 Hi, I had to re-record this 20-minute video, but T-Math's Wrath is fucking great, so I'm not really THAT mad. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Okay, so T-Math's Wrath is the eighth book in the Expanse series, and it is the best one since Abaddon's Gate, I'm gonna say. Now, Abaddon's Gate, I will say, is a little bit better, but this one, just because of what we find out about the thing that killed the protocol, the protocol creators, and the fight against Laconia and Winston Duarte, that stuff is just fucking great, and it blows... Well, I won't say it blows everything else out of the water, but it is way better than most of what we've seen in the series so far. And I still really like the series so far, so that's saying a lot. So this one starts up about four years after Persepolis Rising ended. By this point, Laconia has pretty much consolidated control over all of human space. You know, the soul system, Laconia itself, all the colony worlds, everything. They control everything. But there is an underground resistance movement that is not led by Naomi, but she's one of the leaders, and the rest of the old crew of the Rosinante are there fighting. And the thing is that they can really only do... they can't do much more than just annoy or harass the Laconians at this point. So at the beginning, a lot of them are thinking like, okay, should we really keep doing this? Are we really serving any sort of purpose when we do this? Meanwhile, Holden is being held prisoner on Laconia, and we actually don't get a whole lot from his POV. I'll talk about that more in a minute, but suffice to say it is a little weird at first, but you get used to it. And you also see a lot of what's going on from the perspective of Teresa, who is Winston Duarte's daughter. And finally, the third main plotline that's going on is Dr. Elvie Okoye. I think that's how you say it. Okoye? I don't know. But she's the scientist from Sabola Burn, and she is looking for information on the things that killed the protomolecule creators, and also trying to help Laconia find a way to maybe fight back or defend themselves against it. So when you get this late in a series, there's obviously a lot of stuff going on, okay? There's just so much that has already happened, and there's so much we need to keep track of in this one. But one thing that's pretty great about the expanse, and even though I feel like the pacing of the story as a whole has been a little slower than I would have liked, I do think that they've done a great job of spreading that information out so that you don't have too much coming at you at once. Like, when we find out little bits of new information about the protomolecule creators and what destroyed them and who destroyed them, the things in the gates I'm going to call them because, you know, they're eating ships that go through the gates. But it's never too much, even though it is, like, kind of weird and out there and it does stretch my understanding of physics, at least my understanding, other people might feel differently. And that aside, the plot to this one is still really great. I mean, it is weird that we don't really follow Holden in this one all that much, because we have the prologue, the epilogue, and one chapter in the middle that are him. And that's weird because he's, I mean, he's the protagonist. And don't get me wrong, he's not always been the greatest character, like there have been times where he's been a little annoying and stuff, but we always saw things from his perspective. However, in this book, we don't get in his head all that much, but we do see what he's doing from other people's point of view. And by this point we know him well enough that we can kind of understand what he's doing and why he's doing it. So it wasn't really that bad. I did, I was fine with that. And it's also a little weird that the crew is kind of split up and the Rosinante is gone. Like at the beginning of the book, Amos is missing, they don't know what happened to him exactly. Naomi is kind of off doing her own thing and so the only members of the crew that are really together are Alex and Bobby, and they're on the Gathering Storm, which is the Laconian destroyer they stole in Persepolis Rising. And so it just feels weird that the Rosinante is gone and the crew is split up, because ever since the first book, that has been the main core of the series. And so later on when they start meeting back together, it feels like a real homecoming, and I liked that a lot. The fight against Laconia is pretty great too, because again, it feels appropriately desperate, it feels appropriately pointless at the beginning. So when the characters are talking about, hey, maybe we should just give up, hey, maybe we should just retire, it feels justified. It doesn't feel like they're being whiney or anything. It feels very much like, okay, maybe there's no point to this, maybe we should just try and fix the system from within, or maybe we should just try and live our best lives that we can this way. And I didn't find myself agreeing with them, but I could definitely see where they were coming from. And then a little bit later on when they start thinking, okay, maybe we found a new way to fight against