A small detail in The Expanse’s final battle at Medina station acts as a neat callback to the Rocinante crew’s humble beginnings from season 1.
The Expanse‘s final battle remembers the Rocinante crew’s origins, bringing a poignant sense of closure to their live-action journey. Babylon’s Ashes may not be where James S.A. Corey’s novels end, but The Expanse season 6’s finale of the same name draws a line under Amazon’s TV adaptation… for now. Celebrating the end, The Expanse‘s last episode drops a series of callbacks to earlier points in the story. The Rocinante crew share one last proper meal, Xan becomes a Protomolecule hybrid (of sorts), and James Holden upsets lots of people by doing the right thing – just as he did in The Expanse‘s very first episode.
Even the final battle contains a cute throwback to the early days. The Expanse‘s series finale sends the Rocinante on one final mission – penetrate the Ring’s Slow Zone and send a ground assault team to seize control of the Free Navy’s railguns. In order to avoid getting hit by said railgun, the Roci takes a second ship, the Giambattista, with it. The assault squad are packed into individual pods alongside a ton of empty crates and tipped out of the Giambattista’s hold like LEGO bricks, confusing the railguns’ targeting systems. The Giambattista comes in handy again during the climactic confrontation with Marco Inaros. Naomi overloads the ship’s reactor to help generate the energy required to summon the Ring entities that’ll destroy Marco’s flagship.
A random, unmanned ship with no prior relevance to The Expanse may seem an out of place addition for the TV show’s final battle, but there’s a secret significance behind the Giambattista assisting the Rocinante. As explained by Holden during the introductory briefing sequence, the Giambattista is an ice hauler – hence it can pack thousands of one-man pods into its storage chamber. There’s something poetic about an ice hauler accompanying the Rocinante during her final onscreen mission, since The Expanse‘s main crew – Holden, Naomi Nagata, and Amos Burton – all met while hauling ice aboard the Canterbury.
And it was the Canterbury’s destruction that led directly to Holden and his friends getting involved in the Protomolecule conspiracy in the first place, then commandeering the Rocinante and, finally, finding themselves in an alien pocket of space about to summon godlike creatures from another universe to defeat a warmongering dictator who almost destroyed Earth. It was an ice hauler that started the Rocinante crew’s journey in The Expanse season 1, and now an ice hauler goes into battle with them at the very end – a pleasing bit of narrative symmetry on the TV show’s behalf.
The Giambattista wasn’t necessarily designed as a Canterbury “full circle” moment for The Expanse‘s final chapter. The very same ship features in James S.A. Corey’s book series, which carried on for another three novels after the Pella’s destruction in Babylon’s Ashes. With Amazon’s The Expanse TV show ending on season 6, however, the presence of the Giambattista takes on an added significance, calling back to the fresh-faced Holden, Naomi and Amos of season 1. The Giambattista also serves as a reminder of how far that trio have come since those early days. Not so long ago, The Expanse‘s Rocinante crew were toiling away on a ship just like the Giambattista… now they’re blowing one up to save a thousand colonies scattered across the galaxy.
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