I have to admit, the first time I heard about ABC’s new series Defying Gravity (10 PM ET) the first thing I thought of was the song from Wicked (a play about the persecution of a person of color). When I saw it was about space exploration I thought, “Was that the best title they could come up with?” An NBA dunk defies gravity; certain skateboarding maneuvers, dancers and pole vaulters defy gravity. Astronauts aren’t “defying gravity,” they’re escaping it.It’s the year 2052 and the spacecraft Antares and its eight-person crew are about to depart on a six-year mission to explore the entire solar system. In flashbacks we see the astronaut selection process is less like what space agencies do now—selecting qualified applicants and training them for their specific missions—and more like a reality show (candidates are given a series of challenges and whoever passes hangs around for another week). On the eve of their departure two crew members develop the same medical condition that scrubs them from the flight so they can be replaced by their backups; even the remaining original crew are asking each other “Why did they pick you?” There is also the unaddressed question of why the space agency would undertake such an ambitious and expensive (“ten trillion dollars”) mission.It seems it all has to do with Beta, the unnamed… something in Pod 4 that is the real reason for the mission. Beta is also hand¬picking the crew of the Antares for reasons only it knows. And no one knows about Beta except the space agency bigwigs and the mission commander. (Just what you want, a crew full of people who don’t know why they’re there for the most important mission ever!)
This is not the only eyebrow-raiser in the first two episodes: a crucial equipment test that should have been done while still on the ground is performed after they’ve left Earth orbit, solely to put the crew in additional danger, and the science is “fuzzy” and a bit inconsistent. (A character says the crew can walk around as if they are on the ground because microfibers are woven into their uniforms that electrostatically “attract” them to the floor. It sounds cool until you think it through: all you’re doing is building up a killer carpet shock.We need a new warning before SF shows, like the ratings that tell us why a show is TV-MA as opposed to TV-G, regarding the actual science content of the program. A show is not automatically science fiction just because it takes place on spaceship any more than Police Squad! or Sledge Hammer! were “cop shows” because the title characters were police officers. (Hey, I was surprised to find they both had exclamation points in the titles, too!) Defying Gravity is nice to look at but too derivative—and it takes more than eye-candy to make a riveting story.
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