Defying Gravity Falls Flat

The SFnal concept of ABC's Defying Gravity initially seemed very promising. This new show from James Parriott of Grey's Anatomy and Michael Edelstein  of Desperate Housewives, puts an ensemble cast into the pressure-cooker environment of an international spacecraft for a six-year mission in the near future. In Joss Whedon's or Joe Straczynski's hands, this could be an amazing show.

That's why it's such a pity that the muddled, confused, banal story and mediocre script manages to be both didactic and trite all at once, and the characters are so poorly developed that you don't actually care who sleeps with whom, or whether the engineer guy succeeds when he paints his face and exits the spacecraft to put his space-suited body into orbit as a means of suicide. It's not the actors' faults. They do the best they can with the material they're given. The writing is so lackluster and the actual plot points so glaringly dumb and full of holes, though, that there's only so much a talented and earnest cast can do with this clunker of a new show.

Defying Gravity follows the journey of eight astronauts, through their selection and training, all the way (hypothetically) through their six-year mission on the Antares to visit seven of Sol's planets.

It's the year 2052. Abortion is illegal, apparently due to an overwhelmingly anti-choice majority on the Supreme Court—one character makes a reference to "a couple of new justices" could change that. In fact, you can't buy over-the-counter pregnancy tests anymore, either. Or contraception, apparently, because in spite of the oft-expressed desperate importance of and brutal competition for a spot on the crew of the Antares, one of the characters manages to get pregnant within the first hour because she's had drunken, unprotected sex with one of her instructors. She's not only stupid, but as it turns out, perhaps is insane as well—apparently after her illegal abortion, she starts hearing her unborn baby crying. Because, you know, having an abortion makes women go mad. Nice bit of anti-choice propaganda, dropped in there. Not heavy-handed, at all. *eyeroll*

It's okay, though, because she's predestined to have a spot on this crew, no matter how much smarter, harder-working, saner, and better-qualified most of the other applicants might actually be. Of the other crew members, one of them goes nuts and tries to suicide in space, one of them is apparently an alcoholic, and I've completely lost track of who is screwing whom and who is married to whom. Oh, and unbeknownst to anyone but Mission Control and the on-board Mission Commander, the Antares is carrying some sort of Sooper-Sekrit Stowaway with metaphysical powers. They're calling this reconstituted Kosh character the "Beta."

You see, the mysterious Beta is really responsible for picking the crew. In fact, after they're already aboard the Antares, the Beta magically gives heart problems to two of the crew members it decides it dislikes, which forces them to return to earth to be replaced by their two alternates—one of whom is Defying Gravity's leading man, so you see why it was so important to actually get the guy onto the ship . . . Even though he's a burn-out screw up who really shouldn't be in space.

There's a name for that particular device to solve plot problems. Writers usually pull a deus ex machina out of their butts when they're too dumb, lazy, or inept to write themselves back out of a corner. So it's emphatically not a good sign to me that Defying Gravity entirely revolves around this device. If stuff in a story only happens because an off-stage character is arbitrarily waving a magic wand to make that stuff happen, it's awfully hard to invest any actual energy into engaging with the characters and their predicaments. Defying Gravity's creators and writers better be hoping that the mysterious Beta can wave its magic wand and make the viewers care enough to tune in for more of this contrived drek.