In this grim time a little escape and new heroes to admire
are certainly welcome, and this week’s recommendation for where to get them cites
a familiar source. Neil deGrasse Tyson, everyone’s favorite astrophysicist, is
back on the Fox Network with his second re-imagining of the popular Cosmos
television show first created by Carl Sagan and wife Ann Druyan in 1980.
This time the show is titled Cosmos: Possible Worlds,
and uses the fictional trick of the “ship of imagination” to take us both back
in time to view our Earth’s creation and our human species’ rise, and out into
space to explore other possible life-nurturing planets in the galaxy. The ever-optimistic
Tyson is our host for these journeys, explaining everything in a way that’s
scientifically based, graphically displayed and easy to understand. Ann Druyan serves
as lead writer on the series. She’s also an executive producer, along with comic
Seth McFarlane, well known as a space geek.
I hope you have a decent television set at home to watch
this show, because the visuals are stunning. Whether you are in a location here
on Earth, or looking at the stars, everything is awe-inspiring, which I imagine
is the point.
I do have one criticism of this latest iteration of the Cosmos
franchise. The various historical segments are done in a kind of weird
stop-action-looking CGI animation rather than using real actors. This, combined
with Tyson’s tendency to lecture in maddeningly simple terms, made me think I
was watching a science special aimed at fourth-graders at times, rather than the
Carl Sagan show of old, which always pitched the material way over my head.
Unfortunately, I think there’s a reason for that. We no
longer respect, value or bother to learn science (or history) in this country.
A show like Cosmos: Possible Worlds has to dole out its information in
small, easily digestible bits or risk losing the audience. That doesn’t exactly
explain why real actors couldn’t have been used instead of CGI for the
historical parts, but I can understand that the producers might have wanted to
reserve a limited budget for more WOW-factor location shots and onscreen
recreations of exploding stars.
Nikolai Vavilov |
A recent episode provided an example of the show’s underlying
philosophy, and its ultimately uplifting inspiration, even though the
production aspects were frustrating. Episode Four, titled “Vavilov,” told the
story of an unsung hero of science, Russian agronomist, botanist and geneticist
Nikolai Vavilov. In
the years before World War II, Vavilov traveled the world collecting seeds and
roots in a search for the earliest, purest genetic forms of common food crops.
He believed knowledge of these base forms would provide a starting point for
improving the seeds used for agriculture.
Trofim Lysenko began to denounce Vavilov’s theories and put forward his own, nonscientific ideas. The politically astute Lysenko found easy favor with Stalin, a man with no patience for learning or science. But Lysenko’s simplistic theories only encouraged Stalin’s foolish political ideas with regards to state agriculture. The result was mass famine on a scale seldom seen even in Russia. Millions died in 1932-33 in an event the Ukrainians named the Holodomor (death inflicted by starvation).
Vavilov, by contrast, lost favor with Stalin. By 1939,
the famous scientist had lost the right to travel abroad, and in August of 1940
he was arrested. A year later he was condemned to death. The sentence was later
commuted to life in prison, but in reality, Vavilov was forced to slowly starve
to death. He died in prison in January, 1943 at the age of 56.
The Global Seed Vault in Norway |
I knew about the siege of Leningrad, Stalin’s famines and the Global Seed Vault, but I had never heard the name of Nikolai Vavilov before this episode of Cosmos: Possible Worlds. And I had certainly never known of the heroism of Vavilov’s fellow scientists in Leningrad. It was worth putting up with the irritating CGI production on the episode to gain this useful knowledge and a historical reminder that a refusal to accept the facts of science in the pursuit of a political agenda can lead to death and destruction.
There was another upside to this episode. Viggo Mortensen provided the voice acting for Vavilov’s character. If you’ve seen the excellent movie EASTERN PROMISES, you know he can do a terrific Russian accent. (The man speaks five languages, after all!) That makes it even more disappointing, though, that we didn’t get to see Viggo act the character.
Cheers, Donna
Thanks for this. I had seen his previous seasons and am happy to be reminded to record this series.
ReplyDeleteWow! What a fascinating episode. I'll need to catch up on watching these.
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