Mikhail Petrov flies everything in the story that flies. He is at the controls when the HELIX rocket leaves the pad, he reaches the hatch of the Ares first, he flips the UNDOCK switch, and he fights the capsule down through plasma and blackout to a landing beside the outpost with four columns of fire under him. He plots the descent window with the planet turning beneath the ship, and the film gives him the one shot in Track 4 where his hand grips the viewport frame hard enough to whiten the knuckles. He is the one who will have to put them down on that.
On the ground he becomes the crew's builder and its humour. He bolts the dome frame with dust flying, climbs the ladder to fit the top pane, heats the first meal in the tiny galley. When Yuki is pregnant he welds a crib out of spare capsule parts, and it is that crib that stands in the museum a hundred years later. On the night of the birth he is at the comms console sending a signal to an Earth twenty light-minutes away, and then in the med bay doorway, grinning and wiping his eyes.
He plants the HELIX flag on Sol 1. It is Lena's hand he holds when the engines cut.
