 All right, so we have finally reached it. We have finally gotten to Leviathan Falls, the final book in the Expanse saga. And I actually finished it several days ago. It's taken me a bit of time to get around to filming this because, well, I just... I barely even know what to say at this point. Like, it's a continuation of the story. You know, it's not like some of the other books which are definitely connected into everything, but they are somewhat more episodic, I guess, like a Sibola burn, for instance. Like, that's mainly about the disaster going on on Elus, but it does still tie into the bigger story, of course. Leviathan Falls is like just a continuation of what was going on in Tiamat's Wrath. And, you know, it's about fighting against Laconia. It's about trying to save humanity from the things in the gates which killed the builders, which originally built the gates and created the protomolecule and everything. And, well, it is really good. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Now, one positive thing I want to say about this is that it's a long book, but it doesn't really feel that long. Because this one is a bit more streamlined than most other Expanse books. Like, they all have a bunch of different POV characters. Or actually, I think the first book only really had two. It was Miller and Holden. But this one has more than usual, and each character usually only gets a couple of chapters devoted to them, which I can't say I'm a huge fan of that. But overall, there's only two storylines that connect fairly early on, and they are tied pretty closely together even before that. Plus, it's just a fairly simple story. Now, some people hear me say simple and they think that's a bad thing. It's really not. It isn't a good or bad thing. It just is. Plus, the series before this has been really complex leading up to this moment, so it's just not a big deal either way. And this one starts with, actually, the prologue is Duarte, remember the leader of Laconia, the man who wants to be dictator of all humanity, who kind of sort of turned himself into a proto-molecule thing. And his mind was gone for most of Tiamat's wrath, and then he finally came back online, I guess. Comes back to his senses, whatever you want to say. And then he leaves Laconia and goes off on... He has his own plan to save humanity from things in the gates, and we don't know what it is quite the beginning, but then we have a new character named Tanaka, who is deciding to track him down, and the way she does that is by trying to find his daughter Teresa, who, if you remember, is with the crew of the Rossinante. And of course, while this is going on, the Rossinante is on the run, and they are still running the underground and trying to defeat Laconia to break it up, because at the end of Tiamat's wrath, I kind of thought that the Empire was done for, like they would just really only have control of that one system, because they had just taken so much damage, but no, their grip is weakened, but they do still control pretty much all of human space. So, okay, I misread that a bit. But, yeah, the story here, nothing really crazy happens until near the end. Like, before that we do still have a Cat and Mouse game, we do still have some really good action scenes and such, and getting to know this new character Tanaka is fine and dandy. It's just nothing crazy happens until near the end. And the thing about Tanaka is that she is the only new POV character in this book, which is unusual for the expanse, because normally the core cast stays the same from book to book, but all the side characters get switched out quite a bit, so that's why we get new POVs in every book. The only character that got a POV in every book was Holden, and I think I mentioned in my review of Tiamat's wrath that I found myself kind of missing him, because he was barely in that one. He only got one or two chapters from his POV. And, again, Tanaka is a good character. She is well-developed, I understood her and what she was like. She is a really... Well, she's a jerk, quite frankly, and she's loyal to Laconia, but she also kind of resents how authoritarian it is, so she has her own small rules that she decides to break now and again, but that doesn't stop her from being loyal. She's an interesting character overall, but at the same time, she's introduced so close to the end of the series that she'll never really get to the same level as people like Holden or Naomi or Amos, who we've been with for such a long time. Like, I feel that this close to the end of a series, whether you're talking about a book or a book series or a television show or anything like that, you should probably stop introducing new things and just kind of stick to fleshing out what you already have, whether it goes for characters or aspects of the world or whatever. Now, the good news is we learn a lot more about the builders and we also learn a lot more about what killed them. They still remain mysterious, like we still don't know that much about them. They still feel as though they're so far above humanity that we can't even really comprehend them, but we do learn more about them and we do somewhat understand what went down a couple billion years ago when they were all killed. And, well, we finally get to the ending and I'm going to have a spoiler section, don't worry, and the spoiler section will be like a look back on the series as a whole as well, but the ending, I will say, is thrilling. You know, it's a space opera, so we have huge big action sequences in space and people go in pew-pew with lasers and stuff. Like, it's what you would want from a big space opera and it's thrilling, it's surprising, it's depressing, but it's also hopeful and it's not really weird or dark just for the sake of it. Like, I'll get into it in the spoiler section but it does tie into, like, themes and such that we've had since the beginning of the series, really. And, you know, that's all the specifics, really, I have to say, that are not spoilery for Leviathan Falls. Like, overall, really, really solid ending to a really solid series. If you have not read The Expanse, then please go do that, go do that. Like, Leviathan Wakes is great, and in fact, the genre for each book kind of changes. Like, the authors have talked about this. Leviathan Wakes, the first book is kind of a noir mystery. Babylon's