At the Free Alliance Base on Mars, some space flunkies are loading tri-radium and nearly drop a canister.  That would be, as they say, bad.  A teaspoon of the stuff can power a ship to earth and back, or vaporize the ship if dropped.

Major Dara Talif belongs to a rival faction.  It seems to be some sort of exchange program that has put her on this base.  This is A-OK with Major Bowen who flirts relentlessly with her.  Their witty banter is interrupted by a message from earth.  Peace talks have broken down between the Free Alliance and the Coalition.  Both sides accuse the other of making a tri-radium bomb.  Bowen’s and Colonel Samantha Elliot’s mission, if they decide to accept it, is to see if any tri-radium is missing from Mars.  They find the missing tri-radium very quickly when they see the freakin’ Earth suddenly and completely engulfed in flames.

Elliot can’t reach anyone on earth, but it might be because she uses Sprint.  Bowen ludacrisly suggests maybe a local radiation leak gave the illusion of earth exploding.  Elliot says they must assume the Coalition launched a pre-emptive strike that destroyed the earth.  Wait, why would they do that?  Doesn’t the Coalition also come from earth?  Major Talif is Chinese.  Unless this show is reaalllly racist, she ain’t no alien.

Like the Alliance, the Coalition ^[1] has a Mars base.  If they see any signs the Coalition is behind the destruction, Elliot intends to destroy them.  She makes an astute deduction that the Coalition attacked the earth — if it had been the Alliance, she believes she would have been warned.  Also, the Coalition has a history of sneak attacks on a Moonbase and on Sagan-5.  Wait, where?  Humanity seems to have only made it as far as Mars.  WTF is Sagan-5? ^[2]

The rest is just an exercise; but I keep telling myself exercise is good.  Yeah, there are red herrings, explosions, drones.  But nothing really seems to matter.  The set-up is in place for a great suspenseful episode like Trial by Fire, but they just can’t put the pieces together.

The last half is just ploddingly going through the motions.  And if that is the best you can do with 1) the earth being destroyed, 2) the only survivors stuck on Mars,  3) paranoid rival factions that could destroy the remaining humans,  4) rogue drones, 5) a military coup, and 6) a rival maybe-spy embedded in your camp . . . just give up.

The production design, performances and script were fine.  I felt like the scoring and direction just didn’t build suspense or a sense of urgency.  Meh.

Other Stuff:

• [1] Their full name is The Coalition of Middle-Eastern and Pacific States.  It is beautiful that the Alliance refers to their camp, CMPS on the radar, as the Chumps.  Bravo!
• [2] This is a two-fer for them.  They get to use the old Star Trek trick of establishing credibility by dropping an alien name into our history (“remember Napoleon, Hitler . . . and Parnu of Sirius IV”), plus name-checking Carl Sagan.
• Dara Talif has got to be a reference to Dejah Thoris. However, this would imply that she has more of a claim to Mars which is not implied or true.
• The only IMDb credit for writer Garth Wilson.  But that’s one more than you have.