Amos Burton (TV)

This page is about the TV character. For the books incarnation, see Amos Burton (Books).

Books character	TV character

Amos Burton is a ship mechanic originating from Earth. Currently, he works aboard the Rocinante as a mechanic and is one of the four crew members.

Biography

Background

Amos served aboard the Pur'n'Kleen ice hauler, the Canterbury as a mechanic (which supplies water for the Asteroid Belt's residents). He's an Earther who doesn't talk about his past – but knows a lot about brothels and Baltimore. He's eerily comfortable, and even cheerful, at the prospect of violence.

Amos has a lot of past in his past. In "Rock Bottom", while he and Alex are in a night club, Amos says that he "grew up in places like this," and makes vague reference to a history of sex work.

Throughout the series

In "Dulcinea", a small crew from the ice hauler Canterbury – Amos, Naomi Nagata, Alex Kamal, Shed Garvey and Jim Holden – respond to a distress call from a seemingly abandoned ship, the Scopuli. Once aboard, they discover the distress call was planted. Shortly thereafter, Amos watches as a ship with advanced stealth technology blows up the Canterbury, killing all the crew aboard.

In "The Big Empty", with oxygen dwindling, Amos and the surviving crew of the Canterbury struggle to stay alive in their shuttle. They theorize the Canterbury’s destroyers were Martian, since the distress call transponder was of Martian Naval origins. Jim Holden broadcasts a public message that implicates Mars in the attack, thus ensuring he and his crew won’t be killed by the MCR, for fear they will look more guilty. The message goes out just as a Martian warship, the Donnager, approaches the shuttle.

In "Remember the Cant", the Martian Navy detains and interrogates Amos and his crewmates over Holden’s public accusation that Mars destroyed the Canterbury. When Amos discovers Alex’s past connection to the Martian navy, he gets suspicious of Alex’s motives and goes ballistic. He comes within seconds of attacking him, before Holden intervenes.

In "CQB", the Donnager comes under attack by a fleet of stealth ships just like the one that destroyed the Canterbury. The crew realizes this indicates Mars’ innocence. While Shed is killed, Amos, Holden, Naomi and Alex escape the destruction of the Donnager aboard a Martian attack ship, the Tachi.

In "Back to the Butcher", Amos and his crewmates escape the Donnager’s destruction through the fighter ship, the Tachi. They receive an offer of help and refuge from Fred Johnson. After much debate, given Fred’s reputation, they decide to take him up on his offer, shortly before disguising the ship with the new name of the Rocinante.

In "Rock Bottom", Amos and his crewmates arrive on Tycho, where Fred Johnson reveals that he was the one that chartered the Scoupli. the ship whose distress call starts the chain of events that destroyed the Cant. He tells Holden he needs their ship, the Rocinante, to go find the Scopuli’s sole survivor – code name 'Lionel Polanski'. Holden agrees to lend the ship if he is part of the crew, as Lionel might be able to reveal who really destroyed the Canterbury. Fred agrees, and Holden, Naomi, Alex, and Amos decide to stick together until they get answers.

In "Windmills", on the way to retrieve Lionel Polanski, the person that can reveal who destroyed their ship, Amos and Co. elude detection by a Martian warship. They discover Avasarala's spy, Kenzo, stowed away aboard the Rocinante. Holden and Amos disagree over his treatment.

In "Salvage", Amos and the crew find The Anubis at the coordinates provided by Lionel Polanski. They realize the Anubis was the stealth ship that blew up the Canterbury, and is filled with a dangerous substance that must have killed the crew. The crew traces the Anubis’ shuttle to Eros, where they meet Miller and escape UN Undersecretary Errinwright’s team of assassins, only to discover the agent they’re looking for – Julie Mao - is dead and infected with the same strange substance.

In "Critical Mass" and "Leviathan Wakes", Amos and his crew compare notes with Miller. Both parties realize that the trails they’re following point to the bioweapon that made its way from Phoebe. Eros goes on lockdown, and Miller deduces it’s the work of the same people responsible for the bioweapon. While Miller and Holden go searching for answers. Naomi, Alex and Amos head to the Rocinante. Amos shoots Miller’s old friend, Sematimba, who was trying to force them to leave without Miller and Holden, who join shortly thereafter. The five vow to go after Dresden, the scientist who is responsible for locking down Eros to use its population as an experiment for the bioweapon.

In "Safe", in the aftermath of the Eros station disaster, Amos and the crew of the Rocinante are once again on the run, this time with a sample of the protomolecule, the extrasolar life form responsible for all of the havoc on Eros station. With so much at stake they decide to reconvene on Tycho with Fred Johnson, the very man who sent them there in the first place.

In "Doors & Corners", once on board Tycho, the crew of the Rocinante hatch a plan to get rid of the protomolecule, the extra-solar life form that destroyed Eros. Amos and the crew of the Rocinante depart for Thoth, a Black Ops station hidden in the belt and the whereabouts of the foremost protomolecule scientists.

In "Static", After the battle on Thoth station, the crew of the Rocinante take some much-needed R&R. Amos quickly sets his sights on Cortazar, the scientist recovered from the research station. Working with Holden, Amos is able to extract vital protomolecule information from Cortazar.

