This episode brings back an old favorite, the Cosmic Calendar, which maps the history of the universe onto a calendar of one year, but soon focuses in on human origins-the art, culture, and technology of early hunter-gatherer societies, the invention of the city, and finally leading up to Baruch Spinoza, the Enlightenment scholar who (controversially at the time) found his God in the order of nature and the laws of physics.Įpisode 2, “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,” continues this theme with the question, “Is DNA destiny?” Dr. Tyson introduces the new season by recapping the “rules” for scientific inquiry from his final monologue of the last season, before getting into the main story. I took issue a little bit with the animated histories I thought they played a bit fast and loose (a complaint I had about the previous season as well), but it was still solid storytelling.Įpisode 1, “Ladder to the Stars,” was mainly asking the question, “Where did we come from?” And rather than evolution, as in the previous season, this question was really, “Where did we come from…as a civilization.”Īs usual, the episode opens with an archival narration by Carl Sagan and vignettes of possible future colonies on Mars and other worlds, followed by Neil deGrasse Tyson introducing the theme of this season: possible worlds-far away and deep inside us, in the past and in the future.
COSMOS A SPACETIME ODYSSEY EPISODE 11 SERIES
I haven’t cared for how they’ve handled the series so far.)Īnyway, now that all that’s out of the way, what did I think of the episodes? Well, I thought they were solid. (At least, I hope they won’t be making any more changes. At that time, Episode 2 of this run, “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,” was switched with Episode 11, “The Fleeting Grace of the Habitable Zone.” The production codes reveal that the current airing on Fox is the correct order, and reading over the summaries, I think it feels more natural that way. I also need to note that this is not the order the episodes were aired on National Geographic Channel.
I know they’re only running one episode next week because of the Presidential debate, and the network doesn’t list their schedule further in advance. It’s not clear if that schedule will continue. Episode 2 seems to echo Episode 11 of the original, “The Persistence of Memory.”įor the record, of the other episodes in the original series, Episode 4, “Heaven and Hell,” was about the twin disasters of asteroid impacts and the runaway greenhouse on Venus and Episode 7, “The Backbone of Night,” was about our historical understanding of stars and the galaxy.Īnyway, last time, I reviewed four episodes at a time, but this time, since Fox aired two episodes last night, I wanted to get started now. Other than this, there’s only one other obvious parallel in this season. However, after reading the summaries, that turns out not to be the case-although Episode 8, “The Sacrifice of Cassini” does seem to parallel Episode 6 of the original, “Travelers’ Tales,” which was about the Voyager mission.
COSMOS A SPACETIME ODYSSEY EPISODE 11 UPDATE
In fact, sight-unseen, I was at some point expecting an update of Episode 5, “Blues for a Red Planet,” which was all about Mars. That does leave a few more that they could potentially draw on now. A Spacetime Odyssey told many original stories, but it also spent quite a bit of time updating the material of Episodes 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 12, and 13 of Carl Sagan’s original.
Granted, the new season, Possible Worlds, doesn’t exactly lend itself to this. During the previous season of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, I reviewed the series to discuss how it measured up to the original, and I wanted to do the same thing again.