Prime Video's New Sci-Fi Series Borrows A Page From The Expanse's Missing Seasons

4 weeks ago 13

Published Mar 25, 2026, 4:31 PM EDT

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.

While The Expanse might have ended a few years ago, Prime Video’s upcoming show The Captive's War is picking up where one of its most intriguing storylines left off. Based on the novel series of the same name by author James SA Corey, The Expanse was a critically acclaimed sci-fi series that lasted six seasons between SyFy and Prime Video.

The Expanse was set in a future where humanity had colonized the rest of the solar system, and the show’s ambitious, sprawling plot focused on the relationship between the Martian Congressional Republic on Mars and the United Nations of Earth and Luna. As The Expanse’s seasons continued, the show morphed from a political thriller into a bigger space opera.

Frankie Adams Shohreh Aghdashloo and Tim DeKay in The Expanse

Appropriately enough, given its title, The Expanse expanded the show’s focus with each new season, incorporating new characters and introducing new parts of the show’s fictional universe. However, since the show was canceled after six seasons, The Expanse never got around to properly adapting the "Dark Gods."

These were a super-powerful alien force that would have acted as the show's first extraterrestrial villains. While The Expanse earned many comparisons to the Star Trek franchise, one notable difference with this space opera was that all of its earlier villains had been humans until the introduction of the “Dark Gods.”

Fortunately for viewers who felt that the six-season space saga was incomplete, Corey started a new multimedia franchise set in the world of The Expanse back in 2024. The release of Corey’s novel The Mercy of Gods marked the start of The Captive's War franchise, and the book begins with a human colony’s invasion by an inscrutable evil alien empire with a hive-mind, the Carryx.

The Captive's War May Spark Further Demand To Finish Adapting The Expanse

Bobbie Draper wears a space suit in The Expanse

Often compared to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and other ambitious sci-fi novels, The Mercy of Gods expands the fictional universe of The Expanse, and its upcoming TV adaptation promises to act as a spiritual successor to The Expanse. The release is even set to reunite many of the original show’s creative team.

As such, fans of The Expanse can be sure that The Captive’s War, between its novels and TV adaptation, will finally bring to life the extraterrestrial threat that was teased but never fully realized on-screen in the original series. This means The Captive’s War can build on The Expanse’s universe without betraying the essence of the original series.

Release Date 2015 - 2022-00-00

Network SyFy, Prime Video

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