Actors Are Not So Replaceable

5 min readJul 1, 2021

We were watching the 4 thSeason of The Expanse — a show that takes place in the future where a lot of stuff happens in space. (We call it Space Stress — as in “You up for watching some Space Stress?”) The woman in charge of Earth was on a space shuttle talking with a man who seemed to be an advisor of some sort — maybe a vice president or secretary of education? “Who’s that guy?” we asked, since we’d never seen him before. Then the woman in charge of Earth (Chrisjen Avasarala is the character’s name.) introduced him to someone as her husband and we were, like, “What happened to her previous husband? Did he die? Have we taken a dramatic jump forward in time? Has so much time passed that her sweet husband died and she had time to remarry a younger busybody one?”

We were very confused since the show made absolutely no mention of what the deal was. It took looking up both the actors on IMDB and eventually finding an article about it to understand that they meant this guy to be same character as the one before. He had the same name, the same back story. It was supposed to be the same guy.

They were pulling a thing that they do on soap operas where they just change actors, without any reference to it. So, one day (in the 80s, just for example) you can be watching the soap opera, Santa Barbara, for example, because you really like Robin Wright’s performance and then, for example, suddenly her character has someone else’s face! (Yes, this happened. Yes, I’m glad she went on to do cooler things but my middle school self is still mad about the sudden switch!)

In the case of The Expanse, this switcheroo happened because they’d been canceled on one network and before they got picked up by Amazon, the actor playing the husband had another gig and was therefore unavailable. A challenge, for sure.

But there are a myriad of other solutions to this problem! Why did they think it was better to try and fool us? The second guy appears to be at least twenty years younger than the first one. (He is! He’s a full 18 years younger! I looked him up! He’s Gen X and the previous guy was a Boomer! There’s a whole generation in between them! The wife was born the same year as the first guy!) The new guy has an entirely different physique. They dressed him differently. AND, most frustratingly, they wrote him a completely different personality.

The first husband wasn’t around much on the show. He was a quiet presence who took care of their grandchildren and mostly offered love and support. He was the character the Earth ruler would send away to keep safe. The new husband was ALWAYS around, always chiming in or criticizing and the grandchildren they’d both been so concerned about were nowhere to be seen. He’d be an interesting character on the show if he weren’t supposed to be the previous guy. As a trusted advisor to Avasarala, he makes total sense — as her husband, he’s baffling. And I spent much of the show distracted by it. When the husband complained that Avasarala had changed, I was like, “Her?! Come on man. It’s you who’s changed! You are a totally different person! In every way!”

I just don’t understand why this show, which is good in so many ways, went so far off the rails with this choice.

They took us to a whole new planet in a whole new galaxy but they couldn’t maintain one logical human relationship? Why? Why? They could have done this EXACT story line if this guy was her gay best friend in an advisory role, for example. He could be her minister of New Worlds who we get to meet for the first time. They could have killed off the first husband, if they wanted to — and he could have been her second. They could have told us her husband was taking care of their grandkids on some other planet for a while and let this whole dumb story line go.

But instead they wrote an entirely new character in the place where a beloved old one was. Honestly, the husband had almost nothing to do in previous seasons but he’s such an extraordinary presence, we worried over him anyway. The new guy is a very good actor — but he’s betrayed by the position they’ve put him in by having him do something so out of line from what we knew the first guy to do.

This show doesn’t do a great job of writing dialogue for personal relationships. Whenever the characters try to have a meaningful talk that isn’t about space or interplanetary politics, it tends to get hilariously cliched and clumsy. Seeing how they seem to think one human can be exchanged with another without any hiccups helps me understand why those personal chats aren’t as good as the rest of the show. They just aren’t that interested in that human stuff. I mean, it’s fine. We watch this show for its space stuff, its alien stuff, its future gazing, interplanetary exploration stuff — not the human stuff so much. However, it just would be nice if they realized that different actors are different people and allowed for the audience to experience people as consistent humans. They can do better.

Unless — maybe aliens are writing this show and they don’t know the difference! Maybe to them those two guys are exactly the same. In the eyes of an alien, we are all alike and infinitely replaceable.