AVAILABLE on Netflix for some months now, sci-fi series The Expanse remains very much a cult affair despite it attracting great reviews and being deemed worthy of a second season, which has just started airing in the US.
Based on the books by James SA Corey, the show is a slick hybrid of detective noir and space adventure in the vein of Blade Runner meets Battlestar Galactica and Total Recall.
The Expanse is set 200 years in the future: Earth and a long-colonised Mars are tussling for supremacy while space-born manual workers known as 'Belters' demand basic human rights from exploitative corporate paymasters.
Off-world detective Josephus Miller (the excellent Thomas Jane, sporting a provocative cyberpunk haircut) works in the down-at-heel space colony on dwarf planet Ceres.
Assigned to track down a missing girl, before long Miller has uncovered the threads of a conspiracy which threatens to spark off a full scale war between Earth and Mars.
Also in the mix are a handful of rogue Belters led by James Holden (Steven Strait), the sole surviving witnesses to an apparent act of war by Mars military forces, and United Nations peacekeeper Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo), who is investigating the cause of rapidly escalating interplanetary tensions.
Although it takes a couple of episodes to hit its stride, is occasionally inpenetrable and certainly isn't the most original work ever to hit the screen, The Expanse still offers enough sci-fi goodness to get genre fans on the hook.
:: Watch now at Netflix.com
