Paul Levinson's Infinite Regress

reviewing Black Doves; Citadel; Cross; Dark Matter; Dept. Q; Dexter: Resurrection; Dune: Prophecy; For All Mankind; Foundation; Hijack; Memory of a Killer; MobLand; Outlander; Paradise; Presumed Innocent; Severance; Silo; Slow Horses; Smoke; Star Trek: Strange New Worlds; Tehran;The: Day of the Jackal, Diplomat, Last of Us, Night Agent; Your Friends & Neighbors +books, films, music, podcasts, politics

George Santayana had irrational faith in reason - I have irrational faith in TV.

Showing posts with label Mars. Show all posts

Friday, May 15, 2026

For All Mankind 5.8: Firing on All Cylinders

Ines Asserson

For All Mankind was firing on all cylinders -- literally and figuratively -- in episode 5.8, up on Apple TV today.

The main action was the approaching attack on Mars by the Earthly multi-national alliance, and the defense that our Martian heroes mounted. Celia (Mireille Enos) and Leonid (Costa Ronin) were a good duo to mount the defense, and we get a better understanding of Leonid, his ethics and prowess, in this dangerous undertaking.

On board in the attack from Earth is A. J. Jarrett, granddaughter of the world-famous Tracy and Gordo Stevens, characters that I really miss in this multi-generational story (there is no else in the current story who have their unique mix of outrageousness, heroism, and sheer style). Jarett (Ines Asserson) is a complex character to begin with, and what happens to her when she gets to the Goldilocks asteroid will make her far more complex and conflicted.

Meanwhile, there's also a classic drama brewing with the crew that has landed on Titan. As we saw last week, Kelly Baldwin defied Captain Griebel's command that the Sojourner turn around and go back to Mars, rather than make the perilous landing on Titan. But Griebel doesn't yet know that Kelly did this -- he thinks the failure of the Sojourner to turn around was his fault, some mistake he made in the programming. He's determined to find out what he did wrong, but you and I both know that it's just a matter of time until he realizes what Kelly did. I like these kinds of powder kegs in narratives.

And just to end on a musical note: I really like Ollie's song, "A New Life," played twice in this episode. As soon as I can find a video of it up on YouTube, I'll post it here.

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Saturday, May 9, 2026

For All Mankind 5.7: Titan!

Finally, an inspiring episode this season -- 5.7 -- of For All Mankind. An episode that captures the essential quality of what we humans need to do to push the limits our existence, and through science and spirit get ever further out into this infinite universe.

[And there will be spoilers ahead ... ]

The set-up was perfect. The Mars settlement is continuing to destroy itself. Earth is no help at all, and indeed is making life on Mars worse. One of the two missions to Titan -- the largest moon around Saturn, replete with an atmosphere, and therefore a possibility of life -- has failed and taken with it its crew. The captain of the other mission, with Kelly Baldwin on board, wants to turn back. But Kelly has other ideas. And ...

The mission lands on Titan! The final scene of the crew standing on Titan, looking at the darkly clouded sky, was wonderful. We may call it a moon, because Titan revolves around a planet, Saturn, not the sun. But we're walking on another world, the furthest away from our homeworld of Earth that we've traveled so far. That's an epitome of progress.

I will say, though, that I wish For All Mankind would stop presenting communication from Titan to Mars as instantaneous. The same for communication between Earth and Mars. Since the show isn't postulating that in this alternate history in the 2010s we humans figured out a way to send messages across these enormous distances at a faster-than-light speed, there would be an inevitable lag in the communication. I understand that For All Mankind is ignoring the lag for dramatic effect, but I think these scenes would be more effective if they respected the laws of physics.

Back to the narrative: Dev may not have intended to hurt let alone kill anybody, but launching that attack against the Martian greenhouses was still unconscionable. I've been pretty much a fan of Dev up until episode 5.7, but I have to now classify him as a demented maniac with a god-complex. Given what happened, Lily did have a great idea for a birthday present for Alex, but the two would have been better off celebrating Alex's birthday is his room.

And back to Titan: I hope our team discovers some kind of life there. And if it's intelligent life, that it doesn't have it in for us.

And I'll be back here next week with a review of the next episode.

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Tuesday, May 5, 2026

For All Mankind 5.6: Earth vs. Mars

Episode 5.6 of For All Mankind, up on Apple TV since late last week, was a middling good episode depicting the rising tensions verging on war between Earth and the human settlement on Mars..

First, Earth vs. Mars is a well-trodden topic. On TV, it was well explored in The Expanse. In books, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy did an excellent job of it. The best part of this episode, for me, was seeing the role of the Soviet Union, still in existence and thriving in this alternate history. The kiss between Lily and Alex was also nice to see.

