Season 5 of The Expanse (****½) isn't quite the show at its best, but it's damn close. In fact, it's a bit bewildering that they're still following the books so closely (including material which is setup for Books 7-9, which are not being adapted in the show, or at least in this show) when it feels they should be closing things down for the final run of episodes. Things come together in the season finale, one of The Expanse's strongest episodes to date, setting things up for next year's final season. Amos has his own mini-finale in the penultimate episode, including the show's most ambitious ground action sequence (which unfolds via what appears to be a single, long, continuous shot) to date, which is handled very well. Dominique Tipper gives a reliably outstanding performance as she has to guide Naomi through the toughest test she's ever faced, this time without the backup of her crew. Still, The Expanse is decent in its quieter moments as well as the loud ones and we get some good stuff here, particularly for Naomi as she has to embark on possibly the chanciest escape plan you'll ever see. Amos's storyline at least allows for more dynamic action and character interplay, even if the "will humanity hold together after an apocalypse or turn on one another?" question feels a bit redundant after decades of post-apocalyptic shows, books and movies, but everyone else is spinning in circles for much of the second half of the season. Having gotten the good stuff out of the way early on, the rest of the season feels locked into a holding pattern: Naomi is in a prison cell Amos and his band of fellow survivors are trying to find a ship to escape Bobbie and Alex are sitting in chairs on a spaceship and Holden and a bunch of newer and older characters are sitting in chairs on their spaceship. The second half of the season is still good, but less effectively-paced. The first half of the season is an unabashed triumph and might be the best run of episodes in the show's history. All of the actors do good work, with Wes Chatham in particular turning in a great performance as Amos finds himself effectively the disaster relief coordinator for a small band of survivors of the disaster. The first half of the season is tense and taut, delivering a countdown to Armageddon, exploring the event as it happens and then the immediate aftermath. The TV show, fortunately, more or less nails the landing. This allowed it to effectively cover a huge storyline from multiple vantage points located all around the Solar system. Widely-regarded as the best book in the series, Nemesis Games manages both a large-scale, epic story combined with much more personal stories tightly focused on each of the crewmembers of the Rocinante. Ever since the Expanse TV series launched in 2016, fans have been hoping it would make it as far as the events of the fifth novel in the series, Nemesis Games.
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