The Expanse creators dig into a series ending still full of mystery

polygon.com:

Over the weekend, The Expanse ended for the second time — only this time around, showrunner Naren Shankar and franchise creators Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham (collectively known as the author James S. A. Corey) wrapped up the series on their terms. The beloved television adaptation of the novels by James S.A. Corey faced a premature end once, after original network SyFy declined to renew it following its critically acclaimed third season. Against all odds, the series found a new home on Amazon Prime, which just wrapped an abbreviated six-episode season that plunged its characters into the thing they’ve been trying to avoid all along: war.

As the show comes to a close, Polygon got on the phone with Shankar, Abraham, and Franck to talk about how there is no neat way to end a war, and how it’s important to accept that the universe is full of things we will never truly understand.

Polygon: The whole season is very much one big war story, was that what you set out to do from the start?

Naren Shankar: Yeah, absolutely. That was the intention. We talked about it in precisely those terms. This is a war story. It’s these people who’ve been at war for, you know, eight months we say at the beginning of the season. It’s a war of attrition, and the entire season was a crawling, agonizing, climbing up the ladder, so to speak — getting out of that hole and taking the fight to the final battle.

Despite being a big war story, the final season of the show builds towards this very optimistic place; was that something you always wanted to end on?

Shankar: When we adapted the books, we tried to stay very close to the spirit of the books. So, that kind of mix of optimism and hope and admiration for humanity, and also grimness and darkness