Discovery's 'Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking'

THE SHOW "Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking"

WHEN | WHERE Sunday at 9 p.m. on Discovery

REASON TO WATCH "The Story of Everything," the second part of the former Cambridge physicist's three-part series, which premiered Sunday.

WHAT IT'S ABOUT The beginning and the end . . . the alpha and the omega . . . or, let's just say, the really big picture. "Big" is the operative word. Hawking begins with the Big Bang and ends with the Big Crunch. The first half of this two-hour telecast adheres tightly to that for which Hawking is world famous - an elegant and broadly sketched description of the universe's greatest protagonist, gravity. The second half gets into discussions about future perils, such as asteroids, gamma ray bursters (nasty beasts that could fry our ozone and hence us), and of course, the end of the universe itself, in (oh) 30 billion years or so.

Not one to worry about that, Hawking muses: Could it "be possible to navigate outside the universe before the Big Crunch ? We could perhaps becomes masters of the universe next door."

MY SAY As readers of Hawking's numerous bestsellers well know, he is not only a genius, but a superb writer with a poet's eye for analogy and metaphor. In that regard, he rivals TV's other grand tour guide of the universe, Carl Sagan, who died in 1996. Sunday's telecast contains what may be the most vivid description of star formation ever seen on TV (his analogy is an "onion," but let him tell the story). There is an equally enthralling description of gravity's impact on the distribution of matter in the early universe. The real beauty here is in the absolute simplicity.

This is the universe made simple, but also smart. But by midpoint, entropy sets in. The center does not quite hold. Hawking - a narrator speaks Hawking's words because he suffers from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) - drifts into a discussion about life, the future of humanity and whether intelligence will get us out of our inevitable scrape. It becomes "The Story of Too Much of Everything."

BOTTOM LINE A gorgeous, mind-blowing romp through the stars. But the first half is stronger than the second.

GRADE A-