Season 1, Episode 4:
CQB
The Donnager gets attacked by a mysterious fleet. Miller's pursuit of Julie leads him to a difficult-to-identify corpse. Avasarala and Fred Johnson both observe the Donnager attack, but are too far away to do anything about it.
Tropes:
- Almost Dead Guy: Lopez stays alive for just long enough to turn over control of the Tachi to the Canterbury survivors.
- Artistic License – Physics: A railgun shot tears through the pressurized brig without igniting the air, spraying shrapnel throughout the cabin, or even noticeably warping the points where it penetrated the wall.
- Boom, Headshot!: Shed meets his end by way of a headshot. With a railgun. That cleanly decapitates him.
- Continuous Decompression: Downplayed as those inside have time to seal it and the equipment to do so. Unfortunately, all the rooms around them are also exposed to vacuum, meaning they are trapped in there and running out of oxygen. Alex takes a sedative to buy them time, and fortunately Holden is able to bargain for the marines to rescue them too.
- Falling into the Cockpit: The four remaining Canterbury crew members fall into a badass corvette - the Tachi. Alex has to pilot it out of the Donnager while still groggy from the sedative he took.
- Fantastic Racism: The Martians towards Earthers.
- Foreshadowing: Assuming the series continues to follow the books, Avasarala's conversation with her grandson on the roof foreshadows the main plot of book 5 (notably, in the book published most recently before the TV series began).
- Generation Ship: The Nauvoo, which is being built by OPA-aligned Belters for a century-long Mormon colonization attempt on Tau Ceti.
- Not With the Safety On, You Won't: Holden gets into a Mexican Standoff with a wounded soldier from the people who boarded the Donnager. Unfortunately, he's using the man's own rifle which is safety-keyed not to shoot his own armor.
- Only Mostly Dead: Havelock survives being impaled and left for dead.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: The Donnager's captain, although angry after Holden blamed Mars for the attack on the Canterbury, is willing to make a deal with him, and when it turns out that the ships attacking the Donnager were the same as those that attacked the Canterbury, makes sure to get Holden to safety so he can testify to what happened.
- Red Shirt Army: The entire crew of the Donnager.
- Sacrificial Lamb: Shed has been set up to be one of the main characters of the show for the first few episodes, but gets suddenly decapitated in the middle of the attack on the Donnager.
- Self-Destruct Mechanism: As soon as the corvette gets away, Captain Yao blows up the Donnager to prevent their mysterious attackers from capturing it.
- Shame If Something Happened: Fred Johnson meaningfully warns that, if he's replaced as project manager on the Nauvoo, all sorts of things might go wrong with the ship. Of course, he can keep those bad things from happening, as long as he keeps the job.
- Sitting on the Roof: Or lying on it, in this case.
- Spaceship Slingshot Stunt: Miller finds a group of people betting on a fatal attempt to slingshot around Jupiter.
- Tempting Fate: Shed tells Alex that everything's going to be alright seconds before a stray shot decapitates him and opens a hole into the vacuum of space.
- Title Drop: When the Donnager starts shaking violently, Alex says that it can only mean one thing: "CQB".
- Two-Keyed Lock: The self-destruct on the Donnager requires thumbprints from both Yao and her lieutenant.
