A malfunction with the ship early into its voyage forces Misha and Emma to work together, but can they trust one another enough to get the job done?

One thing I was inclined to give Away a pass on in its opening episode was its pacing, which was somewhere slightly north of glacial. Here, things don’t really speed up, but to be fair, it’s a show about a space mission, and stuff on space missions doesn’t happen all that quickly. This is one of the few concessions to science-reality the show makes.

Surprise of all surprises, not long into the Mars leg of the mission, the ship develops another fault – one of the solar panels that they will need to reach Mars won’t open, meaning that they won’t have enough power to get there. This means that there’ll have to be a space walk to get to the affected part and fix it. Misha is the obvious candidate to do this, being the most experienced astronaut on the mission by some margin. Emma has to go as well because she’s so awesome (so the show keeps telling us), and also I guess because she’s the mission commander.

Misha and Lu remain sceptical of Emma’s chops for leading this mission, and it won’t take a genius to work out that Misha and Emma completing this particular difficult task together may help them to repair some of the damage in their professional relationship. What the episode mostly does for Misha is give him some flashbacks of his own to piece together his own background story for the audience, which is perhaps a little surprising given how he presented in episode 1, even if it is at the same time once more yanked from the Big Sci-Fi Book of Cliché.

Back on Earth, Matt is finding out that his recovery might be slightly more complicated than he may have hoped, Lex is sort of there as a convenient prop for the script to remind us of the stakes for our main character and to tangentially help reveal the reason Melissa gave up her shot at the space program to be a family liaison instead – spoiler alert, it’s crushingly tone deaf and more than a little ableist in tone for this particular viewer.

The issue is, the show seems to not really be quite sure exactly what it wants to be. It seems more focused generally on being about relationships under pressure in an extreme situation, so it’s a little light on the science and certain details (people make phone calls from outer space to Earth and vice versa on mobiles and tablets, a space mission commander doesn’t know significant details about her crew, one of them is a botanist who’s never been in space before and is now on the world’s first manned mission to Mars). But then from another angle, it seems almost precious about trying to be faithful to the setting, with that glacial pacing and an entire episode spent solving one problem that – in almost any other setting – would take moments.

Verdict: It’s not really doing anything particularly strongly. It wants to be a human-focused drama, but it also wants you to take its science seriously, but the former is too cliché and the latter too haphazard. Strong central performances are just about keeping it going, but it remains pretty much a star vehicle for the power and sincerity of Swank’s acting and little else besides. 6/10

Greg D. Smith