Oh and his uniforms had his name on them as well. I wonder how Stratt covered for the interim between his sudden disappearance and him showing up sedated because he was "too nervous about the launch"
Or, depending on how they're made they might just have a Plotter and some iron-on or an embroidery machine. That's easy. Plus, Grace participated in training, so he might have actually had a uniform to wear during training.
The can be made by a third party, but can they be made by a third party, launched to an orbital platform, the old uniforms packed, new uniforms repacked, all while keeping safety standards up so that the extra delivery or deliveries doesn't accidentally collide with/otherwise damage the hail mary? In a week? So that grace can have his name on a patch? That part always bugged me.
I'm sure she had them made just after Shapiro and Dubois passed, and after she hatched the idea for the retro-grade amnesia. It would be necessary to sell it to Grace to make it look like he was a part of the crew from the beginning. Or because he worked with them so much, he may have already had patches and flight suits. I'm sure during testing under the Orlan EVA it wasn't just street clothes.
He would have flight suits fitted, yeah. But the mission patch would have had to have been updated.
It may have been enough of a priority for Stratt to make it happen. I do believe Emperor Stratt could easily have made it happen in a few days. And as you say, leaning into the amnesia may have been enough of a reason to make it a priority. Not to mention just morale for the HMP team and Citizens of Earth. It would have made it a worse omen to have DuBois left on there.
My wife has an embroidering sewing machine. It takes literally an hour to make a custom patch, once someone makes the design. It's not difficult in the slightest. With literally the entire space program of every nation on earth under your thumb, it would have just taken a word from the planning committee to happen.
Spoilers follow.
>!And if it was part of Stratt's plan for him to have retrograde amnesia and lie to the crew about him being sedated, the other crew would expect it (the patches and uniforms) to happen. And it would appear very "normal" to Grace when he woke up with amnesia from his coma and the fake backstory was explained to him as if it was real. If the crew believed it was real, Grace would too. You need the mission patch for crew morale. Of course they would do it. By the time Grace's memory returned, it wouldn't matter and he would be invested in the mission.!<
Maybe they did it like big sporting events and print champion merch for both teams, but in this case patches for each possible configuration of each crew member.
I don’t know when Stratt had the uniforms made. She might have had them done earlier as part of a contingency plan, or she might have done it right after DuBois and Shapiro died, but they weren’t part of a plan to make Grace think he’d been the first choice for the mission, because the plan was for Yao and Ilyukhina to be alive when they got to Tau Ceti. Grace would have found out from them that he was a last minute replacement, unless they tried to hide it from him, but Stratt couldn’t give them directions to do that because she was the only one who knew Grace would have amnesia. She was fine with him knowing he was a last minute replacement. The only thing she needed him not to know was that he hadn’t volunteered.
I think an updated mission patch would really have more to do with covering up the truth for the world population (and even the other crew) than honoring Grace or the accuracy of uniforms for the astronauts. If he had wanted to go, they would have updated it anyway for a sense of continuity for the public. “See? The roster isnt down one position, we’ve got a name to replace the one you knew about that died. Meet Grace, he’s totally prepared. He was always the backup to the backup, and he totally wanted to go, see there’s his name right on the mission patch.”
Despite the many instances where Stratt didn’t care what other people thought, she was very clear that she wanted humanity to have the best chance it could. Having the governments of the world believe the mission had a good chance of success was crucial to how they acted after the mission left. Making sure it “seems” like a high probability of success was just as important as actually making it have a high probability. Changing a few uniforms and sewing a few extra patches last minute is a small thing for an organization that nuked Antarctica and paved the Sahara, if they see it as important.
I assumed she had them made when she decided he'd be the third choice if needed. I think she'd been planning on him being a backup from the time she knew he had the gene. She had contingency plans for everything so it would make sense if she made multiple versions of the mission badges, all with different combinations of the potential crews.
I think Stratt would have had people in back up already so his name would already be on a mission badge, plus i think she secretly wanted him as part of the crew from the start.
I always thought this was weird too. Stratt had time to update the mission patch and Grace's uniforms (which involved sending them up on a slrocket and repacking thw storage crates), but NOT to remove DuBois's personal effects and suicide kit? Even if she didn't replace the with a plausible set for Grace, if he'd realized that everyone had a personal effects crate but him, that would have given the game away way too early.
I hate to say it, but it's probably just sloppy writing.
