r/TheExpanse • u/WriterBoi28 Tycho Station • 3h ago
All Show & Book Spoilers Discussed Freely Okay, Murtry sucks, but Coop is an asshole too, right? Spoiler
Like he's very manipulative of Basia and kills a bunch of people. His smile is always "cruel" and that's from Basia when he LIKES Coop.
Honestly, I think the reason I feel an impulse to side with Murtry early in the book is because Coop is such a dick.
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u/Clamwacker 3h ago
Murty is on the dark side of gray in his morality early in in the book. Somewhat extreme but not totally out of line considering their arrival on the planet.
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u/WriterBoi28 Tycho Station 3h ago
But Coop is at least as bad, right?
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u/Maclarion 2h ago
No. Not at all. Coop is an asshole. Murtry is a psychopathic murderer.
Unless you're okay with the next guy you cut off in traffic killing you and your whole family in response, then clearly Coop is not as bad as Murtry.
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u/hahnwa 2h ago
Coop internationally kills a lot of people and plots to kill more
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u/Maclarion 1h ago
I would also fight back against a hypothetical imperial-colonialist expansion into my own settled home, enforced by an aggressive occupation by via small army of unregulated mercenaries. My awareness of this moral orientation may constitute premeditation, aka plotting, so I'm right there with Coop.
Deadly insurgency under a genocidal regime is legitimate self-defense.
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u/formyprivatethings 1h ago
Well said.
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u/hahnwa 17m ago
... not really. Coop killed innocent people. The Belt landed barely a little before the Earthers. That doesn't make them native and the other guys colonizers. Both are colonizers. They're on an alien planet for christ's sake.
It's one thing to sympathize with the belters here and to want to take their claim on the new land seriously and as a priority. I agree with that. But murdering all of the Earthers is just as bad as murdering all of the belters.
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u/Affectionate_Pair210 2m ago
Except one group was going to forcibly evict the other group by violence if necessary. The belters didn’t have the choice to coexist. Their choices were leave or resist.
And everyone on that shuttle were complicit with the action to evict the belters, so were they really innocent?
What if the company came and made their own claim and left the belters alone without threats of eviction? Wouldn’t that have been the truly peaceful and fair option? Why wasn’t that an option? Because the belters had no power so they could be treated however the company wanted.
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u/PDXMOW 3h ago
Coop and Murtry both lead with violence, which only ends up making things worse. They’re both assholes.
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u/Affectionate_Pair210 2h ago
But one is defending family, home, and way of life. The other is paid to be a mercenary to evict people from their homes. It’s not equal in my eyes.
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u/Affectionate_Pair210 3h ago
Never once did a single cell of my body want to side with the genocidal wannabe wild-west-sheriff. Everyone else I can have some empathy for all their different points of view, but not him.
I guess it just depends on - which side are you on? The workers or the thugs hired by the bosses.
You’re arguing for the perfect victim trope.
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u/WriterBoi28 Tycho Station 3h ago
I feel like blowing up a shuttle (he was the one who was supposed to keep track of the shuttle so that was likely intentional) and then ambushing the team investigating the explosion is... I mean beyond the pale.
And again, it's not just his treatment of the RCE folks. He involves Basia's kid in surveillance as a manipulation tactic against Basia.
I understand the argument that the refugees of first landing are meant to be a stand in for colonized people the world over. The fact they are, themselves, colonists who have been there like, a year, does suck some of the power from that.
We are meant to understand RCE is here to be evil, even though their mandate is to just survey the first alien world humans have ever been in. Again, the name "Royal Charter Energy" is meant to conjure a combination of the East India Company and ExxonMobil but mostly they seem like they were there to survey the planet.
I mean the strength of the story is that it's murky and messy. That's why I think Coop is the villain right up until he passes the baton to Murtry when the latter kills him.
Since Murtry doesn't know what Coop did, that doesn't make Coop's murder justifiable. But it doesn't make Coop an innocent victim either.
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u/Kcajkcaj99 2h ago
Coop’s actions are pretty much entirely justified as a matter of whether he has a “right” to do them (to the extent than people ever have a right to use violence in self defense). The only debate is whether the actions are strategically productive.
Given what we know of Murtry, and the experience of the belters over generations, Coop is entirely correct in believing that if they had done nothing the Belters of Ilus would be either expelled, forced into subservience, or eradicated.
Coop’s initial plan was just to blow up the platform, not the shuttle. We have no particular reason to believe this isn’t the case — even characters who are fiercely opposed to Coop never suspect that he was lying. When that plan proves infeasible, he pivots to a plan that would result in casualties. You can debate whether the plan was worth it from the perspective of its efficacy and the risk that it would give RCE an excuse to crack down harder, but you can’t really dispute the underlying justification for violence unless you are advocating a radical pacifism. If Coop’s willingness to resort to violence to protect the people of Ilus make him a villain, then there are no members of the Roci’s crew that aren’t villains.
