The Expanse / Tropes A to E

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A

• Aborted Arc: Stealth technology found in the hands of the OPA is what kicks off the story for Chrisjen Avasarala on Earth, and initially leads her to believe that the OPA and Mars have entered into an alliance. During her investigation she learns that it is Protogen, not Mars, which is building a secret fleet of stealth warships as part of a massive conspiracy, and they are not supplying stealth technology to the OPA. After the reveal, how the OPA obtained those original samples — or what they were going to be used for — is never examined again. Word of God says that those samples went to Marco Inaros, likely as part of his plan to use stealth rocks against Earth.
• Absent Aliens:
  • Played with. The series starts with no aliens present in the solar system, but Dresden determines that the protomolecule is extra-solar in nature and is ecstatic that it's proof of alien life. Season 3 reveals that it was created by a race of Precursors who used it to build and maintain their Portal Network before something wiped them all out.
  • Season 4 provides hard proof that at least some primitive alien life exists, with Ilus being home to some basic lifeforms.
  • In season five, it is revealed that the entities responsible for the destruction of the Builders still exist.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Dialogue indicates that Belters as a whole are taller and thinner than Inners due to growing up in zero-g, and anti-belter slurs ("skinnies" and "long-bone") are based around this. Due to the impracticality of finding so many actors who fit that description, this is generally ignored when it comes to the actual body types portrayed onscreen.
• Ace Pilot:
  • Julie Mao's most treasured possession is her space racing pinnace, the Razorback, and she was an award-winning pilot at its helm.
  • Alex Kamal flew with the Martian Navy for twenty years, but in all that time he was only on transports and even describes himself as a "glorified bus driver". Once he fell into the cockpit of the frigate Rocinante he found his true potential and demonstrated exceptional skill.
• Accidental Discovery: Solomon Epstein was a hobbyist who tinkered with his used spaceship trying to get slightly better fuel efficiency. Instead he accidentally unlocked the secret to unlimited acceleration, making interplanetary travel a matter of days rather than weeks/months.
• Action Dad: Deconstructed by Alex, who's estranged from his ex-wife and son because he prefers the action of piloting spacecraft, even if it's fairly pedestrian ice-hauling. Ultimately, he admits that as much as he loves his family, he loves flying more, and his wife files for divorce.
• Action Girl:
  • Julie Mao might be the richest heiress in the System, but she has rejected her father's money and joined the OPA. With this experience comes respectable hand-to-hand fighting skills, and an iron determination that even bends the will of the protmolecule.
  • Naomi Nagata hates combat and often refuses to carry a weapon, but her engineering skills mean that she often comes out on top anyway.
  • Gunnery Sergeant Bobbie Draper is a female Martian Space Marine capable of winning an arm-wrestle with her own Powered Armor. Repeatedly. The rest of the badass marines consider these events a spectacle.
  • Camina Drummer would rather be an administrator than a fighter, but when administration fails she is one of the best fighters in the Belt.
• Action Survivor:
  • The survivors from the Canterbury are functionally just a group of blue-collar workers. Holden was dishonorably discharged from the Navy after serving only a short period, and Alex went his entire 20-year career never seeing combat. Naomi Nagata once ran with the OPA, but only as a teenage gang member, not the sleeper operative that martians initially accuse her of being. Only Amos is comfortable or experienced with violence.
  • In Season 2, Prax is a botanist, who barely escapes a collapsing dome on Ganymede and becomes just another refugee. He returns to the station with the Rocinante crew to search for his missing daughter.
• Actor Allusion:
  • Elias Toufexis once again plays a spy with cybernetic implants. Maybe he didn't ask for this either.
  • This is not Shohreh Aghdashloo's first role as a resolute authority figure who bends the rules to help her people and save them from destruction in a science fiction franchise.
  • This is not the first time Daniel Kash has been a villain associated with the name Dresden.
  • François Chau is once again experimenting with alien technology although he's left his ethics behind.
  • Burn Gorman once again plays a sociopathic killer. This also isn't his first time dealing with dangerous alien technology.
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade:
  • In the books, the survivors from the Canterbury know each other fairly well and get along pretty much from the start, while the show makes them more distant and argumentative in the beginning. This gives them a collective Season one arc turning into Fire-Forged Friends.
  • Avasarala's son was killed in a skiing accident in the books, but in the show he was a UNN soldier killed by the OPA, giving her an It's Personal interest in the OPA and understanding that War Is Hell.
  • Inverted with Holden and Naomi's Relationship Upgrade. In the novels, Naomi initially refuses Holden until he can prove she's a genuine Love Interest rather than a Lust Object because of his Ethical Slut past on the Canterbury. In the show, this isn't an aspect of Holden's backstory and they get together without any qualms in "Safe".
  • In the novels, Alex merely has an ex-wife to get over. In the series, they are still together and have a son, which makes Alex staying aboard the Rocinante an act of abandonment that tears their family apart.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Alex and Amos are both younger, slimmer, and less bald than their literary counterparts.
• Adaptational Badass: The Pella, the flagship of Marcos Inaros, is given this treatment when it debuts in the fifth season. In the books, it was a Corvette-class like the Rocinante. In the TV show, it's upgraded to a full-blown light cruiser. Word of God admits that this was done to make the ship scarier.
• Adaptational Early Appearance:
  • Chrisjen Avasarala doesn't appear until the second book, but she's a major character from the first episode of the show in order to provide an Earth-perspective to political events.
  • Bobbie Draper also doesn't appear until the second book, but she's brought into the show at the start of the second season in order to provide a Martian perspective on the destruction of Phoebe Station. This also provides more development for her squad prior to their deaths.
  • Camina Drummer doesn't appear until the fifth novel, but she is introduced in season two filling in for other characters.
  • Methodist pastor Anna Volovodov, a POV character in the third book, is given an Adaptational Backstory Change and a subplot in the first half of the third season. This better establishes her character and bridges the gap between the first and second halves of the season.
  • Marco Inaros, the main villain of the fifth book, is given a subplot while the show is still adapting Book 4 in order to better establish how the opening of the Ring gates has affected the main characters who aren't on the Rocinante.
• Adaptational Heroism: Klaes Ashford is an incompetent, borderline-crazy ship captain in the novels who is a problem to work with even before things go crazy. He's far more well-meaning and reasonable in the show. When he takes a directly antagonistic role at the end of season 3 he's a Well-Intentioned Extremist that even his opponents recognize is doing what he thinks is the right thing.
• Adaptational Late Appearance: In Season 3, the book character Carlos "Bull" de Baca was Adapted Out and his role mostly given to an Adaptational Early Appearance for Camina Drummer. However, by Season 5 Adaptation Expansion had moved Drummer beyond her Book 5 introduction as Fred Johnson's security chief, so Bull is introduced then and in that role instead.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: While generally quite faithful to the novels, Avasarala's more abrasive Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior! and Sir Swears-a-Lot traits are downplayed. It's perhaps no coincidence that "Windmills", the first episode where she exclaims "Shit!", was penned by the guys who wrote the novels.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Not "villainy" per se, but in the first novel Holden is idealistic to a fault, whereas the show makes him a bit Darker and Edgier while still acting as the crew's voice for heroic idealism. He also reluctantly destroys a defenseless medical ship that threatens to expose his operation to destroy Eros in "Godspeed", while the closest thing he did in the book was threaten a UN science ship being escorted to Eros, and they backed off before he was forced to fire.
  • Chrisjen Avasarala doesn't condone or oversee Cold-Blooded Torture in the novels, while it is her second scene in the series.
  • Miller doesn't personally accept bribes in the book, and his internal narration explicitly describes the Julie Mao case as his first 'kidnap job'. In the series he takes bribes to overlook faulty maintenance (Although he does reverse once he sees the breakdown affects) and he doesn't dwell on the kidnap job when it is handed to him.
  • In "Dulcinea", Capt. McDowell ignores the Distress Call and calls whoever leaked it a "piece of shit do-gooder." In the novel, Holden notes that if McDowell had really wanted to Refuse the Call he'd have done so quietly, and his public discussion is just to set up himself and Holden as both being right in front of the crew.
  • The crew of the Donnager is portrayed more antagonistically by seizing and roughly-handling Holden's crew rather than rushing to save them from the pursuing mystery ships. Holden also describes Lopez's interrogation as "surprisingly human" in the novel, unlike the steely interrogations of the show. The show also portrays the Martians as vindictive in dealing with the Xinglong, while the books leave it ambiguous whether the incident was a suicidal gesture of defiance, an accidental shooting by antsy Martians, or both.
  • Star Helix, while still very much Law Enforcement, Inc., at least attempts to act like a legitimate police force in the books rather than a gang of hired thugs. The same can be said of Dawes and his followers, who are explicitly members of OPA's security apparatus (and appear to operate within a chain of command and follow rules of their own) rather than just another gang on Ceres.
  • The OPA, while disparaged by its opponents (Avasarala calls them "Hezbollah of the vacuum" and "a rugby scrum with a currency"), are actually a functioning government with an established hierarchy, court system, currency, security apparatus, and foreign policy in the novels, capable of controlling piracy and delivering disaster relief without any assistance from the Inner Planets. The series tends to portray them as a street gang writ large throughout the first and second seasons, relying on real and implied threats to get their way.
  • In the show, Bobbie Draper starts out as a Blood Knight who's itching for a fight because of her serious grudge against Earth. In the books, she staunchly refuses to counteract the interests of her home-world but is otherwise a Gentle Giant who struggles with PTSD rather than Fantastic Racism. This is a part of her Adaptational Early Appearance, as she shifts towards her book counterpart after the attack on Ganymede, which is where her book story began.
  • In the books, Captain Martens is a calm chaplain who helps Bobbie deal with her PTSD. In the show, meanwhile, he's a Faux Affably Evil political officer who's a part of the conspiracy around the protomolecule.
• Adaptation Distillation: In contrast to the 15 episodes spent adapting the first book and the 14 episodes spent adapting the second, only 7 episodes are used to adapt Abaddon's Gate, meaning that many of the novel's subplots are either trimmed, skipped over or cut out entirely.
• Adaptation Dye-Job:
  • A minor point, but in the books Bobbie Draper's Powered Armor is a distinctive red to camouflage against the Martian surface. In the show, it's a plain, sterile grey.
  • Anna Volovodov in the books is a redhead, while here she's a blonde.
• Adaptation Expansion: By taking 10 episodes to adapt just 400 pages of a nearly 600 page novel in Season 1 there's room for quite a bit of this.
  • Chrisjen Avasarala, an Iconic Sequel Character from the second novel, is brought forward into Season 1 with an all-new Third Line, Some Waiting plot of her own. This causes a bit of Adaptation Deviation once the show starts adapting her subplot from Book 2.
  • Miller's investigation into Julie Mao is much more in-depth, with Anderson Dawes in particular taking on a much broader antagonist role.
  • Holden's crew run into problems in Season 1 that they don't have in the first book, particularly the Sinking Ship Scenario in "The Big Empty" and everything to do with the stowaway spy Kenzo in "Windmills". Also, the strict POV structure of the books means that whenever Season 1 separates Holden from his crew like in "CQB" or "Leviathan Wakes", one group or the other is acting out new material (Holden in "CQB", his crew in "Leviathan Wakes").
  • Havelock loses his post-Ceres involvement in the story, but does get his own mini-arc on Ceres in the first few episodes.
  • Some events only mentioned in the books, such as the destruction of Anderson Station and the Xinglong, are dramatized on-screen.
  • Bobbie Draper, like Avasarala, is only introduced in the second book, so her initial material in Season 2 is original since the show hasn't quite reached that point yet.
• Adaptation Name Change: Ade's last name is Nygaard rather than Tukunbo.
• Admiring the Abomination: Dresden describes what the protomolecule does to a human being as "incredible" and the victim as "fortunate" and "blessed"... while being very careful not to infect himself, of course.
• Advertised Extra: Florence Faivre (Julie Mao) is mostly relegated to photos and video clips except for a few memorable sequences in "Dulcinea", "Critical Mass", and "Home".
• Aerith and Bob: There's Jim and Joe, Fred and Naomi... and then there's Praxidike and Sadavir.
• Afraid of Blood: Alex doesn't deal well with seeing Amos' protruding leg bone in "Back to the Butcher".
