This story is part of Welcome to Mars, our series on exploring the red planet.
Once you introduce people into the infinite vacuum of space, they will fill it with the worst and the best - personal problems, cultural prejudices, pettiness, but also ingenuity and optimism.
All of this can be seen in Away, a solid Netflix drama starring Oscar-winning actress Hilary Swank. It joins a small fleet of films and television shows, and offers the Earthbound a real-life glimpse into the sacrifice and struggle inherent in space exploration.
Away is based on a 2014 Esquire article by Chris Jones about NASA astronaut Scott Kelly who spent a year aboard the International Space Station. The show picks up on the basic themes of the article, such as addressing physical and emotional distance from loved ones, and broadcasts them to an international team of five astronauts, led by Commander Emma Green (Swank), who are embarking on a three-year year Round-trip travel to Mars for the first time.
The show divides their time between the crew of the Atlas spaceship, who floats around fixing life-threatening problems while dealing with their excitement and fear, and Green's family in Houston.
In the first episode, a health crisis at home forces Emma, who is waiting on the moon to head to Mars, to choose between family and mission. Meanwhile, an incident causes some of her crew members - including older, more seasoned Russian cosmonaut Misha Popov (Mark Ivanir) - to question their leadership skills.
The message is clear: if Emma had been a man, none of this would be up for debate.
Away shows that even the most emerging women are not immune to drama and sexism in the workplace.
If Emma chooses a job, she's a bad mother. If she decides to have a family, she spits "women in the face" everywhere, as one character says. It's an almost impossible dilemma. But nothing is more believable on Swank's shoulders than her full freedom of movement from worried wife and mother to highly skilled NASA astronauts and, most importantly, people trying to figure it all out.
Gender dynamics isn't the only piece of luggage loaded into the hold of the Atlas. Away is also aware of the trip to Mars as a "global effort" that puts astronauts from the US, India, China, Russia and the UK in a tin can. Space policy is their own business.
"Reaching Mars could prove to be the greatest achievement not only for science, but also for our planet," Green said at a press conference before the launch. Not everything is in harmony on board, as the crew members learn to relate to one another and to accept each other as individuals with different life experiences and cultural frames of reference. Chinese astronauts Liu Wang and Emma, for example, are excited when it comes to how they approach parenthood from space and what they mean as symbols in their respective countries.
It's hard not to take space seriously. It's a death trap. In recent years, several shows and films have shown with solemn tones how difficult it is to explore space. National Geographic's Mars has interspersed real-world documentary footage and dramatizations of the colonization of the red planet to explain everything from dealing with long-term psychological stress in space to the seemingly inevitable battle between the scientists who want to study Mars and the companies who wanting to strip it for resources. Hulus The First focused on the least sexy part of the whole process: politics and bureaucracy.
With this in mind, there are moments when Away takes narrative paths familiar from other TV dramas. For example, each crew member gets their own backstory - some more successful than others. Certain characters develop feelings for one another in the midst of this stressful situation. Swank begins visualizing her husband Matt (Josh Charles), a NASA engineer, on the ship, advising her, and helping her through her troubles.
There are also fun space things. Mischa makes vodka. The botanist Kwesi (Ato Essandoh) deals with the cultivation of space lettuce. Everyone agrees that the Chinese space agency packaged the best food.
Overall, Away is a beautiful, well-done drama that highlights just how human even the best of us are, even in the least philanthropic situations.
