The Expanse always intended the final season to be one big war story

Polygon

"Yeah, absolutely," says showrunner Naren Shankar. "That was the intention. We talked about it in precisely those terms. This is a war story. It’s these people who’ve been at war for, you know, eight months we say at the beginning of the season. It’s a war of attrition, and the entire season was a crawling, agonizing, climbing up the ladder, so to speak — getting out of that hole and taking the fight to the final battle." ALSO: The paradigm for the final season was a submarine war film.