• After-Action Patch-Up:
  • Amos suffers a compound leg fracture during the crew's escape from the Donnager that requires medical attention from Naomi and Holden at the start of "Back to the Butcher."
  • Miller and Octavia have one that results in an awkward Almost Kiss after she saves his life in "Rock Bottom".
  • Holden and Naomi share a quiet moment while she's setting the Auto Doc to treat his radiation poisoning in "Leviathan Wakes".
• Age Lift: Nami, the daughter of Anna and Nono, is introduced as a baby or toddler in the novels; In the TV series, she's a few years older.
• The Alcoholic:
  • Miller shows signs of this, like many a fellow Hardboiled Detective.
  • Amos claims Holden can find the Canterbury's XO by following the reek of whiskey.
  • The Asteroid Miner Mateo is mildly-to-completely soused throughout his entire One-Shot Character story.
• Alien Geometries: The inhabitants of Ceres and Eros Stations live in miles and miles of tunnels that spiral beneath the asteroids' surface. "Down" is oriented outwards towards the outer crust because the stations' gravity is artificially created via centrifugal force rather than the asteroids' mass. Ceres Station's introduction in the premiere episode provides some idea of how internal tunnels are oriented.
• All for Nothing: Mars has spent generations working on terraforming their planet, dedicating whole lifetimes to work that they will not live to see completed. When the ring gates opened the need to terraform a planet suddenly became irrelevant, and many Martians view all the previous work as pointless now.
• Alliterative Name: Naomi Nagata, Arjun Avasarala, and Mei Meng.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Bobbie and her squad are very hard on one of the squadmembers because he was born on Earth, rather than being native-born martian.
• All There in the Manual:
  • It's never explained on-screen, but Miller rousing the CPM mercenaries to Let's You and Him Fight by calling them "just meat for the machine" is ironic because CPM literally stands for Carne Por la Machina ("meat for the machine"), which is doubly appropriate since they're being left as literal meat for the protomolecule.
  • It's implied during Avasarala's conversation with her grandson in "CQB", but the novels (and later seasons) make it explicit that the Colony Drop is the new Mutually Assured Destruction between Earth and Mars.
• Almost Dead Guy: Lt. Lopez survives just long enough to turn over control of the Tachi to Holden's crew and is finished off by the extremely high-g burn the ship makes to escape the battle.
• Almost Kiss: Miller and Octavia have one as he's comforting her about shooting two people to save his life. It takes the awkward silence route when Miller turns away.
• Almost Out of Oxygen: The crew's main problem during the Sinking Ship Scenario in "The Big Empty", made worse when a broken airlock requires them to vent the ship to make repairs. Then it gets even worse when Alex's respirator craps out, forcing Shed to share with him, resulting in both suffering this inside their suits.
• Ambiguous Situation: Diogo is left Dramatic Space Drifting by his uncle Mateo in "Rock Bottom", and isn't seen again until six episodes later when he shows up again as part of the OPA assault team in "Doors and Corners."
• Ambiguously Jewish: Amos sports two Hebrew tattoos, though these are actor Wes Chatham's actual tattoos that the showrunners decided not to cover up. One along his outer forearm is Hebrew lettering that (although a little garbled) translates to "State your opinion." He also has "Timshel" written in Roman letters on the inside of his forearm, which means "thou shalt rule over it" in reference to sin, taken from the Cain and Abel story. Whatever Amos's background, he's almost certainly not a practicing Jew.
• An Arm and a Leg: The ice-hauler Paj loses his arm to a giant block of ice in "Dulcinea".
• And Starring:
  • Shohreh Aghdashloo (Avasarala) gets this.
  • Beginning in Season 3, Thomas Jane receives special billing on episodes he appears in.
• And This Is for...:
  • This is clearly what's going through Holden's mind when he orders the destruction of the ship that blew up Ade Nygaard and the Canterbury.
  • When Miller shoots Filat Kothari on Eros as revenge for impaling his partner Havelock.
• The Anti-Nihilist: Holden knows he lives in a Crapsack World, but that never stops him from trying to make it better.
• Anti-Villain: Anderson Dawes is a main antagonist in the Belt, but he's mostly just a Well-Intentioned Extremist who wants a better life for his people.
• Anyone Can Die: While not as blood-soaked as some other recent Darker and Edgier series, this one doesn't shy away from disposing of characters — even ones who looked about to be major.
  • The series premiere ends with Ade Nygaard and Captain McDowell getting vaporized along with the rest of the Canterbury's crew.
  • Shed Garvey, one of the initial survivors of the Canterbury, is decapitated by a railgun with absolutely zero warning in "CQB".
  • Julie Mao is dead by the time the Rocinante's crew finds her.
  • Miller shoots Dresden to stop him from giving up his information to Fred Johnson.
  • Miller makes a Heroic Sacrifice to save Earth in "Home".
  • Sutton is set up as a foil to the Hot-Blooded Draper, only to be unceremoniously killed during the battle over Ganymede, which also claims the lives of Draper's entire squad.
  • Michael Iturbi and Col. Janus, along with the entire rest of the Arboghast crew, when the ship is disassembled by the protomolecule in the atmosphere of Venus.
  • Admiral Souther, a Reasonable Authority Figure in the UNN, is murdered by Fleet Admiral Nguyen while trying to conduct an Anti-Mutiny against him.
  • Cotyar, Avasarala's Sarcastic Devotee, pulls a Taking You with Me on the protomolecule that's infected him and the rest of the Agatha King by blowing up the entire ship, killing the aforementioned Nguyen as well.
  • Anna's friend Tilly Fagan is one of the many casualties of all the ships' deceleration in the Slow Zone of the Ring, though the fact that Clarissa was attacking and trying to kill her anyway at the time certainly didn't help.
  • Cohen Casti, Monica's blind cameraman, is revealed to be another such casualty, having been Killed Offscreen by being sliced in half with a door.
  • Diogo Harari gets an elevator dropped on him by Naomi while trying to kill her, Holden, and Drummer.
  • Chandra Wei, who becomes Amos's uncertain ally with benefits throughout Season 4, eventually has to choose between her feelings for him and her loyalty to her boss, and sides with the latter, forcing Amos to kill her in self-defense.
  • Klaes Ashford, while attempting to hunt down and kill Belter terrorist Marco Inaros, instead ends up being captured and Thrown Out the Airlock by Marco and his son Filip (though not before flipping them both off and singing up to his last breath as he's executed while also secretly warning the UN of Inaros' planned terrorist attack).
  • In the Season 5 finale, Alex Kamal strokes out after executing a high-g burn to save Naomi.
  • In the season six premier, it is revealed that Marco Inaros had Anderson Dawes Killed Offscreen.
• Apocalypse How: The alien station at the heart of Ring space has a Wave-Motion Gun capable of inflicting a Class X-2, which it used on multiple star systems in a futile attempt to save its creators from... something. The climax of "Abbadon's Gate" has it charging to attack the Solar System after identifying humanity as a threat.
• Apologetic Attacker:
  • In "Assured Destruction", Cotyar reluctantly strangles Theo the electrician before they're picked up by the UNN, because he doesn't trust Theo not to reveal Avasarala's location if the UNN leans on him enough. He apologizes while doing it.
  • In "Delta-V", Clarissa Mao apologizes to Ren before, during, and after murdering him to conceal her sabotage.
• Applied Phlebotinum:
  • A fusion drive that provides constant acceleration in order to allow Casual Interplanetary Travel.
  • The protomolecule is acknowledged in-universe to be capable of defying the laws of physics, making it even harder to cope with for the protagonists, who don't have this luxury.
• Archnemesis Dad: Jules-Pierre Mao to his daughter Julie, who ultimately dies fighting to stop his N.G.O. Superpower from killing millions of Belters. Unfortunately, Julie's body yields enough protomolecule samples to go ahead as planned.
• Arc Symbol: The OPA monogram (which resembles an anarchist A) appears more and more frequently as the organization gains power and support in the Belt.
• Arc Words:
  • "Remember the Cant!"
  • "Milowda na ányimals!" (Belter for "We are not animals!")
  • "(When) the blood's on the wall..."
  • "The work must be finished..."
  • "Doors and corners"
• Arm Cannon: Unlike Earth's ground forces and regular Martian Marines with their more conventional rifles, MMC Special Forces like Draper's unit wield miniature miniguns mounted to the lower right arm of their Powered Armor.
• Armies Are Evil: Neither the United Nations (Earth) or Martian navies are portrayed in a particularly positive light. The UNN has a track record of blasting stations full of families open to vacuum when their workers mutiny rather than let them surrender, and the MCRN is shown to be very hostile and abusive to Asteroid Miners whose ships they inspect in the wake of the destruction of the Donnager.
• Armor Is Useless:
  • No matter how huge a space warship is, any ship-to-ship weapon goes through its hull like a hot knife through butter, and more powerful ones like railguns usually punch clean through the entire vessel without slowing down. It appears that, similar to today's seabound warships, armor has fallen out of favor as a protective measure, and the best (and only) thing you can do to avoid damage is to not get hit in the first place.
  • Completely averted by Martian Goliath-class Powered Armor. These hulking suits are Immune to Bullets and highly resistant to most other forms of damage. It requires heavy weapons or similarly massive trauma to inflict serious damage on them.
  • Also averted during Holden's and Miller's mad dash to the Roci in "Leviathan Wakes". The body armor they took off the dead mercs was intact before they got into the shootout near the docks, but shows multiple bullet impacts afterwards that would've been lethal without the plating's protection.
  • Played completely straight in Season 4. Some characters wear body armor, others don't, but they all die the same when shot.
• Artificial Gravity:
  • Ships simulate gravity by having the decks arranged vertically relative to the engines, with the thrust providing the gravity whenever the engines are active.
  • In "Home", the protomolecule is able to maintain Eros' normal gravity in spite of completely changing its spin and momentum, in addition to providing Inertial Dampening that prevents anyone still on it from being killed by the forces involved.
• Artificial Limbs: Discussed. Many Earthers and Martians can afford to have lost limbs regrown from bio-gel, but many Belters have to make due with advanced prosthetics that can sense heat and pressure. Some even take pride in preferring "a good Belter-built fake."
• Artificial Meat: In "Salvage", Kenzo offers a line on a place that sells "vat-grown ribs".
• Artistic License – Biology: Getting impaled through the solar-plexus should result in death very quickly given the number of important arteries in the region as well as the nerves and tissues that control breathing that make it very close to a real life version of an Instant Death Bullet. Hyper-advanced medical treatment doesn't mean much when you should be dead long before you could receive any.
• Artistic License – Military: Gunnery Sergeant Draper leads a four-man fireteam (sometimes incorrectly called a "squad", itself a common misconception in fiction since a military "squad" refers to a unit of multiple fireteams). Assuming a gunnery sergeant is an E-7 in the Martian Marine Corps as it is in the US Marine Corps, Draper should be the senior NCO (an advisor/staff member to the commanding junior officer) of an entire platoon of around 50 personel, a job that takes about nine years of service to make, for which someone in their early twenties looks really young. Corporal or just plain Sergeant Draper would be a much more fitting rank for the job she's shown doing.
• Artistic License – Physics:
  • Used intentionally and often lampshaded and discussed. The show is hard Sci-Fi by television standards, but it's acknowledged in-universe that the protomolecule doesn't play by the laws of physics, and the fact it can do things the characters simply can't is a major source of drama.
    Holden: Uh, okay, so we broke a few laws of physics here.
  • Accidentally invoked in "Here There Be Dragons": Alex's method of reaching Ganymede without alerting MCRN ships is scientifically sound... except that one of the moons he passes (Cyllene) is way too far from Ganymede to make sense. According to one show runner, this was only caught after the scene had been shot and couldn't be changed.
• Artistic License – Space:
  • The explanation for Dawes' scar is solar radiation heating up the metal components of the old space suits to the point they burn. In reality, most of that radiation energy would bleed off as infrared long before it got hot enough to sear flesh.
  • Given how much the series makes of the dangers of radiation and of its importance to the Protomolecule, it oddly completely ignores how much radiation there is in space just from the Sun when you do not have a planetary magnetic field pushing high-energy particles aside.^note To give some point of reference, spending one year on the International Space Station would expose a person to almost ten times what the U.S. Department of Energy recommends as the maximum annual radiation exposure for people working with radioactive materials. Radiation exposure is currently the greatest single health risk associated with extended stays in space.
