From The Earth To The Moon

I'm not normally a fan of "AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!" TV programmes, but the Monkeys With Badges have been watching the 1998 series From The Earth To The Moon, because it is about going into space, and I have to admit it is quite good.

Obviously made off the back of the 1995 film Apollo 13, it comes across as a labour of love by that movie's star Tom Hanks - he not only co-produced the series, he wrote an episode, directed an episode, and narrates the introductions to all the episodes except for one... which he appears in as a main character.

Aside from Hanks, the cast contains many recognisable faces from American films and TV, including Cary "not left handed either" Elwes and Bryan Cranston before he was famous.

Disappointingly, for both me and the Monkeys With Badges, the series skips over the early space adventures of Albert, Ham and Enos to concentrate almost exclusively on the mannys involved in the Apollo missions to the moon, with part one giving a condensed version of the backstory of NASA and setting up the "space race" to the moon after the Soviet Union beat the USA to getting the first manny (not to mention the first doggy) into space.

The best episode by far is part two, Apollo One, which tells the story of the fire that killed three spacemannys and the subsequent investigation into how the fire happened and whose fault it was. Being based on a tragedy, this makes for the most dramatically powerful installment of the series, but also casts its shadow over the later episodes by firmly planting the idea of how dangerous the Apollo space missions are.

This is crucial to the success of the programme, since because it is entirely based on true history then the writers cannot inject peril and excitement where none actually occurred - and the spacemannys themselves didn't want things to be dramatic and dangerous so did everything they could to avoid it!

The series also tries to highlight what dramatic moments there are through its use of incidental music, but in this it is far less successful because throughout the series the music is far too overblown and intrusive - like a lot of what we hear in modern-day Doctor Who and its ilk, the music tries to tell the audience how to feel at any given moment, and as a result it comes across as unsubtle as a sledgehammer.

With the most famous point in the Apollo missions - the landing on the moon by spacemannys Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin - coming in episode six, the second half of the 12-part series gets to tell the lesser-known stories of the Apollo missions. That is except for part eight, which avoids too much overlap with the Apollo 13 movie by telling the story of Apollo 13 from the point of view of the media reporting of the mission, as seen through the eyes of two (fictional) news reporters: Emmett Seaborn (played by Lane "New Adventures of Superman" Smith) is the old-school dependable type, having made several appearances in other episodes to deliver required exposition to us via the medium of his news broadcasts, while his rival Brett Hutchings is a sensationalist, lowbrow, tabloid-style reporter. Their conflict is a metaphor for the battle between the two styles of news reporting, with Hutchings sadly but inevitably coming out on top in the end.

Once mannys had successfully landed on the moon once, the media and the American public seemed to lose interest in the Apollo spacemannys, except for when there was a crisis such as with Apollo 13. This led to NASA having its funding cut and the end of Apollo missions to the moon. This hangs over the final two episodes of the series, and leaves us with a palpable sense of disappointment and missed opportunities. The very last episode, Le Voyage Dans La Lune, acts as an epilogue when it goes back to use the making of the 1902 film Le Voyage Dans La Lune as an example of how important imagination was to inspiring the missions that actually went to the moon.

Going from the Earth to the moon seems like a lot of effort, and I for one am happy to leave it to mannys and the Monkeys With Badges to handle the W-word. If I am ever going to go into space, I would like it to be like this: