Mars
Created by Ben Young Mason & Justin Wilkes
Based on How We’ll Live on Mars by Stephen Petranek
Developed by Ben Young Mason, André Bormanis, Mickey Fisher, Karen Janszen, Jonathan Silberberg
Starring Ben Cotton, Alberto Ammann, Anamaria Marinca, Clémentine Poidatz, Jihae Kim, Sammi Rotibi
Composers Nick Cave & Warren Ellis
Hard science fiction is pretty rare on television. I can think of a few made-for-TV movies, a couple of anime series, such as Space Brothers, and not much else. There’s a fair number of science fiction shows on TV, and some of them are quite good, but they are, to quote Gene Roddenbury, “Wagon Train to the stars”. Hard science fiction is somewhat more common in theatrical movies, ranging from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Martian.
The good news is that it’s nearly impossible for hard SF to be idiotic. The bad news is that it tends to be a bit dry, that being the common tongue word for “cerebral.”
Hard science in documentaries is a lot more common and those tend to be easy to tell from idiotic documentaries because they don’t drop breathless hints that Jesus might have been involved somehow, and don’t wave the camera around to simulate action when in fact nothing at all is happening.
Mars was very nearly unique to television: a cable series (National Geographic) that combined hard SF of the purest kind with solid science-based documentary, with actual scientists discussing items related to the exploration of Mars and equating it to the problems of Earth. Most notable were Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, and Kim Stanley Robinson, a man who has devoted a certain amount of thought to the problems Martian colonists might face, and which are reflected in this series.
On the SF side, the science is pretty solid, although it does have its moments of silliness. Exterior shots of craft in space still rumble or whoosh as they traverse the screen. In one particularly silly plot set up, the Lukrum colony, which was self-sufficient in power, is using extra from the orginal colony to allow for drilling. When the supplementary power is shut off, it seems that Lukrum has no power for heat or oxygenation, all die, oh the embarrassment.
Still, silly moments aside, it was an extraordinarily well-crafted series, and it’s a pity it only went for 13 episodes. Intelligent, with plausible plots, and with meticulous attention to detail and science give this series a heft not usually seen on television.