******SPACESHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!******

One day, back in 2004, I was perusing my local Barnes & Noble bookstore when I came across a large coffee table book titled “Voyage to the Planets” (originally titled “Space Odyssey” in the UK), written by Tim Haines and Christopher Riley. The cover featured a photorealistic image of a young astronaut standing on the surface of what appeared to Jupiter’s unstable volcanic moon, Io. I was instantly intrigued. Since I found the book in the TV/Movie section, I assumed it was based on a forthcoming movie or TV show. As I leafed through the book, I saw photos of actors dressed as astronauts on a speculative, six-year ‘grand tour’ of our Solar System aboard the spaceship Pegasus, which visits Venus, Mars, the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn and the planet Pluto (still a planet in those days), with a final landing on an unstable comet before the massive ship takes its final voyage home to Earth.

Since this was a BBC book, I assumed it based on was a BBC production, and eventually I caught the miniseries as it made its stateside debut on BBC-America. With breathtakingly gorgeous visual FX (state of the art CGI for 21 years ago), the two-part miniseries was shot on video, resembling a cross between a high-end BBC nature documentary and MTV’s “The Real World,” with the cast telling their characters’ perspectives in video ‘confessionals’ during their Homeric journey across our solar system. In addition to the triumphs, failures and tragedies among the crew, there was also a bit of drama among the mission controllers at the ESA (European Space Agency) Mission Control Center, as each flight controller advocated their excluding priorities to the flight director.

Needless to say, I bought the DVD as soon as it became available in early 2005, and I’m glad I did, since it was difficult to find a current streaming platform with an uncut version of this now rare miniseries.

Part 1.

Written and directed by Joe Ahearne (1998’s “Ultraviolet,” 2005’s “Doctor Who”), the miniseries is narrated by famed actor David Suchet (“Agatha Christie’s Poirot”). Part 1 opens with the launch of Pegasus from Earth orbit towards Venus, where it makes a first manned landing. After that, Pegasus slingshots towards Mars, where a landing is made near Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system. After leaving Mars, Pegasus skims the outer atmosphere of the sun for a gravity assisted push to Jupiter (narrowly avoiding collision with a binary asteroid along the way…). All of this occurs in the first hour…

Note: Scottish-American actor Martin McDougall, who was raised in New Jersey, looks and sounds like he might be related to the late Ray Liotta (“Goodfellas”). McDougall has also appeared in “Batman Begins” (2005), AppleTV’s “Foundation” (2021) and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” (2023).

Note: The Pegasus employs lots of practical appointments, such as a massive heat/meteorite shield, as well as a few minor ‘science fiction’ conceits, such as a miniature magnetic field, which comes in handy when the ship skims the outer atmosphere of the sun later on. What’s never discussed in the miniseries is how much such a grandly-appointed spaceship would’ve cost those nations of Earth who participated in this mission. Even with the pooled resources of NASA, the ESA and Roscosmos, it’d easily be the single most expensive space mission ever conceived.

Note: The scenes of Venus, and later Mars, were both filmed through various color filters and digital skies at the Atacama desert in Chile, a uniquely dry locale which doubles for both planets. This photo of actor Rad Lazar in his character’s spacesuit was a production photo, not a screenshot; you can see members of the production crew reflected in his helmet visor at the Chilean desert location, and an unfiltered blue sky.

Note: The miniseries features an astonishingly accurate recreation of the old Soviet Venera 14 probe, which took the first color photos from the surface of Venus. Little details, such as the lens cap that lodged between the probe’s drill and the surface, are carefully recreated. Tension is added to Yvan’s short spacewalk as cameras implode under the planet’s 92 bars of atmospheric pressure, blast-furnace heat (462 c/467 F) and near-Earth gravity. It’s a genuine nail-biter as the exhausted Yvan hurriedly trudges back to the Orpheus landing craft before his hard suit fails.

Note: Zoë (Joanne Quinn) speaks Russian to Yvan, and it’s hinted the two share a close bond; possibly more than platonic, though subtle enough to remain interpretive. Actress Joanne Quinn also appeared in a 2012 episode of Doctor Who (“A Town Called Mercy”). In this scene, Zoë acts as the stopwatch for her partner Yvan; keeping him on track before his suit is compromised in the extreme Venusian environment. Their situation is reversed in Part 2 when Yvan shouts at a succumbing Zoë to get back aboard the Io lander “Hermes” before her own mission turns fatal.

