Sep 24

Sep 24 Away (2020)

“Away” (2020+) was clearly Netflix’s attempt at competing against AppleTV+’s “For All Mankind” (2019+) and a very delayed parallel to “The Martian” (2015)
It missed the mark.
By a lot.
I watched the entire show over the course of approximately a week, because it made good fodder to have on in the background as I was doing more productive things with my life.

So let’s dive into why it wasn’t worth my undivided attention.
Also spoilers, because this show is bad and you shouldn’t watch it.

The five-body international crew set to be the first human access to Mars was made of American mission commander Emma Green (Hillary Swank), Chinese physicist Lu Wang (Vivian Wu), Russian engineer Misha Popov (Mark Ivanir), UK biologist Kwesi Weisberg-Abban (Ato Essandoh), and Indian medical doctor Ram Arya (Ray Panthaki).
Almost immediately, it was clear that Misha and Lu didn’t trust Emma to be a competent commander and boy did she pretty much prove them right at every step.

I understand why Emma was questioned during the mission - they day they launched from the Moon to Mars, Emma’s husband went to the hospital with a brain aneurism. Tough situation.
Unfortunately, from there on out, every other action that Emma took made me question her ability to lead a crew to Mars, let alone her own way through a grocery store.
I would like to think that’s because of how she was written, as a human, and not that the show runners decided “this is how a woman would react,” but I absolutely would not follow a male commander who broke down and had as many lapses in judgement as she did.

In the pilot episode, it was noted that the United States was the largest contributor to the Mars mission. Mere seconds later, a journalist asked Lu how she would feel about being the first human to walk on Mars.
Why?
If the US contributed the most to such an international endeavor, why wouldn’t the American astronaut be the one who gets to walk first?
Having now watched through the season, I get that it was done for the sake of two emotional points near the end, but I only know that because I’m the audience and I watched all 10 hours of the show.
As a point of world-building, it makes no sense; there was zero attempt to explain how the US reached that agreement with China.

It was never particularly clear how long this mission took to get from Earth to Mars. As current-day ships can get our various rovers there in 3-9 months, I’m going to estimate that it took them 6 months.
Even being overly generous and pretending it took a full year, that doesn’t provide an allowance for the pseudo-science bullshit that the script kept calling into play.
There were repeated times when someone’s body would start reacting weirdly – like when Kwesi’s entire right heel simply fell off – and someone else would say “no one has ever been in space this long.”
Presuming this show exists in our universe in the near future, is absolute crap, as Scott Kelly spent a year orbiting the Earth to find out exactly what would happen to the human body during such a period.
Those lines would also often be followed with “our bodies are adapting!” which, again: no.
Our physiology is not that of Pokémon – our DNA doesn’t spontaneously start triggering beneficial traits and features just because there’s extended weightlessness and increased radiation.
That’s a good way to get cancer, not superpowers.

At one point, Ram told Emma about his childhood, to which Emma almost immediately got weird about. When Ram asked why, Emma stated that she didn’t like mixing ‘work and personal’ info.
What an incredibly stupid thing to say.
The Atlas mission was slated to be a three-year endeavor. Did Emma really believe that she can’t open up to her crew during the three years that they’d be living together in close quarters, with extremely limited access to their loved ones back on Earth?!
Emma was shown to have been a Navy pilot, so maybe that was part of it, but if that’s the kind of culture that the Navy instills in its pilots, then NASA made a horrible choice for who they wanted to lead.
I absolutely understand the ‘no fraternizing’ rule in the military, but everyone on that mission would have been the equivalent of an officer of similar rank, so there wouldn’t have been any ‘officer getting too close to an enlisted troop’ problems.

Meanwhile:

Water – or lack thereof – was a consistent issue for the crew aboard the ship.
While the humans on Earth and in space dealt with their monster-of-the-week type problems per episode, there was a perpetually, progressively more stupid water problem aboard the Atlas.

So for starters:
The main water pump broke. Popov helpfully noted that it was a “notoriously finicky system.”
Why?
Why would NASA install that?
Since the show takes place in at least 2020 (if not somewhere in the 30s), then NASA has been sending humans into space for 60+ years, and most of those years included some kind of water circulation and filtration system. There’s no excuse for a “notoriously finicky system” to be part of the first manned mission to another planet, and just existed as a plot device as written by someone who thought it sounded like a good idea.
Now, at least they pretended to know how NASA works, because there was a backup system aboard the Atlas, but that promptly shit the bed too, causing the crew to limit themselves to rationed water for the duration of the trip to Mars.

