CBS ran the pilot episode of “Salvation” tonight. The plot of the show, in short, is this: a seven-kilometer asteroid has been discovered that is going to hit the Earth in 186 days, impacting off the east coast of the US. Promising! The US government has known about this for some months, and is working on a plan to deflect the asteroid. Yay! But the plan involves… a gravity tractor. Ummmm… no. Gravity tractors might be a fine way to go if you have decades to deflect an asteroid, but 186 days? Nope. The acceleration is just too low.

Anyway, in order to keep civilization from exploding into panic, the government is keeping everything hush-hush, to the point where they are whacking civilians who find out about the asteroid.  Enter Our Heroes: one of whom is very clearly a stand-in for Elon Musk. When Pseudo-Musk finds out about the coming apocalypse (because why would the Feds tell people in the rocket industry about something like this), pseudo-Musk actually has the best idea of the show. He has been working on interplanetary spacecraft to eventually be used for the colonization of Mars; now, he’s going to speed up the project, build as many as he can, and send as many people to Mars as possible before the Earth is inevitably trashed, because he recognizes that the Feds plan is Teh Dumb. The plan is to send an ark, not a deflection mission.

Up till this, it seems promising. But OF COURSE, another Hero convinces Pseudo-Musk to devote his effort not to saving a few, but saving the entire planet. That would be fine…but it’s accepted as a given that in order to succeed, they will need to invent and perfect technologies that don’t actually exist. This… is a bad, criminally negligent approach.

Sigh.

Equally annoying: the use of nukes is suggested as a Last Resort. A character who should know better trots out the old canard that nukes are a bad idea because blowing up an asteroid just turns it into a shotgun blast, when anybody sane enough to run an asteroid deflection program will use stand-off detonations, and a whole lot of them, to deflect the asteroid with an Orion-drive-like approach. But I guess that system, which is easy to explain and understand, requires no new technologies, would be reliable, could be made operational in a relatively short time, and would annoy the religiously anti-nuclear crowd.

And since this is a network program, there is an excess of Pretty People, an excess of Family Drama, an excess of Extraneous Filler. As with Lovecraftian fiction, End Of The World yarns that revolve around massive attempts to stave off The End are best when they don’t spend a whole lot of time on delving incredibly deeply into the characters, but rather give us the actual *story.* It doesn’t help that rather than working on the story and the science, the producers spent effort on Social Justice. This article claims that the producers made sure that the forthcoming technologies to be developed by Our Heroes have been vetted and aren’t scientifically stupid, so I guess we’ll see.

On the whole… ehhhh.