| In Space, No One Can Hear You Scram |
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| Written by Tom Shales | ||||
| Saturday, 01 August 2009 00:00 | ||||
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ABC's new science fiction drama "Defying Gravity" takes eight astronauts on a dangerous six-year mission to explore the Solar System and each other.
Read more: http://space-tv.suite101.com/article.cfm/review_of_abcs_defying_gravity#ixzz0ROVnkRRD Alien life, sex in space, a six-year mission to go where no man has gone before. No, it’s not Star Trek VII. It’s Defying Gravity, ABC’s gutsy endeavor to bring a space drama to the attention of a general audience, outside of the Sci-Fi Channel. Set in 2052, the series follows eight astronauts aboard the international spacecraft Antares, as they set out on a six-year tour of the Solar System. The hook is that eight really hot and brainy people are stuck together in tight quarters. Now what could go wrong? Sex and the SpaceshipRon Livingston (Office Space, Sex and the City) plays lead hunk and chief engineer Maddux Donner. He exhudes the right combination of sexy and damaged, making Donner irresistible to the ladies, especially geologist Zoe Barnes, played by Laura Harris (Dead Like Me), and pilot Nadia Schilling (Florentine Lahme). Since Antares is “the most ambitious exploration in the history of mankind,” its launch is surrounded by all the pomp of the Apollo program. The show hearkens to an era when space flight was an imperative, before it became workaday. But Antares’ glory is somewhat tainted by an earlier mission to Mars, during which two astronauts were left behind. Donner and Commander Ted Shaw (Malik Yoba) were on that mission and not everyone is pleased with their presence on Antares. Ads by Google
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Book your flight to Space! An Accredited Space Agency www.galacticjourneys.com/ Making the CutThe four women and four men accepted into this highly exclusive club first had to pass a battery of tests to guarantee their physical and psychological fitness, so how did they manage to get on board with all the emotional baggage and neuroses? In part because the selection process wasn’t entirely objective, which explains the selection of physicist Steve Wassenfelder, played by Dylan Taylor (The Incredible Hulk), a porn-loving nerd who nearly drowns during a candidates’ endurance test. As in Lost, there is a mysterious force at play, furtively referred to as “it” or “Beta” by the handful of people who have priority clearance. Beta makes its preference clear for who will go on the mission. The select few who communicate with Beta includes Shaw’s wife, Eve (Karen LeBlanc) who works in mission control. While there’s plenty of existential angst and flirting aboard Antares, mission control is herded by men and women in black and military types exchanging knowing looks. They mutter things like, “When will you tell them?” and respond to each other with “Copy.” And there are clues that the NSA is somehow involved. Leading the pack is mission director Mike Goss, who was mission commander on the ill-fated Mars mission with Donner and Shaw. He may not have their best interests at heart, but Andrew Arlie (The 4400), who plays Goss, also gives the impression that when all is said and done, he may be the crew’s salvation. Entry, Descent, and LandingOne of the most awkward aspects of the series is Donner’s narration: “...being an astronaut is all about control. From the launchpad to the final touchdown, you don’t want surprises.” Often prosaic, it’s meant to guide the audience through the emotions of what it is seeing. (Biologist Jen Crane is going to be separated from her husband, Rollie, for six years! Can't you feel her pain?) To get into the characters’ heads, Defying Gravity cuts from the mission to the crew’s video diaries and flashbacks that go back five years, showing how the crew was selected and trained, and how, along the way, they bonded with each other and with members of the ground crew. Everyone is articulate to a fault, poetic even. One engineer describes being cut from the program as being “without a rudder in a fierce wind.” One head that is painful to get into is Zoe Barnes’, Donner’s erstwhile love interest. She’s so frivolous and dotty that it’s hard to believe that she’s an astronaut, picked from thousands of candidates. The character is so annoying that she has to be a catalyst for something, one hopes. Grey's Anatomy Meets the BBCDefying Gravity was inspired by the BBC’s Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets, the depiction of a future manned mission to explore other planets. The docudrama also follows five astronauts on a hazardous six-year voyage. It was created by James D. Parriott, executive producer of Grey's Anatomy and Ugly Betty. Unlike science fiction shows that propel the audience into the distant future full of rubbery-headed aliens, Defying Gravity features realistic technology. Antares makes use of conventional propulsion. No warp drives, thank you. Gravity is only present in the rotating arms of the ship. But that is not to say that the show doesn’t take liberties with science, because the bottom line is, the science has to fade into the background to let the drama take center stage. All the audience has to know is that nano-fibers in the suits keep the astronauts on the ground and nano-technology in their hairspray keeps them perfectly coiffed. To keep viewers from abandoning ship, Defying Gravity relies on the chemistry of the characters, as well as the mysteries of space, especially Beta. A few of the more interesting characters aren’t even in space, including engineer Ajay Sharma (Zahf Paroo), who’s fate seems nonetheless inextricably linked to the Antares. This offers the hope that fans won’t be faced with revisiting Zoe’s secret fear that she might have been better off as a science teacher at an Ivy League school. ABC, Sunday night at 9 p.m., Eastern and Pacific times; 8 p.m. Central. Read more: http://space-tv.suite101.com/article.cfm/review_of_abcs_defying_gravity#ixzz0ROVxnuTF ABC's new science fiction drama "Defying Gravity" takes eight astronauts on a dangerous six-year mission to explore the Solar System and each other.
