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!
