The Ark: Created by Dean Devlin. With Christie Burke, Reece Ritchie, Richard Fleeshman, Stacey Read. Follows the remaining crew of a spacecraft known as Ark One, who must become the best versions of themselves to stay on course and survive after experiencing a catastrophic event that caused massive destruction and loss of life.

This feels equal parts “Origin” and “Ascension” but never really gets it’s feet under it, at least not in the first couple episodes I watched. There’s a paradox in the series with some heavy science fiction, which I appreciate, but then a complete lack of respect for commonly known elements of things like “physics” or “gravity”. There’s a big point about how the spinning rings of the ship give them gravity, but it’s done in a way that makes it obvious the writers weren’t sure about how the spinning motion would actually produce gravity, so there’s gravity through the entire ship and when you’re on one of the rings, there’s no transitioning or fading from the effects of the spin. There’s a couple scenes of them outside the ship at well with the rings going at full speed and they kinda just float over to it like it was no big deal. Additionally, these rings have engines pointing back directly into another body segment of the ship and since it’s a straight line, whatever’s in that section is getting seriously cooked!

There’s a lot that doesn’t work for me, but surprisingly the acting and characters weren’t part of that. There’s two characters that are so nerdy that they talk really fast and they’re super socially awkward and oh god, when I realized they had TWO of those tropes on the show, I honestly wanted to see how they would interact with each other, and to my shock their relationship was one of the better ones on display.

If you can get past the bad science (I can’t), the bad science fiction (I can’t!), there’s a great show under some really weird choices. Maybe they’ll tighten the ship up, but for now I’m going to be skipping the rest of season one.

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