Review for Defying Gravity - The Complete Series

Introduction

I don’t watch a lot of broadcast television anymore. A fair bit of that comes from having a DVD collection large enough now to never actually need to tune in to television at a broadcaster’s whim. But a lot of it has to do with how television works these days. Twenty years ago, it’s fair to say that I was a telly addict, would watch anything up to five hours a day of content piped through the aerial, and I had a list of shows that I was determined to watch each week. The problem then, as it is now, is that I’m a genre TV fan, I like my sci-fi, I like fantasy, and I like event television. Then, as is still the case, this was television that was more expensive to produce than the rest, and most prone to be cancelled. Then, as now, it would be a lottery as to which shows would succeed and which shows would fail, and I would have a couple of favourites that would go the distance, while the others would fail after a season or two.


The difference between then and now is the plurality of multi-channel television, with genre shows chasing ever smaller niche audiences, coupled with a more ruthless bottom line mentality among studio execs less willing to give a show a chance. That coupled with the way that US television works has resulted in a perfect storm that has by and large turned me off from broadcast television altogether. In recent years, the best case scenario that I could hope for when it comes to a genre show is that its first season would get a run on terrestrial television, and if it garnered any success, subsequent seasons would be snaffled up by Sky, putting it out of my reach. By the time I’d get back around to those episodes, the whole zeitgeist water-cooler aspect of the show would have passed me by. It happened with 24, it happened with The Pacific following on from Band of Brothers and it happened with Lost. It happens often enough that I feel there’s little point in emotionally investing in a show that I won’t see the conclusion of.


The worst case scenario is what usually happens. A US company commissions a sci-fi show, we get the first season, and it fails to find an audience and is cancelled. The last time this happened to me, the last time I tuned into broadcast television for a US sci-fi series was in late 2009, when the BBC showed Defying Gravity. A couple of weeks after the BBC started showing it, the plug was pulled in the US, and although vocal fans pleaded for its return, no clemency was shown. I suppose the writing was on the wall, as it was a show made by Fox Television, and it was given the same special treatment that was afforded Firefly. The second thing was that it was wholly mis-sold. The PPI scandal is small potatoes in comparison! I mean, Grey’s Anatomy in Space. I could have told you for free that rather than attracting two mutually exclusive demographics as they had hoped, it would just end up alienating both. What Defying Gravity really was, how it should have been marketed, was as 2001 the TV Series, a high concept space sci-fi show with a realistic approach to the genre. You would have got a smaller initial audience than the Grey’s Anatomy approach, but they would have been loyal.


In the middle of the 21st Century, mankind is poised to embark on the greatest adventure. A multinational crew is set on a 6 year mission to take a grand tour of the solar system aboard the spaceship Antares, visiting the major planets orbiting the sun. Maddux Donner and Ted Shaw are back-up crew members for the Antares, and have spent the last 5 years working with and training the best of mankind to take on this epic journey. They also have next to no chance of actually making the mission, as ten years previously they were part of a disastrous mission to Mars that left two astronauts to die stranded on the surface. Then, the commander of the Antares and the flight engineer simultaneously develop the same heart condition, and they have to be scrubbed from the flight. It turns out that something specifically wants Maddux Donner, Ted Shaw, and the other six crew of the Antares on this mission, and as the initial leg of the voyage to Venus progresses, and more and more odd occurrences transpire, it becomes clear that this is no simple mission of discovery.


All 13 episodes of Defying Gravity are presented across 4 discs.

Disc 1
1. Pilot
2. Natural Selection
3. Threshold
4. H2IK

Disc 2
5. Rubicon
6. Bacon
7. Fear
8. Love, Honour, Obey

Disc 3
9. Eve Ate the Apple
10. Déjà Vu
11. Solitary

Disc 4
12. Venus
13. Kiss

Picture

Defying Gravity gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer across 4 DVD discs. It’s a very good conversion of a recent show, clear and sharp throughout, with hardly anything in the way of compression artefacts. The only thing you may note is some digital banding around certain visual effects scenes, but the live action components of the programme come across as pristine. This is a show from 2009, so the material ought to be there, but I guess it’s asking for pie in the sky at this point for a Blu-ray release. The show came at a time when visual effects could offer anything that a filmmaker with a modest budget could wish for, and the space sequences in this show are really very impressive. The Antares is brought across well, and you can’t see any of the seams in the effects sequences, except maybe where live action and CGI mesh.

