I had always assumed that Miller's fate matched that of the books. Was it changed because of Thomas Jane's schedule?
No worries. I just need to rewatch some scenes. In fact I wanna get the books but I won't have much time to read til Spring Break or perhaps Summer
I was thinking this. I know they started filming The Predator lately (though season 2 was filmed like late summer ) so who knows. I'm sure Jane still has film roles here or there so maybe he just didn't want to be restricted on a tv series.
I think that things have been very well explained -- most of the characters have clear motivations for their actions. Miller (Thomas Jane's character) was basically obsessed with finding Julie Mao, and all of his actions (shooting the head scientist on the protogen station, suiciding with the protomolecule on Eros) make sense from that perspective. My understanding from the books (which I haven't read, but seen summaries) is that we will still see his character every so often as a representative of whatever the protomolecule is building. (Do we need a book-free thread like the Game of Thrones threads?) Fred Johnson, Anderson Dawes, the UN leadership, the Martian marine, we all know where they're coming from and why they're doing what they're doing. It's not easy to do this well -- plenty of shows don't do this so clearly and then we're wondering why the characters are doing stuff that doesn't make sense based on what we saw before. Holden is maybe an exception to this, he's kind of a goody-goody that got caught up in universe-changing events, usually trying to do the right thing even if it's not logical. The rest of the Rocinante crew is pretty simplistic - Naomi has some Belter sympathies that we've seen, how she preserved the protomolecule sample and then helped the Tycho station folks break the Earth missiles. Alex (the pilot) is sympathetic to Mars and acts accordingly. Amos is interesting, he's part childlike innocence and then violent, but his character is consistent throughout the show. As long as you've seen and paid attention to the previous episodes, I don't find this show confusing at all. It doesn't put me to sleep like Legion does. It's tight - everything makes sense, and the plot is moving forward at a rapid pace, it makes me not want to miss an episode. It's probably my favorite show on TV right now. Colony on USA is pretty good, not as tight as The Expanse, but also moving forward rapidly. Also wanted to add that I totally agree that the patois we hear from the Belters is a great universe-building aspect. We hear it from Naomi, Drummer (Fred Johnson's XO whom Belgian guy has a thing for ), Diogo and especially Anderson Dawes. It helps to make the universe more real, in a way that Star Trek never did, they could travel to the Delta Quadrant and sure enough, the universal translator ensured that we were hearing North American English no matter how alien the aliens were.
Why did Fred Johnson tell the Rocinante crew that they would not be welcome back at Tycho station in the future? They just saved his life and, probably, the lives of everyone on Tycho Station! (Because if the radical Belters HAD gotten control of the nukes, they promised to use them and didn't mind Tycho getting destroyed in retaliation.)
I didn't get that myself. I assumed that it had something to do with the adaptation. Perhaps they took more time to get to the same point in the books but they felt forced to get there more quickly on the show? It certainly felt a bit jarring in the moment.
The show is losing me, although full disclosure, I am few eps behind…loved the books, but the show is failing to capture my interest/ imagination…