“Have a Good Sol” focuses with laserlike intensity on the crowd-pleasing theme of disillusionment. We’re having fun this week! Scales are falling from every eye, with widely varying results: Miles and Dani, arriving at Happy Valley on the same shuttle, have directly opposite experiences as a grunt and the new Commanding Officer; Aleida acquiesces to her unprocessed trauma and quits NASA, while Kelly realizes she doesn’t have much to lose by leaving now that her research has been defunded; and poor Margo unwittingly walks right into a coup.
Miles and Dani’s experiences start in the same place, full of wide-eyed wonder at the scale of 2003 Happy Valley and all that the M-7 Alliance team is accomplishing. Dani reminisces in her first department heads meeting, noting that the facility had been “not much more than a couple of hallways” when the original crews served their first mission together in the mid-1990s, and now it’s a large corporate campus anchored by a five-story residential/command center. Rather than build further up into the Martian atmosphere, the building has many sublevels beneath the planet’s surface. It’s not unlike a cruise ship or a stately home — what’s on the surface or above is Happy Valley’s public face, but only the officer corps gets to live there in well-lit single-occupancy dorm rooms to enjoy their freshly cooked meals in the commissary, and to receive, view, and respond to vidmail and other communications from home.
A side-by-side montage (set to Gorillaz’s paradoxical “Clint Eastwood,” a chill-and-loping tune with revolution-summoning lyrics) comparing Dani and Miles’s daily routines illustrates their experiences’ disappointing distinctions. On Level one, the living is fairly easy, but in the lower levels, plebs like Miles, Massey, and Ilya sleep six to a room in military-style bunks, eat the Mars versions of sad desk salads in dingey, badly lit lunchrooms, and have been waiting for weeks for sufficient bandwidth to get through a massive backlog of vidmail. The Upstairs-Downstairs dynamic is exacerbated by the astronaut corps acting like clueless, entitled gentry; one guy pauses a video from his wife to ask Miles to unclog the slow-draining sink, then blithely returns to the video without waiting to hear Miles say he’s an HVAC guy, not a plumber.
Of all of the buckets of cold water Miles had dumped on him during his first sol on Mars (2.75 percent longer than one Earth day, or 39.6 minutes for the mathletes among us), the work order abruptly shifting him from being a well-paid fuel technician to lower-paid climate-control expert is probably the one with the worst long-term ramifications. The promise of excellent, routine pay for at least two full years was why Miles accepted this job and convinced Mandy that it would be a good thing for her and their daughters, too. Unfortunately, the Kronos disaster has put the asteroid mining operation on long-term hold, and there’s not a thing to be done about it. He’s there on Mars and may as well make the best of it. The one tiny, bitterly funny thing about this is what a sly callback it is to the second season. Remember when Tracy Stevens couldn’t stand the AC in her rack? Seems like none of the space geniuses who’ve followed in the last three decades have managed to solve the enigma of interplanetary heating and cooling.
To her credit, only some of these problems escape Dani’s notice. She rightly homes in on the morale-sapping issue of Earth-to-Mars communications and, over a delicious-looking lunch of fettuccine alfredo, directs Ed to have his engineers focus on repairing the faulty communications satellite. It’s a huge, complex, and dangerous undertaking involving a seven-hour spacewalk, but the team gets the job done, restoring a modicum of equity to everyone on base.
Speaking of Ed, I’m even more concerned about him than normal. The more I think about it, the less sense his presence makes here in the fourth season. I’ve enjoyed and admired Joel Kinnaman’s performance over the years, but I’m dubious about what purpose the character serves here on Mars other than as a grizzled, swaggering, anxious, grieving foil for the almost impossibly well-adjusted Dani. Maybe that’s it, and maybe that’ll pay off — goodness knows, many things that initially made me go “hmm” over the years have paid off beautifully. However, it was the most glaringly not-quite-right thing that stood out over the two times I watched this episode.
At any rate, Eli Hobson was right to recruit Dani as the next CO and to charge her with being at least a partial bulwark against the worst of Ed’s entrenched habits. She pushes back on his learned helplessness regarding the communications satellite and his open, sneering disdain for the Downstairs class of Helios employees’ complaints. It’s unclear how she’s been made aware of the problems among the lower ranks, but it’s promising that she sets about improving what she can right away and that assures all of her department heads “there will never be a penalty for speaking the truth” under her leadership.