them, that feels like a real triumphant moment. All of Theresa's parts too, where she's just in the palace, are pretty good too. Like, she is a little angsty because she's a teenage girl, but it's really not bad. It's like, they barely touch upon it, it's fine, it's not a big deal. And seeing her perspective on how things work and we also get to see some of the internal politics of Laconia and how this place is actually holding itself together, that is really neat as well. Because we didn't get a whole lot of that in the last book, we sort of did. But it was more glossed over, whereas in this one we get a more in-depth dive to it. And I was happy about that. And so Theresa overall just, yeah, she's a fine character. The real shine for me in terms of plot in this book was all the stuff with LV trying to find out stuff about the protomolecule creators and what happened to them. And not only that, but after a little while Laconia starts to try and fight back against them, the things that are eating ships in the gates. And without spoiling things, it doesn't go great. And so essentially, no, no, I'm not going to say more than that until the spoiler section. But it doesn't go great. And so now it's made clear that, yeah, Laconia is a threat. Laconia is a big threat. And they want to hold humanity under an authoritarian boot or whatever other poetic nonsense you want to say. But at the end of the day, the things in the gates are a much bigger threat. And in the last book, when they set off their magnetic cannon, or I think that was the term for it, everyone in Soul System just shut down for like three minutes. Their brains just shut off. They went unconscious for a couple of minutes. Yeah, that sort of thing continues to happen in this. And it only gets worse. So that aspect of the plot was by far my favorite. The only real complaint I have about this book, and even then it's not that big, is that the ending is a little dull. Because like, again, I'm talking about all this stuff that makes it seem like it's super desperate, and they're just fighting constantly. And yeah, that is really good for most of the book. The climax of it is really good. But then when you get to the actual ending part where it's just them saying, okay, we gotta keep fighting now, but I don't really know how to put it. It ends on a note where it seems like it's trying to feel really desperate and trying to feel really crazy and out there, but it's not quite on the level that it's trying to be. Of course, that's seriously not a big deal. This book is, I mean, it is amazing. Like, if you haven't read the experience already, seriously get into it. It is some of the best science fiction I've read in ever, actually. It's just some of the best science fiction ever. And well, obviously if you read the first seven books, keep going. Like, I assume you're invested if you've made it all the way to Persepolis Rising. And it is also a little weird that the time jumps between these books just don't feel as big as maybe they should, but hey, whatever, that's another tiny problem. And we are now going into the spoiler section, so if you're not interested in that, then you should check out now. Bye. Okay, so, the first thing I want to talk about is Amos and his death because in this book Amos went on a mission to Laconia like two years before the book starts and he's been missing ever since. They don't know what happened to him. And Teresa actually has a friend named Timothy in Laconia and as you read it's pretty clear that, okay, yeah, that's Amos. He's just going by a different name. And a little bit later on, Teresa accidentally leads some Laconian soldiers to him and Amos gets shot and just dies right there. And when that happens, it's, I mean, it's shocking. It's a real kick in the nuts there. And it happens really quickly and it's over really quickly so that was a huge part of it, just like, wow, Amos is gone. But then there are these protomolecule technology things that they call drones on the planet and it turns out that if you leave a dead person out, the drones will put them back together and actually bring them back to life. But the thing is that are they brought back completely normal? And Amos gets brought back at the end and he comes back in but his eyes are black and he acts just a little bit differently and so I don't know how I feel about that because on one hand if Amos is actually different and there's something wrong with him now then I think it could work really well. But if he turns out to just be back to normal and he has just a normal life going on and he lives forever, then that would feel really bullshitty because they don't even introduce the drones until either right before or right after he dies. The other big death in this is obviously Bobby and she stays dead, let's be clear about that because in this near the beginning they attack some Laconian supply ships and they steal what they find out is an antimatter bomb from them and antimatter bombs are just gigantic, way bigger than nuclear bombs could ever hope to be. And so they figure, okay, we can lure out the big destroyer that they have in the Sol system, part of the Tempest was its name. And so, okay, we can just lure that out, put the