The ending of the episode promises an interesting stream with Dev now determined and on-track to doing something big to stop and/or surmount the escalating conflict between Mars and Earth. Bringing Dev into For All Mankind in the first place was a good dramatical move -- he's a wildcard, like Musk and Bezos in our own reality. All have billions of dollars, rankle under the yoke of governments, and have the power to march to some extent to their own drums. In Dev's case, he may not only have this power, but the wherewithal to impose it on the US, the Soviet Union, and the countries on Planet Earth. We'll see.

Actingwise, Edi Gathegi as Dev is a good choice to deliver the goods. And speaking of acting, Mireille Enos's Celia is by far the best of the military on Mars. There's also a lot of potential in the Titan mission, and what it might discover there. I don't know if we'll get a chance to see that this season, but I'm looking forward to more -- more profound developments, more eye-opening, brain-teasing wonders in our solar system, more than the ICE-like agents on Mars, which (as I've said in my review of episode 5.5) I've already seen more than enough of in our real world these days down here in the United States.

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Friday, April 24, 2026

For All Mankind 5.5: ICE on Mars

Well, I have mixed feelings again about the latest episode -- 5.5 -- of For All Mankind, up on Apple TV today. On the one hand, it's crucial to speak out against the murders and general brutality that ICE has meted out in its treatment of protestors in our reality right now in the USA. I give The Pitt on HBO Max high marks for integrating into its narrative the manhandling and arrest of a health-care worker who dared to stand up to the ICE agents who were interfering with the treatment of someone they had brought into the ER. But that was just one thread in a complex, multifaceted story, the rest of which had no relation to ICE.

In For All Mankind 5.5, we're treated to a full-scale attack on the "Mars is Ours" protestors on the Red Planet. It's ordered by the current Governor of Mars -- Leonid Polivanov (Lenya, a former Soviet cosmonaut, played by Costa Ronin, who portrayed a KGB operative in The Americans), and is reminiscent of both the British attack on America in the Revolutionary War, and the current depredations of Federal agents in the past months in our own country. (This happens in For All Mankind after we and the protestors are reminded in episode 5.3 that the First Amendment doesn't apply on Mars.) From a political point of view, I was glad to see this reminder of the attack on our freedoms that is going on right now. It's necessary to keep these attacks on our democracy front and center, by all means possible.

But that doesn't mean I enjoyed the episode, and this part of its alternate history. It was fun to see Ted Kennedy elected President (no Chappaquiddick), and John Lennon not assassinated. And I know that for an alternate history to be believable, it can't be all a bed of roses. So episode 5.5 deserves credit for that, in addition to reminding us of the ongoing fascist attacks on our democracy. But after watching protestors beaten senseless on Mars, I nonetheless hope there are more brighter interludes in outer space in this series.

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Friday, December 22, 2023

For All Mankind 4.7: Dev on Mars

Well, I was waiting for Dev to have a major role in this season of For All Mankind on Apple TV+, and in episode 4.7 he gets it.

He's the first person person we've seen who wants to spend the rest of his life on Mars. He made that clear in a previous episode this season. And that means he thinks differently from everyone else. He's truly a person of the future.

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

The alliance he makes with Ed Baldwin at the end of the episode shows Ed feels the same way about Mars. That, indeed, is why he's already stayed there so long. His leadership of the strike, and his opposition to Poole, were rooted in his view of himself as a Martian, whether he was fully aware of that or not. NASA and everything else that comes from Earth is increasingly something that literally and figuratively come from a different world.

About the strike, I'll just throw in my two cents that it was wrong to remove a crucial piece of equipment. There's a fine line in a strike between refusing to work and damaging equipment. And though the people at the site were wrong to try make the equipment work anyway without that crucial part, I think the blame for the explosion is with whoever removed it in the first place.

Last point I'll make about this important episode is it's good to see Margo back in Houston, however uncomfortable she -- and Aleida -- may feel about that. I have a feeling good things for the human species will come from it.

Chuck Todd and Paul Levinson talk Alternate History, including For All Mankind

Tuesday, September 8, 2020

Review of Tobias Cabral's New Eyes: Newer Worlds

Tobias Cabral picked a good time to send me his 2018 novel New Eyes for review. Mars is in the air. Actually, it's always been in the air, or at least, at the top of the air, in the sky. But NASA's Perseverance is on its way to Mars, with a landing date in February of next year. Elon Musk wants to colonize the Red Planet (I'm 100% on board, here's a talk I gave at the 19th Annual International Mars Society Convention at The Catholic University in Washington, DC on 23 September 2016):

And I just saw, loved, and reviewed the first season of Away on Netflix.

