YMMV / The Expanse

• Complete Monster: See here.

Book series

• Catharsis Factor: After a book and a half of Winston Duarte and the Laconian Empire being a borderline Invincible Villain, suddenly the aliens who wiped out the protomolocule creators finally get good and pissed off at him and remove much of his advantage out of existence in a split second. The remainder of Tiamat's Wrath is the heroes getting sweet payback for all the indignities heaped on them.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Amos Burton. He is messed up in his head in an unspecified manner that makes him extremely blasé about killing and death and not entirely understanding 'morality'. Many traits fit a sociopathic profile, except his protectiveness of children. While he believes Murder Is the Best Solution, he is bound by others.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Chrisjen Avasarala and Bobbie Draper are popular with a lot of readers. The former as one of the few politicians in the series actively working to improve the situation and refusing to take shit from anyone. The latter for her snark, badass Action Girl status, and more or less getting to be a space marine in an otherwise gritty series. In the show, the two are even added to the events of books they weren't present in, Leviathan Wakes for Chrisjen and Abaddon's Gate for Bobbie.
  • Samantha Rosenberg, aka Sam is one of the most popular side characters. Snarky, helpful to the protagonists, and an all around Nice Girl who gets some of the best lines. It's a real shame she's killed off in Abadon's Gate.
    • This character is largely the origin of OPA member Drummer (see the note for Ensemble Dark Horse in the TV show below), though her role in the TV show is vastly expanded with her rising in the OPA to become Fred's right-hand woman and getting most of Bull's scenes and plot relevance from Abadon's Gate - and she gets Spared by the Adaptation for both her Sam's death and Bull's.
• Fanfic Fuel: There's a lot of speculation throw about in the fanbase that The Expanse takes place in the same universe as The Martian, fueled by the constant back-and-forth jokes, jabs, jives and vague cryptic references between their respective authors. Not helping matters is that in-universe, the Free Navy owns a Martian ship called the Mark Watney. While it's typically Earth that names their ships after famous, and supposed, historical figures, Mars isn't above this practice either, with ship names such as Armstrong and Hammurabi.
• Fridge Horror: After Marco's attack on Earth halfway through Nemesis Games, what happened to the characters we last saw either living there or headed there for other reasons? Basia's daughter? Anna's wife and daughter? Havelock? One or more of them might have been off-world for any number of reasons, but if they weren't, the situation doesn't look good.
  • Thankfully, Anna and her family are all revealed to be alive in the next book. No word on anyone else though.
• Magnificent Bastard: From the Auberon novella: Erich re-emerges from the 30-year timeskip as the ruler of the eponymous planet's underworld. He embarks on a campaign to blackmail Laconian governor Biryar Rittenaur. Erich first tries to bribe Biryar, and when that fails, manages to escape simply by implying that Biryar's guards are in his pocket. Erich is ruthless to his enemies, but supportive to his allies. When Erich blackmails Biyrar over Biryar's wife embezzling money from Laconia, Biryar tries to kill himself. Erich talks Biryar down and convinces him to be more true to himself by accepting Erich and his corruption. Erich was introduced as a petty criminal with no legal status and ends the series as the shadow ruler of an entire planet.
• Moment of Awesome: In Nemesis Games, a power-armored Bobbie Draper surfs on a laser-guided missile to save a free-floating Naomi drifting in vacuum.
• Paranoia Fuel: Slugs that can kill with a touch? Scary, but as long as you pay attention you should be fine. They get a lot scarier when an alien microorganism colonizes your eye, and suddenly you can't see.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Elvi Okoye was a deeply unpopular character in Cibola Burn, with her Celeb Crush on Holden turning her into a one-note character, and then getting resolved in the most contrived manner imaginable. Thankfully, when she returns for the final two books, she's much more interesting, with her position in the Laconian Science Department putting her in a position to get a good look at Laconia's inner workings and the protomolecule experiments.
• The Scrappy:
  • Despite the Character Development and the Freudian Excuse of being raised by a complete narcissistic sociopath, a lot of readers still can't find anything redeemable about Filip Inaros. Being the person who orchestrated the near-destruction of Earth will do that.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Clarissa Mao. By the time she joins up with the Roci crew, she's been through the proverbial wringer, and it's implied she still has nightmares. Having as much blood on her hands as she does, she may never fully come to terms with herself. As of Clarissa's death in Persepolis Rising she still hasn't, although she has gained the forgiveness and trust of the rest of the crew. The implants she intended to use to kill Holden—and which are in turn killing her in the long run—she uses to save him and his companions in a final sacrifice.
