So, you’ve
touched down on Mars – not at the habitation modules you’d been aiming for, but
your eyeballs are still in your head and you’re still in your preferred number
of pieces. In other words, you’ve made
it! What’s a captain to do now?
Well,
if you’re the first king of Mars, you quibble with mission control over the
precise number of bones broken during landing, and you try to claim that your
screams were actually the eerily human-sounding airbags. But enough of all that; you’re planet-side
now, and there are much more pressing issues to worry about.
There’s
the five-mile journey to your intended destination, further hampered by Mars’s
many magnetic norths. There’s the utter
lack of water and the ever-dwindling supply of oxygen. There’s your solar-powered buggy and the
knowledge of impending sunset. There’s
even your incorrectly-hooked-up microphone, which means you hear nothing but
your own amplified voice echoing inside your helmet.
However,
for our illustrious captain, all that’s nothing compared to the herculean task
of delivering the first words uttered on another planet. He laments that mission control didn’t see
fit to include a speechwriter on their team, and upon arrival, he proceeds to
offer the finest example of awkward, run-on babbling since Andy Millman on Extras.
Oh my goodness gracious, it’s just spectacular. He winds up with “leaping into the footprints
of giants,” somewhere between fretting that he’s cribbing too much from Armstrong
and clarifying that they’ve not actually
seen giants’ footprints on the surface, yet.
It’s a
great, terrifically funny sequence. The
lines are enjoyable enough on their lines, but PC’s delivery really is matchless. He’s just a scream – so fumbling, so
flummoxed, and yet so determined to
sound important and impressive. I love
it.
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