"Have a Good Sol" focuses with laser-like intensity on the crowd-pleasing theme of disillusionment. This week, we're having fun as scales fall from every eye, revealing widely varying results. Miles and Dani, arriving at Happy Valley on the same shuttle, experience directly opposite experiences as a grunt and the new Commanding Officer. Aleida acquiesces to her unprocessed trauma and quits NASA, while Kelly realizes she doesn't have much to lose by leaving now that her research has been defunded. Poor Margo unwittingly walks right into a coup.
Miles and Dani's experiences start in the same place, full of wide-eyed wonder at the scale of 2003 Happy Valley and all that the M-7 Alliance team is accomplishing. Dani reminisces in her first department heads meeting, noting that the facility had been "not much more than a couple of hallways" when the original crews served their first mission together in the mid-1990s, and now it's a large corporate campus anchored by a five-story residential/command center. Rather than building further up into the Martian atmosphere, the building has many sublevels beneath the planet's surface. It's not unlike a cruise ship or a stately home – what's on the surface or above is Happy Valley's public face, but only the officer corps gets to live there in well-lit single-occupancy dorm rooms to enjoy their freshly cooked meals in the commissary and to receive, view, and respond to vidmail and other communications from home.
A side-by-side montage (set to Gorillaz's paradoxical "Clint Eastwood," a chill-and-loping tune with revolution-summoning lyrics) comparing Dani and Miles's daily routines illustrates their experiences' disappointing distinctions. On Level one, the living is fairly easy, but in the lower levels, plebs like Miles, Massey, and Ilya sleep six to a room in military-style bunks, eat the Mars versions of sad desk salads in dingy, badly lit lunchrooms, and have been waiting for weeks for sufficient bandwidth to get through a massive backlog of vidmail. The Upstairs-Downstairs dynamic is exacerbated by the astronaut corps acting like clueless, entitled gentry; one guy pauses a video from his wife to ask Miles to unclog the slow-draining sink, then blithely returns to the video without waiting to hear Miles say he's an HVAC guy, not a plumber.
Of all the buckets of cold water Miles had dumped on him during his first sol on Mars (2.75 percent longer than one Earth day, or 39.6 minutes for the mathletes among us), the work order abruptly shifting him from being a well-paid fuel technician to lower-paid climate-control expert is probably the one with the worst long-term ramifications. The promise of excellent, routine pay for at least two full years was why Miles accepted this job and convinced Mandy that it would be a good thing for her and their daughters, too. Unfortunately, the Kronos disaster has put the asteroid mining operation on long-term hold, and there's not a thing to be done about it. He's there on Mars and may as well make the best of it. The one tiny, bitterly funny thing about this is what a sly callback it is to the second season – remember when Tracy Stevens couldn't stand the AC in her rack? Seems like none of the space geniuses who've followed in the last three decades have managed to solve the enigma of interplanetary heating and cooling.
To her credit, only some of these problems escape Dani's notice. She rightly homes in on the morale-sapping issue of Earth-to-Mars communications and, over a delicious-looking lunch of fettuccine alfredo, directs Ed to have his engineers focus on repairing the faulty communications satellite. It's a huge, complex, and dangerous undertaking involving a seven-hour spacewalk, but the team gets the job done, restoring a modicum of equity to everyone on base.
Speaking of Ed, my concerns for him have escalated to unprecedented levels. The more I ponder his presence in the fourth season, the more I question its relevance. While I've always admired Joel Kinnaman's performance, I'm left wondering what purpose Ed serves on Mars beyond being a gritty, swaggering, anxious, and grieving counterpoint to the seemingly impeccably adjusted Dani. Perhaps this is indeed his role, and perhaps it will pay off – after all, many things that initially struck me as odd have unexpectedly flourished. However, it was the most glaring inconsistency that stood out during my two viewings of this episode.
Eli Hobson's decision to recruit Dani as the next CO and charge her with at least partially countering Ed's entrenched habits was a wise one. She challenges his learned helplessness regarding the communications satellite and his blatant disregard for the grievances of the Downstairs class of Helios employees. While it's unclear how she became aware of the problems among the lower ranks, it's promising that she immediately addresses them and assures her department heads that "there will never be a penalty for speaking the truth" under her leadership.
I suspect Dani will soon need to put her money where her mouth is. Miles' wide-eyed disgust at the disparity between the conditions he expected and those he's living under prompts his roommate Massey to educate him about the entrenched, baked-in nature of the scams they're living under. Has Miles noticed that although many of the Upstairs staff are honoring Kuznetsov with GP badges on their uniforms? Why are there no TP badges to honor the equally deceased Tom Parker? Furthermore, Happy Valley's Comcards (on-base debit cards to pay for extras) only work on a worker's rack level. Even when Miles finds himself Upstairs, he can't pop into the commissary for lunch because his money is literally no good there. "At the end of the day," Massey sighs, "we're just the help." Is a hint of worker solidarity emerging? We'll want to keep an eye on that.
Speaking of workers from various worlds uniting back on Earth, Kelly Baldwin and Aleida Rosales are having a rough go of it. Ed nearly broke Kelly and Alex's hearts again at the end of the last episode by choosing to remain on Mars "just until the new CO settles in!" Sure, buddy. Thank goodness Dani is giving him a hard time about it because she is simply the best. This week, Hobson pours some fresh lemon juice over that paper cut, informing Kelly that he must defund her very promising and important scientific research into the likelihood of finding life on Mars because "everything hinges on the asteroid program" restarting successfully, or, as Kelly wryly puts it, "No Buck Rogers, no bucks."
For her part, Aleida continues not to handle her PTSD well, refusing to return to work and rejecting further therapy and medication in favor of tinkering with the family TV in the small hours. Victor is freaked out, worried, and kind of fed up, so she makes one more attempt at going back to work, only to abruptly quit when Hobson kindly and reasonably asks her to work with a mental health professional before returning to responsibilities that hold the lives of others in the balance. His every word triggers Aleida, specifically her awful memories of finding Margo's office destroyed on the day of the JSC bombing, and off she goes.
Fortunately, the two find themselves at the former Outpost and engage in their very first genuine conversation. It seems almost incongruent for Kelly to have never met Aleida, the visionary strategist who, at the end of last season, devised the daring plan to strap a heavily pregnant and pre-eclamptic Kelly to a rocket. But now that they've finally met, it doesn't take long for them to bond and recognize each other as kindred spirits of scientific genius and mutual support. In fact, Kelly's dire predicament finally provides Aleida with a challenge she can truly tackle! How would Kelly feel about joining forces with Aleida to seek private funding for her research?
The other intriguing storyline for me has been Margo's Bogus Journey in the USSR. This one is less of a concern in "Have a Good Sol," as I'm somewhat reassured by Margo's dawning realization that she's living through a coup. The pacing in the final scenes of this episode is swift and pulsates with genuine dread. A series of subtle details—TV is only broadcasting test patterns and classic Bolshoi ballet performances (I think one even features Mikhail Baryshnikov, who must not have defected in FAM's timeline); sirens can be heard everywhere, continuously; the usually cheerful baker is surly; the atmosphere at the park has shifted from lively and debate-filled to anxious and violent—the tension has been ratcheted up very effectively. More of this, please!