• The Woobie: Teresa Duarte. She was raised to be the heir of an intersteller empire, leaving her with only one true friend, Amos. When her father falls into a coma, she has to deal with the other leaders of Laconia viewing her as a political pawn and Cortázar's attempts to murder her. When she goes to Amos for help, Laconian soldiers gun him down. When she pleads with her father to stop his Assimilation Plot, he ignores her and then tries to kill her when she attempts to disconnect him from the alien station. Whlie Holden saves her and covers her eyes, Teresa still has to be there as Tanaka brutally kills her father.

TV series

• Awesome Music: The show's intro song is an incredible combination of Orchestral Bombing and One-Woman Wail that perfectly fits the intro's Time Lapse of mankind's expansion throughout the solar system.
• Broken Base:
  • The more initially antagonistic relationship between the members of the Rocinante, especially in comparison to their book counterparts. While many fans have stated that they feel it was a necessary change so as to add more interpersonal drama aboard the Roci and make the show more interesting for a television audience, others have complained that it just comes across as ultimately contrived and makes it harder for the audience to see why the crew would even work together in the first place.
  • The decision to have the "Slow Zone" look more like an alien nebula rather than the starless black void described in the books. Some have described it as more visually interesting and a sensible change so as to better differentiate the region from the "normal" Sol System, while others have complained that it looks uninteresting and loses the more alien emphasis upon the region from the book series. Amusingly, the swirling alien appearance of the TV version of the Slow Zone is exactly what it looks like come the events of Tiamat's Wrath after the aliens unleash the exploding neutron star.
  • A lot of fans aren't happy with how much of the episode limited Season 6's run time is being taken up with Naomi, Marco and Filip's internal drama, whereas other fans like that the show can still dedicate runtime to exploring the character interactions, unlike with certain *other* finales that were forced into a six-episode final season. Both sides generally agree that this would still be improved with either a longer season or a guaranteed future for the show.
• Cargo Ship: Alex literally breaks up with his wife so he can stay with the Rocinante.
• Catharsis Factor: Although "Immolation" is still a super-tense episode, it does allow for some excellent catharsis. All of the primary villains get their comeuppance, and it's immensely satisfying to watch. The vilest of them all, child-torturing Strickland, begs for his life before Amos rightly puts him out of everyone's misery with a 12-gauge to the head. Errinwright is revealed for the manipulative extremist he is and arrested. Nguyen is left to die in a mess of his own making. And Jules-Pierre Mao is taken prisoner by Holden and delivered right to the feet of his old enemy, Avasarala...who, for bonus points, is wearing his daughter Julie's flightsuit from the Razorback, symbolically allowing the now-dead Julie to be present to condemn her father's misdeeds.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • After Amos learns that Holden and Naomi are an Official Couple (with him thankfully taking it quite well), he notes that he and Naomi are Like Brother and Sister...before noting aloud that "I'd still do her if she let me." Wes Chatham's perfect delivery of that line, combined with Holden's face (which is an amazing mix of Flat "What" and Too Much Information) makes the whole moment completely hilarious.
  • Same thing with Amos' "so does that mean we're not fucking any more?" line after an argument with Chandra Wei. It leaves her completely dumbfounded.. until she squeaks out "no, no, I guess."
  • When the Arboghast is "deconstructed" by the protomolecule on Venus in "Caliban's War," everyone has an initially terrified Oh, Crap! realization...Well, except for Iturbi, whose shit-eating grin at being proven right about the existence of extra-solar life makes the scene (somewhat) darkly hilarious.
  • Manéo Jung-Espinoza's Cruel and Unusual Death is easily one of the most horrifying moments in the entire series...but has also become a source of dark humor within the fandom, with many simply describing him as the "Red Splat Guy" (since that's all that was left of him when his ship hit the "Slow Zone").
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • MCRN Lieutenant Lopez underwent such rapid character-development that it made him very likable and memorable despite only appearing in two episodes.
