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TELEVISION
THE EXPANSE
PETER SUDERMAN
An old saying holds that all politics is local. In The Expanse, all politics is interstellar. Somehow, they’re kind of the same thing.
The series, which completed its fifth season on Amazon Prime Video in February, is set hundreds of years in the future. Human beings have colonized the solar system and divided into three broad political sects. There’s Earth, an economically stagnated political mess and also the species’ breadbasket; Mars, the elite technological center; and the Asteroid Belt, the working-class locus of resource extraction.
From the beginning, these three groups are in rotating conflict with each other. That conflict intensifies with the discovery of the protomolecule, an alien organism that is both immediately deadly and a warning sign of greater dangers bey ond the solar system’s limits.
Eventually, the protomolecule leads to the discovery of a portal to
