This is just a quick note: Away is a new Netflix series about a manned mission to Mars. The first season has ten episodes and takes us from launch to touch-down. I enjoyed it for its mixture of high-tech adventure, interpersonal drama, and political maneuvering. The high-tech adventure is standard stuff, things don’t work and so the crew must cope; the mission almost falls apart two or three times, maybe four – I wasn’t counting.
There are five in the crew: an American, Emma Green (Hilary Swank); a Chinese, Lu Wang (Vivian Wu); a Russian, Misha Popov (Mark Ivanir); Ram Arya (Ray Panthaki), from India; and Kwesi Weisberg-Abban (Ato Essandoh), British-Ghanaian and Jewish. As you might imagine, tensions between nations show up in relations among the crew. That’s what makes this interesting. We are implicitly asked to read interactions between crew members as a metonymy for relationships between nations. Spoiler: when they touch down on Mars, the crew presents a united front.
At the same time crew members have their own problems with family and friends on the ground. While we get personal background on all the crew, current day interactions center on Emma Green, Misha Popov, and Lu Wang. Of those three, Emma Green, who is also the mission commander, has the most complex situation. And those are the ones representing the most powerful nations.
It will be interesting to see how this develops in subsequent seasons, assuming the series gets renewed.
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