TV review: Syfy’s ‘Ascension’ goes off course
There are several intriguing concepts built into Syfy’s “Ascension” (9 p.m. Monday through Wednesday), but the execution is not quite up to snuff in the first episode and infuriating by the conclusion.
In the 1960s, America launched a top secret one-way space mission made up of hundreds of men and women for a 100-year journey to colonize a new planet. The notion that the technology existed to build the gigantic spaceship U.S.S. Ascension in the 1960s requires a fair suspension of disbelief, but viewers willing to go with it will be intrigued by other questions it raises, even if the way the show’s writers phrase these ideas in dialogue comes off as exposition-heavy.
How would it feel to be born on a spaceship sent on a one-way journey, to know your choices in life are limited? Would you be grateful for the adventure or angry that you had no say in your fate?
“We’re all going to the same place: Nowhere,” says one angry passenger. “And none of us had a choice.”
Layer onto that class stratification on the ship, with lower decks passengers left to feel like an underclass responsible for the dirty work while passengers closer to the tip of the ship live in midcentury modern luxury.
Viewers join the journey at its halfway point just as a murder appears to be committed with a handgun that’s not supposed to be on board. Executive officer Oren Gault (Brandon P. Bell) takes over the investigation into a young woman’s death, but like seemingly everyone else in the ship’s command structure, he has secrets related to the deceased that he’d rather keep under wraps.
And that’s where “Ascension” begins to fray around the edges. The show’s primary plot is solid – including an earthbound twist involving the son (Gil Bellows, “Ally McBeal”) of the mission’s creator – but the soapier aspects are poorly written and sometimes poorly performed, too.
Capt. William Denninger (Brian Van Holt, “Cougar Town”) seems saintly but may have a tarnished halo while his Lady MacBeth-like wife, Viondra (Tricia Helfer, “Battlestar Galactica”), pushes him to be more assertive lest the ship’s council succeed in replacing him.
“I'll go on being the politician so you can go on being the statesman,” she declares.
“Ascension” does a decent job of introducing some new-ish or largely unexplored ideas in TV science fiction, but the script by miniseries co-creator Philip Levens (2008’s “Knight Rider,” “Smallville”) is overly reliant on characters sleeping around to create pulpy intrigue in the show’s first episode, and that curbs viewers’ ability to buy into the miniseries.
The production design is pretty terrific, and with the exception of a funeral scene that’s straight out of “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” “Ascension” does seem more original than most of Syfy’s past miniseries efforts. In its first episode, it grasps to be great but falls somewhat short.
In subsequent episodes, “Ascension” really runs off the rails as it abandons interesting questions of fate in favor of a tired conspiracy theory plot and a cynical, keep-it-open-ended-in-case-we-want-to-do-more non-ending that is sure to give the notion of “limited-event series” a bad name if viewers can’t trust that they will get a conclusion, which they don’t at the end of “Ascension.”