The UN politicians on Earth declare war against Mars. The Outer Planets Alliance (OPA) becomes the government of the "Belters", workers on the asteroid belt and Ganymede. The crashed asteroid with protomolecule on it emerges from Venus as a spaceship which floats away to an orbit beyond Uranus, and assembles a giant space ring with a green-blue matter inside it. Mankind of Earth, Mars and the asteroid belt unites and sends ships to investigate the ring. Once inside, ship captain Ashford wants to destroy the ring, fearing it might cause a danger to all humanity, but Holden has visions of Miller, who leads him inside the base of the ring spaceship. Holden has visions of the death of the alien civilization that created the protomolecule. He persuades the crew to turn off their generators. This causes the ring to conclude that human spaceships are not a threat, and releases them through a portal / wormhole to 1,300 habitable solar systems.
The third season of "The Expanse" finally managed to align its episodic story into a clear storyline with a goal, yet some flaws still remained. The authors still cannot differentiate what parts of the gigantic story are worth the time and which parts are not worth wasting time on. This can be demonstrated in episode 3.10: it ends in a fascinating, almost surreal sequence in which Holden places his hand inside the circuit inside the alien ring and suddenly gets visions of the past (DNA particles floating in space; a dozen portals / wormholes with solar systems seen through them, which start blowing up one after another; a beam of light which causes a yellow star to turn blue and explode). After it, the viewers get excited and stimulated to see what will happen next. But the entire next episode, 3.11, is spent only on showing injured people on their space station, and it isn't all until the last two minutes that Holden gets to talk about what he has seen with Frankie. Nobody cares about showing every single injured astronaut in this episode, everything is clear already after five minutes, which makes the entire episode a symbol of excessive stalling instead of focusing on Holden and his amazing discovery. And unfortunately, this is symbolic for the entire season.
There are some "polished" bits in here. The first episode starts with a gorgeous space scene in one take, in which the camera drives away from Venus where the protomolecule is creating someting, passes by Earth with its satellites and radio signals that war is inevitable with Mars, then passes by Mars and "catches" its radio signals about Earth's imperialism, and then goes all the way to Ganymede, with "Belters" shooting with their spaceships, thereby encompassing all the key players across half the solar system. The new character of Anna, a philanthropist pastor of a Methodist church, played wonderfully affectionate by the excellent Elizabeth Mitchell, gives the story something fresh: a character with compassion that is endearing to the viewers. In her first appearance in episode 3.2, Anna witnesses a riot police officer hitting a protestor with a police stick, so she actually stops to comfort the injured protestor, ask his name, and then ask the name of the police officer, only to order the official to bring the injured protestor to a hospital. There are also other good bits and ideas (Holden, in a spacesuit, floats in space while he has a vision of Miller, without a spacesuit), but after watching the last episode, one realizes that "The Expanse" didn't need 39 episode to get there: the last episode of the 1st season, where the protomolecule was introduced, should have already been the first episode, and the last episode of the third season could have been the last episode of the first season. All those overlong and overcrammed subplots of one faction fighting the other, or one group scheming against the other one, prove to be unnecessary. At least half of all episodes could have been cut. The main focus is on humanity discovering a portal of a dead alien civilization, and this is all what matters. Everything else is just an attempt to obfuscate the viewers and prolong the running time past its prime.
Grade:++
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