Characters / The Expanse (TV): The Rocinante

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Crew of the Rocinante

Rocinante

Rocinante

The Rocinante began her life as the MCRN Tachi, a Martian Navy frigate that operated from the hangar of the battleship MCRN Donnager, the Martian Navy's flagship. In the wake of the Donnager's destruction, the Canterbury survivors claimed the Tachi as their own and re-christened her as the Rocinante^note Spanish for "Work Horse" as well as the name of Don Quixote's horse, see Jim Holden's entry below.

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• Ammunition Conservation: The Roci is explicitly supposed to hold ten thousand PDC rounds in her magazines and she can burn through those very quickly. Rearming is an issue, because few are willing to supply a salvaged Martian warship. At one point, the crew has to resort to salvaging ammo from a wrecked Martian flotilla. The Roci also carries twenty torpedoes that can run out in a single engagement.
• Bigger Stick: One major benefit to a group of civilians flying around in a Martian gunship. If push comes to shove, the crew have a ship more heavily armed than any civilian transport, and aren't afraid to leverage that.
• Cool Spaceship: She is a sleek gunboat designed for speed and maneuverability and is bristling with more than enough firepower to take on one of the stealth ships that destroyed the Canterbury, albeit at a disadvantage. On his first day piloting her, Alex can't help but gush that she can easily cruise at 12-g while her engines purr. Later on, she's shown to be able to easily speed up to 15 and 20-g with absolutely no problem. Granted, the occupants would survive for a matter of minutes at that kind of thrust, but the ship itself would keep going on autopilot. She also comes equipped with black gold and sleek machines in which to use it: filter, espresso, macchiato... coffee!
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Despite the ship's frequent David vs. Goliath odds, most battles the Roci gets tangled up in, she wins simply due to being a damn good ship helmed by a damn good crew. It's best shown when they take on Marco's fleet of three Martian heavy cruisers (i.e., three ships much bigger and better armed than the Roci), and completely overwhelm him.
• David vs. Goliath: Most of the Rocinante's battles fall into this category:
  • Despite being heavily outgunned, in its fight against the the stealth ship around Thoth Station, the Rocinante comes out on top through surprise, closing the distance and using its superior PDC coverage to turn perforate the stealth ship.
  • In its fight against a UNN battleship, the Rocinante prematurely explodes torpedoes to blind the battleship scanners, then uses that moment of blindness to close the distance and shoot the battleship's engines off.
  • When pursued by Marco Inaros' small flotilla of three ships, a lucky railgun shot from the Rocinante disables one of Inaros' escorts and causes the other the fall back to assist, and predict the remaining ship's trajectory to take it out.
• Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: Rocinante's new rail gun in Season 4 can only shoot forward relative to the ship, since the recoil from the weapon would tear it off were it mounted anywhere but the vessel's keel. This becomes a rather literal Chekhov's Gun in Season 4 when Alex uses the recoil to propel both the Roci and the Barbapiccola into higher orbit around Ilus when the planet's protomolecule technology disabled all fusion reactions.
• Insistent Terminology: The ship was a legitimate salvage operation. Okay? Legitimate salvage! Alex, who is himself a Martian, is particularly picky about this and will often appear from Behind the Black to set the record straight. Amos even has a crew plaque made for the ship where it identifies her as a "Legitimate salvage."
• Ironic Name: 'Rocinante' in Spanish roughly translates into 'Previously a Workhorse', from Don Quixote's horse being repurposed from a broken-down nag to a knight's steed. This Rocinante is instead a war vessel disguised as a freighter a.k.a. a workhorse.
• Living Legend: The crew as a whole. They are each almost instantly recognizable anywhere in the System for their exploits. People who meet and recognize them, depending on their politics, meet them either with respect or disdain. This is why Marco Inaros wants to destroy the ship and its crew so badly. They are a living example of how a unified humanity (Earthers, Martians, and Belters) can repeatedly overcome the odds and accomplish the extraordinary.
• Magnetic Weapons: The Roci is fitted with a keel-mounted railgun in season 4. Similar to the Protogen stealth ships, this lets her punch well above her weight class, such as taking out a Martian heavy frigate in a few shots.
• Meaningful Rename:
  • Originally the MCRN Tachi.^note A type of Japanese sword. Holden renames her the Rocinante after Don Quixote's horse, reflecting his own tendency to get caught up in situations he has no business being involved in.
  • Arguably "Beratnas Gas" is one of these, too — beratnas is a Belter Creole word meaning "brothers".
  • During the UN-MCR War during the first half of Season 3, the crew temporarily rechristens her again. This time they name her Pinus Contorta, after a species of pine tree that depends on wildfires for reproduction and survival. Appropriately, the episode that resolves that arc is titled "Immolation".
• Mid-Season Upgrade: In the gap between Season 3 and Season 4, Rocinante becomes deadlier with the addition of a rail gun in her bow. She also gets a set of beefed-up landing struts installed so she can land in a Earth-like planet's gravity well.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: She's given a new coat of paint and has some fake gas tanks bolted to her exterior but this is only to fool the most passing of glances. Anyone who takes a close enough look will be able to tell that Rocinante is actually a heavily armed frigate bristling with weaponry and Alex eventually decides to simply dump the disguise.
  Marasmus Doctor: Your markings notwithstanding, we know a Martian frigate when we see one.
• Stealth in Space: Discussed. Actually hiding isn't an option, so the ship needs to appear to be something else. Repainting the hull and gluing a bunch of freighter parts on her helped, but no one would mistake the ship as anything but a Martian Navy vessel if they actually got on board.
• Vehicular Turnabout: Though the crew didn't—strictly speaking—steal the Roci, they obtained it under dubious circumstances and have no intention of giving it back (legitimate salvage!). The hostilities between Mars and Earth make this a moot point for the first two seasons, but after the Time Skip and truce in season 3, Mars sues the crew to have their property returned. Avasarala helps the crew sort out the legal issues in season 4, making it legally their ship, but some Martians still hold a grudge.

Holden

James "Jim" Holden

"Earth and Mars have been stepping on the necks of the Belters out here for over 100 years and I didn't want to be the boot."

Played By: Steven Strait

"Earth, Mars, the Belt, the OPA, it's all bullshit. There shouldn't be any sides."

Jim Holden is the Second Officer of the ice trawler Canterbury (which supplies water for the Asteroid Belt's residents). This position offers him freedom and a minimum of responsibility.

A Montana native, he is the only child born to eight parents as part of a genetic collective. At a time when Earth's population is over 30 billion, there are big incentives for people not to have children. Holden's family is fighting to preserve one of the last undeveloped wildernesses in Montana; a losing battle that Holden joined Earth's Navy to escape.

In the UN Navy he served as a First Lieutenant until an ideological conflict turned into a physical confrontation, and Holden was made to face court-martial. After being dishonorably discharged from the Navy, Holden took a contract with Pur'n'Kleen (owner of the Canterbury), looking to get as far from home as possible.