• Ascended Extra: Several characters are given more material than their book counterparts.
  • Anderson Dawes is a relatively minor character in the books, while the show embellishes him into a moderate antagonist, first for Miller and later for Holden/Johnson.
  • Havelock is a minor satellite character to Miller in the first novel, but the show gives him his own subplot.
  • Gia, the Hooker with a Heart of Gold who befriends Havelock, is an unnamed, single-scene extra in the books.
  • Holden calls his family once or twice in the books, but nothing with the depth of Avasarala's visit to their farm in "Windmills".
  • Cotyar, a very minor character who acts as head of Avasarala's security detail in Caliban's War, shows up much earlier here and assists in her investigation into the U.N. conspiracy.
• Aspect Ratio Switch: In Season 4, scenes set on and around Ilus/New Terra are shot in anamorphic widescreen rather than 16:9 like the rest of the series.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Filat Kothari, the Belter thug who attacked Havelock.
  • Dresden, the Mad Scientist who massacred all of Eros For Science!. Generally any member of The Conspiracy that gets their comeuppance one way or another, which by the end of Season 3 means every single one, no exceptions.
• Assimilation Backfire: The protomolecule uses Julie Mao, the first thing it absorbed on Eros, as the central node for all the growth on Eros. This allows Miller to talk Julie into diverting Eros into Venus, rather than hitting Earth as originally intended.
• The Assimilator: The protomolecule, given the way Dresden speaks of "letting it learn" by infecting all of Eros Station in "Critical Mass". Not only does it infect living tissue, it mimics the structures it infects. Julie Mao was killed by the protomolecule, then it completely mimicked her — memories and all — to use as a "brain" of sorts.
• As You Know:
  • This exchange in "Dulcinea":
    Ade Nygaard: We're obligated to check it out.
    Capt. McDowell: (annoyed) I'm well-aware of the statute, Miss Nygaard.
  • Lampshaded in "Safe":
    Admiral: Due to light-speed delay, it will be two hours until we get a response—
    Avasarala: I know how the fucking thing works!
• Asteroid Miners: A major occupation for Belters, with the poorest of them living as "rock-hoppers" who spend their lives moving from asteroid to asteroid struggling to harvest enough valuable material to survive while corporations like Pur-N-Kleen use freighters like the Canterbury to harvest ice from Saturn's rings.
• Asteroid Thicket:
  • Averted in the Belt, where asteroids are realistically distributed and reasonably well-charted.
  • Saturn's rings in "Dulcinea" provide a reasonably justified version of the denser conception, which is why the Canterbury is there to collect ice.
  • Another justified and possibly invoked example occurs in "Safe", in the form of an "abandoned asteroid mine": a small thicket implied to have been formed from the remnants of either a very large isolated asteroid or a number of smaller ones intentionally gathered into a vaguely stable gravitational system for more convenient processing.
• Attack of the Political Ad: The OPA employs demagogues and later video announcements to get their anti-Inner message out to the public.
• The Atoner:
  • Fred Johnson's motivation for joining the OPA after what he did to Anderson Station.
  • Clarissa is haunted by the blood she's spilled in her quest for vengeance against Holden. At the end of the third season, she attempts a heroic self-sacrifice, but survives.
• Author Filibuster: Parodied in "Doors and Corners" when Alex's angst about not saving more people from Eros turns into a rant that threatens to Break the Fourth Wall as the camera presses in closer and closer... until he looks over to find Amos has already bailed and offered to buy a random girl drinks if she'll listen to Alex instead.
• Authority Sounds Deep: Avasarala of course has Shohreh Aghdashloo's trademark rasp, and Chad L. Coleman adds noticeable gravel to his already husky voice to portray Fred Johnson.
• Auto Doc: Military ships come equipped with these while civilian ones like the Canterbury seem to lack them. Holden and Miller are very grateful for the one on the Rocinante when they get extreme radiation poisoning in "Leviathan Wakes", though Amos struggles to override the devices when they keep trying to default over to "hospice mode".
• Awesome by Analysis: Fred Johnson neatly demolishes Holden's bluff when they first meet in "Rock Bottom":
  Johnson: That's a Corvette-class Martian frigate that typically crews thirty. I only see two of you. That tells me that you're trying hard to hide your numbers. Tactically, if there were more, as a show of force, you would've brought them out. I'm guessing there are two to four people left on your ship, and I'm confident there's no Martian Navy on board. If they were, they'd be out here speaking with me now. You walked off that ship because you're in charge. At least you think you are...

B

• Backstory:
  • The interrogations in "Remember the Cant" provide a lot of info on Holden's past, some key insights into Naomi's and Alex's, a crucial lowlight from Shed's, and absolutely nothing about Amos.
  • "Back to the Butcher" actually dramatizes the decade-old incident that earned Fred Johnson the titular epithet "The Butcher of Anderson Station" and prompted him to become a Defector from Decadence.
• Badass Boast:
  • Capt. Yao of the Donnager is very confident before battle in "CQB":
    "Well, whoever they are and whatever they've come to do, it's just become a suicide mission. They started this fight, and we're going to finish it."
  • Avasarala gives an epic, long-winded one in "Paradigm Shift", explaining exactly how she'll tear apart the Mao family if they don't hand over Jules-Pierre Mao to pay for his part in The Conspiracy while also giving a veiled threat to Erringwright how she knows that he's part of the protomolecule conspiracy. See the quotes under MegaCorp below for the whole thing.
  • Holden delivers one to the MCRN blockade over Ganymede in "The Monster and the Rocket".
    "This is the warship Rocinante. You're aware of our capabilities more than anyone. We're escorting a vessel of refugees away from your AO. Any ship that opens fire on us will feel the sum total of our state-of-the-art Martian arsenal rammed up its ass. We'll all die together. This is your only and final warning."
• Badass Bureaucrat: Chrisjen Avasarala has never been elected to anything but is currently Number 3 in the government of Earth and knows all the gambits to get information out of her opponents.
• Badass Creed: When preparing for a drop, Bobbie Draper psyches up her Martian Marines with a call-and-response:
  Bobbie: Who's going to feast on Earth's sky and drink their rivers dry? (MMC!) Who's going to stomp their mountains into fine Martian dust? (MMC!) 'Til the rains fall hard on Olympus Mons, who are we? (MMC!) I can't hear you! (MMC!) Who are we?! (MMC!)
• Badass Crew: The Rocinante crew.
• Bad Boss:
  • The Conspiracy abandons many of their Hired Guns on Eros as fodder for the protomolecule.
  • Anderson Dawes never responded to Julie Mao's Distress Call when she was captive on the Anubis or stranded on Eros, either because she failed him or because he considered her not worth the effort.
• Bad Guy Bar: Miller confronts Dawes in one full of OPA members in "Windmills" and tries to start a Bar Brawl.
• The Bad Guys Are Cops: CPM, Eros' Law Enforcement, Inc., are this since they are mainly gangsters and mercenaries hired by The Conspiracy.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: Prax is ready to kill Dr. Strickland, but Amos convinces him that he's not that guy. Once Prax leaves, Amos turns around and says "I am that guy." before doing the deed himself.
• Bad to the Last Drop: 99% of coffee in the Belt would appear to be this. The other 1% is brought there aboard Inner Planets naval ships. That the Belter Creole word for "coffee" literally translates into "shitwater" should tell you everything you need to know.
• Bag of Kidnapping: Miller gets grabbed this way leaving Julie Mao's apartment in "Back to the Butcher".
• Bait the Dog: Sematimba seems at first like a reasonable guy given his affinity for Miller, but then he kills an Eros survivor for slowing him down and threatens to shoot Naomi if she doesn't abandon Holden and Miller.
• Band of Brothels: Prostitution is common and well-policed, and when Amos warns a prostitute that a prospective client is packing a knife, Alex asks, "Are you their union rep?" in a tone that implies he's only partially joking.
• Bar Brawl: Miller tries to start one in "Windmills".
• Bath of Poverty: Although Miller has a functioning shower, it cuts off before he can rinse because water is strictly rationed in the Belt. He later takes the opportunity to finish his shower at Julie Mao's apartment, since she has unlimited water due to her wealth.
• Batman Gambit: In "Remember the Cant", Avasarala "leaks" just enough information to her old friend Ambassador Frank DeGraaf to prompt him to send a panicked message to the Martian government, and deduces from the Martian government's own panicked reaction that they really didn't destroy the Canterbury.
• Battering Ram: Holden summarizes Miller's plan in "Godspeed" as using the Nauvoo as one of these, though in this case, they're not trying to open the target, they're trying to Hurl It into the Sun.
• The Battlestar: MCRN Donnager carries an arsenal of torpedoes and railguns capable of fighting off a small fleet by herself, as well as a large hangar bay housing smaller vessels such as the frigate Tachi.
• Beard of Sorrow: Miller always has Perma-Stubble, but it becomes one of these for a couple episodes after escaping Eros until he shaves in "Static".
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted.
  • In "The Big Empty", Miller and Octavia discuss why Julie Mao would retain a scar in an era that averts Scars Are Forever, with Miller even calling it a "badge of defiance."
  • Julie Mao is the focus of the worst Body Horror in Season 1.
• Before I Change My Mind: Miller tells Diogo this after deciding to take over the Dead Man Switch in "Godspeed".
• Being Good Sucks: Answering a Distress Call always carries the danger of being Lured into a Trap.
• Being Watched: Miller feels this way as he pushes deeper into the protomolecule's Genius Loci in "Home", and doesn't buy it when Naomi suggests it's because she's watching him from Mission Control on the Rocinante.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Between Miller and Octavia until around the time she saves his life in "Rock Bottom".
• Berserk Button:
  • Amos is very protective of people that he terms are "his", primarily Naomi. He is also protective of children in general. Threatening somebody that he has claimed or a child will push him to an almost immediate homicidal rage.
  • Chrisjen Avasarala really does not like it when people make cracks about her age or imply in any way that she's old. Which is why Cotyar likes doing it.
• Better than Sex: Diogo claims space-walking is this, though Miller is skeptical that he has the experience necessary to make that comparison.
• Big Badass Battle Sequence:
  • "CQB" contains one between The Battlestar MCRN Donnager and six advanced stealth fighters, which is interspersed with a running gun battle as Holden's crew attempts to escape.
  • The joint OPA and Rocinante assault on Thoth Station in "Doors and Corners".
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • In "Salvage", Miller saves the Rocinante crew from a UN black ops team that was trying to assassinate them.
  • In "Caliban's War", just as Mao's men are about to kill Cotyar and Avasarala, Bobbie returns after leaving to get her Power Armor and curb-stomps all of them easily.
  • Anna tasers Clarissa from behind before the latter can finish throttling Naomi to death in "Fallen World" .
• Big Dumb Object: The protomolecule turns Eros into one of these, capable of defying the laws of physics to propel itself on a course towards Earth. It ends up crashing into Venus instead and begins constructing a new one, which ultimately becomes The Ring at the edge of the system.
• The Big Guy: Amos is naturally the largest and strongest of the Rocinante crew, and growing up on Earth only increases this by also making him a Heavy Worlder. His rough upbringing and emotional detachment also make him the most comfortable with violence.
• Bilingual Bonus: Belter Creole is entirely unsubtitled. Most of the time, the Creole is limited to a few words or the odd phrase that viewers can guess. Sometimes, lines will be spoken entirely in Creole and the only way viewers will be able to understand is if they learn the patois themselves.
• Bilingual Dialogue: Miller occasionally converses with Belters this way, though usually they each throw in some of the other's language as well.
• Bio-Augmentation:
  • Implants of various sorts are common. Communications devices and organ augmentation are mundane while identity scramblers are expensive and illegal.
  • Belters have to resort to drugs or hormones just to maintain reasonable health and well-being (if injuries haven't reduce them to outright prosthetics), and these treatments don't always work well. Miller, for instance, has spurs on his spine where the vertebrae didn't quite grow properly because of "cheap bone-density juice when he was a child."
  • Martian marines have communications systems and other implants to augment the equipment in their battle armor. Amos taunts one such marine by insisting castration is a mandatory part of the process.