Note: There are a couple of scientific accuracies in the Mars sequences that one rarely sees in movies or TV shows about the red planet. As Tom first exits the lander craft Ares, he’s enveloped in a thick, fast-approaching Martian dust devil which, in Mars’ thin atmosphere (6-7 millibars) is little more than a gentle breeze on Earth. The Martian environment, like Venus, is depicted as accurately as possible in a terrestrial location (Chile’s Atacama desert again).

Note: Valles Marineris (“Valley of the Mariners”) is gorgeously depicted using a combination of plates and CGI extensions that give this miniseries nice accuracy and scale (certainly for 2004). If the canyon were on Earth, it would span the continental United States, and run roughly six miles, or ten kilometers deep.

Note: Water is discovered below the Martian surface, which is entirely plausible, since the Phoenix lander (which landed at a Northern Mars latitude in 2008) found pure water ice literally beneath its landing pads! The white clumps of ice quickly sublimated into vapor (on camera) after they were blown clean by the lander’s thrusters and exposed to the thin atmosphere. Given that, deep subsurface liquid water is not impossible.

Note: Few details are overlooked in Joe Ahearne’s brilliant script, which is as much space documentary as it is drama. Like the crew of the International Space Station, the crew must drink reclaimed water made from their own urine, which condemns cancer-stricken John to death since any chemotherapy used to treat John’s aggressive cancer would poison the entire crew’s water supply. Actor Mark Dexter plays the affable medic so well that his character’s fate is a real gut punch.

Note: The actors playing the ESA Mission Controllers are memorable as well, with an authentic mix of British, French, American and other accents. Mark Tandy is the semi-obsessive Chief Scientist Alex Lloyd, whose hubris for the mission often conflicts with what is best for the crew, to the ire of empathetic Flight Surgeon Claire Granier, played by Hélène Mahieu. Capcom (“capsule communicator”) Larry Conrad (John Schwab) delivers the final call to the crew, which is made by Flight Director Duncan (Colin Stinton).

Part 2.

Part 2 opens with the Pegasus heading towards Jupiter. Flight Medic John Pearson’s heavy radiation exposure has left him with a fatal leukemia that cannot be treated with chemotherapy, due to the fully-recycled shared water supply aboard Pegasus. Meanwhile, Exogeologist Zoë Lessard makes a solo landing on Jupiter’s volcanic Io, where shifting surface conditions and heavy radiation forces her to abort. Pegasus then makes it way to Saturn, where a robot probe to the moon Titan fails, and where John sadly passes on. Determined to finish their mission in his honor, the Pegasus crew proceeds to a landing at Pluto and later to an unstable comet, before making the long voyage home.

Note: The miniseries gets many details of Io right, including its extreme vulcanism, its radioactive bombardment by Jupiter, and even the variable gravity on its surface. I realize it makes for a dramatic visual in the story and the science of the scene is soundly researched, but landing human beings on Io is nothing short of madness.

Note: I liked that we see Zoë grappling with her perceived failure on the Io mission, and actress Joanne Quinn gives a lot of shading to and sympathy for her character. We also see Zoë finding solace with Yvan, and while their relationship appears to be platonic, a deeper connection is also implied as Zoë turns off the camera in her quarters.

Note: Very realistic that we see this gargantuan mission having its shares of successes and failures. In the wake of the Io failure, the robot mission to Europa returns with samples of the moon’s subsurface water for Nina’s to test. Robots and humans working in tandem would be the ideal way to explore our solar system, though robots run no risk of humans dying should they fail. I also appreciated how the miniseries doesn’t conclusively answer the question of whether or not Europa (or Mars) have life. Nina’s results are inconclusive; either it’s native life, or Pegasus crew contamination. Even actress Michelle Joseph seems to delight in the ambiguity of it.

Note: Nina’s spacewalk among the rings of Saturn is a vicarious thrill for the viewer that fulfills childhood dreams of anyone who’s ever seen the dazzling rings of Saturn through a telescope. The dust fogging Nina’s helmet visor is one of those little details that make this miniseries feel so ‘real.’ Unfortunately, the exhilaration is cut short when ailing John succumbs to his cancer. The crew’s recommitment to their mission in the wake of his loss reminded me of the Apollo program rebounding after the deaths of the Apollo 1 crew (Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee) in a cockpit fire during a routine systems test on the launchpad. On a side-note, the real-life NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to the Saturnian system in 2004 was a rousing success; with the Huygens lander (an ESA construct) successfully landing on the frozen moon Titan in December of 2004–relaying images during descent and after landing.

