The premiere of The Expanse season 6 shows a devastated Earth still reeling from the fallout of Belter terrorist Marco Inaros' asteroid attack in season 5. Additional rocks hurled at Earth by the Free Navy in the months since have irradiated the Earth and depleted its agricultural capacity. While visual depictions of the ravaged Earth were rather limited in The Expanse season 5, season 6 immediately illustrates how the asteroids' devastation serves as an enormous problem for Earth as it struggles to heal from the millions of casualties sustained thus far.
The Expanse season 6 immerses its main characters in a system-wide war between the collaborating powers of Earth and Mars against Marco's Free Navy acting as the Belt's leading force. In season 5, Marco obtained stealth technology by exchanging a protomolecule sample with a group of rogue Martians led by Admiral Winston Duarte. Duarte's fleet took off for the Laconia system after also supplying the Free Navy with ships. The armaments enabled Marco to hijack wandering asteroids in the system and hurl them at Earth undetected. The attacks embody Marco's vowed retribution on the Inner planets as a result of their generations of oppression on the Belt's populace.
In The Expanse season 6, episode 1 "Strange Dogs," UN Secretary-General Chrisjen Avasarala and Bobbie Draper visit a now desolate high-yield grain farm on Earth and assess the damage. Avasarala compares the planet's current state to a nuclear winter. She concedes to Bobbie that the latest biospheric assessment concluded that they have been unsuccessful in deterring meteoric contaminants and that the levels are rapidly increasing. Avasarala hopelessly states, "Every rock kills us a little more, even when they miss." Radiation from the asteroids threatens to keep the death toll rising as more asteroids rain down. Increasingly uninhabitable by the day, Earth is staring down the last stand for its survival in The Expanse season 6's ongoing war.
A dying Earth poses an enormous obstacle for the joint UN-Martian fleet's chances of defeating Marco's Free Navy. The fact that Earth's forces have been able to shoot down the most recent asteroids hardly matters because enough damage has already been done. With the planet's biosphere contaminated with radiation, Earth's survivors face the possibility of starving to death and losing all access to clean water. Just as Marco intended, Earth is undergoing the same deprivation of essential resources that it has inflicted upon the Belt for so long.
While most of the attention centers on the battles in space, the most compelling struggle may be happening on Earth. What will a victory against Marco's Free Navy mean if the Earth is dead and unable to supply food and water to the rest of the solar system? The stakes have never been as high in The Expanse as they are in season 6 and the five remaining episodes will determine the fate of the Blue Planet.
New episodes of The Expanse air Fridays on Amazon Prime Video.