Ryland Grace wasn't even hiding, that's what breaks my heart. He wasn't curled up in some bunker ignoring the issue and waiting for it to blow over. He was roped into the PHM and he stepped up - he upended his life basically overnight and moved to the facilities to help. He became essentially the second in command after Stratt, THE expert on Astrophage, training the candidates for the mission. He was going down with the sinking ship of Earth descending into hell
His fatal flaw is that he panicked. Like a human being would, especially one not trained to deal with extreme pressure in extreme conditions, like astronauts in space (which is why he thought he wasn't a good fit for the mission). "well, we're all gonna die (one day in some distant future)" is veery different from "OMFG you're dying Right Now, the clock is very much ticking" The walls closed in and he panicked about it.
Just consider: you have mere hours to say goodbye to your life and to Earth. In a few days you'd be sent into space (for the first time in your life), put in a coma, so you'd wake up years later, spend months working out a solution (which may or may not even work) and then you'd just... die. Your past, present, and future. Process all that in HOURS. Like you know that moment in the movie where he scrolls and scrolls and scrolls from Tau Ceti to Earth and just gets sad? Yeah, could you schedule your existential crisis over the shear scale of the universe into the allocated time? Please and thank you
To add insult to injury, they give him time to make his decision only to reveal that the decision is already made. If the backup plan already involves lying to the public that I went willingly, then just do that. Don't give me hope that there is an option of not going
This might be an unpopular opinion but I think if the launch wasn't so soon and they had more time, they could've fully persuaded Grace to go. Give him some mental health time to panic, maybe do some specific crash courses on astronaut things and he would go along with it (I'm not saying he would've been thrilled but if he knew from the get-go that it was non-negotiable, he would've adjusted). Just look what he did on Hail Mary in the movie - he moped around drinking vodka for a while and then he got his ass up to work
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