Date of airing: April 5, 1998 (HBO)
Nielsen ratings information: 5.19 million viewers
I have always been thinking about watching this miniseries, but I also always got the feeling that I wouldn’t know or understand a lot about the technical aspects of spaceflight, even though APOLLO 13 has been one of my all-time favorite movies for forever, and it even turned me into something of a space nerd as a kid (similar to how the Apollo program was Tom Hanks’ time to turn into a space nerd, hence the existence of this miniseries), Still, FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON was released, but it wasn’t appreciated on German television, as it never found a network it could air on, so I had to wait for the DVD box to be imported, let alone know how to import DVD boxes and have a bank account to do so. At one point I did exactly that – I just turned 20, I just joined the military and was in training, and I had my portable DVD player with me to kill time in the evenings, since I wasn’t much about having friends anyway, so why not watching films and television on my little device as I became accustomed to weapons and military jargon? Then I started watching it, and I realized I was bored because I didn’t know the technical facts, I didn’t know the historical points of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, let alone the characters and real-life persons involved in them. A little more than a decade later, Ryan Gosling became Neil Armstrong for the Hollywood biopic FIRST MAN, which is a film I loved and could follow without a problem (and that was a surprise to me, considering the Mercury and Gemini projects were sort of swallowed up by the fact that FIRST MAN is a simple biopic), so I figured it was time to tackle FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON once more. Here I am now, making my way from the Earth to the Moon.
And holy cow, now I am disappointed that the Mercury and Gemini programs get breakfasted like this show is an eating competition. I know that there wasn’t a lot of excitement during the history of both programs when you look at it from a storytelling point of view, and the Apollo missions had more potential for Hollywood in general (two missions defined by tragedy, and one historic mission), but I was more interested to get to know about the Mercury and Gemini missions, especially since FIRST MAN went into making the Gemini 8 failure a damn fine thriller I would love to see for real at one point in my life. Granted, the left roll on Gemini 8 was the first real problem NASA and the astronauts had to deal with in the race to the Moon, but both Mercury and Gemini are too much of an important factor before the Apollo program to just gloss over that in record speed of 59 minutes. Besides that, focusing more on the Mercury and Gemini missions would have given FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON an opportunity to properly introduce the astronauts and the cast that was portraying each and every single one of them. Thanks to this being America in the 1960s, the astronauts very much looked all the same, and so did their portrayers. I needed the end credits to realize that Heisenberg himself was playing Buzz Aldrin, and that Cary Elwes was in this show as well (I recognized his 90s babyface during the “All Hands” meeting, which was the last scene of the episode). Yes, we already know all the people from the history books, but since they were also part of this scripted retelling of history, it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea to also introduce them as characters within a narrative, which FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON wants to have.
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| "This is how we're going to do this!" |
This is essentially the biggest problem I had with this episode, and it’s the same problem I might have had with BAND OF BROTHERS as well – too many characters figured as important by the narrative, and this from the very beginning. BAND OF BROTHERS made it easy by creating the boot camp premise for its first episode (which was clever to have a mostly successful attempt at introducing most of the regular players), but FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON had a bit of a different problem: The writers wanted to get more into the historical aspect of the space race than the characters who were part of it. Let’s quickly go through the Mercury history, and then showcase one important Gemini mission after the next. After all, isn’t the Apollo program the thing the viewers want to see and the writers want to get into and the directors want to showcase? The idea to make an hour-long anthology show about the astronauts involved in the big firsts wasn’t there? Yes, having Neil Armstrong get out of left roll for 40 minutes would have taken away from any potential future biographical drama about his life, but no one in the late 1990s cared for that, since no one was probably interested in a Neil Armstrong biopic. That interest may have been woken up by the APOLLO 11 movie (not the gripping CNN-produced documentary, there was actually a TV movie about the mission that aired on The Family Channel in 1996), as well as the box office success that was Ron Howard’s APOLLO 13.
Then again, I don’t know if I would have had the idea to specifically focus on one or two characters during an entire episode and depict the specific mission they were on. And who knows, maybe that is to come throughout the next eleven episodes, as BAND OF BROTHERS happened to be character-focused as the miniseries went on. Does it mean we will get to know Ed White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee as characters in this scripted narrative before they meet their fiery deaths? And what I’m especially interested in is how much synchronicity will there be between FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON and its companion FIRST MAN from two decades later. I mean, if the Apollo 1 episode comes, I’m kind of expecting Neil Armstrong to be in the White House... And no, I did not check whether FIRST MAN was historically accurate or Damien Chazelle chose some liberties for the sake of dramatic purposes.
Besides the historical pieces of this hour of entertainment, as well as the troubles I’ve had with it, this episode was still fun to watch. Having removed most of the political criticism of the space race was a pretty nice move, because I wouldn’t have been able to handle the onslaught of characters, history, as well as politics, for the first hour. Even the animated educational clips produced by NASA were hilarious, especially when Chaffee was playing them for an impatient and annoying audience that probably couldn’t have handled all the science talks Chaffee would have given otherwise (maybe he was just too hungry to hold a presentation on spaceflight). Seeing famous faces during these 59 minutes was also fun. I’m sure I probably know more than half of the big-name faces in this episode from other shows, so it’s gonna be a surprise to see this or that person here. Bryan Cranston and Elves just being two of them. Sometimes it’s fun to have television A-listers in shows where no one really knew them, or they were about to break out in a few years.
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| "Look! We're actually doing this!" |
All I want from FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON now is the focus on single characters during their moment of fame, while also the writers diving into the deep of the stories they were retelling. I want to know much more about the space race and the Apollo program, and I don’t think I will learn anything from it when the only usable education this show is giving me is the names of the “First [insert achievement] in space,” even if that happened to be a nice touch during this episode. Maybe more politics, now that the characters are hopefully getting focused on, especially during the Apollo 1 mission. Okay, I’m already having some expectations of the show I’m not sure they can be met, but especially after the fire, there has to be a storyline in which the characters face the fear of their program being canceled, because their worst nightmare has become true. It’s a whole storyline all by itself that needs to be part of this show.