Sound

The only audio track is a simple DD 2.0 Stereo track. The dialogue is mostly clear, except for the modern tendency for realism in acting leading to the occasional mumble. At this point subtitles may be missed. There is a bit of spatial separation in the audio, and some effects do get discrete placement. One thing I remember fondly about Defying Gravity is its theme music. Modern US television with all its adverts doesn’t afford much time for credit sequences anymore, but Defying Gravity manages a memorable theme tune that is very catchy, in just a space of around 10 seconds at the start of each show.

Extras

The discs get solid animated menus, and each presents its episodes either separately or with a Play All option. Select them individually, and you are taken to a screen where you get an episode synopsis and scene select for that particular episode.

The collection’s extras are on disc 4.

Mission Accomplished: A Look at Defying Gravity lasts 10½ minutes, and has the cast and crew talk about the show, and introduce the concepts and the characters, without hinting too much at the story.


Photo Slideshow offers 5 slideshow galleries with concept art and promotional imagery from the show. It’s split up into separate sections for Spacecraft Design, Set Design, Costume and Prop Design, Production Graphics and Promotional Photography, and in total they run to just over 7 minutes.

There are 21 minutes of deleted and alternate scenes taken from 12 of the 13 episodes. You can select from each episode individually, or play it all in one go. Naturally not all of the scenes have been completed in terms of audio and effects work, and the majority come from episode 1.

Finally there are 15 character profiles to read through.

Conclusion

The television industry is a cutthroat business at the best of times, and US television in particular is a bloodthirsty beast that leaves no survivors. It truly is survival of the fittest, and gone are the days when a show would get time, space, and support to bed in. Defying Gravity was cancelled after just eight episodes had aired, and the final five episodes were only streamed online before its US DVD release. I’ve become used to shows that I dare to show an interest in, being culled just when I begin to form a commitment. None has left me feeling so bitter than the cancellation of Defying Gravity. Watching these thirteen episodes again now on DVD was a bittersweet experience indeed, as not only is the quality of the show apparent from the off, not only is it absolutely compelling and engrossing, but every step of the way through the re-watch, I was fundamentally aware of just how much promise this show had, the potential of the stories that it could have told, and what it could have accomplished. It’s the missed opportunities that hurt the most, and knowing it in advance this time actually made the final episode even harder to watch.


Had it gone the distance, Defying Gravity could have become one of the best television shows of our age. It’s because it is unique to my experience. There is still a lot of sci-fi around on television, and there used to be a lot more a few years ago. But that is sci-fi that takes a fantastic allegorical air. It’s space opera, it’s fantasy, it’s unreality and grand fiction, with little to ground it in the real world. Defying Gravity was a hard sci-fi show, something that just doesn’t happen in television. You get hard sci-fi in cinema, and that’s a rare enough beast when novels like 2001 and Dune get adapted to the big screen, but when it comes to television, the only such adaptation I can recall is a mini-series that adapted Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, over thirty years ago now. Defying Gravity isn’t an adaptation, but the way that it approached its material, the depth of thought, the realism, and the concept at its heart is really the epitome of hard sci-fi.


Most shows offer a little hand-waving to get past the disbelief of the viewer, warp drive takes us faster than light, teleporters eliminate the need for space shuttle SFX, police boxes send us through time, but there is very little of that in Defying Gravity. It’s set in the near future, near enough that the technology and human society isn’t too far removed from our own, with a few developments not all that implausible. Filming in zero-G is mostly impossible, and faking it causes chafing to the average actor above and beyond the call of duty, so the spaceship Antares has magnetic-gravity to keep its crew tethered to the floor of the ship. The only hand-waving comes with the instantaneous communication between the Antares and Earth, which by the time they got to Venus would in reality be several light-minutes apart. I’m sure had the series continued, the words Quantum Entanglement would have been bandied, but other than that, the only science sufficiently advanced to be unrecognisable, the only magic is in the ‘objects’ themselves. Given that they are the driving force behind the mystery in the show, the equivalent of the Monolith in 2001, a little fantasy is to be expected in even the hardest of sci-fi.