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• Adaptational Villainy: Not "villainy" per se, but in the first novel Holden is idealistic to a fault, whereas the show makes him a bit Darker and Edgier while still acting as the crew's voice for heroic idealism. He also reluctantly destroys a defenseless medical ship that threatens to expose his operation to destroy Eros in "Godspeed", while the closest thing he did in the book was threaten a UN science ship being escorted to Eros, and they backed off before he was forced to fire.
• Age Lift: About a decade younger than his book incarnation and quite a bit rougher around the edges as a result.
• Always Save the Girl: Downplayed since he'll ultimately make the right call about priorities at the end of the day (such as in Season 5 when he knows that, despite Naomi being in danger, hunting down the protomolecule is top priority and he delegates saving Naomi to someone else), but he will take huge risks that he'd otherwise never consider and put himself in harm's way for the sake of his crewmates' safety, especially his girlfriend Naomi.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: He finds himself bemusedly mortified when all eight of his parents try to speak in Belter Creole to Naomi.
• The Anti-Nihilist: Holden knows he lives in a Crapsack World, but that never stops him from trying to make it better.
• Bait-and-Switch Character Intro: The pilot initially sets him up as being cynical and Brilliant, but Lazy, not really giving a damn about anyone but himself. Then he reports the Scopuli's distress call, and his characterization quickly shifts into that of an idealistic, kind man downright obsessed with doing the right thing.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: He signed on to the Cant because he wanted a well-paying union job with little responsibility. Instead he wound up having to decide the fate of humanity.
• Blood from the Mouth: He and Miller start coughing up blood after the two are subject to severe radiation poisoning.
• The Captain: He becomes the de facto captain of the Rocinante and begins to be addressed as such by the rest of the crew.
• Character Development: Holden becomes more and more accepting of the fact that he lives in a Crapsack Solar System and even takes a certain level in cynicism, but still never lets go of trying to make the Solar System a better place for everyone.
• The Chosen One: Subverted. Everyone, even the Protomolecule, takes note of the fact that Holden always appears to be in the middle of the action. However, the series shows that Holden often inserts himself into the situation (often against the advice of his friends) in order to do what he thinks is right, even though he knows he should just find somewhere safe to hide. Also, when it comes to interactions with the Protomolecule, it's not so much that Holden is special per se, it's just that he's capable, has a ship, and the Protomolecule can exploit his relationship with Miller.
  Protomolecule Miller: "How is it that every time there's some shit-storm in the universe, there's James Holden, right there in the middle, saying "How the hell did I end up here?""
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: At the start, he's trying very hard to ignore his inbuilt instinct for doing this. Unfortunately, life has other plans and, as the series goes along, he bounces from incidence to incidence as he breaks out repeatedly with bouts of the syndrome. It all starts with being unable to completely walk away from a distress call, and snowballs. Really, Amos pegs him as "Mr Righteous" for a lot of good reasons.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Other characters note that he hasn't been back to Earth in years and asks why he hasn't visited. He points out that he wouldn't be working on an ice freighter if he thought he'd be welcome back home.
  Miller: How could you ever leave a place like Earth?
  Holden: Everything I loved was dying.
• Deadpan Snarker: Takes a certain level in snark as the series goes on. One of the more notable instances of this is him only giving Alex a flat stare when the latter is concerned about him claiming to see visions of Miller.
• Designer Babies: He was conceived by combining the genetic profiles of all eight of his parents. He was then gestated and primarily raised by Mother-Elise.
• Exotic Extended Marriage: He has five fathers and three mothers who run a farm on Earth.
• Famed In-Story: As the series goes on, he becomes the most famous man in the history of the whole Solar System, being the man who (mistakenly) becomes the central figure of the OPA's resistance against the Inners, one of the people who helps save the Earth from a protomolecule-driven Eros Station, and even being the first person in history to survive traveling through the Ring among other famous achievements.
  • The Call Knows Where You Live: As a result of this fame, by season 4, both the galaxy and the protomolecule tech/The Investigator itself recognize him as an expert in protomolecule matters, dragging him back towards trouble whether he likes it or not.
• Freudian Excuse: Holden's need to do the right thing stems from having been told since birth that he was meant to prevent injustice^note He was specifically conceived because his parents wanted to save child taxes and lay a generational claim on their land and prevent the Earth government from seizing it. Also, at one point it was heavily implied that they were raising him to be some sort of messianic leader for a revolution, which is why Mother-Elise sent him away when he turned 18 to spare him that fate. and he identified with Don Quixote after having been read the story to him by Mother-Elise as a child.
• Idiot Ball: He doesn't take a moment to think that the woman who led the repairs on his ship and just shot Fred Johnson might have sabotaged said ship.
• Jack of All Stats: Holden is a talented pilot, but not as good as Alex (Holden pilots the 'Roci' ably enough to survive the Free Navy Conflict, but Amos notes that it was a rougher ride than when Alex was their pilot). He's also a very capable combatant, but not so much as Amos. He seems to excel in tactical warfare, but he is not as good at it as Bobbie (as seen when she recognized and exploited the dodge-pattern of the Pella). He is talented enough of an engineer to help maintain the Roci in Naomi's absence, but he lacks her prodigal talent.
• Knight Templar: He's an interesting cross of both this and Inspector Javert, with the investigative side to chase the breadcrumbs, and the increasingly harsh do-gooder aspect emphasized as he gets more desperate to stop the protomolecule from getting out of control.
• Living Legend: Has quickly become one, to the point where his face is recognizable across the Belt by the middle of Season 2. He becomes the focus of a documentary in Season 3, and by the end of Season 3 and throughout Season 4, people speak of him as if he's a Protomolecule Prophet. Even Ashford and Inaros say his name with great respect (although it might be ironic with Inaros).
• Love Interests: He is Naomi's. He actually had another love interest named Ade at the beginning of the series, but after she's killed in the pilot episode, Holden and Naomi begin their development into the eventual Official Couple of the series.
• Mama's Boy: Holden has eight parents (three of them mothers) but Elise, the mother who carried him to term, says that he's really her baby. He left Earth because Elise told him to and only keeps in contact with her.
• Mr. Fanservice: Amusingly enough, all of Holden's sex scenes have given more focus to him than to either of his partners (i.e., Ade and Naomi).
  • In-universe, some characters remark about Holden's appearance; Melba/Clarissa's work team, for example, joke about which of them would have sex with him.
• Must Have Caffeine: A minor sub-plot is Holden's quest for a decent cup of coffee. He finally finds a stash of beans aboard Tachi and indulges himself. That, dear readers, is the moment he went from really liking the ship to downright loving it.
• Nice Guy: Even taking into account his Chronic Hero Syndrome, Holden is a fundamentally positive and kind person who just wants to make the Solar System a better place for everyone.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Holden's heart has always been in the right place, but his early tendencies to act before thinking things through led to a stealth ship targeting and destroying the Canterbury and causing a system-wide incident by erroneously blaming Mars.
• Official Couple: He and Naomi are the main couple in the series, starting from the beginning of Season 2. Their relationship is badly fractured at the end of the season when he learns that she gave the protomolecule to Fred Johnson and his trust in her is greatly shaken, but they reconcile by mid-Season 3, and are fully back together again by the end of Season 3 once she returns to the Roci, remaining a solid couple for the rest of the series.
• Oh, Crap!: When he and Miller are exposed to heavy radiation, Holden has an uncharacteristic look of complete panic on his face.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: He becomes a panicking mess when the Investigator first starts to appear to him in the second half of Season 3, to the point where Amos, Alex, and Bobbie all think he's going crazy.
• The Paladin: invoked Word of God has said that the "standard" paladin from Dungeons & Dragons was the primary inspiration for Holden's character.
• Revenge Before Reason: After the events on Eros, Holden becomes hellbent on ridding the solar system of the protomolecule no matter the cost, alienating friends and allies left and right in the process. It takes a while (and a couple What the Hell, Hero? speeches from his crew) for him to come to his senses.
• Retired Badass: In a sense. Holden was a previous member of the United Nations Navy and was dishonorably discharged after he assaulted his superior officer who was trying to harm innocent Belters during a routine search. He was then only able to find work aboard the Canterbury, but he seems to personally view it as his own form of retirement.
• Right Man in the Wrong Place: He and his crew have managed to land themselves smack in the middle of a vast conspiracy simply by virtue of Holden being too noble to ignore a distress call.
  Fred Johnson: You're either some kind of genius Mr. Holden, or you're the luckiest dipshit in the solar system.
• Sanity Slippage: Everyone including himself thinks he's undergoing one when he starts having conversations with the cheerfully nonchalant ghost of Joe Miller about halfway into Season 3. It's actually the protomolecule's way of establishing contact with a susceptible human in the vicinity of the Ring.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: His guiding philosophy is to always do what he considers to be the right thing, even if it isn't necessarily the legal or even smart thing.
• Second Love: He is Naomi's; she dated her First Love, Marco Inaros, when she was a teenager, and even had a son with him. He is a much better boyfriend to her than Marco was, to the point that she tells Marco to his face that Holden is everything Marco pretends to be.
• Sex God: According to Ade, Holden is "entirely too good" at sex.
• The Stoic: It takes a lot to disturb Holden's equilibrium.
• Took a Level in Cynic: To a certain degree has the series goes on. It's perhaps most notable during the first half of Season 3, with him even bursting in bitter laughter when Chrisjen insists that the protomolecule sample aboard the Rocinante must be destroyed since he's been saying the same thing from the beginning and has long since given up hope on that ever happening.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: For a while, most notably in mid-to-late Season 2, he becomes near fanatical in his quest to destroy all traces of the Protomolecule. His intentions are undoubtedly good, since the Protomolecule could easily prove to be dangerous to all of humanity, but he embraces increasingly morally dubious and even brutal methods to accomplish his goals. Furthermore, he is willing to risk the lives and relationships with the other crew members to do it, despite increasing evidence and persuasive arguments from Naomi that there must be more of the Protomolecule out there if such a large-scale scientific organization is working with it.
• Why Did It Have To Be The Protomolecule: After his experience on Eros and seeing what the alien creation can do, it's left Holden traumatized and deeply fearing the Protomolecule and its variants, to the point of hunting down one hybrid as if to reassert control over it.^note  Though this part of his characterization is considerably downplayed compared to the books, where it's often stated even in stories set years after Eros that he's absolutely terrified of the Protomolecule and wants to stay as far away from it (and therefore the plot) as possible, and where this fear drives him to temporarily become a lot more violent and less idealistic in the years between the Eros Incident and the climax of Caliban's War, to the point that Naomi breaks up with him because he's not the man she fell in love with anymore. This conflict is rewritten to be more about Naomi coming to terms with her past mistakes instead in the TV series.

