Prime Video's 62-Episode Sci-Fi Masterpiece Has Some Of The Best Worldbuilding In TV History

Worldbuilding is essential to any science fiction TV show, especially a space opera. Spectacular starships and adventures on strange planets can grab attention, but it’s a rich and convincing universe that gives audiences a reason to stay. There is a reason Star Trek and, more recently thanks to multiple Disney+ shows, Star Wars have become staples of TV sci-fi: their universes feel tangible. The central adventures take place in settings so grand and fleshed out that it’s easy to believe the story continues even when the camera turns off.

However, the scope of Star Wars and Star Trek developed across multiple movies and television shows. Their fictional galaxies benefit from decades of accumulated lore, with each new project adding new detail. Their contemporary worldbuilding depth wasn’t present when The Original Series or A New Hope first arrived. That makes what The Expanse achieves across six seasons especially impressive. The Prime Video sci-fi show builds a rich, inhabited galaxy through one interconnected 62-episode story.

Airing from 2015-2022 and based on the novels by James S.A. Corey, The Expanse takes place in a solar system colonized by humanity centuries in the future. Earth, Mars, and the exploited inhabitants of the Belt compete for resources and power until an alien discovery threatens their precarious balance. The story itself is riveting enough, but it’s the depth and detail of the setting it takes place in that elevates The Expanse from being a great sci-fi show to a true genre achievement when it comes to effective worldbuilding.

The Expanse Creates A Coherent Sci-Fi Universe Across 6 Seasons

There is plenty to love about The Expanse, from its brutal space battles to the uneasy camaraderie of the Rocinante crew. However, its greatest achievement is making its universe essential to everything happening within it. The solar system isn’t simply a map on which to plot out intergalactic conflict, it’s the core reason these conflicts are happening. Space never becomes an empty stretch between adventures in The Expanse: it’s the foundation of literally everything that happens on-screen.

The creative team behind The Expanse did an extraordinary job of making Earth, Mars, and the Belt feel like realistic societies that would develop if the same conditions were there in real life. Earth carries the weight of entrenched privilege and mass unemployment. Mars organizes its identity around military strength and the dream of terraforming. Belters supply the resources that sustain both powers while enduring exploitation. Their competing interests give even relatively small disputes the potential to become catastrophic, and it’s always believable.

This worldbuilding authenticity is achieved thanks to attention to detail, as the divisions between Earth, Mars, and the Belt extend beyond political speeches. For example, Belter language, gestures, and physical adaptations make the generations of separation from planet-born humans impossible to ignore. Even the more out-there sci-fi concepts, like the alien protomolecule or Ring gates, strengthen rather than weaken the coherence of The Expanse‘s lore.

Its impossible capabilities disrupt an established order in ways that feel totally believable, such as the fact that opening routes to other worlds with the Ring network threatens the economic status-quo holding the solar system together. This grand-scale cause and effect helps secure The Expanse‘s legacy. Its universe feels alive because nothing happens in a vacuum, and few, if any, sci-fi shows can rival the speed and efficiency of its worldbuilding because of this.

There Are Still More Stories To Tell In The Expanse Universe

For all its extraordinary depth, Prime Video’s The Expanse leaves enormous possibilities unexplored. Its sixth season concluded in 2022, bringing the show’s central conflict with the Free Navy to an end. However, the TV show stops with Babylon’s Ashes, the sixth novel in James S.A. Corey’s book series. Three more The Expanse books remain: Persepolis Rising, Tiamat’s Wrath, and Leviathan Falls. Those novels do much more than supply another enemy for the Rocinante. They significantly expand the universe of The Expanse.

Persepolis Rising, the 7th The Expanse book, advances the timeline by roughly three decades, allowing humanity’s settlements beyond the rings to develop into established societies. The rise of the Laconian Empire, which was teased in the final season of The Expanse, introduces an imperial power built around alien technology, transforming the balance between worlds.

Tiamat’s Wrath then builds on this further by exploring the rest of the galaxy’s attempts to resist Laconia, while also pushing deeper into the dangers surrounding the Ring network. Then Leviathan Falls, the last The Expanse book, brings humanity’s relationship with the alien infrastructure, its vanished builders, and the forces that destroyed them toward a final reckoning. Together, the unadapted The Expanse trilogy expands both the political map and the cosmic mystery underpinning the grander narrative.

The final seasons of The Expanse even plant foundations for that future with the season 6 cold openings, which adapted the novella Strange Dogs, which is set on Laconia and focuses on characters who later become central to the plots of Persepolis Rising and beyond. A hypothetical season 7 has already been teased, meaning that if the show were to return, introducing Laconia wouldn’t feel like narrative whiplash. One of television’s richest sci-fi settings may have already been built, but The Expanse still has room to grow bigger, stranger, and more dangerous.

The Expanse