Of course, it wasn't always like this. The stars used to be thought permanent, immutable. They were as remote in distance as they were in essence. Our ancient (human) ancestors may have thought the stars powerful beings in the sky. Later, others believed they were the light of heaven shining through holes in the dark cloak of night. People thought they were made of far different stuff than everyday matter on Earth. Aristotelian belief codified the stars as distinctly different, made of stuff later called quintessence (the fifth essence, as opposed to water, air, fire, and earth).

As science progressed, and as we saw in episode seven, humanity learned the true nature of the stars: that they were made out of matter like that found on Earth, but impossibly far away. Even as our understanding grew and the stars joined our pantheon of physical objects, they moved beyond our grasp.

But we are closer to the stars than we ever dreamt. We come from the stars. So do the plants. And the rocks. And the Earth. We are star stuff, reconstituted atoms forged in stars long gone. We share not just a common ancestor, but a common progenitor with every thing around us.

This is Sagan's ultimate answer to the why of astronomy: we are connected to the cosmos. The study of the cosmos is ultimately the study of ourselves. Those lights in the sky, so distant and so mysterious, not only are made of the same stuff as us, but created the stuff of us. It's a beautiful, unifying idea.

The episode itself begins very strong, with a delightful, self-mocking sequence tracing the origin of an apple pie. I found myself wanting Strauss' weighty "Also Sprach Zarathustra," famously used in "2001: A Space Odyssey," as the musical accompaniment. As the pie is served to Sagan, he speaks one of the truly great lines from Cosmos: "If you want to create an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." What a weird, wonderful line.

We progress to a quick review of atomic theory and exponential numbers, and I was again struck by how simple Cosmos is in its presentation. We have a nearly eight-minute segment of just Sagan speaking to the camera. There are no fancy visualizations, just Sagan with a slice of pie and a piece of paper explaining the concept of atoms. It takes an unusual amount of charisma and force of delivery to maintain the audience's focus for so long. The new Cosmos series, borne of an era rich in cheap computer graphics, probably won't go this route.

After a chemistry lesson and a review of the elements (notably absent: the periodic table) we track the lives of stars that created the 92 mixtures of protons and neutrons presented to us. We revisit the Orion Nebula, but then bring it home to us, tracking the life of our own star, our Sun, and the sad, inevitable destruction of Earth.

Supernovas are mentioned, but I wish that they were given more time in this episode. Elements beyond iron are generated within the massive amount of energy released in the supernova process itself, and supernovae are just plain awesome, in the very literal sense of that word. Type 1a supernovae (when a white dwarf accretes additional matter) are also used to measure absolute distances in astronomy, though I can't fault Cosmos for not mentioning this, as the technique wasn't developed until the 1990s. There are also some very impressive computer simulations that try to reproduce the behavior of supernovae, though the process is notoriously time intensive. These types of supernovae also led to the discovery of the accelerating universe, a topic that will surely be discussed in the new series. The deaths of stars serve not only to sow their matter throughout the cosmos, but also to light our way.