Ascension. Follow

Mini series starts up tonight.

Looks like some sort of "Rapture in Space". Utopian high class society of people abandoning a failing Earth in 1960s to find a place to live.

First episode is tonight, 1.5 hours long. Next two episodes over the next two days are two hours. I assume that the first episode just has fewer commercials.

Ok. It was pretty bad.

Don't bother, unless for some reason you want to waste five and a half hours.

This show is whack. at least 128% whack.

Considering that the preview showed no real plot whatsoever, I decided to skip this one entirely. Glad to hear that it sucked.

Never saw trolls 2. I enjoyed Micheal Bay's TMNT a lot more than Ascension.

I'm trying to think of a good comparison but can't come up with one.

Imagine a show where the trailers and info show something possibly interesting. Then they throw it away in the first hour and make it a generic government conspiracy movie, and in the last hour decide to throw in a SpoilerStar ChildSpoilerCharacter literally says "The Star Child must be born!" and leave it at a very stupid cliff hanger.

The creators used the mini series as an attempt to jump start a series. But where the show ended would make for a very dull series.

The miniseries had no real story by itself. And I cannot see any potential series from it being any better given the direction it went.

Yeah. Someone actually called her "star child" (why is it always a girl?). And you all know how much I love that particular plot device.

It's a pretty glaring example of starting out with a decent plot idea and setting, and a decent twist, but then having the writing/producing process decide that's not enough, so let's just toss in a ton of other stuff and make it really really really bad. Oh. And let's not forget the obvious attempt at social commentary while using a society for which such things not only make no sense at all, but would not work even if someone was trying really hard to create a stereotypically easy to condemn social structure.

SpoilerSad thing is that had they just played the whole thing straight, it could have been a good miniseries. Just keep the twist until the end, and have the characters keep encountering strange events. Allow them to start finger pointing, and investigating, and more strange things happen. Then, when things come to a head, introduce the twist and end it on that note. The way they did it? Terrible. The twist was obvious about 5 minutes into the first episode. As soon as they introduced characters living in current day Earth, they had to be able to tie them together, and the only way to do that was to have the ship be on earth. Obvious as hell. Writers are so freaking predictable.

As they wrote it, there were a huge number of problems:

1. Society makes no sense. I get that they want to make comments about a stratified class based society, but that's not going to happen in an environment with just 600 people. Everyone knows everyone else. There are just certain social constructs that only occur in a large society mostly filled with strangers. The stewardess/prostitutes thing was great eye candy, but totally impossible in a society like that, for example. There are many such examples. They make a huge deal about the upper decks versus the lower decks, but unless someone actually set out to build the ship with the kind of class separation in mind, how would you get that?

Not to mention, half of the most powerful people on the ship were from the lower decks anyway, so it's doubly strange that they make this huge deal about class distinction including obvious clothes and luxury differences, yet it doesn't seem to actually exist except when they feel the need to make a point about it.

2. The writers know nothing of how chain of command systems work. Like say, the idea that the Captains wife is somehow in command when he and the XO leave the command deck (apparently along with every other single member of the crew except for a junior officer/cadet/whatever who apparently is left as the only guy on said command station during a crisis situation despite having worked in water reclamation until just a few days earlier). Which is another example of the class society that isn't really there when plot requires it. Just bizarre.

3. What really was the objective of the mission? It appears as though the whole point was to breed someone capable of operating some technology (was that hidden at the bottom of the pool? Is it alien? Human? What the hell?), that would allow for transportation to other words. At least, I'm assuming that's what the whole bit was at the end with the XO. And we have to assume they knew about this and where they could go because it looked just like the simulated environment in the lab. So this was planned, right (how did they know this? And who are "they")? And the device she's interacting with is on the ship, right? So why, when they've finally succeeded in this, does the Director decide to pull the girl off the ship? Um... What? Why? That makes no sense at all.

4. Where are all the elderly people? Do they have some kind of age limit at which they Euthanize people? If the ship launched 51 years ago, and we have to assume most of the adults were in the 20-40 age range at the time, then there should be a ton of people in the 70-90 age range. But there didn't appear to be a single person much over 60.

5. Pigs on the upper decks. I get the symbolism they were going for, but really? Does a crisis situation grant pigs the ability to use elevators?