"In space, there's simply no room for error," barks a mid-21st-century astronaut stomping around his spaceship in ABC's new sci-fi series, "Defying Gravity." In television, of course, there is plenty of room for error; sometimes it seems like one big errormobile. Unfortunately, "Defying Gravity" will have to be listed as one of its well-intentioned mistakes, another of the many peculiar oddities churned out by broadcast and cable every year, every week, every moment of our earthbound little lives. While "Defying Gravity" might be a good title for a sitcom set in outer space, the gravity being defied here is of a more sober, serious, scientific sort. At least the series makes an attempt to correct the estimates of space breakthroughs projected in 1968 by Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke foresaw humans larking about the universe willy-nilly no later than the turn of the century. And there was that big spooky mission to "Jupiter . . . and beyond," remember? Zero-gravity toilets had been invented but somehow communism had survived. It isn't made terribly clear, at least not in the first episode, what kind of planet Earth has become by the time "Defying Gravity" occurs. In fact, it isn't clear what time "Defying Gravity" does occur. As the series begins, we don't know when it is, but soon there's a caption on the screen that says "2042 -- 10 Years Earlier -- Mars." Ten years earlier than what? Never mind, because by the next commercial break it's "5 Years Earlier" than 10 Years Earlier. It begins to seem like a game. Or a twist on that backward episode of "Seinfeld" when the mission's destination was merely India. Space travel can't be all that common by 2042 or even 2052, because the crew of the big ship spend a lot of time talking about it. "Space travel is a fool's game," someone says, twice, followed by a meditation on how much water is being toted around in your typical human body (we're 60 percent water, a scientist says). "Being an astronaut is all about control," one space ranger philosophizes. "Man belongs in space," another crew member pipes up. "We're resilient; we can adapt," says somebody else or maybe the same one. "I've never felt more alive or more human," says an astronaut as the crew settles down for a long trip to Venus that is also apparently going to be a six-year "grand tour of the solar system." It's all terribly confusing, but then quite a bit of sci-fi gets by on passing off the terribly confusing as profoundly mysterious. The unfortunate truth of this mission is that you're going to need a whole lot of patience to get through even the first hour of it. Things do seem to be happening: One crew member's vasectomy is reversing on its own ("bit of a sticky wicket," as the British used to say); two potential crew members must report for physicals when large amounts of "calcified plaque" turn up inside them; one astronaut has to improvise an EVA (that's extra-vehicular activity, as those of us who remember the '60s will know) to save the ship, and an astronaut says she got pregnant from a one-night stand, but just how long are the nights out there in Spaceville? Some of the special effects are beautiful and seem lavish for television, but as the movies of the past couple decades have shown, jim-dandy special effects can take you only so far, and now that TV shows are as special-effected as commercials have been almost since TV began, audiences have every reason to be jaded about them. The story has to be strong, and "Defying Gravity's" isn't. There are no monsters, at least on the premiere, and that's disappointing. Then again, considering all the sex talk, there might be some of those "monsters from the id" that Professor Morbius talked about in "Forbidden Planet." That was the big, wide, scary one from MGM that gave us Robby the Robot -- way back in 1956. "Defying Gravity" takes us not back to the future so much as forward to the past, and it takes its old sweet time about it, too. Defying Gravity (two hours) premieres Saturday night at 9 on ABC. Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/31/AR2009073103780.html
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