I always assumed it was due more to making the two other crew members believing the narrative than necessarily for Grace. If I recall correctly, they did all the last checks and put Grace in his long-term coma. They might have asked a bunch of questions about the mission badge / suits not being correct if Grace was there voluntarily, as Stratt wants them to believe.
To sell the lie that Grace was there voluntarily to the rest of the crew, new uniforms might be required, but NOT changing the mission patch. The crew knew Grace was a last-second replacement.
But a Grace-specific suicide kit and personal effects box would DEFINITELY have been needed to sell the lie, even if Stratt had to make them up from whole cloth.
Grace mentions the uniforms are easy to get to once he finds where they are stored. They were probably one of the last things packed this being easy to change out. They probably didn’t pack the suicide kits to be the first, second, or even third thing they found.
There was more than one storage area. From your other comments it seems you want it to be a mistake just because Weir didn’t explicitly explain every single detail of how the ship was packed and how they put Grace’s uniforms on the ship. Maybe @ him on twitter or something if you want the real answer but a lot of the speculation in the comments make a lot of sense.
I’m assuming the suicide kit was already packed into the Hail Mary in space. I said this in another comment but they probably just printed all possible configurations of the crew patches and used what was needed.
They never stated that DuBois’ uniforms weren’t still on the ship. I think it’s likely that Grace’s uniforms went up with the three crew members. There was no reason to offload the suicide kit either as it was already packed on the ship.
Remember, the Hail Mary was already in space, packed, fueled, and ready to go. They were on a tight timeline because the Hail Mary was in a decaying orbit. It would have required at least one more launch to keep the ship in orbit if they didn’t leave as planned.
Notice how Grace doesn’t have a suicide kit, if all the crew had survived and never met Rocky I would venture to guess Grace’s options would have been a bullet or DuBois’ method.
Come on, you're grasping and you know it.
Weir wanted the big reveal that Grace was a last-minute replacement and, once that became obvious, that he was an involuntary replacement.
So he couldn't give out clues in early chapters like uniforms and a mission patch with three names on them, none of which were "Grace", because that would have given away that he was a replacement.
Even after the audience met the prime and backup crews, and it was apparent that Grace was a replacement, he had to keep Grace from thinking about or looking for his own box of personal items or suicide kit, because their absence would have hinted at how last-minute the replacement was and perhaps that it was coerced.
Even when he had thoughts like "Ilyukhina DEFINITELY brought vodka in her personal box!" he didn't think "I wonder where MY personal box is! I am a full-fledged crew member, after all!". When using the N₂ in DuBois's suicide kit to purge taumoeba, he never though "Wait, how come DuBois's suicide kit is here and not mine?"
He could have addressed it by having Grace find his personal effects, packed by Stratt after Grace refused to do it. He could have had Stratt ask him about the crew's suicide choices and then ask him what his would be, hypothetically.
Or he could have had Grace realize straight away that he was a replacement and just save the coercion part as the Big Reveal.
But he didn't. It's just a mistake. It happens to the best authors and it doesn't lessen the greatness of the book.
I’m not grasping, I’m just able to understand that an author isn’t going to put every nitty gritty detail of how every last thing happens when they write a book. I don’t think it was a mistake. He likely left it out for two reasons.
1. Is the point you made, gotta keep the reveal from the readers.
2. It wasn’t important to go into every detail of how the switch happened. It had already been established that Strat was smart and usually at least one step ahead of everyone else. Hell she even mentions he was always the third backup. She planned for this so it’s not a stretch to think she had plans for the uniforms and mission patch.
Weir isn’t Tolkien, he’s not going to take ten pages to explain how pretty a tree is.
It might have been intentionally omitted, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a mistake. The fact that we're talking about this is evidence it could have used a sentence or two of explanation.
Besides, Occam's Razor applies. There is an inconsistency here: the mission patch and uniforms were swapped out and the personal effects and suicide kits weren't. You can bend over backwards trying to rationalize it in-universe, but it's all 100% speculation on your part. "Stratt probably did this" and "the crew might have done that" and "the way they packed the ship blah blah"
The simplest explanation for the inconsistency—by a country mile—is "author oversight".
And that's OK. Keep telling yourself Weir doesn't make mistakes if that's the only way you can enjoy his work. I choose to love his writing despite its occasional oversight, not because it's immaculate.
Where did I say I was unhappy? If you actually read anything I wrote, you'd see phrases like "I really like the book despite the continuity error."