  • Season 3 features a documentary cameraman who has extensive augmentations visibly implanted beneath his skin. He's also blind but can use his implanted tech to see through drone cameras.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: The protomolecule's Meat Moss and skin lesions as The Virus crackle with blue light very reminiscent of electricity and give off radiant blue spores. It's creepy as all hell.
• Biotech Is Better: This is used to establish class disparities. After a hauler on the Canterbury loses his arm below the elbow to an ice block, he's told he could go for the bio-gel that regrows limbs. He opts to go for a prosthetic limb because he's been with Pur-n-Kleen long enough for the company to provide him with a deluxe model featuring pressure feedback and hot-and-cold sensors.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: The heroes might not be paragons (though some like Holden certainly try), but several villains are utter monsters.
• Black Market Produce: A major cottage industry in the belt. Dairy products are held in particularly high regard: while expensive, vegetables and fruit can be grown hydroponically both legally and illegally with minimal fuss. Small livestock like chickens likewise can be raised or smuggled fairly easily, and even the tank-grown Artificial Meat is a passable substitute for the real thing. Dairy, however, requires either maintaining at least one large female livestock animal in orbit, or moving dense wheels of cheese from the ground into space and law enforcement swiftly cracks down on "curd cartels". Cheese, in fact, is such a prized commodity that the troubles on Ceres noticeably quieted down when one such cartel began selling genuine cheddar on the station.
• Black Site: Avasarala travels to one of the UN's a couple of times to interrogate a Belter caught smuggling stealth tech.
• Blatant Lies: Errinwright's claims that Fred Johnson is framing Earth.
• Blood Knight: Bobby Draper is just itching for a fight with Earth, until she gets a taste of real combat on Ganymede and decides that War Is Hell.
• Bloody Smile: In the season 4 finale, Amos does this after Murtry punches him, giving him the perfect excuse to dispatch him as revenge for Wei's death.
  Amos: Thank you. (initiates beatdown)
• Boarding Pod:
  • What the unknown enemies use to seal the fate of the Donnager after the latter blows away four of six of the attacking ships. The Donnager self-destructs to prevent a successful capture.
  • Fred Johnson uses modified FedEx containers to make a "special delivery" of boarding parties to take control of The Conspiracy's base on Thoth Station.
• Bodyguard Betrayal: Avasarala's escort ship leaves her to die on Jules-Pierre Mao's ship in "Caliban's War", under orders from Errinwright, and even fires five missiles at it just to be sure.
• Body Horror: One of the book authors once noted that, "If I wrote greeting cards, they'd probably have a squick factor." The TV adaptation lives up to everything that implies.
  • Cutting her way into the cargo bay of a Ghost Ship in "Dulcinea", Julie Mao finds a giant, glowing Meat Moss Eldritch Abomination in the process of assimilating a human torso.
  • Some of the negative traits a lifetime in low-g has spawned among the Belters, especially their low bone and muscle densities that leave them unable to even breathe back on Earth.
  • In "Salvage", Miller and the Rocinante crew find Julie Mao has been killed by the protomolecule infection in her shower. Blue-black lesions cover her pallid remains from head to toe, sprouting spines like anemones, and crystalline structures have grown straight out her left eye and mouth, while a gossamer webbing has rooted her to the shower.
  • Miller and Holden's slow degradation from radiation poisoning. Holden's descriptors "melt from the inside out," and, "bleeding out of places you don't even want to know about," don't help.
  • Katoa gradually starts to look more inhuman and horrifying as he's turned into a Hybrid by the protomolecule growth in his body. And in one of the worst examples in the whole series, he completely rips apart his nurse offscreen; we see the man's insides and guts strewn out all over the floor.
  • Manéo Jung-Espinoza gets this when he travels into the Ring, entering the Slow Zone. The Ring defenses forcibly decelerate his ship to a dead stop, but not Manéo. His inertia no longer matching the ship causes him to rocket forward with such force that his skeleton tears free of his body, causing his head to fly off and his bones to jut out of his flesh, leaving him as nothing more than a red splat in a pilot suit.
  • Inside the Ring Station, the leader of Bobbie's platoon throws a grenade that leaves a dent in the floor. The commander is then lifted into the air by the station, disassembled, and broken down into his constituent matter to refill this dent.
• Book Ends:
  • Season 1 begins and ends with a character encountering the protomolecule, showing how it's changed.
  • At the end of Season 2, Dr. Strickland is whistling the same tune that Amos was at the start of the season.
• Boomerang Bigot: Despite being a native Belter who's never left Ceres, Miller dresses like an Earther, works for an Earth-based Law Enforcement, Inc., and generally acts superior to other Belters because of it. He's even the first character to hurl the Fantastic Slur "longbone" at another Belter.
  Miller: I am nothing like you, longbone. Take your OPA bullshit back to the Medina, and wait for the revolution with all the rest of the victims.
• Boom, Headshot!:
  • The fate of Shed Garvey, whose head simply disappears thanks to an unlucky railgun round.
  • How Miller takes revenge on Filat Kothari, the thug who impaled his partner. Bonus points for covering the guy's retreat first only to put one between his eyes once he got a little closer.
  • In "Doors and Corners", the boarding party is taken by surprise when one of their group is shot in the head and a big red splash appears. After the shooting stops, Miller realizes he was actually hit by a non-lethal gel round which didn't even penetrate his space suit helmet, as the minimal crew weren't expecting boarders and were only armed to the extent necessary to disable the prisoners they were watching over.
  • Played straight in the same episode, where Miller pops Dresden in the head then shoots him twice more for good measure.
  • Drummer does this to the Belters who shot her in an attempt to force missile launch codes out of her and Fred Johnson in "Pyre".
  • Amos delivers this to Strickland in "Immolation", though we only get the perspective of the blood splatter against the airlock door.
  • Murtry doing this to the belligerent but unarmed Belter thug Coop on Ilus is what sends the already fragile RCE-Belter relations into a rapid downward spiral.
• Born Lucky: Diogo just happens to get caught stealing water by the comparatively merciful Joe Miller rather than a more aggressive cop or serious gangster, then he's Thrown Out the Airlock far from anywhere but is picked up by a passing ship before his air runs out, and then gets shot in the face but survives because his opponent was only equipped with non-lethal ammunition.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: In "Down and Out", the guards at the prison have biometrically-locked guns that only respond to their individual users. When deprived of her gun against a prisoner with mods that make him super-strong, the guard grabs the gun of a dead colleague and uses his hand to fire it.
• Boss Subtitles: A couple government officials get these with their name and position, including third-line protagonist Chrisjen Avasarala after she's already been on-screen for over a minute.
• Bottomless Magazines:
  • Miller gets better-than-expected mileage out of his six-shot cylinder despite a closeup at the start of "Leviathan Wakes" that proves that's exactly how many bullets it holds^note the show's propmaster tried to Hand Wave it away by saying that in their universe one bullet could equal a thousand shots.
  • Averted in the case of the Rocinante itself, which runs low on ammo on a semi-regular basis. At one point the crew resorts to raiding a Martian debris field to restock.
• Bread and Circuses: Lt. Lopez claims in "CQB" that, "The only thing Earthers care about is government handouts: free food, free water, free drugs so you can forget the aimless lives you lead."
• Breakout Character: Camina Drummer after her Boom, Headshot! moment in Season 2.
• Brick Joke: When they part ways in "Home", Miller tells Diogo to get himself laid. The next episode, he's seen walking hand in hand with a prostitute saying, "Miller, this one's for you."
• Bring News Back: Holden and (at his insistence) his crew are escorted off the Donnager by a squad of Martian marines because they're the only ones truly capable of testifying that Mars did not destroy the Canterbury.
• Broken Aesop:
  • Anderson Dawes tells Miller one about how he had to Mercy Kill his sister in order to keep his family alive. Miller points out that Dawes didn't sacrifice himself and that just proves him a coward.
  • Happens again when Sutton talks about how Mars avoided a war with Earth in the nick of time through diplomacy to talk about the value of peace, only for Draper to state that led to a Space Cold War where Mars was delayed a century in its terraforming efforts.
• Broken Pedestal: At least two in Season 3.
  • Naomi becomes this to Amos after it is revealed that she gave the protomolecule to Fred Johnson. Lampshaded by Amos, who starts to instead look to first Prax and later Anna as his new "moral compasses".
  • Camina Drummer feels deeply betrayed after Fred Johnson tells her that he has struck an unholy alliance with Anderson Dawes not long after an attempted mutiny by OPA sympathizers on Tycho which almost left both of them dead.
• Broken Masquerade: After investigating the disabled stealth ship in "Godspeed", Avasarala has it pushed into the nearest UNN patrol route so it will be discovered and reveal the connection between the stealth ship attacks and Protogen (and hence Jules-Pierre Mao). Mao is good enough to wriggle out of any personal liability, but it definitely puts a dent in his plans and sours his partnership with Errinwright.
• Brutal Honesty: When Miller asks if he really just saw his old friend Sematimba's body at the end of "Leviathan Wakes", Amos bluntly answers, "Yes. I shot him."
  • Amos lives this trope, often to the disgust, anger or unsettlement of other characters. The main crew gets used to it after a while.
• Bulletproof Human Shield: Rare example of played straight, done a lot, AND justified. In zero-g, bodies, especially with grav boots on tend to remain standing. People in general are easier to pick up. The bullets themselves need low penetration to avoid punching holes in the ship’s hull, out into space. This creates a lot of scenarios where dead bodies can be used as temporary cover, or someone can be grappled onto and used to absorb low penetration rounds.
• Bullet Sparks: All over the place during the dash to the Tachi in "CQB".
• Burial in Space: Miller gives Sematimba this at the end of "Safe" by ejecting his body bag out the airlock.
• The Butcher: Fred Johnson is called "The Butcher of Anderson Station" after he brutally put down a worker revolt on Anderson Station eleven years before the series proper, despite the workers' own pleas to surrender. By the current time period he is working on behalf of the OPA to redeem himself, but he is willing to lean on his reputation if necessary to get the compliance of others. Season two reveals that he didn't know Anderson Station was trying to surrender, and learning the truth is what spurred him to defect.

C

• Call-Back:
  • Diogo reintroduces himself to Miller in "Doors and Corners" by shouting, "Stay away from the aqua," recalling Miller's parting warning to him in "The Big Empty".
  • While infiltrating Eros in "Home", Miller returns to the pachinko parlor he and Holden hid out in for awhile in "Leviathan Wakes".
• Calling the Old Man Out: Miller finds a video message of Julie Mao doing this:
  Julie: You're so blind and so condescending, and you're never going to change. If you won't take yourself seriously as an adult then why should I care about being your child? You wanna sell the Razorback, do it. You can't buy me off or control me anymore. Maybe what you hate about me the most is that I remind you of yourself.
• Camera Spoofing: When Anderson Dawes kidnaps Cortazar, he loops the camera feeds in that section of the station so no one realizes until he's well on his way out.
• The Cameo: The season 2 finale features a brief onscreen appearance by Adam Savage.
• Canon Foreigner:
  • The UN's ambassador to Mars, Franklin DeGraaf.
  • Kenzo, the corporate espionage spy from Tycho Station.
• Can't Stop the Signal:
  • Despite talk in "The Big Empty" about the Donnager already being in jamming range when Holden sends out his message, events on Earth and Ceres in the next episode revolve around reactions to his broadcast, so it clearly got out.
  • In the titular Flashback in "Back to the Butcher", some Belter protesters transmit a signal to anyone listening when it becomes clear the UN just intends to kill them all without further negotiation.
  • In "Critical Mass", Fred Johnson beams out a transmission containing evidence pinning all the recent strife on Earth, and since the culprits cannot stop him they waste no time manufacturing evidence pointing right back at him.
  • Subverted in "Godspeed". When the crew of the Rocinante catches a humanitarian group investigating Eros, they jam long-range comms. The group tries to break for signal range by going around the asteroid, so Holden reluctantly blows up their ship.
• The Captain:
  • Holden on the Rocinante, despite Amos' initial insistence that he isn't.
  • Captain Yao of the MCRN Donnager, and Captain Kirino of the MCRN Hammurabi.
  • Fred Johnson for Tycho Station.
