Image courtesy of Everett Collection
Published Feb 16, 2026, 4:00 PM EST
Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.
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While The Expanse might have changed a lot throughout its long run, the six-part space opera still has no bad seasons to its name. The Expanse was based on the novel series of the same name by author James SA Corey. Beginning in 2015, the series aired 62 episodes across six seasons before ending its run in 2022.
Set in a future where humanity has managed to colonize the rest of the solar system, The Expanse tells the story of an uneasy relationship between the Martian Congressional Republic on Mars and the United Nations of Earth and Luna. Initially, the show’s story sees detective Josephus, ship captain James Holden, and UN Security Council member Chrisjen discover a conspiracy.
However, although The Expanse season 1 feels like a noir-influenced conspiracy thriller set on a spaceship in the future, the show doesn’t maintain this tone for long. As The Expanse continued, the show broadened its scope to focus on other aspects of the colonized solar system and its political makeup.
The Expanse Has No Bad Seasons
The Expanse used its fictional setting to comment on everything from political corruption to colonization, and this required the show to introduce a slew of new characters with each new season. Memorable figures like Holden, Naomi, Amos, and Alex came to define the show’s overarching story, despite Chrisjen and Holden dominating season 1’s story.
Fortunately, this didn’t hurt the show’s reputation. On the contrary, each season of The Expanse has its own unique appeal, from the detective investigations of season 1 to season 4’s exploration of the alien planet Ilus. Depending on the season, the show’s scope varies, and its tone follows suit.
By season 5, the ship’s crew has been split up, and the series follows a trio of different factions as Amos explores Baltimore, Naomi searches for Filip, and Marco’s Free Navy declares itself the entire solar system’s ruler. This ambitious season’s story diverges and intersects, with one plot flowing into another, in a way that season 1’s more straightforward plotting would never have allowed.
Similarly, season 2’s addition of Camina Drummer, a new character who went on to become one of The Expanse’s most important characters, allowed the series to broaden its perspective. As Miller’s story continues, the show also introduces more characters who will go on to define later seasons, ensuring the series lives up to its title.
The Expanse Does Start Off Slow
Image courtesy of Everett CollectionAfter a quiet, comparatively slow debut, The Expanse quite literally expanded with each subsequent season. However, just because the show’s debut outing was less complex doesn’t mean the season is any less impressive. On the contrary, season 1 of The Expanse was about as complicated as the show could get without alienating mainstream viewers.
Holden and Chrisjen’s story subtly sets up the worldbuilding required by later seasons with the show’s main mystery, so that viewers don’t notice the backstory that is drip-fed throughout this patiently paced first outing as they are engrossed in this plot. Unlike the later cyberpunk series The Peripheral, The Expanse doesn’t drop viewers in without a lifeline.
Instead, the complex conspiracy that the main characters discover forces them to question everything they know about the politics of the solar system, which conveniently means that they end up explaining these politics and their history in detail. By the time the mystery is solved, viewers are invested in the solar system’s future, so the show can now expand its purview.
Within a few episodes of season 2’s debut, The Expanse has opened up its world to include more characters, more factions, and a whole new main storyline. However, instead of feeling overwhelmed, this seems like a natural progression from season 1. The lingering impacts of season 1’s conspiracy go on to shape the series, meaning it is never superfluous.
The Expanse Is Worth The 6-Season Ride
Image courtesy of Everett CollectionIn fact, this is arguably the most impressive achievement of the series as a whole. The story of the series is undeniably complicated, and one harsh reality of rewatching The Expanse is the realization that not all of its plots worked. However, the show managed to effectively ground its action across its six-season story.
The Expanse could easily have become an insular series that only made sense to readers of the source material, especially in an era when dense, inaccessible adaptations of bestselling genre novels were the order of the day. After decades of prioritizing simple, episodic storytelling, TV networks started pushing for complexity after Game of Thrones succeeded.
Fortunately, The Expanse did an incredible job of walking a tightrope between maintaining increasingly complex storylines and a massive, sprawling cast, and still ensuring that its plot was accessible, and its stakes were clear. As many lesser sci-fi shows prove, this was no small feat.
Related
3 Years Have Passed, So What Happened To The Expanse Season 7?
Amazon Prime Video dropped The Expanse season 6 finale in January 2022, and three years later, there is still no word on a possible seventh season.
As such, The Expanse deserves credit for proving that big, ambitious sci-fi shows could jump from story to story with aplomb, and they would not risk losing viewers as a result. This proved the way for future hits like Silo and Foundation, cementing The Expanse’s status as one of the most important sci-fi shows over the last twenty years.
Release Date 2015 - 2022-00-00
Showrunner Naren Shankar, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby
Directors Breck Eisner, Jeff Woolnough, David Grossman, Kenneth Fink, Rob Lieberman, Terry McDonough, Thor Freudenthal, Bill Johnson, David Petrarca, Jennifer Phang, Mikael Salomon, Sarah Harding, Marisol Adler, Anya Adams, Nick Gomez, Simon Cellan Jones
Writers Georgia Lee, Robin Veith, Hallie Lambert, Matthew Rasmussen, Ty Franck, Naren Shankar, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Daniel Abraham, Dan Nowak
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Dominique Tipper
Naomi Nagata
English (US) ·