Four problems with this miniseries

I enjoyed it, but I had four major issues with the 2030+ plotline, three of which are interconnected:

1. Sawyer tried climbing all the way back up the ladder to get back to the cockpit before landing, which resulted in him falling all the way back down and rupturing his spleen. It would have been far safer to just brace himself in the bottom of that tube and hope for the best. But, of course, they needed to have one character die early on, so that couldn't happen.

2. Leslie Richardson is a Type-A+ personality. She tries to achieve dominance in every situation _and_ she is almost incapable of admitting when she was wrong (up until the point when Paul killed a bunch of people). Rule #1 when assembling a mission crew should be whether they can work with other people, and it's pretty clear that she's only going to work when things go flawlessly.

3. Paul Richardson is a freaking timebomb. He may be the top in his field when he's in a stable and/or predictable environment, but they even admitted that he was deemed a risky inclusion. The third mission to continue building a colony is not even remotely the time to start sending people like that into the mix.

4. The airlock wasn't an airlock. It was a bulkhead. Yes, there was an override switch to prevent opening it into Mars atmosphere, but pressing one button isn't enough of a safeguard. Also, all airlocks on a station like that would be actual airlocks, meaning a series of two doors so you can reclaim all the air from the chamber before opening it to Mars atmosphere. Another option that we've looked at was EVA suits that function as airlocks in their own right. Basically, the suit back would connect to the habitat, and you'd be able to just pop open a hatch on the back to climb out. The first problem here is that it would require an ever-growing collection of ports to attach the equally-growing collection of EVA suits to, and once all the ports are full, nobody else would be able to enter that habitat. The second problem is they'd be even heavier to accommodate the rigid hatch on the back, and Mars has enough gravity to make that hard to get around in. And the third problem is if you only planned on that sort of egress method, you wouldn't be able to get equipment in and out, and you wouldn't be able to gain access to the interior of a breached habitat to fix it.

You know what noone tells you about cooking with the Dark Side? The food is really good!