Note: The retirement of Flight Controller Duncan (Colin Stinton) midway during the mission gives us a nice sense of the time passage on Earth during the Pegasus voyage.

Note: Given that this miniseries was made in 2004, and the first flyby of Pluto wouldn’t happen until NASA’s New Horizons flyby mission 11 years later, the overall science is as accurate as possible; including the dwarf planet’s tenuous atmosphere periodically freezing on its surface. Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union in 2006. The New Horizons probe also confirmed four more mini-moons of the dwarf planet; in addition to Charon (discovered in 1978), these new ‘moonlets’ are named Nix, Styx, Kerberos and Hydra.

Note: The comet lander is named Clyde, after astronomer Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997), who discovered Pluto in 1930. And like a crewed landing on Io, a crewed landing on a comet is absolutely insane, considering their negligible gravity and random geysering the closer they come to a star. Poor Zoë gets all the crap assignments, doesn’t she?

Note: As I wrote above, the subsequent pelting of the Clyde and Pegasus by cometary debris after the comet’s geysering only confirms that a crewed landing on a comet is insanity. However, in reality, there have been successful robotic missions to comets; most notably the ESA’s Giotto mission to Halley’s comet in 1986 (literally a once-in-a-lifetime flyby), and NASA’s recent DART Mission, which pelted a comet’s surface to see if the comet’s course might be altered by such an impact–and it was, slightly.

Note: With a heady mix of triumphs, failures and even a tragedy, the Pegasus voyage–as chronicled in this fictional miniseries–comes to a close.

The End.

Summing It Up

More than two decades years after its 2004 BBC debut, Joe Ahearne’s “Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets” still makes for a thrilling and scientifically relevant limited series that foreshadows future science-heavy movies like Andy Weir’s “The Martian” (2015) and, to a lesser extent, “Interstellar” (2014) and “Gravity” (2013); all three of which this ambitious, exceptionally well-made miniseries precedes by a decade or so.

For a science-heavy docudrama, the international cast is surprisingly strong. American-Scottish actor Michael McDougall (“Commander Kirby”) has an intense, Ray Liotta-like vibe about him, and makes for a steady anchor. Yugoslav-actor Rad Lazar (“Yvan”) plays ‘Russian bear’ Yvan, and his bond with slightly neurotic Canadian Zoë (Joanne McQuinn) adds some dimension to both characters. Delightful Michelle Joseph (“Nina”) becomes increasingly sassy as mission controllers squabble over her methodology. Mark Dexter as affable, ill-fated medic John Pearson is heartbreakingly selfless. Even the actors playing ground controllers make meals out of morsels with their relatively small but memorable roles–particularly British Mark Tandy as testy flight scientist Lloyd, and French actress Hélène Mahieu as empathetic flight surgeon Grainier. These characters are a far cry from the stock cardboard characters you’d see in a 1950s space flick.

Some of the miniseries’ science has since been supplanted by the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan, as well as the New Horizons flyby of Pluto (which added several new moons to the now downgraded dwarf planet). Nevertheless, the depictions of Pluto in Part 2 are surprisingly accurate, as are scenes of the comet flyby. Any other minor quibbles with the science are easily dismissible, given the greater overall accuracy and passion of this made-for-TV production, which still outclasses many of its predecessors and successors. With NASA facing massive budget cuts amidst a growing climate of science denial within the United States (as well as soured international relationships), the dream of anything close to this docudrama’s ambitious Pegasus mission grows increasingly dim. Nevertheless, dreams and aspirations remain important; especially in such troubling times.

For fans of science-heavy, realistic space epics who can forgive a few outdated facts and early-naughts CGI FX, this miniseries allows viewers to be armchair astronauts aboard a cruise into the deep reaches of our solar system. If you can find a watchable copy of “Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets,” it’s well worth seeking out.

Where to Watch

Both parts of the miniseries can be seen in their entirety on The Internet Archive here: Space Odyssey Voyage to the Planets 1/2. Portions or abridged versions can also be viewed on YouTube. The miniseries was also on the BBC iPlayer, but has since been removed. The DVD of the complete miniseries is available for purchase on Amazon and is highly recommended for the bonus content. Just a shame this otherwise gorgeous miniseries was never released on Blu-Ray, at least not in the US.