Naomi

First Officer Naomi Nagata

"I fix ships, not people."

Played By: Dominique Tipper

"Every shitty thing we do makes the next one that much easier, doesn’t it?"

Growing up on poor Belter mining ships meant that Naomi's early life was lived on a knife's edge: nearly suffocating, starving, and becoming marooned were regular occurrences throughout her childhood.

Self-educated with multiple advanced degrees, and having risen to the rank of Chief Engineer aboard the ice trawler Canterbury, she appears to be a model Belter success story, though she carries with her a secret pain.

She is cagey about her past, even with her closest friends. She abhors violence, but has witnessed enough injustice to understand the necessity of it.

Her complicated relationship with violence and her troubled history have lead to an unlikely friendship with the Canterbury's mechanic, Amos Burton.

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• Accent Relapse: In Season 3, she returns to the OPA and drops the British accent she put on while working for Earthers, speaking in pure Belter Creole instead.
• Action Survivor: Naomi isn't a former soldier like Holden or even an experienced "tough guy" like Amos, but has more than proven herself to be able to get out of numerous sticky situations over the series' course.
• The Atoner: She's spent her life trying to make up for her role in the sabotage of the Augustin Gamarra, which killed over 500 people.
• Category Traitor: Naomi occasionally comes across Belters who are angry and confrontational over her decision to run with Earthers and a Martian aboard the Rocinante. Marco and his followers dial this attitude up to 11.
• Character Development: In the second half of Season 3, Naomi takes some time off to help work with the OPA on the Behemoth as she's Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life. However, she eventually realizes that she truly misses being with her friends aboard the Roci more than anything else and her new life in the OPA just isn't meant for her anymore.
• Child Soldiers: Though she was a techie rather than a trigger-puller, Naomi joined an OPA cell at a very young age and spent a fair amount of time with them. Being no older than her mid-30s and having had a child right before she left who's now about 20 indicates just how young she was at the time.
• Conflicting Loyalties: Belter (and which faction thereof), crew of the Roci, general system inhabitant or "fuck all that noise". She juggles with all these.
• Dark and Troubled Past: The MCRN believes that she is a former OPA agent, who got sick of the death brought about by following their causes. She turns out to be a former member of the OPA's radical Inaros faction, having joined as a kid, and Marco Inaros's former lover and mother of his child. After Marco tricked her into developing code that he used to kill over 500 people in a reactor explosion, Naomi refused to work with him, so he refused to let her see their son Filip again.
• Deadpan Snarker: Has her moments, such as her drily asking her fellow crewmates if they need a back rub before they leave their escape pod to fix exterior damage in "The Big Empty".
• Friends Are Chosen, Family Aren't: When she goes looking for her deserted son in season 5, Naomi learns the hard way that she now has more in common with her new crew than with him (or of course with her ex-partner Marco) — and she has to act on this.
• Hypocrite: True to Belter form, Naomi can hold one hell of a grudge. When the crew saves Bobbie and Avasarala from certain death, Naomi is the only holdout who absolutely refuses to work together with them, even though it will quite literally stop the war and save countless lives, simply because she doesn't like either of them. Similarly, when Clarissa officially joins the crew of the Roci and more than proves her worth and that she has genuinely changed, Naomi utterly refuses to acknowledge her. ...And yet, no one has acted against the crew's best interests and wishes more than Naomi herself, and yet expects them to understand her without batting an eye. In Season 6, eventually, even Amos gets completely fed up with her and calls her out on her horrible treatment of Clarissa.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Naomi might be a downright brutal pragmatist who always has long-term survival topping virtually anything else on her priority list, but she still has a strong moral center and strives just as much as Holden does in terms of doing the right thing.
• Love Interests: She is Holden's.
• The Lancer: Begins to take this role, to Holden; where he's idealistic and righteous, she's much more pragmatic. Yet, with Amos, she's The Leader and he's The Lancer. That which Naomi can't get herself to do (even if she thinks it may need doing)... he just plain does before she can stop him or second-guess herself.
• Morality Pet: For a long time she was Amos's. After she betrayed her crew by giving Fred Johnson the Protomolecule at the end of Season 2, she completely loses his trust to do the right thing for a quite a while, until he finally forgives her at the end of Season 3. Still, by that point, she is no longer his only morality pet the way she was before.
• Ms. Fanservice: Never to an exploitative level, but She Cleans Up Nicely whenever she wants to.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Defied concerning her giving the protomolecule sample aboard the Roci to Fred Johnson. That being said, she does regret how it hurt her friends and wishes that it could have come across better than it did at the time.
  • Played straight concerning her role in the tragic destruction of the Augustin Gamarra, and it's all but stated that she's never really forgiven herself for her part in the terrorist attack.
• Official Couple: She and Holden are the main couple in the series, starting from the beginning of Season 2. It's fractured at the end of the season when she reveals to him that she gave the protomolecule to Fred Johnson, but they reconcile by mid-Season 3, and are fully back together again by the end of Season 3 once she returns to the Roci, remaining a solid couple for the rest of the series.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: In the second half of Season 3, Naomi returns to her natural Belter creole, but occasionally the British accent she used on the Roci pokes through, indicating that she's not as invested in the cause of the Belt as she imagines herself to be.
• Platonic Life-Partners: Heavily implied with Amos, to the point of being Like Brother and Sister.
• Pragmatic Hero: She grows more towards this as she regains her desire of being a hero, but hints of it were always there. She got badly burned in her past, which made her promise to herself not to pull blind heroics — preferably, no more heroics, ever. As a result, whenever she does backtrack on "no heroics", she tries to think all the angles through and puts doability and longterm survival very high on the list: you can't properly play hero if you're floundering well out of your depth, dead and/or nobody learns from what you found if you do die.
• Restraining Bolt: Amos trusts her implicitly to be this for him. She looks out for him, in turn; however uncomfortable it occasionally is.
• Second Love: Downplayed, since Holden is implied to have had many lovers in the past, but she's his second love interest in the series (after his initial love interest, Ade, is killed in the pilot episode).
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: She refuses to acknowledge Clarissa as a part of the crew for most of Season 6. She does get over this however, eventually.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Gets an absolutely massive one from the entire crew when they learn she gave their protomolecule sample to Fred Johnson of all people. It takes a very long time for them to even start speaking with her again, and her relationship with Amos was irreparably damaged. In fact, it's the lingering fallout from this decision that partially leads her to leave the crew and join the Behemoth for a while.
• Wrench Wench: Other characters rely heavily on her mechanical knowledge. Amusingly, she's actually angry at how well Tachi's fully-automated engineering system works because it means there's nothing for her to do.