Ashes, which is book number six, is a regular war story. Was it Sabola Burns, like a disaster story or something like that. They were all different from one another, but they're all still space opera at the end of the day. And, well, this is just a really good way of ending it. You know, check out The Expanse, you know. You don't have to worry about it never ending like you do with something like A Song of Ice and Fire or The King Killer Chronicles, and you don't have to worry about it having a bad ending. Like, I feel this one may be controversial, but I really liked it. I had to think about why specifically I liked it for a while before I really got my head around it. But, overall, yeah, this is more of The Expanse. Like, if you've already read up to this point, well, you're probably going to enjoy this one. It's the same characters, for the most part. The new ones who we get introduced to are still really good. They're still really fleshed out. The story is still pretty fast-paced and goes through a lot of really cool, neat shit. Like, they spent two and a half years writing this one when they used to put them out one per year. So, I'm glad that they took their time on this because it's good. And, yeah, it's just good, solid ending. So, if you want to read The Expanse, you want to get started on it, go do that or just watch the TV show because the TV show is really good too. Okay, so spoilers. The simplest way of putting this is that Duarte, once he comes back to his senses because he's connected himself to the protomolecule and thus to all the builder's technology, he manages to go out and gain access to a bunch more of it and he decides that in order to fight back against the things in the gates, he needs to turn humanity into a hive mind because it turns out that the builders were a hive mind and that's why when the things in the gates... I'm sorry, they don't really give them a name in the books, unfortunately, which I think works to make them seem more mysterious and scarier, but it does make it a little bit difficult to talk about. But, yeah, apparently the builders had a hive mind and the things in the gates, when they were shutting down humans for periods of time and they were messing with the laws of physics in our universe, they were doing that because that was stuff that killed the builders and it's not working on us because we are a bit more resilient, I guess, partially because we're all individuals that are not connected and partially just because something about our anatomy makes us just harder to kill. The whole villain wants to turn all of humanity into a single hive mind thing, but we want to not do that because we love individuality. I've seen that before. It's a little bit cheesy, but it works well enough here because at least here you see where the villain is coming from. It's not just, oh, we'll end suffering or anything like that. It's, hey, we're all going to die if we don't do this because basically when Duarte connects to other people, it gives him more processing power as it were, so it allows him to prevent the things in the gates from affecting our universe. At one point, a ship goes through the gates and they're about to eat it. It's about to go Dutchman and Duarte is able to stop that, so he has a point. He will be able to protect humanity if he does this, at least for a while. We don't know if it would work permanently, but it would work for a time. It's just, is it worth the cost? And most of the heroes say no. And then at the end, Holden and a couple others managed to get into the ring station where he has set up his base, basically, and they managed to kill him. And we also learn at this point that apparently proto-molecule technology can break the laws of physics because it is accessing another universe. And this other universe is where the things in the gates live. So that's how they're basically taking the laws from that universe and bringing them into our world in a small way. That's how they're able to have inertia-less movement and they're able to fold space and create the ring gates and things like that. It's interesting. I certainly have never seen that before and it's a really cool explanation for how all this works. But it also takes some energy from that other universe. The ring gates are fueled by energy from the things in the gates universe and they resent that. They compare it to a windmill slowing down the wind slightly and so that's why they want to kill the things that are doing it and shut down the gates. Okay, that kind of makes sense. I do almost wish that they hadn't given that explanation because it would make them seem a bit more like cosmic horrors from beyond the veil if we didn't even know what their motivations were. But that's still fine. And basically they have finally figured out ways to kill humanity and they're about to kill all of it but Holden, who has also infected himself with protomolecule stuff, is able to connect to the ring station and he is able to temporarily hold them at bay and then he tells everybody like, hey look, get out of ring space, go to another system and be prepared to stay there because I'm just going to shut down the rings. That's the only way we can stop them from killing all of us. And so that's the end. They shut down the rings and they mention that a lot of the different systems are not self-sustaining so people are probably going to die and then there's an epilogue a thousand years later that humans have discovered a different way to have interstellar travel and they're starting to connect the different systems again. You know, there's people traveling around and someone rediscovers Earth and they start talking to humanity there and that's the end. So humanity is saved but many people died in the process and the Rossi crew is forever broken up. You know, in the last couple of books Bobby and Clarissa died in this one, Holen died and then Alex actually goes to a different system than everybody else. Like Amos and Naomi head to Seoul system because they're like, well that's where Earth and Mars and everything is so that has the best shot of surviving and that's also where everything we know is so we're going to go there and Alex actually takes the Rossi Nante and heads to a different system because his son was there and he's like, you know what, I screwed up raising one kid I don't want to