So, the National Geographic Channel has delved into new terrain: a dramatic miniseries. Well, sort of. In an effort to pull itself up out of the morass of cable channels increasingly viewed as nonessential, the NGC is trying to leave behind its raft of fairly unscientific low-budget reality shows set in Alaska. "MARS" is the first serious effort in that direction, and it's hard to be definitive after just two episodes, but this mix of documentary and fictional content is an awkward mix of sometimes inspiring and aggravatingly thin in spots. The concept is worthy, and the show's ability to teach is important. The tone is a good deal more serious than Ridley Scott's somewhat syrupy take on Andy Wier's fantastic book, "The Martian," in which we got to hear Matt Damon make the same joke about bad Seventies music at least a half-dozen times. The "MARS" format jumps between present-day scientists and advocates of an effort to colonize Mars, to a fictional first crewed mission, set in 2033. It's got a sort of a "we wouldn't be trying this if it hadn't been for the visionaries back in the 2010s" vibe, all of which creates a tenuous tie to N.G.'s documentary DNA. The tone is earnest, the crew is precisely multicultural and multinational, the effects are generally not bad, and neither is the acting.
But I detect budgetary issues which feel like they're dragging the show down. This thing is backed by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, and apparently they spent about $20M on it. That's not a lot for a miniseries, although that makes it Nat Geo's most expensive venture yet, and it's only 6 episodes long. Much of the 2033 imagery scrimps on expected effects shots such as the launch of spacecraft Daedalus (we only see an exhaust plume). The sets inside the ship and in mission control are very sparingly designed: we see a starkly simple spacecraft control room, a gear-up room, the obligatory equipment corridor, the door of an airlock and an EVA elevator. We don't see any crew living space or exercise areas in any serious way, no hydroponics bay, no life support section, in a ship that has to make a 7-month flight. Because the first episode chooses to focus on them arriving at Mars, rather than the long trip necessary to fly there, perhaps this can be excused, but if you want to teach young people about space exploration, you'd think dealing with the ship in some detail would matter, right?
The press briefing room for the multinational Mars space authority looks like the lobby of a San Francisco boutique hotel. Mission Control (set in Austria for what exact reasons, now?) looks like a Google working pods environment. Launch Pad 39-A looks like ... Launch Pad 39-A, pretty much the way it's looked since the start of the shuttle program, which is illogical from a space engineering point of view. More troubling: some of the tech processes are badly off-kilter. Most noteworthy is that Daedalus is depicted as a SpaceX-style landing and takeoff craft, and it's pretty big, meaning the booster system required to get it off the ground of Earth would be GINORMOUS, with a correspondingly huge weight burden during launch. But again, we don't get to see that.
Most vexing, the moments of crisis in the fictional story raise questions about why there aren't a series of more flexibly designed backup and fail-safe systems available to the Daedalus crew. They keep getting backed into corners where they only have one daunting, long-shot chance to pull their situation out of the fire. That may be dramatic, and it may provide good classroom teaching moments, but it's just not very realistic, nor does it reflect good science. If your plan is to ride your bike to the park, your backup in case a tire goes flat is walking the bike back home. Flying to and landing on Mars offers no such room for makeshift error.
The budget impact was painfully displayed in Episode 2. There were zoomed shots of pressure suit gloves, and they clearly don't look the way airtight gloves will look, they look like open-weave fabric. They're ski gloves, O.K.? There's a scene in which the rear axle of the rover cracks open, and one of the crew has to go EVA to inspect the damage, but we don't see an airlock sequence, and the rest of the crew are just sitting there in the rover without their helmets on, so they're not cycling the air in the rover into reserve tanks, either. The show seems riddled with scientifically lazy stuff like that.
