History Series / Cosmos

* WhatMightHaveBeen:
** Sagan briefly speculates on what might have happened if the spirit of scientific inquiry found in ancient Greece and Rome had persisted.
** At the time of his death, he and his wife, Ann, were planning a new miniseries, ''Cosmos For Kids''. [[note]]The early-80s Japanese educational series ''[[Anime/MiimuIroiroYumeNoTabi Meme]]'' has very strong ''Cosmos'' influences.[[/note]]
** The state-of-the-art CGI in the 2014 remake, as evidenced by its trailer, makes one wonder how the original series would have looked had Sagan had access to the technology in 1980.

** The trailer for "The Immortals" poses the question of whether or not scientific advance will someday make if possible to live forever. Naturally, this question is never answered in the actual episode--the closest thing is saying that if humans managed to avoid any extinction scenarios, then there is no reason why civilization cannot outlive the Earth, but of course, [[YouFailForeverForever billions of years is not "forever"]], and the episode doesn't even mention that humans would have to find a way around the heat death of the universe or the Big Rip in order for the species to truly exist forever.

* [[TearJerker/LiveActionTV Tear Jerker]]: Sagan's heartfelt plea to prevent nuclear annihilation, and his [[CrowningMomentOfHeartwarming heartwarming acknowledgement of its aversion in the later DVD commentary]].
** From the book, the murder of Hypatia of Alexandria at the hands of a Christian mob, as well as the loss of widespread skeptical scientific inquiry from the western world for roughly 1,000 years that Hypatia's death represented.

* TakeThat: At pseudosciences. He spends the first ten minutes of the third episode deconstructing astrology and the first ten minutes of the twelfth episode deconstructing ufology, while the second episode includes a sequence demonstrating the pitfalls of intelligent design. [[HumansAreMorons Not that anyone listened.]]

* TakeThat: At pseudosciences. He spends the first ten minutes of the third episode deconstructing astrology. [[HumansAreMorons Not that anyone listened.]]

* WhatTheHellHero: Sagan clearly reveres the Greek scholars whose work was stored in the Library of Alexandria, but in the last episode he points out that there is no record of them ever questioning the society they lived in, particularly the institution of slavery, which he calls "the cancer of the ancient world."

* VoiceClipSong: ''[[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc A Glorious Dawn]]'', by WebVideo/SymphonyOfScience, which mixes and sets a tune to scenes from ''Cosmos'', along with Stephen Hawking's ''Universe''. Notably, entire phrases from the respective shows are used as lyrics. It's rather awesome. And thanks to [[TheWhiteStripes Jack White's]] record label Third Man, it was actually given a [[http://store.thirdmanrecords.com/carlsagan.aspx limited release]] on vinyl, with a copy of the diagram from [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record the Voyager Golden Record]] etched on the backside.

* TheWorldIsJustAwesome: The goal is to demonstrate this is true for the ''entire universe''. Earth is awesome. Subatomic particles are awesome. Galaxies are awesome. ''Bacteria'' is awesome. Everything from the massive star Eta Carinae to the microscopic tardigrades that survive anywhere, is beautiful, complex, and wonderful in the literal sense of that word.

* TakeThatUs: In the episode "The World Set Free", an animated segment at the 1878 World's Fair in Paris shows several displays and banners passing by. One of them is [[Creator/SethMacFarlane MacFarlane Refined Lard]]. Seth MacFarlane is the executive producer of the series.

* ShoutOut: Sagan refers to our neighborhood in the Milky Way as "obscure backwaters", a clear reference to the opening lines of Franchise/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy

** The trailer for "The Immortals" poses the question of whether or not scientific advance will someday make if possible to live forever. Naturally, this question is never answered in the actual episode--the closest thing is saying that if humans managed to avoid any extinction scenarios, them there is no reason why civilization cannot outlive the Earth, but of course, [[YouFailForeverForever billions of years is not "forever"]], and the episode doesn't even mention that humans would have to find a way around the heat death of the universe or the Big Rip in order for the species to truly exist forever.

** This was also acknowledged in the afterword of the new version of the final episode, "Who speaks for Earth", showing images of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shaking hands and the abolition of the [[TheApartheidEra apartheid in South Africa]], mentioning how "walls have fallen down and [[ReconcileTheBitterFoes irreconcilable ideologies have embraced]]", and taking it as a good omen for the future.

* TakeThat: At pseudosciences. He spends the first ten minutes of the third episode deconstructing astrology.

* ArtisticLicenseBiology: The tardigrades are depicted as fleshy pink and opaque (the way they appear in an electron microscope, minus the "pink" part) because it would be hard to see transparent tardigrades in a transparent water droplet (as they appear elsewise).

** One episode features [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hooke Robert Hooke]] and discusses his numerous accomplishments, but the episode devotes more focus to his rivalry with IsaacNewton, where he comes off largely as a windbag trying to take credit for Newton and Halley's work.