Cabral's novel starts in February 2047. Trips to Mars take just four days. There's a space station named "Jeff Bezos," a ship named the "Elon Musk," and androids are "equipped with ‘minds’ that could not just pass but proctor the Turing Test" (italic and quotes around 'minds' in the novel). And, at least one is capable of murder. With the result that New Eyes is just as much in the tradition of Westworld and the new Raised by Wolves (see my reviews) as it is a descendant of The Martian Chronicles and The Martian.

But as the title suggests, the fulcrum of this narrative are eyes, in particular Gaspar's "Martian eyes". The character's a "bio-cyberneticist," women desire his body, and his new eyes in effect make him a human on the way to becoming an android, in the time-honored Six Million Dollar Man way.

The novel also has resonance to the work of Orson Scott Card (sims play an important role, as in, you often can't tell what's really really real) and, to my eyes, at least, the novel reads a lot like Isaac Asimov (a big compliment in my book). But as to the plot, well, Mars is "a mostly-unpopulated planet" at this point, and this "young Martian society" is populated by humans and increasingly by androids. Could this actually happen by 2047? Probably not (more because of the androids than living on Mars). But my late editor at Tor, David Hartwell, always told me that readers are willing to grant you at least one big part of a story they find unbelievable, and I'm happy to grant Cabral that. I should also mention that Cabral throws in a bit more repartee humor than does Asimov -- someone comments that someone has a "nice assonance... that sounded naughty" -- and there's even some rapping in this story.

But that still doesn't tell you much about the nuts and bolts of the plot, does it? You'll need to set your eyes on the novel to find that out. Ok, I'm in a good mood. Here's a quote from the novel: - think "alternate branches in a Many Worlds Hypothesis time travel story". And enjoy.

first starship to Alpha Centauri leaves from Mars Vestibule ...

Sunday, September 6, 2020

Away: Relationships and Reality in Space

My wife and I just finished binge-watching Away, a 10-episode series, on Netflix. I can't recall a better movie or television series about missions to Mars or early human settlements on Mars, and that includes contenders like The Martian, The Martian Chronicles, and Total Recall.

The great strength of Away, that puts it in a class of its own, is its attention to families and loved ones of astronauts back on Earth, and relationships among the five space travelers in the Atlas. These include Hilary Swank in one of the best performances of her career as U. S. Commander Emma Green and Mark Ivanir, whom I don't think I've seen before, as the Russian cosmonaut Misha with the most previous experience in space. Vivian Wu as Lu (Chinese), Ray Panthaki as Ram (from India), and Ato Essandoh as Kwesi (from Africa, and devoutly Jewish, which adds a religious dimension to the story) round out the international crew. Each one of has a special combination of talents, and powerful personalities which are often abrasive, vulnerable, and usually devoted to the mission, which makes for a compelling tableau of a first mission to Mars narrative with humans aboard.

Missions to any world off this planet are inherently perilous just about every moment, and Away conveys these dangers unsparingly and harrowingly. Fortunately, The Good Wife's Josh Charles plays Emma's husband Matt, who is good at both taking care of their understandably very worried teenaged daughter Alexis (well-played by Talitha Eliana Bateman) and coming up with some ingenious solutions to the Atlas's problems in space. But none of these solutions are easily implemented, and to watch the ten episodes of Away is to be treated to a continuing set of close encounters with failure and death, often stunningly presented, and making you feel that you're in a front-row seat somehow somewhere in space or on the ship, watching the incredible events unfold.

Two minor quibbles. One, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow puts in an appearance as herself early on, and she looks exactly as I just saw her last night on MSNBC. Since Away must be taking place at least a decade or two in the future, what did Rachel do, drink some immortality tonic in the next year or so? Second, the Atlas crew talk to people back on Earth via instant smartphones for the first half of the journey, and then normal phone conversations become impossible. In reality, the capacity to have a conversation should have deteriorated gradually and continually throughout the voyage to Mars.

But there are small quibbles indeed, and I very much hope there's another season.

my Summer 2015 interview with John Glenn

Friday, December 2, 2016

Mars 1 and 2 on National Geographic: New Kind of Helping Hand Into Space

Just caught the first two episodes of Mars on National Geographic, and wanted to post this review before I see and review more.

First, this series is a great amalgam of documentary - up to and including events in 2016 - and a drama about the first expedition to Mars with humans in 2033. That's a great idea for a story, and it works very well on screen.

The main of the part of the documentary, so far, is Scott Kelly's year in space mission, which ended successfully in March 2016. This is counterpoint to the 2033 mission to Mars, in which team leader Ben Sawyer is badly injured right before landing and ... well, I won't tell you how that works out, because that's the main personal drama in the first two episodes.