Alternate plans had to be made, of course, because months on water rations with two broken systems was a terrible idea.

Mars doesn’t have a particularly thick atmosphere, but it has an atmosphere, and landing a spaceship through any atmosphere is a very tricky process that includes a lot of heat and a tendency to cause damaged heat shields to explode.
Which is why it made perfect sense that, when trying to harvest water from the bladders that were built into the ship’s walls (for radiation protection, I think), the crew took a drill and went to town.
It worked out exactly how you’d expect, and they exposed their living quarters to the vacuum of space.
Thus, when they tried to land the ship on Mars, it absolutely should have exploded on entry.

When drilling through the walls didn’t work, the crew decided to go for a spacewalk to the outside of the ship to find what appeared to be a souped-up garden spigot and pump the water from the bladders that way.
I had to delete a long, rambling chunk about why the process didn’t make sense and what previous NASA missions prove it to be so, but I’ll compress it to this: the water came out as small ice crystals, which floated away from the ship somewhat at random, and no one was concerned about a massive new debris cloud that was now near the ship’s sensitive everything after they’d already given the crew quarters a brand new piercing.

And they still managed to land on Mars and not explode.

At one point, Ram decided to confess to Emma that he loved her.
I get it, kinda – you’re stuck in a ship for 6+ months and you start to get the starship equivalent of beer goggles, but c’mon! It wasn’t a secret that Emma was married and that her husband and daughter were waiting for her back on Earth.
When Emma didn’t take positively to a crewmember hitting on her (obviously), Ram went off to pout. Kwasi asked him how Emma responded to the confession and Ram said she didn’t take it well, and Kwasi said something along the lines of “well, she wouldn’t have reacted at all if she didn’t have any feelings for you.”
WHAT?!
Dude, don’t egg him on, don’t give him stupid, misguided false hope.

And because she showrunners hated the idea of a healthy, functioning marriage, Emma’s husband back on Earth had to shoot down advances from a family friend, Misha’s daughter hated him and didn’t want to talk, Lu was a closet lesbian and only had a husband and son to appease the CCP, and Ram was estranged from his entire family.
Impressive that NASA let so many emotionally unstable people travel together for a three-year endeavor.
“You don’t have to be married to be emotionally stable!” I can hear someone yelling at their computer screen as they read this.
Correct. But there clearly was emotional instability in a majority of the crew as none of them seemed capable of holding a healthy relationship together.
Except Kwasi, who was quite content to tend to his hydroponic garden.

And there was a lot of filler regarding Emma’s daughter back on earth, both with dealing with the idea of one parent being gone for three years while the other struggles to return to normalcy, and with some melodramatic teen romance crap that included the line “but daddy, I *love* him!” and multiple shots of teens sneaking out of their bedroom windows to be with each other.
Ugh.

All of the emotional and character development struggle that went with the crew bonding around Emma was resolved by the time they landed on Mars, which means that the prospective next two seasons will either a) be very light on any character development, or b) pretend that progress never happened (or plot-device undo it somehow) and force the audience to trudge through the tedium of almost-mutiny again.

And finally: why was the ship so small?
It was not only discussed, but shown, that there was an established moon colony that was capable of mining and refining hydrogen to fill the Atlas for its launch to Mars.
Why didn’t NASA and the other space organizations send up components piece-by-piece? There was no reason for the Atlas by itself to make the trans-system travel.
The ISS wasn’t constructed in a day or launched in one piece.
In “The Martian,” the Aries ship was clearly designed and built in pieces, with a designated shuttle to carry the crew down to the Martian surface. That was four years before this show even started filming. Why wasn’t the Atlas built the same way?!

There was probably music in here somewhere, but I don’t remember it.

The special effects were actually pretty good. Anyone floating in the center of the ship actually looked like they were floating – no fishing lines were visible.
The soundstage that served as the ship itself looked realistic and cramped enough to make me think it was a plausible ship.

Like I complained about in “3022” (2019), we’ve had a looooooong time to talk about space travel and how it should work and what our ships should look like and how people should behave.
There’s no excuse for Netflix to have gotten it this wrong.

Do not watch this show.
Do not waste 10 hours of your life.
The characters were not endearing, the events were contrived, and the premise has already been done elsewhere and better.
Go rewatch “The Martian.”