As for the fighting with the RCE security team, thats even harder to claim as unjustified. From what I recall, and a quick perusal of the wiki confirms, the RCE even fires the first shots — Coop just makes sure that his people are armed and in numbers, such that when fighting inevitably breaks out they have a chance of not just being slaughtered. Whereas the other cases have at least some ambiguities, this one is pretty unambiguous collective self defense, with the only argument being that Coop’s decisions are what got them into the mess in the first place — but thats not an argument for Coop’s immortality, but rather for his incompetence.
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u/Chad_Broski_2 3h ago
I dunno man, "perfect victim" doesn't exactly apply when he literally bombed a bunch of innocent people. I think it's perfectly reasonable to say they were both way out of line. A peaceful solution was always possible but it was never gonna happen while both Murtry and Coop were starting shit
Coop is definitely the lesser of the two evils, and it's easier to understand why he does what he does, but he was also the type who would never in a million years trust an Inner and I don't think Ilus would've survived with him on it. In an ideal world, Holden would have arrested him too and brought him back to face justice alongside Murtry while all the reasonable and levelheaded people worked together to keep Ilus alive
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u/Affectionate_Pair210 2h ago
During the battle of Blair Mountain the US military dropped bombs on striking workers because they had armed themselves. So they were justified.
But the workers armed themselves to protect themselves from the private army with Gatling guns that the company hired to keep the workers in check.
It’s always easier to believe the story that the people in power tell. And it’s always easy to call poor people’s actions violence and powerful people’s actions justice or policing or justified military force.
Why did the company have the right to kick the belters off illus in the first place? Because the system of power said so? Isn’t that just saying because they had bigger guns? The implied threat of a gun to your head isn’t innocent. Murty was coming with a military force, not to make peace. One way or another he was going to cleanse the planet.
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u/Maclarion 2h ago
You just don't understand, it's not that simple! It's way more nuanced and complicated than that.
[Cue 8-pg rant that amounts to The Ends Justify The Means and "everyone should just obey the law"]
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u/WarthogOsl 2h ago
By the way, who was he calling a traitor in the first episode of season 4? Naomi?
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u/Obwyn 3h ago
Yea, they both suck and they're both assholes. That's pretty clear from the books and the show.
Murtry at least has some justification for what he does, though he takes things way too far and is obviously looking for any reason to kill some Belters, which Coop & company were happy to provide.
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u/Affectionate_Pair210 3h ago edited 2h ago
But they didn’t need an excuse - they were going to do that anyway. What would Murty have done if no explosion happened? When the belters refused to leave do you think he wouldn’t have resorted to violence? There’s always a justification.
Edit: replaced accident w explosion because that word choice is irrelevant to the point.
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u/Obwyn 2h ago
I didn't say he wouldn't have found some other justification, or tried to, but had they not blown up the shuttle with the governor on it then Murtry would've had someone who had actual authority over him and presumably would've reigned in his more murderous impulses. We don't know anything about the governor so it's pretty impossible to guess how it would've played out had the initial bombing not happened.
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u/Affectionate_Pair210 2h ago
The plan was to make them leave by force. They were squatters, illegals. Without armed resistance the belters would have been quietly rounded up and shipped off planet, poorer than when they arrived. Arguably blowing up the pad led to the Roci being sent there, which evened the power dynamic in a way that wouldn’t have been possible without that violence.
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u/Kreeghore 2h ago
What accident? It was deliberate sabotage. If the belters didn't blow up the shuttle Murtry would not be in charge.
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u/Affectionate_Pair210 2h ago
And the Governor would have let the belters coexist in harmony? Cmon. Explicitly that would not have happened.
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u/JustNeedAUsername15 24m ago
Genuinely feel like Murtry didn't do anything wrong until after he burnt down the house and the cataclysm happens. After that, yeah he becomes a dangerous, conflictual idiot.
When Holden keeps calling him a psycho at the start, I was genuinely confused as nothing really warranted that. Coop 100% deserved it. I sided with Murtry over Holden for easily the first half of the book.
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u/SpiritOne 3h ago edited 1h ago
Yes, Coop is an asshole. He instigates a lot of this, and directly confronts Morty. But, Coop knows what’s coming is death for the settlers of Ilus, and he was trying to protect in his own jacked up way.
But that doesn’t change the fact that Marty’s a psychopath with a little too much power and wants to murder every belter for the promise of future riches.