In "Godspeed", Alex, Naomi, Holden and Amos take off with the massive generational ship the Nauvoo in tow, which will be used to destroy Eros and the protomolecule. Once they get close to Eros, they encounter a small rogue Belter ship, the Marasumus, has boarded Eros and been exposed to the protomolecule. Holden has no choice but to fire upon the Marasmus crew lest they infect the rest of the system with the protomolecule. Later, the Rocinante crew launches the Nauvoo into Eros, but the asteroid defies all physics and dodges the starship.

In "Home", with Eros now hurtling towards Earth at speeds that defy physics, Holden and the Rocinante crew convince the UN to give Fred Johnson the codes to a horde of nuclear missiles so that he can control them remotely through information the Rocinante feeds him. The UN agrees, but it’s Miller that saves the day when he convinces a protomolecule-Julie Mao hybrid controlling the asteroid to crash into Venus instead of Earth.

In "Paradigm Shift", Amos and the Rocinante crew return to Tycho and are hailed as heroes. Alex regales a group of women at a Tycho bar, with tales of his adventures when a jealous Belter picks a fight with him. Amos steps in and beats the man half to death, shocking Alex in the process. Alex doesn’t know what to make of Amos’ gesture, but it appears to cause a rift between the two. Worried about the sample of the protomolecule still in the Rocinante’s possession getting in the wrong hands, Holden convinces the rest of his crew to blast it into the Sun to destroy it. Naomi, thinking it may be valuable to the Belters, secretly saves it, lying to Holden in the process.

In "The Seventh Man", Amos and the crew of the Rocinante are pitching in to help the Ganymede refugees. When Amos tries to prevent a refugee from stealing more than her share, he accidentally lashes out at her. Amos confides in Cortazar and asks him about the procedure he underwent to get rid of his emotionality; he wonders if it's possible to reverse-engineer a cure for his own psychological condition. But Cortazar dashes his hopes, sending Amos into a tailspin.

In "Pyre", Alex and Amos continue to clash over offering help to the people of Tycho. After the disaster they both witnessed on Eros, Alex can't stand that Amos is totally unaffected and tensions between the two are raw when they depart for Ganymede. Amos may be an unfeeling murderer, but when he meets Prax, a father who hopes to find his daughter alive on Ganymede, it awakens in him a sense of purpose.

In "The Weeping Somnambulist", Amos and the crew of the Rocinante are en route to Ganymede, but need a way onto the damaged Jupiter moon that is less conspicuous than boarding with a Martian gun ship. They hitch a ride on an aid ship called the Weeping Somnambulist and conscript the unwilling help of two Belters for safe passage to Ganymede.

In "Cascade", Amos and the rest of the Rocinante crew, sans Alex, begin to canvas Ganymede for any signs of Prax’ daughter. Their search leads them to a corrupt video technician named Roma, who is exchanging his access to the video feeds for canned chicken. After some aggressive negotiations from Amos, they find the last video of Prax’ daughter alive, being lead into the bowels of Ganymede.

In "Here There Be Dragons", on Ganymede, Amos and the Roci crew attempt to locate where Strickland was taking Mei. They find Strickland’s cronies and appear to be ready to negotiate when Prax sees Mei’s backpack and goes ballistic. In the ensuing gunfight, Amos gets shot before Strickland’s crew escapes. Afterwards, they find one of Strickland’s test subjects. It appears that he was injecting protomolecule into humans. Outside of the lab, they hear a massive explosion and confrontation; someone or something destroyed the lab and everyone in it. Naomi thinks she can do more good by helping Melissa on the Weeping Somnambulist get as many people off Ganymede as possible. She and Amos leave the rest of the team.

In "The Monster and the Rocket", Naomi and Amos approach Melissa Suputayaporn, the captain of the Weeping Somnambulist, to offer their help in getting civilians safely off Ganymede. Melissa is hesitant to let them help until she sees how handy Naomi is in repairing her ship. After being shot in the research facility, Amos is far from having fully recovered and is forced to take a back seat as Naomi and Melissa prepare the ship for take-off. When they finally do take off, they are immediately target locked by MCRN vessel who have explicit instructions not to let any ship leave Ganymede. When they are fired upon, they can do nothing except brace for impact, but Holden and Alex manage to save them with the Rocinante’s rail guns. The two ships depart Ganymede together.

In "Caliban's War", Amos returns on the Rocinante. Soon thereafter, he and the crew discover that the human-protomolecule hybrid aboard the ship and must construct a plan to destroy it. In the ensuing battle, Holden gets pinned to the wall by one of the freighter boxes that the creature hurled at him. Luckily, the creature seems more interested in finding the ship's nuclear power-source than killing the captain. Prax and Naomi board the exterior of the ship with one of the Roci’s nuclear missiles and, when Alex cuts power from the Epstein Drive, the creature is attracted to the energy of the missiles. Prax hurls the missiles in space, and the creature leaps after it. Then, Alex turns on the engines to incinerate the hybrid.

Personality

Amos appears very bold to most people that he encounters. Even so, he does have a more sensible side, as shown when both him and Nagata were ready to die aboard the Martian vessel Donnager that captured them and their fellow escapees.