As Atlas approaches its final touchdown on Mars, Emma is haunted by the possibilities of all that might go wrong. Can the crew pull together and overcome the odds to finally reach their destination in one piece?

So here we are, the final episode, the thing we have been building to for nine hours of television. The big landing on Mars itself. Will it all have been worth it? Will we get emotional payoffs to different subplots that have run through the show from episode 1?

No.

What we will instead get is the sort of saccharine sweet stuff where everyone makes everyone feel better about The Thing Which Is Worrying Them, whether or not doing so is in keeping with any established character traits whatsoever. After all, we’ve already had Lu telling Emma how inspirational she is with her whole… doing extremely stupid and dangerous things which endanger the lives of the crew she commands? So what if Misha is now a big softie there to give Lu a pep talk and a quick hug because her country is being mean to her? So what if Lu – the stoic, emotionless, logical Asian stereotype character – seeks spiritual comfort in words from Kwesi? So what if Ram and Emma have the most ludicrous set of conversations it is possible to imagine a commander and her subordinate to have and it ends up being Kwesi who gets them to sort themselves out? What is narrative consistency anyway?

Anyway, Emma is jittery about what faces them (because at least in some areas the show has consistency nailed) especially after she has a nightmare about the landing. I’m not sure exactly whether the show wants us to think that her talks with an imaginary Matt are cute little asides or manifestations of a serious psychosis setting in, and honestly I could easily see it being either (or even both). How on earth this woman passed any sort of mental evaluation to lead this mission is utterly beyond me.

The rest of the crew are equally worrying in their own ways. Misha is slowly coming to terms with being almost completely blind, Lu is thinking of her little boy, and Ram is working through his awkwardness at basically having confessed his love to Emma when they were on the spacewalk. Fortunately, we aren’t always with the crew, and this in fact throws up a large factor of what the show’s been missing all this time.

You see, back on Earth the various family members of the crew are gathering at mission control to watch the landing. That means we get to see Kwesi’s mother meet Misha’s grandkids and daughter, and we get to see Lu’s son worrying as his father tries to make sure he’s OK. Matt and Lex go off doing something to take their minds off the worry, which leads to some awkward confrontations between Matt and Melissa when she lets slip more than she intends, though if you’re looking for resolution on that subplot, think again.

But seeing the other families made me realise that’s the big missed opportunity here. I said from the start that Away was clearly intended as a Hilary Swank star vehicle and it has been exactly that, while failing utterly to justify the focus on her character. Misha is the world’s most experienced astronaut, Lu is a brilliant, and obviously complex character. Ram has no contact with his family. All of these are angles that could have been explored, both by giving more focus to the other crew and by splitting the Earth-bound stuff equally among the various families. The focus on mostly Emma, Matt and Lex means that the whole conceit of the show – different nations collaborating to make the biggest explorational step in the history of the species – just rings hollow because it’s all lip service, much like the inclusion of a character with Down Syndrome feels like paying lip service to inclusivity when you essentially use her as a prop to reflect the ‘goodness’ of others (or worse as an excuse for her mother to have ‘given up’ her career as an astronaut).

The stupid thing is, there are little moments scattered throughout this episode and the show as a whole that genuinely got to me. Mark Ivanir is a fantastic screen presence and brought Misha to life with what little he was given. All the cast, in fact, show genuine flashes of pure talent as actors, struggling against a script that has their characters make oddly disjointed decisions and spin on a dime to be something completely different as and when it deems necessary.

As to whether it was all worth it – you’ll have to watch to find out because I’m not telling. At the end of the day, how interesting can landing on a big red dustball be when all’s said and done. The adventure in this kind of story is in the journey, but unfortunately this journey was just too narratively unfocused to be really enjoyable.

Verdict: A hugely talented cast just got mostly wasted for ten straight hours by a script that just didn’t know how to use them. A great shame. 5/10

Greg D. Smith