Saturday, August 17, 2019

Mars, Season Two, Episodes 1 through 3: “We Are Not Alone,” “Worlds Apart,” “Darkness Falls” (Imagine Entertainment, Zak Productions, RadicalMedia, 20h Century-Fox, National Geographic, 2018-2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyriht © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s program at the Mars Movie Screening in Golden Hill (http://marsmovieguide.com/) consisted of the first three (out of six) episodes of the National Geographic limited-run TV series Mars, a sort of neither-fish-nor-fowl combination of documentary footage (including talking heads) on how we just might be able to get humans to the planet Mars and what conflicts various groups of humans might engage in with each other when there, along with a fictional story of how the International Mars Science Foundation (IMSF), a multi-country consortium founded to land people on Mars for the benefit of human knowledge and scientific study, launched their first ship to Mars in 2033 and dealt with various hazards, both natural and interpersonal, in building their colony. By the time the second season’s first episode, “We Are Not Alone,” directed by Stephen Cragg from a script by Dee Johnson, opens, it is now 2042 and a private company, the Lukrum Corporation, has arrived on Mars with a much larger contingent of colonists and a more typical greed-motivated capitalist program: to start mining and drilling operations on Mars to exploit its natural resources and hence turn a profit. We get the message from an early scene in which the members of the IMSF team go outside on Mars’s surface (of course they need spacesuits to do this since unmanned probes on Mars have found their entire atmosphere is virtually all carbon dioxide) and find themselves virtually incinerated by the Lukrum ships’ heat shields, which break up on entry into the Martian atmosphere (just because humans can’t breathe it doesn’t mean it isn’t there!) and turn into potentially lethal shrapnel, forcing the IMSF personnel to “go to ground” like infantry soldiers under enemy fire. 

The IMSF Martian colony is commanded by Hana Seong (Jihae), whose twin sister Anna (also Jihae) was the former head of the IMSF’s governing council until she stepped down to go to Mars herself and the person who took over, Leslie Richardson (Cosima Shaw), has decided to accommodate herself and IMSF to Lukrum’s demands, including that they be allowed to take up to 10 percent of Mars’s underground water supply for their own use. Supposedly they will repay IMSF by building solar panels to beam solar energy to Mars from satellites orbiting the Red Planet, but months go by and the members of Lukrum’s crew, acting like the typical greedy capitalists they are, seize more than 10 percent of the water both sides need to ensure their own survival and don’t deliver any solar panels in exchange. There’s a growing antagonism between the IMSF and Lukrum’s crews but there are also growing attractions — including a sexual affair between a male IMSF’er and a female Lukrumite which a jealous female IMSF’er denounces as “sleeping with the enemy” (a phrase with a fascinating history: it was originally coined in the 1970’s by Lesbian separatist feminists who used it to attack women who called themselves “feminist” but still had sexual relationships with men, though it’s probably best known today for the 1991 movie starring Julia Roberts as a battered wife who fakes her own death, flees and finds happiness with a non-abusive male until her psycho husband hunts her down). There’s a bar fight that seems to have been inspired by the one David Gerrold wrote for his Star Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles,” in which an attempt at a friendly get-together between IMSF’s and Lukrum’s colonists erupts in violence. 

The uneasy relationship takes a new turn when Lukrum’s miners discover their own source of underground ice they can mine for water and therefore no longer need to tap into IMSF’s reserves — only in the meantime other melodramatic stones get thrown into the plot soup. Lovers Javier Delgado (Albert Ammann) and Amelie Durand (Clémentine Poldatz) have a derailment of their relationship when Amelie announces her intention to return to Earth — only a week later Amelie turns out to be pregnant with Javier’s child, apparently the first human conceived on Mars (but the way some of the crews are screwing around, she’s hardly going to be the last!), which means she can’t go back to Earth and she and Javier have to patch up a relationship they had both agreed to end because they are going to have the responsibility of parenting the first human baby born on Mars. There’s also a lot of concern about whether spending her time in the womb (of course the couple, both being scientists, have ultrasounds done and determine as soon as possible that baby-to-be is going to be a she) in Mars’s lighter gravity is going to retard her development, make her bones brittle and make it impossible for her to survive if she ever goes to Earth. There’s also a surprisingly grim plot line in the third episode, “Darkness Falls,” directed (like the second episode, “Worlds Apart”) by Everardo Gout (whose somnolent pacing of what are supposed to be suspense scenes marred the first season’s six episodes as well) and again written by Dee Johnson (though there are at least six other people listed as story developers, series creators et al.), when biologist Marta Kamen (Annamaria Marinca) gets wind that the secret water source Lukran has discovered may contain samples of a different breed of the indigenous Martian microorganism whose discovery constituted the “stinger” at the end of season one that was supposed to keep us watching into season two. 

