TV Review: “Cosmos”

by Mary Anne Butler; Editor/Reporter/Photographer

“We are made of star stuff.”

Something amazing about the world of social media, almost everyone will post or check in or have photos of whatever it is they’re doing.  Most often, these are things they deem “cool” or worth sharing with their friends and the public.  Almost all of the folks on my personal friends list were posting about the same thing, which almost never happens.  They were all talking about Cosmos: A Space Time Odyssey.  Does that title make you think of Carl Sagan and the Starship of the Imagination?  Well it SHOULD!  But the one that aired tonight on the Fox Networks is the brainchild of Sagan’s wife Ann Druyan, and also of Brannon Braga, Neil deGrasse Tyson (who I got to interview at SDCC 2013) and Seth MacFarlane.

The point of the series is to explain the wonders of the universe as simply as possible, using grand extraterrestrial (which actually means ‘of or from outside the earth or its atmosphere’) visuals and wonderfully rendered cartoons occasionally.  During the first episode, we are shown some of the history of the visionaries of  astronomy through animation,

The calendar of the universe is amazing, months being measurements of one billion years.  The Big Bang starts on January 1st of this annal, in bursting coronas of energy that move as waves our or sunglasses wearing host.  Fair warning though, if you are a believer in creationism, this show is not for you.  There is SCIENCE on this show, you guys.  This is the point of such a series.  The unimaginable scale of this timeline is awe inspiring, the last few seconds of the year of the universe remind us how small and new we are to existence compared to the galaxies that surround us.

Neil ends the first episode with a story of his first meeting with Carl Sagan, when Neil was only 17 years old. I can’t tell you how lovely this moment is to picture, and how it makes everything come full circle for this series.  I am already excited for next week, and can only hope others take to it as well.

(The one issue I had with our dear Dr. Tyson was his putting his fingers INTO his ears during a segment where the meteor struck and wiped out all early life.  When not at conventions I spend weekends around historical reenactors and shoot black powder muskets and cannon, you cup AROUND your ears to deflect the sound, not fingers in the ears to direct the vibrations further in.)