Main cast: Mackenzie Davis (Martha Kivelson) and Holly Jade (Juliet Burton)
Director: Emily Dean
Martha Kivelson and Juliet Barton are two officers of the Io Expeditionary Mission, down on the moon for what will be hopefully a simple mission of taking a few pics here and there for their space station HQ Orbital.
Naturally, things never go swimmingly in shows like this. Their vehicle is caught in a huge sulfur explosion that kills Barton. Kivelson will not be able to contact Orbital until the communication window opens 12 hours later, and she needs to make her way to the contact point to do so. Oh boy, and she’s stuck here with limited oxygen supply.
Did I say that Bad Travelling is the best episode to date? Well, that’s before I watched The Very Pulse of the Machine, heh.
Sure, this is a slower episode, but it is also touching on one of my favorite intellectual sci-fi tropes: existentialism.
It’s very reminiscent of Zima Blue, in that the entire episode leads to a beautiful, unforgettable scene, but unlike that one, this episode is far longer and hence has plenty of time to build up to its penultimate scene.
Sure, the episode is kind of predictable after a while, and Kivelson even spells out clearly what I am supposed to believe or interpret in certain scenes, but this inability of the people writing the screenplay to trust that viewers will “get it” doesn’t become too didactic or intrusive to pull me out of the episode.
If I have an issue with this one, it’s that this episode for some reason removes much of the beautiful spiritual allegory present in the short story by Michael Swanwick as well as the explanation of the role played by the sulfur on Io behind much of the happenings in this episode.
On the other hand, the episode adds more finality to the episode, the most obvious being Kivelson’s fate, which is far more ambiguous in the short story.
I personally will love to know why the people behind this episode does what they did, because I feel that, in some ways, this episode sort of downplays much of what makes the story evocative and heart-tugging in order to ramp up the survival thriller aspects that aren’t always present in the source material.
Still, no matter. This episode is in many ways a haunting allegory to one’s fear or curiosity of what awaits after death, the acceptance of mortality, and perhaps, the possibility of existence outside the shell of our bodies. The universe is vast, unfathomably so to our finite capacity to understand, and who knows… maybe one day we’d find an audience with Io, or instead kneel and tremble before Azathoth.
Whatever the possibilities may be, this episode captures some of them very well, and for that, this one will linger in my mind tad longer than most of the previous episodes of this show.
