How To Build a World THE EXPANSE Why You Should Watch [No Spoilers]

Today's video is brought to you by 8 Hours, a new online platform curating video essays on film and television. Head over to 8hours.com to browse over 4,000 video essays on topics like screenwriting, filmmaking, and genre. That's right, I have a sponsor. I've seen a lot of space battles on TV and in movies, but when I saw this one, it felt different. There aren't any lasers, no force fields, and there's this crazy attention to the detail of physics. And then I realized that what makes this battle so interesting is exactly what makes the series it comes in so good, how it carefully thinks through every detail from the ground up. This is The Expanse, the sci-fi, er, Amazon series that's one of the best shows on TV at this kind of world-building. Now every work of fiction builds a world to hold the story it tells, whether it's with the ice zombies of Game of Thrones, or a fictionalized Albuquerque with a thriving methamphetamine industry. But The Expanse is one of the best places to see this kind of thinking, because it takes huge swings. It projects into the future, where humanity has colonized the solar system, living on Mars, the Asteroid Belt, and far-off moons of Jupiter and Saturn that you haven't heard of since your solar system unit in middle school. Keep hearing about Phoebe Station. Let's go back to Ketamine. We are going to IO. Land a course for Callisto. Demas is just a little dot. While the show is critically acclaimed, it didn't really make major headlines until last year, when it was killed by the sci-fi network. As science fiction fans are programmed to do from birth, they mobilized to save their show. But this time, it actually worked. People flew planes with Save the Expanse banners, and George R. R. Martin called up fantasy sugar daddy Jeff Bezos to beg him to save the show. And in a nutshell, that's what makes The Expanse so great. Its ability to build a world that feels so real that people will take to the streets to defend it. So that's what we're going to look at today. How The Expanse builds its world, and why it's so interesting. Yes, I'm aware that this is also a book series, but on this channel, we talk about TV. And I haven't read them. Where are you going with this? Wherever I goddamn like. I'm Jackson, and this is Ideas at Play. Let's start by jumping back to that space battle that got me thinking in the first place. In a sentence, what makes this so different is the show's willingness to rethink everything, and envision how something like this would actually have to look. By getting rid of lasers and shields, the crew has to depressurize the ship to prevent air leaks once bullets start ripping through the hull. Because inertia is going to be a major factor, every change of direction is tough on the crew, like that spinny thing astronauts and pilots train on. Each concept that the show rethinks sends these massive ripple effects on down the line. The result is a world that feels a lot fresher than a lot of other built worlds we see on television. So much of fantasy takes place in some kind of medieval northern Europe, or in a space navy like Star Trek. But The Expanse is somehow both grounded and, pardon the pun, expansive. Executive producers Mark Fergus and Hawk Osby are masters at creating worlds that don't fit those stereotypical molds, like they did when they wrote their classic sci-fi film, Children of Men. The world was stunned today by the death of Diego Ricardo, the youngest person on the planet. There, they tried to think through what a world might look like if nobody had been born in 18 years. And here on The Expanse, they start that recalibration on an even more fundamental level, gravity. Earth's gravity is hell on the Martian physique. You need to take one dose of each of these every day. Blood Ox Booster, Muscle Fatigue Inhibitor, and this is Osteo-X, which is a rapid bone density enhancer. From interstellar to the Martian to, well, gravity, sci-fi films have been thinking about gravity a lot more recently. But the difference is that they deal with gravity in the short term, what it would be like if you or I were suddenly thrown onto a different planet. The Expanse thinks about how cultures and people would evolve over generations in those environments. For example, think about how different you'd be if you grew up on an asteroid space station with really low gravity. Your bones would be less dense, and you'd be taller. Your environment is more hostile, so your culture would probably value self-reliance and toughness the most. And that kind of culture, combined with being spread out over a bunch of asteroids, is tough to govern. So there probably wouldn't be much of a centralized government. What I just described is one of the three main factions in the Expanse, and the one we spend the most time with. The Belters. 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. And that technique of using gravity as a launching pad is the first step that author N.K. Jemisin describes in her worldbuilding workshops. She's won the Hugo Award, the top prize for science fiction and fantasy literature, a record three times in a row. So she kind of knows what she's talking about. In her workshops, she recommends starting on the biggest possible level and working your way down to the most minute details, because it's those fundamental changes that shape everything, even if we're not aware of them at first. Every one of those details about the Belters stems from the previous one, and they can all find their roots back to the physical level. But the Expanse keeps pushing those physical differences. Where do you get your air? Who controls the air? And how does that power structure affect the people who live there? Air is good, don't you think? Of course, this is way, way, way too much information to just dump on an audience. So the Expanse gives you a steady diet of kernels that slowly reveal the larger structure beneath. The best writers think about this as an iceberg, with 10% of their world explained and 90% beneath the surface. That 90%, while invisible, is really, really important. Just ask the Titanic. The audience needs to feel that there is a 90% down there, because even if it's not present in their minds, it's shaped the characters they're watching. Here's how NK puts it. We