A day after the fact, I finally got around to watching the latest episode of SyFy’s “The Expanse,” “The Weeping Somnambulist.” Like basically every other episode of both seasons of this series… it was a damn fine show. But there was a single moment that made me bust out laughing harder than I have in weeks.
In my view, the most entertaining character in both the books and the TV series is Chrisjen Avasarala (played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, who played the Starfleet Admiral in charge of the improbable Yorktown starbase in “Star Trek: Beyond”). She is a sharp-witted and terribly foul-mouthed old Indian lady, an executive at the United Nations. This being late-night SyFy, they get away with more profanity than you normally expect out of non-pay TV… heck, Chrisjen said something at one point that got censored basically as “fuc*.” But the best bit, the very best bit, came as Chrisjen was questioning a Martian Marine. Several episodes prior, a battle had broken out between the forced of Mars and Earth on the surface of Ganymede; the firefight on the ground then expanded into ships in orbit pounding each other, with civilian infrastructure getting trashed in the crossfire. (One of the great things about “The Expanse” is that battles here are fought in confusion, and often for mistaken reasons.) So Chrisjen is yammering away as politicians often do, going on about something seemingly irrelevant to the discussion, when one of the Martian delegates interrupts her and asks “where are you going with this?”
Chrisjen’s reply to that question was just a thing of beauty, made possible by Shohreh Aghdashloo’s masterful acting. The screenshot below was from that very Moment Of Awesome; she may look quite jolly and friendly, but, dayum, she weren’t. It shut up the other feller right now.
If you’re not watching “The Expanse,” you really should. It is set in a world where humanity is conquering the solar system using Hard Science… and they have encountered alien technology that is damn near magical in its capabilities. This may irritate some hoping for “pure” hard-SF, but there is a long, proud history of “technology so advanced dumb humans think its magic.” Lovecraft perfected it 90 years ago; Star Trek made occasionally spectacular use of it. And it’s a major feature of my own “Zaneverse” world…
UPDATE: Here’s a clip of the bit in question. Prepare for awesome… not only for Chrisjen’s response, but for her description of the economics of the future. Which are unfortunate, but I have a hard time seeing how things can really go differently.
Longer version of the same scene, includes the later oddly-semi-censored “fuc*:”