This was the first season made for streaming and it shows, for better and for worse. The worse isn’t actually that bad, it’s mostly that episodes will end on awful false cliffhangers which makes watching an episode a day of this show kinda annoying. I ended up taking a break halfway through the season and binging the last five episodes last night and this morning. I think this is my favourite season so far, although Season 3 does have two finales which helps that one out a lot. Idk I just really dug the space western vibes going on in the first half. The second half with all the protomolecule stuff was good as well but not as good as “James Holden has to serve as mediator between a group of belters who illegally colonised the first habitable planet outside the solar system and a charter team who were legally sanctioned to colonise the planet but arrived later.” Like that is the kind of frontier space western shit I go crazy for. The tension between the two factions slowly rising despite Holden’s efforts, like that’s so good. Then they go into the structure and activate the planet and then it gets a little boring for me. Like I don’t really care THAT much about the ring builders. I mean I liked Season 3 because that one just moved insanely quickly with no room to breathe and think, but this season is intentionally slower, and about the relations between people and factions, which I was not looking forward to at first based on the show’s past attempts at human drama, but I was pleasantly surprised by how invested I was in the conflict. Of course it wouldn’t be the expanse without a bunch of forgettable tertiary characters that won’t show up again but you take what you can get. The aspect ratio change was a really neat idea that makes sense if TVs were wider but looks weird on a normal TV. Like I get that it’s the frontier so they want the screen to go wider but on a TV it doesn’t go wider it goes lower. I mean you get used to it so I’m not gonna complain that much. Episode 9 which was entirely set on Ilus was the best episode and it helped that it wasn’t changing the size of the frame constantly. I mean it wasn’t that bad, like they would have each storyline have chunks of an episode so you could get acclimated to one aspect ratio before it changes in the next chunk. The stuff outside of Ilus was pretty average, I assume that’s all show-only stuff setting up Season 5. I’m glad we got more Claes Ashford because despite being a pretty one-dimensional character in season 3 David Strathairn brought a lot to the table in making him so compelling to watch. In season 4 he mostly stands around in rooms and then has a big action scene at the end and dies but like, surely he could’ve stayed around. Just replace any of the forgettable belter characters and put him in the role instead, most characters in this show are pretty interchangeable it wouldn’t be that hard to keep Ashford around and remove some other character. Oh well. The Mars and Earth stuff were both really boring I don’t have anything else to say about them lmao.