The new episode of The Expanse from this week, S03E07, “Delta-V.”

I adore the show, but still don’t like the current awkward structure of one book per 1.5 seasons. It made S02E05 and S03E06 feel like season finales because…well…they’re book endings. Putting them smack in the middle of the season is awkward structurally, because everything comes to a climax, then it all hits the brakes the next week.

In season 2 it wasn’t so bad, because they did some rewriting to compress the in-story time gap between books 1 and 2 so there is essentially no time gap between S02E05 and S02E06. But with season 3, they kind of did the opposite - they kept the time gap that exists between books, but on top of that they skipped over more things than the start of book 3 did. So characters who aren’t separated just yet at the start of book 3 are suddenly separated in S03E07, there’s a documentary crew roaming around one of the ships with little to no buildup or explanation, and the large shift in the political landscape of the system is only thinly sketched out in expositionary dialogue.

Now, that doesn’t mean it was a bad episode, but if you’re just watching the show without having read the books, it could feel rather jarring.

Having said that, this might actually be a good thing, because they’re just blazing through book 3 and that book is already more fast-paced and streamlined compared to the first two, so it seems likely that they’re actually going to end season 3 with the end of book 3, and not Midway through like they did with the first two books. Which means the structure of the show going forward might be “fixed” after the season ends.

TL;DR - the episode is an awkwardly-placed “season premiere” midway through a season which might throw people off, but it’s the start of the best book so far and it seems like episodes 7-13 are going to cover all of it, potentially fixing the pacing issue for season 4+.