It’s a rare screenwriter who can resist the lure of the title drop - that nudge-nudge moment when the name of the thing you’re watching makes its way into the script.
In Away, the ambitious new space drama from Netflix, this wink at the audience happens within the first 10 minutes. On the night before NASA commander Emma Green (played by Hilary Swank) is scheduled to blast off on the first-ever manned mission to Mars, she presents her teenage daughter (Talitha Bateman) with a bracelet that maps out her route through space in rudimentary, bejewelled form.
“Just remember, the further away I get, I’m actually just getting closer to being back to you,” she tells her. No prizes for guessing where the emphasis falls. Very quickly it becomes clear that while Away has all the shiny trappings of science fiction, it’s really a chrome-plated Trojan horse, hiding a good old-fashioned family drama that’s designed to pull at the heartstrings — a bit like Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, but less pretentious.
Commander Emma is single-minded in her commitment to her groundbreaking mission, accompanied by an international crew of astronauts, whose motivations and past traumas are probed in flashback sequences indebted to shows like Lost or Orange Is The New Black. On the ground, she’s backed up by her husband Matt (Josh Charles), an engineer whose own hopes of space travel have been dashed by a genetic heart defect. We’re not left to assume that he resents his wife’s success — theirs appears to be a genuinely supportive partnership.
Things are pushed to crisis point, however, when he is hospitalised after suffering a stroke, hours before Emma, already in space, is meant to launch the second leg of her mission. Can she bring herself to travel into the unknown (her chances of survival, we’re reminded, are just 50 percent) when her family back on earth is unravelling? Cue a very high-stakes game of can-she-have-it-all, facilitated by endless phone calls (in space, no one has dodgy wi-fi, it seems) and interspersed with some familiar sci-fi micro-dramas: a mutinous crew, a nerve-shredding space walk, a piece of vital tech that needs fixing.
Two-time Oscar-winner Swank is always compelling to watch, but despite Away’s lofty ambitions and inter-planetary scope, you might find yourself wishing that she had more to work with. There’s an interesting moment in episode one, when an older, female ground commander berates her character with the collective expectations of womankind, telling her she’d be “spitting in the face” of her female predecessors if she abandons her mission and flies back to her husband’s side.
The show also probes the back stories of Emma's crew (Diyah Pera/Netflix)
When Emma dismisses her lecture as “feminist bulls**t,” it’s strangely refreshing: she’s been stuck in Powerful Woman gear thus far, which can be just as limiting and one-dimensional as any other stereotype when stoicism comes at the expense of any other emotion or nuance. But after this brief, intriguing wobble, she settles back into Strong Female Lead mode, with a side helping of ‘concerned mom,’ micro-managing her surprisingly pliant daughter’s life over SpaceTime. Luckily some of the show’s supporting characters provide a moving counterpoint, especially the Chinese scientist Lu Wang, who is weighed down with her country’s expectations even in zero gravity.
A pattern seems to emerge, though, as Away sets up intriguing scenarios which are never quite propelled into the stratosphere.
Leaving your family for three years in service of a mission that may never be accomplished will doubtless seem incomprehensible (even unconscionable) to most viewers, and the show gets tantalisingly close to grappling with this vast emotional undertaking — before panning down to earth for high school scenes that could have been pulled straight from an unthreatening teen series. Just as it’s about to take flight, it gets dragged back down to the ground.
All episodes of Away are available to stream on Netflix now.