Published May 8, 2026, 5:37 PM EDT
Jeff Dodge (he/him), a published author and graduate of Western Washington University, has been a TV news editor for many years and has had the chance to interview multiple reality show stars, including Randy Jackson, Nick Cannon, Heidi Klum, Mel B and John Cena. Fun Fact: he’s been to every single Idol Live! Tour.
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The authors of The Expanse are revealing whether it's even possible for their new series to be adapted for the screen.
Under the pen name James S.A. Corey, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck wrote the nine-book series The Expanse, which was eventually turned into a six-season TV show that debuted on Syfy in 2015 and ended on Prime Video in 2022.
They have a new series of novels called The Captive's War, and in an interview with Polygon, the writers opened up about the difficulties of creating another TV adaptation.
Signal Received · Deep Space Broadcast The Ultimate Sci-Fi TV Trivia Quiz “The truth is out there.”
🚀Deep
SpaceFinal frontiers
⌛Time
TravelWibbly wobbly
👽AliensWe are not alone
👁DystopiaThe black mirror
💡Upside
DownHawkins, 1983
ENGAGE →
01
The most famous opening monologue in TV sci-fi begins: “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the ___.” Complete the line from the original 1966 Star Trek series.
AUSS Voyager BUSS Defiant CStarship Enterprise DUSS Discovery
✓ Engage! William Shatner’s iconic opening — “Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before” — has become one of the most quoted passages in all television. Later Trek series would adapt it, but the Enterprise is the one that started it all.
✗ Subspace interference! The answer is Starship Enterprise. USS Voyager belongs to the 1995–2001 series, the Defiant to Deep Space Nine, and the Discovery to the modern 2017 series. It’s the original Enterprise, captained by James T. Kirk, that William Shatner immortalized in that final-frontier monologue.
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02
The Doctor’s time machine is disguised as a 1960s British police box and is famously bigger on the inside than the outside. What is the acronym it’s known by?
ATRACIS BTARDIS CTRADIS DTANDIS
✓ Allons-y! TARDIS stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. The name was coined by the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan in the very first 1963 episode. The police-box shape is the result of its chameleon circuit getting stuck while parked in 1963 London — and it’s stayed that way for sixty-plus years.
✗ Chronal distortion! The answer is TARDIS — Time And Relative Dimension In Space. The other options are invented distractors. The TARDIS first appeared in 1963 and has followed every regeneration of the Doctor since, though its interior famously redesigns itself whenever the showrunners want a fresh look.
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03
The acclaimed 2004 Battlestar Galactica reboot — considered one of the greatest sci-fi TV shows ever made — was developed by which writer-producer, a veteran of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine?
ARonald D. Moore BJ. Michael Straczynski CDavid Eick DGlen A. Larson
✓ So say we all! Ronald D. Moore developed the modern Battlestar Galactica, reimagining Glen A. Larson’s 1978 original as a gritty, post-9/11 political allegory. Moore had cut his teeth writing many of TNG and DS9’s best episodes. His BSG aired 2004–2009 and tackled terrorism, torture, faith, and what it means to be human.
✗ Frak! The answer is Ronald D. Moore. J. Michael Straczynski created Babylon 5, David Eick was Moore’s co-executive-producer on BSG, and Glen A. Larson created the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica. Moore took Larson’s cheesy space opera and rebuilt it into a Peabody Award-winning meditation on war and morality.
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04
Netflix’s ’80s-drenched sci-fi hit Stranger Things is set in a small American town sitting above a secret government lab that tore a hole into the “Upside Down.” What is the town called?
ADerry, Maine BCastle Rock, Oregon CHawkins, Indiana DSpringwood, Ohio
✓ Friends don’t lie! Hawkins, Indiana is the fictional town the Duffer Brothers invented for Stranger Things — home to Hawkins National Laboratory, where Dr. Brenner’s MKUltra-style experiments opened a rift into the Upside Down. The show is actually filmed in Jackson, Georgia, but the Hawkins sign is now an iconic TV landmark.
✗ The Upside Down! The answer is Hawkins, Indiana. Derry is Stephen King’s fictional town from IT, Castle Rock is another King town (and an anthology series), and Springwood is from A Nightmare on Elm Street. The Duffer Brothers deliberately evoked King’s small-town horror tradition when creating Hawkins.
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05
In The X-Files, Fox Mulder has a famous poster hanging in his FBI basement office — a UFO photograph with a three-word tagline beneath it. What does the tagline say?
A“Trust No One” B“The Truth Is Out There” C“Deny Everything” D“I Want To Believe”
✓ The truth is out there! “I Want To Believe” sits below a blurry UFO photo on the poster that hangs in Mulder’s basement office throughout the series. The line became so associated with the show that it was used as the title of the 2008 feature film, The X-Files: I Want to Believe.
✗ File that one away! The answer is “I Want To Believe.” “Trust No One,” “Deny Everything,” and “The Truth Is Out There” are all iconic X-Files taglines — but it’s “I Want To Believe” that’s literally printed on the UFO poster in Mulder’s office, and which became the title of the franchise’s 2008 movie.
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06
Apple TV+’s Severance — about office workers whose memories are surgically divided between their work and personal lives — was created by a first-time showrunner who used to be a customer service rep. Who is he?
ADamon Lindelof BDan Erickson CBen Stiller DJonathan Nolan
✓ Praise Kier! Dan Erickson wrote the Severance pilot while working soul-crushing office jobs — literally daydreaming about splitting his mind so the “work-him” would suffer instead. Ben Stiller came on as executive producer and directed most episodes, but Erickson is the creator whose personal ennui gave us Lumon Industries.
