams), and Drummer (Cara Gee) have obliged us to weigh his optimism against the complicated chill of reality on a regular basis. Avasarala’s foul-mouthed excoriation of his every stupid heroic move has dimmed whatever saintly glow might have blinded the audience after his greatest victories. It’s always helped, of course, that Holden’s fairy-tale optimism has been filtered through his friends and co-conspirators. It’s to the show’s credit that this theme, even in the mad rush of this final, short season, never turned didactically pat. To put it more plainly, Holden reaches the end of The Expanse no less than what he was at the beginning: A fucking optimist.
If it’s the right thing to do-and you can even attempt to do it-you should. It doesn’t matter if it bruises your ego. It doesn’t matter if it’s hard, or dangerous, or even monumentally, heroically stupid. And when something is right, it’s just… right. As far as Holden has always been concerned, what we each do for each other, both individually and collectively, means something. But humility all the same.ĭelightfully, the actions Holden takes to provoke Avasarala’s exasperation have stayed wholly, bull-headedly consistent: from his seizure of the Roci after the explosion of the Cant to his surprise abdication as the first president of the Transport Union, to the many suicide missions he and the crew of the Roci took to prevent needless suffering and death in the episodes between. Which is to say, when the Avasarala of “Babylon’s Ashes” calls Holden a fucking optimist, it’s with humility. But where the Avasarala of Season 1 anchored her exasperation in the certainty that her decades of political experience guiding Earth through both its Cold War with Mars and its colonialist chokehold on the Belt put her in the right, the Avasarala of Season 6 knows enough to understand that Holden’s particular brand of heroic optimism isn’t just laudable, but necessary.
The expanse season 5 episode 3 review series#
When she flung these same words at him in the series finale, “Babylon’s Ashes,” it was (perhaps unsurprisingly) with an equal sense of exasperation. If it could promise anything, it was only strategic failure and early death. The solar system was at war idealism, as far as the undersecretary of the United Nations was concerned, was for children. When Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) first leveled this charge, some seven years and two networks ago, at newly minted folk hero James Holden (Steven Strait), it was with a sense of exasperated superiority.
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