All the Pieces on the Board

On one hand I respect what the storytellers – Andy Diggle, Rubin, Francesco Pisa, and Raul Angulo – were trying to do with The Expanse: Dragon Tooth. They had to create a story that connected from The Expanse season six over to the seventh book (which may or may not become a seventh season at some point), Persepolis Rising, and it has to do it in a way that feels respectful to what came before, what comes next, and feels relevant to both. It’s not an easy task, especially when these comic authors are working independently of authors James S.A. Corey and showrunners Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, and Naren Shankar. I respect what they did considering the daunting task at hand.

With that said, the final result, even in this third volume, still feels like it’s lacking something. Don’t get me wrong, this is the best volume of the set by far, doing much to combat the issues I had with the previous two sets in the story (Part 1 and Part 2). The simple fact is, though, that for a story that is supposed to span twenty years across three distinct time periods in the “lost era” of The ExpanseThis series is set in a future where humans have colonized the Solar System, but then have to contend with alien tech that upends their whole civilization., the story feels oddly rushed, like barely any time has truly passed and the characters involved haven’t really changed all that much at all. It’s short, truncated, small, all when (without trying to make a pun) it needs to feel expansive.

Maybe it’s that the writers bit off more than they could chew. Or it’s that the plan they had going in didn’t really fit a three chapter, twelve issue series. The story of sleeper agents working within the Transport Union could have been interesting and special, giving us real insight into how the Transport Union operates and how the characters we know have been forced to adapt to a new way of doing things. The Expanse: Dragon Tooth, though, doesn’t really spend any time on any of that, effectively keeping all the characters in amber as they were at the end of the sixth season, as if it’s afraid to change anything just in case the seventh season comes along and it has its own changes to make instead. It weakens the book and leaves it feeling like less than it could have been.

The story picks up with the crew of the Rocinante – Holden, Naomi, Amos, Peaches, and Bobbie – back on Medina station ten years after the last time we saw them (in part two of this saga). While on the ship, getting a bite to eat, Amos and Bobbie end up foiling a drug exchange after Bobbie spots some dudes looking real shifty. All the drug dealers (and their buyers) end up dead, and after the investigation is complete it’s discovered that the criminals were dealing in Osteo-X, a bone density drug. The buyers were all lifetime users which meant they weren’t Belters but, instead, were Martians dressed up as Belters.

Camina Drummer, head of the Transport Union, quickly (too quickly) puts it together that these Martians must be related to the group that was responsible for the attack on the ring space ten years earlier, and likely tied to the attack on Belter ships ten years before them. They’re all part of the Dragon Tooth, the underground agents that were, at one point, working for Laconia, and their business isn’t done. While Holden and his crew try to find the sleeper agents working on Medina, the agents have their own plan: blow up the Earth ring and prevent the motherworld from ever accessing ring space again. If the Rocinante crew don’t work fast, Earth and Mars might be lost forever.

I think the ten year gaps between chapters do more harm than good to this story. It introduces issues with the overarching narrative that the story itself simply can’t get past. The story will jump ten years and the only comment on it is that one of the characters might be a little rounder around the middle (not that we can tell from the art). Maybe hair is a little greyer, or a character has grown a beard, but it’s not anything substantial that changes the narrative in any major way. That, of course, is by design since the characters effectively need to be kept frozen in amber so they can be used if a seventh season eventually happens, but it still means that we aren’t seeing any major changes for the characters or their narrative because of the time jumps.

Worse, it also means that events that should have been forgotten aren’t and become relevant even when the characters should never remember them. Camina very quickly pieces together everything (and I do mean everything) about the plot in five or so pages despite events happening ten years prior that, for the most part, she should have forgotten. She’s able to make leaps that only someone reading these books back-to-back-to-back would do. She has perfect recall of twenty years of facts which doesn’t make any reasonable amount of sense. If this story took place over the course of a few months or a year then it would be fine, but twenty years is too large a span to make sense.

It also leaves the villain feeling somehow shallow and empty. We don’t get a ton of character development for Dhillon, the head of the Dragon Tooth group, but what we know about him is that he’s a proud servant of Laconia (even before Laconia was officially reformed) and he’s willing to do anything to get back “home” to the Laconia system. The system is close, notably, and anyone that crosses into the Laconia ring is fired upon immediately. Dhillon, though, holds out hope. That’s fine, but it’s literally his own defining character trait and it doesn’t change over twenty years.

Bear in mind this is twenty years of him living deep cover where he’s not just running a covert group of deep sleeper agents but he’s also a rising star and head security officer on Medina station. Time and again people in his own organization tell him that he needs to find a way to move on, to make a life for himself here now that Laconia is done with him, but he refuses. What he doesn’t see, and the book never acknowledges, is that he has made a life for himself and he’s throwing it all away by committing to his plan to destroy the Earth ring.

There could b e nuance and depth to Dhillon. We could explore his backstory and learn while he’s such a committed soldier. We could spend time with him as a security agent on Medina, learning his patterns, seeing who he is as a person. There are all kinds of things this book could do, with or without the ten year time jumps, to make Dhillon feel like more than a barely sketched agent. In the same amount of time that Dhillon has been sitting back, waiting for his moment across twenty years, Marcos Inaros went from pipsqueak thug to head of the Belter Free Navy, throwing stealth rocks at Earth. Dhillon had twenty years to become more than just a sleeper agent waiting for Laconia to love him. He simply didn’t.

Hell, Dhillon doesn’t even have a plan of his own. He steals specs from Earth about the ring and then makes another stealth rock, stealing that idea from Inaros. Dhillon never comes into focus as a villain because, deep down, he feels like a copy of a copy. He’s just Inaros but less interesting, less charismatic, and less effective. I like the idea of a sleeper agent working within Medina to cause carnage, but nothing about his plan or its eventually intended results feels original or interesting. He’s just some guy that the book props up to be a villain because it doesn’t have anything better to do.

With all that said, I do still like parts of this book. I like the character interactions with the Rocinante crew as, for the first time in these books these characters actually feel like their counterparts from the show. I think the artwork in this book is great, really matching the universe we know while getting so many details right. The layouts are dynamic and colorful and this really feels like The Expanse books are on the right track to tell clean and effective stories set in this world. It’s just a pity it’s all wasted on a nothing burger of a plot.

The Expanse: Dragon Tooth could have been really interesting if the writer, Andy Diggle, actually put the right kind of time and investment into the story to make it sing. Diggle can be a good writer, and has been working in the industry for years, but either he didn’t really care about this assignment or it was simply larger than he could handle in a 12-issue run. Whatever the case, this is bad work from Diggle and it leads to a hollow and empty story. Which, really, is par for the course for comics based on The Expanse. Maybe one day we’ll get a good comics series from this universe, but The Expanse: Dragon Tooth is not it.