Not too spoilerish:
Finished up season 4 this morning. I enjoyed it. Amazon spent big money on this and it shows. It follows the book fairly close except they added following Bobby around on Mars and more backstory for events to come in the next season. Some of this came from some of the novellas written around the main books. Same with Dummer and Ashford, they weren’t in book 4 at all. Drummer and Ashford’s character was kind of an amalgamation of characters that the series made up which really gutted season 3. I don’t recall the book having anything about Crisjen’s re-election campaign either. They ditched the Havelock story line when was a good choice in my opinion. He was Detective Miller’s rookie partner on Ceres. I groaned anytime one of his chapters came up like the lesbian ministers. Goodie-goodie chapters are boring. No Elvie falling in wuv with Holden which was an improvement. Lots of Amos being Amos that everyone will enjoy. Alex had some decent character development for a change. Holden is always Holden. Same with Naomi with a brief setup for what is to come next season. They tried developing Bobby some, but it comes across as flat. The guy they got to play Murtry Did an excellent job. You hate is fucking guts just from his smug gaping dickhole looking face. Many good conversations between him and Amos.
Events on the planet were nearly an identical match for the books sequence. It’s like the director read the book and envisioned what was being described and they made the scenes match. I had a hard time visualizing the end in the book so much that I read those chapters a few times. The series showed it well but the end felt a bit rushed. Being on Amazon, they really let the cussing sync up with the books which makes Crisjen’s character so much better.
Firearm handling improved a lot these season. It’s no Way or the Gun, but for a sci-fi it’s about as good as you’re going to get.
A lot is left unanswered which I assume is part of the series arc that hasn’t been hashed out yet by the authors. Supposedly the last book is due out in 2020. Amazon just started filming season 5 this month. I chatted with Shohreh Aghdashloo, who plays Crisjen Avasarala a little bit about the move to Amazon and her take on it. Overall it seems like it is a huge improvement for the fans and source material. So much was lost that occurred on the Behemoth. General consensus was that season 3 was an absolute clusterfuck where they jammed two books into one short season. Season 4 seems to be trying to correct this and ending diverging storylines by tying them off.