by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I saw the last three episodes of the National Geographic Mars series from 2016 (there’s apparently a seventh
episode from the first-season that’s basically a making-of featurette, and a
second season will start on the National Geographic cable channel in November)
at the Mars movie screenings in Golden Hill, http://marsmovieguide.com/. The series
overall has been interesting but hardly as compelling either as drama or as
documentary as it could have been, at least in part because of the ponderous
direction by Everardo Gout which makes each episode seem twice as long as its
stated 46-minute running time. To recap, the show is a fictional story about
the first manned (personned?) mission to Mars in 2033, where a crew of seven
led at first by Ben Sawyer (Ben Cotton), the sort of tall, handsome, jut-jawed
and incredibly butch Anglo-American Captain Kirk type one usually get as the
captain of a space mission in a science-fiction film or TV series, then by Hana
Seung (Jihae), the Chinese female assistant commander who takes over after Sawyer
dies at the end of episode two (a surprising deviation from the usual
stereotypes by writers Ben Young Mason and Justin Wilkes, though he comes back
in some flashbacks in episode six), establishes a base camp on Mars even
though, as one of the characters puts it, “Mars has fought us back every step
of the way.”
By the time episode four, “Power,” rolls along, it’s 2037 and a
second spaceship has arrived from Earth to bolster the colony and make it
self-sustaining. The script tells us that 50 additional people have arrived but
the only ones who really become important characters we get to know are married
couple Paul and Leslie Richardson (John Light and Cosima Shaw), who are
included because he’s the world’s greatest botanist and he’s therefore in charge
of nurturing the specially engineered strains of wheat (actually I couldn’t
tell onscreen what plant it was supposed to be and I’m relying on the official
synopsis to tell me it was wheat) that are supposed to be able to grow on Mars
and feed the subsequent human settlers. Alas, in episode four, “Power,” the
colony is beset by a Martian dust storm — Martian dust storms, as the
documentary portions of the show explain, can last for months, can cover the
entire planet’s surface (which is why sometimes astronomers using telescopes
can see geographic features on Mars and sometimes they can’t and the entire
planet becomes just a blurry red dot in the sky) — which renders the solar
panels they’ve put up on the Martian surface unusable. Meanwhile, a dumb
decision on the part of the mission controllers on Earth — led by Hana Seung’s
twin sister Joon (also played by Jihae) — to speed up the nuclear power plant
that’s their only other source of energy leads to it conking out and going
offline, so the colonists are forced to rely on battery power and Hana has to
ration electricity use so tightly that Paul can’t run the hydroponic lights on
which he was depending to keep his plants alive.
The power shortage finally ends in episode five, “Darkest Days,”
when two of the crew members, including hunky bald-headed Black man Robert
Foucault (Sammi Rotibi), go outside the station onto the surface of the planet,
and Robert finds the frayed cables that were injured in the dust storm and/or
burned out from the overload, fixes them and restores full power to the colony
— but in the meantime Paul Richardson has become totally freaked out because
all but two tiny plants have died on him. He starts hallucinating that the
outside door to the Mars station — which, if it’s ever opened, will mean all
the oxygen inside will be sucked out and everyone in the station will instantly
die — is the door leading outside his garden home back in England. In what I
found to be the most beautiful part of the whole series even though some of the
other viewers at the screening took it to task as a major plot hole — why would
they have an unlocked door
opening out when its opening
would mean certain death for everyone in the installation? — we see his
point-of-view shot of the doorway at his home as he starts to open it and Hana
Seung realizes that no one is going to be able to get to him in time to stop
him, so the only thing that she can do is seal off the botany lab from the rest
of the compound, meaning Paul will die and so will what’s left of his plants
but the rest of the crew will survive. This duly happens and sets the stage for
the final episode, “Crossroads,” in which the international agency that brought
together various governments and private entrepreneurs to finance and
administer the Mars mission is ready to pull the plug on it now that so many
people have died on Mars — the official synopsis of “Darkest Days” said seven
people died in the incident with Paul, but it seemed to me that Paul was the
only person who perished when Hana sealed the room and the other six casualties
were the people who’d died in earlier parts of the mission (we see a tombstone
for Ben Sawyer and get a flashback of him and Hana jogging together on Earth
before they left) — until a sort of deus ex machina occurs when an expedition from the central camp
stumbles on something that looks like an animate Tinker Toy that is supposed to
establish that they’ve discovered the first sign of indigenous life on Mars.
In
some ways “Crossroads” was the most interesting episode from the documentary
point of view, since it provided one of the better explanations I’ve seen for why the U.S. space exploration program so abruptly ended
after the final Apollo moon flight in 1972. The show featured archival clips of
Wernher von Braun and argued that he’d dreamed of a human mission to Mars since
his days as a kleiner Kind in his
native Germany; he’d signed on to the Nazi rocket program at Peenemünde and
then with NASA after World War II (just after he published a German-language
book about going to Mars containing mathematical formulae for how the rocket
would be propelled and what trajectory it would need) in hopes of going to Mars
and he “over-engineered” the Saturn-5 moon rocket because he wanted it to be
capable of going to Mars as well as the moon. While it didn’t explore my own
theory of why the U.S. abandoned space exploration after the end of the Apollo
moon program — that the Soviets had already thrown in the towel and given up a
manned moon program after having beaten us to the first-man-in-space title, and
therefore there was no longer any way continuing space exploration would be
seen as a victory in the Cold War since we no longer had Soviet competition —
it did suggest that the
near-disaster of the Apollo 13 mission (an event near and dear to the hearts of
two of the co-producers of this series, Apollo 13 producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer) did a lot to
turn people against space travel by pointing out how dangerous it could be.
