Anyone watching? Not bad. I’m on episode 6 right now, and there’s an actress I can’t place. She plays Miriam. Nothing in the credits or IMDb, and I’m striking out with Google.
Anyone know who that actress is?
Marion Eisman?
Sorry; make that Alona Tal.
That just may be her. Damn, you’re good
I watched the first episode last night. I had been on the fence about whether I was going to. It’s partially because I’m not a huge fan of Hilary Swank, and partially because I’m not that far removed from watching the similarly themed Netflix show Another Life. But I like Josh Charles and I like Ray Panthaki, and nothing else in my queue was exactly calling to me, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to try. I thought it was pretty good. It probably would have been more interesting had the division between the astronauts who support Swank’s character and the ones who don’t wasn’t so dreadfully cliched, but that’s not a huge drawback. I’ll keep going with it.
It’s not bad. Have watched 2 episodes, but I’m kind of hung up on the technology. It seems like this is set a good 50+ years in the future but they are using old iPads and phones for the consumer tech which just confuses me. Like this tech is dated NOW.
All the while there is no latency between conversations from space to Earth
The lack of latency is driving me crazy. I know it’s a minor point in the overall scheme of things but the fact they have instantaneous comms just is wrong. They manage to nail the idea of zero G and the idea of long periods of downtime punctuated by short periods of utter stress well and I like the story line well enough to keep watching.
The lack of latency is a narrative necessity. Can you imagine trying to watch a scene with a conversation that has a gap of a couple of minutes of real time on screen between each exchange? It would be excruciating to watch, and much of an episode would be taken up just with a couple of characters exchanging pleasantries. Unless it becomes a plot point somehow that they have instantaneous communications, just pretend that you’re watching an edited version of the conversation (which of course you literally are) which omits the lacunae due to latency.
Yeah, I get that. Still, even a few seconds delay would get the point across, I believe. It just makes the hard conversations harder and would give the actors a lot of opportunity to address the frustrations of the characters.
Latency will be in the Director’s Cut. It will be 227 minutes longer, but with no additional footage or dialogue, just all the latency left in.
I’m enjoying it enough, and haven’t shouted at the TV once, while the neighbours had cause to complain while I watched the stupidity that was Another Life.
About 1/2 way through the series. Yeah, the lack of latency is driving me crazy too. It’s not THAT difficult to deal with narratively-- If you were making a series about say, The Civil War, you’d have communication latency issues to deal with as well-- it was called “writing letters”.
And I understand that there are going to be a lot of problems to deal with, both for story reasons and to show how difficult a trip to Mars would be. The National Geographic series “Mars” was downright exhausting to watch for this reason. But the problems in “Mars” seemed more likely. In “Away”, some seem to be from dumb lack of planning:
When the solar panel fails to open properly and Hilary Swank and the Russian have to spacewalk to fix it, she has to go around to the back of the panel to fix the cable that jumped off-track. There are convenient tether clips on the back of the panel, but no way to get from front to back without a dangerous untethered space jump? Seems like a bit of an oversight.
And the guy, forget his name, who gets sick because he has the Epstein-Barr virus. Did they not do blood screening on the astronauts beforehand? Maybe there’s a circumstance where the virus can be dormant without the carrier even showing antibodies for a time…? I did google it for 5 minutes but I didn’t find out for sure. So I guess I’ll give a bit of a pass on that. Though they really played his sickness out dramatically-- he hallucinates to the point that he tries to open the airlock, potentially killing them all; he hallucinates about his dead brother that he gave typhus to, allowing some back story; he falls out of his sick bed and cuts his back very badly. Nightmare patient! Although, those face shield / mask combo things they were wearing were pretty cool-- we could use those IRL these days!
My mother really enjoyed the series, and has been on me to watch it, so I reckon I will.
But that’s what is annoying. It means those conversations just wouldn’t be like that at all, because they would have cooling-off periods built into them. I get that it’s a narrative necessity, but they have defined an impossible and unrealistic narrative requirement. Other movies and series have dealt with the latency as a feature of the scenario, not some sort of flaw to be swept under the rug
I’ve only watched the first episode, but there were several things that I had trouble with.
- The latency issue mentioned by others.
- The idea that the commander could be replaced on a whim. As I understand it, entire crews train together. If one goes down, they all go down and the JV team gets called up. They don’t pull just one person.
- The guy who gets space sick was on his first space mission. It seems to me that NASA would not put someone on this mission who had never been to space. What if he never gets his vertigo under control?
