Well, they’ve lost me now.
Psychic powers, onboard prostitution spy rings, isolated scientists discovering MRI technology… nope, sorry. I stopped paying attention after the first half of the second episode.
There’s no retirement in space, I think it’s clear that anyone who was an adult when the ship was “launched” is dead now (probably either ritual suicide or euthanasia). It’s a closed system (at least as far as the crew’s concerned) and spending resources on someone who can longer work or contribute is an impossible luxury. They said outright that they can’t add a couple to the Birth List without someone dying. Both the birth and death rates would have to be artificially controlled to ensure proper staffing levels and that couples could be still be matched for breeding. I wouldn’t be surprised the Genetics Committee even dictates which sex child couples are allowed to have when authorizing pregnancies.
So the real purpose of the experiment was to breed a Starchild :rolleyes: capable of using her mental powers to teleport people across interstellar distance to a planet where humans can conveniently survive in shirt sleeves. :dubious: And none the he nudity was male; they would’ve at least showed us Van Holt’s ass to balance out Tricia’s. So who else is not planning on tuning in in the unlikely event this get’s a series order.
I actually thought it was pretty good. Would like to have seen more of what happens afterwards.
Wow. That was… remarkably stupid for something that thought it was clever.
M. Night “twist”. Government conspiracy. Magical starchild. And no actual resolution.
And, really, Ascension would be screwed now, whether or not they were on a real starship. They just blew a substantial amount of their lithium hydroxide all over the ship beyond recovery, and made it rain on all their 60s-era technology.
Mind you, I’m still not sure how they’d regenerate lithium hydroxide from the lithium carbonate their scrubbers would be making, unless they’re carrying a 100 years supply. But then, I’m also not sure how a ship full of scientific geniuses haven’t noticed they’re still under planetary gravity instead of propulsion Gs. Or haven’t noticed gravity affecting things (like, coffins) launched from the ship, since the starfield is just projected around it. Heck, someone in 51 years must have had to spacewalk to fix something outside – did no one notice the atmosphere and gravity then?
Any follow-on series would look to have way too high of a budget – even with all the sets inherited from the miniseries – for SyFy to go with. They seem to prefer series they can do real world location shoots with cheap CGI sfx, like Haven or Warehouse 13.
I don’t think the little girl actually has magical powers, she just thinks she does. She is the one who is going to figure out the truth and nobody will believe her because she seems crazy.
But yeah, lots of holes in the story. Why are the rooms so spacious? Why does the little girl have a queen sized bed all too herself? Why are young girls trained in prostitution on a ship filled with families? Why do the ‘lower deck’ personal do all the work while the ‘upper deck’ people spend their days swimming and complaining about their lot in life? And what kind of idiot would have signed on as a lower deck person in the first place?
The first thing I noticed was the constant planetary gravity, but I assumed that the ship was under a constant 1G thrust, and that they would make them go to sleep in the radiation pods when they flipped the ship around, but that should have been a year ago…
Other than that, I could go with all of the developments over the 50 year span of the “trip”.
The end just fucked away the whole concept for me. When Enzmann re-watched the tape of Aaron being teleported, it was like he was expecting that to happen. WTF teleportation through selective breeding? What was Enzmann a Bene Gesserit or something?
I saw the initial twist coming. I thought that there would be an Earth-ending calamity, like a nuclear war or an asteroid impact that wipes humanity off the planet, and then the bewildered crew of Ascension emerge from their “ship” only to discover that they needed all of their terraforming technology and knowledge to bring life back to the Earth. I would watch that show. Any sequel to this trash - meh.
Ascension? More like ASScension. I mean, Tricia Helfer has a nice ass, but that got a little gratuitous trying to fit it into every episode.
Anyway, the whole starchild thing was stupid and dumb, and the show would have been better without it, with or without the whole fake launch thing. What is it with sci fi that every franchise has to include something magical in it? I mean Star Wars, yeah, it’s flat out fantasy with sci fi setting, but even more “grounded” stuff like Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc has shit like telepaths in it.