  • Camina Drummer, Johnson's Number Two, becomes this for the repurposed Nauvoo (now the OPAS Behemoth) as of "Delta-V". This causes some tension with Klaes Ashford, her First Officer from Dawes's faction. When Drummer is seriously injured in "Fallen World" and temporarily out of commission, Ashford replaces her as captain.
• Captain Smooth and Sergeant Rough: Lt. Sutton and GySgt. Bobbie Draper.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: When Miller starts doing this in "Home", Naomi tells him, "Hey, don't get all Holden on me: weird and chatty under pressure."
• Casual Interplanetary Travel: An Applied Phlebotinum fusion drive allows this.
• Category Traitor: Miller is viewed as a traitor (welwala in Belter Creole^note It also means someone who's obsessed with the Inner Planets) by other Belters because he dresses like an Earther and works for Ceres' Earth-based police force, Star Helix Security.
• The Cavalry Arrives Late: In "Reload", some rescued Martians try to seize the Rocinante. Holden and Bobbie manage to talk them down, at which point Amos shows up and immediately lampshades his tardiness.
  Amos: Did I miss it?
• Central Theme:
  • The Power of Trust and our emotional connections with each other.
  • No matter our different backgrounds and philosophies, we're all far more similar to each other than we'd ever like to admit.
  • Even into the (relatively) far future, humanity will change relatively little while our technology does by leaps and bounds.
• Centrifugal Gravity:
  • Belter stations like Ceres and Eros are asteroids that have been artificially "spun up" to create gravity through centrifugal force. The show occasionally shows how liquid and dust fall in unusual ways due to the high rate of spin required to achieve the effect.
  • Tycho Station is a roving construction yard that has rotating habitat sections to provide inhabitants with gravity while maintaining gravity-free construction space.
  • The Generation Ship Nauvoo is capable of generating rotational gravity through a massive drum that dominates the habitable section of the ship. This comes in handy in "Fallen World", when the Ring Station has frozen every other ship in the vicinity, making the rechristened Behemoth the only ship capable of generating gravity for the proper treatment of wounds.
• Character Development:
  • Boomerang Bigot Miller has a minor epiphany in "Static" when he catches himself using the word "us" to refer to all Belters, including himself. He also becomes significantly more altruistic and selfless after discovering Julie Mao's corpse, to the point of performing a Heroic Sacrifice by convincing the resurrected Julie to have Eros crash into Venus instead of Earth.
  • Holden becomes more and more accepting of the fact that he lives in a Crapsack Solar System and even takes a certain level in cynicism, but still never lets go of trying to make the Solar System a better place for everyone.
  • Amos starts to develop the vestiges of an internal moral code for himself after he gains a Broken Pedestal for Naomi and forms an Odd Friendship with Prax.
  • Both Alex and Naomi find themselves Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life aboard the Rocinante, with Alex quickly realizing that he's at his happiest as the Roci's pilot. Meanwhile, Naomi takes time off to help work with the OPA on the Behemoth before figuring out that she truly misses being with her friends aboard the Roci more than anything else.
  • Bobbie Draper starts out as a typical gun-ho Martian Marine, but the massacring of her entire squad and the realization of The Conspiracy within the MCR government has her defect to the UN. Furthermore, she starts to better understand how many lies she's been fed her entire life and strives to earn her own independence from Mars, to the point where she both forms an Intergenerational Friendship with Chrisjen (even serving as her bodyguard for most of the first half of Season 3) and even becoming a crew member aboard the Rocinante.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Julie Mao's animatronic gerbil, which turns out to conceal the data chip with information on the Phoebe incident that led her to the Anubis.
  • Julie's racing sled, the Razorback, is a big one for Seasons 2 and 3.
    • In "Home", Miller realizes that Eros is heading for Earth because it's assimilated Julie, who thinks she's flying the Razorback home.
    • And in the Season 3 premiere, Bobbie and Avasarala use the Razorback to escape Jules-Pierre Mao's yacht right before a missile strike destroys it.
  • The Generation Ship Nauvoo is revealed to be one when Miller incorporates it into his new plan in "Static". And again in Season 3 when Fred Johnson has it recovered and retrofitted into a Belter warship rechristened the Behemoth.
  • Part of Melba Koh's introduction in Season 3 consists of her getting lectured on how not to install an electrical component lest it shut down the entire ship in a Disaster Dominoes effect. This knowledge comes in very handy in the season finale.
  • Holden's cancer. Or specifically, the medication he's been taking for it all the way since the Eros incident ends up being able to kill the blinding micro-organisms caught by everyone on Ilus inside the protomolecule structure.
  • Early in Season 5, Holden uses an injector to re-oxydize Monica Stuart's blood so she doesn't die oxygen deprivation. Later in the season, Naomi uses a similar injector to survive jumping through the vacuum of space without protective gear.
• Chekhov's Skill:
  • Subverted by Havelock's practice with Belter Creole and gestures. Worse than useless, it's comical to the thugs who ambush him in "Remember the Cant".
  • Played straight by Bobbie being strong enough to arm-wrestle her own Power Armor. When she battles the Hybrid!Katoa on Io in "Immolation", they both fall from a great height that damages her armor, leaving it as nothing more than dead weight around her. She uses this skill to lift her arm up high enough to shoot the Hybrid before it can kill her.
• The Chessmaster: Avasarala tries to manipulate every given situation to come out her way.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Holden has it.
  Naomi: It's not your problem. It's not your fault! None of it is.
  Holden: Okay, but now I'm making it my problem.
• Children Are Innocent:
  • The three-year-old girl outside Miller's apartment with her pet bird in "Dulcinea".
  • Avasarala's grandson doesn't understand his grandmother's fear of an interplanetary war resulting in a Colony Drop.
    Grandson: Nobody could throw rocks that big. It just happens sometimes because, you know, gravity.
• City Mouse: Miller notes that he's "more of a city Belter" when asked why he's never done a space-walk before in "Godspeed".
• Civil War vs. Armageddon: The Earth-Mars Coalition breaks down into interplanetary war and the Belters openly rebel against both planets due to the machinations of a MegaCorp experimenting with — and failing to control — the alien Protomolecule that threatens to consume all life in the solar system.
• The City Narrows: The Medina district, located at the innermost part of Ceres Station, where Centrifugal Gravity is weak and property is cheap.
• Civil War: Although Earth, Mars, and the Belt are increasingly independent, many still consider a potential war between them to be this within a united humanity.
• Cliffhanger:
  • "The Big Empty" ends with Holden's crew being captured by the Martian Navy.
  • "Remember the Cant" ends with Havelock being ambushed and impaled.
  • "Leviathan Wakes" (and therefore Season 1) ends with Holden's crew picking up the villains' transmission back to their base, and the protomolecule evolving.
  • "Godspeed" ends as the protomolecule begins moving Eros, with Miller trapped aboard manning a Dead Man Switch.
  • "Caliban's War" ends with Fred Johnson finding the protomolecule that Naomi left for him, and Naomi revealing to Holden that she did so (and essentially betrayed his and the rest of the crew's trust), then cuts off before showing much of Holden's reaction to this.
  • "Immolation" ends with the protomolecule growth on Venus launching a jellyfish-like structure into space for purposes unknown.
  • "Dandelion Sky" ends as the Ring Station slows the "speed limit" in the Slow Zone down greatly, jolting every spaceship there to a grinding halt that injures or kills hundreds of people, and shows Holden things that happened in the past, leaving him in a Heroic BSoD.
  • "Abaddon's Gate" has this same station open up numerous other portals, leading to some 1300 habitable systems for humanity to explore. The Rocinante crew, now back together, decides to head through one of them to begin investigating what happened to the race of Precursors who built the Ring portal system.
  • "Cibola Burn" ends Season 4 with Arc Villain Inaros spacing Klaes Ashford before launching the last of six stealth-coated asteroids at Earth, with none of the protagonists being aware of the impending Colony Drop. However, Ashford managed to broadcast a warning before dying, setting the stage for Season 5.
• Clear My Name: The Rocinante crew are forced to make a run for the Ring Gate in Season 3 after Clarissa Mao frames James Holden for a politically motivated act of sabotage, and are fired upon. Holden is later detained by the MCRN and must convince those in command that he is neither a terrorist nor insane.
• Close Up On Head: The series' opening scene builds outward from an extreme closeup of Julie Mao's face, which writer Hawk Ostby says they did to subvert the Standard Establishing Spaceship Shot.
• Code Name:
  • Julie Mao's OPA operative code name is "Lionel Polanski".
  • Avasarala's security code name is "Archangel".
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Avasarala does this to a Belter caught smuggling illegal stealth tech simply by exposing him to Earth's gravity; because his body is not adapted to it, he suffers tremendously. Avasarala gets chewed out for this but isn't punished, and the smuggler goes on to use gravity itself as his Cyanide Pill by wrestling out treatment for a multi-g transit to Luna, proving it wasn't going to work no matter how long they left him on those hooks. She even taunts him when she visits him to hear who he's working for:
  Chrisjen Avasarala: I'm sorry the gravity of a real planet hurts, but it's appropriate: you wish to hurt Earth, the Earth that is now crushing your weak Belter lungs and your fragile Belter bones.
• Cold Equation:
  • Averted when Shed chooses to save Alex from suffocation by sharing his air supply with him in "The Big Empty".
  • Anderson Dawes describes facing this choice with his ill sister Athena when recalling his backstory in "Rock Bottom".
• Colonel Badass: Fred Johnson was one when he still served the UN. Avasarala still calls him by this rank to appeal to his old allegiance when she secretly reaches out to him in "Static".
• Colonized Solar System: Humanity has yet to expand beyond, and only Mars and the Asteroid Belt are heavily settled, with a couple outposts at least as far out as the Saturnine moon Phoebe (where the protomolecule was discovered).
• Colony Drop:
  • Given Avasarala's reaction to her grandson's talk about the dinosaur-killer and her worry about "people who throw rocks" in "CQB", this trope is the new Mutually Assured Destruction.
  • In "Rock Bottom" Diogo's Uncle Matteo attacks a Martian patrol skiff using his cargo (a small asteroid) as an improvised weapon.
  • "Godspeed"/"Home" has Eros pushed out of orbit by the protomolecule and set on a collision course with Earth. Given it's three-times bigger than the rock which took out the dinosaurs, stopping it is of vital importance. Thanks to Miller, it ends up hitting Venus with an impressive boom.
  • The crisis on Ganymede is caused by the destruction of an orbital solar mirror which impacts on a large part of the surface colony, the fallout of which renders the rest of the colony uninhabitable.
  • The season finale of season 4 has Marco launching asteroids outfitted with Martian stealth technology at Earth, which make impact three episodes into season 5. Three hit Earth before the UN catches on and retasks their satellites to detect and destroy the remaining rocks, which is more than enough for Marcos to make his case that the rest of the solar system should fear retribution by the Belt.
  • He repeats the trick in the season 5 finale, engineering a stealthed meteorid storm on the fleet guarding the Sol Ring at the same time his own fleet moves into attack position. It turns what would have been a Curb-Stomp Battle against him into an almost complete rout. Marco only loses a few skiffs to the damaged capital ships, aided by a fleet of defecting Martians.
  • Season 6 opens with Marco launching small asteroids daily at Earth. They're easily shot down, but Marco has the resources to keep it up for months, and Earth can't afford to move their fleet without potentially allowing additional impacts.
• Color Wash: Scenes aboard ships get a heavy blue filter.
• Combat Tentacles: Season 1 ends with the protomolecule seizing a character with these.
• Comically Small Demand: Played for Laughs in "Home" when Fred Johnson's response to being called "the most powerful man in the System right now" is a sardonic, "Oh really? Then go get me a cup of coffee." Instead, Drummer just smirks and flips him off.
• Commie Nazis: A downplayed variant with the Martian Congressional Republic. While their heavy nationalism, habitual disregard for Earthers and Belters, and insistence that they are the future of humanity comes across as disturbingly similar to Nazi Germany, their Space Cold War with the United Nations on Earth and other cultural attributes (such as government-planned economics being responsible for their terraforming efforts) bear more similarities to the Soviet Union.
• Commitment Issues:
  • Ade Nygaard just wants to stay a Friend with Benefits to Holden, who's disappointed but understanding.
  • Holden himself has been the acting XO of the Canterbury for months, but refuses the captain's offer to make it permanent.
