Two Series Tackle Life’s Big Questions

Big picture, small picture.

Like other worlds, this one’s surface is pocked by giant craters resulting from collisions with meteorites millions of years ago. Also, here are craters of the mind--human scarring caused by ignorance and injustice.

Meteor and man. That duality is symbolized by this week’s premieres of two distinguished PBS documentary series, each dazzling in its own way.

In the science series “The Miracle Planet” (at 9 tonight on Channel 24, 8 p.m. Tuesday on Channel 50 and 8 p.m. Thursday on Channel 28), the sights are breathtaking and also mysterious. In the first hour, a camera slowly pans the bones of a species of great dinosaur that is now but a “faint shadow” after occupying the Earth infinitely longer than we have.

No less spectacular in the civil rights series “Eyes on the Prize II” (tonight at 9 on Channel 28 and at 10 on Channel 15) is the 106-year-old black man registering to vote for the first time, a living fossil finally tasting freedom in Mississippi a century after the Civil War.

Reference points for “The Miracle Planet” and “Eyes on the Prize II” couldn’t be more different. One speaks of Saturn and Mars, the other Alabama and Mississippi, Chicago and Detroit. Yet each series delivers a profound message about humankind.

Narrated by Bill Kurtis, the six segments of “The Miracle Planet” use splashes of visual brilliance to meaningfully explore the Earth’s evolution in relation to other solar systems and chart the ages-old cataclysmic changes that affect life even today. Why those craters, for example, and what connection have they to the sudden disappearance of dinosaurs 65 million years ago?

A collaboration between KCTS in Seattle and Japanese television, “The Miracle Planet” is stunning television that puts humanity in context, reminding us that our lives are only a moment in time, an infinitesimal glint of being on the landscape of eternal history.

Yet the moment is big when you’re living it. And what meaning have cosmic things when the extent of your personal world is poverty and degradation?

That is the earthly setting for “Eyes on the Prize II,” Henry Hampton’s eight-part continuation of his profound 1987 series that traced America’s civil rights struggle from 1954-65. Carrying the story into the ‘80s, the sequel will surely be recorded as one of the most significant programs of this decade.

Like its predecessor, it’s a major, exhaustive work, a conventionally told story that is nevertheless mesmerizing as it weaves news footage, period music and current interviews into a narrative that vividly--and often achingly--conveys both the ugliness and exhilaration of the times. More than merely superb storytelling, this is essential history and mandatory viewing not only for those too young to recall this trench warfare, but also for those who do.

As in the earlier series, narrator Julian Bond’s gentle voice effectively balances the passion on the screen without softening it. Morality and power politics interlock and sometimes clash on this stage, as the opening hour charts the ups and downs of a civil rights movement that begins to splinter into groups led by charismatic leaders with competing methods and styles, if not agendas.

Who could have been more different than Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, the one-time national minister of the Nation of Islam, each demanding that America make good on its promises to blacks, but doing so in such contrasting ways that many then regarded them as the good cop/bad cop of the movement?

Much of the first segment does refract the struggle through Malcolm X, and you can feel his presence and persuasiveness here, feel the brawn of his words that resonated in New York and later echoed in the South as calls for black power. Yet the angry rhetoric that terrified so many whites and even some blacks in the ‘60s seems not at all outrageous, but justified and understandable when weighed from the perspective of 1990.

Actor Ossie Davis recalls here a moving, humanizing anecdote about his friend Malcolm X concerning the later’s alarmed reaction--as a husband and father--after narrowly escaping an assassin’s bomb.

Malcolm X was murdered in 1965, and other assassinations--including King’s three years later--also reverberate through “Eyes on the Prize II.” Before then, however, we follow the rise of Stokely Carmichael and his clashes with King, monitor the triumphs and failures of the movement in volatile Chicago and Detroit, watch the emergence of Oakland’s Black Panthers and Carl Stokes’ as mayor of Cleveland and reach the midpoint in this blazing series with the doomed King’s final eventful year.

So many tones, so many war zones.

Unfortunately, this is a story with no ending, one that someday will require an “Eyes on the Prize III.” Obviously, this is no time for self-congratulatory smugness about equal opportunities or black-white relations, as evidenced most recently by the ugly racial undertones in the bizarre murder case of Charles and Carol Stuart in Boston. However, three decades have not gone for naught, and things at least are better than they were.

“Billions of years of history have brought us to this moment,” Kurtis says in “The Miracle Planet.” The clouds break and the sun’s rays spread across a new world. A hopeful sign.