Syfy's Ascension received a lot of hype, as well as a lot of criticism, after its first episode aired earlier this week. But how did the series work overall? We'll address that in this review.
First, please note that the following contains spoilers. If you don't like spoilers, run away now.
Syfy promoted Ascension as a space drama. It looked at a possible scenario: what if the U.S. government had a secret mission that sent hundreds of people to space in the 1960s on a generational spaceship, called Ascension, that would eventually take them to an alien planet? And that it would take three generations to get there?
This is how we first see Ascension. The second generation on the spaceship, which has been in space for 50 years, is now grown up and dealing with life in space, having never seen Earth, or experienced anything that Earth experienced after the spaceship launched. There was no women's liberation movement, no disco and no 9/11. These people are essentially stuck in a 1960s frame of mind, as is the ship, as seen in its design.
Women are still treated as second-class citizens on the ship. Although, we see a hint in Viondra (Tricia Helfer) that women manage to find other ways of controlling the men who control them. "Sex is currency," says Viondra, and although it seems a cheesy statement, it's all too true. She, along with other women on the ship, use sex to manipulate everything, even politics.
In fact, we see that although Viondra is wife to Captain William Denniger (Brian Van Holt), she's the one doing the dirty work and politicking to keep him in his position.
In the first episode, the ship encounters its first murder. This episode is about solving that murder, but more about a major reveal. When the presumed murderer gets tossed out of the ship's airlock, he lands on a mattress, on Earth, and guess what? The entire thing is an elaborate hoax! The ship never left Earth and seems as if it's just some weird sociological experiment that's fooled the people inside the fake ship for 50 years.
That insane reveal felt like a letdown for those wanting a science fiction show set in space. But for those who kept watching, there was eventually a big pay-off. But more about that later.
The first episode also shows us a little girl, Christa (Ellie O'Brien), who is either crazy or sees the future, or maybe both. But we really don't get to know her and her purpose until later.
We also meet Officer Aaron Gault (Brandon P. Bell), an African-American who managed to work his way up from the lower decks (yes, the class system is alive and well here); the delightfully evil politician Councilman Rose (Al Sapienza); and Dr. Juliet Bryce (Andrea Roth), who is struggling to understand a teenaged daughter.
The problem with the first two episodes is the large cast of characters. Although there's a good chance that Syfy will pick Ascension up for a full television series, there are way too many characters here for a mini-series. This means that many characters are just there as plot devices, and nothing more.
For example, Ryan Robbins portrays Duke Vanderhaus, the husband of the woman that Officer Gault is sleeping with. Although his character seems interesting at first, especially as head of security on the ship, because he gets so little screen time, he's delegated to nothing more than the angry husband by the end of the mini-series' run.
This happens with other characters, too, such as with Roth's character, Dr. Bryce, who has a teenaged daughter, Nora (Jacqueline Byers) facing what other teens call "No Future," because at some point, children are forced to marry who they're paired with and told what their future careers will be. Teens on the ship obviously struggle with the fact that they aren't the masters of their own fate and it would be interesting to see how this plays out for the mother of such a teen. But we don't get that because there's no time.
The second episode of Ascension dealt with setting up Christa. We learn that she's definitely something more than she seems and that maybe she's the key to the entire social experiment. She sees what's going on outside the ship, although she's never stepped foot in the world that exists out there.
It's not until episode three, though, that we see what Christa is capable of. There's some weird orb in the bottom of the ship that responds to her, creating a crazy electrical energy that nearly kills everyone on board after it knocks out the oxygen scrubbers.
The scenes here are tense and frantic and really get the heart pumping. But then Ascension goes weird again and you just know you're in for another reveal.
Before we get to that, though, this final episode of the mini-series shows some great acting by Helfer, whose Viondra finally manages to become captain of the ship (because her husband is working to fix the oxygen scrubbers). She takes control like you'd expect, becoming a better captain than her husband dreamed of being. Watching her put Councilman Rose in his place on the bridge is an applause-worthy moment.
Brad Carter as John Stokes, the presumed ship's murderer (although we learn that he didn't do it) has a beautiful moment in a convenience store on Earth, realizing all he'd missed out on being trapped on the ship. His breakdown there in the store feels heart-breakingly real.
At the end of episode three, Christa's power goes haywire again and the orb responds. But how does it respond? It sends Officer Gault to something that looks a lot like an alien planet. And we find out that the purpose of the ship really was about going to space, but in an entirely different way than expected.
For those who stopped watching after the reveal of episode one, you're missing out. This really is a space drama, just not the Battlestar Galactica kind of drama Syfy fooled us into thinking it would be. Instead, we get something that's a bit more like Stargate, which is possibly not the space drama we wanted, but one that's still compelling to watch.
Obviously, the mini-series left a lot of unanswered questions, particularly at the end. What is that orb and where did it come from? How did locking up hundreds of people inside a fake spaceship lead to actual space travel? Are there other children on board the ship like Christa?
Now we only have to wait for the announcement from Syfy that Ascension is becoming a television series.
