Lower Decks

The following includes spoilers through “Threshold,” originally broadcast 8/9/09.

The most crucial thing about any new series is how well its initial pretensions hold up past the first episode. In a way, viewers of ‘Defying Gravity’ had a sneak peak of that on debut night, when the second episode was aired directly after the first. But the true test is when those viewers have to wait the week for a new one, as they would normally have to for a weekly series. Does the show have something interesting, or just a minimal supply of curiosity that can’t be sustained? Being a serialized drama, ‘Defying Gravity’ has already assumed that viewers will answer in the affirmative, and the network seems to have agreed, because otherwise there would have been very little point in airing back-to-back episodes last week (except for an accelerated schedule, which NBC has been doing to a certain extent with ‘Merlin’ this summer). “Threshold” isn’t the first regular episode, but it might as well be; it’s the first opportunity in three hours for the creators to sit back and take a more expansive look at itself, and at least as far as this reviewer is concerned, it was worth it.

At this point, the long-term appeal of the cast and the scenario it’s found itself in becomes more important, not less, and in a serialized drama, that’s almost more important than what an individual episode has to offer, but what’s more important still is whether a new episode has something new to say, or if there’s development of any kind for the characters. “Threshold” succeeded on these points as well. As the narration of Maddox Donner (Ron Livingston) suggests, the episode is about crossing boundaries (which is certainly an appropriate topic), what it means to do so, our choices, and if they should be crossed at all. Again, this isn’t hammered over the head, but articulated in a number of interesting ways. You’ll remember me mentioning Ajay Sharma (Zahf Paroo) last time, the flight engineer Donner ended up replacing on the mission-tour of the solar system. He went through quite the dramatic arc in the first two episodes; here he begins to accept the radical change that has introduced itself to his life, a sense of chaos where he was always the model of order. The door he crosses ends up not being Mission Control but his own apartment, which he had packed up in anticipation of being away from for six years.

Another quite literal door is also a metaphorical one: Ted Shaw (Malik Yoba), who replaced Rollie Crane (Ty Olsson) as commander of the Antares, becomes much more than the guy who tagged along with Donner on the failed Mars mission ten years earlier and happens to be married to Eve Shaw (Karen Le Blanc), one of the main figures at the ISO Mission Control; he becomes a functional character, finally, after going through a pointedly catatonic experience with the mysterious Beta, which I’ll be addressing a bit later in the review. Ted, as I said, wasn’t much of a presence for the first two hours, and I probably should have referenced that in the first review as a dissenting negative opinion in an otherwise positive notice, so for him to be put in a position where he is suddenly going to matter, especially as Donner and Zoë Barnes prep for Venus exploration, is even better timing than realizing that, yes, he’s commander of this mission. When he finally snaps out of it, he comes directly to life and steps right into the role and presence he should have had from the beginning.

But he’s one of several people in this show who know what’s really going on — actually, it seems, almost only himself and his wife Eve, or so it seems, besides other members of Mission Control including Mike Goss (Andrew Airlie). But he’s got other issues as well. What ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ alum James Parriott has accomplished here better than a literal ‘Grey’s’ spin-off in ‘Private Practice’ is establish the characters with their various interconnecting and continually conflicting histories so that the viewer will actually care, once they sort it all out. Donner and Zoë are the best illustrated of that romantic mess so far, but Ted and Eve are getting there, too. Back to the five-years-ago training period, Ted had a thing going with Jen Crane (Christina Cox), who’s best been known so far as Zoë’s best friend, but who is also married to Rollie, which would have put quite a different context to the HALOs featured in the episode, devices intended to curtail the libido issued to each of the astronauts (and the subject of some amusement five years ago, when they first became acquainted with them; Ajay factors surprisingly into those sequences, in a way that sort of eludes me at the moment in the overall arc of his role in the episode, when he manages to beat it, entirely against his will). Given that Rollie was originally supposed to be onboard, he and Jen would have had an interesting time, but now that it’s Jen with Ted out there, that’s all the worse for Rollie, who otherwise has been quite the professional about all this.

Anyway, there’s also Paula Puke, I mean Paula Morales (Paula Garces), the host of the documentary segments that give humans back home an intimate perspective of the mission, who’s gotten sick, which doesn’t seem to work well with quirky Steve Wassenfelder (Dylan Taylor), who’d be right at home, say, in ‘Big Bang Theory’ with Sheldon, Howard, and the rest of that gang, which is unrelated, we would think, to everything else going on, but I guess we’ll see. The remaining members of the cast, Evram Mintz (Eyal Podell), Nadia Schilling (Florentine Lahme), and Claire Dereux (Maxim Roy), have minor moments once again that will hopefully lead to more expansive roles in future episodes.

The matter of Beta, then. When Ted visit’s the bay that’s supposed to house this entity, all he sees (and we later have confirmation that it’s what Eve has seen as well) is the surface of Mars, and whether that indicates that Beta also happens to play prominently in the botched events Ted and Donner experienced in the past or not will probably be answered in time, as will Beta’s role as a whole, but for now I like the approach as it is. As a big fan of ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’ (now ten years completed), I can’t help but draw a parallel with the Prophets, the wormhole aliens worshipped by Bajorans and approached a bit more skeptically by Starfleet, whose existence as even Sisko couldn’t deny (before he ever learned that he was, in fact, half-Prophet) was unlike a conventional entity’s. Beta is like a completely secular Prophet, at least as it’s been presented so far, and contact with it isn’t something that presents a pretext that explains anything, even in riddles, and that’s what makes even Ted as a completely inward-turned figure more compelling than he’d previously been. He’s our first contact with Beta, our first reaction, and it’s a profound one. Ted doesn’t know what to think, and so it seems he can’t think at all, no matter what his crew or Mission Control does to try and reach him. And then just as suddenly, he’s back on his feet and better than ever.

But Beta is apparently working some kind of biological control over these people, and not just those on the Antares, but Eve as well. Just as it made Ajay and Rollie medically unsuitable for a six year mission, it’s still maneuvering the remaining characters in play. To what end? Yeah, well, we’ll see.

“Threshold” makes it clear that the initial instances of ruminating on the matter of procreation wasn’t a mistake, as the HALOs themselves make clear, as well as the unresolved fate of Zoë’s pregnancy from five years earlier. For whatever reason, the world forty years from now is quite keen on getting a lid on population expansion, and I doubt it stops at the astronaut program. Maybe the more it gets talked about, the more we’ll understand, that, too, but as long as the people who have been born are as interesting as these characters, I don’t think there’s much to be concerned about.

I don’t know how many episodes there’s supposed to be in this season, but I have a feeling that I’ll be writing quite a bit about them. ‘Defying Gravity’ is the kind of show that plays the game and rewrites it at the same time. There should be plenty to talk about.