This one was OK, I guess? It felt like an adaptation of a short story from the '60s though. Like, not a specific one that I remember reading, it just had that vibe of the old sci-fi short stories I used to read a lot of. The cast would probably have been different back then, but the story would have been identical. And if it had been written in the '60s it would be perfectly fine, but in a modern TV show it's weirdly outdated.
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| Everyone's having a good time for about thirty seconds. |
There are these five astronauts and they're going to be the first humans on Mars, but as they're taking off a nuclear war starts and they have to decide whether to continue with the launch or abort, and obviously they decide to go ahead with it or there wouldn't be much point in them being astronauts.
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| This space ship is fucking huge. And yet they all sleep in a single room - with a big empty space in the middle. |
The rest of the episode is basically just them hanging out in space while their absurdly spacious and comfortable ship completes its journey. And there was either too much of this or not enough. Too much because it doesn't really go anywhere, and not enough because we don't really get to know any of them as characters. You could cut it down without losing anything, or you could extend it to a full movie and make it all about the people, but this is just sort of half way there and it doesn't work.
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| All this space and yet no privacy. They don't even get partitions, just curtains. |
Then the one guy who always seemed kind of crazy goes full crazy and says they're in a simulation and the whole thing is just a test to see how a real crew would cope with this kind of thing and then walks out the airlock. And the twist is, he's sort of right only it's aliens instead of humans who are testing them, and the aliens are trying to decide if humans are worth saving. And the one thing that makes them decide we are is that we managed to get a handful of people to Mars. That's important to them for some reason. Oh well, aliens. I guess their reasons make sense to them.
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| This guy? Crazy? Now way! |
So the message is that it's important to try to go out and explore the unknown and make our mark on the universe, but the justification for that is basically just that some aliens think that's cool. There's no real argument presented, it's just an opinion. And I don't find it particularly compelling. Like, wouldn't it be better to focus our efforts on making life better for all the people on Earth instead of an escape plan for the lucky elites? We don't know these aliens are out there testing us, so we've got to assume that we're on our own here, and managing to save a handful of people while the rest burn doesn't seem particularly admirable to me. In fact, this story would have been better without the twist. Make it about the personal value the astronauts place in their endeavour despite knowing that they're doomed and the world may be as well, without that prize waiting for them at the end. But I guess without a twist it wouldn't be properly Twilight Zoney.
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Oh yeah, no extra space in the cockpit. Why would you need any room to move in there?
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