The EXPANSE The Investigator & Bullet Explained | Protomolecule Pt. 3

they quarantined the systems shut down the network to stop whatever was capping the locals so behind each of these gates is a solar system full of whatever made the proto molecule miller laughed something in the sound of it sent a shiver down holding spine that seems pretty unlikely why this station has been waiting for the all clear signal to open the network back up for about two billion years if they'd found a solve they wouldn't still be waiting whatever it was i think it got them all all of them but you holden said not kid i'm one of them like the ross ante is one of you the rossi's smart for a machine it knows a lot about you it could probably gin up a rough simulation of you if someone told it to those things the ones you felt like compared to them i'm a fancy kind of hand terminal and then nothing it explains holden said you mean what killed them well if we're gonna be fair it's not really nothing miller said crossing his arms we know it ate a galaxy spanning hive consciousness like it was popcorn so that's something and we know it survived a sterilization that was a couple hundred solar systems wide hey guys pete here it's time for part three of my expanse proto molecule series today i'm going to be discussing the investigator that fancy kind of hand terminal that also happens to appear to holden as everyone's favorite belter detective josephus miller we'll also discuss the mysterious artifact that he discovered on illus which he dubbed the bullet doing that will involve some spoilers if you've not watched the expanse tv series through episode 1 of season 5 then there will be some things here you might be seeing for the first time i've read the books the show's based on and i'll be referring to those a lot but only up to and including nemesis games with that out of the way let's get started in part one of this series we talked about what the proto-molecule is not in itself a living thing but a set of free-floating instructions designed to adapt and guide other replicating systems how the bit of proto-molecule that got sent to soul system got trapped in saturn's gravity and how that stopped it from completing its mission for over 2 billion years we talked about how humanity discovered it how they tried to use it for their own means and how that made it possible for it to move forward with what it was sent to do in the first place build the ring gate in part two we talked about what the ring gate actually is plus the network of other gates it's attached to and how the alien civilization that created it all no longer exists most of what we learned about them came from interactions james holden had with what looked like our old friend detective miller we'll come back to that in just a minute but what i hope you took away from the first two videos is this the protomolecule is a tool the long extinct gate builder civilization used that tool to create a network of wormhole gates through each of these gates lies a system with at least one habitable planet and they all connect around a hub in the non-space that's referred to as the slow zone this isn't the only way the tool can be used and it isn't the only tool they have in their toolbox but it is what the load that phoebe was carrying was for because it took so long for this ring gate to open and connect to the network there was nobody there when it happened that meant it couldn't complete the next step in its process that's all it was designed to do and that brings us to the subject of today's video what does the proto-molecule do when it can't report to the station that work on the ring gate is complete it creates the investigator the creation is a tool for a specific purpose to figure out why it can't complete its task that's pretty straightforward but because the civilization that created it was so advanced the things it can do aren't always easy to grasp in our story no one understands this better than james holden who has his brain manipulated in a way that makes him see hallucinations of miller because active protomolecule was left behind on the rossi after the hybrid incident it became a node on the network and a possible path to utilize to complete the task because detective miller's consciousness was absorbed into the hive mine on the way to venus it's able to use that to contact holden he first experiences this around the time that the slingshotter moneo flew his ship the yk into the ring in the beginning the things he says don't make any sense and lead holden to think he's going insane since he can check for that sort of thing with their auto dock he figures out that he's not and then starts to believe he's being manipulated by the protomolecule in a way he's not wrong but given the circumstances he unsurprisingly misinterprets why that's happening holden has his first real conversation with the investigator when he travels alone to the ring station they're able to communicate in a coherent way the investigator makes it so that he can go inside the structure because he needs his help to access what he calls the records i discussed most of what happens here in my previous video and this is when we learn a lot of the details about how it is that holden has been seeing him in the first place the important thing that happens here for the investigator is he learns that the gate builder civilization is gone he learns how that happened and holden sees that too the important thing that happens for humanity is that miller explains that if the ships in the slow zone power down their reactors the station will no longer see them as a threat and then he can shut