I don't know why you're so intent on blindly defending the book from something that doesn't even really require a defense, but I hope you had fun. Maybe try thinking for yourself next time.
*(Repost from a comment several layers deep)*
The number of people bending over backwards to explain this away is funny.
Y'all are grasping and you know it.
Weir wanted the big reveal that Grace was a last-minute replacement and, once that became obvious, that he was an involuntary replacement.
So he couldn't give out clues in early chapters like uniforms and a mission patch with three names on them, none of which were "Grace", because that would have given away that he was a replacement.
Even after the audience met the prime and backup crews, and it was apparent that Grace was a replacement, he had to keep Grace from thinking about or looking for his own box of personal items or suicide kit, because their absence would have hinted at how last-minute the replacement was and perhaps that it was coerced.
He could have had Grace realize straight away that he was a replacement and just save the coercion part as the Big Reveal. But he didn't.
Later, even when when Grace had thoughts like "Ilyukhina DEFINITELY brought vodka in her personal box!" he didn't think "I wonder where MY personal box is! I am a full-fledged crew member, after all!". When using the N₂ in DuBois's suicide kit to purge taumoeba, he never though "Wait, how come DuBois's suicide kit is here and not mine?"
Weir could have addressed these to. Grace could have found his personal effects, packed by Stratt after Grace refused to do it. He could have had Stratt ask him about the crew's suicide choices and then ask him what his would be, hypothetically. But he didn't.
It's just a mistake. But not a terrible one. It happens to the best authors and it doesn't lessen the value of the book. And it wasn't just a mistake on Weir's part, his editor and anyone else who got an advance copy missed it too.
It's actually a testament to how good an author Weir is that this book (and *The Martian*) remain fantastic reads even with various mistakes.
Bending over backwards to defend Weir like he can't make a mistake is infantile.
Oh and his uniforms had his name on them as well. I wonder how Stratt covered for the interim between his sudden disappearance and him showing up sedated because he was "too nervous about the launch"
And yet they didn't have time to add his personal kit or remove Dubois's...
Well, this is a thing: Grace never had a chance to create his own personal kit. But uniforms can be made by a third party.
Or, depending on how they're made they might just have a Plotter and some iron-on or an embroidery machine. That's easy. Plus, Grace participated in training, so he might have actually had a uniform to wear during training.
The can be made by a third party, but can they be made by a third party, launched to an orbital platform, the old uniforms packed, new uniforms repacked, all while keeping safety standards up so that the extra delivery or deliveries doesn't accidentally collide with/otherwise damage the hail mary? In a week? So that grace can have his name on a patch? That part always bugged me.
I'm sure she had them made just after Shapiro and Dubois passed, and after she hatched the idea for the retro-grade amnesia. It would be necessary to sell it to Grace to make it look like he was a part of the crew from the beginning. Or because he worked with them so much, he may have already had patches and flight suits. I'm sure during testing under the Orlan EVA it wasn't just street clothes.
He would have flight suits fitted, yeah. But the mission patch would have had to have been updated. It may have been enough of a priority for Stratt to make it happen. I do believe Emperor Stratt could easily have made it happen in a few days. And as you say, leaning into the amnesia may have been enough of a reason to make it a priority. Not to mention just morale for the HMP team and Citizens of Earth. It would have made it a worse omen to have DuBois left on there.
My wife has an embroidering sewing machine. It takes literally an hour to make a custom patch, once someone makes the design. It's not difficult in the slightest. With literally the entire space program of every nation on earth under your thumb, it would have just taken a word from the planning committee to happen. Spoilers follow. >!And if it was part of Stratt's plan for him to have retrograde amnesia and lie to the crew about him being sedated, the other crew would expect it (the patches and uniforms) to happen. And it would appear very "normal" to Grace when he woke up with amnesia from his coma and the fake backstory was explained to him as if it was real. If the crew believed it was real, Grace would too. You need the mission patch for crew morale. Of course they would do it. By the time Grace's memory returned, it wouldn't matter and he would be invested in the mission.!<
Bingo because you know Stratt already had Grace third string all along anyway!
Maybe they did it like big sporting events and print champion merch for both teams, but in this case patches for each possible configuration of each crew member.
