You know what’s difficult? Communicating clearly. Unless we are constantly interrogating ourselves or making a habit of metacognition, we often don’t fully understand our own motives and priorities, which can enhance the difficulty of conveying them clearly to others. Even when we do communicate in a way that we think is clear to others, they aren’t privy to all of our little mental and emotional nuances. And this is assuming that everyone is communicating in good faith! People who are being deliberately manipulative or deceptive are in a different category entirely. Negotiators, too — everyone in that situation is holding something (or many somethings) back for strategic reasons. “House Divided” approaches the (un)knowability of others’ minds through the lenses of a bunch of tricky conversations, including global and interplanetary politics, workplace safety and workers’ rights, and conversations literally being held in two different languages.
The action starts with an argument that becomes as close to a fistfight as we’re likely to see between two people wearing space suits. Svetlana and a new-to-us worker named Vasily are squabbling over the successful Soviet coup by newly installed president Karzhenko; he’s thrilled, she’s not. Things escalate from a testy disagreement to a shoving match when Vasily won’t drop the subject and calls Svetlana a traitor and a whore. In the brief melée, Vasily falls down and rips a hole in his suit, resulting in a terrifying experience that he’s lucky to survive at all. As we all should know by now, physical altercations in space are a very bad idea. Svetlana and Vasily don’t seem to recall what happened when their forebears fired space guns and incinerated a cosmonaut in his suit.
The ripple effects from this incident threaten to delay the new asteroid capture program, destabilize the entire M7 Alliance, and set off the tinderbox of dissatisfaction that underpaid Helios workers are stewing in. Poor Dani has her hands full enough without Ed sticking his single-minded, biased beak in and attempting to undermine her decision-making authority. Once again, why is Ed here? Last week’s sweet scene in the greenhouse between him and Svetlana is not nearly enough to outweigh how annoying he is in every scene this episode. Dani could easily be having similarly tense (but possibly a tiny bit fruitful) conversations with some other significant character at Happy Valley. This is yet another reason to lament the loss of Kuznetsov; Dani is absolutely right in saying he would not have stood for any of what’s going on, but I think she underestimates Irina Morozova’s skillful political maneuvering at Roscosmos. There was no way that Dani’s choice of consequences for Svetlana — removal from flight status and a 60-sol suspension without pay — was going to be acceptable to the new regime, who are exercising their option to recall Svetlana to Moscow to face trial for “crimes against a patriot.” So, a shoving match is treason now? What a cool situation!
Back on Earth, Eli is suffering under an even more optimistic delusion, eagerly anticipating a fruitful conversation with Irina on the grounds that “if I can hash out a good deal with the UAW, I guarantee I can with her!” This sweet summer child. He seems not to have absorbed some key facts he just learned about Irina, such as her 35-year tenure in Roscosmos’s intelligence apparatus and steady purging of “disloyal” staff since becoming its chief administrator. Unsurprisingly, their conversation is a two-minute exercise in Irina twisting Eli’s talking points to serve her own purposes, as she cites chapter and verse of the M7 treaty and the distinction between enforcing policy vs. the rule of law. If NASA’s position is that some aspects of the M7 treaty are no longer valid because it was negotiated under Gorbachev’s premiership, the USSR will consider withdrawing from the agreement altogether and recalling all of their personnel home.
Eli fell victim to one of the classic blunders, believing that he’d be speaking with Irina administrator-to-administrator in a brisk beginning of an eventually solid working relationship. Not only does Irina outmaneuver him with her high-ranking political and espionage functionary-ese, but she also has different priorities. Eli wants to arrive at a mutually acceptable deal that will enable Happy Valley to recommence their asteroid capture-and-mining program as soon as possible, while Irina is content to delay science and commerce if she can capitalize on the opportunity to settle a political score and send a message to all of Karzhenko’s would-be critics on Mars and Earth. Eli needs to learn that his breezily stated belief that “history is not made by talking only with the people who agree with you” is true and is the type of thing that can only be said by people who think they have the upper hand when they talk with people who don’t agree with them.
Some practical repercussions from this conversation manifest immediately on Mars. The base-wide operating system for computers is now unnavigable to NASA staff because Roscosmos has ordered that it be reverted to its original Cyrillic. This one is particularly tough to swallow, as it comes with the additional indignity of Dani learning from one of the cosmonauts that Roscosmos no longer acknowledges her as Happy Valley’s commander, rather than from an official communiqué. In response, the plan to send Svetlana back to Earth on a shuttle departing Mars the next sol is on hold, and Dani agrees with Ed’s suggestion to post a security officer outside her quarters so that “the Soviets don’t try to grab her.”