  • After casually executing two of her previous captors while having a bullet lodged in her stomach in "Pyre", OPA member Drummer became a fan favorite. As a result, her screentime and plot relevance is vastly expanded in the TV show compared to her book-counterpart (Samantha Rosenberg), she gets many scenes that were part of Bull's plotline in Abbadon's Gate (instead of Sam's function in the plot of that book, which is given to Naomi and a mauve shirt OPA member), and she even survives Bull's death scene from the book.
  • Klaes Ashford, having been a particularly unlikable antagonist in Abbadon's Gate, has turned into a fan favorite as well. Unlike his book counterpart, Ashford in the series is a competent, respected leader who doesn't let politics get in the way of common sense, and has a greater vision than most of the OPA leadership except perhaps Fred Johnson.
    • It also helps that he gets parts of Bull's characterization and plot from the books^note  Bull was wisely edited out for the TV show, given that he was basically just Miller 2.0, or how Miller would have been if somebody saved him from his alcoholism and gave him the home / group-belonging he was desperately longing for. To further clarify, Bull's scenes were reassigned to Ashford and Drummer., doesn't start out as the ship's captain, and gets a new backstory as a space pirate who tragically lost a child.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: In the show, Chrisjen Avasarala is mostly Happily Married to Arjun for the first four seasons. However, while that does have its fans, most fans prefer to ship Chrisjen with Bobbie Draper. This is mainly due to the chemistry between their actresses and their Odd Friendship that formed from having to work together in Seasons 2 and 3. On Archive of Our Own, for example, Chrisjen/Bobbie has a little over 9 times as many fanfics as Chrisjen/Arjun.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: Marco Inaros, full stop. He's a handsome looking man to be sure, but his sense of style...or lack thereof, is a hot mess. Dresses like a Goodwill bargain-bin Char Aznable? Check. Raided Drummer's entire supply of eyeliner? Check. Desperately trying to bring back man buns? Jesus, check.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With the revived Battlestar Galactica, what with both series being (relatively) hard sci-fi Space Operas that give a fundamentally cynical and philosophical analysis upon humanity as they progressed into the stars.
  • With Game of Thrones. In fact, a very popular turn of phrase when The Expanse first started to get significant critical acclaim was describing it as Battlestar Galactica meets Game of Thrones.
• Funny Moments: Has its own page.
• Genius Bonus:
  • In Season 4, Amos is shown trading bullets for drinks. An apocryphal story says that, in the Old West, a single bullet could be bartered for a small portion of whiskey leading to the term "shot of whiskey" and the "shot glass".
  • The OPA vessel Guy Molinari is named for Guy Molinari, a US congressman from New York whose name is also used for a class of vessels in the Staten Island Ferry system. Fittingly, the ship is a ferry (and, given the timeframe, a very old one for the name to still be significant).
  • Holden is shown eating yakamein while on Tycho Station. Yakamein originates from New Orleans and is a fusion of Chinese and Creole cuisines, appropriate for a melting-pot culture like that of the Belt.
• Growing the Beard: Season 1 was critically acclaimed, but Season 2 is where the show became significantly bolder and the plot became more intricate, with the characters becoming significantly more interesting and well-developed as consequence. Amusingly enough, this was also around the time the series got the cred for being able to use the occasional Precision F-Strike (albeit censored, muffled, or replaced with "forget you" on some broadcasts) to better match its characters to the ones in the books. Season 3 introduces the Belter Creole equivalent 'felota', which allows the writers to get away with a lot more than in previous seasons (at least for Belter characters—Drummer and Ashford make copious use of it in particular).
• He Really Can Act:
  • While his performance was never seen as necessarily bad, Steven Strait's performance as Jim Holden was often seen as being the comparative "weak link" out of the Rocinante crew. However, his surprisingly captivating depiction of someone undergoing rapid Sanity Slippage in "It Reaches Out" was widely praised and seen as some of his best work on the show.
  • Wes Chatham's performance as Amos Burton has been one of the most consistently praised aspects of the series, with his genuinely convincing depiction of a near-sociopath attempting to find a moral compass being both surprisingly engaging, genuinely unsettling, and weirdly endearing. Many fans have even favorably compared his "I am that guy" line from "Immolation" with "I am the one who knocks!"
