I think, of everything that happened over the course of Project Hail Mary, the lab explosion is what haunts Stratt the most.
Rereading the scene where they talk to Redell in the Auckland prison, Stratt shows such distain for Redell and how his negligence killed 7 people. She doesn’t let him make excuses and try and worm his way out of it. To her, he as the leader of the project has a responsibility toward those people and he failed, and in doing so killed them.
Every other action she takes has purpose. Every death that may be caused by those actions is counterbalanced by thousands of lives it saves. She can live with those decisions, because she knows they had to be made.
The lab explosion never should have happened. It was a mistake on the part of the quartermaster, but if there were additional safety protocols in place, it is a mistake that likely could have been prevented. I don’t think there’s any way that Stratt feels anything other than personally responsible for it.
She was negligent in her duty to ensure the safety of everyone working under her and the project itself, and because of that 14 people died. 14 people who did not need to die, whose deaths did nothing to save humanity.
Not only that, but the events catalysed the need to send the one person she’d let get closer to her to his death.
Of all the crimes she committed in during the project, I think that’s the one she feels like she truly deserves to be imprisoned for.
One of the things that makes me so crazy about the accident is that there was no good reason for both Shapiro and Dubois to be in the lab at the same time.
Ohhhhhh, you're about to go test something extremely dangerous? A cataclysmic failure condition? Sure, let's put both science specialists in a room together while this happens.
Not doing that is basic safety protocol for high stakes missions. WTF. Stratt must have been so mad at herself for not specifying that was never to happen.
Controversial take perhaps but I actually thought that Stratt should have vetoed the relationship between Shapiro and DuBois. Sure they said they were totally objective about it and no way they were gonna let the relationship interfere with any of their duties, but that's. That's just not the kind of thing you can guarantee.
The particular outcome that we got -- that they happened to both be present at the point of a terrible accident -- was an unlikely but foreseeable outcome of them spending all their free time hanging out together. Like that was the explicit reasoning for the two teams not taking transport together.
That being said, yes Stratt would absolutely feel responsible for this, and she would be right. She was in charge.
That is an extremely based take. I also think Stratt would have interfered with that relationship. Maybe it was a thing where it was like, "better this than them running around behind people's backs," but it still feels like a weird thing for her to have ignored.
You mentioning Shapiro maybe ending up pregnant in the tags reminded me of a weird thing I wondered about: were the crew members rendered sterile before they were supposed to board? If it was a mixed crew, then hypothetically people could have ended up hooking up in space, which could have resulted in someone conceiving a baby. How do you deal with that?
