The Ark: Season 1
Created by: Dean Devlin and Jonathan Glassner
Written by: Dean Devlin, Jonathan Glassner, John-Paul Nickel, Rebecca Rosenberg, and Kendall Lampkin
Starring: Christie Burke (Lt. Garnet), Reece Ritchie (Lt. Spencer Lane), Richard Fleeshman (Lt. Brice), Stacey Michelle Read (Alicia), Ryan Adams (Angus), Pavle Jerinić (Felix), Shalini Peiris (Dr. Kabir), Christina Wolfe (Dr. Cat Brandice), Tiana Upcheva (Eva)
The Ark season 1 trailer:
Wow.
I saw ads and trailers for this show before it aired, which is obviously how I knew to tune in. It looked like a fun and decent show maybe in the vein of Star Trek. But wow, I loved it, and it was one of the shows I actively anticipated each week as it aired.
The show was definitely not in the vein of Star Trek. It was a little more like Passengers, the 2016 movie starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, with passengers aboard a huge colonial ship experiencing tragedy. In The Ark, tragedy was on a much larger scale. A huge part of the ship (called Ark One) experiences a catastrophe (the nature of which is a spoiler) in which the majority of the crew, including all of its leadership and ranking officers, are killed in their cryopods. This occurs in the pilot, forcing all the remaining survivors to wake up and immediately take action to save the whole of Ark One from falling apart in the first several scenes. When things settle down, they realize they're the only ones left alive, and they're still about a year away from their destination planet--which they were supposed to already have arrived at upon waking up. It's a very rude awakening, especially as most of them are civilians or lower-tiered officers, and the remaining season is about them taking up the mantles forced upon them and surviving on a limping ship.
We quickly meet and become accustomed to a small group of leading characters who form the heart and soul of the show. It's a confined space and tempers tend to flare with opposing personalities, and part of the charm of the season is watching friendships form and fail or ulterior motives become discovered. About mid-season, things are shaken up (necessarily; the entire premise is in danger of stagnating) when they encounter another colonial ship from earth and take on a single survivor from that ship, Kelly (Samantha Glassner). Characters and viewers alike must then decide whether she can be trusted, especially when the latter half of the season brings her original ship into the story, whose crew is still fully alive.
Despite the risky nature of the entire crew being confined on a single spaceship for the entire season--which I described above as in danger of stagnating--the season impressively never got old, continuously throwing new loops, new concepts, and exciting possibilities at us. One episode acts as a whodunnit, with a murdered body discovered on board and the whole of Ark One become eligible suspects; other episodes explore life systems and the logistics of feeding all survivors on a very limited amount of food; several episodes explore space science as they encounter mysterious threats; and many others explore crew histories as sketchy backgrounds lead to shifting alliances and legitimate questions of trustworthiness. And that's just the first half of the season. When Kelly comes aboard Ark One, the season dynamic expands beyond just Ark One's crew and we learn about the whole colonial mission the ship is part of, the state of Earth in this show's version of the future, and series-changing reveals of new characters onboard and more ships around them lead to changes in, well, everything. By the end of the season, the earlier episode's intra-crew drama seems trivial as much larger threats arise from the outside.
It's hard to describe a lot in this review because so many things will become spoilers, especially with only a single season out so far, and nothing else to reference unfamiliar readers. So I think I'll leave the review off here.
I do want to mention that I saw a lot of negativity and criticism of this show on social media as it aired... but I quite simply don't understand it? I saw a lot of comments simply saying "It's garbage" or "The whole pilot was boring" or generic descriptive words like that without basis or specifics on exactly what people didn't like. I was sad to see those things because I wanted to understand what people didn't like, but that's not something that's important or worth getting hung up on. I loved every episode and I thought the plot was fully engaging the entire time!
I'm thrilled to say it's already been renewed for a second season. I can only hope it's as exciting as the first!!
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