✗ Outie interference! The answer is Dan Erickson. Damon Lindelof created Lost, The Leftovers, and Watchmen; Ben Stiller is Severance’s executive producer and primary director (but not its creator); Jonathan Nolan created Westworld and Person of Interest. Erickson’s script sat on the Black List for years before Stiller championed it.
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07
In 2018, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror released a groundbreaking feature-length episode that let viewers make choose-your-own-adventure style decisions for the protagonist. What was it called?
ABandersnatch BUSS Callister CSan Junipero DMetalhead
✓ Interactive transmission received! Bandersnatch followed young programmer Stefan as he adapted a choose-your-own-adventure novel in 1984. Viewers could make choices at key moments, branching the story into multiple endings. It was Netflix’s most ambitious interactive experiment — and the meta commentary on viewer control remains quintessential Black Mirror.
✗ Null pointer! The answer is Bandersnatch. USS Callister is the Emmy-winning Star Trek riff, San Junipero is the beloved ’80s romance episode, and Metalhead is the black-and-white robot-dog thriller. All are Black Mirror, but only Bandersnatch was the interactive choose-your-own-adventure special that launched in December 2018.
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08
Joss Whedon’s space-western Firefly became a legendary cult classic after Fox infamously cancelled it — airing episodes out of order, burying the pilot, and pulling the plug. How many episodes aired on Fox before cancellation?
A8 B11 C13 D22
✓ Shiny! Only 11 of the 14 produced Firefly episodes aired on Fox in late 2002 before the network pulled the plug. The remaining three (including the two-hour pilot “Serenity”) first aired in proper order on the Sci-Fi Channel and eventually on DVD. Fan outcry led to the 2005 film Serenity — a rare cinematic rescue for a cancelled series.
✗ Fox strikes again! The answer is 11. Fourteen episodes were actually filmed, but Fox only aired 11 before cancellation, and they aired them out of order with the pilot held until last. The complete set finally aired on Sci-Fi Channel and DVD, and the fan-driven “Browncoats” campaign eventually convinced Universal to greenlight Serenity.
REVEAL MY SCORE →
Transmission Complete · Signal Decoded Your Sci-Fi Rating
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Trekkie-level canon — or still buffering?
⤴ RETRANSMIT
The Expanse showrunner Naren Shankar is already on board as the showrunner of The Captive's War, and Abraham admitted that Shankar ended up being "really annoyed and confused" because "we made it so freaking hard to adapt."
The main reason for this is that there's "a lot of interiority in the characters," along with aliens that will require a lot of special effects. "We didn't make it easy," he added.
“It really annoyed and confused our showrunner, because we made it so freaking hard to adapt into a TV show. The Captive’s War has a lot of things that would need a lot of work before they turn it into a screenplay: a lot of interiority in the characters, a lot of amazing, spectacular aliens. All of that stuff is challenging. And, yeah, we just leaned right into it. We didn't make it easy.”
Franck compared the adaptation process to a "million tiny little blocks stacked on top of each," with the team currently on the third block. "There's thousands of blocks to go before anybody would go, 'Okay, so now let's talk visual effects.'" At the moment, they're asking, "Do we write a script?"
“The reality is that adaptation is a million tiny little blocks stacked on top of each other. At this point, I think we've stacked the third block. So there's thousands of blocks to go before anybody would go, ‘Okay, so now let's talk visual effects.’ At this point, we’re talking about things like, ‘Do we write a script?’”
That "interiority" surfaces with characters like Dafyd Alkhor, who is holding onto a "secret guilt" over decisions he's made. Interestingly, Abraham and Franck know that these are areas that can't be shown on screen.
They ran into a similar situation in the first Expanse novel, Leviathan Wakes, when Miller sits around "feeling sorry for himself." That wouldn't have made for great television, according to Abraham, who added that the show found visual ways to portray what he was feeling.
“It’s not the first time we've had to do that. If you read Leviathan Wakes, Miller is a character who sits around and feels sorry for himself and drinks and thinks a lot. The actual version of him we had in the book would have been terrible to film. So you find other ways to portray that, that a camera can see. And you get Thomas Jane. Then you wind up with something that achieves the same effect with a different toolbox.”
The first Captive's War novel, The Mercy of Gods, came out in 2024, followed by the first sequel, The Faith of Beasts, in April 2026. The authors also wrote a novella called Livesuit.
The Mercy of Gods follows Dafyd after he and his research team are kidnapped by a society called the Carryx. Dafyd is forced into survival mode as he works to save humanity.
Unlike The Expanse, which had nine novels (not to mention several short stories and novellas), Abraham and Franck plan for The Captive's War to be a trilogy.
This was a conscious decision after realizing how much work went into adapting The Expanse. "We didn't want to write nine books. You get to about the fourth or fifth book, and you go, 'Jesus, we got four more of these things to do," Franck explained.
Working on the Expanse books and TV show simultaneously proved to be very challenging and "brutal," so the writing duo kept that in mind when creating The Captive's War, which has a "smaller scope than The Expanse," even though there are still several major puzzle pieces to work out along the way.
Franck: “We didn't want to write nine books [this time]. You get to about the fourth or fifth book, and you go, ‘Jesus, we got four more of these things to do.’”
Abraham: “We were in production by the time we were doing book five. It was exhausting, sending Ty off to do 12- and 14-hour days on set, and still trying to make our deadlines on the books. It was brutal. So [we wanted to write] something of a smaller scope than The Expanse.”
Both Abraham and Franck were executive producers on The Expanse TV show, but this time around, their producing duties have increased now that they have their own production company, Expanding Universe. Prime Video's The Captive's War will be the company's first project.
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) ·