The majority of this episode is about comets, with a central theme of the transition at one point in history between comets being seen as omens of disaster, which is how they were perceived in every culture when there was no explanation for what they were or why they appeared when they did, and comets being explained - scientifically - as another part of the rational cosmos.
Neil deGrasse Tyson spends a little time talking about Jan Oort and the Oort Cloud explanation of comets, but the real focus is on the 17th century and the work, interactions and relationships of four men: Edmund Halley, Robert Hooke, Christoper Wren, and Isaac Newton.
I have read and seen on TV other accounts of Newton's life and work, but - with the focus here specifically on his work on gravitation in the context of comets - here he takes second billing to Halley. Tyson gives an account of Edmund Halley's achievements in his own right - mapping the stars of the southern hemisphere, mapping the Earth's magnetic field, inventing the diving bell - so he is not just Newton's sidekick in this story.
Robert Hooke is portrayed as something of the villain of the piece. Even though Tyson does mention some of his not unimpressive achievements, his decade-spanning feud with (undisputed genius and therefore in the right) Newton, combined with the artistic decision that - because no portrait of Hooke survives from his time but the unflattering descriptions of him do - he should be a shadowy, hunchbacked figure with, to top it all, an evil voice.
Newton's life is gone into, without glossing over his unscientific obsessions of alchemy and bible codes, and then the story comes together when Halley met Newton in 1684 to persude him to publish a book on his laws of universal gravitation.
The history lesson is never allowed to get dull. In addition to the presence of panto villain Hooke, Tyson tells us about "The History of Fish", the book that the Royal Society used up its annual budget publishing, leaving them unable to finance Newton's revolutionary Principia. In fact they even had to pay Halley with copies of the unsold fish book. Halley backed Newton's book himself, saving the day.
Halley applied Newton's mathematical laws to known comets and deduced that three comets were really one and the same, regularly returning with a gap of 76 years between each visit. He was able to predict its return in 1758, which was still over 50 years in the future, as well as its path across the sky. Tyson makes an unflattering comparison between "mystic prophecies" which are purposefully vague and open to interpretation, and this scientific prediction.
There is a return to the earlier pantomime with a scene showing an older Newton, now head of the Royal Society following the death of Hooke, burning Hooke's portrait. The implication being that the reason there are no portraits of Hooke is that Newton had them all destroyed as a form of revenge.
I'm in two minds over these scenes - on the one hand they are a distraction from the strong central message of the episode - that science has saved mankind from the kind of superstitions such as perceiving comets a heralds of doom, but on the other hand they are both entertaining and illustrative of the characters of these real human beings from the past, however theatrical and speculative. Ultimately I'd say they are a distraction, but they don't dominate the episode or drown out the message, they are used with moderation. The central message remains strong and powerful.
The episode ends with a spectacular computer simulation, made using Newton's laws, of the merging of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies in billions of years from now.
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