queer_scribbling (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
queer_scribbling) wrote2023-02-17 01:45 am
queer_scribbling) wrote2023-02-17 01:45 am
Entry tags:
The Ark (Season 1)
Episode 2: Like It Touched the Sun
A space walk to try to explore the damaged impact zone of The Event that started this whole thing off leads to someone dying and one injury. A support collapsed and shed metal pieces, more or less, so the spare dude got impaled and one of the lieutenants got a cut on his forehead (and he was supposed to be under observation for a concussion). We are now up to eight total deaths (seven plus the murder of the impersonator).
There was going to be a 'release the bodies into space' thing, except Angus dramatically stopped everything to bring up the idea of human composting. Now, I get that these specific deaths were a bit of a surprise, and I know that the audience may have opinions on end-of-life planning, but I really found the decision to vote on this to show a lack of planning on the writers' part. There should already be a procedure in place for what to do about deaths in space before you send anyone out there on a one way trip to a new planet. If there are any options to choose from, participants should have their final arrangements with whatever information is in the Ark database before Ark One leaves Earth's gravity. There's also no reason to frame 'what will my shipmates do with my remains' as something to indicate worth or worthiness to the mission itself.
(I'm purposefully not picking apart one character's simplification of not wanting to do human composting as 'it'll feed the plants we are going to eat which is basically cannibalism'. I also do not want to get sidetracked by looking into human composting too closely, but it is A Thing in several US states. Angus mentioned a specific thing intended for use on the planet that would compost a human body, so we're just skipping the details of having the necessary components for it.)
In the course of checking on the lieutenant in the med bay, the audience also finds out that Dr Kabir hasn't slept in about 50 hours. There's a bit more that happens in this episode - diverting coolant or whatever to the plant growing bay has essentially led to no A/C and exacerbated crankiness, for example - but I do want to touch on the whole sleeping arrangements thing. At a certain point, the lieutenants acknowledge that they might communicate a little less testily if everyone got the chance to sleep, and Lieutenant Garnet orders Shifts 1 and 2 to sleep for five hours. There's not enough bunks and officers quarters for everyone, and quite frankly, my family was thrown by this.
Like, how do you plan out a spaceship for several hundred people and not have enough beds or sleeping surfaces for everyone to have their own place to sleep? Maybe the two lieutenants who aren't acting as commander would have to figure out switching off on using the one lieutenants quarter left, but that would have to assume that almost everything related to the officers were literally in that one bay that was broken off. Not having enough regular bunks for everyone else, though? The best we can figure is that the cryo-pods were supposed to count towards sleeping quarters, perhaps for certain ranks, but it's on thin ice. Why even have bunks then? Who was going to use those when everyone had a cryo-pod?
Putting that aside, I'm disappointed by the lack of sleep and a little confused by the seemingly useless shift designations. There's this whole thing with Eva - current head of Waste Management - guilting someone who's in Shift 1 or 2 into not sleeping when the water recycler thing needs fixed. She also supposedly can't sleep because no one else knows what to do, and there's the overly familiar "either help or get out of my way" line. (While she is grieving [Harris was her boyfriend], it's a bit adversarial here.) See: Did 3 NASA Astronauts Really Hold A 'Space Strike' in 1973?; Sleep Deprivation Stage Three: After 48 Hours.
On the job impairment due to lack of sleep isn't some obscure and hard to know about topic. The benefit of having a shift schedule is that you don't need to keep everyone awake 24/7 - or until the hallucinations get too intense, or whenever the body gives out. There should be directions for whatever project is being worked on and delegation on the part of heads/chiefs of a division, even if it's "do X and Y but wake Eva for the next step". I'm sure most people are not thinking about documentation and checklists, but if we're 50 hours into being awake from the cryo-pods, we should not need one person to give every instruction in person and verbally. It creates a need for someone to be there all the time, and for some of these projects, there may well be a time when a new person is clueless about what was done and how to troubleshoot it later.
(And five hours of sleep? Some of these people have been going for around or possibly over 50 hours without sleep. Once they find a bed/bunk (which cuts into that five hour break), they're going to be asleep until their body lets them wake up. Granted, maybe I had a different experience with going without sleep, but there was no 'oh, I'll be up in five hours' pre-planning. I choose a bedtime that allowed for 9 or 10 hours and I was at the mercy of when my body released me from sleep.)
Not touched on: Some guy had on one of those stoles that clergy wear during the funerary rite prior to Angus interrupting, so we have glanced very briefly on Religion In Space. Garnet joined in on a brawl in the mess hall. Eva unilaterally decided to divert engine cooling water during the five hour sleep, which means the engines currently don't work.
A space walk to try to explore the damaged impact zone of The Event that started this whole thing off leads to someone dying and one injury. A support collapsed and shed metal pieces, more or less, so the spare dude got impaled and one of the lieutenants got a cut on his forehead (and he was supposed to be under observation for a concussion). We are now up to eight total deaths (seven plus the murder of the impersonator).
There was going to be a 'release the bodies into space' thing, except Angus dramatically stopped everything to bring up the idea of human composting. Now, I get that these specific deaths were a bit of a surprise, and I know that the audience may have opinions on end-of-life planning, but I really found the decision to vote on this to show a lack of planning on the writers' part. There should already be a procedure in place for what to do about deaths in space before you send anyone out there on a one way trip to a new planet. If there are any options to choose from, participants should have their final arrangements with whatever information is in the Ark database before Ark One leaves Earth's gravity. There's also no reason to frame 'what will my shipmates do with my remains' as something to indicate worth or worthiness to the mission itself.
(I'm purposefully not picking apart one character's simplification of not wanting to do human composting as 'it'll feed the plants we are going to eat which is basically cannibalism'. I also do not want to get sidetracked by looking into human composting too closely, but it is A Thing in several US states. Angus mentioned a specific thing intended for use on the planet that would compost a human body, so we're just skipping the details of having the necessary components for it.)
In the course of checking on the lieutenant in the med bay, the audience also finds out that Dr Kabir hasn't slept in about 50 hours. There's a bit more that happens in this episode - diverting coolant or whatever to the plant growing bay has essentially led to no A/C and exacerbated crankiness, for example - but I do want to touch on the whole sleeping arrangements thing. At a certain point, the lieutenants acknowledge that they might communicate a little less testily if everyone got the chance to sleep, and Lieutenant Garnet orders Shifts 1 and 2 to sleep for five hours. There's not enough bunks and officers quarters for everyone, and quite frankly, my family was thrown by this.
Like, how do you plan out a spaceship for several hundred people and not have enough beds or sleeping surfaces for everyone to have their own place to sleep? Maybe the two lieutenants who aren't acting as commander would have to figure out switching off on using the one lieutenants quarter left, but that would have to assume that almost everything related to the officers were literally in that one bay that was broken off. Not having enough regular bunks for everyone else, though? The best we can figure is that the cryo-pods were supposed to count towards sleeping quarters, perhaps for certain ranks, but it's on thin ice. Why even have bunks then? Who was going to use those when everyone had a cryo-pod?
Putting that aside, I'm disappointed by the lack of sleep and a little confused by the seemingly useless shift designations. There's this whole thing with Eva - current head of Waste Management - guilting someone who's in Shift 1 or 2 into not sleeping when the water recycler thing needs fixed. She also supposedly can't sleep because no one else knows what to do, and there's the overly familiar "either help or get out of my way" line. (While she is grieving [Harris was her boyfriend], it's a bit adversarial here.) See: Did 3 NASA Astronauts Really Hold A 'Space Strike' in 1973?; Sleep Deprivation Stage Three: After 48 Hours.
On the job impairment due to lack of sleep isn't some obscure and hard to know about topic. The benefit of having a shift schedule is that you don't need to keep everyone awake 24/7 - or until the hallucinations get too intense, or whenever the body gives out. There should be directions for whatever project is being worked on and delegation on the part of heads/chiefs of a division, even if it's "do X and Y but wake Eva for the next step". I'm sure most people are not thinking about documentation and checklists, but if we're 50 hours into being awake from the cryo-pods, we should not need one person to give every instruction in person and verbally. It creates a need for someone to be there all the time, and for some of these projects, there may well be a time when a new person is clueless about what was done and how to troubleshoot it later.
(And five hours of sleep? Some of these people have been going for around or possibly over 50 hours without sleep. Once they find a bed/bunk (which cuts into that five hour break), they're going to be asleep until their body lets them wake up. Granted, maybe I had a different experience with going without sleep, but there was no 'oh, I'll be up in five hours' pre-planning. I choose a bedtime that allowed for 9 or 10 hours and I was at the mercy of when my body released me from sleep.)
Not touched on: Some guy had on one of those stoles that clergy wear during the funerary rite prior to Angus interrupting, so we have glanced very briefly on Religion In Space. Garnet joined in on a brawl in the mess hall. Eva unilaterally decided to divert engine cooling water during the five hour sleep, which means the engines currently don't work.