down the security system when he does that it will also reopen the network giving them access to all of the rings and therefore all 1300 systems that lie beyond them he takes hold into one of the planets one that is very similar to earth in a vision slash hallucination and there he explains what he's actually made to do that goes like this i wasn't built to fix [ __ ] humanity broke miller said i didn't come here to open gates for you and get the lockdown to let you go that's incidental the thing that made me just builds roads and now it's using me to find out what happened to the galaxy spanning civilization that wanted the road why does that matter if they're all gone it doesn't miller said with a weary shrug not a bit if you set the nav computer on the rossi to take you somewhere and then fall over dead a second later can the rossi decide it doesn't matter anymore and just not go no holden said understanding and finding a sadness for this miller construct he wouldn't have guessed was possible we were supposed to connect with the network we're just trying to do that doesn't matter that the network's gone what came up off of venus's dumb kid just knows how to do one thing it doesn't know how to investigate but i do and it had me so i'm going to investigate even though none of the answers will mean [ __ ] all to the universe at large that's their last interaction in the third book and the third season of the show and at the end of that he hints that he'll still need holden's help to continue he tells him that he'll need a ride so to recap the real detective miller died on the way to venus with his consciousness being absorbed into the ring building project when the ring gate was finished it tried to complete the next step which was to connect to the network at the ring station not able to do that it eventually created the investigator as a tool to figure out what was wrong in that process it used the protomolecule on the rossi to reach out and manipulate holden's brain making him see and interact with a construct based on miller this displays aspects of miller's personality those are artifacts that are built into it and it does help humanity get out of the situation in the slow zone but it only exists for the purpose of investigating initially why it wasn't able to connect to the ring station network and then later what happened to the civilization that built it as far as why it contacted holden in the first place he asked this question to the investigator directly inside the station before he touches the big thing in the middle of the room i get why no one else sees you but the real question is why me at all i mean okay you're screwing with my brain and that's hard work and if there's other people for me to interact with it's too hard and all like that but why me why not naomi or the un secretary general or something miller nodded understanding the question he frowned sighed miller kinda liked you thought you were a decent guy that's it you need more book four cibola byrne is where we learn a lot more about how the investigator functions because it includes several interludes which are basically chapters from its point of view they read like a stream of consciousness and the first one starts like this it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out 113 times a second nothing answers and it reaches out it is not conscious though parts of it are there are structures within it that were once separate organisms aboriginal evolved and complex it is designed to improvise to use what is there and then move on good enough is good enough and so the artifacts are ignored or adapted the conscious parts try to make sense of the reaching out try to interpret it we learn some new things from these interludes and get some clarification about what's happening early on when the investigator would reappear it didn't have a memory of talking to holden before this is because it was essentially killed and recreated over and over again it uses miller's consciousness creates the investigator and lets it investigate on its own with some limiting boundary conditions the rossi and the crew go to ellis which has a lot of proto-molecule-built artifacts on the planet itself and this opens a new pathway for the investigator to look for clues as to what happened to the gate builder civilization because there's active proto-molecule on the rossi things get turned on the investigator is able to access the network there to look around and eventually it discovers a place where the proto-molecule can't go this is a clue and so it focuses on trying to understand what it is the interlude says this and instead there's a dead place a place where nothing is where nothing pulls back the investigator reaches out and what reaches out dies the investigator ceases to reach out it waits it considers something was here once something built all this and left its meal half eaten on the table the designers and engineers that spanned a thousand worlds had lived here and died here and left behind the everyday wonders like bones in the desert the investigator knows this the world is a crime scene and the one thing that stands out the one thing that doesn't belong is the place that nothing goes it's an artifact in a world of artifacts but it doesn't fit what would they put in a place they couldn't reach is it a prison a treasure chest a question that isn't supposed to be asked a bullet a bomb still ticking under the kitchen table after the blitz was over the investigator talks holden into going to where the bullet is mercury interrupts as he doesn't want the protomolecule tech shut down even though everyone is probably going