Things in the Project Hail Mary book that aren't in the movie that I think are delightful
Spoilers under the cut for the book
Stratt hires a climate change scientist and then nukes Antarctica and paves the Sahara desert and the scientist just sobs
Rocky calls Grace a leaky blob
Rocky thinks humans are crazy for doing EVAs
Stratt gets sued by Everyone for plagiarizing Everything
Grace gets scurvy
Grace drags Rocky back into his habitat after Rocky saves him, and he gets really bad burns from coming into contact with Rocky's atmosphere
Grace also power washes Rocky, but we don't talk about it
Rocky was orbiting Tau Ceti for 40 years before Grace came along
Rocky has anxiety about oxygen after he gets lit on fire by Grace's atmosphere
Rocky also has anxiety about Grace using the centrifuge because of how it almost killed him that one time
Grace also pulls that maneuver a few more times and repeatedly passes out (at least he doesn't get crushed by a metal chair after the first time, though)
During the confrontation with Grace and Stratt, Stratt calls Grace a coward and Grace says that Stratt is murdering him. Just much more aggressive language all around
Grace doesn't lose his memories from the coma; Stratt injects him with memory altering drugs. Her hope was that by the time he remembered, he'd either already be done, or he'd be in too deep to stop
Eridians don't know about relativity, which is said in the movie, but in the book Rocky talks about how he was basically running the ship alone with a faulty trajectory and STILL managed to make it to Tau Ceti
When taumoeba leaks into the Hail Mary's fuel, Grace immediately dismisses the possibility of Rocky's boxes failing because Rocky is such an incredible engineer
When Grace and Rocky separate, Grace does loser amounts of math to figure out how long he'll be able to see Rocky's ship
When Grace does something stupid, Rocky forces him to take a nap to be less stupid
Rocky doesn't have a voice, Grace just learns Eridian by using his laptop setup
Grace gets arthritis at the end from Erid's intense gravity
Grace also gets a slew of other diseases from malnutrition
He survives by eating taumoeba until the Eridians can figure out how to feed him
The Eridians feed Grace by synthesizing human meat. Grace calls them "me-burgers" and they're his favorite food
Rocky's blood is mercury and he eats toxic heavy metals
When Grace teaches Rocky about radiation, he gets Rocky to cover his side of the tunnel in astrophage to protect him. Rocky tells Grace to do the same, but Grace just lies and says that humans are immune to it. On the inside, he thinks that it doesn't matter if he gets cancer because he's going to die anyway :(
Rocky's ship is the first actual spaceship Eridians ever made. Rocky has to fix so many things on the way over, because they just have no experience with space travel
Rocky thinks it's really cool that Grace can see light, and he's a little jealous until the power goes out and Grace keeps blindly walking into things and Rocky is like "wow you are useless"
Rocky bouncing happily when Grace does the puppet show
Carl
"That's lava" "It's not 😐"
Savior of the universe hat
The don't go crazy room
HUGS
The ship talking to Rocky
"Grace Rocky dead, Erid dead, Earth dead, we DIE we DIE we DIE we DIE"
That part when they go fishing and he gets hit in the head and drops the collector and he has to get it and he just goes "be back in a minute" and as he slides down you hear Rocky going "NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO" and my heart explodes
His SHIRTS
"Is usually closer. On your chest :)"
He gets to go on the Blip A!!!!!!!
"Rocky hate Mark >:("
Ilyukhna's little "you'd be in 😎 very cool company 😎"
When Grace tells a fun fact about the centrifuge and immediately regrets his entire life
👎👎👎
Woomp there it is
"WHO GRACE TALKING TO, QUESTION🗣️🗣️🗣️"
"Hello Grace :) Hello Grace friend :)"
Getting to see old Stratt
The whole sequence before he wakes up to the alarm when the taumoeba escape... it's so beautiful. It plays in my head constantly.
- teaches chemistry, biology, and physics on top of earth and space sciences (which is what i assume he was teaching in the movie)
- refers to his students as "chemists"/"biologists"/ "physicians"/"astronomers"
- has the periodic table song memorized and retains it even through the amnesia
- uses the exclamation point smiley faces on every single good quiz/test
- makes his chemistry classes do karaoke of "2 become 1" by the Spice Girls when teaching synthesis and decomposition reactions
- constantly forgets to balance chemical reaction equations and has to keep re-correcting quizzes bc his answer key was wrong
- despises his ID card photo.
