How That Amos Shower Scene Defied Expectations With ‘Power

SPOILERS forward for “Exodus,” the primary episode of “The Expanse” Season 5.

After a comparatively calm fourth season, “The Expanse” returned with a bang Wednesday through the primary three episodes of Season 5 — and with it a serious storyline, plus quite a lot of private progress, for Amos Burton (Wes Chatham).

As issues kick off, the crew of the Rocinante have (briefly) break up up, with Holden on Tycho station whereas Alex, Naomi and Amos journey by way of the system to cope with numerous private enterprise. In Amos’ case, he’s headed again to Earth for the primary time in a long time after studying that Lydia, the girl who raised him in Baltimore, has died.

While in transit, Amos intervenes to cease an extortion racket benefiting from the poorer passengers headed to the internal planets. And as this can clearly result in the extortionists taking revenge in some unspecified time in the future, Amos decides to chop to the chase by heading over to the showers, the place he is aware of they’ll come discover him.

We’ve seen this kind of factor earlier than: While “The Expanse” doesn’t experience violence for its personal sake, all through the sequence Amos has been on the middle of a few of the present’s starkest bodily confrontations. (“I am that man” stays certainly one of our all-time favourite moments.) These scenes have virtually all the time underscored Amos’ matter-of-fact, survive-at-all prices method to every little thing, and usually, he no less than seems to in a short time shrug off what he’s been compelled to do.

This time, nevertheless, the present pulls off a genuinely shifting avoidance of expectations. Amos, as predicted, finds himself surrounded by thugs, and it seems as if we’re about to see him beat them to shreds. But we then reduce to the aftermath, with Amos standing underneath a showerhead. He’s actually and figuratively washing the blood off, because the scene is punctuated by very transient flashbacks to the melee. The viewer will get a glimpse of how brutal the entire thing was, however the scene actually facilities on Amos’ clear wrestle to course of the violence he simply inflicted on his attackers amid his grief for Lydia.

Ahead of the Season 5 premiere, we spoke to “The Expanse” creators Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, in addition to showrunner Naren Shankar, who talked about how that scene got here collectively and what it says about Amos’ frame of mind as we reconnect with him.

Abraham defined that the scene truly began out because the extra conventional hero-kicks-ass type of brawl the viewers little doubt anticipated. But in what he known as a “case study” within the “power of film editing,” the choice to vary issues up was made in postproduction.

“I love that scene so much. And the thing is, we filmed the other scene. We filmed the traditional action scene and we were in editing and Naren was looking at it and going, ‘Yeah, this is getting into it. This is a beautiful scene. This is a beautifully rendered action scene, but I can do something more interesting,’” Abraham advised TheWrap. “And actually tips on how to filmically get the emotional core of that character current in that scene, tips on how to inform that story visually. The factor I’ve loved myself most about getting to do that is coming to grasp the ability of movie enhancing. And that’s my case examine on tips on how to do it proper.”

Shankar added that he wished to really convey Amos’ growth relatively than present easy thrills. “That scene is not about him killing, kicking some dudes’ asses. It was about what’s going on in his head,” he defined. He additionally famous that it was born of necessity resulting from how storytelling differs between tv and literature.

“It’s like within the books, the Amos story begins with ‘Lydia was dead.’ It actually begins with that line of dialogue. And so the reader understands what’s occurring with Amos’ head. The downside for us is we don’t have entry to that inside monologue. So it grew to become a query of what’s occurring with Amos, and we needed to be as subjective as attainable. So exhibiting…