"TINA, mute communications and play 'Family'."
Jordan Peele: Five voyagers setting sail to a mysterious red light 35 million miles across an empty sea, soaring within the greatest invention ever created by the human spirit to escape a catastrophe made possible by the most destructive regions of the human mind. Individual madness or shared nightmare? The answer lies in their search for safe harbor here in The Twilight Zone.
A crew of five people traveling to Mars to start a space colony find themselves alone in the universe, and their personal and interpersonal bonds are put to the test.
Tropes for this episode include:
- Absent Aliens: Langford talks about "The Great Filter,"
a theory that the true test of an advanced civilization is whether it can travel to another planet before destroying itself. That eventually turns out to be the Secret Test for the crew. - Aliens Steal Cable: The crew's hopes briefly jump when they begin to receive a transmission from Earth... only to soon find out they're catching old television broadcasts from the '60s.Donlan: "Caller on this frequency, identify yourself!"
Radio: "...The Munsters, brought to you by Joy, the dishwashing liquid that gets you so clean you can see yourself shine!" - Ambiguous Ending: It is left to the viewer to decide whether the Earth is actually destroyed in a nuclear war, if the Bradbury actually flew to Mars, if the whole thing was an elaborate simulation by the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, or some combination of everything. It's also not known how Pierson ended up with them at the end or what they did to him.
- Arc Number: The mission briefing number begins with "1015".
- Artistic License – Space: The crew is able to stay grounded on their ship and even sleep comfortably and eat dinner on a table in spite of there being no gravity. In real life, they should be floating all over the place. Handwaved when one of them mentions the ship has pseudo-gravity.
- Being Watched: Pierson comes to believe the entire mission is a simulated experiment, and the crew is actually being watched by Ground Control the whole time. He's not entirely wrong...
- Bottle Episode: The episode takes place almost entirely within the cramped confines of the Bradbury.
- Cabin Fever: All of the crew members suffer from this to some degree, most notably Pierson.Pierson: "You don't believe me! You want me to do what they want! They made us think that our families are dead! They made us think that the Earth was destroyed! They fucked with eight months of our lives, and I saw them watching us!"
- Call-Back: Flight Surgeon Katherine Langford has a toy Northern Goldstar airplane, the same airline from "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet".
- Colonized Solar System: The Bradbury mission was supposed to be the start of this.
- Contrived Coincidence:
- A planet-destroying nuclear exchange begins just as the Bradbury is ready to launch.
- A deadly solar flare is detected right after Pierson shares his theory that they're all in a simulated voyage.
- First Contact: It is implied this will happen after the episode ends.
- For Science!: Pierson repeatedly collected fecal samples from the toilet to "prove" that their voyage is a simulation."There is nothing! I took samples for 105 days with my bare fucking hands, and there has never been a ring!"
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: The episode begins with static interference starting with the CBS All Access logo.
- Fun with Acronyms: TINA stands for Transport Information Network Artificial intelligence unit.
- Humanity on Trial: Indirectly; by working together despite their hardships, the Bradbury crew convinces the aliens observing them that humans are worth saving.
- Leitmotif: "Family," by The Interrupters, ends up being a recurring theme of the episode for its emphasis on familial bonds.This is my family / My one crazy family.
- Ludicrous Precision:
- Pierson beat out 15,380 other applicants to get on the mission.
- Pierson says that it's a 735.6 billion to 1 odds chance that a North Korean missile launch would happen right before their launch.
- He also says that his proof that their mission is a fake is because he could not find a crystallizing ring of approximately ten microns from the fecal matter of their space toilet.Pierson: "—vapor from the trash bags, which, over a 12-week period of approximately five to ten fecal collections a day, thus five to ten interactions with a vacuum, should create a crystallizing ring of approximately ten microns around the internal—"
- Mythology Gag:
- Whipple is the company responsible the space program.
- Jerry suggesting that they're in a simulation echoes the ending of "Where is Everybody?"
- A group of astronauts leaving for another planet because their home world is being attacked by nuclear weapons is reminiscent of "Third from the Sun".
- The computerized artificial intelligence system TINA is named after Talky Tina from "Living Doll".
- The crew's names are based on those in "I Shot an Arrow in the Air".
- Secret Test: Pierson becomes convinced that their entire mission is a simulation to test how the crew would hold up under the stress of a flight to Mars.Pierson: "My hypothesis is such that the events on this ship are the result of an endurance simulation experiment meant to test crew morale and mental durability during a trip to Mars. Unlike other such experiments, we were not informed in order to get a truer result."
- Shout-Out:
- An In-Universe one — the flight is the Bradbury Heavy mission, after author Ray Bradbury and The Martian Chronicles.
- A more subtle one appears when one realizes that humans surviving on Mars after a nuclear war is a theme of The Martian Chronicles.
- Suicide Mission: The crew views their trip as this after they believe the Earth is destroyed.
- Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: They are revealed to have been observing the crew (and rescued Pierson) the entire time.
- Team Mom: The crew treats Commander Brant as such.Langford: "We're a family, and we need our mum. You're the mom."
Brant: "I'm commander of nothing but a slow suicide." - Title Drop: Mission Specialist Jerry Pierson suggests that they're in a "Six Degrees of Freedom" simulator.Pierson: "So, obviously, we are housed in a six degrees of freedom simulator — we're capable of performing the six types of motion possible by a rigid body in three-dimensional space."
- Thrown Out the Airlock: Jerry does this to himself to prove that this mission is actually a test for the crew. He's not wrong, but to be splitting hairs just wrong about who is running the test.
- Zero-G Spot: Pilot Casey Donlan and Engineer Rei Tanaka get busy in the space craft, with the captain then calling them out on it and explaining why it's a bad idea, since if Rei got pregnant they wouldn't have enough supplies to provide for an infant too.Brant: "I'm not trying to tell you who you can and cannot fuck, but we cannot do this. This mission is not designed for it."
Jordan Peele: It is said that seeing is believing. The crew of the Bradbury Heavy mission to Mars might tell you otherwise. They are about to find out that they couldn't trust their own eyes. But who, or what, can we trust if not ourselves? The answer lies somewhere between takeoff and landing in The Twilight Zone.
