I just finished watching both seasons of the Nat Geo series “Mars” on Netflix. Spoiler Alert: I’m going to give some details, so don’t read any further if you’re afraid I’ll spoil it for you.
It was actually pretty interesting. It seemed very believable. The dialogue was fine. The acting was quite good. The sets and effects were well done. It was somewhere around the second or third episode, though, that I realized that the whole thing was really about Climate Crisis, Global Warming and preservation of our fragile earth from the exploitation on greedy capitalists. As the series continued, the comparisons between humanity’s plunder of earth’s natural resources and the desperate attempts of “science” to protect and preserve the pristine Martian world from the same horrible profit-motives that have wrought havoc on the earth’s fragile ecosystem became rather heavy-handed and obvious. When a “commercial” enterprise made it to Mars and began heedlessly trying to exploit the red planet, it became a little hard to stomach and I started skipping forward a bit. But this isn’t intended as a review of the series. I just wanted to point something out and see if anyone else noticed it.
The ending of Series 2 was predictable: a juxtaposition of earth, now in the midst of a terrifying and calamitous Climate Crisis of Global Warming, the result of the unrestrained capitalism of the energy industry; and Mars, a new planet, pure and untouched, under the protection of those Priests of Pure Science, who are gathered together to celebrate the appearance of liquid water near the Martian poles, the first evidence of the success of their “terraforming” efforts!
Does anyone besides me see the hilarious but unintentional irony of hand-wringing over “global warming” created on earth by the energy industry, immediately followed by the starry-eyed wonder of intentional “global warming” created on Mars by the “responsible” scientists?
I’m sure the writers and producers didn’t.