What they didn’t get right was how he spent his first hundred sols alone. They thought he spent them calculating potato yields and distilling water from hydrazine. In reality, after the initial panic subsided, Mark discovered something far more vital to his survival than oxygen: boredom.
Mark stared at the cracked visor of his helmet. “Who am I?” he muttered. “I’m a botanist who talks to potatoes and watches bad dubs.”
Mark Watney wasn’t supposed to survive. That was the first thing the NASA briefing got right. The second thing they got right was that he was, in the words of the Director, “unreasonably, irritatingly resourceful.”
The potatoes grew faster. Or maybe he just imagined it. the martian in isaidub
But Mark just smiled, pulled out his jury-rigged drive, and plugged it into the Hermes’ main viewer. As the ship pulled away from Mars, the screen flickered to life. A badly-cropped logo appeared: ISAIDUB.COM – WATCH ONLINE .
Mark Watney, the Martian, leaned back and sighed. He was finally home.
The rover journey to Schiaparelli Crater. Fourteen days of driving through dust storms. He had downloaded (illegally, he noted with a chuckle) thirty dubbed movies onto a jury-rigged drive. As the rover trundled across the endless red waste, the tinny speakers blared: “Avan yaaru? Ivan yaaru? Naanga yaaru? (Who is he? Who is this? Who are we?)” from a particularly confusing scene in Kaththi . What they didn’t get right was how he
At first, he thought it was a hallucination. A grainy, teal-and-orange-tinted Tamil movie appeared on his screen, the audio dubbed so badly that the actors’ lips moved to a completely different rhythm than the words coming out. The background music swelled at random moments. A hero punched a villain, and the voiceover screamed, “Oru nimidam! (One minute!)” while the villain flew backward into a stack of hay.
“Watney,” Lewis said, gripping his shoulders. “You’re safe. How did you survive?”
“Indha senai… indha manushan… indha MARTIAN kum… ungalukum naduvula… oru chinna vishayam irukku. (Between this army… this man… this MARTIAN… and you… there is a small matter.)” Mark stared at the cracked visor of his helmet
Mark answered the screen. “We are all just stardust and bad lip-sync, my friend.”
“I’m alive because of potatoes, Commander. And terrible, terrible dubbing.”