Theme/Story
An Apollo astronaut crash-lands forty years into the future of present-day Earth where he must find a way back through time to his past life and reunite with his wife and son.
ACT I
The year is 1968 and Patrick Dorion is a maverick test pilot and astronaut on the Apollo space program. His lifelong dream of setting foot on the moon is shattered when he’s diagnosed with a heart murmur and suspended from the program, though Dorion insists it has more to do with politics. When an eccentric billionaire scientist named Archie Friedman invites Dorion to take part in a secret moon mission that the government knows nothing about, Dorion reluctantly accepts, telling his young wife Helen he’s leaving to do flight training in the desert. He promises he’ll return to her and his infant son in three weeks time.
The mission takes place at a secret launch facility in the Nevada desert with two other crew members — both test pilots with a criminal past. Things go horribly wrong when Dorion and his crew are lost in space and presumed dead — until they unexpectedly crash-land back onto Earth in the Nevada desert — forty years later.
The astronauts’ arrival creates quite a stir — the men haven’t aged and look just as they did forty years ago. Government officials debate the voracity of their story and how to proceed, until Archie arrives and claims it’s all true. Dorion only wants to see his family, but Archie tells him they’re no longer alive. Archie proposes to send Dorion into space again, claiming that he can send Dorion back through time to be re-united with his family.
ACT II
With the news about his family, a devastated Dorion grapples with a number of opposing forces. In addition to Archie, who he no longer trusts, Christian Wallace is a high-ranking military man steeped in paranoia and suspicion who views the renegade astronauts as a security risk, and Robert Casper; a soon-to-be retired Air Force astronomer who still remembers Dorion from years ago. Casper is the most sympathetic to Dorion’s plight and earns his confidence when he reveals that Dorion’s son Conor is indeed still alive — and living in Los Angeles.
Dorion flees to LA to see Conor and find out if Helen is still alive. Meanwhile, one of the astronauts is murdered and the other astronaut (Sanchez) is missing. Sanchez is dangerous and psychotic, going on a manhunt for Dorion to prevent him from going back in time. Sanchez fears that anything Dorion disrupts might result in Sanchez serving out his 1968 death sentence and ceasing to exist in the future. Inside the government, Wallace contends that Dorion is a fugitive, while Casper and Archie form an unlikely alliance when they discover that the astronauts’ bodies are slowly dying. Dorion is running out of time and Archie’s outlandish plan is his only hope.
In LA, Conor thinks Dorion is a mental case, but an offer of money entices him to accompany Dorion to Helen’s death bed near Palm Springs. With Sanchez in pursuit, Dorion eventually finds a way to re-connect with Conor who seems like something of a lost soul — nihilistic and unhappy — and estranged from his mother. The scene at Helen’s death bed has a profound effect on Conor and Dorion. Conor now realizes that Dorion really is his father while Dorion commits himself to finding Archie and trying to return to his past life in the hope that things might turn out differently for everyone. After dodging an attempt on his life by Sanchez, Dorion discovers that Sanchez had a hidden agenda in the secret moon mission and Wallace will stop at nothing — even killing Casper — to keep details of Archie’s secret moon mission from ever going public.
ACT III
Dorion and Conor race against time and their pursuers, as they find Archie’s facility in the Nevada desert where they endure a final showdown with Sanchez and Wallace. The dramatic payoffs include: (1) Sanchez’s death inside an exploding rocket, (2) Wallace meeting his untimely demise with an ironic twist, (3) Conor reluctantly parting with his father, despite wanting him to stay, and (4) Dorion blasting off into space in a nick of time and returning to 1968. In the end, Dorion learns that life should be lived to its fullest and never taken for granted, and that his family is more important than reaching the moon — even if maybe he already went to the moon anyway.
Michael Raymond
7719 - 27th Avenue NW
Seattle, WA 98117 E-mail