If you are looking for a new space series beyond the Star Trek and Star Wars iterations, then SyFy’s The Ark may be for you. Premiering February 1st, it has all of the necessary elements: a long space mission, something going wrong, everyone’s fate hanging in the balance, and a heroic effort saving the day. I hope I did not give anything away.
Here is the full story from SyFy:
The Ark takes place 100 years in the future when planetary colonization missions have begun as a necessity to help secure the survival of the human race. The first of these missions on a spacecraft known as Ark One encounters a catastrophic event causing massive destruction and loss of life. With more than a year left to go before reaching their target planet, a lack of life-sustaining supplies and loss of leadership, the remaining crew must become the best versions of themselves to stay on course and survive.
And don’t miss the trailer, which clearly points out that the ship is off course and the captain is dead. The last space series I watched with with this set up was HBO Max’s Avenue 5, but those passengers were only traveling around the solar system. Here the stakes are more like those in Kim Stanley Robinson’s scifi novel Aurora, which involves a multi generation trip to a distant planet. I recommend both the HBO series and novel, but I will need to wait on the roll-out of The Ark to say more about this new series.
I am looking for my next Expanse series, so I will watch The Ark and hope for the best.
Update: My hopes were dashed. The pilot was so bad that I watched the second episode just to be sure. That episode was bad as well. You cannot look at the crew of the Ark and think this is the best hope for humanity. Throughout both episodes all you had was yelling and dysfunctional behavior. Clearly there was no vetting for this crew. If this is the way we ran out submarine fleet then I would expect every sub to be on the bottom of the sea (about three days after launch). The show even has a turtle-necked founder of the Ark mission chatting away as a hologram. I thought we saw this in the movie Don’t Look Up and basically every other movie after that when you need a stand-in villain. I might have continued if SyFy simply billed the TV show as a comedy, yet even that would have problems since no one on the show can act. Oh well, I will await the next series and hope again. I am not giving up.
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