Alex

Alex Kamal

Played By: Cas Anvar

"If that thing out there really is some sort of human-protocrap hybrid, then we're yesterday's model. Obsolete."

A pilot for the Pur'n'Kleen ice trawler Canterbury.

Having grown up in Mars' Mariner Valley, Alex was raised with the incongruous Texas drawl that has caught on among the largely Indian and Chinese population who live there. Unlike the rest of his sizable family on Mars, Alex looked at the generations-long terraforming project with a sense of restlessness and dread. He just couldn't bear the thought of whiling his life away on a project he would never see completed. With dreams of flying fast attack gunships, he enlisted in the Martian Congressional Republic Navy. After his tour ended the call of adventure proved too strong to resist. Signing up with Pur'n'Kleen gave him the chance to visit the farthest reaches of the solar system.

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• Ace Pilot: Double Subverted. He had aspirations to fly gunships for the Martian Navy but the MCRN deemed that he wasn't the right fit and assigned him to fly transports. He himself describes his job as a "glorified bus driver", and this experience eventually led him to becoming Canterbury's pilot. As the series kicks into high gear, however, he winds up becoming the pilot of an MCRN frigate thus achieving his dream. In fact, his motivation largely stems from how he feels while piloting it.
  "Big brass said I didn't have what it takes to fly their badass gun-ships. But I'll tell you one thing, flying the Rocinante back there, that was just about the best feeling I have ever had."
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Is much younger and slimmer than his book counterpart, along with not balding.
• Age Lift: From middle-aged to (at best) late thirties to early forties. In Caliban's War he's described as being in his 50s and balding, a far cry from Cas Anvar.
• Author Filibuster: Parodied with him in "Doors and Corners" when Alex's angst about not saving more people from Eros turns into a rant that threatens to Break the Fourth Wall as the camera presses in closer and closer... until he looks over to find Amos has already bailed and offered to buy a random girl drinks if she'll listen to Alex instead.
• Category Traitor: Some Martians view him with suspicion because he pilots a stolen MCRN gunship captained by an Earther.
• Character Development: While he still does deeply love his family, Alex struggled with him Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life throughout Season 2. By Season 3, Alex has eventually realized that he's at his happiest as the Roci's pilot.
• Death by Adaptation: Alex is still alive and kicking in the novels (as of Book 8), but dies at the end of the fifth season (which adapts Book 5) in the show.
• Dies Wide Open: Has a stroke while piloting the Screaming Firehawk (formerly the Razorback) and it takes a moment to really register that he's gone.
• Disappeared Dad: He abandoned his wife and son on Mars so he could continue flying. When Alex tries to reconnect with his family, his now ex-wife informs him that their son barely remembers him, although it later turns out that she was lying and their son is proud of his father.
• Falling into the Cockpit: Alex was thrown into the Rocinante's pilot seat by Holden. It turns out to be the roundabout fulfillment of a lifelong dream.
• Freak Out: He has one in "CQB" when the crew is trapped inside a cell on the Donnager as the ship gets locked in combat with an unknown, but powerful enemy. Shed's head getting blown off doesn't help, though he pulls himself together to help. It seems to be the result of a lack of control, as he shows no such fear when piloting under fire.
• The Heart: He's usually the one who tries to peacefully resolve conflicts between the Roci's crewmembers.
• Insistent Terminology: He consistently refers to the protomolecule as "protoshit", "protocrap" or some similarly disparaging variation thereof. And of course he's the most adamant in insisting that the Roci is "legitimate salvage".
• My Greatest Second Chance: He loves the Roci for many, many reasons (she is an awesome ship) — but the main one is this. Flying her to find out what the hell has been happening in the system won't fix the mistakes he's made in the past and the relationships he's wrecked through bad choices and worse timing. But, it does prove he was always more than a glorified bus driver. He's pulling the stops out to make every second with her counts for something.
• Nice Guy: Though he can be hot-tempered when pushed, Alex is relaxed and affable most of the time and tries to resolve most conflicts among the crew—and even with their enemies—through talking.
• Non-Action Guy: Played straight through most of the first season, since he has no real experience with firefights or hand-to-hand combat- but then subverted in Season 2, where he gets to show off his chops as the pilot of a gunship.
  • In the Season 3 finale, he also grapples with a Martian Recon Marine (the elite soldiers of Mars). He holds the Marine off for Bobbie to take out another marine. Considering that Alex got beaten up by a Belter in Season 1, this is a huge improvement in Alex's fighting ability.
• Still Wearing the Old Colors: Beginning in the second season, he's taken to wearing MCRN uniforms and other clothing emblazoned with Tachi (the Roci's original name) while his shipmates wear Beratnas Gas uniforms to go along with their ship's paint job.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Due to a number of sexual assault/harassment allegations leveled towards Cas Anvar, Alex was promptly killed off in the fifth season finale and removed to make room for Clarissa joining the Rocinante.
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: Suffers a fatal high-g induced stroke during an attempt to rescue Naomi from the Chetzemoka in Nemesis Games without any prior indication that he was having it.
• Team Mom: Best highlighted when he prepares a sit down meal and fusses over everyone to lighten the mood after the events on Eros.

Amos

Amos Burton

Played By: Wes Chatham

"The way I see it, there's only three kinds of people in this world: Bad ones, ones you follow, and ones you need to protect."

