Defying Gravity
ABC Sundays at 10PM
Created by James D. Parriott
Starring: Andrew Airlie, Christina Cox, Paula Garcés, Laura Harris, Peter Howitt, Florentine Lahme, Karen LeBlanc, Ron Livingston, Ty Olsson, Zahf Paroo, Eyal Podell, Maxim Roy, Dylan Taylor, William C. Vaughan, and Malik Yoba.
“Pilot”
Written by James D. Parriott
Directed by David Straiton
“Natural Selection”
Written by James D. Parriott
Directed by Peter Howitt
Warning: this review contains some spoilers. If you’d rather not know what the episode is going to include, bookmark this page and read it after viewing.
I just saw the premiere of Defying Gravity, ABC’s new Sunday night science fiction-ish soap opera with a Big Mystery that won’t be revealed, apparently, forever. I was woefully underwhelmed.
The series is set about 40 years in the future, aboard the ten-trillion dollar Antares mission, which will see a crew of eight people visit seven planets in six years. It’s supplemented with numerous flashbacks to five years earlier, when the crew members were being selected. And there are also echoes of ten years earlier, when the (first?) manned mission to Mars wound up abandoning two crewmen on the surface. Two of the survivors of that mission are back-up crew members for the Antares mission, but the Big Mystery, at the last minute, causes two of the guys on the ship, Commander Rollie Crane (Ty Olsson, Battlestar Galactica) and engineer Ajay Sharma (Zahf Paroo, Firewall) to have serious heart disease, and they’re pulled off for the two back-ups, our two Mars veterans, new Commander Ted Shaw (Malik Yoba, New York Undercover) and engineer Maddux Donner (Ron Livingtson, Holly). Crane’s wife, biologist Jen (Christina Cox, Blood Ties and F/X: The Series) remains aboard as part of the crew. Shaw’s wife, Eve (Karen LeBlanc, Nurse.Fighter.Boy.), is one of the two mission directors. Those two directors, apparently, know exactly what the Big Mystery is. As part of his last-minute briefing, Eve tells Ted (though we don’t get to hear it). His shocked “How the hell could you keep this secret from us?” is something the viewer echoes. Not to worry, says she, we were planning to tell the whole crew in 43 days, when they get to Venus. Yeah, I’m trying to figure out why the series’ creators thought “we’ll tell the crew the mystery later” is either a good idea in their world, or entertaining enough for the audience, when we’ve all seen and read 2001 in the last forty years.
There are minor mysteries, too. Such as, how could Donner, who had a vasectomy when he returned from Mars, apparently need another one at the last minute before going aboard Antares? What is that in pod number four? Why does Zoe keep hearing a baby crying (well, that’s not so much a mystery as psychology, but they’re playing it up as something else)? And why are Zoe and Donner sharing a repeating dream?
Other than the Big Mystery, and the science fictional trappings, what we have is essentially soap opera. There’s the love triangle among reserve engineer, geologist Zoe Barnes (Laura Harris, Dead Like Me), who was secretly pregnant during training, and Claire Dereux (Maxim Roy, ReGenesis), who may really want him, or just be teasing (we’re not sure). There’s Steve Wassenfelder (Dylan Taylor, Tideland), the incredibly awkward, unathletic (yet huge), non-astronautic genius who is on the mission seeking dark matter, but who proves he’s also a necessary, creative thinker (and there’s another mystery: why did Eve know he was required to be on the flight?). There’s the too-perky mission specialist Paula Morales (Paula Garcés, Clockstoppers), who runs the camera for public relations. There’s the rejected Hindu engineer who freaked out and went for a spacewalk when he heard he was coming home. And on and on.
Creator James D. Parriott (who’s written for Forever Knight, Misfits of Science, Voyagers!, the original Bionic Woman, and many more) has set the show on a huge interplanetary spaceship, and the production values are high, but apparently the production crew have decided it’s too difficult (or too expensive) to actually show some form of a weightless environment. So there’s a throwaway line early in the show, telling us that the nano-something-or-others in crew’s suits orient them to provide faux gravity (and then showing us by tossing a tomato that doesn’t fall). But there’s no commentary on hair that hangs straight down, or the fact that they’ve got comfy chairs scattered about, because they sit for the daily briefing with legs crossed.
Yeah, I’m not terribly pleased with it. I’m not a big fan of the “It’s a Big Mystery: you have to watch every episode to gather clues to figure out what it is” genre. Especially not when some of the characters know what the Big Mystery is. When we do actually start flying long-duration, crewed spaceflights, the personal interactions aboard the ship will indeed be the foremost concern, because space travel takes a long time. And along those lines, this could be a pretty good series. But when they tell us, right off the mark, that there is a Big Mystery controlling everything, and that the mission directors know some of the crew aren’t coming home, they’ve set us up for a series in which everything is secondary to figuring out that Big Mystery. I’m not thrilled.