antimatter bomb near it and blow it up and poof, it will take out their biggest ship. And so they do that, but then Bobby has to get out of her ship and actually just be in her suit and fire at the Tempest a little bit in order to distract them and so she's nearby when the bomb goes off and actually even before the bomb goes off she gets hit with a PDC round just torn to pieces because the human body cannot withstand that sort of thing. And hers is also like a kick in the nuts, it's very sad and kind of shocking but the thing is that several pages before she dies there's build-up to it where it makes it clear that yeah, she's sacrificing herself here and so it doesn't come as quite as much of a shock as Amos' did because that one was out of nowhere where as Bobby's was like, well, I'm gonna have to go out there and I don't think I'm gonna survive this. Well, let's do it and then she goes out so it's still a very good death, it's still very heart-wrenching but it doesn't feel quite as bad as Amos' partially because again the shock and also because Bobby has not been a member of the Rossi Nante crew for as long at least in terms of the books because again, she was there for 30 years to the characters, she's their family but to the audience, to the readers she was there for a little while in Caliban's War and then she joined in during Babylon's ashes so she's still been there a while and I still liked Bobby and everything she just didn't feel like as much of a member of the crew as Amos did I really liked how the downfall of Laconia was shown here too because that's the thing is that when the Laconians send an anti-matter bomb into the gates and try to hurt the things that are eating ships they turn off everyone's brains again just poof, make everyone go unconscious except this time it's in all systems and Winston Duarte, they think it's because of his immortality juice where he's making himself more like the protomolecule creators he just loses his mind for a while like he's no longer there he's just sort of staring off into space mumbling to himself and he just isn't there he can't lead them anymore and around that same time the gates also eat everything that was in the ring space like when you go through the ring gates there's the space station and all their ships go through there to get to the other gates well, everything in there got eaten everyone there is gone so that was another Laconian battleship just poof, gone so the Laconians don't control the turnpike and they only have a couple hundred ships to patrol thousands of systems so it does really show you how fragile a hegemony like this is at the end of the day and it shows you a lot of the problems that come with autocracy and with authoritarianism because, well, if you're going to be authoritarian then you're going to have a lot of people pissed off at you and if you're going to be autocratic and only have one person in charge then when that person goes it's very difficult to pick up the pieces and make things run properly again not to mention the actual climax where they just take a fleet of underground ships and throw them into the Laconian system and they, even though they're at a severe technological disadvantage they're able to outthink and outmaneuver them enough so that they can actually rescue Holden and Amos and destroy the Laconian construction platform so they can't make any more ships that's, yeah, that's a pretty big deal and it's just a great climax and, yeah, I really love the way that it shows Laconia's fault and then, of course, there's the information about the things in the gates and now they for sure know that humans are there like, before it was possible that the things eating ships in the gates was a natural phenomenon like, because we just didn't know we were fairly certain at least I was fairly certain that it was a more malevolent entity or a more malevolent race or something but I was pretty sure it wasn't a natural phenomenon was the thing and in this we now have confirmation of that because they tried to attack them with an anti-matter bomb and all it did was piss them off and now they're not only shutting off humans to make them go unconscious but they're trying it in different ways and the theory that Elvie comes up with is that whoever created the protomolecule creators or whoever created the protomolecule that shutting off sending them unconscious probably would have killed them killing humans so they're just trying different ways of doing it now and so humans are having weird spells where they can see atoms and shit and just it's a it's not good whatever is in there it's some sort of eldritch abomination which with our current information and our current understanding of physics we can't really make sense of so this is some HP Lovecraft shit and I like that so that's about all I have for you if you watch this far thank you be sure to like the video and to comment and to subscribe obviously and I'll just put all my patrons names up here so that thanks to all of them I wouldn't be able to do this without them and if you want to do things like getting videos early and participating in polls to determine what kind of videos I make then maybe check out my Patreon page and that's everything