Date of airing: April 26, 1998 (HBO)
Nielsen ratings information: 3.82 million viewers
Apollo 12 – the most boring and forgettable mission of all, because the two most essential things that happened during the mission were the call for SCE to auxiliary, as well as Al Bean smashing the TV camera with a hammer, giving nothing but emptiness from the Moon back to Earth. It’s kind of interesting how this episode is going to be in sharp contrast with the next one, or maybe just the film APOLLO 13 itself. Apollo 12 seemed like a perfectly executed mission, in which everything went as it should be, if you exclude the little moment of panic during the liftoff when lightning hit the spacecraft and served the three astronauts a couple of seconds of heart attacks. Apollo 12 seemed like the mission to tell yourself that lunar landings aren’t that exciting anymore because you don’t know anything about the science behind the missions or aren’t interested in it, so you lose interest in the entire program, simply due to nothing exciting happening during the mission. Apollo 12 was the mission that might have started the rumor of NASA losing some of its funding, since the Russians have ended up being the sore losers of the “Race for Space,” so why should humankind continue going to the Moon? Why should the American taxpayer continue to pay for a program that brought the desired outcome a few months ago?
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| Lights! Camera! Action! Moon landing! |
The contrast is ridiculously intriguing, and damn, would the show have been great if it had found a way to join Apollo 12 and 13 somehow, and show that the space missions are never easy and that even Apollo 12 had moments so tense, your heart would have jumped out of your chest, even if it didn’t look like for almost the entire episode, thanks to the ludicrous easiness of the crew and how Alan Bean commented from the off that the three have been best friends through flight training, the actual mission, and then afterwards. Damn, Al Bean, Pete Conrad, and Dick Gordon talked and hung around each other like they were a set of triplets, never to be separated, always being with each other, experiencing the same adventures, having the same interests, talking the same words while doing the same jobs. If this had been a porn parody, it would have been certain that the three guys were all into each other, intertwined and laughing and happy, and definitely not ashamed or embarrassed over how dirty they are, never humiliated by the thoughts they expressed with words, and ready for the climactic finale (that sounds like the most wholesome porn ever). I almost can’t believe that the three were indeed best friends forever, because the Apollo 12 mission must have run like a well-oiled machine and I never think that any of the Apollo missions ran like well-oiled machines.
Barely anything worth mentioning happened in this episode, so what can there be said about this hour? Maybe Paul McCrane took some of his cocky attitudes into the character of Pete Conrad, or maybe Conrad really was this carefree and friendly and funny and on-the-nose and freaking foul-mouthed during training. Maybe Dave Foley was a little too youthful for his character and his face looked like he was a proper astronaut with some experience, yet his voice sounded like he was about to spend a hot summer with a 17-year-old in a random small town during 1950s America before getting killed by a murderous shape-shifting clown. And maybe I would have loved to see more of Dick Gordon, because what FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON hasn’t managed to do yet is give examples of what the command module pilot was doing when the commander and LEM pilot were on the Moon. Dick was obviously working on something, but dammit, I’m interested in seeing what the command module pilot is doing when the real action is happening on the lunar surface, and I’m especially interested in learning what they do and think about when they are alone for a day or two. The missions got only longer with each Apollo flight, so it’s even more important to showcase what happened in the command module, and what this kind of loneliness and isolation can do to someone professional as an astronaut who was trained to be in isolation for an extended period of time.
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| It was getting a little hot in here. |
Plus points for all the funny moments of the episode though. “Survey – Her activity” gave me a good chuckle (was this the first and only time someone looked at porn on the Moon?), and Pete and Al getting into the command module naked after docking was also hilarious, because I can’t imagine they were indeed strapped in and prepping to burn their way out of lunar orbit without wearing any underwear. By the way, together with the nude pictures on the Moon, that was the first R-rated imagery of this very G-rated production of HBO – consider me surprised.
