If Defying Gravity Hadn't Been Cancelled, What Would Have Happened Next?

As many of you know, we here at Republibot have been pretty steadfast in our coverage of the sadly departed “Defying Gravity” series, which was - alas - dead before it ever even hit the air. A lot of you have emailed or posted in comments, wondering what would have happened next in the story, or asking how to contact the producers, so you can ask ‘em.

Well, now we know!

James Parriott, the series creator gave a detailed interview over on Clique clack, in which he answered many, many, many of our questions about the show. It’s sort of fun to read over it and see what we guessed right and what we got wrong, but, of course, it’s also bittersweet because we’ll never get to see it unfold. And of course he doesn’t reveal the ending. Let’s take a look, shall we?

First of all: Many of us called it right on Nadia’s character: She was born a hermaphrodite, and chose “Female” around age 10, but she’s haunted by the life she didn’t get, and of course she’d have gradually become male in the second season of the show. Ugh. Frankly, if there’s one aspect of the show that I *didn’t* want to see, it’s this. The whole thing really icked me out.

Donner and Zoe would, of course, provide the emotional and romantic core of the show, and despite his having a vasectomy and her having an emergency hysterectomy, they’d end up having a kid during the course of the mission. In fact, that’s kind of neat: We’ve never seen anyone attempt that on an SF show before. Obviously, Goss would have dropped a kidney in anger over that one.

We don’t get any significant answers about Wassenfelder, though we are told that he didn’t have any hallucinations since they hadn’t figured out his character well enough to guess what he’d hallucinate about.

Arnell Poe would have, as nearly all of us guessed, lost a leg in training, which is how they’d have brought Zoe back in to the program. Later, he, AJ, Trevor the Reporter, and Claire, would start a cabal to get the real information about the Antares mission out to the public.

We’re also not given any meaningful explanations for Jen - we don’t know why she didn’t hallucinate, but it’s somehow tied up with her fears of abandonment. In season 2, she’d have had to kill her bunny.

Eve has probably the most unexpected story of the show - she’s been having flashbacks of mars, where Ted is yelling, and eventually she realizes the logo on his helmet is “Antares,” so it’s not a flashback at all, but a flash forward! Her and Rollie end up going to Mars and meeting the Antares crew there!

Goss would eventually have a degree of redemption.

Sharon and Walker - the astronauts abandoned on Mars ten years earlier - survived for weeks or maybe even months on the planet afterwards. (How does this jibe with Eve’s mention that “They never would have made it to the lander”, though?) There was talk about having the two still alive on Mars when the Antares got there, in season 3. Probably half of season 3 would have taken place on Mars, or in orbit around it.

Season 2, we can surmise, would have been all about Mercury.

You can read the whole article online here http://www.cliqueclack.com/tv/2009/10/29/how-defying-gravity-would-have-... and it’s pretty fascinating. There’s also some discussion of why the show wasn’t promoted better, and whether or not getting labeled “Grey’s Anatomy In Space” was a good thing or a bad thing.

Check it out, and if you’ve got any friends who like the show, be sure to tell them!