LogFAQs > #961738485

Though I guess what I'm really pushing back against is the idea that the show boiled down the Solar System politics to "grr kill Inaros" because I feel like something this season repeatedly hammered in was that while that was a shared goal between the various parties, it alone was not enough or a winning message.

You basically had Earth, Mars, Drummer, and Holden as four different parties all sharing various goals but all sharing "kill Marco Inaros" as one of them but they each (aside from Mars) had other goals they ultimately placed higher in priority.

By Season 6, the hollowing out of Mars politically we saw in the wake of the Ring worlds reached the point where it was arguably done a disservice and reduced to one-dimensionally screeching "kill Inaros" all season and having no presence other than that (with the "spirit of Mars" that we saw in Seasons 1-3 going off to Laconia.) Pretty much all Mars did this Season was advocate for killing Inaros as soon as humanly possible regardless of consequences. And they spend the entire season failing spectacularly and coming off as idiots. When Avasalrala is talking about how they have a humanitarian crisis on Ceres and they can't just ignore that even if it's Inaros's doing and they're doing exactly what he wants by trying to help them Mars is like "don't care, let's just go to the ring and blow the Free Navy up" and just make everything worse, almost "game over" worse. Sure there's the scene where later Avasalrala wonders if they were right and she's at fault for going "soft" and not shoving all-in with them but I think the show makes it pretty clear she made the right call.

Everyone else, while still gunning for Inaros, has other things they end up placing ahead of it when they're faced with the choice of maximally going after Inaros instead: Avasalrala has the humanitarian crisis on Ceres as the last stage of her redemption tour where she places her growing empathy for the Belt and atonement for her past cruelty above just passing it by and letting Ceres die in pursuit of Inaros. Like she has, and justifies it with, strategic and PR reasons but that's a bit paper-thin IMO - she gives up the game with that "have I gone soft?" speech to Bobbie from before. Drummer has the past treatment of the Belt by the Inner Planets. If all she cared about was killing Inaros at all costs then she would take Avasalrala's alliance deal to maximize the chances of killing him but her grudges and resentment outweigh that initially and it takes Naomi appealing to a better future and someone having to break the cycle as well as Holden scheming to make sure the Belt isn't screwed over again for her to work together with the rest. And Holden's main concern is the Ring Entities because they scary. Remember he proposes informing Inaros about the problem and Avasalrala tells him to just get the fuck outta here.

Really the whole thing falls apart if not for the domino effect and culmination of a lot of past character arcs fitting together to make it all work out. If Holden hasn't gained the trust of Avasalrala through continued actions, or built up some cred with Drummer and the Belt (and even then it really seemed to come down to Naomi being someone Drummer loved) then I imagine Drummer just goes back to being done with it all as her revenge quest ends in failure and the dissolution of her family. Maybe tries to go out in a hopeless blaze of glory and gets torn apart by the railguns she wouldn't know about.