Ascension: Season 1

Here's a miniseries I've had my eye on for a little while. Ascension aired three ninety-minute episodes on Syfy across three nights back in 2014. It's been hanging around on Netflix for some time and I finally took the plunge the other night, because I'm a sucker for space-based sci-fi even though it's perpetually disappointing and shitty.

The premise here was kind of cool. (They always are!) An enormous life-sustaining spaceship took off in the 1960s, bound on a 100-year journey to Alpha Centauri in order to colonize other solar systems. We begin our story in the present day (2010s) exactly halfway into the ship's journey. Most of population of the ship at this point has been born on the ship, out in space, never knowing Earth. And most of the population will die on the ship, out here in space, before reaching Alpha Centauri. They're the ultimate lost generation, then, facing existential dread and questioning their purpose and fate, and it shouldn't be that surprising at all when the ship experiences its first ever murder.

Everything falls apart pretty quickly, the show flailing all over the place with space magic and "higher power" garbage, unveiling twist after twist that completely realign the mission's paradigm - I would have absolutely bailed after the first two episodes had there been more than one remaining. Worst of all, what had been sold to me as a "miniseries" very clearly ended on a big old hook for a second season, with nothing wrapped up at all.

But the show's biggest missed opportunity in my opinion was in its depiction of the society on board. Again, this is a collection of people born from the people who went up into space in the 1960s - probably very patriotic and militaristic, certainly more than a little sexist and racist by today's standards - and yet when we meet them in 2010 they're just sort of... culture-less. Like, a lot of the women have Pan-Am stewardess-looking hair and outfits, but the captain is a black guy, women hold very important positions of power - how? Why? Even a hokey throwaway line like, "we realized after the great Oxygen level crisis of 1984 that a man's leadership capabilities aren't affected by his skin color" would have gone a long way toward fleshing out some semblance of history for this very unique group of people. Like I almost hate to bring this up, but why would there even have been any black people being sent on the colonization effort in the 1960s? (For what it's worth, I can't recall there being any Asians.) I also can't recall if the ship was receiving any radio transmissions from earth in the form of newsclips, music, sports scores - do these people know about the Miracle on Ice? About 9/11? About Taylor Swift?

I digress. Don't watch this one. There just isn't enough meat on the bone, and even if you find yourself invested in the actual stories here, there's no real payoff.