I suspect Dani will have to put her money where her mouth is before long. Miles’ wide-eyed disgust at the disparity between the conditions he expected and those he’s living under prompts his roommate Massey to educate him about the intractable, baked-in nature of the scams they’re living under. Has Miles noticed that although many of the Upstairs staff are honoring Kuznetsov with GP badges on their uniforms? Why are there no TP badges to honor the equally dead Tom Parker? Furthermore, Happy Valley’s Comcards (on-base debit cards to pay for extras) only work on a worker’s rack level. Even when Miles finds himself Upstairs, he can’t pop into the commissary for lunch because his money is quite literally no good there. “At the end of the day,” Massey sighs, “we’re just the help.” Is a soupçon of worker solidarity emerging? We’ll want to keep an eye on that.
Speaking of workers of various worlds uniting back on Earth, Kelly Baldwin and Aleida Rosales are having a rough go of it. Ed just about broke Kelly and Alex’s hearts again at the end of the last episode by choosing to remain on Mars “just until the new CO settles in!” Sure, buddy. Thank goodness Dani is giving him hell about it because she is simply the best. This week, Hobson pours some fresh lemon juice over that paper cut, informing Kelly that he must defund her very promising and important scientific research into the likelihood of finding life on Mars because “everything hinges on the asteroid program” restarting successfully, or, as Kelly wryly puts it, “No Buck Rogers, no bucks.”
For her part, Aleida continues not to handle her PTSD well, refusing to return to work and rejecting further therapy and medication in favor of tinkering with the family TV in the small hours. Victor is freaked out, worried, and kind of fed up, so she makes one more attempt at going back to work, only to abruptly quit when Hobson kindly and reasonably asks her to work with a mental-health professional before returning to responsibilities that hold the lives of others in the balance. His every word triggers Aleida, specifically her awful memories of finding Margo’s office destroyed on the day of the JSC bombing, and off she goes.
Fortunately, the two find themselves at the former Outpost and have their first real conversation, ever, apparently? It seems out of character for Kelly never to have met Aleida, who devised the daring strategy of strapping a very pregnant and pre-eclamptic Kelly to a rocket at the end of last season, but now that they have met, it doesn’t take long for them to bond and recognize each other as kindred spirits of scientific genius and mutual support. In fact, Kelly’s crummy situation finally provides Aleida with a problem she can work on! How would Kelly feel about teaming up with Aleida to pursue private funding for her research?
The other iffy storyline for me has been Margo’s Bogus Journey in the USSR. This one is less of a concern in “Have a Good Sol” because I’m somewhat reassured by Margo’s dawning understanding that she’s living through a coup. The pacing in the final scenes of this episode is brisk and pulses with genuine dread. A handful of little things — TV is only broadcasting test patterns and classic Bolshoi ballet performances (I think one even features Mikhail Baryshnikov, who must not have defected in FAM’s timeline); sirens can be heard everywhere, continuously; the usually jolly baker is surly; the atmosphere at the park has gone from lively and debate-filled to anxious and violent — the tension has been ratcheted up very effectively. More of this, please!
Houston, We Have Some Bullet Points
• There’s a reference to base scrip in HR Director Palmer James’s “Welcome to Happy Valley” tour pattern, and I’m highlighting it here because it lends a bit more heft to Massey’s criticisms of Helios as an employer. Historically, scrip has been a form of company credit for workers, especially coal miners. Although it was issued as advances on wages for use at company stores, it often sank workers into debt (as contemporary credit cards can do), which we see in Miles’s drastically reduced first paycheck.
• Two little moments focused on North Korea in this episode: Palmer James very firmly instructs his newly arrived recruits that under no circumstances are they to enter the area where the North Korean crewmembers rack; and the actual first person on Mars, Lee Jung-Gil is stonefaced adhering to his handler’s reminder to “behave appropriately.” The latter gives Dani a pang of sadness; Lee had been a crucial part of the crew in 1996, but political pressure may now mean that Ed can’t address him as his good dumpling.
• The one way in which the living conditions in Happy Valley are fully egalitarian is that the coffee is bad regardless of where you drink it because the water is recycled urine. Ew!
• The use of Gorillaz’s “Clint Eastwood” is extra-amusing because it’s the second confirmation we’ve received that Clint Eastwood also exists in FAM’s timeline. The season-opening news montage in “Glasnost” mentioned that Eastwood played Ed Baldwin in a film about the first Mars mission, co-starring Jada Pinkett Smith.