* AccentUponTheWrongSyllable: Carl Sagan's idiosyncratic pronunciation of the word "cosmos" - not to mention that this was the first time anyone in Britain had heard the alternative pronunciation of the planet name "Uranus" - caused much hilarity in Great Britain and was [[TheBurkissWay extensively parodied]].

* DreamSequence: Giordano Bruno's fateful dream of an infinite cosmos. Along with stars and planets, and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophanim Ophanim]] (the angels shaped like wheels). It gets a callback in the final episode when he "escapes" his prison cell through a FantasySequence.

* ReCut: Later editions of ''Cosmos'' have been supplemented with material dating from after the original run of the show and even after Sagan's death-clips of the Space Shuttle, of the Exxon ''Valdez'' disaster, of the Mars rovers. In the final episode, one of the broadcasts Sagan listens to as the ship of the imagination sails back to Earth is a bulletin from the 9/11 attacks.

'''''Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey''''' aired on FOX network 34 years later as both a remake and an update. With UsefulNotes/NeilDeGrasseTyson as host, viewers were once again taken on a journey through the wonders of the Cosmos. It used many parts from the original series which still held up and showcased many things which had come about since the original show's airing, also branching off in other directions.

* AsteroidThicket: The first and seventh episode featured one for the asteroid belt, probably for RuleOfCool. The real asteroid belt is incredibly sparse and boring. Tyson later points out the actual sparsity of the Oort Cloud.

** NDT's explanation of the speed of light using a motorcyclist in the countryside in episode 4 is word for word identical to Carl Sagan's explanation. In fact, several explanations are verbatim (or nealy so) from the original series because this is an updated version written by the same two scientists who wrote the original series with Carl Sagan. Phrases such as "star stuff" show up due to this trope.

* DontTryThisAtHome: Michael Faraday, probably anachronistically, says this to his audience while demonstrating how an electric spark can make gunpowder go boom. (Or [[AluminumChristmasTrees possibly not an anachronism]], since [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_History_of_a_Candle his book about candles]] included several "at home" experiments and advised on proper safety measures.)
* DramaticPause: Incorporated into the penultimate scene, an AstronomicalZoom replicating the Pale Blue Dot photograph, to allow the audience to contemplate their place in the cosmos.

** Invoked and discussed at length. Neil explains the process Bishop Ussher used to determine that Earth is 6,000 years old[[note]]by going backward from the death of Nebuchadnezzar[[/note]] and then how geologists realized the Earth had to be older than that by examining rock layers before Clair Patterson arrived at the figure we use today. Also covered are the transition from the "disappearing land bridges" idea to the theory of continental drift and the vindication of Payne's discovery that the Sun is mostly hydrogen rather than having the same composition as Earth. Several times, Tyson says it's important not to feel too smug over previous' centuries ignorance because they didn't have the technological capability to observe distant planets and that science is still marching on today.

** Neil gives credit to Henry Norris Russell for ''not'' doing this to Cecilia Payne when he realized her thesis on stellar atmospheres was correct after all.

* BonusEpisode: the original VHS release of the series included an additional episode in which Sagan is interviewed by Ted Turner for an hour about the series and it's concepts. This bonus episode is not included in the later DVD release.

* UnintentionalPeriodPiece:
** In the third episode Sagan is shown picking up a copy of the ''New York Post'' which announces "[[Music/TheBeatles THE BEATLES]] ARE BACK!". Music/JohnLennon was murdered two months after the episode first aired.
** The episode where Sagan explains how the Voyager data was received and collected now doubles as a fascinating portrait of the state of computer technology in TheSeventies. Data was collected on "magnetic disks, much like a phonograph record."

* ContemplateOurNavels: Sagan's entire reflection on the Pale Blue Dot photograph is narrated over an AstronomicZoom that becomes the famous Pale Blue Dot photograph.

** At the time of his death, he and his wife, Ann, were planning a new miniseries, ''Cosmos For Kids''. [[note]]The early-80s Japanese educational series ''[[Series/MiimuIroiroYumeNoTabi Meme]]'' has very strong ''Cosmos'' influences.[[/note]]

** Creator/SethMacFarlane is a huge geek for the original series and for Creator/CarlSagan. He is also one of the producers of the updated version of the show starring Creator/NeilDeGrasseTyson. He admits that, in his opinion at least, he is the "least important" player in the remake, serving mostly as the means by which Ann Druyan (Sagan's widow) and Steven Soter were able to meet with FOX and get the new series off the ground in the first place.

* CometOfDoom: Deconstructed in the third episode, "When Knowledge Conquered Fear". Tyson explains how this trope was based in superstition and ignorance of how the solar system worked, and then tells an absolutely ''epic'' version of how Edmund Halley went about utterly crushing this superstition by figuring out what comets were and how they worked. It ended with [[NeilDegrasseTyson Dr. Tyson]] telling of Halley's "prophecy" that not only would a particular comet return in 50 years, but accurately and correctly predicting where in the sky it would appear, and how long it would be visible, and how "Halley's Comet" became the best known comet in the history of the world.