Deal With It.

me when I get home:

me the entire weekend:

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

but I haven’t seen a lot of people talk about how he didn’t even know if he could find him again

like in the book he narrows down where Rocky might be to… an area of about twenty million kilometers.

and he still goes

no one makes him, he just looks at those odds and decides, on his own, to throw himself into the depths of space anyway

it’s not just a hail mary to save Rocky, it’s a hail mary to even get the chance to try, but the important part is that it’s his hail mary

that’s the crux of it. for once, it’s not something forced on him, not something he’s dragged into. he chooses it

Grace isn’t depressed primarily because he’s woken up weak and alone and stranded in space. That part engages his curiosity as well as simple fear. He’s much more overwhelmed by the astrophage situation, when it comes back to him; and he’s mourning his team. Every time he thinks of them, before he even remembers them properly, he starts to cry. His depression seems like loneliness at its core—he needs people to care for. Feels like that foreshadows how he’ll feel about Rocky.

He also thinks warmly of his friend Marissa (old roommate’s ex, still meets him regularly—he can keep a friend!), and Steve (the Carl prototype), and Dmitri, the Russian scientist who makes an astrophage pun—he immediately invites him out for drinks. He enjoys people. He gets annoyed easily but moves on easily too. His internal monologue on the Mary, pre-Rocky, is just constantly returning to everything he loved about his dead crewmates and wishing they could have seen what he’s seeing. It’s not even that he feels sorry for himself all alone—it’s that he adored them for themselves.

Grace is given first look at the astrophage specifically because he’s a middle school teacher; he’s not functionally important in the scientific community, and they need someone brilliant but expendable. Stratt is afraid astrophage might kill whoever works on it (is it radioactive? infectious?), and if that happens she wants it to happen to a lone guy who won’t be too missed, so they can learn from his death how to protect the more important people who work on it later.

And they had no intention of letting him go on working on it! Since he doesn’t become infected and the astrophage disproves his theory, they send him home. But then he has a panic attack teaching his class realizing that they’re all going to deal with the apocalypse. He storms back into the facility demanding they give him astrophage to work with, because he has to do something. I love that, and it feels like it makes his horror at being ordered to go himself even more poignant. He understands the stakes. He’d storm a high security facility for the stakes. He just doesn’t want to die.

He’s completely terrified of zero G—has a phobia of falling. He expects the fear and tries to psych himself up for it but as soon as the engines cut out he doesn’t just scream, he flails and curls up into fetal position and vomits into his jumpsuit (because even while having a full breakdown he remembers the dangers of free floating liquids and aspiration). But in twenty minutes he’s figured out how to get around while floating and is starting to have fun. Everything that terrifies him also wakens his curiosity, and that saves him over and over.

His mind moves a million steps a minute. He thinks of every possible outcome and wants to test them all. He’s deeply impatient—keeps skipping important steps in his science to move faster. The unbalanced centrifuge in the movie actually makes sense when you know he did things like freehand the nanosyringe which should have been attached to a precision machine because he was annoyed and “felt like getting stabby.” He’s also not fully aware how exceptional his mind is—repeatedly excuses his encyclopediac knowledge of physics and complex near-instantaneous mental math with “science teachers know things.”

Not only is he confused and embarrassed by other people’s sex lives, he doesn’t notice at all when people are into him. Dr. Lokken (book-only character) is constantly arguing with him but gets flustered when he smiles at her or praises her ideas, tries hard to convince him of her theories, and looks to him for grounding when shocking things happen; he is simply baffled at this.

Grace theorizes that an ancestor of astrophage is the source of interstellar life—that as it traveled between planets and stars to breed it shed cells onto planets capable of supporting water-based life, which evolved into humans, Eridians (yes, they’re also water-based), and whatever else may be out there. Rocky says that only the two of them met because any other planet with life less advanced wouldn’t be able to travel in space, and more advanced planets could solve the problem without leaving. Eridians and humans are both at the stage of development where they needed to go see Tau Ceti for themselves to learn the answer.