• Companion Cube: Alex develops a very personal connection to every ship he pilots, and he falls absolutely head-over-heels in love with the Rocinante.
• Company Town: Ceres and the other large Belt settlements are run as such, which is why the OPA is becoming popular.
• Composite Character:
  • In the novels, it's a Martian Innocent Bystander named Enrique Dos Santos rather than Havelock who gets impaled by angry Belters.
  • The show's Lieutenant Lopez takes on the roles of two Martian lieutenants from the novels: the selfsame Lt. Lopez who interrogates Holden, and marine Lt. Kelly who helps Holden's crew escape.
  • In the books, Octavia Muss takes over as Miller's partner after Havelock leaves Ceres at Miller's urging, and Miller has an ex-wife named Candace who is mentioned a few times. In the show, Octavia is one of Miller's colleagues and has a quasi-romantic relationship with him (or at least did once).
  • Cotyar of the show fills the roles of both Cotyar of the books as Avasarala's head of security, and also of Soren, Avasarala's much put upon personal assistant who dutifully absorbs the majority of her vitriol.
  • Camina Drummer takes on the roles of many different characters at different times. In Season 2, she serves the roles of both her namesake (Fred Johnson's security chief) and Sam Rosenberg (Tycho's top engineer and friend of the Roci crew). In Season 3, she shares the role of Michio Pa (XO of the Behemoth) with Klaes Ashford, as well as filling that of Bull de Baca (Fred Johnson's protogee who's paralyzed by the hard deceleration). In Season 4, her material is basically entirely new. Then Season 5 sees her back in Michio Pa's new role as the polyamorous space-pirate who defects from the Free Navy.
  • Inverted with Col. Janus, who doesn't appear in the books, but exists in the show as a counterpoint to Dr. Iturbi, providing the viewer with an interesting character dynamic instead of just stale reports to Avasarala.
• The Confidant: Holden will discuss things with Naomi that he won't with the rest of the crew.
• Conlang: Belters speak "Belter Creole", a patois featuring words from Russian, Turkish, German, etc. and integrates hand gestures for communicating in spacesuits. They also continue to speak English (using an accent that sounds vaguely Afrikaans) and Chinese (which is heard in station announcements).
• Connected All Along: Julie Mao's disappearance, the attacks on the Canterbury and Donnager, the ruin of Phoebe Station, the bio-weapon on the Anubis, it all leads to the release of the protomolecule on Eros.
• Continuous Decompression: Played fairly realistically in "CQB" when a railgun blows two fairly large holes in the room the crew are in, and they have to quickly but calmly patch the holes. Naomi also notes afterward that since air was rushing out both sides, they're now trapped in a room surrounded by hard vacuum.
• The Conscience:
  • In addition to being The Captain, Holden is often his crew's voice of morality, though he himself turns to Naomi if he's having doubts about something.
  • Amos doesn't seem to have much of a sense of morality, but he usually has a pretty good idea of what Naomi would or wouldn't approve of and uses that to guide his actions.
• Conspicuous Consumption: A summit between the UN and MCR takes place on Earth in a large, mostly empty hall with big windows that let in plenty of sunlight. There are also large flower arrangements and a buffet featuring plenty of fresh fruit on clear display. This is all done so that the UN can thumb its nose at the MCR delegation, showing the Martians that, in spite of their superiority complex over Earth, none of them will ever get to see such luxuries on Mars in their lifetimes.
• The Conspiracy: The ultimate culprit for everything in Seasons 1, 2, and the first half of 3 is one of these involving billionaire Jules-Pierre Mao and UN Undersecretary-General Sadavir Errinwright.
• Contrived Coincidence: Miller and Holden's storylines finally intersect in "Salvage" when their respective investigations lead them to the same hotel on Eros at the same time, with Miller arriving just in time to save Holden and his crew from a UN hit squad, though its downplayed by the fact they've been Working the Same Case.
• Conveniently Timed Attack from Behind:
  • Octavia saves Miller this way in "Rock Bottom".
  • Similarly, Anna saves Naomi from Clarissa like this in "Fallen World".
• Cool Starship:
  • The Rocinante is fairly plain on the outside, but the inside is pretty sleek and awesome.
  • LDSS Nauvoo, the only true starship in the series so far, is a Generation Ship and the largest vessel humanity has ever built. It also fully averts Standard Human Spaceship, what with it being a cathedral as well as a ship. Becomes even cooler once the OPA hijack it and turn it into the warship Behemoth.
• Cop Killer: Filat Kothari and his goons become attempted ones in "Remember the Cant". Star Helix Security is not impressed.
• Corrupt Cop:
  • Miller to an extent, though he has more boundaries than many Law Enforcement, Inc. employees in the Belt.
  • In Season 4, Esai Martin turns out to be one. Although a reasonably decent man at heart, he abuses his position and connections to get rich by stealing valuable tech from the Martian government.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Jules-Pierre Mao.
• Corrupt Politician:
  • Miller justifies being a moderately Corrupt Cop by noting that his bosses are bribed even better.
  • Sadavir Errinwright is part of The Conspiracy.
• Cosmic Horror Reveal: The protomolecule, its effects, and the unknown intelligence behind it are less Independence Day and more "The Colour Out of Space".
• Costume Porn: Avasarala seems to wear a different intricately-made and vibrantly-coloured sari in every scene.
• Crapsack World: Things are better than they are in the 21st century in certain respects, but the more things change the more things stay the same. Advanced medical technology and synthetic foods may have made disease and hunger less of an issue than any previous era, but they've been overshadowed by overpopulation, class warfare and extreme environmental damage. Each nation (Earth, Mars, and the Belt) is consumed by their own problems for their inhabitants.
  • Although Earthers have an average life expectancy of 123, a total population of 30 billion and a dramatic rise in sea levels has led to job shortages and most remaining land being heavily developed, so most people live on some sort of government assistance. People on "Basic Assistance" live in cardboard boxes, without access to medical care or clean drinking water, and can spend decades waiting for job training to even have the chance of getting off Basic. Private property is heavily regulated to the point that a 22-acre farm in Montana^note An average 21st-century family-owned farm in the United States is 441 acres is considered extravagant and the government would like nothing better than to seize it.
  • The life expectancy on Mars is even higher than Earth's due to its superior tech base - but it's also a hardline military dictatorship, with all that implies. We see emphasis placed on order and discipline even above self-preservation, and Martian soldiers are callously disposed of by superiors if it can be justified for the 'good of Mars'. For civilians, civil liberties appear to be easily revoked when we see police actions in season four. And though Mars has an infamously low unemployment rate up through season three — so low that Bobbie Draper cannot even recall the last time she even saw an unemployed person — it lacks any sort of large-scale social safety net so it is completely unprepared to help people when unemployment drastically rises after the Rings open.
  • The average Belter life expectancy is 68. Low- or zero-gravity takes its toll on muscle and bone growth, hypoxic environments stunt child development, cops are often just thugs with badges, and general poverty and organized crime reign. Most Belters die a lot sooner due to the screwed-up infrastructure of their stations, let alone the rampant crime and corruption as well as strict water and air rationing. Drug use and slumlording is ignored while water theft—greywater theft—is harshly punished. The Belter working class are stuck in highly dangerous jobs and forced to live in tight quarters. Earther and Martian corporations run operations in the Belt and outer moons with virtually no oversight and often pay only lip service to employee safety and health benefits, while paying next to nothing. Various outer moons, asteroids, and space stations are ostensibly governed, if at all, by Earth or Mars, but it’s obvious to Belters that the "Inners" don’t give a shit about them.
• Creator Provincialism:
  • A minor point, but despite the UN's One World Order, the half of Earth's interplanetary nuclear arsenal that actually gets launched in "Home" appears to come solely from the continental United States.
  • Bobby Draper, a 23rd-century Space Marine from Mars, is awarded the Purple Heart when she's wounded.
• Creepy Cleanliness: Downplayed with the Martians and Earthers. The MCRN flagship Donnager is dark but clean and sterile, the elite levels of Ceres Station are a spotless white with islands of perfectly groomed green, and the UN headquarters in New York border on a crystal spire. There's nothing really wrong with them being clean, except it serves to contrast their luxury with the Belters who are forced to live in squalor.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • The OPA courier who had been captured by Avasarala killed himself by slipping his slender neck between the safety restraints during a shuttle launch from Earth. It is unclear whether what ultimately killed him was avoiding the drugs intended to mitigate physiological damage from high-G acceleration, or simply having his airways collapse under the weight of his head.
  • The Virus slowly consumes whoever it infects, keeping them alive as it eats them. You only get to die when its growth stops something important, like breathing, and even then that may not be the end of you.
  • Several individuals are disassembled into their component organs by the Protomolecule, becoming Human Resources.
• Cult Colony: In Season 1, the Mormons are financing humanity's first Generation Ship, and Miller gets to know one of their colonists on his transit to Eros. Developments with the protomolecule see their ship hijacked, first as a massive bullet against Eros to knock it out of orbit and then repurposed as a Belter warship after that plan falls through.
• Cultural Posturing:
  • The Belters take pride in how they manage to survive with so much less than the Inners. The ice-hauler Paj refuses even the idea of regenerating a lost arm by declaring, "Screw the Inners and their magic Jell-O! No offence, Holden. I'd rather a Belter-built fake any day!"
  • Martians believe that their planet-wide commitment to terraforming makes them superior to Earthers (Who they view as lazy) and Belters (Who they view as greedy).
• Culture Clash:
  • Earthers vs. Martians vs. Belters.
  • Havelock (an Earther) is a complete Fish out of Water on the Belter station of Ceres.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • The Martian Navy is regarded as the preeminent military force in the system, and they are used to curb-stomping all opposition when it comes to an out-and-out fight. This leads to a severe shock to Captain Yao in "CQB" when it turns out that this fight is much more two-sided than anything she expected. The Donnager does manage to take out four of the six attacking ships, but the remaining two get close enough to launch boarding craft and Captain Yao has to self-destruct the ship to prevent a takeover.
  • In a moment of frustration and anger, Alex makes the mistake of getting physical with Amos, who easily overpowers him. It doesn't turn into a real fight, but Amos makes damn sure Alex knows it is a very bad idea to pick one with him.
    Amos: I don't want to fight you, Alex. Please don't make me. 'Cause if we do, who's going to fly the ship?
  • At the climax of season two, when Bobbie Draper gets her Power Armor she walks through the gunmen attempting to kill her, Avasarala, and Cotyar.
• Cutting the Knot: The Rocinante is held in place by docking clamps and none of the codes the crew knows works. Alex gets around this problem by breaking off some clamps through sheer force and then simply jettisoning the fake gas tanks the remaining clamps were holding onto.
  Alex: You are a gunship and I am a Navy pilot, so... to hell with this "gas-hauler" bullshit!
• Cyanide Pill: The Belter smuggler subjected to gravity torture on Earth uses gravity itself as this by wrestling out of his gravity-coping treatment during his multi-g transit to Luna, thus avoiding further interrogation and proving it wasn't going to work no matter how long they left him on those hooks.
• Cyberpunk: With a bit more emphasis on the "punk" than the "cyber".
• The Cynic: Miller.
• Cynicism Catalyst: Anderson Dawes's ill sister Athena didn't just die, Dawes himself had to kill her to save the rest of the family, including his three other sisters.

D

• Da Chief: Captain Shaddid of Star Helix Security is a female example.
• Daddy Issues: Neither of the Mao sisters had a healthy relationship with their father. Julie, despite benefiting from Parental Favoritism, chafed under his hypocrisy and impossible expectations, which drove her to forsake her family and run away to the belt. Clarissa was The Un-Favorite despite being devoted to their father, who never appreciated a single thing she did. This drove a wedge between Clarissa and Julie and became Clarissa's Freudian Excuse for much worse things.
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • It's stated multiple times that anyone who signs up as crew for a ship like the Canterbury is probably running from something in their past. Holden left Earth because, "everything I loved was dying," and the UN Navy because he didn't want to be an oppressor. Alex is a washed-up divorcee, Shed is hiding from debts to drug dealers, and Naomi has some kind of OPA affiliation but doesn't believe in causes.
