The Expanse 2: Caliban's War [1] Quiz

Answer: She didn't kill the monster.

Bobbie was lying on the ground as the monster killed the last Martian Marine. Before it could move on to Bobbie, it shuddered and sprouted an extra set of limbs, and then immediately blew up. The blast knocked Bobbie unconscious, but it also threw her kilometers away from the battlefield, which saved her life. Minutes after the fight, one of Ganymede's orbital mirrors fell on the site, crushing all evidence of the monster.

It was later learned that the scientists creating the protomolecule hybrids (the monsters) could not reliably control them. The protomolecule would always eventually figure out how to break its programming. The scientists installed a bomb on each monster that would detonate when that happened, to prevent their experiment from running out of control. When the monster fighting Bobbie grew two new limbs, that was not part of the original programming, and the bomb activated.

Answer: He could not make coffee.

The whole galley on the Rocinante was down so Amos could fix something. Holden had just woken up to fight pirates, and was upset that he couldn't get his caffeine fix before he had to work, telling Naomi, "I can't fight pirates without coffee." Amos knew his captain, and had made a thermos before shutting things down.

Holden was a bit of a connoisseur of coffee, and his love for the drink was mentioned throughout the series.

Answer: Getting a new custom-fit suit was a difficult process.

Bobbie wore an old Goliath III suit of the Martian Force Recon Marines, instead of the new Goliath IV. Bobbie was larger than most other people, standing more than two metres tall, and massing in at more than one hundred kilograms, all muscle. Going through the requisition procedure for a custom-fitted suit was so much of a hassle that Bobbie just elected to keep her old suit.

Answer: They had weakened immune systems.

Mei and her patient group had Myers-Skelton Premature Immunosenescence. Without her daily medicine, her immune system would start to shut down, and then a minor infection might kill her.

Prax was initially concerned that Mei's kidnappers didn't know about her condition, and that she would die within a week of disappearing. He was relieved when he found out that her doctor had taken her.

Dr. Strickland was actually Carlos Merrian, one of Protogen's psychopathic scientists. He had set up a practice to find immune-compromised children to use as test subjects because they had fewer systems he had to account for when creating the delicately balanced protomolecule hybrids.

Answer: To distract them from Holden

Alex was left on the Rocinante in hiding, and everyone else went to Ganymede on the Somnambulist. Naomi posed as the captain while Holden and Amos were regular crew. Holden was wanted by the UN, so he had grown a beard to try to disguise himself (it was not very effective).

Naomi showed the inspections officer around the Somnambulist while the marines watched Amos and Holden. Holden became nervous about being recognized. Amos saw Holden acting strange, which would have brought on even more attention. To save his captain, Amos started antagonizing the marines to shift their focus to him.

Answer: Cascade failure

Prax was familiar with the concept of a cascade failure from his work in a biology lab. Catastrophic events happened frequently, but natural systems were diverse and robust, and could survive those events. Artificial systems (such as those in a biology lab) were not robust, and a single event could bring down the whole thing in a cascade failure. The death rate on Ganymede was increasing since the attack, which made sense to Prax. It was not the blunt-force trauma of a battle that killed most people. It was the food and medical supply shortage that came after that did more damage.

Prax often thought about the cascade when considering his daughter's immune system, Ganymede's social and environmental structures, or the new protomolecule hybrids.

Answer: Food freighters trying to take off were blocking relief food from landing.

Ganymede was the first rocky body beyond Earth with a magnetosphere, which protected it from the solar wind better than any other Belter station, ship, or rock. This made it the best place to grow food in the Belt, which in turn made it the only rock Earth and Mars both maintained a presence on after their coalition broke down.

When Earth and Mars started fighting, the food shipments from Ganymede stopped. The people of Ganymede started to starve, but corporate-owned food freighters still wanted to take off to feed the rest of the Belt.

Holden and his crew had to wait for hours in Ganymede's orbit for a berth to be available. They were waiting for food freighters to take off so they could land relief food. Holden was stunned by the absurdity of the situation.

Answer: There was a spike of protomolecule activity on Venus.

At the end of "Leviathan Wakes", a protomolecule-infected Eros crashed into Venus, and started building complex structures under the clouds. Whenever the protomolecule hybrids became active, protomolecule activity on Venus would surge, like a nerve response.