She’s indignant that Lukran might destroy the microorganism in the process of drilling for water and valuable minerals, and so she sets out on a lonely journey, stealing a surface rover with only her talking computer as company (gee, when Arthur C. Clarke thought up a talking computer for the script for 2001: A Space Odyssey and Robert Heinlein ditto for The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in the mid-1960’s it was a fascinating conceit; now talking computers have become not only one of science fiction’s most annoying clichés but also too much the stuff of ordinary life: I recently had occasion to call the Metro PCS help line on behalf of one of my home-care clients’ malfunctioning cell phone, and the machine voice on the other end expected me to tell it what the problem was when the problems my client was having didn’t fit into any of the machine’s programmed boxes — for several minutes I kept saying to the machine, “Service Representative,” hoping the machine would give up and let me talk to an actual human — and the machine volleyed me at every turn, saying that before it would let me talk to a service representative I had to give it a better understanding of the issue so it could help me — and finally, with the client I was doing this for telling me it was useless and I should just give up, I decided it was useless and just gave up, reinforcing my contention that if I were ever dictator of a country the first thing I would do is make all voicemail systems illegal, much the way in the backstory of Frank Herbert’s Dune the human authorities decided to outlaw computers after the computers attempted to rebel and instead trained special humans, called Mentats, to serve the functions formerly performed by computers, including navigating their spacecraft — sorry for the digression). 

Anyway, while Marta is out alone in the surface rover staging a daring raid on the Lukran compound to grab some of their ice so she can find out if there are any strains of Martian life in them before Lukran’s drilling and mining operations destroy them, a solar flare hits Mars and knocks out all communications, shorting out a transformer on the planet’s surface and leaving two men to go about, testing all the transformers to see which is the bad one (and one of them is Robert Foucault, played by the very hot Black actor Sammi Rotibi, who had quite a lot to do during the first season but remained pretty much unseen until the third episode of this one — and since he’s working on the Martian surface, he has to wear a spacesuit and everyone who wears a spacesuit looks pretty much like everyone else who wears a spacesuit — I’m still amused at how in the film Gravity Sandra Bullock and George Clooney looked alike in their spacesuits and you had to wait for their close-ups through the suits’ visors to see which one was which!). The solar flare knocks out all electronic communications on Mars, including the ones that ordinarily help navigate a surface rover, which means that both Marta and her precious samples are somewhere on the surface of Mars between the Lukran and IMSF camps, but nobody, neither Marta nor anyone at IMSF central, knows where. Marta barely survives after she tells her computer to turn down both the internal temperature control in her spacesuit and the one in the rover to the bare minimum needed for human survival. Eventually she recovers when Foucault and his comrade figure out which transformer went down — the script gives no explanation why the effect of a solar flare on Mars is so devastating when Earth is presumably hit by them all the time (especially since we’re considerably closer to the sun!) without apparent ill effects; I presume we’re supposed to think it’s the thicker atmosphere of Earth that shields us, but that isn’t specified in the script. 

