Streaming: Funimation
Episodes: 12
Source: Light Novel
Episode Summary: With the midcentury space race in full swing, the communist UZSR seems to be in a winning position. Having completed the first space flight with a living being aboard (a dog named Daly), they’re again tasked with reaching for the stars – sending a human being into space during a live broadcast. Such a thing would cement the position of the Union as the world leader in space exploration, but it comes with some complications; namely, that with such prestige at stake, any error would likely spell shame and death to those who had failed their country.
Lev is a failed cosmonaut candidate assigned to the top secret Project Mechtat, which aims to skirt by on several technicalities – namely using a vampire as their cosmonaut test subject rather than a human soldier. Irina, codenamed N44 and the vampire in question, serves as a test subject in this program. Biologically similar to humans, she becomes the vehicle by which stresses on the human body during space flight are tested, and if she dies in the process, well, she was only considered a test object by the standards of the program. Lev is ordered to remain emotionally hands-off as her handler during this mission, but despite the many myths surrounding vampires, he already finds himself focused on her inherent humanity.
Impressions: I often love the idea of a historical AU. The kind of “what if?” speculative skills it takes to transform known history into a different living, breathing timeline are fascinating to me. One really has to have a good grasp of actual history in order to make the most of the various tweaks and twists of an alternative historical pathway.
Irina: The Vampire Cosmonaut doesn’t really seem to be a story of minor tweaks and subtle shifts, however; its premise of “what if vampires are real and helped some self-serving space executives get around a technicality regarding use of human life?” is about as blunt-force as you can get. Yet, even though creative human culture is enamored with vampire lore for the sake of it in ways that aren’t always as interesting as they could be, the first episode of this series makes a pretty good argument for its own existence.
I think we often gloss over the sacrifices made to send human beings into space. This episode spends some time discussing the first orbital space flight of a living being – in this case (and in reality) a small dog. Abstractly it’s fairly easy to look at this as a sacrifice that had to be made – not knowing whether the rockets were safe or what the effects of zero-G might actually be, we wouldn’t jump right to sending real, sentient human beings up there. And yet, a living being without the capacity to understand logically what was happening was strapped into a capsule and sent flying above the atmosphere only to die as the unfinished vehicle didn’t have the capacity to return to Earth in a safe way. Our romanticization of the story paints the animal as a hero, but in reality it didn’t have the capacity to understand the nature of its own unwilling sacrifice.
This knowledge lends a chilling air to Irina’s experience. Treated like an object for various reasons, the primary of which is that she’s both non-human and can therefore be considered “other,” and also because following their experience with the dog the scientist team doesn’t want to become emotionally attached to someone who might very well die, she nevertheless stands out as a thinking, feeling being. There’s a scene where she’s eating dinner with Lev and savors the single eggs of caviar on her toast. Ignoring the fetishy framing of her mouth in the scene it’s such a human thing to do – savoring little bits of food that might be unfamiliar, enjoying the little fragments of stimulation after having been essentially ignored and dehumanized by everyone aside from a couple people assigned to be handlers.
I get the feeling that the AU history stuff here is mostly window-dressing, and the real beef in the borscht, so-to-speak, is this story of people in exile pursuing a dream in the midst of a tense, dehumanizing situation. And that, done right, could be compelling.
Pros: I’ve been doing a lot of catching-up lately with anime, and for whatever reason there have just been a lot of vampire-related stories over the past year. Many of these tweak vampire lore enough that it isn’t a death sentence for vampires to be outside during the day (only Mars Red seemed to go hard on that point), or they aren’t scared of crosses or garlic or what-not. I kind of like this; while there is something to be said for limiting the reach of creatures who we’d describe as monstrous, lending a bit of a disadvantage to beings who otherwise have super strength or are especially deadly in other ways, I also think there’s something to be said for making them “just like us” in most ways. This allows the storytellers to create a tale involving prejudice while also avoiding some of the inconveniences that come along with having characters who can’t go outside during the day.
This series takes that route, having Irina prefer the cold and mention that vampires are simply more susceptible to heat stroke. It makes it clear that it’s not the technicalities of vampire existence that are the issue here, but instead the other humans’ perception of those differences that causes problems.
Cons: The aforementioned scene where the characters are eating together is distracting. It’s deeply focused on Irina’s mouth in a creepy way. It’s not that I necessarily mind this kind of content generally, but it feels extremely out of place considering the tone and the subject matter of the rest of the episode.
Content Warnings: Animal death, cold war style politics, prejudice/othering/dehumanization of a sentient person.
Would I Watch More? – This was a really interesting premiere episode; it does a decent job of taking a “what if?” scenario and making it interesting. I also think the relationship between the leads has some potential. I will probably watch at least a few more episodes.
One reply on “Autumn 2021 First Impressions – Irina: The Vampire Cosmonaut”
Most early animals in space were used to generate useful data for later human missions. In fact, there was usually an effort to safely recover astro-animals alive so a thorough medical exam could be performed. They were then retired to zoos for public display or adopted in the case of dogs.
Khrushchev even gave Kennedy a puppy born of one of their early dogs in space for his children. Sergei Korolev, the chief architect of the Soviet space program, was known to get attached to the dogs they were using.
Laika, a random mutt grabbed off the streets of Moscow, was an exception. That launch had no scientific value. It proved nothing that hadn’t been demonstrated on numerous suborbital flights before and we already knew Soviets could put something into orbit. We know Laika died but we don’t know for sure how. It could have been heat or oxygen deprivation or radiation. It was a PR stunt.
Leaving an animal in space to slowly die like that would have been unacceptable in the US program. Early on, a fair number “died on impact” on return but that quickly changed. The US used mostly primates for our astro-animals and some of them became celebrities.
The first cat in space was launched by the French.