#leviathan falls
Goodbye to a beautiful show that has moved and inspired me.
(Leviathan Falls spoilers)
The Expanse tarot: James Fucking Holden as Judgement
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The Expanse tarot series part 1: https://fluorescentwolf.tumblr.com/post/664531145453600768/the-expanse-fanart-tarot-card-series-part-1-part
The Expanse tarot series part 2: https://fluorescentwolf.tumblr.com/post/664531422669864961/the-expanse-fanart-tarot-card-series-part-2
The Expanse tarot series part 3: https://fluorescentwolf.tumblr.com/post/670842695102660608/the-expanse-fanart-tarot-card-series-part-3
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The Judgement card is “choices and their inevitable consequences coming due.”
The cosmos is calling and you have to answer. It’s a call to something greater. You have to act. You need to make a decision. Unlike the Justice card, this decision is a mix of logic and intuition.
Your past is behind you. All your past experiences are learned. All regrets and wrongdoings are processed.
Any choice you make is going to have a huge, long-lasting effect.
Trust your judgement and know you’re on the right path.
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James Fucking Holden, my man. The top is the video still from episode 1x02 “The Big Empty” where he sent out that fateful message about the Canterbury. He pressed the button. And there his life of lazy drifting turned into answering the call.
The bottom is his final act, becoming one with the Ring Station to help save everyone. The halo-arc of protomolecule crowns him; since it’s a curvy protomolecule dot it means the “natural” protomolecule - as opposed to the human-engineered protomolecule.
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Books I Read in 2022
#23 – Leviathan Falls, by James S.A. Corey
- Rating: 4/5 stars
It’s over, and it’s not perfect, but I’m happy with it.
Yes, there was some bloat and repetition in this story. It probably could have been fifty pages shorter easily, or perhaps eighty with a more ruthless hand. But I never felt any one section was a slog more so than the others, and there was no plot point or POV character I feel needed to be cut in entirely.
I usually don’t care about spoilers in reviews, but this one I’m going to go entirely spoiler-free. I do think the setup surrounding the Final Boss of the series was good, even if the secondary antagonist below it was a little simplistic. I enjoyed the presence of the new major POV character added, and don’t agree with some other reviews I’ve read that found her pointless–I thought her character arc was solid and her role in the larger story worthwhile.
I’m mostly pleased with the way our favorite long-running characters are treated and how their dynamic has changed (or not) over the years and changes in circumstance. The major change that happened to a core character in book eight was addressed and expanded upon to my satisfaction, though again, I see other people don’t agree with me on that.
What kept this from being five stars for me was the combination of slightly more text to read than the story needed, a sort of excessive maudlin tone to one character’s POV in particular that I did not enjoy, and the wish that the proximate goal of the story (stop the secondary antagonist to hopefully thwart the primary one) had been either a little more complex, or a little better executed in its simplicity. However, overall I think this stuck the landing. Am I too used to being disappointed by the endings of major media properties? Because this isn’t the end of Mass Effect 3, here, it’s far more narratively and thematically cohesive than that pile of turds.