A mechanic aboard the Pur'n'Kleen ice trawler Canterbury. He's an Earther who doesn't talk about his past – but knows a lot about brothels and Baltimore. He's eerily comfortable, and even cheerful, at the prospect of violence.

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• Adaptational Attractiveness: He's much younger, less bald, and more muscular than his book counterpart.
• Ambiguously Bi:
  • In "Rock Bottom" he rejects a male prostitute's advances by simply saying "not interested" before asking about the local working conditions and then warning him about a potentially dangerous male customer.
  • In "Delta-V," a female reporter offers sex for info, he turns her down because he "doesn't shit where he eats". That reporter's male co-worker asks if he has a shot, Amos tells him the same thing. He never says "I'm not interested." Like most things with Amos, though, it’s hard to say for sure, as things that would be meaningful for anyone else are often (but not always) meaningless to him, and it’s often anybody’s guess which is which.
  • invoked According to Word of God, his sexual orientation is "yes".
• Berserk Button: He doesn't take it well if someone tries to take advantage of children in any way, even in jest. The first time he is shown to truly lose his temper is when a data broker tries to extort the Roci crew by suggesting Prax Ming's daughter might end up forced into sexual slavery. Remember, Amos is perfectly okay with violently murdering someone when he's calm. When he loses it, it ain't pretty.
• The Big Guy: Growing up in Earth's higher gravity means he is the largest and heaviest of the Rocinante's crew, and also the most comfortable with violence. He hands Miller's ass to him in the Season 2 premiere (although Miller was still suffering extreme radiation poisoning at the time).
• Brutal Honesty: He apparently cheated the job lottery, and Amos Burton might not be his real name, but other than that, Amos simply doesn't lie. Ever. He's also extremely blunt about it, such as when he tells Holden that the only reason he doesn't murder him is because Naomi wouldn't like it.
  [To Kenzo] I'm gonna be honest with you. No matter how this plays out, you're dead, and I'll probably be the one who brings you the good news.
• Bully Hunter: Despises bullies, with an implication that he regularly used to deal with them in Baltimore. When Roma, the data broker, tries to extort canned chicken from Prax in exchange for security footage of Mei, Amos completely loses his shit and very nearly beats the guy to death (with canned chicken). Likewise, he has next-to-no patience for Diogo "Little Shit" Harari when he tries throwing his newfound weight around aboard the OPAS Behemoth.
• Butt-Monkey: If someone's getting injured, odds are it's him.
  Amos: Why am I always the one to get shot?
• Character Development:
  • After he gains a Broken Pedestal for Naomi after she gives the Roci's protomolecule sample to Fred Johnson, Amos starts to develop the vestiges of his own internal moral code and even forms an Odd Friendship with Prax.
  • Amos starts the series only caring for his own survival, but gradually comes to care for the safety of his crewmates. In the finale, he attempts to shield the injured Bobbie with his own body when it looks like they will both be gunned down by the Free Navy.
• Combat Pragmatist: In his vocabulary, there is no such thing as "cheating" in a fight. When he and Bobbie engage in a "friendly" sparring match, she actually has him pinned pretty quickly. Just as he was about to pass out, he triggers the Roci's emergency alert system to distract her and quickly grapple her to the ground, beating her. She's too flabbergasted by such a cheap move even be angry.
• Dark and Troubled Past: He grew up on the streets of Baltimore and was a child prostitute before becoming gang muscle. He's not ashamed of his past, but it's clearly a significant factor in how strange he is.
• Dead Person Impersonation: His birthname is Timothy. The original Amos Burton was a crime lord that Timothy killed to save his best friend Erich. Timothy stole Amos's identity so he could start a new life beyond Earth.
• Dissonant Serenity: Amos is soft-spoken and friendly, and obviously has no problems at all with killing anyone except Naomi (and any kids in the vicinity) — such as when he calmly tells Holden that he's trying to come up with a decent reason why he shouldn't just murder him, then politely asks him to pass a wrench so he can keep fixing the oxygen regulator on the Knight. Similarly, he tells Alex at one point that he really doesn't want to kill him when the latter starts to act aggressively towards him — After all, who would fly the ship?
• Fingore: Murtry shoots off the index and middle fingers on Amos' right hand in a firefight. Thanks to advanced biotech, though, he is able to grow them back.
• Fire-Forged Friends: In Season 5, he bluntly lays out how their shared experiences have created an unbreakable bond between himself and Holden, to which Holden readily agrees.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Initially played straight since both Alex and Holden regard him with poorly-disguised fear while Naomi seems to be the only person who actually sympathizes with him, but as the series goes on he starts to form stronger emotional connections with the rest of the crew.
• Freudian Excuse: So far there have been no clear details, but Amos has heavily implied he had a very abusive childhood. His desire to protect children may very well stem from understanding how this shaped his mind to work abnormally, and he wants to make sure no one else grows up to be like him.
  • Season 4 confirms that Amos was sexually abused as a small child.
• Friend to All Children: Surprisingly, he's the first to agree to take a surviving child of the Eros Incident on-board the ship and chastises another rescued citizen for not protecting her. Following the battle on Io, he's the one watching over the kids they saved from Protogen aboard the Roci.
  • Amos also appreciates anyone who shows kindness to children. Helping kids is probably the quickest way onto his good side.
• Genius Bruiser: He looks — and frankly, acts — like a brute whose first instinct is to just shoot the problem. It belies the fact that he is remarkably intelligent and knowledgeable in a number of fields, from physics, to engineering, to psychology, and human physiology. He actually snatched an employment with Pur-n-Kleen as a mechanic through an apprenticeship by cheating the lottery. First off, he cheated the lottery and got away with it. Secondly, he had enough ship engineering knowledge to quickly move up the apprenticeship pole and become one of the Canterbury's two head mechanics despite his past being a complete blank. No advance degrees, no prior work history.
• Heroic Build: Outside of his jumpsuits, Amos is built like a battletank.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Amos is protective of children, and shows an unexpected measure of respect for Prax due to his refusal to give up on his little girl. As he says, “Every kid just needs one person who won’t give up on them.”
  • He displays good understanding of his psychological problems on an intellectual level, and has learned to recognize areas where his mind does not function properly (such as making moral judgments) and work around them.
  • For a guy whose default approach to problems is often "murder them violently," Amos is surprisingly big on second chances. If someone, like Clarissa or Naomi, is genuinely repentant, Amos is quick to cut them some slack.
• Innocently Insensitive: Can come across this way. A lot. Like when he tells Anna that "nothing she does matters" in the med-bay, when he really meant that she can do a whole lot more good with her people skills. Amos is extremely blunt and doesn't beat around the bush at all. The worst case was doubtless the Martian flag on the Roci's bulkhead. After Errinwright destroys Deimos in a retaliatory strike, Amos decides to "update" the flag by erasing Deimos from the flag and replacing it with a bunch of tiny little dots. To patriotic Martians like Alex and Bobbie, this is blatant and brazen defacement. He was simply trying to make it more accurate.
  Bobbie: Alright. Who defaced the Martian flag on the bulkhead!?
  Amos: I updated it.
  Bobbie: You think that's funny!?
  Amos: Well, maybe not now...
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Well, kind of. Amos is a violent man who claims to have a Lack of Empathy, but he slowly shows the vestiges of a moral compass and a genuine desire to be a better person.
