Thomas Jane wears an unidentified watch

Josephus Miller works the Ceres Station beat in a felt trilby and a long coat, a film-noir detective relocated to a future asteroid belt, and the watch on his wrist matches the rest of him: a bulky brushed-steel case with a black screen on a scuffed leather strap. Thomas Jane plays him through the first two seasons of The Expanse (2015 to 2022), a cop pulled off petty work and onto one missing-persons case, the search for the heiress Julie Mao, that becomes the thread tying Earth, Mars, and the Belt to the edge of war.

Up close, the watch is plainly built rather than bought. The brushed-steel case stacks two panels, a drilled speaker grille and a small engraved emblem, above the black display, with bare pushers down each side, and no catalog sells it. The Expanse made its name on a used future, hardware scuffed and patched instead of sleek, and Miller's watch is the production's own, aged to look like decades of wear it never had.

Propstore auctioned it in 2023, in a lot with three plastic coins stamped Ceres Station, a dulled Tac-Force pocketknife, and two photographs of Florence Faivre as Julie Mao, the woman Miller is hired to find and cannot stop chasing. It sold with a certificate of authenticity, a guarantee of realness for a watch that no company ever made.