The most interesting/terrifying part was that Venus reacted immediately, with no delay from the speed of light, showing once again just how much more advanced the protomolecule builders were than humans.

Answer: Chicken

Civilization on Ganymede had been reduced to food barter. The most prized commodities were protein sources. Prax paid the hacker the first time with vegetables, which was how he found out Dr. Strickland had taken Mei. If he wanted the hacker to actually follow the doctor across multiple cameras, he would have to find chicken.

After they met, Holden supplied Prax with "chicken product", which they hoped would be enough. When they went back for the rest of the footage, the hacker tried to jack up the price. This triggered Amos, and the hacker was beaten nearly to death. After they had the new footage, Naomi commented that she probably could have gotten the footage for them.

Answer: She asked Alex to shoot down the freighter if it took off.

The ship was one of the food freighters that was trying to take off, and an angry, hungry mob didn't want to let it go. A spokesperson was trying to reason with the mob, to no effect.

Holden was going to threaten the security officers, but when he reached behind him for his gun, Naomi took his hand. She openly called Alex, who was hiding nearby on the Rocinante, and asked him to shoot down the freighter if it attempted to take off. Realizing that they were going to lose the food either way, the security guards left, letting the mob have their food. When Holden asked how Naomi had thought to do that, she said she just tried to act the way he would have, because he was starting to act the way Miller used to.

Answer: They got tickled.

Avasarala was always working, even at home when her grandchildren were visiting. Avasarala had been away too long, so her granddaughter Kiki lured her into a water balloon ambush. Despite her enraged face, Avasarala's only punishment was severe tickling.

She loved her grandchildren, sneaking chocolates to them, and enjoying the few moments of levity they provided when distracting her from UN work.

Answer: Help Holden find Mei in exchange for a ride off Ganymede

Wendell, the Martian leader of the Pinkwater team was skeptical, but when Amos pointed out that it was the poorly disguised James Holden making the offer, he took the offer seriously. Holden gave Wendell and his team the Weeping Somnambulist, the ship he had originally come to Ganymede on. Holden got off Ganymede on the Rocinante.

Answer: Prax cocked his gun.

Prax wanted to go with Holden and Amos to find the kidnappers, and his conviction persuaded Amos to let him come along. Amos gave Prax a pistol. Prax had never used a gun before, and everything he knew about them came from action movies. In action movies, in a tense situation, people would cock their guns when making an important point.

When Prax met the kidnappers, he cocked his gun while making a point, which immediately escalated a tense situation into a firefight. Prax managed to not get hit and never fired a shot.

Afterwards, Amos took the pistol back from him, saying it hadn't been a good idea to give it to Prax in the first place.

Answer: Holden insisted Fred Johnson was responsible for the new protomolecule monsters.

As far as Holden could tell, Fred Johnson was the only person in the galaxy with any protomolecule sample. Saturn's moon Phoebe, the original carrier, had been destroyed by Mars. The infected Eros had crashed into Venus, and all remaining ships and labs belonging to Protogen had been destroyed. The only sample left that Holden knew of was the one he had taken off the Anubis and given to Fred.

Naomi was getting concerned about Holden. He was turning to quick, violent solutions more readily than he used to. When they landed on Ganymede and a fake customs agent tried to shake down the crew, he drew his pistol to scare the man off. His insistence on accusing Fred outright, rather than thinking things through or giving him the benefit of the doubt, was the last straw for Naomi.

Answer: Soren Cottwald, her assistant, was working for Nguyen.

To Avasarala, Soren was polite and competent. When Bobbie was hired and their desks were near each other, his true colours started showing. Soren was dismissive of both Bobbie and Avasarala, and used some unprofessional words to describe his boss.

The first thing that made Bobbie suspicious was that Soren did not immediately take a data card to Data Services when ordered. Later, Soren took the card and headed in a different direction. Bobbie followed him and found him handing off the card to one of Nguyen's flunkies in a bar, where she confronted him.

Soren had been found out, so he put together a smear campaign to discredit Bobbie, saying she was secretly working for the Martian Intelligence Service. It was a convincing report on the surface, but it did not sit well with Avasarala. Then Avasarala saw Soren bite the inside of his lip, and she knew what had happened. Soren was nervous, which meant the report was false, which meant Soren was working for someone else. Avasarala marveled at how expertly she had been outplayed, and promptly fired Soren.