• Lack of Empathy: He suffers from a form of emotional detachment due to the abuses he suffered as a child. This becomes an advantage, as he's able to figure out how to talk with and understand a scientist who went through a voluntary procedure to destroy his ability to feel empathy, and thus can figure out how to get the scientist to talk. Having said that: those who share similarities in their backgrounds with him, he's quick to, if not totally empathise with, then get on the same side of or decide to let take the lead. But, always to a point: if he decides the churn's moved on and the situation has changed, there's always the risk that he'll drop them.
• Likes Older Women: Asks Holden what Avasarala was wearing and when he met her on the moon, he complimented her looks and then answered that she "could be both" after she told him not to call her 'Chrissy' by saying that she's "a member of Parliament, not your favorite stripper".
• Malicious Misnaming: At first, he refuses to correctly pronounce Murtry's name, calling him "Murty", "Marty", "Murphy", and "Morty". He drops this once Murtry starts killing people and Amos realizes that he's dealing with a true sociopath.
• Morality Pet: An interesting characterization of Amos is that he actively needs one as a moral compass and conscience — his own sort of Jiminy Cricket — due to his mental issues. Naomi, and later Prax, are his. Following Prax's departure, he eventually forms another Odd Friendship, this time with Anna, a Methodist pastor. In season 5, after he and Mao kill a survivalist because they need his stuff to survive, he says he needs to get back to his crew because Holden wouldn't have approved.
• Moral Sociopathy: It's clear that Amos has a code he lives by. The problem is that the code is entirely his own and his crewmates don't know him well enough to gauge how he'll react in any given situation. As he puts it, he judges things by how "the churn" seems to be turning. The moment something get more advantageous to do for survival than the thing he's currently doing, his instinct is to pick it with only very few caveats holding him back. The big one is "run it past Naomi and/or other selected, trustworthy neurotypicals, first". He's well aware that his gut reaction isn't always the right call, even if it makes the most sense to him.
• Mr. Fanservice: The man's not only built like a tank but frequently wears tight jumpsuits and even gets an extended Shirtless Scene showing off his Heroic Build in the first half of Season 3.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: He doesn't do it at the drop of a hat, but Amos goes for killing someone as the solution far quicker than the average person. If people are pointing guns at each other, he will take the first shot instead of trying to de-escalate by talking. Granted, in hindsight, for some cases, his approach would have saved the team a lot of headaches. This is also played for dark humor at times — "Amos! Keep an eye on this character for me." "Would you like me to shoot them?"
• Mysterious Past: He doesn't really like to talk about his past beyond his being from Baltimore and being familiar with the crime syndicates that rule the city. When Monica investigated Amos's past before going to film her documentary, she learned that there was a crime lord named Amos Burton, although the Roci's Amos denies that this was him. Monica also implies that Amos cheated at the lottery that allowed him to be trained as a mechanic. Amos's conversations with Charles and Erich early in Season 5 reveal that he was muscle for a Baltimore gang and he killed the real crime lord Amos Burton and stole his identity to start a new life.
• Noodle Incident: He makes cryptic references to an incident that happened when he was five years old. Something happened in the middle of the night when he was asleep in a pitch-black basement in Baltimore, and that was the last time he felt fear.
  • On a less serious note, when he's teaching Avasarala how to walk on a ship, Amos notes that walking in the boots is just like walking wearing pump heels. When Avasarala asks him how he knows what it's like to wear pumps, he simply says "I didn't always work in space."
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: He remains eerily calm under the direst circumstances, but being blinded by Ilus's microorganisms in Season 4 causes him to panic and attack Holden because it reminds him of an incident where an unspecified terrible thing happened to him when he was five and living in a pitch-black basement.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Grew up surrounded by prostitution, so he goes out of his way to warn one about a violent patron carrying a knife. He's also protective of children and their safety.
  • He takes a liking to Prax Meng and helps him get used to life in space and train for dangerous situations due to the Belter being one of the few truly good people he's come across.
• Reluctant Psycho: He's well-aware that his sociopathy is abnormal and hates it. At one point, he asks a scientist who had his empathy surgically removed if there's a way to reverse the procedure, clearly hoping to cure his own disorder.
• Slasher Smile: He has a terrifying grin when he is about to beat the shit out of Murtry as revenge for Wei's death.
• The Social Darwinist: Amos is a Type V. He was taught from a young age that people can either rise to the top (in his case the top means continued survival rather than wealth or power) or sink to the bottom and that everything in between is simply "the churn" to determine who winds up where.
• The Sociopath: Ultimately subverted. He's somewhere on the antisocial personality scale, yes, what with his talk of "the churn". Still, he's not necessarily disordered with it. For the (incredibly stressed) environment he's in, he certainly makes it work for him, even with the associated social disadvantages (see all the distrust people throw his way). He has a code he uses to try keeping his head on his shoulders both in and out of social situations for as long as possible. It's basically why he picks moral compasses like Naomi to bounce off. And, being quite obviously against child abuse helps his case with others, despite the rest of his Moral Sociopathy.
• Token Evil Teammate: Downplayed. His first response to any problem is to shoot it or beat someone's skull in, which gets him furious rebukes from his teammates who see him as dangerously violent. Naomi stresses to Holden that Amos isn't truly evil, just "different".
• Tranquil Fury: Almost never seen showing any anger, even in the middle of massive ship-to-ship battles or close-quarters firefights. Even his biggest buttons only get him from tranquil to bringing on the violence in three seconds flat, with little emotion on his face.
• Undying Loyalty: If he comes to see someone as being "good" he will back them up and go to great lengths for them like he demonstrates with Holden and Prax. If such people act in a way that goes against his assumptions of them, such as Naomi, it leaves him shattered and confused.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Gives a massive one to Naomi after she admits to giving their sample of the Protomolecule to Fred Johnson. Before that, she was his sole moral compass, but after that, he began to outright ignore her and has gotten quite a bit closer to Prax.
• Wild Card: A good way to describe him is "unpredictable stoicism." He's always stone-faced, and yet can deliver a near-fatal beating without even blinking at the smallest provocation. This makes both Jim and Miller extremely wary of him — at one point, Jim even considers kicking him off the ship because he can't control him.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Very much — he goes out of his way to try not to. And, would very much like to hurt those who would hurt kids when they're within his reach. It's the most easily comprehended aspect of his personal morality chart. However, even though he wouldn't directly hurt kids, he can and will leave them in situations they probably won't survive, simply because he finds it hard to judge which the best thing to do is. Do you leave a kid with their family on a doomed station to die surrounded with love? Or, split them from their family and take them into an uncertain, lonely future with you? He picks leaving her behind. With some reluctance.
• You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry!: Don’t give Amos a reason to kill you, because that’s exactly what he’ll do. He even comes close to quoting this trope when Alex, in a fit of anger and frustration, takes a swing at him, and actually sounds contrite as he easily manhandles Alex:
  "I don’t wanna fight you, Alex! So please don’t make me. Because then, who’ll fly the ship?"

