Epilogue 6: The Expanse on Hard Media
"Remember the Cant."
Given that I haven't had cable service since the early 1990s, I've had to rely on hard media releases in order to see programs such as this. Fortunately the wait wasn't long before seasons 1-3 were released. But then the series moved from SyFy to Amazon, and suddenly the wait became exponentially longer; indeed, seasons 5 and 6 were released nearly two years after their broadcast (or, in this case, webcast).
I'm sure I wasn't alone wondering if we'd ever see seasons 5 and 6 on hard media. So anxious I was to see them that I purchased crappy bootleg DVDs. I know, naughty, but hey, given a choice between crappy bootlegs and nothing, it's not hard to understand why I went to the dark side.
As of 21 November
2023, all was made right with the release of the entire series on Blu-ray and DVD. Hooray! I placed my pre-order as
fast as I could click the button. Then I prepared myself for an Expansive feast.
But... it was a good news/bad news situation. The good is self-evident: seasons 5 and 6 available at long last in HD. The bad? No bonus features for seasons 5 and 6. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. To say the lack of bonus features was a disappointment would be, as they say, an understatement. At the very least, I was counting on being able to finally see the season 6 webisodes. Prime Video never played nice with my PC (in fact, it crashes Windows), so I've not been able to watch them.
Evidently Universal couldn't be bothered to do anything above and beyond the bare minimum. Seasons 1-5 were exactly the way they appeared on their initial release, which meant dealing with the stupid menus from season 1, the incredibly annoying NBCUniversal jingle at the end of every episode in season 2, and so forth.
Many fans immediately began grumbling that they'd already purchased seasons 1-4, and were now being forced to buy them again just to get seasons 5 and 6. I can't say as I blame them much, but I was far and away more irked by the lack of new extras, especially since I already had the bootlegs. So the only bright spot in this whole mess was having nice clean Blu-ray copies of seasons 5 and 6. But... was that worth $70?
Think of it this way: the initial releases of prior seasons retailed for around $33 each. If one regards the full-series release as simply seasons 5 and 6, that works out to $35 per season. All things considered, that's not all that bad. Granted, the seasons were really short, and there were no extras, but again, given a choice between this and nothing.
But a month later, seasons five and six were released separately, and at reasonable prices. Thing is, these were simply the same discs from the whole-series set spit up. No extras at all. Boooooo! One might thing the popularity of the show warranted an extra or two — the online mini-eps, at the very least! Oh well.
HARD MEDIA RELEASE HISTORY
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NOTES
1 From Amazon; note, price can very considerably over time
2 Part of the full-series release