do that again and actually he scraps that I think that was in the show that he had a son that he knew about but anyways, anyways, his point is he's thinking he doesn't want to live forever never seeing his kid again so he goes to another system knowing he'll never see any of the others again and you know, it's sad and depressing but at the same time it's very hopeful it's telling you, hey, like not only will humanity survive but we will find our own way back to the stars again you know, we're kind of just relying on alien technology for this and we'll just do it our own way and that's what they do and it fits with the themes of all progress having a price and that's a theme that has been throughout the whole series because think about it when they finally got access to all of the other colonies outside of Ring Space that kind of killed Mars you know, like their population dropped like a rock because everyone said oh, okay, it'd be easier to live on those other places so they left and then their economy collapsed and their government collapsed and their military was broken down and then factions of it became Laconia and another faction was sold to the Free Navy so like the colonies were progressed but they kind of killed Mars and they almost killed Belters as well because, well, they couldn't go out and colonize those places themselves and they would have died out if they hadn't created the Transport Union or another example being that Earth and Mars became friends and the tensions died down and there was no war between them but that only happened because the Free Navy killed literally billions of people and at the end here we have humanity gaining interstellar travel but it's at the cost of systems dying and I think part of the message here is that you can't just rely on something that other people have done forever you know, the builders created the ring space and humans were just relying on that for several decades to advance their civilization forward and eventually they just said yo, we can't do this we can't rely on them and their tech forever we have to eventually find our own way of doing this and yeah, that's another thing about this series is that it's basically about how technology does not solve social issues like from the first book it's really clear that they still have issues like this isn't a Star Trek level utopia like even though technology is greater and they probably could fix a lot of these social issues they're not like they still have economic inequality they still have racism they still have huge issues with authoritarianism and I think that's an important thing to say because a lot of modern people think that oh, we're just more enlightened than people in the past you know, racism's dead when the civil rights act past or whatever and it's basically gone now or oh, authoritarianism is dead because we can vote for our leaders and it's more complicated than that these things don't just go away forever they can ebb and flow I suppose is a bit of a cliche but you know that's what it is and overall there's a lot of cosmic horror in this series which I like because we just don't see a lot of that anymore and there's a lot of mystery and even though we never or even though we do learn more about the builders and we learn more about the things that killed the builders it doesn't really detract from the horror because we don't learn that much about them and I don't know, I don't have a whole lot else to add like humanity just feels very small even though we have all this crazy technology and we can colonize other planets and shit we still feel very very small and very limited by the laws of physics and everything while these other things do not so the cosmic horror aspect stays there the whole way through basically from the moment you learn where the protomolecule came from and you realize oh okay, alien sent this here like from then on you realize yes humanity is small beyond that I don't really have anything else to say that I haven't said before all the character work in this series really solid all the action really solid the world building is fantastic I liked the storylines in pretty much every book like caliban's war I liked while reading but then afterwards I realized it was kind of a repeat of the first book which is why I'm glad in the show they somewhat combined those it just works better and I'm still not the biggest fan of sabola burn but like I said it ties into everything else and we still learn about the mystery of the builders and everything just overall there's a quote on my copy of the first book from george double r martin where he just says it's been a long time since we had a truly kickass soap opera or space opera excuse me and I kind of agree with him it's been a very long time since we had some really good ones and the expanse has filled that void it's unfortunate that it's over now but you know what we'll still have the last season of the TV show which hopefully we'll be able to get the last couple of books adapted as well the world needs to see these but we'll still have that we'll still have whatever james s a quarry works on in the future and we will still have whoever they whoever they inspire in the future so I don't know I just I really enjoyed the expanse overall I don't have a whole lot of major complaints about the series other than it took us too long to learn about some people's backstory like you know Naomi and Amos and Alex we don't really get time with them away from holding away from just being part of the Rossi crew until like five books in which was obnoxious but I just I don't have major complaints about the series it was really good it was really solid and I'm glad I got the chance to read it goodbye I don't think I could do this and a huge thanks to my ten dollar nut patrons Apo Savilainen, Eris Targaryen Olivia Rayan, Brother Santotys Buffy Valentine, Carolina Clay Dan Anceliovic, Dark King Echo, Karkakatsune Liza Rudakova, Lord Tiebreaker Madison Lewis Bennett, Marilyn Roxy, Matthew Bodro Michael Weingartner, Microphone Peep the Toad, Return of Cardamom Sad Martigan, Tobacco Crow, Tom Beanie and Vaibhictas you're just the best I love all of you please continue sending me money if your name isn't on here then just like the video, subscribe all that stuff I'm supposed to say at the end here goodbye, have fun please don't die bye