Clarissa

Clarissa Mao

Portrayed By: Nadine Nicole

The daughter of Jules-Pierre Mao. She once tried to frame James Holden in revenge for her father's imprisonment, but she would later join the crew.

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• Actually Pretty Funny: After her attempt to capture the Rocinante fails and she gets locked up in the Behemoth's brig, she bursts out laughing when she realizes Holden — her target all along — is in the adjacent cell, though another good reason for it was Holden's hilariously schoolyard introduction.
  Holden: Hey, I'm Jim. What're you in for?
• Age Lift: In the books, she was Julie's younger sister. Here, she's stated to be Mao's eldest daughter.
• Always Second Best: To her sister, at least in the eyes of their father.
• Always Someone Better: Clarissa could never live up to her sister in their father's eyes, despite Julie being a rebellious spirit who had an extremely antagonistic relationship with Mao. It clearly eats Clarissa up from the inside that Mao ultimately preferred Julie, who she viewed as the constant screw-up, while Mao was downright disdainful of Clarissa’s obedience and love.
• Anti-Villain: She's willing to commit murder and risk starting a war to get her revenge, but as the story goes on it becomes clear that she genuinely regrets the crimes that she has committed. In the end, her guilty conscience catches up with her when she abandons her quest for revenge against Holden by risking her life to save Holden from Ashford.
• Apologetic Attacker: When a fellow mechanic finds her bomb, she apologetically says that he didn't have to look before murdering him. His death continues to plague her as the guilt eats away at her.
• The Atoner: After being caught she accepts her imprisonment, and tells Amos that Anna was right and she deserved to be punished.
• Avenging the Villain: She's trying to kill Holden in revenge for Mao's imprisonment, but her motivations seem to run deeper. Rather than just outright kill Holden, she's framing him in an attempt to ruin his reputation and vindicate her father.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: She quickly forms an attachment to Amos because he's the only one who doesn't moralize and provides her with practical advice instead.
• Big Bad: In Season 3's second half, she is the one that sabotages the Rocinante and Seung Un to frame Holden out of revenge for arresting her father and this sets up all the upcoming conflict. Then she spends the rest of the season trying to kill Holden and anyone who gets in her way until her Heel–Face Turn.
  • Big Bad Wannabe: Ultimately what she is by the end of the season. She was a one-man operation to kill Holden and all the large-scale danger with the Ring Station was just unintended consequences. She is nowhere near the danger level of Errinwright, her father, or Ashford.
• Bio-Augmentation: She has special adrenal implants that can give her a short burst of superhuman strength and speed, making her capable of feats like easily lifting a man several times her size and slamming him hard enough to instantly kill him, or moving so fast that she can cross long distances before a gunman can react and shoot her. The downsides are that the effects are extremely short-term and take such a toll on her body that if she uses it for more than a few seconds at a time she usually collapses afterwards. She also eventually learns that it's killing her.
• Cain and Abel: Clarissa and Julie did not get along. Clarissa resented Julie for being a disobedient brat who was still their father's favorite.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: She takes down Ren in a matter of seconds. He doesn't even get the chance to react to her, let alone throw a punch.
• Daddy Issues: Even worse than her sister's, enough to be a Freudian Excuse for some very bad things.
  • Hearing her performance evaluation from Ren immediately contrasts with a flashback of her father dismissing her as an Inadequate Inheritor. Ren had written that she needed a little mentoring, but would grow into an excellent mechanic. The fact that the man she desperately wants to please has no use for her, while the man she murdered wanted to nurture her towards a successful and rewarding career and regarded her shortcomings as obstacles to help her overcome, tears at her.
• Death Seeker: Has shades of this. In the Season 3 finale, she asks Ashford if he thinks that one truly good act at the end of one's life can atone for all prior bad acts.
• Determinator: Nothing will stop her from getting her revenge. Every disaster that befalls the Thomas Prince is just another opportunity for her to exploit to reach her goal.
• Disc-One Final Boss: For Season 3, she's the second one after Errinwright and her father. She spends most of her screentime trying to kill Holden, but is captured right before the last few episodes and undergoes a Heel–Face Turn against Ashford, who is the Final Boss of the season.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: She is the responsible sibling to Julie's foolish, being Jules-Pierre's more dutiful, obedient daughter. This, however, has not won her any points from him.
• Foil: To Julie. Both children of Jules-Pierre and both diverging wildly different directions. Julie resisted her father's control and joined the OPA to spite him. After being betrayed by her boss, Julie accidentally unleashed an alien's deathly attempt at communication, killing many and threatening humanity. Meanwhile, Clarrisa was dutiful and loyal, but unappreciated. After betraying her boss, Clarissa's actions accidentally unleashed an alien's deathly attempt at communication, killing many and threatening humanity.
• Frame-Up: She paints Holden as an OPA collaborator by engineering a fake message of him declaring the Ring belongs to the OPA and sabotaging her ship while having Holden claim he deliberately attacked it. Meanwhile, her mole on the Roci makes sure Holden can neither refute the story nor defend himself from retaliation.
• Heel–Face Turn: Mainly due to a combination of being called out by various people and overhearing a conversation between Holden and Naomi which shows her that he's a genuinely good person and not the "narcissistic asshole" she'd imagined him out to be. Having seen how wrong she was, she lets go of her quest for vengeance and uses her implants to save Holden and sabotage Ashford's well-intentioned but colossally misguided attempt to destroy the Ring, saving the entire human race in the process. She gets shot doing this, but survives. In subsequent seasons she reforms while in prison, then becomes a companion to Amos in the fifth season and eventually a new addition to the crew of the Rocinante.
• Hour of Power: Her implants grant her super-human strength for a minute or so, but she collapses right after that due to the toll they take on her body.
• Ignored Epiphany: She's horrified after she murders Ren and briefly seems to reflect on her goals, only to proceed to carry on with her plan anyway. She eventually comes around and accepts that what she believed and the actions she took were all wrong.
• Morality Pet: Amos sees her as a kindred spirit and does his part to look after her. He pressures the Pit's guards into letting her escape with him, travels miles through the chaos of Earth after Marco's attacks even though traveling would be much easier if he didn't have to deal with the risks of traveling with a fugitive, and he nearly gets himself killed trying to bargain with a doomsday survivalist for supplies he needed to make sure she stayed alive.
• My God, What Have I Done?: The guilt of Ren's murder clearly plagues her, though she tries her best to hide it from her colleagues.
  • The murders that she's committed haunt her for the rest of the series, and she is the only one to be supportive of Holden when he refrains from killing Marco Inaros, telling Holden to never feel bad about sparing a life.
• One-Man Army: She singlehandedly (and without any weapons) massacres 15 armed men during her escape from Earth.
• Pintsized Powerhouse: She has black-market implants which grant her temporary Super-Strength. Despite being a rather slim woman, this allows her to easily kill the broad-shouldered, imposing Ren with nothing but her bare hands.
• Post-Victory Collapse: A side effect of whatever grants Melba her super strength is that she collapses exhausted after using it.
• Power Limiter: Once she's captured the Roci crew strap an injector to her arm to pump her full of chemicals that counteract the effects of her implants. During her imprisonment at the Pit, she is routinely injected with chemical blockers that take days to wear off and are so strong that she has trouble moving for a while after being injected.
• Punny Name: She used the alias "Melba Koh" to track Holden. After her Heel–Face Turn, Amos nicknames her "Peaches" (as in, Peach Melba, the dessert). Even Holden adopts the nickname when she joins the crew full-time.
• Put on a Bus: She goes to prison after the end of the third season. Fortunately for her, Amos happened to be visiting her when Marco's asteroids strike Earth, and the two of them help each other escape the damaged prison and then get back into space.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • On the receiving end of a brief one by her father, who prefers Julie over her.
    Jules-Pierre: She has the will to take our name into the future. She refuses to be stopped, even by me. What do you do? (scoffs) Plan parties.
  • Anna Volovodov gives her a longer and more impactful one after she's captured and locked up in the Behemoth's brig:
    Anna: I keep looking for a way to care about you. I think, "Her father was a terrible person." But a lot of people have terrible parents, and... I think, "Well, she's clearly a damaged person," but then... who isn't? So, I'm down to "Maybe she has a brain tumor." Do you have a brain tumor?
• Revenge Before Reason: She has a single-minded obsession with getting revenge on Holden, regardless of how her actions may affect others.
• Sins of the Father: She had all of her assets frozen as punishment for her father Jules-Pierre Mao's actions, even though she had no involvement with them. It's part of why she's so bent on revenge against Holden.
• The Sixth Ranger: She joins the crew in the last episode of the penultimate season.
• Super-Strength: She has black-market implants that allow her to lift a much larger and heavier man as if he were half her size and bash his head against a bulkhead, killing him and leaving a sizable dent in the bulkhead in the process. She then manages to compress his skull when stuffing his body into a compartment slightly too small for him to fit in.
• The Unfavorite: To her father Jules-Pierre Mao, who holds Julie in higher regard even if they are at odds. After Clarissa receives news of his death, she admits to herself that he never loved her..
• Unknown Rival: She wants Holden dead, but he doesn't even know who she is. When they finally meet face to face, both locked up in the Behemoth's brig, he casually chats with her and she just laughs at the irony. By the end of the season 3 finale, it's not clear if anyone bothered to fill Holden in.
• "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl: No matter what she does and how antagonistic her sister gets, she always came second best in Jules-Pierre's eyes. Not that it is preventing her from taking revenge on Holden on his behalf, even if it's just to say that she did something Julie never would.
  Julie: Our father is a damaged man. You're never gonna be good enough for him.
• Wrench Wench: Her days of apprenticing under Ren, and later Amos, have made her into one hell of a good mechanic. So much so that both Holden and Amos are perfectly comfortable with leaving critical work in her hands. Naomi...less so.
• Your Days Are Numbered: In the finale, Clarissa learns that she has an untreatable illness and will die within five years.