6. Oh. And this one's great. Why was Lorelei killed in the first place. You know, the murder that set off the entire plot line? There's a brief moment where the Doctor is confronted with her death and he says something like "I didn't want her to die", followed with something about her learning something. Um... What did she learn? About what? That the whole thing was a sham? Or that he was in on it? The breeding program? The secret dudad under the water? What? It's never explained, and frankly, it's hard to figure out how anything could be kept secret in an environment like that, or how she could have found out something important enough that he felt he had to kill her. If she could stumble upon anything, then how the hell did a dozen other people in the last 51 years, with nothing to do but to explore every single square inch of the interior of the ship they all live on, not stumble upon it as well.

And while on the subject, how is it possible that anyone could not know about a hatch under 1 inch of sand on the beach? WTF? Did the writers bother to spend any time at all thinking about how the people on a ship like that would really live? Not their "let's make this a slice of our world" live, but how a society would actually form under those conditions, what their lives would be like, how they'd interact, etc, etc. Oh. And despite the whole "look there's a hatch here that no one knows about", it had no relevance to the story anyway. So why bother?

Speaking of things they couldn't have bothered with, and tied to the killing that makes no sense. Note that they had the XO investigating the murder. There's an entire side plot about the secret boy friend slash water reclamation guy finding the tape from 20 years ago she had hidden, and the XO figuring out that it had been edited so as to hide something, but then nothing else results from this. It's like the writers forgot that plotline existed. He never discovers what was hidden, or who hid it, or anything at all. It's never used in any way after that point in the story. So the entire murder mystery plot could just have easily been left out.

7. Too many science problems to list. Yeah. We can suspend disbelief to some degree, but physics is still physics. And math, while hard, is still math. Things like the very basic fact that the "point of no return" would be 1/4 of the trip, not 1/2 shouldn't actually require a rocket scientist to figure out. If we assume that the inhabitants of the ship believe that they are on a 100 year journey, and that the reason they are in 1g gravity is because the engines are providing constant thrust (how do you suppose they managed the turn around btw?), then turning the ship around at the halfway point and thrusting back towards the way you came would result in you coming to a stop at your end point (which is precisely what the normal trip would involve). If you wanted to turn around and head back to Earth while using no more fuel than the full journey would take, you'd need to make that decision 1/4th of the way there, so that you'd actually stop moving towards your destination when halfway there, and could then accelerate back to the 1/4 distance point, flip around again and decelerate to a stop back at Earth. Note, that going as far as 1/4th the way prior to deciding to turn around would still result in a total trip time of 100 years. If you ran into some problem that would prevent you from making a trip that long for some reason, you'd need to turn around even sooner.

Yeah. It's a line of dialogue, and had no impact on the story, but still. If you're going to bother with a story like this on the SciFi (oh wait, SyFy) channel, why not do something like ask a 10 year old who's read a couple books about space travel for the correct information?

Oh. And rather than edit that, pretend "distance" is "time". So 1/4th of the time is your turn around point. Obviously, that can't be actual distance because you're under constant acceleration. Yeah. Science can be hard!

8. Behavior of the folks back on Earth. Almost too many to list. Aside from the aforementioned murder that is never explained and makes no sense, there's no actual reason for there to be a crisis for the folks running the project. But there is. For no apparent reason. Why is the project under scrutiny? No explanation. Is there some ulterior motive that would explain this (and perhaps explain why they wanted to pull the girl off the ship as well)? Not that we're told about. So the motivations and actions of most of the people make zero sense. The woman pulled in to investigate the guy running the project was described as being a spook. And she certainly was prepped for disappearing if/when needed. But she falls for a honeypot (honeytrap?), then figures it out, has the drop on the other woman, but then gets the gun taken away and is killed? Huh? How unskilled was she then (or how skilled was the other woman?). I get that it's more dramatic that way, but it seems like an incredibly low probability plan to hope that the other person allows you to grab their gun while they're holding it on you so you can shoot them. She should have had her own gun and just shot her the second she started to figure it out.

