No, I won’t be calling it Syfy.
Anyway, this is a miniseries that apparently has the potential to go to series. IGN saw the first nigh(tonight) and liked it quite a bit.
I won’t be catching it until all of it aired, but thought I’d start the discussion thread because I’m going to want one.
Anyone planning on watching?
I’ll be watching. I know almost nothing about it, so I’m not sure what to expect. I guess I’ll find out in about an hour.
Thanks for the reminder Mahaloth! I’ve been looking forward to this ever since I saw the previews months ago, but forgot it started tonight. :smack:
I’ve Tivo’d it, but haven’t watched it yet.
I sure didn’t see that coming :eek:, but does explain a lot of little things that were bugging like non-rotational artificial gravity, not flipping the ship around to decelerate, Earth getting updates in real-time instead of a 2 year delay, and why they put everyone to sleep during a radiation alert. Enzmann’s a total monster.
So, the “twist” was exactly what I figured it was.
Good news for M. Night Shyamalan: The Village is no longer the go-to example for “surprises” telegraphed from here to Proxima.
No kiddin’. I suspected that one was coming just from watching the endless adverts.
It’ll be an interesting miniseries, but can’t see it holding interest as an ongoing series. They’ve already used up their “hook”. Something like The Lost Room or that whacky High Moon pilot would’ve stood better chances as series.
Have to say I didn’t see that coming, if only because my expectation of quality was so low, the things that should have stuck out (I.e. Rotational gravity, or how did they lift all those high heels into orbit?) i honestly wrote off as poor writing.
Will tune back in, if for no other reason but to see what they do with this now.
I was also ready to chalk up the scientific lapses to poor writing. The project overseers must’ve also carefully censored all the science textbooks and tech manuals to keep anyone from “on board” from figuring out that something is very wrong. This also makes the apparent total lack of anyone older than middle age even more unsettling. 
After all you can’t waste scarce resources on any one who can’t work, and you need to ensure that future generations come into breeding age in nice manageable cohorts.
The “launching pad” looked remarkably like the one in Interstellar, didn’t it?
Four more hours now, for Stokes to realize where he is now, find a way to break back into the ship with some guns, lead the insurrection (“But you’re dead, Stokes!” “You wouldn’t believe it.”) and mass escape, the big pie fight scene and the closing credits.
I’ll keep watching, but I have very low expectations for anything SyFy. (I won’t call them SciFi because they haven’t been very much of that for a long time.)
The first episode was a little better than I expected, actually… but that says a lot more about my expectations than the show.
The upper/lower class divide seems ridiculous to me, especially the way the two actually interact in such a dysfunctional manner. We’re (supposedly) on a spaceship with limited resources here, people! There shouldn’t be room for unskilled labor in the first place, and fighting each other isn’t going to help anyone, is it? To me, it reads like the stories we wrote in school when we had to pick subjects out of a hat. You just shoe-horned it in because someone told you to.
As for the twist/conspiracy: I have a pretty low tolerance for conspiracy theory plots nowadays. I guess we’ll see where it goes, but it seems like a tired and overused idea that they’ve exhausted before they even made the big reveal.
I saw the “twist” coming very early, so the reveal at the end had no impact. The premise is so outlandish it’s hard to swallow, but I’ll watch the rest of the miniseries. An ongoing series, though? Count me out.
I gave up about 45 minutes into the first ep and deleted it from the DVR. Can someone spoiler box the twist for me?
I just saw it. I don’t have to spoiler box it I think, but here you go if you like.
Ascension is not a ship soaring through space on a 100 year mission. It is a large structure on Earth that simulates space travel…and has been for 51 years. Why? We have no idea.
And now the little girl apparently has psychokinetic powers as a result of select breeding. :dubious: Good think this is just a mini-series and we’ll get some kind of conclusion tomorrow.
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…The upper/lower class divide seems ridiculous to me, especially the way the two actually interact in such a dysfunctional manner…
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What about the Stewardesses? I wonder if they’re always been prostitute-spies, or is that just something recent to Viondra’s reign.
Supposedly, it’s somewhat of a “dress rehearsal,” before the real one takes off . . . a way of learning about what problems will occur in the real one.
My question is: Why are all the adults about the same age, which is less than the 51 years in the ship? And they’ve been selected because of their positive characteristics, about 20 years before they’re born? And what happened to the original people, who would be old now? And there’s only one black guy?
I had the same questions regarding the ages of the passengers not seeming to match the ship’s timeline.
Thanks. That’s kind of what I figured, but after 45 minutes realized I was so tuned out, I just shrugged my shoulders and deleted it.
Additional question on top of those: If everybody is “paired”, who is the black guys wife? Does he even have one?
We’ve never seen *that *in a TV movie/series before, have we? 
:rolleyes:
I thought it was a way for the men to take them all for test drives before rigging the “pairing” process. It’s still the Sixties on-board.
Apparently it’s a science/technology incubator. The descendants of 70 or so scientists from 1963 are responsible for much of the engineering of today. Never mind that if they were so smart they’d have figured out the gravity thing by now.
Although, to be fair, if the ship was based on the Orion concept of a series of a jillion A-bombs blasting the ship’s tail, they could get a relatively constant 1G acceleration, then flip it around and decelerate right down to orbital velocity at Proxima Centauri. That also means they’re a little behind schedule after 51 years, they’d have to be 2 light years away from Earth by now, and meaningful radio transmissions are impossible even without that radioactive cloud behind them - which makes the problem of radiation storms in deep space something else those geniuses could have figured out.