The Expanse

Season 1

Dulcinea

1. For a little Easter Egg, when Vargas is in the airlock, at 00:41:55. you can see a Portal Companion Cube float by out the window, lower right of the screen.

The Big Empty

1. When Joe is searching Julie's apartment, there is a hamster in a wheel on a table. When Joe tells the the computer to display Julie's replies, the hamster's eyes briefly change from blue to red.
2. "Scopuli" is Latin for "rocks", which is an appropriate name for an asteroid belt ship.

Remember the Cant

1. When Joe is looking at the holographic map of the solar system, one of the orbits is marked "Comet 67P". This is 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is a Kuiper Belt comet. 67P was the target of the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission. In November 2014 Rosetta's lander, Philae, landed on the 67P's surface, making it the first time a spacecraft landed on a comet.
2. At the start of the episode, Havelock comes off the 'subway' in a station called Rosse Buurt (Station) - that's Dutch for Red Neighbourhood, meaning Red Light District.
3. Amos' mocking of the Martian Marine is taken from the second book in the series "Caliban's War." In that situation, he'd done it to distract some soldiers from Holden failing to look inconspicuous while investigating problems on Jupiter's moon Ganymede.
4. Amos' left arm says, "click to play."

CQB

1. "Bizi Betiko" is Basque for "Live Forever".
2. The self-destruct interface aboard the MCRN Donnager, visible after Captain Yao decides to scuttle the ship, is a direct homage to the Nostromo's self destruct panel from Alien (1979). The red and yellow colors as well as most of the text itself are lifted directly from the warning label on the Nostromo's self destruct mechanism, seen when Ripley activates it and later, fails to deactivate it.
3. The tool Joe uses to retrieve the data crypt is an Eppendorf pipette (with a metal barrel added), used for liquid handling in Biochemical laboratories.
4. Regarding meteors, Avasalara is worried about people who throw rocks. Since the 1960s Science Fiction writers, and a few real world military strategists, have written about using inert mass warheads as aimed meteors. Nudging asteroids out of the belt and in toward Earth could give you an astoundingly big bang for your buck; a rock the size of a minivan could have a blast effect in the kiloton range. The only tricky part is accurately hitting specific ground based targets.
5. The escape vessel is named "Tachi'; that is Japanese for "us".
6. The Mormon starship is named The Nauvoo. In 1839 the Mormons bought a small town in Illinois and named it Nauvoo (Hebrew for 'beautiful place'). The town was at first a refuge for persecuted Mormons then a place to flee from during the exodus to Utah. Today Nauvoo, Illinois is a tourism destination for Mormons.
7. CQB is defined as Close Quarter Battle

Back to the Butcher

1. The club Tech Noir would appear to be a nod to the club Tech Noir from The Terminator where the Terminator finally catches up to Sarah Connor and is blasted with shotgun by Kyle Reese.
2. Holden renames the Martian military gunship 'Rocinante', and says that it is Spanish for "work horse". It is also famously the horse of Don Quixote - a very old, sway-backed, worn out, skin-and-bones nag - who carries him on a foolish quest of misguided chivalry that brings nothing but defeat and humiliation. Yet the "ingenious gentleman" and his steed carry on...
3. There is an area on Ceres station called "Rosse Buurt". This is actually Dutch for "Red Light District"
4. Rocinante is also the name of the space ship driven into the black hole of Rush's Cygnus X-1.
5. When Detective Miller goes into the club Tech Noir and gets into the back electronics area, he starts scanning various memory storage devices that are scattered on the table amidst various bits of tech. They are all empty. However, when he scans them, each one shows 0.0 YB. YB in this context most likely means yottabytes. A yottabyte is one trillion terabytes. This gives a good idea of the level of technology this society has, even the poverty stricken belters. A typical flash drive for them stores a trillion terabytes.
6. In renaming the "Tachi" Naomi mentions transponder circuits being made of graphene. Graphene is a pure allotrope of carbon forming a two -dimensional hexagonal matrix. This cousin of carbon nanotubes is very, very strong and light and electrically conductive. In 2004 two University of Manchester scientists made the big breakthrough in identifying and studying graphene. This Nobel Prize winning work was totally dependent on two pieces of Scotch Tape.
7. Although Holden states in Leviathan Wakes that he named the Rocinante after Don Quixote's horse from the novel Don Quixote , the name is likely also a reference to the song "Cygnus X-1 " by Rush, a band Ty Franck is a big fan of , because of the following lyrics: Flew into the light of Deneb Sailed across the Milky Way On my ship, the "Rocinante" Wheeling through the galaxies

Rock Bottom

1. The term "sheep dip" was originally for an insecticide liquid applied to sheep, but here it refers to a spy building up a cover story before infiltrating somewhere.

Windmills

1. The episode's title "Windmills" is a reference to the Cervantes novel "Don Quixote", where the hero, a delusional man who thinks he's a knight, tries to tilt, ie joust, with windmills who he perceives as malevolent giants. The phrase "tilting at windmills" has come to mean fanciful or fruitless striving. Holden's mother says that Don Quixote was one of his favorite novels as a child but that he never understood the work's thematic message.
2. Use of the code word "ubiquitous" to indicate one's status covertly had also been done in the novel "Leviathan Wakes," upon which the first season is based. In that situation, Fred Johnson wanted Holden to slip it into the first sentence of his response to Johnson's message to show he wasn't under duress.
3. Shohreh Aghdashloo and Frances Fisher were born on the same day, May 11, 1952.

Salvage

1. Kenzo complains that he's being taken along to the stealth ship to be a "canary in a coal mine". His helmet-camera feed is in fact labeled as "CANARY" on Alex's station.
2. The Expanse book series authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck appear at 27:26 in the arrival scene.
3. This is the first time the original owner of Joe Miller's hat he wore on Ceres is revealed as Inspector Sematimba on Eros.
4. Re "canary in a coal mine". Coal mines with inadequate ventilation can build up deadly levels of carbon monoxide and other toxic gasses. Canaries are more sensitive to these gasses than are humans. Since about 1913 miners would take a caged canary with them into the mines, if the canary fell over the miners would evacuate that mine. Today there are reliable electronic and chemical gas detectors.
5. For Earth surface navigation you only need degrees of longitude and latitude. Belter navigation would be much more complicated. You would need: distance from the sun; distance above or below the ecliptic; position on a line between the sun and some distant star; orbital vectors of speed and direction (defining direction would also require multiple points of reference). And you need that info for both the vehicle and its destination. In the belt, everything is always changing relative position with everything else.

Critical Mass

1. This is the first episode that reveals the code name for Julie Mao is "Lionel Polanski".

Leviathan Wakes

1. The title of this episode, Leviathan Wakes, is the title of Book 1 in The Expanse series, of which this season of the show is based
2. The futuristic looking cubes used for cover from the gunfire during the security forces mutiny gun fight on Eros are standard steel-caged IBC Tote water tanks used commonly on professional farms and other industrial applications.