I also didn’t like that blond investigator lady, it was pretty cool how they took her out, though. Not really a surprise about her “friend” though, that was even more telegraphed than the fake launch.
And if the ship “launched” 50+ years ago, why was there no clergy, or chapel, or anything religious on board? Even the Enterprise had a chapel (no I don’t mean Nurse Chapel) in the original series.
Those sets were expensive. I read that the four-floor elevator is practical, for instance. Why would SyFy have spent all that money, and then neglected to hire a single writer possessing an IQ over 80?
Um, isn’t that like asking why the Food Network has so many cooking shows? 
This is what SyFy DOES.
Heh. Yeah. 
But sometimes what they come up with is at least entertaining. This thing was so inept that it didn’t even rise to the level of being A Hoot.
I’m guessing clergy were excluded along with homosexuals.
It doesn’t even may any sense for them to get jettisoning anything into space, let alone something as valuable as a human corpse. :smack: It’s a closed ecosystem (for real since Enzmann was cheating by pumping in oxygen). But then again having the funeral end with coffin (of which Ascension must’ve been launched with thousands in storage) being wheeled off to the recycling centre isn’t nearly as clichéd as a burial in space.
What did they keep trying to inject the little girl with? she seemed deadly afraid of it but the surely didn’t want to kill her right?
The only time she was really cool was when she poured out the milk and dropped the glass. Otherwise, she was just annoying.
And they spent way too much time on the personal lives of the upper echelons. Why should I care which female was having sex with which male, when they’re all interchangeable anyway.
And doesn’t it fit the demographics so well that the only black guy had come from the lower decks. Is that where all the persons of color are? Was it planned that way or did all the persons of color create their ghetto, throughout the 50 years? And considering their working conditions, why were there no murders in 50 years?
And I’d still like to know how, with '60s technology, they can build a ship that takes only 100 years to reach a known habitable planet?
SyFy’s biggest mistake was assuming their writers are smarter than their average viewer.
They were going to Proxima Centauri (kinda the same place that the Robinsons were going in the TV show Lost in Space), so even in the 60’s they were expecting there to be planets there. They were preparing to terraform any planets that were found. Proxima is only 4.243 light-years away.
I was trying to reconcile this with the having a constant thrust of 1g to maintain the vertical gravity. Unfortunately, using Newtonian physics, a constant thrust of 1g would put you over the speed of light in about a year. I am no good at relativistic calculations, so I am going to go over to GQ and get an answer to how long the trip would take under a constant 1g thrust.
Final Review: Why oh why didn’t this miniseries include a prominent “NORTH KOREA SUCKS” poster somewhere in the set dressing?
“ALF” reruns? Really? “ALF”? 
The historical documents … Those poor people …
The best part of that was the guy who’s never seen anything like that before mentioned the weird cars and clothes and said nothing about the god damn alien.
That might make sense if they launched in the 80’s or 90’s, but 50 years ago? They would have had at least a token religious presence, probably more. If for nothing else, even if the leaders of the program were a bunch of godless heathens less typical of that time than now, they should still have considered that it would potentially help morale and stave off stuff like the No Future whoa is me if they had someone preaching at them about God’s plan instead of just having a mission. I’m not surprised that modern TV writers never even considered such things (and lets face it, there’s a lot of stuff they didn’t consider) but it just sticks out at me as not right for the timeframe.
It just occurred to me you might have been equating clergy with homosexuals thinking about the breeding population, as that was a reason given for keeping homosexuals out. If so, I’d just say, that would only keep out Catholic priests, etc, there’s still plenty of clergy out there that can and do marry and reproduce.
Presumably he’s seen puppet shows before, though for awhile I wondered if they were going have him mistake it for an actual alien transmission. 
No, that wasn’t exactly my intention. I just don’t think they assigned any clergymen to the mission. Sure they’re be religious laypeople, and there’s still at least a token religious presence on-board. Christa talked about Lorelei “being with the angels”, and the Mission pledge mentioned God.