Away Season 1, Episode 1 recap: Go

Away Season 1, Episode 1 recap: Matt is escorted to the hospital.

We learn that Matt has a CCM disorder and had a stroke. He’s escorted to the hospital in critical condition. The doctors plan to operate on a lesion in his brain. Emma contacts Dr. Lawrence Madigan (Alessandro Juliani) from the moon to have him sent over to operate on her husband.

Then she manages to get a call to Lex, who pleads with her mother not to go through with the launch and to return home. Before Emma can decide, she and Lex share an emotional conversation where she implores her daughter to be strong, stronger than ever before. She then tries to speak to Matt, despite him being unconscious, begging him to recover and playing him some of the piano music she knows he loves.

After Matt goes into surgery, we return to the ship where Misha and Lu are telling Jack he is the superior commander and should replace Emma on the trip. Jack isn’t exactly against the idea, as he received the same training as Emma. Both Ram and Kwesi are against it. Kwesi asks Misha to be sympathetic to her now that her husband just had a stroke.

“Exactly, she needs to go back home,” Misha says, just as Emma descends the ladder into the area.

She doesn’t acknowledge his comments, although she makes it obvious she heard them. She only instructs him to finish the patch within the hour and that she will debrief Houston herself.

Next, she contacts Darlene to tell her if Matt has complications during surgery, she should be prepared to transfer command to Jack. Darlene is adamantly against the idea. No astronaut has abandoned the mission, and she thinks Emma giving up would be spitting in the face of every woman who came before her.

Emma is not having any of her “feminist bullsh*t,” she says her family needs her and cuts off communication until they know something more definitive.

In a flashback, we see the early days of Matt and Emma’s relationship, when Lex was still a baby. Matt received a letter confirming his illness and that he can no longer be an astronaut.

Away Season 1, Episode 1 recap: Emma’s version of events.

George (Brian Markinson) is in a board room with the directors of the other countries. He argues that Emma is the best person for the job just as Darlene interrupts and demands a  meeting. When she fills him in, George grows increasingly frustrated. He wants Putney to get a complete prognosis on Emma and the results of the surgery. Most importantly,  he doesn’t want anyone else to know about Emma’s doubts.

At the base, Putney asks Emma for her version of the incident. According to her, Kwesi is the one who removed the panel in the berth passageway when the chemical leak occurred, unaware of the ramifications. Emma quickly moves Kwesi out of harm’s way and then removes her shirt to try and smother the chemical before it can ignite. Unbeknownst to her, a chemical in her sweat worked as an accelerant and ignited.

Despite her doubts, Putney thinks she did the right thing and acted as a good commander should. She went toward danger without regard for her own life and got her crew out of harm’s way.

Then she receives a call from Earth. Matt has come through his surgery with flying colors. He’s going to be okay. Emma says she’s going to go home, but Matt doesn’t want her to. He needs her to do her job, to go. Ultimately, Lex agrees with him, and with her family’s encouragement, Emma decides to make the mission to Mars.

Neither Lu nor Misha is happy with this development, but as Emma says, they better learn because she’s not going anywhere. In the final minutes of the episode, Emma gives a speech to the world before they begin their launch to Mars.

“We will come together now, in the pursuit of a dream that was once thought impossible.”

As they launch, Emma makes one final promise: “We will return home.”

All ten episodes of Away Season 1 are now streaming on Netflix.