It’s all change at NASA in the aftermath of the asteroid incident, which does no favours for Dale in his new life millions of miles from home and gives Dani plenty to contend with as well.

I have to hand it to the writers – having dosed us up on positivity and optimism with a seemingly impossibly perfect vision of the world that could have been in the opening episode, they bring us crashing right back down here by reminding us that, for all the advancements made in their version of reality, human nature is still human nature.

Up in space, that means that despite all the promise and excitement of his training and the journey to get where he’s gone, Dale finds himself somehow worse off than he was before. Turns out that when you’re not one of the actual superstar astronauts up there in the big black, you’re just another unnoticed, under-appreciated grunt, doing the vital work that nobody could live without, but that nobody really cares about either.

For Dale and his new colleagues, this manifests in many ways. Crappy supplies and food compared to those ‘upstairs’, low pay and lack of access to vid messages and emails from home. Even the death of their comrade, named in all the reports as ‘another astronaut’ while the entire upper base crew wear patches commemorating hero Kutseznov, who’s seldom off the airwaves or the chatter, feels designed to needle directly at those downstairs. It isn’t the dream Dale signed up for, and he’s understandably not too happy about it. He’s far from the only one too, and it feels like there’s a potential revolution in the air.

Fortunately, the mission just got a brand new commander in Dani Poole, someone who knows a thing or several about being under-appreciated and ignored, and has a radar for these things absent in others. Her first major order of business ends up being dangerous and potentially reckless, but also vital and demonstrative of how much value she adds to a mission like this, not just as an experienced and capable astronaut but also as a person manager who can see things others might miss and act accordingly to remedy them. Whether she’ll manage to stave off trouble from below decks permanently remains to be seen, but she stands a better chance than most.

Back on Earth, Aleida is struggling to come to terms with things. The mental struggles of dealing with everything she’s witnessed have piled up, and she can’t face going back to NASA and being in the chair again. Home life is getting awkward for her and when she tries to return to work, she ends up making a rash decision.

That rash decision puts her in the path of Kelly Baldwin, a woman with problems of her own as her project to find and catalogue life on Mars gets shelved by NASA due to budget concerns in the wake of the asteroid incident. It’s remarkable to me that these two women have never crossed paths before now, but when they do, it’s every bit as satisfying as you might expect.

Meanwhile in Russia, Margo is getting in over her head all over again. As much as she might think she’s acclimatised to life in her new home, there are still things to which she is completely naïve. A chance meeting with a mysterious stranger is only the start of her problems though, as it becomes clear that the Mars base is not the only place where dissatisfaction in a certain section of society threatens the order of things. And in Russia, they do revolutions pretty quickly and thoroughly.

Verdict: A stark contrast to the opening episode which proves no matter how many of the world’s problems get solved, human nature will always find more. Depressing? Yes. Accurate? Unfortunately very. 9/10

Greg D. Smith