For Alien Consideration

The Expanse seems to be moving into the next stage in its discussion of human relationships with last night's nice new episode, "The Seventh Man".

Spoilers after the screenshot.

The story around Bobbie (Frankie Adams), the Martian marine, has gotten a lot more interesting since last week when she lost everyone else in her unit to what appears to have been an alien life form. Her story isn't unlike Holden's from season one--after a catastrophe where she's lost her friends, she's finding herself alone in a situation where she has to solve a mystery while the motives of government forces are suddenly a lot less clear and more suspicious than they had been. Though unlike Holden, she's basically completely at the mercy of the Martian government who seem to be trying to influence her into saying Earth was responsible for what happened on Ganymede. I think the only reason they haven't killed her is because it would too obviously look like a cover up.

A second story about human connexion has begun after the one that culminated with Miller's sacrifice. Bobbie is surrounded by people while simultaneously being completely alone while Amos (Wes Chatham) has a Kikuchiyo moment where he identifies with a child feeling protective of his mother, recalling something similar from Amos' own past. This leads him to a conversation with someone even more emotionally walled off than Amos, the psychopath scientist, Cortazar (Carlos Gonzalez-Vio), who talks about how liberating it is not to care about other people.

Given the delicate political situations portrayed everywhere else, Cortazar kind of has a point. It sounds like the mad scientists were trying to turn the galaxy into a colony for some kind of alien life at the cost of all human life so the story seems to have become one of where the value of messy, emotionally unsatisfying human life is pitted against complete annihilation or something like the Human Instrumentality Project from Evangelion where all human intelligence is merged.