I thought this episode was played oddly broad. Like, I kept expecting the characters to have some sort of subtext, or to be hiding something, or playing some sort of angle, but then a subsequent scene would occur and show, no, the prior scene was completely on the level. Like, at the end of last episode, when Marco was watching Filip and Naomi talk on the security camera, I wondered if he'd sent Filip to get information out of Naomi about the Protomolecule or the Ring by subterfuge, but then Marco confronted Filip about it, and it turned out things were exactly as they seemed. Same with Naomi's story about leaving and considering suicide, then we heard it again from Cyn's point of view and, not that I had thought Naomi was lying or trying to make herself look good somehow, but his version of what happened is exactly the same.
It all felt very upfront, more like the kind of writing you'd see in a stage-play. Considering how The Expanse usually rewards the viewer for being very attentive to subtleties and being an active audience, it was a surprise to me how overt and straight-ahead everything was.
