As we come near the end of season five of The Expanse, and presumably near the end of its adaptation of the Nemesis Games novel, I have to echo my sentiment from a few weeks ago that they did a hell of job adjusting Michio Pa’s storyline to fit Camina Drummer.
The TV version of Camina is a composite of four different characters from the novels: Samara Rosenberg, “Bull” de Baca, Michio Pa, and Camina Drummer herself. Her friendship and history with Naomi Nagata is pulled from Sam, who was a close friend of Naomi’s who Naomi even briefly lived with when her relationship with Holden and the Rocinante was on the rocks. Her storyline in season three aboard the Behemoth was a mixture of Bull and Michio’s storyline in opposition to Ashford, but primarily Bull.
Now, her current storyline in season five is a direct pull of Michio’s individual story in Babylon’s Ashes, and with the additions of the other characters to the backstory it works much better than it did in the novel.
The problem with Michio’s storyline in the novel -- which I complained about while reading it -- was that she is a character who knowingly and willingly joined, supported, and enabled a genocidal monster. Marco Inaros never had a proverbial gun to her head to force her compliance, she heard his plan and of her own free will decided that it was a good plan and she wanted to be part of it. When she later in the novel decides to betray him because of a different evil action it rings incredibly hollow. Like that “Leopards Eating People’s Faces” meme, “I didn’t think that when I decided to support a man who would kill billions of innocent people on the other side that he would also kill some innocent people on our side”.
Camina in the TV series, on the other hand, wasn’t a party to his plan to attack the Earth. Before this we saw her actively oppose his ideology and work against him. She had no idea it was coming and so does not bear any guilt for helping it to come about (She does blame herself for not killing Inaros when she had the chance, but it’s not the same thing). Afterwards, when Inaros offers her faction the opportunity to join his navy, he absolutely does have the proverbial gun to her head. There’s a lot of implied threats -- and some directly-stated threats as well -- that if she doesn’t join his ‘Free Navy’ her faction will be hunted down. And not just by him, either. His actions were so brazen that Earth will be driven to take revenge on all Belters, so even if she repudiates him the UN forces will still be gunning for her and without the support of the Free Navy there will be nothing to stop them. This pressure, plus the fact that Inaros’s attack has already happened and she can’t do anything to stop it, gives her an “out” when she inevitably later decides to betray him.
I predict that she won’t actively betray him just yet in season five, but that it will happen in season six to directly align with the adaptation of Babylon’s Ashes. When she does turn against him she’ll be able to say “I couldn’t have stopped the attack on Earth then, but now I can stop [XXXXX]” or “I thought we had no choice but to submit in order to survive, but this price is too high”. And this will allow we-the-audience to grant her our permission to do so, instead of viewing her as a hypocrite.
We can view her as a good person who was trapped by a bad situation, and we can root for her to escape this situation and redeem herself.
