i watched the first episode of The Expanse.
i also read the whole set of wikipedia pages about the show, writers and books that the material derives from.
so, two entirely separate things; first, the science.
i love correct science. i also tolerate so-so science, as long as it's not preposterous. i accept that Expanse has dedicated a fair amount of research and they are trying to stick to realism.
second, the actual storytelling and direction. i find the expanse to be just horrible in this respect.
every bad move you can make in filmmaking, they make it. shoveling a ton of characters in the first episode. having deaths and accidents happen to characters who the viewer barely knows at all. big developments to a story that has yet no foundations.
or, as one would say, a clusterfuck.
there are a few interesting establishing shots (say, the crane hands manouvering the huge mineral chunks in the space station, where the guy's arm gets hurt), but they are just shoveled in, and they have no importance asides from the fact that "we can science". could not grasp a single metaphor if there was any.
the dialogue is horribly PG13; even a man who's arm has been torn off has no more intense dialogue that "hey, where's my new arm".
i'm not looking for coarse language, i'm looking for emotion.
good film is about a director telling the viewer "hey, i am going to tell you a story. sit down and watch". and like every story, it needs a beginning, a development, and an end. this series just started with compressing a ton of BS into a single episode where so much stuff happens, i would need to watch it maybe five times to begin understanding what is going on.
same for characters. characters which are unusual need careful introduction, they are not to be just thrown on the screen, assuming the viewer will tolerate them. Expanse completely misses this point, and shovels in weird characters, vistas, environments, languages, themes, sex, violence, all at once.
go to youtube, find a song you like, go to settings, and play it at 2x speed. that's what The Expanse feels like.