Defying Gravity Episode 1.04 H2IK

The Antares crew faces their first major crisis when the ship begins to shut down all of its operating systems, causing the sudden failure of power, heat and gravity controls. We're left biting our nails as everyone aboard is plunged into chaos during the desperate search for a solution.

The sudden failure of the ship's operating systems sends the crew into cold, darkness and zero gravity, while Donner (Ron Livingston) frantically tries to find the cause of the disaster. Oh, no-are we witnessing the end of the Venus mission so soon?

Back on the ground, Ajay is wallowing in his woes at the local astronaut bar when he's approached by nosy British journalist Trevor. Just when we're getting worried that Ajay might spill the real reason why he was sent back to Earth, he collapses.

On the Antares, Jen (Christina Cox) enters the darkened medical bay, to find psychiatrist Mintz (Eyal Podell) having a Post Traumatic Stress-induced flashback to a claustrophobic wartime episode - which, we learn, involves the death of a young girl.

Meanwhile, in mid-broadcast to Earth when the lights go out, Paula (Paula Garces) tries to comfort the panicked Wassenfelder (Dylan Taylor) as they float in his rapidly freezing crew quarters. He keeps tight-lipped as to why he refuses to leave his room, but we're becoming more and more intrigued as the love-hate relationship between these two starts veering more toward the "love" spectrum.

On a spacewalk outside the ship to search for the problem, Donner encounters his own incredible hallucination, which takes him back to the Mars mission tragedy we've seen haunt him several times before. Only this time we learn that one of the two astronauts he was forced to leave behind was Sharon Lewis, with whom he was having an affair.

Back on Earth, Ajay (Zahf Paroo) is in the hospital recovering from an operation to replace his faulty heart valve. Still, at the urging of Ted, Mission Control patches Ajay through to Donner, desperate for an answer about the systems breakdown. Ajay isn't able to offer an answer, but we watch as Donner finally realizes that there's a literal wrench in the works of the ship's circuitry.

Attributing his success to Ajay, Donner and the crew successfully lobby Mission Control to get the banished engineer reinstated. And thank goodness, too, because, as we saw last episode, Ajay was on the brink of completely losing it!

In the final scene, we're made well aware of how much each of the crew members - and people in general - rely upon each other. During a flashback sequence to five years prior, Ajay lets Donner in on a secret code his team used at his prior job if one member didn't know the answer to something - the H2IK Sequence, or, quite simply, "Hell If I Know." Once invoked, another team member would jump in with the answer.

And something tells us H2IK is gonna be used somewhat frequently aboard the Antares.