Lower Decks

The following includes spoilers through “H2IK,” originally broadcast 8/16/09.

The numbers are in for the first three episodes, and they certainly don’t look all that great. ‘Defying Gravity’ will likely have its run this year and that’ll be it (unless you’re Canadian, because the numbers look better there). The complaints, as mirrored at this very site by my colleague forst, are that the series is just too soapy. Oh, and maybe that serialized television may have run its course. The signs have certainly been there for years: ‘Lost’ frustrated fans when they quickly realized they’d really have to watch everything to figure out what was going on. ‘Heroes’ couldn’t even sustain interest, after a while, over the course of a half-season arc. ‘Battlestar Galactica’ promised a series arc about a “plan” at the beginning of every episode, but never bothered with that at all, so naturally fans were quite happy to sustain their devotion to it. Next episode, ‘Defying Gravity’ (yeah, five episodes in) is poised to deliver the goods on the mysterious Beta. These days, fans have already waited too long! At a time when procedural and reality shows have demonstrated a rank ability to sustain interest week after week and the only sitcom to register any significant audience is loathed by critics, now might be the time to wonder if ambition is a death sentence, gimmicks are better than real quality, and the best days of television are slipping into the past.

‘Defying Gravity’ may have the biggest gimmick of them all, but it chooses to embrace it rather than wear it as an excuse to be noticed, because clearly, being noticed isn’t what genre on TV does these days, so the series does the gimmick one better by weaving it into the terrific sense of reality the characters inhabit, as the best premises do. The best genre shows that rely on a serialized approach don’t approach an overarching story as a burden, either, but as an extension of the characters, their circumstances, and how the two mesh into an episodic approach that strengthens the sense of the ordinary in the midst of the extraordinary. The emphasis ‘Defying Gravity’ places on relationships isn’t a detriment for fans, then, so much as a chance to feel as comfortable and natural as the characters themselves do. Most interactions we face on a daily basis shouldn’t feel so different from this, whether you’re deeply entangled in romantic issues like Maddux, Zoë, and Nadia, figuring out how to live with each other like Paula and Steve, or merely being there for each other, like Jen and Evram. Oh, and there’s always Ajay to feel sympathy for, or Mike to hate.

I love this show, and those like it, because it’s so easy to find myself emotionally invested in the characters. For some people, that’s the whole point of watching actors perform, not just to see them get out of the way of the “kewl” stuff around them. For others, the challenge is to find an interest in this sort of thing because what they’re really looking for is something to escape into. ‘Defying Gravity’ is the kind of show that walks that fine line between characters and the big story they’ve been dropped into. If the viewers who are looking for that big story are patient enough, I believe the series will give it to them. But that’s what kind of show this is, clearly: one that might ask for too much patience, even if, as I said, just five episodes in they’re going to be rewarded.

“H2IK” is the kind of episode that demonstrates the worth of holding on to that patience, because a number of things really start to bloom. Last episode, we already saw the effect Beta could have on a character like flight commander Ted Shaw (Malik Yoba) when it changed him from a nonentity to a working figure on the Antares mission and among a crew that had already placed a number of interesting characters in front on viewers. Maddux Donner (I apologize in retrospect for using a “o” instead of a “u” in the name Ron Livingston is going by here), already poised as the lead of the ensemble since the beginning, is pushed a little further when we learn a few more subtle aspects of what made the Mars incident so significant. Among the five-person crew he and Ted were a part of ten years earlier was also Mike Goss (Andrew Airlie), the current Mission Control commander (a fact that might have been suggested earlier but not nearly as emphasized) and a woman named Sharon Lewis. Sharon was Donner’s significant other at the time, so it was that much more tragic that she was among the two colleagues the team had to leave behind, casualties they still reflect on five years later as the new mission gears up, and just as easily five years later still, as the new mission is finally underway.

Since the start, the show has been flashing between the training period and the mission, so it’s been no surprise each episode since to alternate between the periods. If you were hearing about this facet offhand, you might assume it was “borrowed” from ‘Lost,’ but the approach is so different as to make the point moot. ‘Defying Gravity’ has fixed points, and each member of the ensemble is free to be featured, and nearly everyone is always present in each period, where ‘Lost’ spent most of the episodes where the flashes were featured centered on individual characters. This episode there happens to be a little more focus than usual, owing to the celebration of the Mars anniversary, at which point Mike becomes the guy that much easier to hate when he offers a toast in bad taste. Donner is in bad enough a mood, but Ajay also has to remind him that he’s so much more knowledgeable about the ship’s systems, which introduces the acronym from the title of the episode.

In the present, both things become relevant again. I’ve made allusions to ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’ before, but this is an episode that makes is easy to do so again. Whereas Beta seems to be an entirely secular Prophet, if you will, its effect is less distilled as well; there are no quick-fix therapy sessions available here; if Benjamin Sisko were described as living in the past in the first episode of that series but seem no worse for wear about it the next (other than a general brooding he would never really break free from, other than to altered contexts), ‘Defying Gravity’ is ready to take it the next step and let its characters suffer and try and save themselves more naturally. Donner is a character who’s a ladies man and a complete professional and someone who’s perpetually haunted by his own failures, a complex individual who works with all that constantly, and this episode, he narrates how that’s possible, by refusing to accept that he’s alone in having to deal with all that. He’s got Zoë and Ajay he can depend on. Nadia Schilling (Florentine Lahme) has been a lingering figure, never really having a defining moment until now, but her healthy sense of sexuality finally breaks through here when the audience and Zoë (Laura Harris) learn that she’s a “friend with benefit” for Donner, and has to explain to Zoë that she isn’t her competition, but that Sharon Lewis is. That’s life.

The relationship between Paula (Paula Garces) and Steve (Dylan Taylor), meanwhile, evolves as well during an episode that’s essentially your basic crisis moment every sci-fi show seems to do, where characters are paired off and deal with whatever form of coping they’re faced with. They’re platonic, but the kind of make-nice rivals that could turn otherwise in the future. Paula’s better, thank you, after being sick throughout last episode, but this is a fine extension of her experiences then.

We get some added mileage out of psychiatrist/medical officer Evram Mintz (Eyal Podell) as well, another character who’s been roughly sketched in the past but receives much-valued attention this episode. He’s been trying to keep secret that this mission is perhaps that much more tough an endurance test for him than the others, because he’s a recovering alcoholic, and we learn perhaps why when both he and the audience revisit the horrors of war he had to experience. With just that little bit, it’s easy to see him with just as much potential to drive episodes as Donner or Ajay (Zahf Paroo), who’s continued post-mission plight moves a few steps forward when he proves useful in all the ways Mike Goss never anticipated. But then, it’s just that kind of an adventure.

‘Defying Gravity’ isn’t heavy drama or heavy romance or heavy sci-fi, but rather a combination of these things and more, a playful mixture that above all places the characters as the most important element, and this is exactly the kind of episode that allows the viewer to enjoy that fact, know what kind of show it is, what it’s capable of, and why there’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of it.