I watched this when it first came out and was really excited for it because I’m a big sci-fi fan and MARS! I muddled through the overly dramatic drama and the “big twist” that could have been much more interesting and in the end realized that it was an earthbound drama and too much of it at that. Everyone has something major, not just life mind you, but a big deal happening to add to the nonstop over-drama of the show.

Fast forward four years and it was still sitting on my PLEX because I figured, at the time, there would be a season two and perhaps that would be more spacey. Of course Netflix being the piece of crap company they are who don’t know either good shows or how to follow through pulled the plug on this. I blew the dust off and thought, let me try this again and what happened is what always happens when the show is a dud: I found myself fast forwarding through at least half of every episode. The pandering to China with 1/3 of the show about Chinese drama and in Chinese, the totally unrealistic and pandering lesbian drama, the superhero dad that was supposed to lead the mission but now is in a wheelchair with a brat kid, the Russian dickhead in pretty much every scene and so on and so on and so on.

Aside from the normal suspension of disbelief for mediocre sci-fi (good sci-fi is first based on good science, then the rest becomes the stage on which that science is provided), you have the same old trope of a bunch of morons at NASA (who have some of the smartest and most capable people on the planet in real life) and totally unrealistic drama playing out with highly trained and vetted astronauts and it’s just over the top. I have to actually side with Netflix on pulling the plug on this show, I got through half of it a second time before I totally gave up on it and deleted it from my system.

Don’t watch this for sci-fi because it’s not. It’s a modern day drama, based on modern day issues and pandering to modern day talking points that has occasional glimpses onto the interior of a space craft and rare glimpses of outside the space craft (you know, the really cool stuff you came to see). Watch this if you want something like a soap opera with people loosely affiliated with space stuff.