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 Spaceship
Ron 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.
Making the Cut
The 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 Landing
One 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 BBC
Defying 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.
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