Welcome back to the Expanse Rewatch!
If you're curious where the earlier posts are, I haven't yet decided if I'm going to bother migrating them from my now-deactivated Facebook. For the time being, at least, I am into full forward motion, no looking back!
Today's episode: "Remember the Cant."
This episode is interesting not just for really getting the ball rolling on linking up the disparate events of the first two episodes, but also for putting forward a nice "capsule story" for Dimitri Havelock. Havelock hasn't really been much of a presence in the series so far, mainly serving as a "new guy" foil for Thomas Jane's Detective Miller to bounce some exposition off of. Here though, we get to see him pursuing his own agenda: learning about the culture he has come to police.
Havelock is learning about the Belter language from the prostitute he met earlier on at the crime scene. There's a lot of potential trope pitfalls to fall into when it comes to sex work. The immediate tendency on the part of writers is that sex workers must be "saved" from their lot in life, that they lead miserable existences of violence and danger. There's obviously a grain of truth to that; I'm not going to pretend that women worldwide are coerced into sex work through violent and vile means. BUT, what's equally patriarchal is the inclination on the part of writers to throw in a tangled love interest where a male client "saves" the sex worker by giving her Genuine Love For the First Time, or she dies tragically, etc. etc. etc.
Here, there is an obvious hint that Havelock and the prostitute, Gia, share a romantic interest, but it is not overplayed or given a sense of fault-in-our-stars style tragedy. It is simply a facet of a growing relationship, one that largely seems founded on Havelock desperately needing SOMEONE to guide him in a world he still doesn't fully understand. Havelock is an Earther, and Gia's reference to his heritage is a foreshadowing beat that underlines the tense house of dynamite that James Holden just threw a match into with his broadcast.
As such, it actually becomes thematically important to begin and end this episode with Havelock, a character who appears on the surface to be a sidekick to Miller and little more. This little subplot with Havelock learning the Belter language doesn't exist in the books, and what it effectively serves to do here is to set up just how deep the hatreds between Mars, Earth, and the Belt are.
That's a message which is echoed in the other plots in "Remember the Cant." On the Donnager, when Holden and his crew are subjected to interrogation, Alex is instead put back into a Martian uniform. That uniform is enough of a symbol to immediately drive a wedge of tension between Alex and the others, even though he had been working and flying with them on the Canterbury and helped them get rescued. Alex's fellows don't see that shared history: they see the uniform.
Yet it's the people forced to wear those uniforms and symbols who suffer the most immediate consequences in conflict, as Admiral Souther observes. It's interesting that the person most reticent to jump to war is the person with the most firsthand experience in it. Souther, a man in a uniform, is reduced to a tool by governments and by the UN officials like Avasarala.
And ultimately, it's the same fate that befalls Havelock at the close of the episode. The Belters who corner him and drive a spike through his stomach don't see a person, and couldn't give a toss about his attempts to reach them in their language. They see a symbol of Earth.
In the books, this fate falls to another character. Here I feel the change makes the moment more potent. Havelock is already established for audiences, and more importantly the episode "arc" centres around him neatly, with the first scene showing him learning the language, and then being impaled using that language.
"Remember the Cant" is the first episode of the series that shows how the universe of the Expanse is based around humanity's divisions, and around characters who try to make us work beyond those divisions towards common goals. For poor Havelock, though, the divides are too vast, too numerous, too fresh - both in literal terms and in meta-storytelling terms.
It is, in short, too soon to be fixed. It's just getting started.
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