THE ARK – Season 1 Episode 1 – SPOILERS

One hundred years in the future and five years into a voyage to Proxima B, Lieutenant Sharon Garnet (Christie Burke) wakes from cryosleep on the colony ship Ark One because a beam falls on her pod, breaking it open. She hears a siren announcing an impact alert, and awakens the other 150 or so people sleeping in the collapsing bay. (It is a mystery why the impact alert did not automatically wake everyone.) Everyone manages to exit the bay before it collapses except for Susan Ingram (Lisa Brenner), whose pod is pinned under debris. When Garnet decides to wake Captain Lester, who should be in stasis in a separate bay, she discovers that the section of the ship housing command officers and the “mentor class” of scientists is missing. We learn that a “series of malfunctions” occurred while the crew was asleep, and “monitoring cameras went down, so there’s no recording of what happened.”

The colony ship was dispatched because Earth is dying. According to the official line, the planet has seventy years of habitability left, but many think the situation is even more dire. At least that’s what Malcolm Perry (Chris Leask) tells Garnet after being caught masquerading as Jasper Dades, who was supposed to be in charge of maintaining life support systems but was tricked into believing he was reassigned to Ark 2 and left behind. Six people die in a crisis that Perry is unable to resolve before waste management specialist Alicia Nevins (Stacey Read) figures it out. Among the dead is Harris Beckner (Dominik Čičak) who was somehow smuggled onboard by his girlfriend Eva Markovic (Tiana Upcheva). (It is no mystery why Earth is dying. The colonizers are segregated according to class, and unqualified people think nothing of hacking their way into the mission, and putting the future of humanity at risk by doing so.)

Mysteries abound. The biggest one involves the captain and the rest of the command crew, who vanished mysteriously along with a big chunk of the food and water supply. (Since no debris is visible and the ship’s speed will vary over time, the missing part of the ship must have separated a while ago.) Then there is Susan Ingram, who should have been housed with the rest of the officers, but died asleep among the enlisted folk. Her protege Baylor Trent (Miles Barrow) knew she was in that pod, because when something fell on top of it he made a feverish (but unsuccessful) attempt to rescue her. On top of all that, a murder mystery develops after this conversation between Matthew Perry and Garnet:

GARNET: “In a couple days, the representative council will meet to decide your fate, and I’m recommending the death penalty.”
PERRY: “You know I’m not the only one. Lots of people faked their way onto this ship. It’s not just me who ain’t who they say they are.”
GARNET: “Six people died. We almost lost the entire ship because of you.”
PERRY: “Wait. Think about it before you make that recommendation to the council. Now I know a lot of other people who have committed crimes who are on this ship…I’ve been to a lot of places and I’ve seen things. Like a bar in Jacksonville, Florida, you know, the kind that cadets hang out at and drink a bit too much. Met a lot of people there, including a sexy cadet with hair trigger anger issues. I believe her name was Denise? Yeah. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it was Denise. A shame what happened. Tragic. But maybe I’m mistaken. We’ll have to see how good my memory is.”

When the council decides they should hear Perry’s side of the story, he is found dead, with his throat slashed.

Sleeping for such an extended time weakens muscles, so everyone on board wears compression suits to compensate for atrophy and allow them to move about normally. James Brice (Richard Fleeshman) displays muscles that show no signs of atrophy as he pulls himself out of a restorative bath in sickbay. Another crew member, Cat Brandice (Christina Wolfe), surreptitiously attempts to take a shower after water restrictions are announced. She is prevented from doing this, but seems quite agile without her suit. It seems possible that both Brice and Brandice woke up before everyone else, did some rehab (and perhaps other things), then went back into their sleep pods.

With more than a year remaining in the voyage, only about 150 of the original 400 colonists remain onboard. Agricultural genius Angus Medford (Ryan Adams) is trying to grow food in soil he smuggled (!) onto the ship, but until crops can be harvested everyone is on 1000 calorie a day rations. Though the ship obviously travels at sub-light speeds (Proxima B is 4.24 light years from Earth) communications must travel faster. The last message received from Earth by the colonists arrived about a year after they left, and this surprises them.

Cosmo Kay‘s character Nathan Stark may have been named after the head of research at Global Dynamics in the 2006 SyFy series EUREKA.

The show’s creator, Dean Devlin, told Michael Star of the New York Post that his late mother, Pilar Seurat, guest-starred on STAR TREK. “She was in the ‘Wolf in the Fold‘ episode and she plays a psychic princess on this planet who gets killed by Scotty when he’s possessed by the soul of Jack the Ripper,” Devlin said. “She actually came home with the stunt man’s phaser — it was rubber and kind of beat up. It was the phaser they threw all the time.”

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Season Two will premiere on SyFy on 17 July at 10/9c
Season One of THE ARK can be streamed on PEACOCK.

* Last Updated 10 months ago ago