  • Miller's badly-fused vertebrae are described as the mark of a ward of the state who was given cheap medication as a child, and he later tells Holden he and Sematimba were Street Urchins who stole chips from pachinko parlors and joined Law Enforcement, Inc. Star Helix to hand out beatings instead of taking them.
  • Amos is secretive about his rough background on Earth. He makes oblique references to having grown up around prostitution and crime, including child trafficking, and in season three the only records a reporter can find about the name "Amos Burton" at all are related to some sort of mob boss. In Season 5, we learn that all of Amos' hints were accurate, and he murdered the mob boss 'Amos Burton' to save a friend and used his identity to leave Earth.
  • During his time as a UN Marine colonel, OPA leader Fred Johnson destroyed a station full of Belter mutineers and their children even though they were trying to surrender, earning himself the epithet "The Butcher of Anderson Station".
• Darker and Edgier: The novels are by no means all fluffy bunnies and sunshine, but the show definitely takes a darker interpretation of the material.
• Dark Reprise: A much more somber version of the main theme plays over the montage that ends "Immolation". Ironically, this was the first episode to air after Syfy announced the series' cancellation, which makes the sequence far sadder than was intended (luckily, Prime Video picked up the show for a fourth season a few weeks later).
• Dating What Daddy Hates: Octavia cites this as a common form of rebellion, implicitly from personal experience.
• David vs. Goliath: In "Doors and Corners", the crew has to outfight the stealth ship that both outsizes and outguns the Rocinante to protect two Boarding Pods attempting to breach the station the ship is protecting. It takes some fancy maneuvering around the station's habitat ring, the Rocinante takes a decent beating, and they lose a pod when the station reveals it has a functioning anti-asteroid gun, but they manage to disable both the stealth ship and the station's defences.
• Dead All Along: The civilzation that built the protomolecule and the ring network turns out to have been wiped out by an unknown party long ago.
• Deadly Euphemism: In "Windmills", Errinwright activates a black-ops team to "take Holden off the board."
• Dead Man Switch: A rain of shrapnel damages the last of the massive explosive charges being planted by Miller and Diogo in "Godspeed", triggering the 60-second timer and forcing someone to hold their finger on a reset button to keep it from detonating. Naomi offers to remotely shut it down, but since they're short on time, Miller decides to stay behind and detonate it himself. Events conspire to keep him from having to go through with it... at least immediately.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • Miller.
    • When asked why he wears his distinctive hat, Miller claims "It keeps the rain off my head," which would be snarky even if he wasn't a lifelong inhabitant of an artificial biosphere who's never even experienced rain.
    • When told that the bomb he's holding the Dead Man Switch on needs extra work to disarm in "Home", Miller remarks, "Yep, my bomb has to be special," and once the plan changes he declares, "I'm gonna take my pet nuke for a walk."
  • In "The Big Empty", Naomi doesn't take well to everyone's hesitation: "I'm sorry, does anyone need a back rub first?"
  • Chrisjen Avasarala, full-stop. Just a few gems from her:
    "No, I wasn't murdered in the last 30 seconds."
    "I find it hard to believe that a Martian Marine would be fatigued from sitting in a chair."
    "This is going to be very tedious if you remain this dim."
  • Her bodyguard Cotyar Ghazi as well, to the point that most of his conversations with Avasarala are Snark-to-Snark Combat.
    Chrisjen: So, what do you think?
    Cotyar: Why do you pretend that you care about my opinion?
    Chrisjen: Indulge me.
    Cotyar: That's a fuckin' trap.
    Chrisjen: Oh, you're so predictable.
    Cotyar: Yeah, so are you.
• Death by Adaptation: Sematimba, Admiral Souther, Cotyar, Tilly, Diogo, and Alex all bite the dust, unlike their novel counterparts.
• Death Glare: Holden gives Naomi one when she locks him out of control of the Knight's so he can't chase stupidly after an extremely dangerous ship in "The Big Empty".
• Death of a Child:
  • In the backstory in "Back To the Butcher", the station nuked to bits by Fred Johnson had entire families on board, and there's a shot of a dead father holding his daughter's corpse as they float through space.
  • In the Season 1 finale "Leviathan Wakes", the entire population of Eros station is consumed by the protomolecule, which is implied to include a little girl Naomi couldn't convince to leave the station with her.
• Deal with the Devil: Naomi worries they're doing this by accepting Fred Johnson's invitation in "Back to the Butcher".
• Decontamination Chamber: The Roci's airlock doubles as one in "Salvage".
• Decoy Protagonist: Julie Mao has all the potential to be a main character but turns up dead instead.
• Defector from Commie Land: While Mars is not specifically communist Bobby Draper escaping from the Martin embassy is styled directly after incidents and locations from West Berlin and the Korean DMZ.
• Defector from Decadence:
  • Despite her father being one of the wealthiest men in the System, Julie Mao is fundamentally committed to opposing the Inner Planets' oppression of the Belt.
  • In the eleven years since he blew up Anderson Station, Fred Johnson has transitioned from a colonel of UN Space Marines into a leader of the OPA. His reasons fit the trope even more once "Doors and Corners" reveals his nickname and reputation are based on a lie: Anderson Station's transmissions were being jammed the entire time, and he had no idea they had surrendered.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • Basia Merton has a brief apperance in Season 2, but does not return in Season 4, which adapts the book where he is a main character in. His role in the Ilus arc is given to his wife Lucia Mazur.
  • Although Miller's partner Havelock was given a larger role in Season 1 than in the first novel, when it came to adapting the Ilus arc where he's a viewpoint character, he's Adapted Out entirely.
• Department of Redundancy Department: While threatening the Martians in "The Monster and the Rocket", Holden warns them that "this is our only, and final, warning".
• Designer Babies: Reasonably common, since Lt. Lopez describes Holden as such like it's a mundane fact in "Remember the Cant", though their dialogue implies a "full genetic mix" from eight people is more peculiar.
• Detonation Moon: The Martians destroy the Saturnine moon Phoebe to keep Earth from investigating it first. In retaliation, Earth blows up Deimos, the smaller of Mars' two moons, reasoning that the base there is lightly staffed and of little strategic significance. Avasarala and Souther protest that this will seriously piss off the Martians, but are overruled.
• Deuteragonist: Holden and Miller bear the brunt of the storytelling together throughout Season 1 and the first half of Season 2, with Avasarala and others providing a Third Line, Some Waiting. Afterwards, other major characters, such as Bobbie, Prax, and Anna, have their own storylines and become deuteragonists and tritagonists to the Rocinante crew.
• Died Standing Up: Due to a combination of magnetic boots and lack of gravity, most people killed on a spaceship tend to be left floating in a standing position, which makes hallways full of bodies that much creepier.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: Fred Johnson is shot dead by Sakai during the Free Navy raid on Tycho, whereas in the books he dies from a stroke caused by a combination of old age (being much older in the books) and poorer quality "juice" to cope with prolonged high g-force maneuvers. His death also comes an entire book/season earlier than in the books where the killer maneuvers happen during the Rocinante vs. Pella battle adapted in Episode 6.03 "Force Projection".
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Holden's initial reaction to the loss of the Canterbury is to chase down the enemy ship, never remembering he's in a leaky lifeboat. The others have to restrain him until he calms down.
  • Solomon Epstein, inventor of the Epstein drive which all current spaceships use, was tinkering with his prototype and disabled the voice recognition software because it was acting up (mainly because he didn't speak Chinese). Doing this killed him, because once he started up the drive, the g-forces pinned him to his seat, preventing him from shutting it off.
• Dirty Cop:
  • Star Helix is the closest thing to law on Ceres, but is generally accepted to care more about profits than the law, and even Miller is not averse to bribes and brutality. Later, their chief, Captain Shaddid, is revealed to be working for OPA boss Anderson Dawes when she fires Miller to cover up what Julie Mao was doing for the OPA.
  • CPM is even worse than Star Helix. The majority of their officers are former gang members, and are easily bought by the Private Military Contractors working for The Conspiracy, showing no remorse in exposing the citizens of Eros to the protomolecule and lethal radiation.
  • Pinkwater, the private police force that guards Winnipesaukee Island. After the rocks fall and their employers abandon them, Pinkwater shakes down the servants who maintain the Island's facilities for supplies and murder them if they refuse to hand them over. Erich laughs at their transparently obvious racket and they're forced to back down when confronted with actual criminals, though they come back in greater numbers.
• Disability Immunity: The children Protogen kidnapped from Ganymede possess a rare genetic defect that inhibits the growth of the protomolecule, keeping it from asserting its own will as it does in everything else it infects. However, this resistance isn't perfect, ultimately only slowing the transformation.
• Disappeared Dad: Alex is one to his son.
• Disappearing Bullets:
  • In "Leviathan Wakes," Amos shoots Sematimba, spattering Naomi with blood from the exit wound, but the bulkhead and panels next to her are unscathed.
  • In "Doors and Corners," members of Miller's boarding party surround a group of Protogen scientists using a strange computer interface in a small room. When they react violently to being disconnected from it, the Belters panic and mow them down with full-automatic fire. As in, guys standing in a circle facing inward spray bullets at other guys in the middle, with their own guys just a few feet behind the targets. Miraculously, they manage to avoid friendly fire, though Miller cringes and tries to get them to hold fire. Played somewhat for dark humor, as Miller is clearly herding cats as he tries to lead the eager but inexperienced OPA fighters.
• Disposable Sex Worker:
  • Inverted in "Dulcinea" when a brothel patron killed by some other thugs is simply disposed of while Miller gently reassures the sex worker witness Gia, who goes on to become a minor character via Platonic Prostitution with Havelock.
  • Also inverted in "Rock Bottom" when Amos makes a point of telling a male prostitute that a potential patron is packing a knife.
• Disposable Vagrant: The Conspiracy behind the protomolecule seem to consider all Belters this, since they infect the entire population of Eros with the protomolecule just to see what happens.
• Distinguishing Mark: Anderson Dawes has a prominent scar on his neck where a faulty EVA suit caused electrical burns. It's shared by a generation of older Belters including founding members of the OPA, and later generations (including Naomi) have similar marks tattooed on their necks as a sign of solidarity or allegiance.
• Distress Call: Holden's storyline in "Dulcinea" centres around the Canterbury receiving one from a ship called Scopuli. Captain McDowell tries to pretend they never received it until Holden secretly logs it officially, leaving them legally required to respond.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The OPA monogram is a circular O containing an A that's jagged enough to also pass for a P... kinda like some versions of the Anarchist A.
  • The cry of "Remember the Cant!" deliberately echoes "Remember the Maine!", another ship who's destruction triggered a war.
  • The stencil of Holden used by OPA members bares more than a little resemblance to the famous stencil of Che Guevara. Indeed Holden is mythologized as a freedom fighter and/or terrorist just like Guevara, even though Holden has no real political agenda.
  • As aggressively nationalistic as they are, as much as they look down on Earthers and Belters, as much as they insist that they are the future of mankind, you could be forgiven for expecting the Martian Marines to start goose-stepping at any time.
  • The Space Cold War between the United Nations on Earth and the Martian Congressional Republic doesn't even try to avoid looking like the historical Cold War. In fact, the "Vesta Blockade" mentioned in the backstory where the cold war nearly went hot can be seen as an allusion to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
  • The struggles of the Belter colonies for their independence bear many parallels with those of various native resistance and independence movements seen during the height and decline of European imperialism.
• Domed Hometown:
  • Martians live under domes.
  • Ganymede is the breadbasket of the Belt, and features large greenhouse domes that use enormous orbital mirrors to provide sufficient light.
• Doomed Hometown:
  • The Canterbury gets destroyed in the first episode, soon after Captain McDowell points out that it's effectively been Holden's home for the last five years.
  • Amos's hometown of Baltimore is devastated when Marco drops asteroids on Earth.
• Double Tap: When Miller shoots Dresden in the head, he follows it up with a couple more after the man has hit the floor just to make sure.
• Due to the Dead:
  • Former soldiers Holden and Fred Johnson agree on the need to return Lt. Lopez's body to Mars in "Rock Bottom".
  • Anderson Dawes describes leaving his dead little sister in a bauxite cave they found together.
  • Miller gives his old friend Sematimba a Burial in Space near the end of "Safe".
  • Holden gives a heartfelt last farewell to Miller in "Cibola Burn". Due to the real Miller being long dead by then, he uses the Protomolecule sample that was projecting him into his head as a substitute before launching it into the Sun.