- will stand at the classroom door and narrate kids coming into class like it's a race
- used to swear a lot (back in the days when he would take random pills from strangers lol) but once he became a teacher he has to actively stop himself until he got to where he is now (literally saying "fudge" instead of "fuck" in a life-or-death situation)
- has his physics students do paper airplane making competitions (where he teaches them all the different methods of making airplanes then has them throw them off the top of the stairwell) and gives out "medals" (a necklace with a small paper airplane as the bead) for the people who did the best
- the earth beanbag isnt the only one he owns, he has one of every planet in our solar system (favours the earth one so much because the earth is his favourite planet)
- has so much fun decorating his classroom at the beginning of the year. definitely keeps old models his students made, pictures of the classes, and art his students gave for him on the wall. its starting to get to be too much to fit all on one wall
- hosts "pi day" in his class with party hats (homemade (he got really good at it after a while), like Rocky's "savior of the universe" hat) and store-bought pie
- he's the teacher supervisor of the sciences club and while it's usually just time for kids to do their homework or ask for help, he tries to come up with experiments to do (a lot of while involved lighting things on fire, solely because thats what the kids love the most)
- once had to chase a bird out of the school (one flew in and for "some reason" the kids ran to him for help) by scaring it with a clown horn he got to get loud classes attention
- has so much fun with the abbreviation for Formula Unit (FU)
- the first gift he ever got from a student was a hand sewn plushy of a mole (no, he did not cry. OK. maybe a little). he (obviously) named it Avogadro and keeps it on his desk to point to when teaching students about Avogadros number
- the type of teacher to hand out candies after a horrific test
- uses those rainbow multicolour pens as well as pens with pun on them (it's not restricted to his clothing)
- once found out a student smoked and edited every quiz and test that semester to have a question about how much tar/nicotine you inhale and how many years you live if you smoke ever day
- keeps his classroom open at lunch for kids who want to eat somewhere quiet (after a while it turned into a gossip spot, and now he knows a lot about students who arent in any of his classes)
- owns like 50 dry erase markers and somehow none of them ever seem to work. the projector is constantly overheating. the school wifi is so slow they might die to the astrophage before they get a tab open.
- went by Mr G (making the switch from "Ryland" on land to "Grace" in space that much more of a shift)
- half of the time he wears the schools cheap lab goggles his glasses shift awkwardly and he has to have the students tell him if he's doing something right (he pretends its a trust exercise/practice to save his ego)
- learned to do card tricks to entertain kids he babysat when he was younger but once his students found out he could do "magic" lessons would derail very quickly
- never made any of his own models. either got them from the store, from students, or from other teachers. the first time he had to make a model entirely by himself was to communicate with rocky under much stronger gravity
- the type of person to always forget to bring an umbrella when it's going to rain and end up running with their jacket over their head
- likes to redraw/add to/comment on drawings students make on their own tests
- regularly used the "stop running" distraction on people he didn't want to talk to (no, it never worked, but he kept doing it) until the students got used to it. that kid in the flashback replied too fast for it to have been the first time Grace did that loll
- in questions with names in them he changes the names to the kids in his class at the moment
- makes big signs to tape to the classroom door when kids in his class have alergies
- takes immense pride in his gmail signature. its VERY long and details every method of contacting him, contacting the school, multiple quotes and puns that he makes sure to change regularly, contacts for every single help phone in their area, and a scan of his own real life signature. students make fun of him for it. its definitely part of the reason it takes so long to send an email on the school wifi
- calls every student in his class his "favourite student"
- has a massive collection of bandaids that he's written little notes like "this is your reminder to study" on in sharpie to give out to students
- is friends with the com-tech teacher and convinces them to let him use the schools t-shirt printer (usually used for the design students and for making school t-shirts) to add to his collection of dumb joke shirts
ok :) thats all i can think of for now. might add more later
I love Eva Stratt... that scene on the ship where Grace tells her she's mysterious and aloof and you can tell that kind of hurts her. she really does care about humanity, she's just not very good at showing it! she sings her one beautiful song to try to connect with everyone else, not to prove anything to them but so she can feel a moment of connection and camaraderie. and then she gets overwhelmed and goes "okay I'm done bye". I love my autistic friend Eva Stratt
"Dr Ryland Grace was wrong in his paper and all life is water based as proven by astrophage" hm ok but there's more than that.
"Dr Ryland Grace was right actually as proven by the Eridians who are basically rock" nope nope nope.
"Dr Ryland Grace was wrong because the Eridians *are* water based as stated in the novel" well yes but that's not all.
*
there's two parts to Grace's original argument:
1. there's nothing special about hydrogen and oxygen, other elements and chemical reactions could also serve as the basis for life. (remains unproven even at the end of the book since all the lifeforms e.g. taomoeba, astrophage, eridians are water based)
2. The Goldilocks Zone is For Idiots, aka, life could evolve outside of the commonly accepted temperature range. (proven true by the existence of Eridians who inhabit a planet with a tempterature over 200 degrees Celsius)
*
In conclusion:
Dr Ryland Grace was *partially* correct in his paper because while Eridians *are* water-based/carbon-based beings, they do not inhabit the Goldilocks Zone at all.
Was so sad because I was thinking about how eridians can leave a small piece of their carapace to loved ones after passing, but Grace can't exactly do the same due to being human and then got an Idea.
After Grace dies, Rocky recieves a small, preserved bone from his body, as per his will. Rocky is confused, but the note he is given explains that this is the hyoid bone, the only "floating" bone in the body due to it not being attached to any others + its main purpose being protecting the throat. Protecting the voice box. Thank you for helping me find my voice, the note ends with. The idea of a man who was chosen to go on a suicide mission because he "didn't have any connections" giving his best friend a symbol of both their connection and a way to say I'm still here, still singing, in my own, strange, human way.
I'd like to think Rocky keeps it with him until he passes, too.
reading the project hail mary book having already seen the movie is like. the most comforting dramatic irony i've ever encountered. "i'm going to die out here. and i'm going to die alone." hehehe no you're not you silly goose. your alien best friend is on his way as we speak. you're gonna save each other <3
I love the thought that after containing the taumeoba spread on his ship and realizing that Rocky has the same problem only worse, Grace calculates his possible trajectory to rocky, washes up, sits down and thinks. He can go home or he can die. He can save earth and doom his best friend and his best friend's planet, or he can maybe save earth (he can't be sure that the beetles work) and definitely save rocky and his planet.
And you know what? I want him to not realize it, but he makes that decision in less than three hours.
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