Sci-fi series, especially ones that take place on a ship or space station with a large crew, lead with plot instead of character. The notion is that the characters will find themselves, but the situation they’re in is paramount. The new Syfy series The Ark is no different.
THE ARK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A screen that shows the status of the Ark 1 suddenly shows “IMPACT WARNING” after a loud bang.
The Gist: Ark 01 is a ship on a five-year journey to an Earth-like planet with the first group of colonizers from Earth, looking to find a new home as conditions at home deteriorate. In a chamber with hundreds of pods full of people in cryogenic stasis, a beam comes down and smashes one of the pods open.
Lt. Sharon Garnet (Christie Burke) is in that pod, and she wakes up and sees the situation; she activates her compression suit (stasis causes atrophy, of course) and wakes everyone else up; most of the people manage to get out and put on oxygen helmets by the time the bay is destroyed.
When Garnet and the other two officers in the civilian bay, Lt. Spencer Lane (Reece Ritchie) and Lt. James Brice (Richard Fleeshman), go to the pods where the command, the other officers, and civilian mentors are housed, they see that those chambers broke away from the ship. Those people are dead, and they’re on their own.
So the three officers and 150 civilians, carefully selected to help build the colony, are left to fend for themselves, a year from their destination, with limited water and food supplies. Garnet appoints herself the commander, much to the consternation of Lane and Brice. Brice is especially annoyed when she makes unilateral decisions without passing it through a committee of representatives of the ship’s various populations.
One of the civilians, Angus Medford (Ryan Adams), is an agricultural genius, and he tells Garnet that he snuck a crate of super-rich soil on board, in case the planet wasn’t as accommodating as expected. He needs lots of light and power to grow crops in that soil, which Garnet says yes to. She tells the committee that they have to make “hard choices” that will carry risk.
When the oxygen suddenly drops, the officers find that the software expert that was on the ship is an imposter, young and talkative waste management worker Alicia Nevins (Stacey Read) uses her dual degrees to help save the ship. However, not all is wonderful on Ark 01. Engineering specialist Eva Markovic (Tiana Upcheva) loses someone important to her, and the imposter knows something about Garnet.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The showrunners of The Ark are Dean Devlin and Jonathan Glassner, and the show certainly reminds us of the Stargate franchise, which both have been involved with.
Our Take: The first episode of The Ark covers a lot of ground, which is why the characters felt a little flat and one-dimensional. Because so much happens during the episode, we don’t get a feel for who the main characters are, why they’re there, and what they’re going to do to survive this dire situation. Are they out for themselves or are they team players?
The character that embodies this best is a young civilian named Trent Baylor (Miles Barrow). He shows in numerous situations how savvy he is for someone so young, but in the course of “picking the locks” of the various doors during the oxygen crisis, he also stows away oxygen tanks he finds in the surgical center. Is he doing this for selfish reasons or not?
At this point, the only intriguing aspect of the show is that we have no idea who any of these people really are. The further we get into this season, and the more these characters are defined, the more interesting things should be. It’s pretty much this way for any sci fi series that take place on a ship or space station, whether it’s a Star Trek series, both versions of BSG or even The Orville. Plot is introduced and refined first, and it’s no different here.
Will this show fly off into ridiculous directions, as people hook up and their real lives are revealed? Are they going to be on a futile mission, with their loved ones back home already dead on a husk of a home planet? Only time will tell here.
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Garnet sits in her quarters, contemplating the idea that she may be found out. We pull back and see the ship as it hurtles through space.
Sleeper Star: Shalini Peiris plays Dr. Sanjivni Kabir, and it seems that she’s involved in discovering a lot of the mysterious stories surrounding the passengers. Also, Christina Wolfe plays Cat Brandice; the only thing we know about her is that she likes a nice shower, even if the ship has very little water left.
Most Pilot-y Line: Angus calls the officer who was going to mentor him “a legendary horticulturalist,” which is a phrase we don’t think we’ve heard to describe anyone, ever.
Our Call: STREAM IT. We won’t sugarcoat things: The first couple of episodes of The Ark are rough, because the characters take time to settle in. But the first episode brings up enough intrigue to make those episode worth watching until everyone finds their place in the story.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.