I’ve never given this scene much thought beyond the fact that it was one of Maddie’s personal ‘inflection point’. I get that she felt incredibly small standing beside such unimaginably ancient object. I experienced something similar when I was in Angkor Wat. I felt impermanent and small, I wanted to touch every stone there. It was cathartic.
It’s not like nothing is matter all of a sudden and you can do whatever without giving a single thought about the consequences. It’s about realisation that the consequences of your mistakes would never be that everlasting, it’s all fleeting. And this moment must’ve made it less terrifying for Maddie to make the life changing decision to keep Dave. Because there is no right or wrong option. Whatever choice she made, she will still question it. Whether she would ponder if he would be better with adopted parents during the hardest times of her motherhood. Because every parent sometimes questions whether they’re good enough. Or whether she would think about him and miss him if she goes along with adoption. There’s always going to be “What if…”
But it had never come to my mind before Craig Silverstein addressed it in his interview, that this piece of cosmic body not only makes Maddie, we follow for the majority of the show, seem small. It makes Dyson God Maddie seem small too. A woman torn apart by indescribable amount of grief, who came unimaginable length to see her loved ones again. But after all she’s still Maddie Kim. And on top of that, it even makes Safe Surf, with all its power and knowledge, also seem small and impermanent. What is 43 million years compared to thousands of millions?