TV Review: Childhood's End and The Expanse

You have to give Syfy credit for swinging for the fences.  Several years after their breakout hit Battlestar Galactica (who saw a reboot of a cheesy 1970’s TV show as a critical and commercial success?) Syfy is now looking for the next Big Thing.  They have been biding their time, putting out pleasant science fiction that appeals to their fanbase, but nothing that grabs a wider audience.  First they produced the ambitious Ascension, which starred Battlestar alum Tricia Helfer (and showed off her butt on at least three occasions).  Now they waited for the Holiday programming doldrums to put out two more ambitious shows; the series The Expanse and the mini-series Childhood’s End.  The results are mixed, which is probably not what Syfy was hoping for.

Childhood’s End is based on the seminal science fiction novel by SF megastar Arthur C. Clarke (whose science was so solid that he actually invented the idea of geosynchronous satellites).  The novel, about how aliens come to Earth and prepare mankind for the next phase of their evolution, is a standard bearer of science fiction over 60 years after its release (I read the novel back in the 1970’s; I meant to re-read it before seeing the mini-series but didn’t get around to it).  Syfy’s production is impressive, but the results are less than satisfactory.

Part of that is because the novel is SO influential, some of its concepts have become part of standard SF argot.  Seemingly benevolent aliens come to Earth, but there must be some agenda; mankind’s push for material things is counter-productive.  There are familiar tropes to anyone who has dipped into science fiction in the past 30 years.

After watching all six hours, another thing is that the ending is unremittingly bleak.  What few characters we’ve come to know don’t end up well.  We are told the fate of the human race is for the best, but it looks a lot like extinction.  During the course of the mini-series, almost nothing good happens to anyone we care about, which may be realistic but it is hardly uplifting.  The main character, Ricky Stormgren, is offered interaction with his dead first wife in exchange for cooperating with the aliens, which may seem like a reward but is hardly fair to his new fiancee.

And then there is the Colm Meany character.  Called Wainwright, he is supposed to be some media mogul in the vein of Rupert Murdoch.  He reminded me of what Roger Ebert said about a character in the film Die Hard: he exists solely to be wrong every time he says something.  He asks why the aliens chose a Missouri farmer as their liaison, then says he’s “from a flyover state, he won’t ask the right questions.”  So everyone living more than 50 miles from an ocean is an idiot?  The character might think that way, but he’d be more careful expressing himself.  He then develops a plan to drive the aliens away which involves polluting the planet to the point of uninhabitable-ness.  Does he even listen to the words coming out of his mouth?

The show makes some interesting points about religion, essentially taking the position of Vique’s Law that a man needs religion like a fish needs a bicycle.  It’s a daring position to take with the religious right flexing their political power more than ever, but there could have been some debate without every religious person being portrayed as a nutcase.

The Expanse is based on a series of books that are set in the solar system in the 23^rd century.  Earth is a paradise for the elite; Mars is a warlike (get it?  Mars, God of War?) independent colony, and the asteroid belt is populated by rabble who toil for the resources that make Earth enjoyable.  There are three separate stories that I am sure will interlock eventually.  On Ceres, a detective (Thomas Jane) is tasked with finding a runaway daughter of some elites; on Earth, a UN interrogator (silky-voiced Shohreh Aghdashloo) tries to uncover evidence about a terrorist plot; and near Saturn, a ship that captures ice chunks from the ring system is inexplicably attacked.  Syfy broadcast the first two episodes this week, with the next two episodes available On Demand or at their website.

The Expanse takes the “dump the audience in the middle of everything” approach (after an opening crawl setting up the basics), which some people like but I find lazy.  Establishing characters is hard, and to expect the audience to catch up after starting at full tilt puts the burden on them, not the writers.  I also dislike the whole notion that there are three plots at once and we have to trust the creators that they’ll tie together eventually.  But some progress was made in episode two, so maybe the wait won’t be a long one.

There seems to be an effort to inject some verisimilitude into the segments set on the spacecraft, with g-forces and lack of oxygen treated as realistically as possible.  The special effects are good, although the shot of two people having sex in zero-g looked a little too computer-simulation-y (Syfy’s The Magicians preview did it much better).  The first two episodes establish a broad tableau, so there is definitely room to grow.

Given that they are working from a series of books, the show as the potential to create a realistic fictional universe much as Game of Thrones has.  If they can balance the broad strokes of the plotlines (Earth vs. Mars, poor vs. Elites) and do a slightly better job of developing the characters (ok, we get it, the detective is morally ambiguous but good at heart) The Expanse definitely has a chance to run for a while, although I don’t think it has the breakout potential Battlestar had.  It is better than Syfy’s Killjoys or Dark Matter, which are entertaining in a B-movie sort of way but not as good compared to some more ambitious.