understand the world that we live in innately because we live in it. We aren't standing around having conversations with each other about, hey, nitrogen's pretty good today. But we do understand it. So the characters who are going to inhabit this world also need to understand it. We don't need someone to explain that the Belters are poor. We see it in the broken screen on Detective Miller's hand terminal. We can see the Martians militantly working on creating a new Earth on Mars in their straight-laced haircuts and clothing. Earth's wealth is obvious, in their wide-open spaces and sports car racing ships. One of the most fun ways that the writers do this is through the lingo the characters use. Something special on some fine new digital duster seems we just got in stock. Enos of the Enos, 9 and 10. Even more interesting is the way that the Belter language sounds. Me le danse aire de sitar. According to its creator Nick Farmer, Belter Creole, as it's called, incorporates Chinese, Japanese, Slavic, Germanic, and Romance languages to sound both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. And that all makes sense for the Belters. They're immigrant workers from all over, and you hear that in their shared language. Something that changes accents from person to person. Visually we see this on screen. The Expanse has one of the most diverse casts on television. Which makes sense, because humanity is colonizing the solar system, not just white men. It's a vision of our worlds, projected into the future and shaped by changing circumstances. Which brings us back to that battle that's a microcosm for all of these things. You don't need to be in AP physics to understand what's going on. Each of the unique details, the lack of shields, the bullets, the danger in every maneuver, is mined for more tension and drama. There's no countdown to when the shields will run out, and any shot could be fatal. Hell, dodging too quickly could knock them out. It's using that world to up the ante to tell more exciting stories. And the work of building that complex world starts to really, really pay off as it fills in our characters. By describing the world and its conflicts in such detail, the world starts to feel like a character itself. Making its presence felt in the lives of each and every character. Earth and Mars have been stepping on the necks of the Belters out here for over 100 years, and I didn't want to be the boot. So you decided to switch sides? I stopped playing. Those systems drive their motivations, their decisions, and their relationships with each other, so that when two characters from different backgrounds sit down to talk, we feel the weight of all of that baggage. You know what I love most about Mars? They still dream. We gave up. They're an entire culture dedicated to a common goal, working together as one to turn a lifeless rock into a garden. We had a garden, and we paved it. But to me, what really sets The Expanse apart is that its story asks the same things of its characters that the show asks of us. As a show, The Expanse makes us question and think about the basic tenets of our world. But as a story, it demands just as much re-examination from its characters. In order to survive, they have to form empathy and understanding for people from different backgrounds and groups, overcoming their own biases and looking at things from a new perspective, all while a mysterious and unknowable alien threat looms. Without giving anything away, these are not your parents' little grey aliens. For a split second I thought I was hallucinating, after hearing what went down in that lab. When the European tall ships first arrived, the natives couldn't see them. The sight was so completely outside of their experience. They just couldn't compute. And I think this kind of worldbuilding is a perfect fit for television. Think of Game of Thrones or The Wire, shows that immerse you in a world you aren't familiar with by examining it from every conceivable direction. That, of course, doesn't mean it's an easy sell. As much as I can fall in love with these shows, I can have a really hard time getting into them in the first place. Because sometimes the first season can feel like anywhere between five and ten hours of exposition. To bring back NK, Worldbuilding is the process that you use to come up with the world that you then write the story in. Worldbuilding is not a substitute for writing a story. But on The Expanse, it's not. Yes, the beginning can feel plodding, and at times the dialogue is not my favorite. But burn me in mine and I'll go through you like water. I mean, is that a threat? Or an insult? Doors, you're kind of supposed to go through them. Anyways, dialogue isn't all there is to writing. The Expanse's story is based entirely on the world it's building. How that world and those systems react to change, assert power over each other, and shape the lives of ordinary people. So it makes sense to spend time to describe it, and to really appreciate the thought and reasoning behind every choice the show makes. Sure, you could watch The Expanse because you like space and it looks cool, but its worldbuilding offers a completely immersive experience if you're willing to give it the time. And for me, thinking about how a world is built from the ground up also helps me understand our world. Think about if, hypothetically, oh I don't know, the temperature of the planet rose by 2-4 degrees. Physically, rising sea levels would erase islands and coastlines. Growing deserts would shrink food supplies. Tropics could become unworkable in the heat of summer. Refugees would tax even the most stable countries. Global GDP would plummet. Conflicts and wars would rise in the chaos. And that's to say nothing of what happens- Ahem. Sorry. Anyway, watch The Expanse. I'm glad we had this talk. Thank you so much for watching. If you liked this video, please share, like, and subscribe. I was really happy to have 8 Hours as a sponsor today. They're a really cool website that curates all of the best video essays about film and TV and sorts them for you to find really easily. You can head over to 8hours.com to browse over 4,000 video essays on topics like screenwriting, filmmaking, and genre. And you can also listen to my podcast Couch-taters, like couch potatoes, where I talk even more about TV. See you next time.