Challenger: The Final Flight

We get perhaps the most comprehensive and humanized version of events yet, featuring rare archival footage; recollections of journalists; thoughtful profiles of each of the seven crew members, and insightful, deeply moving interviews with surviving family as well as some of the principal figures in the launch, including some who are haunted to this day by the series of events leading up to the launch.

Where the series shines is in the little details, especially when it discussed the lives of the other six crew members who died along with McAuliffe.

There has always been something vaguely ghoulish about subsequent coverage of the Challenger disaster, considering that we all know how the story ends. But Challenger: The Final Flight navigates a delicate path -- celebrating the lives of those lost in 1986, and the hubris, politics and pressure to deliver that became the anatomy of a failure.

Directors Steven Leckart and Daniel Junge don’t uncover startling new information about the lead-up to or aftermath of this tragic event. They do what good documentarians do: contextualize a major moment in a way that clarifies it for people who weren’t alive when it happened and makes it more vivid for those who were.

Challenger: The Final Flight provides an impressive amount of context to the disaster, the lives it claimed and the survivors left behind to pick up the pieces. It's dark and sad and infuriating, but I appreciated its lack of wallowing or frame-by-frame fetishizing.

The post-mortem passages of The Final Flight represent the series at its best. Like nearly every TV docuseries these days, this one is overlong, and broken up into too many parts. It could easily have been two tightly packed hourlong episodes, rather than three fairly shapeless ones that run around 40 minutes each followed by an excellent concluding one that runs around 50. But that last chapter is so moving—and at times enraging—that it justifies the whole project.

The series does take a deep dive into the story, providing no small amount of drama and some eye-opening details. ... To absolutely appalling effect, however, the filmmakers bring before their camera the very people who gave the green light to a launch that evidently should not have taken place, men who take “blame” but “feel no guilt.” ... To their credit, producer-directors Steven Leckart and Daniel Junge (J.J. Abrams is an executive producer) devote considerable time to all the lost astronauts, interview their survivors where possible, provide their personal stories and extol their virtues.

“Challenger,” then, moves this story from a tragedy into an outrage. But it does an elegant job, too, of conveying precisely why NASA felt it needed the boost of a popular and quick mission, and what it might have gained. ... The series, then, can be somewhat scattered, as if it doesn’t want to solely be seen as exposé. Its excavation of the social climate leading up to the fated final Challenger launch is intertwined with its claims of a deeply flawed launch, but the first element there is more interesting, too.

Directors Daniel Junge and Steven Leckart serve up some answers with some never-before-seen footage and a swath of interviews, bundled in a generic package.