“Mars” (9 p.m. Mondays, National Geographic Channel), the year’s most hyped science show, fails to capture the wonder of 2014’s “Cosmos,” which brought science to mainstream audiences with remarkable entertainment value. This is partly because “Cosmos” allowed host Neil deGrasse Tyson and his team to choose fascinating topics from throughout history, whereas “Mars” focuses on one thing: The first manned mission to Mars, which – if one is to buy the premise – will happen within the next two decades.
But I’ll still be back for a second episode, because “Mars” is packed with food for thought. It’s homework, but it’s accessible near-future sci-fi homework that makes me feel smarter for watching it.
Still, I find it interesting that the Red Planet has lost its sense of wonder through the years; we’ve thought about going there for so long that the concept now seems anticlimactic. “Mars” is a mix of real-world interviews and a fictional story of the first manned mission, set in 2033, and it inadvertently drives home the point that we as a culture won’t care nearly as much about this historic moment as we did about the first moon landing. Think about the number of movies about moon missions prior to 1969, and compare it to the number of mission-to-Mars movies, and our collective malaise makes sense.
The pilot episode of “Mars” is more deliberate and science-y than most sci-fi, but it still feels like something we’ve seen before. A team of astronauts with a variety of accents makes the initial landing after Ben Sawyer (busy actor Ben Cotton, who I recognized from “Hellcats”) heroically swaps out a computer part that allows the rocket to make a successful landing.
While this scene is familiar, it comes interspersed with real-world interviews about how a rocket landing is essential to the Mars mission. Throughout NASA’s missions, rockets were not designed to land; they just launched the requisite vehicles into space. The astronauts ultimately returned via capsules that splashed into the ocean or space shuttles that landed in the style of airplanes.
But for the Mars mission to be fiscally viable, rockets must land, and they must be reused. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a commercial enterprise that has received some government contracts, is currently working on landing a rocket using reverse thrusters, but it hasn’t achieved it yet. We see real-world footage of a SpaceX rocket almost landing on an ocean platform, but it explodes.
Another thing I filed away in my Mars knowledge is the concept that buildings, equipment and supplies must be positioned at a base camp before human beings land. Also, the astronauts’ rocket must itself be packed with about 40 tons of stuff so they can survive. (For comparison, the Mars rovers that have sent back pictures of the rocky wasteland weigh about 1 ton.) By the end of the episode, the point was driven home: This isn’t a mere step beyond the moon missions; it is exponentially more difficult. (This makes sense, as Mars is 200 times farther from the Earth than the moon is.)
While Ben’s heroics allow the rocket to land without casualties – although he seems to have broken some ribs, at least – they have landed 75 kilometers away from the base camp. (This equates to 46 miles, but I had to look it up myself; “Mars” doesn’t take pity on primitive 2016 folks who aren’t on the metric system.) One of the astronauts remote-pilots a rover from the base camp, so the episode ends with a mixed bag: They aren’t all going to die just yet, but they needed all the supplies on the rocket in order to survive until the next mission visits. The rover was not meant to transport those supplies. Also, even if Ben merely has broken ribs, injuries on Mars are worse than injuries on Earth, simply due to the logistics – he’ll likely be fighting to survive in episodes to come.
These logistical elements emphasize another point: The first manned mission to Mars, despite the decades of pre-planning, will have a narrow margin for error every step of the way. Before the launch, Ben announces that someone – and perhaps even all of them – will almost certainly die on the mission. But in the mindset of men and women who are wired this way – including Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell, briefly featured – it’s worth the risk to accomplish something that’s never been done before.
I found the argument for the “why” of the Mars mission to be compelling, if only in a macro sense. Whereas we went to the moon out of “want” (inevitably, we see JFK’s “because it’s hard” speech), we’ll go to Mars out of “need.” One scientist in the real-world interviews says that if humans establish a colony on a second world, the odds of extinction fall to almost zero.
That makes a Mars mission essential if one is thinking in terms of the human race’s fate, but it’s not enough to make me share the astronauts’ enthusiasm. One of them, in his pre-flight interview about what he’ll miss about Earth, cites fresh air coming off the ocean. The very idea that he’ll never experience that again (this is a one-way mission, at least for the pioneering astronauts) gives me a claustrophobic feeling.
Once Ben takes a limping historic first step onto the rocky surface, the Red Planet struck me in its lack of redness. It looks like an Earth desert; the post-production team does nothing to make the sky look different from Earth’s whitish-blue. I’m not sure if this is worthy of criticism, or if Mars does indeed look superficially Earth-like from the perspective of the surface.
The biggest problem with “Mars,” though, is the same thing that plagued another show from this TV season: “Pitch,” a fictional present-day story about the first female Major League Baseball player. It’s hard to care about a historic “first” that’s fake. Past Mars movies have provided more drama – Arnold Schwarzenegger’s dream sequence in “Total Recall” comes to mind — although it’s likely that “Mars” is more scientifically on-point than those efforts.
Still, while the minute-by-minute thrills are a bit lacking, I feel like “Mars” is preparing me for this historic event. I would’ve been fine with a documentary about the pre-planning rather than this fictional docu-drama mix. But I will admit that the giant “2033” title card adds a sense of urgency to the proceedings, even if the fictional drama in that year doesn’t land smoothly.