And, while on the subject. If the other woman was a plant reporting back to the project, shouldn't she have, Oh, I don't know, let the folks at the project know about this? Again, it seems like a really stupid plan to allow the person who's trying to leak information about the top secret project your whole job is to protect by pretending to be the person she tries to leak information to, to just continue right to the point of breaking people out of said super secret project and trying to make an escape. Um... She should have immediately notified her superiors and had the leak removed. Period. There's no value to allowing the process to continue, since that woman is on the outside. It's not like you're tracking the leak to anyone to figure out if other players are involved. She was the only other player. Plug it right there and you're done. Spook lady should have been disappeared a couple hours after first contacting the other woman. Done. Of course, you do that and you don't have the other drama that not doing so lead to, so it's another case of writers having characters take actions that make zero sense purely because by failing to make the correct actions it will allow for a better story. Dumb.



It was just bad. The whole thing seemed predicated on the assumption that the audience would be so stupid that they couldn't see these massive problems. But even if you are, you probably wont like it because it's a show that pretends to be about science, which tends to draw viewers who will spot and be annoyed by such things. Know your darn audience! Writing glaring plot holes so as to create more drama works great for a Soap Opera and the audience for said entertainment either wont notice or wont care. Doing so on a science fiction show? What were they thinking?

What's bad is that I get a certain amount of this. It's hard to avoid, and even the best scifi can be inflicted with bad science, and plot holes. But this was so full of such things from one end to the other that it was just outside the realm of even the most absurd suspension of disbelief. Just couldn't do it. Just when you'd start thinking "Ok, that is wrong, but maybe we can hand wave it away or something", they'd toss another ridiculous thing at you. And another. And another. I usually watch shows like this and try to come up with excuses for how the mistakes could be explained away, but I gave up on this show. There were just too many mistakes and no rational way to explain them.

Something that could have been quite good destroyed by absolutely terrible writing. Sigh.

Edited, Dec 19th 2014 5:07pm by gbaji

SpoilerCorrect. You'd have to have constant 1g acceleration for this to work. Of course, if the whole ship is a mock up sitting on Earth, you can fake the engines and fuel bits and just say that they're under constant 1g acceleration. Again though, unless there isn't a single person on the ship who understands even basic concepts about space travel, under a constant thrust situation, your turn around point for a 100 year journey would be 25 years, not 50. How the captain wouldn't know this is bizarre. Even if he didn't understand the science to figure this out himself, all the other super smart people would have and everyone on the ship would know the correct answer. I chalk it up to the writers not knowing this. Which is just poor research.

And yes, the concept of the ship being full of really smart people (who invented stuff that was implemented on Earth) not being able to figure this out is pretty ridiculous. Again though, I was willing to suspend disbelief on the whole "it's faked so well they can't figure it out" bit, but there were so many other problems, it just got ridiculous. It honestly wasn't the faked ship bits that I had the problem with, but all the other actions taken that made no sense that did.




SpoilerWhich is also not explained in any way at all. So the guy who spends the entire series harping about how even the smallest detail mistake could result in people inside not believing the environment and ruining the whole project tosses this out the window? Why? And I didn't think that was the murdered girls necklace, but the mother's (mother of the star child chick, I honestly lost track of who was related to whom at some point). That whole bit was another one that wasn't explained at all. Why take it? No clue.

I got the distinct impression that they initially started out with a decent plot, then complicated it, then decided they wanted to leave things open for a full series, and decided that leaving information out would allow them to fill those gaps later. So the result was a swiss cheese storyline that made no sense. I'm pretty sure that a whole ton of explanatory scenes were cut from the finished product. There were just too many things introduced and then ignored later. Someone took a hatchet to the original script. Worse is that they seem to have cut out things that were necessary to any sort of sane plot in favor for scenes that were trivial or contrived or just eye candy.

Again, I keep going back to them not getting their audience at all.



SpoilerI'd have been happy with anything that kept it simple and interesting. I really do think that at some point the specter of making a longer series opened up, and it forced changes to the story so as to allow for a more open ended continuation, but in the process they butchered the original story. It's either that or they employed the "monkeys banging on keyboards" technique to write the story. The end result was about the same.

Edited, Dec 19th 2014 5:33pm by gbaji

That's already sort of the plot of Spoilerthe 100.

That's not how it works. 128% of 128% of something is 164% of something. So it's 164% whack.

Still gonna watch it, though.