The second part of the Oliver Harper Trilogy. The Cold Equations has a lot to tell in comparatively little time. Let's see how it pulls it off.
The Doctor, Steven and new companion Oliver land on a salvaging spaceship during a dark age of the universe. It’s placed itself right between large amounts of debris, while mining on the planet below. Problems arise, however, when that planet turns out the be earth…
This is a story that has a lot of stuff going on under the hood. It tries to tackle a lot of subjects: The grief of the Doctor and Steven, What makes someone a human, The science of space, Who is Oliver and what is his secret?
And that’s a fair bit of ambition. Let’s talk through them. First, we have the grief aspect. We mostly focus on the grief Steven feels in his episode. He copes with his losses by taking a scientific approach, something he learned in the space academy. He describes space as an uncaring void. Not evil, not out to hurt you, just there. In the same way, he describes his current relationship with the Doctor: Every time we step out of those doors, our odds of returning become slimmer. It’s a grim approach, but fitting.
At the same time, we have someone who’s out of the loop here: Oliver. He comes a bit more into his own in this story. Sneaking in character beats which are subtly presented, but add up to a nice early personality. There’s also his secret, which he protects for quite a while. Steven and the Doctor are aware he’s hiding something, but it’s only when facing death that the truth finally comes out: Oliver is gay. Which isn’t a big deal to Steven at all! “Why would it be?” he proclaims while laughing. All the time he was worried for Oliver, yet in his eyes its something incredibly small. It’s a real bonding moment and a bit of lookback on our growth as humans throughout the years. We get better.
In the main story, we meet with space salvagers who collect human trash to look for usable parts. They sell the profitable stuff and toss the junk into space. This creates a huge web of garbage which could lead to a big domino effect if hit. Yet thorough calculations prevent this from happening.
The problem is that there are still humans living on earth, who now constantly get their stuff stolen. The salvage captain does not seem to worried about this and barely considers those people humans. After all, humans were creative juggernauts! How can those junk rats possibly be humans? It’s an interesting question on human nature.
But we don’t really have time for that, as one of the calculations goes wrong and the spaceship gets blown to pieces. This leaves Steven and Oliver stranded with very little air. This leads to the space calculations, which I won’t repeat in detail here. Just know they are complicated, go on for a while, and should probably be a bit more naturally integrated (In the interview afterwards, Guerrier admits he just copied an email he got from a professor). I have my problems with the explanations that are presented here. Mostly because it forgets to explain some small parts. Steven and Oliver are in this luckily airtight container, and Steven decides to use an air cannister to blast them towards the Tardis. So far so good. So he does this by making a hole in the ship and sticking his hand outside, then blowing air out of the cannister.
This raised some questions with me. I considered this unrealistic. I’ve seen movies. A hole in a spaceship immediately sucks everything out. A bare hand in space would explode from the pressure. After reading up on this, it turns out that Steven should be all right. Since the hole was adequately plugged, there would be no risk of air loss. And Steven’s hand would swell up, but could survive a few minutes in space.
So yay, I learned something new, but I can’t help but think this should’ve been in the story. The vacuum of space is described quite a few times and it has this huge focus on scientific correctness. Why not carry that on and describe the finer details of the process? In story form, it would be way more interesting than the information dump we got earlier.
Which leads me to a bit of an overarching point on all these subjects. Most of these subjects could do with a little bit more time. The human nature aspect is barely touched. The scientific approach could be more expansively integrated. Oliver is in his second story out of 3 and only has the beginnings of a personality. Even the grief is something that could do with a bit more… oompf. It’s a lot of moping, and while we do get insight in Steven’s grief processes, I think it could’ve gone even farther.
So that’s “The Cold Equations”. It has a lot on its plate, but limited time to do it all. What’s there is definitely good, but a jack of all trades is a master of none. A bit more time could’ve truly given each of these aspects the time they needed, so that it truly could’ve been something special. Still, what’s here is good and it has plenty of likeable moments. Worth a listen.
