That’s the stage "The Expanse" laid out for its first season, which explored this fragile ecosystem through various characters with disparate allegiances. There’s Josephus Miller (Thomas Jane, sporting a fedora and floppy space haircut), a Belter detective of the classic mold who unravels a conspiracy surrounding a missing rich girl. There’s UN undersecretary Chrisjen Avasarala (Oscar nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo, with a mouth as filthy as her costumes are gorgeous), working every political angle to stave off war. 

And don’t forget the surviving crew of the ice hauler Canterbury—led by Steven Strait’s reluctant do-gooder James Holden—on the run from sinister forces in their stolen Martian gunship they eventually name Rocinante (after Don Quixote’s horse). 

Future seasons expand the cast, and the show’s scope, to suitably operatic effect. In season two, we get a glimpse of Mars’ stake in the fight through Martian Marine Bobbie Draper (Frankie Adams), who’ll grow to become a trusted ally of both Avasarala and the Roci crew. The internecine conflicts between various factions of the Belt play out through more moderate (David Strathairn’s Klaes Ashford, Cara Gee’s Camina Drummer) and radical (Jared Harris’ Anderson Dawes, Keon Alexander’s fanatical Marco Inaros) voices. 

This is compounded by the protomolecule, the show’s sole concession to the fantastical, whose properties shift and change as it carries out its mercurial purpose. (Eventually, it builds an interstellar Ring near Uranus that permits transit to other unoccupied systems, leading to a new Gold Rush that widens humanity’s existing fractures.)

From the intricately-structured first episode, "The Expanse" lays out a lived-in sci-fi universe that embraces the real-world physics of space travel, and the ways those limitations can exacerbate existing human conflicts like resource distribution and political power. Ice and water are more valuable than gold, and a missing shipment in the Belt can lead to riots and rationing. Belter terrorists can be tortured simply by sending them to Earth to suffer in its more punishing gravity. Rising oceans and overpopulation on Earth have led to increasing demand for resources from space, further motivating humanity’s hope to maintain its stranglehold on the Belt.

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