- The bit about Hillary Swank’s husband and will she/won’t she go on the mission left me befuddled. Surely, this sort of problem would already be decided before the mission was set. The guy was already in a delicate health situation. This was known. So, what are we going to do if his health turns south? That question should have been answered to everyone’s satisfaction long before the mission began. That way, when the poop hits the ventilator, we’re not scrambling to make decisions in the heat of an emotional moment.
That last problem is really the biggest for me. Everyone on the mission should have a contingency plan for what happens if there is an emergency at home. How or if will the affected crewmember be told? What will he/she be told? Who will make decisions for an incapacitated family member while the parent/spouse is away? Surely astronauts already have those sorts of plans in place even today.
Oh, and the idea that, before launch, there was obvious and serious dissension between crew members, and clear signs of insubordination arising from two crew members, but they all just smooth it over and launch anyway.
We’re people who prefer to watch Netflix series one episode at a time, one or perhaps two a week. Last night we watched episode 3. It’s the one that spends most of its time on the angst of the Chinese astronaut (a completely unlikable character) and the rest on the angst of the commander’s daughter (especially the endless segment in the cafeteria). So much angst! Please tell me if this space soap opera continues in this vein and we’ll give it up now. We really liked the previous episode in which they repaired the solar panel.
It’s very angsty… but Ep5, which we’ve just watched, was fantastic in that. The struggle with Mishka and his family was pretty powerful IMO.
Yeah, the angst continues. The show wasn’t bad, and it held my interest, but I could have done with a lot less of the soapy angst. The teenage variety, in particular, is a pet peeve of mine. I get that shows add teen characters to capture younger viewers, but I’m not the least bit interested in them or their snottiness and drama-filled lives.
I’ve recently started this show as well and just finished the 4th episode.
Agreed on the latency, though I forgave that early on just thinking they’re texts and emails. It really is a lot more interesting watching characters talk rather than read unless they’re Matt Damon.
What I find very difficult to deal with is the crew. These people would have been training together for years. I would understand trying to undermine each other early on in training in order to gain a spot or position on a mission, but not during the mission! Also, it feels like they’re all strangers rather than people who’ve worked together for years preparing for a mission like this. If anybody had questioned Hillary Swank’s competence and leadership she’d have been replaced long long before.
That said, I do understand the angst at the Moon when her husband became ill. They knew that was a possibility which is why they had their friend already in place. If she’d been actively flying at that time there’d be no decision to make as they’d just run with the plan in place. But she was at a point where she actually had an option so I understand that she’d have to make a conscious decision.
I’m still watching as there are enough things to keep me coming back, but I think this will be a largely forgettable series after I finish.
I watched the whole thing and mostly liked it. The latency wasn’t a deal-breaker for me, I just went with they “they edited it out” attitude, though the “Today is the LAST DAY WE CAN TALK” as an absolute cutoff was a bit odd. So yesterday you have to wait 21 seconds, today it’s 22, and that’s the cutoff?
The botanist being a total newbie was bizarre as hell. No WAY would they have done that. I mean, yeah, most missions prior to a Mars trip would not have had a need for a botanist - except maybe to establish some garden areas on the moon, but still… they’d at least have wanted to send the person up on a short trip to make sure he didn’t go bugfuck in space, or be violently space-sick the whole time, or whatever.
The technical issues seem to have been added just to create drama - the bit with the solar panel not unfolding and the untethered walk, the water recycler. That kind of thing would seem to be very much a plug-and-play module, rather than requiring tons of disassembling / rerouting. Unplug an inbound feeder pipe and outbound clean-water pipe, swap it out, reconnect, and done.
It occurs to me that they could have tried dumping fresh urine on the plants they had to let die, too - I know undiluted urine isn’t great, but it’s better than nothing, and it’s not like the recycler would have been able to process that pee. I do hope they had plant seeds along as well, to at least try to recover that portion of the fellow’s mission - otherwise he’s suddenly 100% useless. Might as well kill him and save his water ration for everyone else. At least in The Martian, Watney was trained to do a bunch of other stuff.
The space blindness was a new thing to me - I’d never heard of such a thing but it’s a real concern. It’s not clear whether Misha’s eyes would improve once he’s in some gravity; the reports of actual cases of vision impairment among astronauts on the ISS don’t address that.
I did not follow the whole “spacewalk, collect ice crystals” logic. As far as i could tell, the plan was “drill a hole, the water will sublime/freeze and stick to our suits, then we’ll scrape it off”, right? Seems like there’d be a slightly more reliable way to collect the water than that, even if it did require going outside and drilling a hole.