Marta is discovered and rescued, but we find out her expedition is useless for its intended purpose because, while she did bring back indigenous Martian life, it’s the same strain as the one that was discovered at — and became the cliffhanger ending for — the end of season one. We get a bit of a cliffhanger ending this time around when we get a glimpse of what Marta is seeing of the organism under her microscope — and its strands, which at first look like a just-thrown pack of Pick Up Stix. start wiggling. The documentary portions of these three episodes of Mars are better integrated than the ones in season one (at least as best as I can recall) but they also relate directly to the action in the story and the plot conflicts driving the fictional characters. Two of the three segments have to do with Greenpeace, and particularly their attempts to block a Norwegian offshore drilling platform in the Arctic from actually drilling by exploiting the laws of the sea, parking their main ship and a whole bunch of life rafts around the platform, so by international law the Norwegian’s can’t run it (and the filmmakers savvily interview both the Greenpeacers and the well’s crew to give us both sides of the story, even though their own sympathies are clearly with the environmentalists … as, following the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and the even greater potential difficulties of cleaning an underwater oil spill in the Arctic, they should be!), and the last segment features interviews with a crew of scientists working in Greenland to measure the gradual — no longer so “gradual,” however — disappearance of the ice shelf. 

Watching this episode was particularly timely in light of the news reports that President Trump is considering buying Greenland outright from the government of Denmark, which owns it now — and the Danes’ response that “Greenland is not for sale.” Apparently Trump wants Greenland partly as a “legacy project,” comparable to former U.S. Secretary of State William Seward buying Alaska from Russia in 1867, and also as a private money-making opportunity for himself; he plans to build a giant golf resort there as soon as all that pesky ice melts already. These three programs in the Mars series were actually among the most politically, socially and economically depressing shows I’ve seen lately — though the writers may not have intended them that way, what they argue is that in the age-old battle between exploiters who want to destroy whole continents to extract their natural resources and the preservationists who want to preserve native environments and cultures, the exploiters always win because they’re the ones with the money and, of course, money talks. The talking heads throughout the programs feature individuals on both sides — including images of Presidents Obama and Trump, with Obama encouraging the U.S. to support a human-staffed mission to Mars with the same sort of inspiring rhetoric John F. Kennedy used to challenge us to go the moon (“not because it is easy, but because it is hard”), while Trump is a gung-ho rabble-rouser for putting people back into space because that’s half of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) mission, and Trump wants to keep NASA’s spaceflight capabilities alive while wiping out its other mission: to document the extent to which humans are causing climate change by measuring where the climate is changing (including in the Arctic), how fast and by how much. Of course, in Trump’s ideology humans aren’t causing climate change and therefore studying that topic is practically treasonous. 

After the last science-fiction movie screenings in Golden Hill I started to write an article asking, “Why aren’t humans going back the moon?” — much less why we aren’t going to Mars and further out in the solar system the way science writers were confidently predicting in the 1960’s — and at least part of the reason is the big change in our politics from what we can do to what we can’t, from visionaries like Eisenhower (especially on the interstate highway system — I’ve cited Ike and the national freeways, along with Abraham Lincoln and the transcontinental railroad, and Theodore Roosevelt and the Panama Canal, as examples from the days when Republicans liked big infrastructure projects), Kennedy and Johnson to status quo leaders like the Bushes, Clinton, Obama and Trump. In a Zenger’s editorial during the 1990’s I called it “The No Decade,” because the main message we were getting from government (and to a large extent are still getting today!) is how many things we can’t do as a polity, society or culture. The message of Mars — whether the filmmakers intended this or not — is that don’t ever bet against the capitalists, because they will always win: they will always have the money to mobilize on behalf of their short-sighted greed — and they will always run over the pathetic preservationists and other progressives who dare even hope they can stand in their way. And this is true even when the triumph of the capitalists — especially on continuing to loot the world of fossil fuels and other resources whose production causes air pollution and climate change — means the end of the species, which has led to a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction in which humans have colonized other worlds and thus kept their race going even while they were destroying Earth’s ability to support human life. Mars hasn’t quite got there yet (though the issue was raised as far back as the 1950’s by Ray Bradbury in The Martian Chromicles, a superb book even though a depressing one in which Earth people’s callous stupidities destroy both their own and Martian civilizations), but it certainly has the potential to make itself such a big downer!