No Dreck

Some days you get lucky, and you turn on the TV and find something you’ve absolutely always wanted to see.

This happened to me on Wednesday, when I watched the second episode of Season Three of The Expanse.

The episode was written by James S.A. Corey themselves, and the climax featured a space battle between Rocinante and a Terran warship.  Which was great, because in The Expanse we have real physics.

When was the last time a series set in space had real physics?  Maybe never.

Here’s how it would play in the average space TV show.

“Increase power to the shields by 45%!  Fire dreckion beam!”  Then the camera gets shaky and the bridge crew throw themselves left and right as near misses explode around them.  And then dreckion saves the day, because the whole show is basically made of dreck.

So what happened in this episode was that Rocinante was maneuvering frantically, and the two crew who weren’t on the bridge were strapped down in another compartment, and then a locker in that compartment burst open and released the ship’s supply of power tools.   So every time Roci maneuvered, the tools changed direction and hurled themselves across the compartment.  Some of the tools were heavy, and some were sharp, and the two guys in that compartment were strapped into couches and couldn’t get out of the way.

Perhaps in this scenario there might be something like a little  suspense, no?

A flying tool then cuts the air supply to one of the two guys, so the other has to unstrap and make his way across the room to help his shipmate.  Now he’s subjected to the same gee forces as the power tools, and if he doesn’t hang on he’ll go flying around the room, too, and even if he does succeed in hanging on the compartment is still full of nasty objects hurling themselves around like a swarm of oversized killer bees.

Great scene.  Killer scene.  And it was a scene I’d always wanted to see, without knowing it.

What followed was that Rocinante survived because of a tactic taken straight from The Sundering.  (Which I am fine with, by the way.  If you’re going to steal, steal from the very best.)

Now I’ve got to figure out a way to steal the power tool scene and get it in the next Praxis book.  Because that would be awesome.