AND WE HAVE LIFT OFF
There are men on Mars but, importantly, women call the shots on the red planet,
Men are on Mars, women are in command — at least Hana Seung is in Olympus Town, in the gripping TV series Mars.
That’s until Kurt Hurrelle, the Indiana Jones-style boss of the mining company Lukrum shows up.
Lukrum’s landing on Mars sets the scene for the second season about humans making the red planet their home, and the inevitable tensions between the pursuit of science and profits, and competing international interests.
The show has its own tension, switching every episode between a fictional script and documentary inserts — including on earthly conflicts and issues like the ice in the Arctic melting or climate change.
Despite being sceptical I found the hybrid format flowed, with “big thinkers” and environmentalists giving more texture to the Mars story.
Mars, with this “genre-busting mix”, ranks as the second most-watched and the most DVR-ed series in its history, says National Geographic. But it may not be for everyone.
Mars aficionado Stephen Petranek, who wrote the book How We Will Live on Mars, which sparked the series, was concerned that reality would be distorted for the sake of the drama in the show. Instead he has found remarkable attention to accuracy and detail in the script and on set.
“The idea behind the book was to be a wake-up call to people,” he said in an interview. “You see fiction. I do not see fiction, I see reality. The only fiction is the story between the human beings and their behaviour.”
“The chief technical officer at Nasa has worked closely on it. The rocket in the first series is very close to what would be used to land on Mars, if not identical,” says Petranek, who had the chance to comment on every script.
Even the spacesuits are the most sophisticated model developed by Nasa.
“This gives the cast a sense of authenticity. Actors have told me they are thrilled to be on Mars,” he says.
Petranek, who believes people will go to Mars by 2030 — the first landing date in the show is 2033 — was astonished to be approached about converting “this intensely factual book into a narrative”.
Space X CEO Elon Musk, one of the experts on the show, is not kidding about getting people to colonise Mars, he says. The Tesla CEO and Paypal cofounder intends to launch test flights of Mars rockets by next year.
Petranek says: “The driver is Space X. It can afford to make mistakes. We hope a cargo mission will go in the next few years. It could be a failure but we can learn so much. We need a number of cargo missions over the next 8-10 years, then we can have a human landing.”
The Dutch project Mars One, which aims to land 24 people on Mars by 2032, chose a South African physicist to be in the final 100 for selection, out of more than 200,000 applicants. The crowd-funded project has, however, a long way to its target.
Petranek would love to go to Mars. He says: “It would be the greatest adventure of a lifetime but it is a harsh decision: you are not coming back. Everyone in the first 50 or 100 years will not be coming back. It’s way too expensive and not practical.”
You would have to like the cold (or, more realistically, heated air) to live there. Temperatures on Mars drop to -90.5 degrees Celsius in winter and only about a fifth of the air is oxygen, requiring supplementary oxygen to stay alive.
The toll that living in an experimental setting takes on the settlers and mining crew gets amplified by the dangers of surviving on an unexplored planet. These risks, and having relationships, prevent the plot from stalling.
Petranek says: “It is an expensive series to produce [everything is 100% size] and we hope that instead of one season every two years, to do the third and fourth in one year.”
Even though the planet feels alien, the characters do not and they draw viewers in. The dialogue allows the human flaws and feelings to shine out.
Commander Seung (Jihae) of Olympus Town, the scientist who is willing to put her life on the line to protect Martian life, and the doctor all have dynamic female roles.
The boyish leader of Lukrum (Jeff Hephner) is convincing, yet on Mars women call the shots.
Venus has nothing to do with it (on a planet named after the god of war.)
Mars is produced by Academy Awardand Emmy-winning producers Brian
Grazer, Ron Howard and Michael Rosenberg of Imagine Entertainment and Emmywinning producer Justin Wilkes, Academy Award- and Emmy-winning producer Jon Kamen and Dave O’Connor of Radical Media.
Mars (season 2) is on National Geographic, Sundays 20:00. Available on DSTV, StarSat & Black.