The Story
We Are Mars
Created and written by Michael Shell. Feature screenplay and six-season series bible.
The premise behind the feature film and the six-season series. One world, told once, in full.
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Humanity does not live on Earth any more. It has not for generations.
The people alive now were born on Mars, raised on Mars, and will most likely die there. Earth is not a place to them. It is a chapter that closed before any of them existed.
Mars
What began as survival has become a civilization. There is government here, and industry, and history, and a settled sense of how things are. Children are taught the founding account the way any society teaches its founding account: completely, and without much room for doubt.
Earth was destroyed. Earth is uninhabitable. There is nowhere to go back to. Mars is all there is, and holding on to it is what matters.
The Lie
Except that Earth is not uninhabitable, and the people running Mars know it.
The truth has been held at the top for a long time, kept from the population deliberately and kept well. Whatever the reasoning was at the start, it has hardened into policy: humanity is not to find out what became of the world it left.
The Discovery
Jack Rush is a teenager. He was not looking to overturn a civilization. He found something that did not match what he had been told, and he did not let it go.
What he uncovers is not a small correction to the record. It is the opposite of everything Mars believes about itself.
Earth
Earth has healed.
Left alone for generations, the planet recovered. It is pristine now: green, blue, loud with life, and thriving without us. The world humanity believed it had destroyed came back to life after humanity left.
Jack brings together a group of teenagers and escapes Mars for the forbidden journey to see it. What they find is more beautiful and more extraordinary than anything they had imagined.
The planet did not need saving. It needed leaving.
The Rebellion
The rebellion is not an army. It is a handful of young people who know something their entire society has been built on not knowing.
That is enough to make them a threat. The leaders of Mars are not prepared to let a discovery of this size stay in the hands of teenagers, and they move to bring them back, which turns a question about Earth into a conflict between the generation that kept the secret and the generation that broke it.
The Choice
Return to the only world they have ever known, or stay on Earth and begin a new humanity.
Neither answer is clean. Going back means handing the truth to the people who buried it. Staying means deciding, on behalf of a species that is not present to vote, that it has earned another attempt at the planet it already lost once.
That is the question We Are Mars is built around: not whether humanity can go home, but whether it should.