Synopsis from the link:
' A discovery pushes Naomi and Holden apart and sets the Roci crew against each other.'Syfy Wire's Cher Martinetti and Adam Swiderski join producers/universe creators Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham and discuss 2X11 (featuring special guest star The Expanse showrunner Naren Shankar)
Higlights from the podcast:
* Ty, Daniel and Naren are doing the podcast from the writers' room for season 3. There are amazing BTS stories about the Bobbie-Martens scene. When Bobbie punches him in the throat, Frankie was supposed to mime doing it and hit him on the chest with the flat of her hand, the first time she did it, she hit him so hard it sounded to everyone there like she shattered his breast bone and everyone on set just stopped. Peter Outerbridge is an old pro and just walked it off. Another thing- when she grabs Martens and throws him against the tv, she was only supposed to mime it, before they replace it with a fake tv, maybe even use a stunt actor. The first time, they did it, she actually threw him against it and broke the real tv unintentionally, which is the shot they used in the show. Even at 10% speed, when she's trying not to hurt anyone, Frankie is just wrecking the set.
* Naomi and Holden are figuring out who they are to each other and on diverging paths. Naomi having a kid is part of her character, as the show goes on there'll be more conversations about that and more reveals. Naren loves the Arbogast storyline- in the book it's an open secret what's happening on Venus and people study it in the background, on the show it's more hidden, they focus on the personalities on the ship and talk about the larger philosophical elements it raises.
* Writing process wise, Ty and Daniel always need to know what the ending is and work backwards from that, Naren tries not to write to a result, he reads the material to know the overall story, then in the micro he changes character dynamics or emotional arcs, adds stuff from the novellas ,without breaking the continuity of the overall story. Ty and Daniel are there to make sure the changes don't break the book continuity, that's how they stay on target. The departures happen organically on a more local level. Naren told Ty and Daniel he would like the characters on page 1 of the book, for the show characters to get there around season 3, for them not to know each other/their backstories and learn it over the course of the series, which is a departure from the books. They can dive into personalities a bit differently than the book, they stay true to the material and who these people are.
* Leviathan Wakes is a mystery and a conspiracy, so that forces you to write in a particular way- hide answers, introduce more questions, etc. If you keep doing that it can get tiring, conspiracy themed shows tend to run out of steam and collapse under the weight of their own plot. It tends to feel in the end like a gimmick, where they just keep spinning the wheel, which is bad storytelling and can frustrate the audience. In S2 they ditch the mystery/conspiracy and focus on action-reaction-consequences. They're planting the show in forward motion- you're learning as you're going, things are changing, but you don't have to deal with contradictory explanations and stories that make it difficult to follow, so they can dig into the characters and deepen them. It's more satisfying to keep expanding the scope of the world and move forward.
* There are pluses and minuses to adapting established material- Battlestar Galactica didn't have a blueprint and could take the show wherever they wanted to go, which can be creatively freeing, but they can also go off the rails. Conversely, with a book you can feel constrained by the plot, as long as you're aware of it and can find the balance between new stuff and old stuff. Ty and Daniel are aware of the difference in the mediums and half the time they're the ones suggesting the changes. One of the things Ty and Daniel learned working on the show- if they find actors they like who engage with the material and give a strong performance, they want to write more stuff for them and maybe fold in new, small characters into the existing character, rather than take a chance on bringing in a new to the show.
* The Simpsons' Easter Egg on the show nobody can guess is from season 1 of the Simpsons. The one thing Naren wishes he could have done, but they couldn't do it money wise, is the proto-molecule battle with Bobbie's team on Ganymede, but in S3 they have a way to correct it a bit. He says if there's something they couldn't quite do, they'll find a way to do it eventually. They're very first conversation when they break down a new season, is 'how far can they get?' plot wise and that influences the pace. They purposely did end S1 where Leviathan Wakes ends, because they didn't want the story to feel finished, they wanted people to wonder what happens next and tune in to S2. Ty and Daniel outlined all 9 books while they were working on book 2, the show's writers' room knows a lot of it too, so they know where it's going and don't contradict it. They think the whole story could be told in about 7 seasons.
Thanks to
![]()
rakugaking for the link. Inverse interviewed The Expanse showrunner Naren Shankar. Highlights from the interview:
* Before writing for Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1992 (his first writing gig), Naren was studying at Cornell University in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics. He realized he wasn't interested in being an engineer, Ron Moore, who just joined the writing staff of The Next Generation, encouraged him to write for tv. Naren slept on Ron's couch for 8 weeks in his initial time in Los Angeles.
* He didn't have a cultural reference point for how to become a writer, so he became the keeper of the flame of Star Trek's fake science and grafted their techno-babble- 'It was like spraying this thin metal coating of science on the show.' He made sure te banter between Geordi and Scotty in 'Relics' was as close to being real as it could be and also wrote 'Force of Nature' where warp speed itself is revealed to be creating damage to the fabric of space.
* Naren says that science fiction on television was difficult because doing science realism was hard to depict. Besides writing for three Star Trek shows (The Next Generation, Dee[ Space Nine and Voyager) he also wrote for Farscape and SeaQuest 2032. He took a much needed break from tv sci-fi to be the showrunner for CSI. He was away from the genre for about a decade and was reluctant to return to sci-fi, mostly because he didn't want to jump back into inventing absurd technology or depicting physics unscientifically. He found it boring, goofy and childish.
* The changed when SyFy came to him with The Expanse, which impressed him with its realism and adherence to real space science the series strives to achieve. This season he wrote 'Paradigm Shift' which showed the discovery of the Epstein Drive. Shankar says 'people run away from hard science fiction because it's difficult to produce, but now, the effects allow us to show space battles without photon torpedoes and all that bullshit. The spaceships on The Expanse shoot at each other by flinging pieces of metal really, really fast".
* He favors character arcs over big impact plot developments, like keeping Miller alive well into S2, when he dies at the end of the first novel. He says television is great at digging into characters, but it's not as good at relentlessly producing action, because it's not sustainable. He thinks sci-fi has come a long way in depicting realistic diversity since his Star Trek days, on Star Trek everybody was connected to their ethnicity in a very direct way (Uhura spoke Swahili, Scotty drinks Scotch) but with the Expanse everything is mixed, like Alex being an East Indian who speaks in a Texas accent. Because The Expanse is about 'tribalism', it's a larger, more scientifically accurate story that could be painting the future of humanity perhaps better than Star Trek did. All sci-fi is somewhat allegorical, when people get that about the show, it makes him think they're doing something special, that the show got it right and had something to say.
SOURCES:
#1,
#2,
#3,
#4GIFSThe 'Inside the Expanse' wasn't posted yet. The Expanse airs Wednesdays at 10/9C on the SyFy channel. ![]()
![]()
Get wrecked, Martens.