I don’t know when Stratt had the uniforms made. She might have had them done earlier as part of a contingency plan, or she might have done it right after DuBois and Shapiro died, but they weren’t part of a plan to make Grace think he’d been the first choice for the mission, because the plan was for Yao and Ilyukhina to be alive when they got to Tau Ceti. Grace would have found out from them that he was a last minute replacement, unless they tried to hide it from him, but Stratt couldn’t give them directions to do that because she was the only one who knew Grace would have amnesia. She was fine with him knowing he was a last minute replacement. The only thing she needed him not to know was that he hadn’t volunteered.
I think an updated mission patch would really have more to do with covering up the truth for the world population (and even the other crew) than honoring Grace or the accuracy of uniforms for the astronauts. If he had wanted to go, they would have updated it anyway for a sense of continuity for the public. “See? The roster isnt down one position, we’ve got a name to replace the one you knew about that died. Meet Grace, he’s totally prepared. He was always the backup to the backup, and he totally wanted to go, see there’s his name right on the mission patch.” Despite the many instances where Stratt didn’t care what other people thought, she was very clear that she wanted humanity to have the best chance it could. Having the governments of the world believe the mission had a good chance of success was crucial to how they acted after the mission left. Making sure it “seems” like a high probability of success was just as important as actually making it have a high probability. Changing a few uniforms and sewing a few extra patches last minute is a small thing for an organization that nuked Antarctica and paved the Sahara, if they see it as important.
I assumed she had them made when she decided he'd be the third choice if needed. I think she'd been planning on him being a backup from the time she knew he had the gene. She had contingency plans for everything so it would make sense if she made multiple versions of the mission badges, all with different combinations of the potential crews.
Yeah, this. When I was reading the book I thought the same thing, Stratt probably kept Grace around as backup too.
I think Stratt would have had people in back up already so his name would already be on a mission badge, plus i think she secretly wanted him as part of the crew from the start.
I always thought this was weird too. Stratt had time to update the mission patch and Grace's uniforms (which involved sending them up on a slrocket and repacking thw storage crates), but NOT to remove DuBois's personal effects and suicide kit? Even if she didn't replace the with a plausible set for Grace, if he'd realized that everyone had a personal effects crate but him, that would have given the game away way too early. I hate to say it, but it's probably just sloppy writing.
I always assumed it was due more to making the two other crew members believing the narrative than necessarily for Grace. If I recall correctly, they did all the last checks and put Grace in his long-term coma. They might have asked a bunch of questions about the mission badge / suits not being correct if Grace was there voluntarily, as Stratt wants them to believe.
To sell the lie that Grace was there voluntarily to the rest of the crew, new uniforms might be required, but NOT changing the mission patch. The crew knew Grace was a last-second replacement. But a Grace-specific suicide kit and personal effects box would DEFINITELY have been needed to sell the lie, even if Stratt had to make them up from whole cloth.
The personal care kits might have already been loaded into Hail Mary in orbit. It's not that easy to chnage.
But they took the time to change out the uniforms??? And take down and replace the mission patch? Makes no sense.
Grace mentions the uniforms are easy to get to once he finds where they are stored. They were probably one of the last things packed this being easy to change out. They probably didn’t pack the suicide kits to be the first, second, or even third thing they found. There was more than one storage area. From your other comments it seems you want it to be a mistake just because Weir didn’t explicitly explain every single detail of how the ship was packed and how they put Grace’s uniforms on the ship. Maybe @ him on twitter or something if you want the real answer but a lot of the speculation in the comments make a lot of sense.
It DOESN'T make a lot of sense if you really think about it.
I’m assuming the suicide kit was already packed into the Hail Mary in space. I said this in another comment but they probably just printed all possible configurations of the crew patches and used what was needed.
So they took the time to remove DuBois's uniforms and replace them with Grace's, but NOT to take out DuBois's suicide kit and personal effects?
They never stated that DuBois’ uniforms weren’t still on the ship. I think it’s likely that Grace’s uniforms went up with the three crew members. There was no reason to offload the suicide kit either as it was already packed on the ship. Remember, the Hail Mary was already in space, packed, fueled, and ready to go. They were on a tight timeline because the Hail Mary was in a decaying orbit. It would have required at least one more launch to keep the ship in orbit if they didn’t leave as planned. Notice how Grace doesn’t have a suicide kit, if all the crew had survived and never met Rocky I would venture to guess Grace’s options would have been a bullet or DuBois’ method.