The documentary portions of the show are really the worthier part. Real footage from SpaceX reusable booster landing attempts, and from U.S. astronaut Scott Kelly's year-long mission aboard the ISS, provide meaningful technical context regarding the massive series of challenges we'll have to solve to make travel to and habitation on another planet a reality. An assortment of experts and space advocates explain why it's mandatory to establish a self- sustaining population on Mars (which we now know has subsurface water ice, the building block needed to gain a credible toehold on the red planet). Advocates insist we must populate Mars, to hold true to our quest for knowledge, to spur development of vital new technologies, to gird multinational cooperation, to feed our noble spirit of outreach, etc. But their strongest argument for planting our feet on Mars is to create a backup human presence in the event of an extinction event on Earth. "MARS" is trying hard to be stirring. We'll see if it gets more details right than wrong, and remains compelling. I hope it gets better during the final four episodes, because it covers vital exploratory ground.
But I detect budgetary issues which feel like they're dragging the show down. This thing is backed by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, and apparently they spent about $20M on it. That's not a lot for a miniseries, although that makes it Nat Geo's most expensive venture yet, and it's only 6 episodes long. Much of the 2033 imagery scrimps on expected effects shots such as the launch of spacecraft Daedalus (we only see an exhaust plume). The sets inside the ship and in mission control are very sparingly designed: we see a starkly simple spacecraft control room, a gear-up room, the obligatory equipment corridor, the door of an airlock and an EVA elevator. We don't see any crew living space or exercise areas in any serious way, no hydroponics bay, no life support section, in a ship that has to make a 7-month flight. Because the first episode chooses to focus on them arriving at Mars, rather than the long trip necessary to fly there, perhaps this can be excused, but if you want to teach young people about space exploration, you'd think dealing with the ship in some detail would matter, right?
The press briefing room for the multinational Mars space authority looks like the lobby of a San Francisco boutique hotel. Mission Control (set in Austria for what exact reasons, now?) looks like a Google working pods environment. Launch Pad 39-A looks like ... Launch Pad 39-A, pretty much the way it's looked since the start of the shuttle program, which is illogical from a space engineering point of view. More troubling: some of the tech processes are badly off-kilter. Most noteworthy is that Daedalus is depicted as a SpaceX-style landing and takeoff craft, and it's pretty big, meaning the booster system required to get it off the ground of Earth would be GINORMOUS, with a correspondingly huge weight burden during launch. But again, we don't get to see that.
Most vexing, the moments of crisis in the fictional story raise questions about why there aren't a series of more flexibly designed backup and fail-safe systems available to the Daedalus crew. They keep getting backed into corners where they only have one daunting, long-shot chance to pull their situation out of the fire. That may be dramatic, and it may provide good classroom teaching moments, but it's just not very realistic, nor does it reflect good science. If your plan is to ride your bike to the park, your backup in case a tire goes flat is walking the bike back home. Flying to and landing on Mars offers no such room for makeshift error.
The budget impact was painfully displayed in Episode 2. There were zoomed shots of pressure suit gloves, and they clearly don't look the way airtight gloves will look, they look like open-weave fabric. They're ski gloves, O.K.? There's a scene in which the rear axle of the rover cracks open, and one of the crew has to go EVA to inspect the damage, but we don't see an airlock sequence, and the rest of the crew are just sitting there in the rover without their helmets on, so they're not cycling the air in the rover into reserve tanks, either. The show seems riddled with scientifically lazy stuff like that.
The documentary portions of the show are really the worthier part. Real footage from SpaceX reusable booster landing attempts, and from U.S. astronaut Scott Kelly's year-long mission aboard the ISS, provide meaningful technical context regarding the massive series of challenges we'll have to solve to make travel to and habitation on another planet a reality. An assortment of experts and space advocates explain why it's mandatory to establish a self- sustaining population on Mars (which we now know has subsurface water ice, the building block needed to gain a credible toehold on the red planet). Advocates insist we must populate Mars, to hold true to our quest for knowledge, to spur development of vital new technologies, to gird multinational cooperation, to feed our noble spirit of outreach, etc. But their strongest argument for planting our feet on Mars is to create a backup human presence in the event of an extinction event on Earth. "MARS" is trying hard to be stirring. We'll see if it gets more details right than wrong, and remains compelling. I hope it gets better during the final four episodes, because it covers vital exploratory ground.