Lower Decks

The following contains spoilers through the episode “Bacon,” originally broadcast 8/30/09.

This is how I know, in case you were wondering, just how involved with D2G I’ve become: last week I stumbled upon a movie Laura Harris (the lovely Zoe Barnes) had made with James Callis (my favorite actor from ‘Battlestar Galactica’), ‘Merlin and the Book of Beats,’ and bought it sight unseen. I learned on the back of the package that Harris had apparently been featured in the series ‘Dead Like Me,’ and by complete coincidence had my first experience watching that show just a few days later. Making personal connections, such as they are, with the actors means I’ve really begun to see this show as something special. (I also saw Ron Livingston in ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife,’ but I’ll whisper that one in case anyone wonders if I’m manly enough to depend on listening to in these reviews.)

“Bacon” is another episode, in an increasing string of them, that helps tighten that bond. As with any good series, it seems to recognize the best ways to explore its best asset, being its characters, and as anyone who’s been watching throughout August (uh huh: ‘Defying Gravity’ is now a month old!) knows, each new episode seems to spiral our connection forward. Initially, it seemed like the show was going to heavily feature Zoe Barnes and Maddux Donner (Livingston) and pretty much leave everyone else as supporting players, but that has proven far from the case. The characters exist as part of a mission, and so they’re part of a family, a single unit (which is part of the episode’s theme, too) that has to coexistent, no matter how difficult that can sometimes be.

I should know. To a certain extent, because I’ve chosen to review D2G each week, I get to experience it in a unique and fairly public way, making it difficult to cover the messy tracks that develop as I attempt to record my experiences and thoughts on the show. I get to correct a few more things with this episode! Yay! So as always, bear with me…

I’ve mentioned part of the theme of the episode was being aware of the need to trust one another, but Donner also meditates on failure, how it seems to be how we best identify ourselves. As always, there are a number of situations that help in this meditation, but the primary one also happens to be that focus on our good doctor Evram Mintz (Eyal Podell) I’d been anticipating. Before we get into what that means, exactly, a few words, er, corrections.

Keeping up with a cast this size has been something of a juggle for this viewer. As I’ve said, sometimes it’s been easier to keep up with some characters more than others. It all depends on which ones happen to be immediately important, and which others wait until later for further development. Evram has been stepping forward recently, but this episode we finally get a bit more from that elusive final main cast member, Claire Dereux (Maxim Roy), who was never part of the actual mission crew, but rather has been one of the figures back at Mission Control. “Bacon” finally helps clarify her role as the person Evram has best been confiding with about his withdrawal and psychological issues (and for those who would like a little thought association, the actor Roy has a number of similarities with one-time ‘Earth: Final Conflict’ star Lisa Howard) stemming from his war experiences.

It’s funny, too, because this episode has something for just about everyone, whereas last episode was the first one for Ajay Sharma (Zahf Paroo), one-time flight engineer of the Antares, to not appear in, after having been such an early and important focus of the series, a fact I neglected to point out in my review. He has a moment or two in “Bacon,” and they are both important in completely supporting minor significance (if that makes any sense to you; he’s always welcome, that is to say, but for the now the focus is certainly elsewhere).

Okay, back to Evram and his friend Claire. The worst things one could say about D2G are that it’s nothing but another prime time soap opera and that its science is…imprecise. A fan of the series will say that the relationships are what make it so compulsively relatable (and therefore watchable) and that it’s science fiction for a reason, set fifty years in the future where things are different. Which is kind of funny, because this episode reveals Evram to be the kind of Bones McCoy doctor who trusts the old methods that are always dependable where technology can sometimes fumble. He’s good at what he does and isn’t afraid to say so. In the flashback portions the whole training crew is whisked away to a medical facility, where they meet one of Donner’s old training buddies (who’s important enough so I’ll bring her up again later) and eventually end up in a number of crises, but important to this paragraph one of two emergencies Evram handles personally. As with other episodes, there are subtle inversions of what happens in the flashbacks and what goes on in the present, and that’s the sort of thing Evram gets to enjoy here, with good old Donner and his fear of blood adding that much more layer, because that’s what D2G loves to do.

Okay, so keeping in mind much of the episode revolves around Evram, his past, and his struggles in the present, which resolve in a full disclosure to Donner and Ted Shaw (Malik Yoba), our flight commander who’s the only one onboard to know about why people are seeing visions, there’s lots more to cover. Steve Wassenfelder (Dylan Taylor), who could be called the show’s Hurley (even though I’ve previously referenced him as a good fit for the nerds in ‘The Big Bang Theory;’ and while I’m on Evram this week, he sort of sounds like another ‘Lost’-away, the late Daniel Faraday), has a lot more awkwardness around Paula Morales (Paula Garces), who tries to makes herself sound good to the crew even though her reporting and general peppiness is probably super-annoying. “Bacon” reveals that this odd couple actually started their routine five years earlier, but pushes it a lot further when an accident severs her thumb, and it’s basically his fault. Less a romantic destination than a powerful bond developing between them, Steve and Paula are starting to become something pretty special for the show. Resident nymph, Nadia (Florentine Lahme), meanwhile, finally hits on the thing that makes ne’er-do-well Steve appropriate for this mission: every now and again, he finds a thumb (see: episode).

Lest you wonder what Zoe has been doing all this time, she gets to deal with the ramifications of the decision she finally made in the flashback last episode, the big “a” plunge. Turns out she actually takes the pill this episode, but it’s really all fall-out, which is wickedly convenient, because that Dr. Winkler friend of Donner’s was the opposite case. She made the decision to stick with the pregnancy, so she left the space program to practice medicine, and by the end of the episode, both are reflecting on how their lives would have been different if they’d made the other choice. For a series with so many characters, once you get the hang of them, you notice how easily it tricks you into caring for even more of them. Also, Eve Shaw (Karen Leblanc), in the flashbacks, possibly reveals something of her own background when she confides to Zoe that she could have used her for support in all of this.

Oh, and Jen’s (Christina Cox) embryonic rabbit Rufus also features in the episode. She lets Zoe in on the secret (more than relationships, it’s all about the secrets with this show, how they affect everyone, and how they can sometimes finally reveal them, like Evram does). Keeping Rufus is against mission protocol, but the rabbit is also Jen’s therapy over having Rollie (Ty Olsson), her husband, at Mission Control, and Ted, her former lover, onboard the ship. She needs something that’s hers.

Anything else? Ah, only that ‘Defying Gravity’ is a show that’s ridiculously easy to become addicted to. But you may have noticed…I might also add that with Evram’s confession this episode, that makes it much easier for Ted to decide telling the crew about Beta. Also, thanks to Paula (and Steve), we know they’re about ten days away from touching down on Venus. Just a bit of housekeeping…I’ve also been thinking, and am putting this down for the record, that if the show makes it to a second season (and/or beyond), I suspect we’ll visit, say, four years ago and so forth. Big thinking…