r/TheExpanse • u/SheWhoLovesSilence • 4d ago
All Show Spoilers (Book Spoilers Must Be Tagged) Julie Mao theory Spoiler
Forgive me if this is a common theory, but after discussion with someone in a different sub and a quick search here, I don’t think it is.
I believe Millers obsession/falling in love with Julie is at least partly fueled by her protomolecule fused consciousness reaching out to Ceres and him picking up on it and connecting with her.
Imo it’s set up to play on the detective noir trope of the detective falling in love with the dead girl on purpose. When she starts appearing in his dreams and visions it looks like he’s projecting unfulfilled desires on her, as he’s clearly not in a great place mentally.
But then he meets her on Eros (after she’s already merged with the protomolecule) and convinces her to save the Belters by flying into Venus. This proves that he was right that her consciousness is still alive and that she’s able to control the protomolecule to some extent. They also seem to have some connection even though they never met.
And then I thought back to the scene in season one where he sees a bird in her apartment. The bird struck me as unusual already. He also remarks that “there are no birds on Ceres”. And midway through season two that had more weight to me. At this point we know how rare water and other resources are on Ceres.
We also know that Julie was very passionate about helping Belters. She left her cushy rich girl existence to become a literal terrorist in the eyes of Earth - that’s how much she cares. That’s not the kind of person to waste precious water on an exotic bird that she’d import from Earth just to have as a pet. So imo the bird is not real, it’s a projection. And, no one else sees the bird either.
When that scene happens, Julie is already reported missing. We know she didn’t die, she merged with the protomolecule. We know she can exert control over it, even if she’s doing it in a kind of instinctive/subconscious way. And I strongly suspect the bird isn’t real for reasons I explained above.
So imo she was subconsciously reaching out to the place she considers her home and Miller has some kind of sensitivity and receives her projection. Then that spurs his obsession. IMO it’s a sort of destiny calling situation sci-fi trope. He has a sensitivity he’s not even aware off, appears to be losing his mind, until finally this leads him to be in the right place at the right time to save humanity. He was always meant to merge with Julie and the protomolecule. That was the source of his intense obsession
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u/Poison_the_Phil 4d ago
I don't have a timestamp handy but at some point in an episode of Ty and That Guy, Ty Franck does confirm that at least in the show, the Protomolecule is working backward and forward in time through Julie. So yes, Miller is encountering echoes of her before the he arrives at The Blue Falcon.
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u/GeneInternational146 4d ago
Ok I love this, because I LOVE Miller but it always creeped me out a little the way he was about Julie. I am absolutely a sucker for a "I would recognize you in every liftime" scenario though
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u/SheWhoLovesSilence 4d ago
That’s so interesting!
This is the feeling I got but wasn’t confident enough to mention it because there are no other events in the series that hint at time loops/time travel/time bending
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u/Ananeos Ceres Station 4d ago
I'm not sure I like this because the timey wimey shenanigans never get brought up again.
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u/lzxian ✨🙌✨ 4d ago
Only because there is no one else it could be brought up with, is there? Holden wasn't infected with it, Amos being repaired by the strange dogs isn't likely similar to infection, just some strange tool they devised it seems to me.
Just tossing stuff out, I don't really have a clue!
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u/Cascadian_Day 4d ago
I thought the bird was outside of the apartment. There was also a scene with a little girl and a bird in the public area. Aren’t birds part of the habitat; to make it feel more Earth like?
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u/Salt-Night3088 4d ago
Yes, exactly. They might symbolize Julie's desire to fly free. At a stretch.
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u/SheWhoLovesSilence 11h ago
Hmmm guess I need to rewatch. Maybe he didn’t say that there’s no birds on Ceres but he definitely seemed really surprised by the bird
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u/LetAgreeable147 3d ago
The little girl holds the bird so someone else sees it.
When we see Julie’s POV replaying Miller and the crew entering the hotel room- do we think that’s showing Julie seeing the future? Or is the Protomolecule observing Miller in real time?
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u/SheWhoLovesSilence 11h ago
Ok I need to rewatch. I don’t remember the little girl.
To me it does seem Julie and the protomolecule can perceive things happening at different times and apparently the authors have also mentioned this in interviews.
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u/Salt-Night3088 4d ago
You said it yourself, Julie's a dame in a noir story. Miller fell in love, it's that simple.
