‘The Expanse’ is returning for a fourth and fifth season thanks to Amazon Prime Video picking up the ambitious series after Syfy canceled it. The series is based on the Hugo Award-winning book series by “James S. A. Corey,” which is a pen name for collaborators Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, who also act as producers on the series.
Season 4 will draw heavily from the fourth book in the series, ‘Cibola Burn’, but there will be one glaring omission. According to Franck (via TV Guide):
“I didn’t get my mimic lizard, which made me very sad. He was a little lizard in the books that we didn’t get to have because he would have cost one jillion dollars and the studio didn’t want to pay one jillion dollars. So we didn’t get him. But we got all the other stuff.”
At the end of Season 3, the Ring Gates opened revealing over a thousand new planetary systems. In Season 4, explorers will begin to scout out these new planets to see if they are inhabitable by humans.
“The minute something realizes you exist, it’s going to try to kill you because that’s how nature works. It goes both ways. Obviously the Spaniards showed up in South America and everything tried to kill them. And then the invisible things that lived in their bodies killed everything. The minute two biologies start to mix, it’s deadly for both.”
While the series draws from the books, it will diverge at times. As Franck said, “So we’ll diverge a little bit in the middle of a season and then we’ll come back to where the book is.”
Amazon has already renewed the show for a fifth season. The fourth will consist of ten episodes, and all will be released on December 13. The first three seasons are already available to binge on Amazon, but time is running out!