It’s a great, classic sci-fi story as well, with the discovery of a mysterious object on Earth impelling a grand adventure around the solar system to investigate its import and meaning to mankind. Of course, because it’s so mysterious, so indefinable, it’s not something that can be shared with the public, and so secrecy shrouds the mission, which has been sold as something completely different in the media, and lies and misdirection filters down through every level of the command structure. The series gradually unpeels its layers over these thirteen episodes, but it isn’t like the X-Files or Lost in the way that it presents its secrets. It makes sure that the viewer gets enough to remain hooked, and it doesn’t ‘cheat’ by teasing and pulling back. You do learn more about the story as you go along, even if not all of the secrets are revealed in this series.


The way that the series is structured is also quite ingenious. The procedural of a space mission can be dry and emotionally unsatisfying. To get away from the constancy of ‘Copy that’ from the characters, the story interleaves with flashbacks that introduce the characters during the training phase for the Antares mission, and an earthbound setting allows for much of the soap opera, comedy, and character development that the story needs. This also means that we get to know the ground crew and the spaceship crew as they interact, and the relationships that form over the training period get tested by separation when the space mission begins. Throw an investigative reporter into the mix, and the story has lots of scope in which to develop.


Ironically, this can also be the weak point of the show. Normally the flashbacks were structured to mirror events in the ‘present day’. We’d learn how what happened before has bearing on the issues facing the characters now. In only one episode in the middle of the run did it look as if the soap elements were beginning to overwhelm the story, and at that point I did want the show to ease up on the flashback and get back to the space mission. Also, at the end, we get what seems like a pointless flashback, when it comes to Zoe Barnes washing out of the space programme. Given that she’s on the mission now, it’s patently obvious at that point that what happens in the flashback isn’t permanent, and it loses its drama and impact as a result. Perhaps how that storyline would have played out would have had import to the series, but given that the show was cancelled at that point, we will never know.


What makes good sci-fi great is when it has a message that is relevant to the audience. This is where Defying Gravity shines, as it explores how science impacts society in a way that has been relevant since the persecution of Galileo and before. At its heart is the constant conflict between science and faith, and the way people have been trying to reconcile the two in order to make their worldviews work. The Antares mission, much like any other endeavour in space is as pure a science endeavour as you can expect. In the harsh, unforgiving vacuum of space, there is little room for faith. You have to trust in engineering, you have to trust in ballistic calculations, and miracles are non-existent. Into this mix comes the Beta object with its mystery, and all of a sudden these pragmatic and procedure oriented astronauts are asked to trust in its enigmatic will. They are asked to have faith, indeed the whole mission is based on irrational belief, and it sees these characters tested in unusual ways.


Perhaps the most obvious example of this is in the characters of Wass and Paula. Wass is a theoretical physicist, irreverent, geekish, and wholly sceptic and derisive when it comes to religion. Paula on the other hand is devout and often on the verge of proselytising. She has the sort of brittle attitude to her beliefs that ought to make her utterly unlikeable as a character, and initially they do. The two really shouldn’t be on the same continent together, let alone the same spaceship, and their relationship is abrasive to say the least. But the presence of Beta causes both of them to question their beliefs, and that brings them closer together, so by the end of these thirteen episodes, they are the most interesting characters for me in the show. In a similar way, all of the characters in the show face personal challenges to what they believe in, and seeing how that would have played out in subsequent episodes is really what could have made Defying Gravity special.


I suppose that we get such a ‘failure’ of a show at all should be reason for gratitude. Blu-ray would have been a dream, surround audio would have been great, even subtitles would have been nice. The extra features are a pleasant bonus, but they are taken from promotional material when the show was still a living breathing possibility. I suppose it’s too soon after the pain of cancellation for a retrospective featurette or some commentaries. Some six months after the cancellation when it became clear that the series wasn’t coming back, creator James Parriot did post this blog outlining the direction the show would have taken, and later when it became clear that no Serenity style movie resurrection was possible, he also published the story conclusion. Naturally there are spoilers, and be warned that seeing it in print is no reflection of what it might have looked like on screen.


A theory in quantum mechanics tells us that there are an infinite number of realities, in which all possible universes are reflected, all decisions explored. I suppose somewhere out there, there is a reality where Defying Gravity didn’t get cancelled, and continued and developed and fulfilled its promise. That ought to give me solace, but it really doesn’t. Still, this Complete Series Collection is well worth getting just to see the best sci-fi show never made...