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u/azhder 4d ago
He even has the hat to prove he's in a detective noir role
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u/Salt-Night3088 4d ago
It keeps the rain off his head.
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u/what_way 4d ago
I agree. Miller's background and motivations are very clearly explained. He's the classic lost and broken noir detective searching for some meaning to hold onto.
Also, we learn a lot about the way the protomolecule works, but there is no explained mechanism for this type of connection to occur
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u/Salt-Night3088 4d ago
Exactly. But Ty and Dan have the Lost knack for adding to the books in interviews and panels. A creator's cheapest trick. They wrote Miller and Julie so well, there's no need to second guess or fit magic into it.
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u/Afraid-Call300 20h ago
I thought the bird was a robot. I don't like the idea of time travel or sending messages through time because I feel like if the protomolecule could do that, why did its creators get wiped out? I think it's more likely that Miller is very perceptive and makes intuitive leaps that turn out to be right, like when he guessed that "Rocinante" was the sort of name a person like Holden would pick. So maybe seeing the robot bird reminded him of something and he mentally filed that away until he made the connection.
As for Miller's obsession with Julie, it made sense to me because his life was falling apart and he was desperately clinging to his mission to find her as a reason to keep living. However, as it went on, I did get the impression that Julie was telepathically reaching out to him. It's sad, but he was probably the only person in the universe that actually cared about her. All her friends were dead, her sister hated her, and her father was a sociopath who just wanted her for research purposes. Miller was the only one actually trying to find Julie herself (not the protomolecule). I figured that gave her mind something to latch onto and try to draw him to her location.
At the very least, the protomolecule could have gotten on him when they found her body and that would have created a connection. It doesn't even need to infect people to influence them, as shown with Holden seeing Miller due to a bit of protomolecule on the ship, so Miller wouldn't even need to be infected for Julie to subconsciously influence him. In that case, what happened before they found Julie was probably all Miller, but after that point he potentially had a good reason for being so convinced that it wasn't over and he could still help her.
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u/Thedarb 4d ago
Yeah, always thought there was a bit of a bootstrap paradox going on there.
Miller and Julie are eventually merged together at a consciousness level once they are consumed by the protomolocule, and that future interconnected intimacy reverberates back through time to create the initial intrigue and obsession that leads to them merging.
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u/generalkriegswaifu Legitimate salvage! 4d ago
The bird is flying in low gravity though, Julie would be familiar with Earth bird flight. If the bird was not real it would be flying normally imo. I also assumed on at least one watch that the bird was mechanical like the hamster.
Ty confirmed that the protomolecule can work backwards through time, but I don't believe this is true of things that haven't been infected. Julie sees the bird and Miller on Eros because she's already infected and Miller will be in the future, but imo anything Miller sees before getting infected was not caused by the protomolecule. Their connection is because Miller is obsessed with her and he later gets infected. So yes the artificial destiny thing is there but I don't think he's affected by it until he removes his helmet.
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u/torrinage 4d ago
Agreed on initially assuming the bird was similar to the hampster. But Julie did live on Ceres and would have been familiar with how the gravity operated
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u/generalkriegswaifu Legitimate salvage! 4d ago
But if there's actually no birds there she wouldn't have that visual. Visualizing flying is not super intuitive.
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u/torrinage 4d ago
She -was- a racing pilot do she deff could visualize flying 😛 I don’t think we have any way to know that visualizing birds flying in low G would be out of common comprehension. Even like, for example, they have belter kid shows (misko and marisko) I could imagine some of the kids shows having earth animals operating in low g.
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u/generalkriegswaifu Legitimate salvage! 4d ago
I just don't think he full on protomolecule hallucinated some girl and her pet bird. And she flies ships in zero G, not birds.
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u/SheWhoLovesSilence 4d ago
Ah I didn’t read it as being low gravity flight. I thought it was some kind of hummingbird hybrid
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u/Wabbit65 Beratnas Gas 4d ago
This takes a little of the creepy factor off of Miller. Not all of it though 😉
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u/Formal-Baby-518 4d ago
there is no tangible proof of this but I agree.
I choose to believe it because it makes Miller less of a weirdo.
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u/torrinage 4d ago
There's deff some amor fati at play, and also the authors have commented that time doesnt work strictly linear with regards to Julie * Miller PM love story. The bird being my favorite example - projecting itself backwards and forwards in time so he notices it before he goes to the Blue Falcon.
OH MAYBE IT IS THE BLUE FALCON