The Ark has a promising concept, but poor production values and a hackneyed approach keep it from realizing its potential.
The Ark is a new space-based sci fi series from Syfy which has been highly anticipated because it comes from the creators of Stargate. Dean Devlin was the co-writer of the 1994 film (he is also known for Universal Soldier and Independence Day) and Jonathan Glassner was executive producer on Stargate: SG-1 for its first three seasons. With that pedigree, the expectations might be that they would be bringing the next major franchise to Syfy, but sadly The Ark is not off to a promising start and may deliver yet another one-and-done genre entry for the network.
The show follows the colony ship Ark 1 which is on a mission to Proxima b to establish a new world that the human race can flee to because Earth is dying. All onboard are in suspended animation for the trip, but a catastrophic accident wakes them up before reaching their destination. The module with the command crew is destroyed in the accident leaving mid-level officers as well as scientists and technicians to sort out what has happened and to get the ship back on track for its destination. But several people in the remaining crew may be somebody else than they appear to be.
The basic premise is a familiar one for sci fi (and 2018’s truncated Origin did a much better job), but it is a promising concept that could potentially carry the show. The budget is certainly not in the range of what we are seeing from the mega-dollar streaming originals, but that has to be expected from a basic cable series these days and that is not necessarily a stopping point. With two experienced genre veterans in Devlin and Glassner, you might expect them to hearken back to the early days of Stargate (which also did not have a huge budget) and get the most out of the production. But after trudging through three episodes, I can tell you that is not the case.
So far, the show has given us predicament after predicament piled on with a bunch of young adult angsty drama. The cast is relatively young, apparently because of the length of the journey, though that doesn’t fully make sense seeing as they were in suspended animation. (But get used to it, because quite a number of things don’t fully make sense with this show.) So the cast is full of fresh young faces making this look a lot like a CW production, though with an even lower budget. It also delivers plenty of copy-and-paste dialog and scenes and a heaping helping of unnecessary melodrama. This is space opera in the worst way because it is heavy on soap opera elements. It also throws in the expected mysteries upon mysteries (i.e. the backstory for Lt. Sharon Garnet), but those appear very contrived and designed specifically to manufacture conflict.
The cast consists of mostly new faces, and I while won’t beat them up and say that they are bad actors, they are not up to the task of compensating for the lackluster scripts they are given. The characters they play range from uninspired but acceptable (Lt. Sharon Garnet, Eva Markovic) to just downright annoying (Angus Medford, Dr. Cat Brandice). There is also a palpable lack of chemistry among the cast as the characters have failed to mesh after three episodes. This may be blamed on the plodding, by the numbers directing, though, which has also done little to give the show or its players any sort of boost.
There was a time when I would give a show a minimum of four episodes before making a decision on whether to stick with it, but with the Peak TV crunch I am much less patient. I almost bailed on this one after the premiere, but I stuck it out for two more episodes. I am done for now, though, unless I hear that this show has an upswing in quality as its first season progresses. There are too many other sci fi shows to follow these days to commit time to a meandering, subpar production like The Ark. I really wanted to like the show and hoped that it could give us the next good space-based series. But I was already hate-watching it by the second episode and there is no need to continue with that when shows like Amazon’s The Rig (also a modest production) are much more fun to watch (more on that one at this link).
And for those who are soldiering on with The Ark, I don’t advise getting too invested in the show. This appears to be an acquisition, meaning that Syfy’s parent company NBCUniversal has no financial stake in the production. Therefore, the only way that Syfy makes money is through advertising, and the same-day ratings have not been great so far. (The delayed viewing has kicked things up some, but advertisers do not care about that.) So unless this has foreign partnerships/funding and/or syndication deals, the prospects for a second season are not great at this point. So even though the show has a promising concept and could course correct at some point, I don’t like its chances for sticking around.
Have you been watching The Ark? Chime in with your thoughts on the show in the comments section below.
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I’ve seen worse and I don’t think it’s that bad but nobody cares what I think.
Sure we do. Feel free to elaborate on your thoughts on the show.
In the third episode of “The Ark”, I was not surprised when the crew realized the asteroid approaching the ship was actually an “ice comet” because it had a tail — even though it has been made very clear the ship is in deep space and nowhere near a star that could heat a comet’s ice for it to *form* a tail.
And elsewhere, someone else posted:
“And then they used a small shuttle to make the giant interplanetary ship (which was probably travelling at a measurable percentage of the speed of light) stop on a dime and do a 180 to match trajectories with that “comet.” That literally would have required more energy than they had used to get to that point in their journey.”
“The Ark” seems to be working very hard at being *dumb*.
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Totally agree with the general conclusion that there are lots of things about The Ark that don’t make any sense (housing the entire command crew in one spot which is the root of the predicament they’re in for the rest of the show, a total lack of security screening to ensure the crew members are who they say they are before they came on board, that asteroid/comet episode has a laughably mild brush with scientific/physical reality (it felt like an episode the show runners shoehorned in at the last minute once they realized they couldn’t pull off the water shortage plot point), for people who are supposed to be trained/educated/top of their fields their lack of maturity and levelheadedness is STUNNING, etc.), but frankly I’m going to stick with it at least long enough to see if they can figure out what damaged the ship and why just out of morbid curiosity. At least there were consequences from the comet episode that had to be dealt with in the very next episode so somebody in the writers room is doing some thinking. The Ark does somewhat remind me of Nightflyers, the one-and-done SyFy series based on the book by GRR Martin of Game Of Thrones fame, maybe they’ll lean more in that direction in future episodes?
After watching 10 episodes, I do like the show and am glad it’s been renewed for a 2nd season. Sure, scientifically accurate premises are out the window at times but heck it’s a watchable sci-fi show and I’m enjoying the interaction with the characters and the mysteries that are slowly unfolding.