Deep Cover, Deeper Mission

We’re two volumes down now for The Expanse: Dragon Tooth, and it still doesn’t feel like the series is really coming together. The first volume set up a foe for the heroes of the Rocinante to chase, a deep-cover Laconian asset, Dhillon, left behind in the rest of human space after Laconia closed their borders to all ships. He and his people have one goal: to fight the good fight for Laconia and prove their loyalty so they can go home. It’s an interesting premise, one that would seem to give the heroes we know a new threat they have to battle in the thirty years between the events of the sixth season of the show and the events of the seventh book (which fans still hope, one day, will become a seventh season of the series).

Except, then that doesn’t happen. The second volume actually jumps ahead ten years with the crew of the Rocinante apparently never running into Dhillon and his shadow fleet during that whole span. Ten years where the supposed bad guys are laying in wait, biding their time until they can do… something. Hell, by the end of the volume, one of his crew even asks, “why are we trying to get back to Laconia? We have a good thing here?” And it’s a valid point. Dhillon comes across as a true believer, but his actions, waiting all this time to do… nothing seems to run counter to the whole point of his character, and it sucks a lot of life out of this book.

Importantly, Dhillon doesn’t even show up until the last issue of the volume (meaning we’re almost eight issues in and still haven’t seen real progress on his story) with the rest of the time spent watching the crew of the Rocinante babysit a communications experiment. That morphs into a murder mystery over a dead scientist and what he may have stumbled on, and that sort of points back to Dhillon and his crew, but it all feels very amorphous. “Oh, this sort of ties into something, and this sort of hints at what Dhillon has planned next…” But it’s hard to get energized over that when these maybe half steps have taken up two-thirds of the page count for this series so far and Dhillon feels just as ephemeral of a villain as he did at the end of the first volume.

Put another way, two of the three volumes of the story have gone by so far and we’re still doing table setting for the series. When the comics started up and promised to explore untold stories in the thirty years between series and the final trilogy of books, I can’t think that this was what readers were expecting. Nor does it seem like a good use of that time. Thirty years is a lot of time that can provide all kinds of stories to tell, one would think. But twenty years already spent on table-setting feels like a massive, wasted opportunity, and I just don’t understand the reasoning behind it.

The experiment in question is headed by Dr. Elvi Okoye and her husband, Fayez. Together they’ve been working on a theory about how to use the ring gates themselves to boost communications and develop better relays. Getting comms through the backscatter of the rings has been more difficult than it should be, and the scientists are hoping that the experiment will provide vital data that can lead to a proper solution. The only issue is that the team has to first get the tech working, and then they have to launch a probe with the tech out into a sector of space that doesn’t see much human traffic. That means, eventually, they need to use the Laconia gate.

That’s why the Rocinate is called in. As one of the best warships working for the Transportation Union, Holden’s ship is the perfect one to run defense in case anything goes wrong. And something does immediately when Naomi discovers that one of the lead scientists on the project is dead. Some nefarious person killed them, then hid their body on the drive cone of the Rocinante with a come of mag-pads, making it clear it wasn’t suicide. They’d hoped the body would burn up when the Rocinante fired her engines, but Naomi saw a weird reading from the mag-pads and the investigation turned up the body. Now Holden and his crew have to figure out what is going on, why the scientist was killed, and if there’s something more at play than they first suspected.

Let’s start by noting that the murder mystery is a real flop. For starters, the book doesn’t introduce all that many new characters, especially not ones who could be likely murderers. In reality (without spoiling anything) there’s only one new, named character that would make an obvious choice for who the killer could be, not because of anything they do or say but simply because they’re new and the book isn’t going to make any legacy characters the killer (since they have to show up in later novels). That brings down the pool of potential killers, an obvious one, and when that ends up being right, all you can think is, “well, duh.”

To be clear, it wouldn’t be bad that the obvious character is the killer if they were also developed, but the book doesn’t really do that, either. They show up a couple of times, say their name and seem helpful, and then spontaneously end up the bad guy, but there’s no actual development of them as a person. Because of this we’re robbed of two things that could have made them compelling. The first is that we don’t get to bond with them as a character so that, when they are revealed to be evil, we feel shock or sadness or anything. Worse, though, is that we also don’t understand why they were doing what they did because the book doesn’t spend the time to illustrate that for us. They’re just a random person who kills someone else, and we collectively shrug over it.

Honestly, we could say the same about the dead scientist as well. This book has them show up dead and then barely informs us about who they were as a person. A different story would put the focus on them for an issue so that, when they end up dead later, we feel a tinge of regret about it. “Oh, this person was going to be important. That sucks.” Feeling things about the characters is something we need to make a book compelling, but The Expanse: Dragon Tooth, Part 2 doesn’t seem to care about any of that.

That applies to the crew of the Rocinante as well. We love these characters not just because of who they are but also because of their actions and how they are portrayed. Unfortunately there’s no spark of life to these characters in this comic. They feel hollow, empty, like they’re cardboard stand-ups of the characters getting moved around to say fairly generic dialogue. This is a murder mystery set in the world of The Expanse but if the characters didn’t look familiar to us, it could be any crew from any ship going through the motions here. Hell, if the book had swapped out the crew of the Rocinante for any other crew it wouldn’t have affected the plot in the slightest. The same actions would happen, the same end result would be had. It would just be some other characters seeing it all at the end (if they even cared at all).

This gets back to the biggest flaw in these books so far: Holden and his crew are so distanced from the villain of the story, Dhillon, that they don’t even realize they’re battling against a villain. They don’t have a goal, a specific story they’re following, they simply show up, do their job, and leave. I get that Dhillon is an overarching threat that will eventually pay off, but when no one knows he’s there, and no one even seems to care, that doesn’t make him much of a threat. Dhillon is so deep-cover that there’s no reason for the cover at all. He’s just a guy no one cares about, but he acts like he has some grand plan. If the heroes are engaged with the villain, the readers aren’t going to be, either. It’s all just going through the motions.

We’re two volumes down and I still don’t have a clue where we’re going or what all of this is building two. It’s two volumes that end with a cliffhanger, both times, that have Dhillon saying, “and now our plan can be set into motion…” and yet there’s no real momentum for where that’s going. I want to like these books because they have characters I like, drawn by a talented set of artists that make the books feel like the show. But the story, written by Andy Diggle, just isn’t there. It’s so much padding without any momentum, and if I wasn’t hardcore, deep into The Expanse I would have dropped the series by now. You’d be forgiven if you already had.