Spaceman #7

"Adrift...Off" (7 of 9)
written by Brian Azzarello
art by Eduardo Risso

I must say, Azzarello's Spaceman has me quite befuddled at this point.  The correspondence between the Mars missions and the current kidnapping, always somewhat unclear, is increasingly so.  What at first seemed Orson's fantasy of a life he wasn't allowed to live looks more and more like history.  With the death of Spender under mysterious circumstances and the growing possibility of Ottershaw's murder out of a conspiracy between Orson and Carter, the current conflict frames their familiarity and their seemingly sole survival in entirely different terms.  As before (or perhaps alternately), Carter has bullied and beaten Orson into acquiescing to his plans, which keep spiraling out of his own control.

Meanwhile, the confrontation between the two spacemen on the bridge forces the hand of the reality show producers who must air live footage to keep from being out-scooped.  This, of course, alerts the fuzz to their continued access to Tara via tracking chip.  They're not happy, to say the least, at being strung along.  But now Tara's been kidnapped again by Lilly and her fellow thugs, pursued by Carter and an unconscious Orson on behalf of her original kidnapper, the pedophilic sheik with a thing for celebrity girls, and whatever notions of safety the film crew felt when she was with Orson—though they considered him her kidnapper, erroneously, and still do—are exploded when they are shot with an automatic weapon by her new kidnappers.  It's a tribute to Azzarello's satire that I don't actually know whether this new turn of events will elicit a horrified reaction by the show's viewers at the irresponsibility of the production crew or simply raise viewership exponentially, since hostages have to be better television than an orphan-selection reality competition.

[August 2012]