"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

The First King of Mars: Series 2, Episode 2 – “The Shadow of a Volcano” (2008)

 
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.

No comments:

Post a Comment