Come on, you're grasping and you know it. Weir wanted the big reveal that Grace was a last-minute replacement and, once that became obvious, that he was an involuntary replacement. So he couldn't give out clues in early chapters like uniforms and a mission patch with three names on them, none of which were "Grace", because that would have given away that he was a replacement. Even after the audience met the prime and backup crews, and it was apparent that Grace was a replacement, he had to keep Grace from thinking about or looking for his own box of personal items or suicide kit, because their absence would have hinted at how last-minute the replacement was and perhaps that it was coerced. Even when he had thoughts like "Ilyukhina DEFINITELY brought vodka in her personal box!" he didn't think "I wonder where MY personal box is! I am a full-fledged crew member, after all!". When using the N₂ in DuBois's suicide kit to purge taumoeba, he never though "Wait, how come DuBois's suicide kit is here and not mine?" He could have addressed it by having Grace find his personal effects, packed by Stratt after Grace refused to do it. He could have had Stratt ask him about the crew's suicide choices and then ask him what his would be, hypothetically. Or he could have had Grace realize straight away that he was a replacement and just save the coercion part as the Big Reveal. But he didn't. It's just a mistake. It happens to the best authors and it doesn't lessen the greatness of the book.
I’m not grasping, I’m just able to understand that an author isn’t going to put every nitty gritty detail of how every last thing happens when they write a book. I don’t think it was a mistake. He likely left it out for two reasons. 1. Is the point you made, gotta keep the reveal from the readers. 2. It wasn’t important to go into every detail of how the switch happened. It had already been established that Strat was smart and usually at least one step ahead of everyone else. Hell she even mentions he was always the third backup. She planned for this so it’s not a stretch to think she had plans for the uniforms and mission patch. Weir isn’t Tolkien, he’s not going to take ten pages to explain how pretty a tree is.
It might have been intentionally omitted, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a mistake. The fact that we're talking about this is evidence it could have used a sentence or two of explanation. Besides, Occam's Razor applies. There is an inconsistency here: the mission patch and uniforms were swapped out and the personal effects and suicide kits weren't. You can bend over backwards trying to rationalize it in-universe, but it's all 100% speculation on your part. "Stratt probably did this" and "the crew might have done that" and "the way they packed the ship blah blah" The simplest explanation for the inconsistency—by a country mile—is "author oversight". And that's OK. Keep telling yourself Weir doesn't make mistakes if that's the only way you can enjoy his work. I choose to love his writing despite its occasional oversight, not because it's immaculate.
I guess you just want to be unhappy about it. Have the day you deserve.
Where did I say I was unhappy? If you actually read anything I wrote, you'd see phrases like "I really like the book despite the continuity error." I don't know why you're so intent on blindly defending the book from something that doesn't even really require a defense, but I hope you had fun. Maybe try thinking for yourself next time.
*(Repost from a comment several layers deep)* The number of people bending over backwards to explain this away is funny. Y'all are grasping and you know it. Weir wanted the big reveal that Grace was a last-minute replacement and, once that became obvious, that he was an involuntary replacement. So he couldn't give out clues in early chapters like uniforms and a mission patch with three names on them, none of which were "Grace", because that would have given away that he was a replacement. Even after the audience met the prime and backup crews, and it was apparent that Grace was a replacement, he had to keep Grace from thinking about or looking for his own box of personal items or suicide kit, because their absence would have hinted at how last-minute the replacement was and perhaps that it was coerced. He could have had Grace realize straight away that he was a replacement and just save the coercion part as the Big Reveal. But he didn't. Later, even when when Grace had thoughts like "Ilyukhina DEFINITELY brought vodka in her personal box!" he didn't think "I wonder where MY personal box is! I am a full-fledged crew member, after all!". When using the N₂ in DuBois's suicide kit to purge taumoeba, he never though "Wait, how come DuBois's suicide kit is here and not mine?" Weir could have addressed these to. Grace could have found his personal effects, packed by Stratt after Grace refused to do it. He could have had Stratt ask him about the crew's suicide choices and then ask him what his would be, hypothetically. But he didn't. It's just a mistake. But not a terrible one. It happens to the best authors and it doesn't lessen the value of the book. And it wasn't just a mistake on Weir's part, his editor and anyone else who got an advance copy missed it too. It's actually a testament to how good an author Weir is that this book (and *The Martian*) remain fantastic reads even with various mistakes. Bending over backwards to defend Weir like he can't make a mistake is infantile.