• The Dulcinea Effect: Lampshaded. "Dulcinea" is literally the title of the series premiere, and in it Joe Miller develops a fascination with his subject Julie Mao, and to a lesser extent James Holden (an avid Cervantes fan) wants more from his Friend with Benefits Ade Nygaard.
• Dramatic Irony: The audience knows Kenzo is Avasarala's spy from the moment he first appears on screen, but Holden doesn't realize it until he betrays them on Eros two episodes later.
• Dramatic Space Drifting:
  • The embracing bodies of a father and daughter get this treatment after the destruction of Anderson Station in the titular sequence in "Back to The Butcher".
  • Asteroid Miner Mateo leaves his nephew Diogo this way in "Rock Bottom", instead of taking him on his Suicide Attack.
  • Much like in "Back to the Butcher", this is used in "Pyre" to emphasize the horror of some Belters having some innocent Earthers and Martians Thrown Out the Airlock.
  • Ashford's death scene.
• Drawing Straws: In "Home", Avasarala immediately proposes a lottery system for evacuating Earth.
• Dream Intro: The second episode opens with a dream that Jim has of the time he met his recently-deceased girlfriend while he was actually dozing off for a brief moment.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Although they sometimes display good camaraderie, Bobbie Draper spends at lot of her screen-time shouting angrily at her squad and having hawkish disagreements with her superior.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • The Belter smuggler who commits suicide during his transfer from Earth to Luna to avoid further interrogation using Earth's own gravity as his Cyanide Pill.
  • Lt. Nemeroff, a crew member of the Thomas Prince who has a crisis of faith after the ship passes through the Ring and eats his gun.
• Driving Question: As in any good mystery story.
  • "Who destroyed the Canterbury?" and "What happened to Julie Mao?" in Season 1.
• Dressing as the Enemy:
  • Alex spends several episodes wearing an MCRN uniform, which is justified since he is ex-Martian Navy and wearing the uniform while piloting an obvious MCRN vessel to Tycho Station would allay suspicions if they were hailed.
  • Holden and Miller swipe the uniforms of a pair of guards they kill on Eros so they can avoid trouble from other patrols.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: In the fifth season finale, Alex abruptly suffers a fatal stroke from being at a hard burn for too long. This is due to Cas Anvar being fired after the season had been filmed.
• Dude, Not Funny!: In "Paradigm Shift", Alex catches Amos "fixing" the Martian flag on the Roci (painting out Deimos, which the UN destroyed two episodes prior). He's far from amused, since seventeen Martians died in that event and Mars lost a significant cultural icon. Bobbie is similarly unamused when she actually gets a good look at it in "Assured Destruction" after she and Avasarala temporarily join the Rocinante.
• Dudley Do-Right Stops to Help: Holden chooses to force the Canterbury to investigate a Distress Call rather than ignore it, which he knows will cost them their punctual delivery bonus.
• Dying Alone:
  • In "Critical Mass", we learn Julie Mao died a horrific, agonizing death all alone in a dark hotel room as The Virus ate them from the inside out.
  • Subverted in "Godspeed" when Miller is all set to do this, even turning off his radio so he can listen to the protomolecule's babbling broadcast in peace, until events conspire to keep him alive.
  • Solomon Epstein is unable to call for help after becoming immobilized by a high-g burn, and winds up dying in his chair when he suffers a stroke as a result.

E

• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The first episode features a Belter who is extremely tall and fragile due to being raised in low gravity, which is explicitly described as being the standard Belter body type. Dialogue continues to describe Belters as such throughout the series, but the rest of the actors cast as Belters match normal human body types.
  • In the first season, UN Secretary-General Sorrento-Gillis is The Ghost and Undersecretary-General Sadavir Errinwright relays all of his off-screen orders personally. Come Season 2 and onwards, Sorrento-Gillis is a significant onscreen character who sometimes overrules Sadavir's desires and doesn't always take his advice, making it weirder in hindsight that Errinwright had as much autonomy as he did with the decisions he made in Season 1. This is Justified in Season 3, which reveals that Sorrento-Gillis is ultimately a weak-willed person interested in nothing but his legacy and only really advocates for what the people closest to him want him to do at any given moment, suggesting that Errinwright was mostly using him as cover for what he wanted to do during Season 1.
• Earth Is the Center of the Universe: Despite its many problems, Earth remains the only naturally habitable planet for humans until the discovery of the Ring network and still commands the largest and most capable navy in the entire system. Both Mars and the Belt see themselves as independent of the home planet, though they are ultimately dependent on Earth for survival: it is still the largest supplier of food in the system, and provides the biomatter that makes offworld farming possible.
• Earth That Used to Be Better: Earth is rapidly heading in this direction, as ecological disaster, overpopulation, internal corruption, and political infighting chip away at its dominant position in Sol.
• Eiffel Tower Effect: The opening credits use the Statue of Liberty to show rising sea levels on Earth. Then a new facility is constructed to raise it back to sea level.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • The protomolecule. In its first appearance it's a squishy and cephalopodic Meat Moss surrounded by occult blue bio-luminescent spores that runs on Human Resources. Then "Critical Mass" proves it's also infectious via Mutagenic Goo, and by "Leviathan Wakes" it has full-on Combat Tentacles and can arrange its spores into a humanoid shape. And even ignoring all of that, it's frequently shown to be a complex lifeform that's only "alive" in a way humans can't normally understand it, and also completely violates the laws of physics whenever it shows up in the story.
  • First described in season three, then explored more in season four, are the forces implied to have wiped the protomolecule's creators out. It is uncertain if they are actually lifeforms in any sense of the word. The only hints to their existence are through mysterious spatial anomalies that are essentially holes in space. They have the power to disable protomolecule-based technology and disintegrate anything transiting Ring space.
• Electronic Eyes:
  • The corporate spy Kenzo has one that's featured in several POV shots in Season 1.
  • Cohen the documentary camerman is blind, and sees through his cameras.
• Emergency Cargo Dump: This is standard procedure when facing Space Pirates given Holden's desperate plea for Canterbury to eject its load of ice when attacked in "Dulcinea".
• Empty Chair Memorial: In "Home", the crew of the Rocinante pour Ganymede gin and raise a glass toward the empty chair where Miller once sat.
• Empty Quiver: When Earth launches half their nuclear arsenal to stop Eros, circumstances require them to hand over guidance to Fred Johnson. When the nukes prove unnecessary and Earth sends the abort codes to detonate them, Johnson manages to save and appropriate nearly 30 as an insurance policy.
• Enemy Mine: In "Static", Avasarala reaches out to Fred Johnson, hoping he has solid proof of the conspiracy which he'd be willing to share. He transmits back the location of the derelict stealth ship which his team disabled in the previous episode.
• Energy Absorption: The protomolecule feeds on energy, as shown in "Salvage" when it's found wrapped around a deactivated reactor, and in "Critical Mass" when Julie Mao smashes all her electronics in an attempt to slow its infection of her.
• The Engineer: Naomi and Amos' role on the Canterbury and the Rocinante.
• Epic Launch Sequence: The Nauvoo is launched in "Godspeed" after being hijacked by the OPA to destroy Eros. Being a Generation Ship, it's so big that hundreds of smaller drone-ships have to dock with it and fire their engines to help it maneuver.
• Epic Tracking Shot: The series premiere, "Dulcinea", show off two of them:
  • The Establishing Shot of Ceres Station begins with ships in orbit before using everything from ventilation shafts to public transit to progress continuously from floor to ceiling down through the docks, the wealthy district, and the working-class districts before finally emerging from the ceiling of the slummy marketplace at the very heart of the asteroid. This establishes not only the station's layout, but that "down" is out and gravity influences property value.
  • Aboard the Canterbury, Holden has a Walk and Talk with Naomi and Amos that carries them down a hallway from just outside the galley, into an elevator, up several levels, down another hallway, and onto the bridge where Holden starts up another conversation with Alex in a single take that lasts for over a minute.
• Escape Pod: Knight is technically a shuttle with other primary uses (like investigating a Distress Call 20,000 km out), but it serves this purpose for Holden's crew in "The Big Empty".
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Holden's decision to log the Scopuli's distress signal, committing the Canterbury to a dangerous rescue mission even though it could easily be a pirate trap, establishes him as the resident Knight in Sour Armor.
  • Avasarala is introduced tickling her grandson before hopping on a transport to oversee the Cold-Blooded Torture of a tech smuggler, establishing her pretty solidly as a pragmatic anti-hero.
  • Fred Johnson's first direct meeting with Holden consists of him effortlessly Sherlock Scanning his way through Holden's bluff of having half a platoon of pissed off Martian marines on the Rocinante.
• Establishing Shot: Used frequently, along with a Title In.
• "Eureka!" Moment: Going through the data-broker's workshop Miller spots a half-constructed robotic gerbil and immediately tears out of the room. It turns out Julie Mao hid secret data from the broker inside a similar device.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Deep down, Jules-Pierre Mao does on some level love his daughter Julie. In fact, despite Julie's defiance, he nonetheless favored her over her sister Clarissa.
  • Esai Martin, while not nearly as messed-up as the above example, is a Corrupt Cop who sells Martian government property on the Black Market to make enough money for his family of four to purchase tickets on the colony ships lining up to settle the newly discovered Ring worlds.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Played With by Anderson Dawes, who professes disgust at Filat Kothari's ambush of Havelock and offers the man's hiding location to Miller, but however real his revulsion might be what he's really looking for is leverage over Miller.
• Everybody Knew Already: When Holden and Naomi reveal their relationship to Amos and Alex, they cheer and groan respectively. Both had long since figured it out and were betting on when it started, a bet Alex lost.
• Every Man Has His Price: Anderson Dawes believes this and probes for Miller's. He's quite disappointed when Miller doesn't take up his offer of Filat Kothari's whereabouts.
• Evilutionary Biologist: Dresden, again. As he explains in "Doors and Corners", he sees the protomolecule as the key to humanity's future, as it could allow all humans to adapt to any environment, even hard vacuum. Therefore, he sees every horrible act he's committed as merely the price of progress.
• Evolving Credits:
  • Starting in Season 2, the credits change to reflect in-universe developments such as the destruction of Deimos, the departure of the Nauvoo from Tycho Station, the protomolecule spreading across Venus, the nuclear attack on South America, the opening of the Ring gates and the asteroids hitting Earth.
  • In Season 6 there is also an element of foreshadowing, as you can see the Ring Station having some kind of construction taking place, by Episode 5 it looks complete and in that episode, the construction is revealed to be a set of gigantic railguns that annihilate an attacking MCRN fleet.
• Exact Words: Faced with "unequivocal" orders that "under no circumstance" is he to let Phoebe Station fall into UNN hands, Lt. Sutton opts to destroy the entire moon rather than waste his marines' lives contesting it.
• The Exile: In "Pyre", Fred Johnson threatens this to Holden when he chooses to head for Ganymede to destroy the new source of protomolecule that has popped up. Holden isn't deterred, partly because Fred may very well no longer be in command of Tycho Station by the time Holden gets back.
• Exotic Extended Marriage: Polyamorous marriages aren't considered unusual. Holden has eight parents (five fathers, three mothers) since he was conceived from a mixture of all eight genetic profiles, though Mother Elise is the one who actually carried him to term. The series hasn't explored whether Holden's parents really are polyamorous or are just using every trick at their disposal to keep the government from seizing their land^note In the books, Holden's parents consist of a monogamous homosexual couple, a monogoamous heterosexual couple, and a polyamorous foursome, with no overlap in romantic attachments.
• Expanded States of America: Montana is said to be located in the North American Trade Zone, presumably an expanded union of the USA, Canada and Mexico. It makes sense, given that Earth is essentially united in a One World Order run by the UN, that individual countries no longer have the same sovereignty they once did.
• Expecting Someone Taller: Miller has this reaction to meeting Holden.
  Miller: Half the system thinks your some kind of outlaw hero, but you're really kind of clueless, aren't you?
• Eye Scream:
  • Not that they're alive to feel it, but victims of the protomolecule tend to sprout crystalline structures from their eyes.
  • In Season 4, Holden has to take a sample of his own vitreous humor by jabbing a camera-guided syringe in his eye.

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