  • While initially seen as just an unlikable jarhead, Frankie Adams as Bobbie Draper got a much better reception as Season 2 went on and she was able to show more of her own impressive acting range beyond the generic "tough guy" marine persona originally shackled to her.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Over a private dinner, Chrisjen Avasarala states after learning of the protomolecule's extrasolar origins that the idea of aliens existing is completely terrifying as they are unequipped to handle them if they are a threat. Fans may find this hilarious as Chrisjen's actor, Shohreh Aghdashloo, played a similar authority figure character in another science fiction franchise who was herself an alien.
• Les Yay:
  • Naomi and Drummer have copious amounts of sexual tension from the moment they start bonding during "Static." When Naomi leaves the Behemoth, it's treated very similarly to a break-up, leading fans to speculate. Season 5's "Winnipesaukee" removes any ambiguity from Drummer's side, at least: when Drummer is talking to Oksana while believing that Naomi is dead, she explicitly refers to her as "a woman that I loved". Oksana then asks if Drummer loves her and the rest of their crewmates (who are all in a (polyamorous) relationship with each other) as much as she loved Naomi, which Drummer affirms.
  • Ambiguously Bi Tilly Fagan has a fairly flirty relationship with canonically gay Anna.
• Magnificent Bastard: While Sadavir Errinwright begins as a pawn for Mao, when Mao turns on him, Errinwright shows how skilled a manipulator he is. Errinwright assassinates Mao's Martian contact and starts a war between Earth and Mars to force Mao to work for him. Seeking to use Mao's protomolecule hybrid supersoldiers to give Earth the strength to conquer Mars and remain secure, Errinwright begins a campaign to undermine the Secretary General's anti-war speechwriter Anna, first convincing her that her actions allowed Mars to kill millions in South America and then altering a speech she wrote to call for the annexation of Mars. Errinwright is ultimately undone when Avasarala accomplishes the almost-impossible task of obtaining a copy of a message between Errinwright and Mao and sends it to Anna. When Errinwright realizes that he's lost, he calmly admits to his crimes and remains dignified as security takes him away.
• Memetic Badass: Drummer, who many fans have openly claimed is only kept from single-handedly conquering the entire universe by her loyalty to Fred Johnson. Her badass reputation only increased after she was paralyzed from a spine injury, only to build working mechanical legs/prosthetics for herself and continues to kick ass in the Season 3 finale.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Crossing over with Game of Thrones, the phrase "epic spaceship sex" (in a reference to the "epic boat sex" meme from Thrones) has come up within the fandom.
  • Holden being obsessed with coffee.
  • From season 3: "I am that guy."
  • When referring to Manéo Jung-Espinoza, many people will either call him the "Red Splat Guy" or depict him with a picture of a splattered bug on a windshield.
• Misaimed Fandom: In-universe, Holden was read Don Quixote as a child, and he took it at face value as the story of a noble hero rather than an old man lost in his fantasies.
• Moment of Awesome: Has its own page.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • One of the OPA refugee ships coming from Ganymede in "Pyre" takes all the people from Earth and Mars and throw them out of the airlock.
  • Jules-Pierre Mao crosses it in "Assured Destruction" when he backs up from his Heel–Face Turn and agrees to keep experimenting on the children. The scientists doing the experimenting themselves, including Dr. Strickland, also count here.
  • Admiral Nyugen's cold-blooded murder of long-time colleague Admiral Souther and his subsequent slaughter of the other mutineers in "Triple Point", all so he can commit genocide against Mars.
  • Melba/Clarissa Mao wades into this when she blows up a UNN supply ship and frames Holden for it in an attempt to get him killed. Interestingly deconstructed though, in that she's extremely conflicted about her actions (both before and after pressing the button) and ultimately pulls a Heel–Face Turn in the season finale, saving the entirety of humanity in the process.
  • Avasarala callously uses her son's death for political gain in a speech full of Crocodile Tears to make herself more relatable. Arjun is naturally furious about it and says they should separate shortly afterward. And she even loses the election anyway, making it All for Nothing.