to die and so holden has to stop and deal with that he asked elvia koye to help the investigator who has now figured out how to put himself into something physical it's a proto-molecule tech robot basically after being created and destroyed over and over knowing that there's no way to connect back to the gate builders because they're gone the investigator begins to see the bullet as his way out this is partially due to the influence of miller's consciousness and the show illustrated this by having him start to appear without the hat towards the end of season four the thing that created it only knows how to survive and to reach out and to try to make the final connection it can create the investigator it can kill the investigator and in that process the investigator learns how to die that is the plan with elvis help the investigator plans to pass through the bullet after it connects to everything on illus it needs lv because after it connects the protomolecule will try to stop it she's able to get him there and the bullet kills him and everything he's connected to in the final interlude it plays out like this the investigator pushes his hat back wishes he had a beer he likes this woman this lb he wishes he had a little more time to know her he wishes he had a little more time he doesn't care he has died a million times since he died the void has no mysteries for him now he connects and the investigator becomes the world he feels it everywhere the orbital bases the power cores in the crushing depth of the ocean the library vaults where the old ones had lived the signaling stations high in the mountains the cities deep beneath the ground he is the world there is a struggle at the end there's always a struggle at the end he's not scared and so all through the world the others aren't either you're like peter pan she says when a child died peter pan would fall halfway with them so they wouldn't be scared weird and that's a kid's story anyway it's not me the investigator says smiles at her holds her hand i don't go for half it reaches out and it reaches out and it reaches out and then it stops so that is the end for this version of miller and the activated protomolecule tech on illus it's not exactly clear what that means in the big picture of what the gate builders left behind the investigator did connect to the network at the ringgate station when he was there which means his consciousness probably still exists there's still more active protomolecule out there and now more than 300 new worlds that can be filled with artifacts just like illus for the bullet it seems to be a weapon that was specifically designed to kill the gate builders elvi had an interesting experience when she passed through it but it didn't kill her in the beginning of season five we learned that she stayed on illus to study it and that she created a simulation of what she saw when she passed through it but she doesn't have a clear explanation of what it is or what's going on with it when holden and fred johnson look at the sim he explains that it's a visualization of what killed the builders wiping out their civilization in an instant since no more of these have appeared on any of the other colony worlds they visited fred's skeptical about whether this is something they need to be concerned with holden tells him that every time he passes through a ring he thinks he sees their world the unknown aggressor's world and every time he sees them he thinks they look angrier he worries that humans are waking them up and that's probably not something that humans want to do in the end the gate builders were far more advanced than humans and whatever created this bullet was powerful enough to erase them from existence they were galaxy spanning they were able to harness wormhole technology for faster than light travel and built this elaborate network that connected all of these habitable systems together we know that humans will use the ring gates that they built to colonize the new worlds that's already happening and so we have to wonder how the builders put themselves on the unknown aggressor's radar in the first place and that seems like a good place to bring this video to an end ripped to the investigator ripped to the original detective miller he was a great character and who knows he may come back at some point in the future although i think his story is complete in his service to the proto molecule which is just trying to complete its task we learned a lot about the gate builders and that there is a threat that's bigger than them that could play an important role in the story in the future and i will leave it there please let me know in the comments what you think about the investigator if you have any questions about it if you have any questions about the proto molecule in general if you're going to discuss things that happen in books past nemesis games please mark those as book spoilers so people who are just watching the show won't get spoiled for future events please like this video if you enjoyed it please subscribe to my channel if you haven't already thanks for watching i'll talk to you soon

Channel: Pete Peppers

Views: 112,258

Keywords: the expanse the investigator, the expanse the investigator explained, the expanse protomolecule explained, the expanse detective miller, the expanse miller ghost, the expanse explained, pete peppers, the expanse the bullet, the expanse bullet explained, the expanse, the expanse protomolecule miller, the expanse protomolecule, thomas jane, detective miller, the expanse miller, the expanse unknown aggressors

Id: HaAgniZWhb0

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2021