Recap / From the Earth to the Moon E7

Episode Name: "That's All There Is"

Original Airdate: April 26, 1998

Alan Bean (Dave Foley) was selected to NASA as part of Astronaut Group 3 in 1963. Originally relegated to the Apollo Applications Program, with little hope of going into space at all (much less a lunar assignment), a twist of fate would see him elevated to becoming the fourth man to walk on the Moon with Apollo 12 as its LMP.

He, Commander Pete Conrad (Paul McCrane), and CMP Dick Gordon (Tom Verica), knew they would never measure up to the gravitas of Apollo 11. So they didn't try to. They went to the Ocean of Storms as just three Navy compatriots having the time of their lives.

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This episode features the following tropes:

• Awful Truth: The one thing that couldn't be tested to verify that it still worked following the lightning strike was the parachutes. The control teams ultimately decided not to tell the crew, and to proceed with the mission; if the parachutes failed, they'd be just as dead whether they went to the Moon or not. Fortunately, the parachutes worked just fine. (Which we already knew would happen, since splashdown was one of the first scenes in the episode.)
• Breather Episode: Besides the lightning strike early on (and a brief moment of angst afterward; see Awful Truth), there's little in the way of drama in this episode. This served its original broadcast well, as it was aired immediately before the premiere of the episode on Apollo 13.
• Cluster F-Bomb: One scene shows a tour group (with a bunch of children) passing through while the Apollo 12 crew is in a training meeting, and Pete starts spouting a bunch of profanities, including multple uses of "cocksucker".
• Delayed Reaction: Conrad and Bean look at each other silently for a few seconds before digesting that Intrepid had successfully landed.
• Dramatic Irony: Bean mentioned that Dick Gordon wasn't too upset being left to orbit the Moon in CM Yankee Clipper while Conrad and Bean walked on the surface, expecting to command Apollo 18...a mission that would never happen.
  • And of course, the Awful Truth moment is muted by this. Even without explicitly seeing the splashdown as one of the first scenes of the episode, the history behind the mission would tell us that the parachutes would actually work.
• Flashback Cut: While describing what probably happened to the TV camera, we see a flashback of Bean going through a walkthrough of camera setup. The warning from a tech to be careful sure not to point it at the Sun sounds almost like an afterthought.
• It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: How the mission began, for sure.^note Early on, wind was really the only factor that could delay an American rocket launch. Though NASA would be more careful once they got to the Space Shuttle program, the Air Force wouldn't learn this lesson until well into the 1980s. As late as 1987, they lost an unmanned rocket to lightning. Pete Conrad even remarked after the Shock and Awe cleared that the spacecraft needed more "all-weather" testing.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Bean accidentally breaking the LM's color TV camera by inadvertently pointing it at the Sun, limiting live color television footage from the lunar surface. Naturally, the series made a point of showing Emmett Seaborn's frustration.
• Nipple and Dimed: The Playboy inserts in the wrist pamphlets, a "gift" from the support crew. Between this and the earlier Cluster F-Bomb, this episode definitely locked in the series' TV-14 rating.
• Percussive Maintenance: While trying to get the camera set up, Al accidentally points it at the sun which fries its optics. He tries various ways to fix it, eventually hitting it with a hammer, since he figures he's got nothing to lose. Funnily enough, that seems to get closer to fixing it than anything else.
• Shock and Awe: The lightning strike, as Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice in the first minute of flight, disconnecting its fuel cells and knocking out its telemetry. EECOM officer John Aaron suggests "SCE to Aux".^note SCE = Signal Conditioning Equipment. The (ultimately correct) assumption was that the lightning strike caused an undervolt which knocked the SCE haywire, scrambling the telemetry readings. Naturally, "aux" means auxillary. Alan Bean was the only one on-board who remembered which switch that was from training, and flicked it. The readings returned to normal, and the rest cleared up after first stage separation.
• Shown Their Work: As with the rest of the series, very true with the history. Right down to the propeller hats and the matching Chevrolet Corvettes the crew had. Two aversions, though:
  • The Playboy inserts in the wrist pamphlets were black-and-white xerographs, not full color as this episode depicts them.
  • "Up Around the Bend" by Creedence Clearwater Revival, played when Intrepid lands, was released five months after this mission (April 1970), and the album it's from followed three months later (July 1970). But "Sugar, Sugar" was released earlier in 1969.
• Stunned Silence: Bean's reaction when Pete Conrad asked him if he wanted to join the Apollo 12 crew. The most he could muster was a nod in the affirmative.
• Tap on the Head: Early in the episode, it depicts splashdown, where the command module's TV camera is dislodged from stowage and hits Alan Bean square in the forehead. It's depicted pretty accurately in medical terms; it's obvious he's concussed, as he blacks out and freezes up for 5 to 10 seconds, then goes about what he was doing. He needed a few stitches once the crew was in quarantine, and also noted that if he had his head turned the wrong way, the strike probably would have killed him.
• Title Drop: Alluded to. Bean asks it of Conrad when they leave post-mission quarantine.^note Of course, in their case, that wasn't all there was, as both Conrad and Bean would subsequently command Skylab missions.
• To Absent Friends: Bean recalls the members of Group 3 who met untimely deaths: Theodore Freeman,^note A jet he was flying in 1964 suffered a bird strike, and he crashed. Charles Bassett,^note Killed along with New Nine astronaut Elliot See in a jet crash at the McDonnell plant in St. Louis in 1966, while training for Gemini 9. Roger Chaffee,^note  See: "Apollo One". and especially C.C. Williams, whose death led to his own selection for Apollo 12.^note C.C.'s death was also a jet crash, as his controls jammed over the Florida panhandle in 1967. Unmentioned is that he was flying home to Mobile, Alabama, to see his father, who was dying of cancer. His father would outlive him by six months. Toward the end of the episode, Bean leaves C.C.'s pilot wings on the lunar surface, and notes that he's the reason there are four stars on the mission's patch.
• What Could Have Been: Invoked, in this case, in regards to the Hasselblad camera timer. They had smuggled it on-board in hopes of getting potentially the only photos of both astronauts on the lunar surface, and with Surveyor 3 on top of that. But Bean couldn't find it. Conrad finds it at the end of the second EVA, and Bean just tosses it in frustration.
• The World Is Just Awesome: Actually downplayed a bit. Bean has most of the moments, being the rookie on the flight, but Conrad and Gordon had both flown into space before. This doesn't even get into the fact that the real mission suffered from the windows of Yankee Clipper getting stained due to the rainstorm they launched through, marring much of Gordon's orbital sightseeing.