Be careful what you ask for, because somebody might produce it.
When I sat down to watch the first episode of Mars, National Geographic’s new six-part miniseries, I knew absolutely nothing about it.
The premiere began with the launch, in 2033, of the first crewed mission to the red planet.
My first thought was that it was very interesting NG would produce a dramatic fictional series. My second thought was that they were doing a terrible job of it.
The acting was awkward, the dialogue forced, but they were at least getting the science right.
I don’t know how many times I have complained about movies and television sacrificing scientific accuracy, but let’s just say it is most of the time.
The opening of Mars seemed to be making the case for sacrificing scientific accuracy, however.
Then a strange thing happened. The show all-of-a-sudden turned into a real documentary switching to segments with actual present day astronauts, scientists and tech visionaries such as Apollo 13 commander James A. Lovell, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
Being back in the world of traditional NG documentary was comforting. It is what venerable society does, after all.
The next time the filmmakers, which included Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard, switched to the fictional component, it wasn’t quite so jarring in the new context. Documentaries frequently use dramatization, just not quite to this extent or in quite this fashion because the production values, if not the script and acting, are definitely Hollywood-worthy
But producers of traditional space dramas do things like compress timelines for the sake of pace.
And when things go wrong, characters tend to come up with dramatic solutions on the spot that strain credibility, but are entertaining.
The producers of this production do not do these things. They painstakingly portray things like the communications time lag. As the crew prepares to land, for example, the commander of the mission sends a message along the lines of “by the time you get this, we will either be landed or dead.”
And, when things do go awry, the Mars astronauts fall back on procedures and checklists as real astronauts do.
If you haven’t heard Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s TED Talk about the time he was on a space walk and became blinded by a liquid in his helmet, look it up.
As I got used to the format, I started feeling pretty good about Mars. I am still not 100 per cent sold on the experiment, but the good of it is the science cues are coming from actual Mars mission planning as opposed to science fiction, which frequently takes shortcuts to maintain entertainment value.
Another good thing about the dramatization is it spotlights a lot of the real human physicality connected to such a mission, stuff that often gets glossed over by overblown capabilities of technology in science fiction.
So far, the show also does a really good job of underscoring why we are not already there even though plausible scenarios, and of course the vision and the desire for the colonization of Mars go back as far as the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Emeritus professor at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute John Logsdon’s explanation is as poignant as it is understated: “Mars is far away, it’s hard to get there, and it costs a lot of money.”
It appears this series is poised to take on all of the issues regarding when, where, how and why it now looks like we are poised to become a multiplanetary species.
The technological and medical speed bumps are, obviously, crucial. Never mind the extreme surface conditions that make Antarctica look absolutely hospitable, Mars pioneers face radiation and loss of bone and muscle mass issues that make at least initial colonization a virtual suicide mission.
It will be impossible to go there much less survive for long without robust artificial habitats that mimic Earth’s protective atmosphere and gravity for which we are evolutionarily adapted.
Those things are surmountable through engineering. Episode one portrays brilliantly all of the stuff that would need to already be there for the first human arrivals to use.
Whether the social and political obstacles can be overcome remains to be seen.
As Logsdon also said, “It’s a choice, not an imperative.”
I’m intrigued by how this series will deal with those issues. As I mentioned, I am not yet 100 per cent sold on this docudrama, but first episode definitely did enough to make me to commit to the second.