  • Marco Inaros wants more rights for Belters and wants the Belt to become its own superpower that's no longer oppressed by the "Inners". This would be a noble goal if he didn't take insanely extreme methods to try to assert control: he uses Martian stealth technology to drop numerous asteroids onto the Earth, killing millions of innocent people, threatens to unleash the protomolecule onto Earth and/or Mars if either of them defy him, and claims that all of the Ring Worlds now belong to Belters, essentially making him far more of a tyrant than the Inners ever were to Belters.
• Nightmare Fuel: Being a pretty damn hard sci-fi take on the Space Opera genre, the series has its own page for a damn good reason.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Jonathan Banks appears for all of three minutes in the pilot episode, playing a man suffering from Space Madness, and milks every moment for all it's worth.
  • Veteran character actor Daniel Kash only really has one scene as head protogen scientist Dr. Antony Dresden (excluding a Season 1 cameo toward the end via a recording) but he is highly memorable and deeply chilling in his portrayal of someone who truly believes the ends justifies the means. Even after all the horrors he's wrought, he somehow manages to make the promise of what the protomolecule can do not only vital, but strangely attractive. It's little wonder that Fred and Holden almost immediately start to become convinced by the sheer passion and logic of his argument.
  • The scenes with Manéo Jung-Espinoza in "Delta-V" ultimately aren't very long, but Zach Villa's surprisingly endearing performance and his memorably horrific death have made it nearly impossible to forget him.
• Questionable Casting: Arjun Avasarala was recast for Season 4, with Michael Benyear replacing Brian George, who was unavailable. The differences are so striking that essentially nobody realized they were meant to be the same character, and Benyear makes no attempt to emulate George's performance. Benyear looks completely different from George, uses a different accent, plays the role a little more coldly than George's warm portrayal, and is much younger than either Brian George or Shoreh Aghdashloo. It inadvertently ends up looking like Chrisjen just ditched her first husband for a boytoy between seasons. This entire situation is made even weirder with the fact that Brian George does reprise the role for Telltale Games series.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Some fans found Bobbie Draper to initially be incredibly annoying for her frequent gun-ho behavior on the Earth/Mars conflict, viewing her personality as largely flat outside of this trait. However, after the Ganymede disaster, learning about Mars' experiments, and getting a healthy dose of Character Development, Bobbie began to convince non-book fans that there was more to her character, and has now become a fan favorite.
  • Klaes Ashford went from being a largely unlikable and unsympathetic mutineer in the books to an incredibly likable Reasonable Authority Figure in the series, to the point that some fans have argued that he honestly might actually be a better fit for the captain of the Behemoth than Drummer.
  • Elvi Okoye was The Scrappy in Cibola Burn due to her over-the-top Celeb Crush on Holden that gets resolved too quickly. When adapting this novel into Season 4, the show wisely does away with this; instead, Holden and Elvi start off not completely seeing eye-to-eye, but gradually gain increasing respect for each other and become Fire-Forged Friends as they work together to save everyone on Ilus, culminating in Elvi playing a very important role in the climax. All throughout, their camaraderie remains completely platonic on both sides, and Elvi instead gets Ship Tease with Fayez (the guy she rather-suddenly ends up with in the books). As a result, she is much less annoying and more likable in this version.
• Sacred Cow: In part after the "#SaveTheExpanse" fan campaign which successfully got the series Un-Cancelled, this attitude has started to seep into the fandom.
• The Scrappy: Come Season 3, Diogo Harari has become very unsympathetic and his once-amusing self-delusions have turned him into an infuriating Smug Snake.
• Signature Scene:
  • The Donnager battle in "CQB" is frequently cited as one of the most realistic Space Battles ever put to screen. And it's no less exciting for it.
  • On a more spoiler-ridden note, Miller meeting with Julie Mao for one last time on Eros at the climax of "Home" and Chrisjen's epic Badass Boast in "Paradigm Shift" are often held up as two of the best moments in the entire series.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • When walking up to the Belter undergoing gravity torture in "Dulcinea", Chrisjen bizarrely shrinks as she goes from the left of the screen to the right, indicating that they were shooting on a forced perspective set.
  • Minor case, but most of the more complex Belter tattoos are pretty obvious decal tats. The one on Drummer's neck is just the most prominent example, and it gets especially grating in Season 3 due to the large number of Belters on the Behemoth.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • Downplayed since the series is already based on a book series. That said, some fans favorably compared the series to the Honor Harrington novels, especially in regards to the main similarities in how their long-term world building, political maneuvering and progressive technological developments that dramatically alter the military and political landscape are utilized within the narrative.