Back at Roscosmos, Margo is experiencing some new pangs of culture shock. She’s invited to sit in on staff meetings, but there’s literally no room at the table for her. Nobody but Irina speaks to her, but Irina also uses her presence to punish another person for daring to suggest that Svetlana be permitted to stay on Mars for the benefit of the asteroid program, giving Margo that poor unfortunate soul’s copy of the Kronos incident report. At least the report gives Margo something substantial to work on; I couldn’t get Shazam to identify the music that plays over the scene of her carefully reviewing the report and double-checking all of the calculations, but it’s a classic jazzy Margo piece featuring a trio of piano, upright bass, and drums. It’s comfortingly reminiscent of all of the scenes from earlier seasons where Margo worked into the small hours, strolling the quiet hallways to clear her thoughts and hit the vending machines for a sugary little pick-me-up. In the canteen, Margo has what must be her first normal conversation with a coworker in years, as a young engineer named Tatyana shows her how to use a washer from the dining chairs as a coin at the coffee machine. Margo returns the kindness by offering Tatyana some helpful advice on the model she’s working on for the new asteroid capture protocols. These two have an easy chemistry, in spite of Tatyana and her colleagues having been told to maintain a certain distance from Margo.
I just hope she won’t think that Irina is going to be her work bestie. She rescued Margo from likely execution, but that was a self-serving act. Irina makes no bones about scything her way through dissent and anything that could have so much as a whiff of embarrassment for the Motherland, and Margo gets to witness a prime example of Irina’s methods. Her late-night re-calculations reveal that a flawed measurement unit conversion by Roscosmos engineers resulted in inadequate asteroid anchor bolts, leading directly to the Kronos disaster. The head engineer, Semenov, takes responsibility for the flaw and is swiftly shown the door, while Irina bestows a framed photo of the 1969 team at Roscosmos (including Sergei, aw!) upon Margo, along with a recitation of an excerpt of a love poem by Alexander Pushkin, and an assurance that Irina will respect and appreciate all the work Margo is capable of. The contrast between Margo’s relief and little flush of pride in this scene and her shaken horror when she learns that the KGB arrested Semenov in front of his entire department is chilling. I fear it’s already too late for this advice, but don’t let this manipulative bureaucrat seduce you into an imaginary friendship with compliments and baubles, Margo!
Up on Mars, Massey and Dani should be so lucky as to get to know each other well enough to be in any danger of being chummy. They’d work really well together if they learned how not to talk past one another. Dani made a point of inviting dissenting opinions in her first big department heads meeting, but she doesn’t receive Massey’s concerns in her usual sympathetic, big picture-seeing way. She perceives the power imbalance between Svetlana and Vasily differently than the Helios workers on the lower levels do. To her, Vasily (who has yet to regain consciousness) is a beneficiary of the new regime thanks to his family’s place in it, and Svetlana is in danger of being swallowed up by some gulag. It seems not to have occurred to Dani that the lower-level workers see Svetlana as getting away with near-murder because of her elite status as a cosmonaut, while Vasily’s injuries will have terrible lasting repercussions. Massey stops short of telling Dani that she believes command thinks of the Helios workers as disposable, but I wish she hadn’t because Dani’s wholly unsatisfactory response dismissing Massey’s inferior understanding of the situation’s complexity is missing the point. They’re both right, and they both need to recalibrate their understanding of events and the mood throughout Happy Valley.
Massey doesn’t have much time to lick her wounds, though, because it seems like Miles may have gotten himself into a spot of bother during his little excursion to collect more of the Mars rocks like those he sent home to Lily. They don’t just look cool; they’re a very rare obsidian that Earthside jewelers can’t get enough of. Ilya shut the door firmly on Miles’s attempts to expand their business into gemology, so he’s taken a DIY approach and landed at the bottom of a small crevasse. He’s nearly out of oxygen when Massey finds and rescues him, but at least he won’t need to convalesce in a bariatric chamber. A win is a win.
Eli and Irina arrive at a win-win arrangement to get Svetlana back to Earth: M7 member India will take custody of her and will carry out an investigation and trial there instead. The U.S. can feel okay about the chances of Svetlana getting a fair trial, while the USSR can still be seen as prosecuting a patriot-assaulter. Both sides save face, and the asteroid capture program can resume. Naturally, Ed hates this plan and really lays into Dani, accusing her of being a too-eager careerist bent on pleasing her higher-ups. Dani came out of retirement for this gig, though, and furthermore, Ed is yet again trying to make an exception for a colleague he loves, a decades-long pattern that’s repeatedly yielded tragic results. Ed should never have sent Gordo back to the moon after his mental health crisis at Jamestown (notwithstanding his and Tracy’s later heroic self-sacrifice, it was a bad idea); he also should never have hired the alcohol-dependent Danny Stevens for the original Mars mission. It’s clear from Dani’s voice trailing off and Ed’s cruel taunting that Danny isn’t just gone; he’s capital-G Gone, but neither goes into further detail about it just yet.
Houston, We Have Some Bullet Points
• The fatal measurement unit conversion error is just another example of why the U.S. should switch over to the metric system; Imperial units of measure are generously described as whimsical, and now we know that they can be (fictionally) deadly!
• There are a few things to admire about Roscosmos HQ: The mosaic in the entryway is incredible and is very much in keeping with the Soviet space pride aesthetic on these 1964 commemorative stamps. The samovars in the canteen are a nice touch, too.
