New TV shows 'Away,' 'Raised by Wolves' take viewers through emotional terrain of leaving Earth
Raise your hand if you used to be one of those people who were not at all interested in going to Mars. (Boring, costly and creepy - right? To say nothing of viable.)
But lately? After a rough several months of 2020, getting off this planet is looking better all the time.
Netflix's intriguing but overwrought new astronaut drama, "Away," is a couple of steps ahead of you on this. It's another melancholy and occasionally triumphant take on the brave souls who will someday set foot on our neighboring Red Planet - a journey that "Away's" creator, Andrew Hinderaker, showrunner Jessica Goldberg, and some big-name collaborators (including Jason Katims and Ed Zwick) present as both a fait accompli and a deadly risk.
"Away" - which begins streaming Friday, Sept, 4 - is set more or less in the current day, as an international space cooperative prepares to launch a five-person crew on a three-year trip to Mars and back.
Oscar-winner Hilary Swank stars as former Navy pilot Emma Green, the commander-designate of the Atlas I mission. She's fulfilling a dream that dates back to her Montana girlhood, yet it's tearing her apart. She's a wife and mom, and "Away" seems to be counting on her tears as a sustainable water supply.
"Away" regards the angst of leaving Earth as a more important obsession than the destination; the whole series is built around the pain Emma feels by leaving her husband, Matt Logan (Josh Charles), a mission-control expert and former astronaut who is permanently grounded by a genetic medical condition, and their daughter, Alexis (Talitha Bateman), a high school freshman.
It's easy to be drawn to "Away's" determination to dredge through emotions more than the science, because what could be more profound, more unsettling, than to leave one's planet, knowing that the only way back depends on flawless machinery and math?
It's too bad the series lays everything on so thick, resulting in a work of television that feels far too routine. Ever wondered what it would truly feel like to be on the first trip to Mars? Turns out, it feels a little like a zero-gravity season of "E.R.," or some other network drama in which an ensemble of highly trained experts must overcome their personal issues and simmering conflicts to get through another day of urgent crises.
While fueling up at NASA's nifty lunar base, the Atlas craft barely dodges a deadly mishap that has Chinese astronaut Lu Wang (Vivian Wu) and Russian cosmonaut, Misha Popov (Mark Ivanir), doubting Emma's leadership capability.
Two other characters on the crew - Ram Arya (Ray Panthaki), a hotshot Indian fighter pilot, and Kwesi Weisberg-Abban (Ato Essandoh), a Ghanian-born British botanist - exist mainly to provide trite flashback material, as "Away" methodically and often tediously fills us in on what makes each of these pioneers into the people they are.
"Away" is earthbound at least as much as it's in space. While Emma endures the monthslong trip to Mars, her husband and daughter experience setbacks (major and minor) that keep her in a suspended state of work/life agony, especially as the Atlas leaves the reach of iPhones and the emails begin to take a half-hour to send and receive.
Emma's constant need to check in with Matt and Alexis - freaking out when a text goes unanswered for a day - begins to feel like a sexist form of penance for her "choice" to leave them. While watching Swank strain to give a meaningful performance, it seems a shame that so much of "Away" dwells on keeping Emma at this fragile brink.
And yet, it is this fraught combination of personality, psychology and physicality that remains "Away's" strongest thematic anchor. Who do we become in space?
Pushing far forward, from space drama to a welcome dose of high-quality science fiction, a viewer might be more tantalized and even disturbed by the initial episodes of HBO Max's "Raised by Wolves," creator Aaron Guzikowski and executive producer Ridley Scott's baffling story of two 22nd-century androids (Amanda Collin and Abubakar Salim as "Mother" and "Father") who flee a war-torn Earth for a distant but inhabitable rocky planet called Kepler-22B.
Once there, Mother and Father have been tasked with raising a six-pack of fetuses (it's Mother's job to wire herself up to the amniotic packaging and bring them to term), with the idea of rebooting and repopulating the human race.
Programmed to protect and educate their brood according to atheist principles, Mother and Father discover Kepler 22B isn't as nourishing an environment as their creator might have hoped. They endure the loss of several of their children in the early years, followed by the unwelcome arrival of a space Ark carrying members of a religious sect called the Mithraic.
As her maternal instincts kick in, Mother reveals an ability to weaponize herself into a flying siren to ward off invaders (Collin gorgeously intuits her character's artificial command of logic with an Annie Lennox-esque mystique). This means war, instigated by an interloping criminal (Travis Fimmel) who has joined the Mithraic with his ruthless companion, Sue (Niamh Algar), as a ticket to escape Earth.
Here, science fiction has every advantage over "Away's" schmaltzy realism. "Raised by Wolves" (the first three of 10 episodes premiered Thursday) is just as much concerned with the same theme - the limitations and demands of parenting. But it also gets a chance to devise an entirely new and unfamiliar code of after-Earth ethics.
Even when "Raised by Wolves" gets bogged down by its frenetic plots and a brutal vision of what lies ahead, the show seems exactly right about one thing: A whole new world should totally feel like a whole new world. That's the point of breaking free.
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"Away"
Begins streaming Friday, Sept. 4, on Netflix
"Raised by Wolves"
The first three episodes are currently streaming on HBO Max