Temporary Crew Members/Passengers

Beware of spoilers!

The Investigator

The Investigator

"You're a tool that goes places. I'm a tool that finds things."

Played by: Thomas Jane

"I tried to be the angel. But I was so scared. So she held my hand. And I told her "If you fall with me it ain't gonna be for halfway."

A mental construct generated by a cluster of the Protomolecule left behind on the Rocinante following the battle with the Hybrid. It has taken the form and consciousness of Joe Miller and appears only to Holden as a hallucination, guiding him towards an unknown purpose.

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• And I Must Scream: The Investigator is a construct but Miller's consciousness is still in there, fighting to get through at all times. Furthermore, he must endure being destroyed over and over again and has the voices of all the victims from Eros constantly echoing through his head.
• Deadpan Snarker: When the Roci makes it inside the Ring and the Investigator's "connection" is stronger (read: he's far more coherent), Holden quickly discovers this is very much Miller he's dealing with. See Technobabble below.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Miller is the protomolecule's way of communicating with Holden on a level he can understand, using Miller's form and experiences to relate concepts that would otherwise be centuries beyond Earth's current level of development. He likens himself to Mozart trying to teach a monkey.
  Investigator: (points to himself) Calculus. (points to Holden) Amoeba.
• Greater-Scope Villain: For Season 4. While The Investigator himself doesn't play a directly antagonistic role like Murtry, its single-minded drive to find out what happened to the Ring Builders makes him haphazardly push Ilus's buttons and fiddle with the dials, activating the long-dormant technology and causing an utterly catastrophic environmental disaster, endangering not only the settlers but the folks out in space orbiting the planet as well. And he was completely apathetic about it all. It got bad enough that Miller himself had to wrest control of the Investigator to help Holden put a stop to it.
• Killed Off for Real: After Miller wrests control of the Investigator and takes over a nearby robot, he plunges it into the orb on the Ilus ruins. This very much kills them both, but what really cinches it is Holden destroying the leftover globule of the protomolecule on the Roci that created the Investigator to begin with. Both the Investigator and Miller are well and truly dead.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: He never remembers his previous sessions with Holden, since each iteration is a new construct, repeated until the desired result is achieved. Following the Hub's full activation, this is no longer the case.
• Manipulative Bastard: As Miller explains, everything about the Investigator — from his appearance, to mannerisms, to choice of words — everything is a pinpoint calculation designed to elicit wanted actions, reactions and responses from Holden — from his empathy to his anger.
• Powerful and Helpless: The Investigator has control over the station inside the Ring, letting him uses its defenses as he pleases, but he needs Holden because the one thing he needs access to requires a living being to operate it. This doesn't change after they activate the station; he reemphasizes to Holden early in Season 4 that without a physical body, he needs Holden's hands.
• The Puppet Cuts His Strings: Towards the end of Season 4, Miller's consciousness is able to break free of the Investigator construct's programming and pursue his own agenda against the Protomolecule.
• Signature Headgear: Wears Miller's trademark fedora when the Protomolecule's programming is in control. When the real Miller is in charge, he appears fedora-less as Holden knew him.
  Holden: What's with the hat?
  Investigator: Keeps the rain off my head.
• Spirit Advisor: The simplest way of explaining it. The Investigator seems to be the disembodied consciousness of Miller after he and Julie smashed Eros into Venus, being repurposed by the Protomolecule to guide Holden towards an unknown end. He appears and disappears without warning.
• Technobabble: Played for Laughs when Holden asks him to stop speaking in riddles.
  The Investigator: Where the hell have you been! Come on, we gotta get to the crime scene.
  Holden: No, no more crime stories. I wanna know exactly what you know.
  The Investigator: Oh, so you wanna talk about the non-local quantum hologram, the phase-conjugate adaptive waves resonating in micro-tubules in the brain, which of course requires some closed-timeline curves and Lorentzian manifold, and... You catch up, I'll wait.
  Holden: (Beat) So, a crime scene?
  The Investigator: Crime scene!
• The Unintelligible: The first few times he appears to Holden, he is distressed and incoherent, babbling random things Miller has previously said. He does get a few moments of lucidity, but these tend to be brief. He gets a lot better once they've entered the Ring, since the signal is stronger.
• Walking Spoiler: It's impossible to discuss the Investigator without spoiling Miller's fate. Hell, it's impossible to even look at him without doing that.
• Welcome to Corneria: When his connection to the Ring and the station is poor (as when he appears to Holden on Earth), he has a tendency to repeat things he's already said, in an identical tone of voice.
  The Investigator: (multiple times) Next clue to the case.

Other Allies/Passengers

There are many other characters that, while not official crew members of the Rocinante, they have worked together with them temporarily or are close friends of the crew members. This is a list of those characters, along with links to the pages where their information is located. Bolded character names are other major protagonists on par with the Roci crew.

• The Asteroid Belt Colonies: Josephus Miller, Prax Meng, Mei Meng
  • The Outer Planets Alliance: Julie Mao, Fred Johnson, Camina Drummer, Bull
• The United Nations of Earth: Chrisjen Avasarala, Kenzo Gabriel, Anna Volovodov, Monica Stuart, Cohen Casti, Melba Koh/Clarissa Mao
• The Martian Congressional Republic: Bobbie Draper, Theresa Yao, K. Lopez
• Ilus/New Terra: Elvi Okoye, Fayez Sarkis

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