"Night Watch" is the fourth episode of One Ship, a set of bonus content shorts about the main characters of Season 6 of The Expanse. It was released to streaming on December 31, 2021.
Synopsis[]
Alone in the Rocinante during her night watch shift, Clarissa receives news that force her to confront all the complicated and contradictory feelings she has about her father and their relationship.
Recap[]
Clarissa, in voiceover, says that the Doctrine of One Ship arose from paradoxes: the cold of space and the heat of a drive, bright stars and pure darkness, companionship and void.
In the Rocinante, Clarissa bids Holden goodnight through the comm channel, having taken up her turn in the night watch. She takes her place infront of the console, but soon finds there's nothing to watch for, deciding instead to check the maintenance schedule and picking the reactor from the list.
She descends to the reactor room, finding everything is in order except for a damaged pipe, which she dutifully adds to the maintenance schedule. She then goes to the galley, where she sits alone for a meal which she sprinkles with generous amounts of salt. She opens a news feed on her hand terminal, where the anchor is saying that her father, Jules-Pierre Mao, named as the mastermind of the protomolecule scheme that killed one hundred thousand people on Eros, was found dead last night in his prison cell, seemingly having died of an underlying medical condition. The news state he is survived by his wife Ariadne and children Petyr, Michael and Anthea, while his other two daughters, Julie and Clarissa, pre-deceased him. Clarissa, enraged, activates her implant and crushes her terminal in her own hand, before blacking out.
The lights in the galley turn back on, and Clarissa awakens on the floor, amidst a mess of trashed supplies scattered all around her. As her vitals slowly recuperate, she laboriously sits up and looks at the unsalvageable remains of her terminal before tossing it aside. She calls to the Roci itself, which has been monitoring her through the cameras, and asks it to record a new entry to her private journal as she begins tearing up: In the Pit, her psychologist said that a parent-child relationship is a primal thing, and it is baked into our very core as humans to care about our parents. Clarissa thought her psychologist was full of shit, but she can't understand why she is angry now, considering she was never going to see her father again anyway. She starts to cry into her arms, and wishes her father had been a better man. She wishes he had been a better father, and that he had loved her. She wishes she hadn't loved him.
Clarissa gets up and, though still pained by the side-effects of her implants, she begins cleaning up the mess she has made.
Cast[]
- Nadine Nicole as Clarissa Mao
- François Chau as Jules-Pierre Mao (credit only)
Media[]
Notes[]
- This is the only episode of The Expanse in which only one character appears.
- Although François Chau is credited as Jules-Pierre Mao, he only appears in a photo on Clarissa's hand terminal.
References[]
External links[]