Comic-Con@Home: Everything we learned from The Right Stuff panel

The Right Stuff panel at Comic-Con@Home gave some insight into what the Disney+ series has in store for us. Here’s everything we learned.

Everyone of us has, at some point in our lives, thought about space. Whether it was just looking up into the sky and wondering which tiny shining dot was a planet, or if you dreamed of becoming an astronaut one day, space is part of our world and culture. And that’s part of the reason why Disney+’s The Right Stuff is such an anticipated show and why it got it’s own panel at this year’s Comic-Con.

The Comic Con@Home panel was moderated by an actual astronaut and the first Black woman to travel into space, Dr. Mae Jemison. It included the creators and stars of the show, and showrunner Mark Lafferty and executive producer Jennifer Davisson opened by talking about why they wanted to make the series in the first place.

The series is based on the Tom Wolfe book of the same name and has already been made into a movie. So why the TV show? Lafferty and Davisson explained how it was an “evergreen story” that is always relevant. They also made it clear that this isn’t just going to be a show about space and the astronauts; it will be more of a family drama.

The wives and kids, along with the triumphs and failures of the men who first made it into space, will all be covered. But that’s not all. The show will also cover the women who tried to make it into space but were denied, the Mercury 13. This is the part I am most excited about. I watched the Mercury 13 documentary on Netflix, and the women who were part of it are/were extraordinary.

Dr. Jemison then moved onto the cast, which included Patrick J. Adams as John Glenn, Patrick Fischler as Bob Gilruth, Eric Ladin as Chris Kraft,  James Lafferty as Scott Carpenter, Shannon Lucio as Louise Shepard, Jake McDorman as Alan Shepard, Colin O’Donoghue as Gordon Cooper, Eloise Mumford as Trudy Cooper, Micah Stock as Deke Slayton, Michael Trotter as Gus Grissom, and Nora Zehetner as Annie Glenn.

Jemison asked them what the “right stuff” meant to them, and the answers varied as much as the actors themselves. They mainly talked about it meaning not letting fear stop you from achieving greatness. How despite these men and women not knowing whether they or their loved ones would die or not, they still moved forward anyway.

The cast went on to discuss the research they did to get into character and what they learned about the person they were playing. Patrick J. Adams specifically talked about finding boxes of letters that John and Annie Glen sent back and forth to each other during their lives, and how that informed how he and Nora Zehetner portrayed their relationship on screen.

The panel was broken up with two clips. One was  the first look that has been out for a couple of months, but the other was an actual clip from the series. It gave us our real first look at Alan Shepard (Jake McDorman) and how he almost missed his chance to go into space because his letter got lost in the mail.

You can check out the whole panel (along with the new clip) here:

Dr. Jemison then talked about  how the first season doesn’t seem to focus on the people of color who worked at NASA and helped make this mission possible. Why were those stories not included in the first season?

According to Davisson and Lafferty, they hope to get to those stories in the second season, calling it a “missed opportunity.” They moved to talking about how much the series focuses on the womens’ stories.

While it’s nice that The Right Stuff will feature  the women involved in the astronauts’ lives and the women of the Mercury 13, I would say it’s much more than a “missed opportunity” to not include one character of color in the first season. Considering how big Hidden Figures was at the box office, it’s a pretty big misstep. We can only hope they make good on their promise to include those stories in the second season.

The biggest spoiler-y thing that was given away (if you can really have spoilers for a show portraying real life) was in the latter part of the panel. Davisson noted that the final moments of season one will have nothing to do with the men of the Mercury 7, but will focus on  the wives and children. What that will end up looking like is something we’ll all have to wait for.

Will you be watching The Right Stuff when it hits Disney+? Let us know in the comments below!