THE EXPANSE – Season 1 Episode 8 – SPOILERS
Sadavir Errinwright (Shawn Doyle)
seems the likely villain of the piece. Doyle also was the mad scientist Dr. Isaac Taft of
LOST GIRL season three.
Sadavir Errinwright (Shawn Doyle) is beginning to look like the evil dude behind all this. Earth is the most likely place for those stealth ships to have been built, and Errinwright was just too quick to have Holden killed. The question is, when will Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) figure that out?
Kevin Bundy as the unidentified Mormon
who talks to Miller on the trip to Eros.
Bundy was also the bow tie wearing Dr. Ameni in episode four of DARK MATTER.
The Rocinante finds a small asteroid at the coordinates designated by Fred Johnson. Once there, Naomi spots a stealth ship parked in a crevice. Holden and his crew board the vessel and find what appears to be a life form. They immediately flee and blow the ship to bits.
They head to Eros, a place which was once a five star resort, but now resembles a bad Motel 6. Joe Miller and Jim Holden finally meet during the attempted assassination of the Rocinante‘s crew. (We learn that the bottoms of hotel couches on Eros are for some reason bulletproof.) It turns out that Lionel Polanski and Julie Mao are one and the same person. Mao is found dead, a victim of whatever life form she had encountered on the stealth ship. Florence Faivre has appeared in eight episodes without actually interacting with any of the other cast members. She has been seen in archive security footage,
in a recorded message to her parents, and as a corpse. Like Miller, I was looking forward to meeting Julie Mao.
Fred Johnson (Chad Coleman) and his assistant Sam Rosemberg (Alli Chung) puzzle over the decoded data from the attack on the Donnager. Chung was a nurse in LOST GIRL episode 1.13 Blood Lines.
When Miller, who is no longer employed as a detective, arrives on Eros he runs into his old friend Inspector Sematimba (played by Kevin Hanchard, who is also a cop on ORPHAN BLACK). We learn that Sematimba gave Miller the hat he wore for the first 7 episodes, as a reminder that he should keep his head. It didn’t work. Miller left the hat, and any sense of caution, behind on Ceres Station.
Take notice of the lights decorating the food kiosk where Miller and his buddy ate. They look like Christmas tree lights from the late 20th century. One would expect some more advanced sorts of decorative lighting to be available by 2200. They could be some high-tech stuff disguised as antiques, but why go to the trouble? The rest of Eros Station is almost completely undecorated. Perhaps they are leftover from earlier days. We do learn that one of the delicacies available on Eros Station is “okra infused tank grown ribs”. A logical inference might be that, somewhere, probably on Earth, animals are still raised for food. (Otherwise there would be no need to specify “tank grown”.)
NOTES
Larissa Stadnichuk as the only female member of the hit squad sent by Errinwright
to “take Holden off the table”.
Larissa Stadnichuk who is listed in the credits as “prostitute assassin”, was Elizabeth MItchell‘s stunt double in the second “V” series (2009). Prior to this episode, her most recent acting appearance was as a flight attendant in the 2011 Liam Neeson film THE GREY.
Kevin Bundy (the unnamed Mormon on the flight to Eros) with Stuart Hughes and Joseph Ziegler in a 2011 stage production of THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE. Bundy is currently Juror 12 in a production of TWELVE ANGRY MEN at Soulpepper Theatre in Toronto
Jason Lee Bell (Steven Strait’s stunt double) will be Simon Holcombe in ONLY I, a film about an MMA fighter (Brendon Fehr) who is forced to reevaluate his life. Bell also doubled for Justin Kelly in the LOST GIRL episode 3.10 – Delinquents, and did stunt work in two KILLJOYS episodes — Bangarang and Vessel.
FAUX GRAVITY AND EROS — In THE EXPANSE, the level of simulated gravity on Ceres Station is 0.3g. The spin of that asteroid had to be increased to create that effect on the outer walls of subsurface tunnels. Eros, which is a lumpy rock cylinder that currently rotates end-over-end once every 5 or so hours, has been given similar faux gravity. To create the needed effect, after stopping the end-over-end rotation (which is a lot of inertia to overcome), the asteroid would be partially hollowed out and a considerable amount of spin created along the long axis. Given the rate of spin necessary on Eros and with its small radius (about 11 km) one would expect dizziness and/or nausea in those unaccustomed to the associated Coriolis effect.
