Date of airing: September 11, 2009 (CTV) | September 13, 2019 (ABC)
Nielsen ratings information: 2.45 million viewers, 1.6/3 in Households, 0.8/2 with Adults 18-49, 1.0/2 with Adults 25-54 (on ABC)
written by: Susan Nirah Jaffee
directed by: Fred Gerber
In which the crew of the Antares gets a look into the storage bay pod 4, and the only thing we see from it is the yellow/orange light illuminating out of it. It is not much of an ending, considering the characters get to see what the viewers do not get to see, even though some things can be said about how the characters were reacting to the light (in a way, the characters knew more than the viewers did, which seems to be the breaking of a TV writing rule). Paula looked like she was witnessing a religious moment within the light, while Donner and Ted seemed to be happy they are currently not dealing with one of their traumatic hallucinations. It is great that the characters are about to have some of their questions answered, although most of those questions will be asked between this and the next episode. Still, with the writers going forward with one of the show’s mysteries and having it depicted, established, and its backstory developed, the show levels up, the characters are dropped into a different mission, and DEFYING GRAVITY is not just a show about a bunch of astronauts on a mission to visit some planets any longer. The show is about to change with the mystery being revealed to the characters and the viewers, and no matter what kind of mystery everyone is facing now, it can only advance the show.
Until the closing moments of the episode, the writers made it pretty hard on the characters to even get to that end, and because the episode was destined to close with the yellow/orange light, it needed to be filled with another premise, so the writers came up with the story of following order and how painful it can be, how conflicting it should be for your own good, and how evil and torturous and barbaric it is being seen and noted by the astronauts. Ted and Donner already know that following orders means the death of their friends, so they know what Mike Goss’s repeated “follow orders” mantra means, but the way the flashback story captured the theme of the episode, even I was wondering whether the characters just swallowed the moral and did not even think about asking questions about the order, no matter how appropriate or not the questions were. I mean, following orders that mean distress to someone else... Are you allowed to stop following orders, to question the order? After all, remember how Nazi Germany came to be and how six million Jews and even more million soldiers lost their lives between 1939 and 1945, simply because some Germans were following orders, without asking questions.
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| Astronauts are always training their endurance. |
The question can be asked whether this episode was somewhat of an allegory to Nazi Germany during World War Two and whether the idea of genocide can be repeated, after a superior person taught their underlings to always follow orders and never question those orders. The ascans certainly were not questioning those orders, but when they did, they were reprimanded for it. Wassenfelder had to run an extra two kilometers (poor overweight man), and even Zoe defied the shock therapy test after a short while before being ordered to follow Wassenfelder on the tracks. And we might not have seen how Jen was reprimanded for going back to look for Zoe during the fire alarm, she was certainly paying for it somehow, and maybe not just by running another two kilometers with Zoe and Wassenfelder.
The continuity of this episode was splendid though. All this time, Mike Goss was teaching the ascans about following orders, and every time those orders were questioned, lives were in fact at stake, even if the emergency happened to be a drill. During the fire alarm in the storyline from five years ago, Jen and Zoe could have died if it had been a real fire, and all this because the two women did not follow the order to go up the stairs for evacuation. On the Antares, if the solar flare had been a real one, Jen and Zoe would have been close to death, simply because they did not follow the order to evacuate to the radiation shelter. Of course, one can say that in emergencies where lives are at stake, orders have to be followed, but the notion of Zoe and Jen being the two potential victims during the two potential crises both in the past and on the Antares shows that the writers knew what they were doing here and how they were putting a mirror between the flashback and Antares story. A thing happened five years ago, and on the Antares, the characters follow the lessons they learned five years ago. Or they make the same exact mistakes they made five years ago. It is pretty easy storytelling for a show like this, but the way the continuity lines up is astonishing.
Meanwhile, the thrill that came out of a potential solar flare was great as well. After eight episodes you were probably asking yourself what would happen during a flare event, and here you got the answer. I am however surprised that DEFYING GRAVITY did not copy that one thing from BBC’s SPACE ODYSSEY miniseries from 2004, in which the ship was surrounded by a magnetic field, protecting the crew from the Sun’s radiation. The Antares has so many weird and hilariously far-fetched tech to explain the gravity on the ship, but this is the one science-fiction element from the BBC two-parter they did not take over and I wonder why. It might have been due to budget constraints, because a magnetic field needed to be animated during all the exterior shots of the Antares (and out the windows of the observation deck), and maybe the money was not there for additional VFX. Besides all that, the run to the radiation shelter and the crew’s efforts to turn off all electronics was pretty cool. It is a simple yet effective little action scene that was filled with tension. Sometimes it is quite astonishing what you can do when you depict characters running from point A to point B in a race against time.
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| Wassenfelder is more than just Mister Exposition now. |
By the way, the ascan program is pretty crappy when it comes to giving certain ascans privileges. I know that Donner and Ted are already astronauts and have been on a mission, but seeing those two guys not run a 5k, not do the shock therapy test, and being the ones giving out orders during the fire drill, would have made me icky. They are ascans for the Antares missions, they should have been doing all the training as well. Some training elements, like the 20 minutes in the pool, were unnecessary for Ted and Donner, who have already proven they could swim (although maybe it should have been necessary for them to get into the pool to prove to the suits upstairs that they still have the stamina), but if I had been an ascan, I would have asked some serious questions about the two men during the whole “following orders” lesson, as maybe Ted and Donner stopped following orders after the Mars mission. *Especially* after the Mars mission.
Finally, someone in the writers’ room had the idea to put Schrödinger’s Cat into a dialogue scene, including the explanation of the experiment. As if someone in the room heard about the experiment for the first time and thought it was so cool that it needed to be in a script. Also, how could Paula not have heard of Schrödinger’s Cat before? Even I heard of it in physics class during my high school days, and that was at least half a decade before I watched this episode for the first time. And I sucked in physics class.
