The Expanse Producers On What This Week’s Shocking Death Means For the Series

The Expanse returned to Amazon Prime Video last week with the first three episodes of its fifth season. The third episode ended on quite a surprise cliffhanger, but this week’s new episode had a surprise of its own. SPOILERS for the episode follow. Those who have followed the books likely knew that Fred Johnson wasn’t going to survive to see the end of the series, but he died later and much different in the books than he did in the television series, falling in today’s episode after being shot by one of his people on Tycho Station. ComicBook.com spoke to the series’ creators/producer about how Fred’s death changes the game for the rest of the season.

“Fred Johnson is the symbol of the outside seat, the person who was not part of your culture, who shows up and goes, ‘I’m going to fix everything for you guys. I’m going to teach you how to move forward,’ which has typically not been a great way of fixing problems,” says The Expanse co-creator Ty Franck. “We talk about, in media, the white savior, the person who fixes it for the native people, the white person who shows up and tells them how to be civilized. In many ways, Fred Johnson is that person, he’s the earther who shows up. He goes, ‘All right Belt, I’m going to teach you how to be civilized.’

“And we like Fred and he is a moderating influence on Belter culture. And so because of that, we’re sympathetic to him, but there’s also a very problematic element to what he represents in the story. And so for the actual Belters, the hardcore hardline Belters, people like Marco Inaros and his faction, Fred represents something very negative about the future of the Belt. And so I absolutely understand why getting him out of the picture becomes a priority.”

Co-creator Daniel Abraham adds “Fred Johnson was always the voice of reason and restraint and negotiated peace and diplomacy and almost a politics as usual way of addressing the underlying problems in the series. And with him off the board, I feel like it’s kind of taking the governor off of the engine. Now the threats don’t have that voice of restraint, that person who is really trying to cross boundaries and is trying to build bridges. And that leaves a gap, that leaves a vacuum. And that I think is really important moving forward.”

If anyone will be expected to fill that vacuum, it’s James Holden. Johnson has been an unexpected mentor to Holden, another Earther who has tried to work in the best interests of the Belt and in the interest of peace in the system. Now Holden has lost a leader and a key ally in a moment of crisis.

“Holden finds himself really, truly alone within the sociopolitical landscape,” says Steven Strait, who plays Holden and is an executive producer on The Expanse. “He is now really the only person that every side speaks to and he’s got to tread carefully. He’s been lobbying Fred about the dangers of what he has seen out there and the true nature of what is going on inside of those ring gates and what he has experienced and how afraid he is for everybody, that we should not be playing around with this.

“And when Fred dies, the man who is the face of the most diplomatic faction of the OPA, who’s tried to create a nation-state in a way that didn’t involve a ton of conflict, the stakes rise. Not just for the heat in the political landscape, but also for Holden as a man. The race is on now because humanity can’t seem to get out of its own way, and we are fighting at a scale that we’ve never seen before, and the greatest threat we’ve ever experienced is right at our doorstep and nobody seems to be paying attention to it. So, his journey this year is to really push that message and to try and get some kind of resolution so that we can deal with these things that we really need to be dealing with.”

New episodes of The Expanse debut Wednesdays on Amazon Prime Video.