  • The show already has a video game adaptation of sorts. It's called Call Of Duty Infinite Warfare which has the exact same plot of a United Nations-dominated Earth fighting a rebellious force of space colonists who want to break away from the government and form their own nation.
• Squick: As with the books, virtually anything to do with the protomolecule, though special mention probably has to go to Katoa's "disassembly" of his nurse in "Reload."
• Stoic Woobie: Over the course of the series, Camina Drummer gets shot through the gut by traitors on Tycho Station, has her spine severed by being crushed under heavy machinery in the slow zone, gets brutally friend-zoned by Naomi, becomes disillusioned with a leader she trusted, spends a season and a half building up a sweet Odd Friendship with Ashford only for him to be killed (which she blames herself for, not without reason), is forced to submit to the man who killed him, watches her polyamorous family die or leave her one by one and finally her fleet gets cut to pieces and her second in command dies in a kamikaze charge in the finale. She does not let any of this slow her down much.
• Strangled by the Red String: Holden and Naomi's relationship is prone to complaints about how the storylines can grind to a halt while they work out romantic drama many people aren't interested in.
• Take That, Scrappy!: After becoming an insufferably arrogant and idiotic Jerkass throughout Season 3, Diogo Harata gets a vicious verbal and physical beatdown by Ashford before having an elevator dropped on him by Naomi in "Abbadon's Gate."
• Tear Jerker: Has its own page, though special mention must be given to when Miller finally meets Julie face-to-face in "Home" and he prevails upon what's left of her humanity to steer Eros away from Earth.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Some fans were disappointed with the mid-Season 3 Time Skip that shifted the show's focus to the Ring, as they felt that not only were the intervening events (i.e. the uprooting of the Protogen conspiracy) on both Earth and Mars) interesting enough to watch in their own right, but also that trying to then stuff all of the third novel into just half a season left that material feeling rushed as well.
  • Not showing any of the major space conflicts in the final season. There are some Bombers on the Screen style graphics, but all the ship combat shown is between small handful of ships and the battles between the large combat groups are handwaved through dialogue.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The effects used for the spaceships and space battles are pretty cool to look at, but the opening sequence for episode 1 (and the entirety of Season 2) deserves special mention. It shows the progress of humanity over the next two hundred or so years and is simply gorgeous.
  • The inside of Eros after the protomolecule has fully taken over in "Leviathan Wakes" is truly a sight to behold, and it gets ever more gorgeous the closer Miller draws to its core.
  • The slingshot maneuver in "Here There Be Dragons" may be Artistic License – Physics, but it's absolutely stunning to look at.
  • The fate of the Arboghast, which takes a seemingly simple shot and turns it into something intricately beautiful.
  • The climax shot of Caliban's War where The "Caliban" Protomolecule creature is crawling over the hull of the Rocinante is just breathtaking.
  • The show is generally amazingly good at making the audience believe that characters are floating in Zero G whenever she ships aren't under thrust and the characters couldn't lock down to the floor with magnetic boots. Case in point: the forced-slowdown situation in the Season 3 episode "Fallen World".
• WTH, Costuming Department?: The show uses off-the-shelf rank insignia and applies them haphazardly and inconsistently. So a yacht captain wears the insignia of a US Army sergeant major while MCRN captains' insignia change from episode to episode and Gunnery Sergeant Draper wears the same stripes as an MCRN lieutenant.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Melba/Clarissa Mao might be a villainous saboteur and murderer, but she's clearly unwell and suffering for her father's sins. She's tormented by her actions, but feels she's come too far to stop now, and we get a good view of how abysmally she was treated by her own father.^note Whereas in the book, it was implied she was "Daddy's darling" or at least not The Unfavorite. Furthermore, Anna immediately likes her instead of realizing "This woman wants to kill me" just from looking into her eyes the first time they met, which helps give Melba more moral ambiguity as consequence. Also, given that we don't get her narrative POV and self-justification thoughts in the TV show, she comes across as far less of a sociopath than in the first half of the novel-version of Abbadon's Gate.