But the point of this new kind of docudrama is that the personal stories are part of the bigger story, the yearning and necessity of human beings getting off this planet, and successfully settling on another planet - in this case, Mars. Not a complete migration by any means, but establishing enough of a continuing existence to insure our survival if and when something catastrophic happens to Earth. As Elon Musk of Space X and other worthy fame says in the first episode, this is the only way to insure our survival - since catastrophes happening to both Earth and Mars at the same time are extraordinarily unlikely.

The cinematography in both 2016 and 2033 is stunning. We've seen all kinds of fictional accounts of space travel - ranging from The Martian to Star Trek - and all kinds of docudramas, such as Apollo 13. I've loved all of them, both as riveting stories in their own right, and as vehicles to getting our imaginations in better gear to actually get further off this planet and out into space.

We'll need all the help we can get, and its good to see Mars now lending a big, bold, imaginative helping hand.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Life on Mars 2nd Episode in America: Coma, Time Travel, Mars Rover

The second episode last night of Life of Mars - American style - provided a few more clues as to what is really going.

Sam puts up a list of explanations about how he got from 2008 to 1973. Coma is at top of the list, ahead of time travel. The others - drugs, another planet, multidimensional travel (whatever that is) - I think we can safely rule out.

Why is coma at the top of the list? Because that's by far the most likely explanation. Time travel has going against it the fact that it's intriguingly, deliciously impossible.

But that's in our reality. So the question about Life on Mars can really be put as: is it a show about reality (as are most of the shows on television - cop shows, hospital shows, etc), or is it ... science fiction? Time travel, of course, is not only possible in science fiction, but is one of its staples.

On the actual evidence so far, coma looks the more likely explanation. Sam saw flashes in the first episodes - which could have been doctors shining light into his unconscious 2008 eyes. And last night he repeatedly saw a little futuristic gadget which didn't belong in 1973 - a Mars rover, which landed on the Red Planet in ... 1997. (The Soviets sent two rovers to Mars in 1971, but they didn't look like Sam's 1997 model.) Seeing things that don't belong in the past means that (a) you're dreaming from the future, not time traveling, or (b) objects in addition to what you may have carried with you are traveling to the past. (I'm doubting that somehow Sam is really on Mars...)

But come to think of it, even Sam's clothes were 1973 when he first arrived there. Another argument for coma.

But, I don't know, coma seems to easy and obvious an explanation.

At this point - and I haven't seen the BBC series, so this is truly just based on the first two American episodes - I'm thinking it's somehow coma as well as something else, maybe time travel... Hey, is that "multi-dimensional travel"?

See also Life on Mars Debuts in America ... Life on Mars Goes On in America: What Happens When a Time Traveler Runs Into His Earlier Self? ... Life on Mars #4: All in the Family ... Life on Mars #5 Meets the Wire ... Life on Mars #6 Meets Itself on Television ... Life on Mars #7: Is Annie Real, Or, Is Life on Mars a False Memory

The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Thursday, June 26, 2008

Mars Soil Suitable for Asparagus - Can Humans Be Far Behind?

"It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard, you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well" - this from Sam Kounaves, lead scientist investigating the soil on Mars, via the Phoenix that landed there on May 25, after a 10-month journey from Earth.

Kounaves added that he was "flabbergasted" about the finding.

It's thrilling news indeed, even if you don't care for asparagus. Because even if there was no life on Mars in the past - and this finding certainly makes it more likely that there was - a soil hospitable to life is a big step towards the terraforming of Mars, or making it hospitable for current human life.

The Martian atmosphere is still too thin, the water picture not yet clear (ice may have been found, just beneath the surface), but the soil beneath our feet on Mars is an excellent foundation indeed for extending our world on Earth to our neighbor to the "north" in the solar system.

Sunday, June 1, 2008

Ice is Nice on Mars

"challenging fun"
- Entertainment Weekly

e-mail received from a reader:
Dear Paul, I just dreamed of airships flying between raindrops. I just returned from 2042 CE, where I sold my hardcover copy of The Plot to Save Socrates for seventy million Neo-Euros, because it had your response to this e-mail from way back in 2007 scotch-taped onto the inside of the cover. A Paul Levinson collector paid top Neo-Euro, because of the authentic archaic e-mail printout from you. It turns out that not many of your e-mails from before your tenure as CEO of HBO/Cinemax and terms as United Nations Secretary General will survive that far into the future. So, please respond to this e-mail, to help found my great-grandchildren's fortune. My Will will stipulate that they must share with your great grandchildren. Thanks! Tom

I of course happily replied...

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