Grace is not just a yapper but a very good listener, when he doesn’t have a theory to prove. He’s gentle with Marissa on the day astrophage is identified, with Stratt when she’s panicking about putting the crew in comas, with the climate scientist grieving the changes to earth needed to survive, with Rocky when he’s asking for help in sleeping and explaining the crew deaths. He’s the one who puts a hand on the divider and tells Rocky he doesn’t have to be alone anymore. Grace may be blunt but he’s deeply empathetic—profoundly good traits both for first contact and for a middle school teacher.

Something that I found while I was watching PHM that I haven’t seen being talked about a lot is that Eridians have gaps in their knowledge when it comes to space travel and other scientific shortfalls.

Usually, books and films indicate that any contact humans make with another alien species will see that species have far superior tech and knowledge compared to the human who has stumbled across them.

The Eridians, while knowledgeable in some aspects, are not all knowing. They don’t know about time dilation and the impact radiation will have on them and it takes a human, a fellow (albeit reluctant) space traveller to share that information with Rocky. That is incredibly refreshing. Humanity’s knowledge isn’t infantilised in comparison to the Eridians. It’s just different. We’re not seen as some creature that’s clawing blindly in the cosmos compared to Rocky.

We watch as Grace has to come up with a nitrogen resistant Taumoeba on his own when he realises it doesn’t survive when it comes into contact to nitrogen and see how distraught he becomes when he works out Rocky’s ship becomes a massive conduit for the Taumoeba to reach the Astrophage because it can penetrate xenonite.

Rocky isn’t stupid either, it’s clear why he was part of the Eridian mission to save their planet and he uses his engineering prowess to come up with solutions where Grace’s gaps are evident. His kind has solidified Xenon to create a metal, something seemingly impossible to do back on Earth and they worked out, just like humans did, that Astrophage can be used as a fuel. He works out the Taumoeba is a predator to the Astrophage. He gets excited when Grace gives him a laptop with everything that Humans know.

Which is to say, the movie tries to play a bait-and-switch, acting as if it's going to take the "stern, non-nonsense woman learns to open up" route: the slow build towards the vulnerability of the karaoke scene, shots of her and Grace looking at each other that seem like they might be headed for a romance plot—and then it plays her ruthlessness as a reveal. No, you were wrong about where this is going. They aren't going to kiss. She's going to drug him and send him on a suicide mission against his will for the good of the planet. And this is really effective!

But in the book we've known how ruthless she is for a long time. We see her taking drastic actions on-page and we know she'll do anything for the mission (and Grace knows it too). What we haven't seen is any hint of vulnerability . . . until their very last conversation. That's the first and only time we see the cracks in her facade, as she wraps her arms around herself and talks about how she studied history, how she knows that death and war and famine are coming and that the Hail Mary is their only hope for survival. She never explains herself, but she tries here, finally, desperate to make Grace understand what's at stake. She's frightened. She's spent years in control of everything and the only thing more terrifying than that is that as soon as the Hail Mary launches she'll have no control anymore. It will be out of her hands and in his and he doesn't even want to do it. She's been the picture of iron self-control for the whole book and it's only at the very end that we get a glimpse of all those messy human emotions that she keeps tamped down. For the most part I think the book struggles to evoke the same intensity of emotion as the movie does, but this scene hits.

There's this woman who was doing everything imaginable to save her species, her planet. Your friend worked for her, trusted her, cared about her. You love your friend, and he's the first sentient being you have met in decades, half a century. He's the reason your world is saved and you can go back home. He's the reason you're alive and gave you hope. His mission was supposed to end in death, by design, but you saved him. He uses that gift to save you instead. Save your planet. There's a woman who did awful things for the sake of the world knowing she would pay the price. She (thought she) killed your friend. But he's not dead! But she couldn't know. The woman sent you a saviour, a gift from the sky beyond your perception. She betrayed your friend. She's the reason you can go home. She hurt him and made him scared scared scared. She saved her world, gave you your best friend. She took his memories (eridiana don't forget. Can't. Amnesia must be a horror story) and autonomy. She is the reason no other crew will die, because now you know the dangers of space.

Stills below the cut lol