The Terrible Secret of Space
Sep. 7th, 2002 06:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cmdr_zoomEarth sure has lost a lot of lone astronauts to freak accidents. There's Marlena Glenn (He-Man), John Blackstar (Blackstar), John Crichton (Farscape), and William "Buck" Rogers. Nor are three-man crews any safer: consider the Zarkov expedition (Flash Gordon; that makes three Filmation cartoons, by the way), the lost expedition of Col. George Taylor and the unsuccessful rescue missions that followed (Planet of the Apes), and the landing team of the Attila 1 misson (LucasArts' The Dig). Even robotic explorers like Voyager 6 are vulnerable to this statistical anomaly.
The conclusion I draw from all this:
If you go out into space alone, or with two others, you're practically asking to wind up lost on a fantastic planet with no way home, usually being attacked by savage natives and/or shot at by weirdly-dressed inhuman goons (who never seem to hit anything but scenery).
(And yeah, I know that's because all of these are just expressions/iterations of the Pulp Adventurer formula. Heck, some of these characters were originally contemporaries of John Carter.)
The conclusion I draw from all this:
If you go out into space alone, or with two others, you're practically asking to wind up lost on a fantastic planet with no way home, usually being attacked by savage natives and/or shot at by weirdly-dressed inhuman goons (who never seem to hit anything but scenery).
(And yeah, I know that's because all of these are just expressions/iterations of the Pulp Adventurer formula. Heck, some of these characters were originally contemporaries of John Carter.)
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Date: 2002-09-09 08:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2002-09-09 07:00 pm (UTC)And Apollo 1, though technically they never got off the pad.