Amazon's 'The Expanse' drops final season trailer, confirms December premiere at NYCC

The Expanse lived up to its name Friday at NYCC with a first expansive (hey now!) teaser trailer for the show's sixth and final season, which officially premieres on Amazon Prime Video Friday, Dec. 10. Sorry, streaming bingers, but given the fact that this last hurrah is only six episodes long, new installments will drop on a weekly basis.

“What it does give you is intensity," showrunner Naren Shankar explained during the New York Comic Con panel where the teaser debuted to a cheering crowd. "Every episode feels as intense as it can possibly be. The compression is there, you never feel like you're letting your foot off the gas pedal, so by the time you get to the end, it's cathartic."

Shankar also revealed that the series finale is "super-sized" with a runtime of almost 65 minutes. “I’ve probably seen the last episode like 150 times," he admitted. "It chokes me up when I see the end of it ... Even when we were looking at a visual effects review of Episode 6, the people who have been working on it, they were cheering ... I think that tells you something about where we're going and I get misty-eyed when we get to the end."

Watch the trailer below:

Despite the truncated episode count, The Expanse novelists and executive producers, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (their novels are published under the pen name of James S. A. Corey), don't feel like anything was left by the wayside in this final season.

"We just had to tell the story we were there to tell," Franck said, going on to add that he, Abraham, and Shankar are currently polishing up "the last little bits, so that it looks fantastic when it comes out." One might even say they hope to give fans a prime (sorry, again) viewing experience.

“It’s been a long project and it’s really gratifying that it turned out well," Abraham concluded with a chuckle. "It was not something where we started off the project thinking, 'I know, let's write a huge, nine-book series and make a TV show. We were much more calm than that when we started it and it just kept rolling. And here we are — it's amazing."

The Expanse will start to bring Amazon's sci-fi saga to a close on Prime Video on Friday, Dec. 10. Each episode is set to be followed by a special look behind-the-scenes known as an "X-ray."

Click here for SYFY WIRE’s full coverage of New York Comic Con 2021