Date of airing: April 12, 1998 (HBO)
Ah damn it, and I thought some part of the episode would also depict the actual mission of Apollo 7, but it looks to me like the writers and producers were only interested in the tension before and during liftoff, which by itself delivered proper tension already, considering the backstory of the Apollo 1 fire and how everybody feared that another accident would be the end of the spaceflight program and give the win to the Russians. With everyone being anxious enough about that accident to almost ghost their way through work and preparation, and always having to fear that some random reporters will continuously ask them about the fire and what might go wrong during their mission, I would feel pressured to perform above and beyond as well. Although I was curious as to why no one was feeling the pressure about mission parameters set after the launch. After all, the launch is not the only part of the mission, right? Maybe a few minutes could have been spent at the end of the episode to depict the actual mission of Apollo 7, just to help the audience figure out that there was more to the mission than its launch? I don’t know anything about the Apollo program before Apollo 11 and after Apollo 13 (therefore, this miniseries comes at the right time), so it would have been nice to get into that a little more. Even more so after the Apollo 1 tragedy, with the launch of Apollo 7 standing in as something of a “moving on” moment.
Again, the writers tried not to focus on the character at all and instead only put time and effort into showcasing how much pressure there has been to put on a successful launch. There were a few moments during which Wally Schirra looked like a true character in a scripted television show, when he was worried about the wind speed and explained what could happen when the wind is too strong during a launch, but the latter was very much a scientific factoid of the Apollo missions, as was Donn Eisele’s story of how he was supposed to be part of the prime Apollo 1 crew and was therefore retelling his feelings of relief, shock, and guilt later. It’s almost like both the historical figures of the story, as well as the writers recreating the events, decided to put their hands into a box of cliches and be as calm and non-confrontational about the topic as they could have been. Okay, I get why Donn wouldn’t go into an hour-long therapy session about how he felt after the Apollo 1 fire, because you simply wouldn’t do that during an interview for a documentary film, but that moment had something scripted to it, and I know I’m saying that about a scripted television drama.
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| Man's greatest sport has to be filmed by a documentary crew. |
Still, consider me surprised when I heard that the prime Apollo 1 crew looked differently before and that both the backup crew, as well as all the other astronauts, were essentially scheduled to lift off at one point, and they all had to think back about what happened in 1967, going through the motions of what might have been if they had been in the command module on that fateful day. The former info was new to me, and the latter was barely used as a character-defining moment during this episode. Then again, shouldn’t the fire have been thrown everybody involved at NASA and in the Apollo program forward, now even more eager to succeed in the mission and bring mankind to the Moon?
I loved the notion of how important it was to get every aspect of the Apollo 7 flight right. Focusing on the pad crew, as well as on the astronauts, was a great idea, because no we all know what actually happens during the time the astronauts sit in the command module on top of a rocket for seemingly hours, barely doing anything except flipping switches and talk to Houston or Cape Canaveral, waiting for the countdown to hit zero so they can finally lift off. It turns out that the pad crew was doing the heavy lifting before the launch, which is something space flight dramas have never depicted before, and I was close to believing that the launch pad was cleared hours before the launch, simply because what else need there to happen after the astronauts have been placed in their tin can?
Putting a documentary crew into this episode was also a neat idea, as it allowed the viewers to quickly get past the dramatic and traumatic events of the previous episode, and get back into spaceflight and Apollo program science and mathematics (and physics, and apparently the weather as well). I could imagine this episode being the hardest science episode of the entire show, as the entire final act didn’t have a story at all and instead just depicted the pre-launch procedure, which could not have been more boring for anyone not interested in spaceflight. It was basically the moment in FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON that defined its audience: Those who loved the moment are space (flight) nerds (like me, but APOLLO 13 and CONTACT turned me into that back in the 1990s), and those who were bored were most likely tuning out of the show after this hour, because why would they be interested in seeing the characters flip switches?
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| Günter Wendt watches the start on his futuristic iPad. |
It also shows what the producers thought of the show in general: Yes, it’s HBO, and sometimes on HBO you can do whatever you want, as long as HBO is happy it is getting money back from customers, but the last 15 minutes were dry of story and instead drenched in technical spaceflight procedure. As if you were in it, taking part in it. No action, no drama, no excitement. I get why that would be alienating to some Michael Bay fans. I get why you would moisten all the spaceflight fans out there with that. Tom Hanks, being the spaceflight nerd that he is, may have been super excited about the last act of this episode, and I can’t blame him. And in a way, I was more excited about those minutes than Tom Hanks probably was at home, watching the final cut of this hour.
One thing about Günter Wendt though: He wasn’t perfectly cast. Max Wright did a terrible German accent (he tried though, and that counts for something), and I had hoped for the producers to have cast an actual German actor for the role. But I guess 1990s television wasn’t ready for inclusivity and never even thought about casting international actors for non-American roles.