While all three Apollo 13 astronauts got back safely, it was touch-and-go there
for quite a while (an event eloquently dramatized in Howard’s and Grazer’s Apollo
13 movie) and that might have turned a lot
of people off to space travel by highlighting the potential dangers of it.
Also, as an early line of dialogue in Apollo 13 while the mission is still proceeding as planned
noted, the media were no longer interested in covering space flights by 1971
because “you’ve made going to the moon seem about as exciting as going to
Pittsburgh.”
I suspect, though, that the final collapse of the U.S. human space
exploration program was a by-product of Watergate and the overall loss of trust
the U.S. people had for any major
government projects — particularly once the American Right realized that the
best way for them to recover from Watergate and Nixon’s fall was to trash the
whole institution of government and say it wasn’t just a failure of Nixon, the
Republicans or the political Right but all large government undertakings. The crises of the early 1970’s reinforced
both the Right and the Left critiques of space exploration — the Left’s that it
was a grandiose waste of money and resources that could better be used to
alleviate poverty on Earth, and the Right’s that it was a pointless waste of
taxpayer money and, according to sacred Libertarian principles, if exploring
space were worth doing, the private sector would do it and make a profit off
it. The pivotal decision point was in 1973, when given the choice by NASA of
whether to continue human exploration and mount a mission to Mars or authorize
the space shuttle program — which essentially turned into a giant flying truck
to put satellites in orbit more cheaply than mounting each one on its own
rocket — he opted for the shuttle. (It’s also possible that part of the
decision was Nixon’s egotism; just as President Trump has gone out of his way
to undo just about all President Obama’s accomplishments, it’s possible Nixon
saw human space flight as too associated with the man who defeated him in 1960,
John F. Kennedy, for it to be a legacy he would want to perpetuate.)
I found
myself irritated, as I had been in the earlier episodes, at the extent to which
this series heralded Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk as the Howard Roark,
Hank Rearden or John Galt of space (for those who don’t recognize those names,
they’re the super-capitalist heroes of Ayn Rand’s books The
Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged), the
super-innovator and entrepreneur who will take up the baton the U.S. government
dropped in 1973 and get us to Mars — the big climax of the documentary portion
of Mars’ sixth episode is the
successful test of Musk’s reusable rocket in December 2015 (after a previous
version spectacularly blew up in space in June 2015). The film reiterates and
apparently endorses Musk’s claim that the key to a successful human program to
Mars is perfecting the reusable rocket so the enterprise doesn’t have to keep
building single-use launch vehicles every time the colony needs to be
resupplied. I think Elon Musk is one of the biggest capitalist scumbags
currently alive and he’s going to have a hard time keeping his various
enterprises in business and avoiding going to prison for stock fraud in his
attempts to pump up the price of Tesla stock by claiming he was going to buy
out the shareholders and take the company totally private with money from the
Saudi Arabian Royal Wealth Fund (which gave Musk a big fuck-you by recently
making a major investment in another
small electric-car start-up), and if the future of human space exploration is
dependent on that slimeball,
there isn’t a future in human
space exploration.
There was also an interesting aspect of the film which
pointed out that one key variable in a human space mission is the psychological
health and well-being of the crew, both individually and as a unit. The
filmmakers pointed out that if you’re on Earth and you’re with a person you
don’t get along with, you simply move away from them and avoid interacting with
them. When you’re locked together with that person in an object the size of an average
bathroom, and it’s going to take months or even years for you to get where
you’re going, you can’t get away
from anyone else on the trip you don’t like. The show depicted “Mars 500,” a
Russian attempt (with co-participation by Europe and China, though their
involvement isn’t mentioned in the film) to simulate a human Mars mission with
six astronauts, and noted that by the end of the 1 ½-year-long simulation only
two of the six participants were fully mentally healthy. As the Wikipedia page
on Mars 500 states, “In January 2013, the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences reported that four of the six crew members had considerable problems
sleeping, and some avoided exercise and would hide away from the others, in
behavior compared to animal hibernation.[12] Also, circadian
rhythm of autonomic nervous system activity was dampened during confinement.”
(“Circadian rhythm” means the normal sense of a difference between day and
night that conditions human beings on Earth to get tired and go to sleep at
about the same time each night.) The film wrapped up with the optimistic ending
— the authority on Earth is about to close down the Mars mission and send one
final spacecraft to pick up the survivors and bring them back to Earth, but
once indigenous life is discovered on Mars the authority reversed itself and
decided to keep the Mars mission going — and an interesting segment on the ways
the dreams of the future expressed in science fiction have shown the way to
real-life developments. If that’s
the case, it’s hard to imagine much of a future for human space exploration
because the dominant theme in today’s science fiction is dystopia: the Hunger Games, Divergent and Maze Runner cycles and all the writings by people who’ve tried to imitate them and
latch on to their success signals a broad-based cynicism about whether human
beings are any good at all and whether human life will even be able to survive
on Earth, let alone spread
anywhere else!
