Ascension "Night One" Review: Bending Time and Space
Ah, American television in December. The broadcast networks are all snug in their winter hiatuses, visions of pre-VOD, pre-internet, and pre-cable boom days dancing in their heads while the cable networks wonder if they can lure audiences into sampling their wares. I'm exaggerating, of course, but only a little. TV is nearly a year-round entity these days, even on the broadcast networks, but there's always a dearth of new programming in the weeks surrounding Christmas, and it often feels too long, especially when it's so easy to marathon the shows we've allowed to pile up on our "to watch" lists in rapidfire stints, leaving us no better off than we were before.
Enter Ascension, a Syfy miniseries that clearly wants to be something more. And after one installment of the three-night event, the jury's still out. Ascension isn't anything like the delightful High Moon, a wacky Bryan Fuller pilot that Syfy passed on but then aired as a TV movie just to mock us; no, Ascension instead feels very much like a trial balloon along the lines of the December 2003 Battlestar Galactica miniseries that was ultimately successful enough to convince Syfy (then Sci-Fi!) to order a full show, one that debuted just under a year after the miniseries concluded. Clearly, both the show and the network are hoping that lightning to strike twice, especially as Syfy attempts to return to its science-fiction roots.
Whether or not Ascension will receive the call up to the majors and become a full series is something I can't fully predict, as factors like ratings expectations and production costs are unknowable to me. But from a quality standpoint, "Night One" didn't match BSG levels—though I'm not ready to write it off just yet.
Ascension's premise isn't a bad one. Inspired by actual interstellar rocket plans developed over many decades and the United States' interest in them in throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the series revolves around that idea that the U.S. actually launched a rocket larger than the Empire State Building during the Kennedy administration, sending into space a rocket filled with people whose grandchildren would propagate the human race on a distant planet. The story picks up 51 years into that mission, making Ascension a space show that takes place in 2015, which is a little novel as far as premises go.
Except, as we know now, none of that is actually the case, a situation I'm going to address before we dive into the episode proper. As it turns out, Ascension the ship apparently never left Earth, and instead has been the site of a multi-generational experiment conducted by the government to study the effect of interstellar space travel on humans. Or something. In short: All the people who think they're in outer space, worried about cosmic radiation and whether or not they'll ever reach their new home planet, are actually living in a rocket that itself is standing in some bunker buried deep within the Earth's surface.
"Night One" pretty quickly tipped its hand to the fact that the folks "in space" aren't in space, despite some establishing shots of the ship not on the ground and that long pull-out from the station as the anachronistic "Rocket Man" played (Ascension should've just returned to its "Fly Me to the Moon" cover instead). Apart from Elton John singing about how it's going to be a long, long time till touch down brings him round again, a few other signs indicated a simulation pretty quickly, including the show's handling of radiation storms and shielding—we haven't figured this out ourselves, though we also haven't launched a space ark—and the captain's mention of sending a message to Earth, as if it would arrive anytime soon. But then, hey, people on Earth were gabbing about an "anomaly."
I didn't make the leap to the idea that the ship had never even left, but I did assume the scenario involved some sort of virtual-reality narrative for the ship's crew while in cryosleep—you know, like the one from a certain remake of a British cop show on ABC—and obviously still an experiment. In any case, the big reveal as Stokes was "spaced" only to land on a high fall air bag wasn't a huge shock, and I imagine that a few of you weren't surprised either.
Obviously this reveal—and I'm glad it came sooner rather than later, because those Earth-based scenes would've been exhaustingly pointless, unless they were reconfigured to focus on silencing that poor, over-eager grad student—might compel some viewers to quit and some to stick around for Ascension's two remaining installments. It was a very science-fiction-y thing to do, a twist that would've happened at the end of an episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits with the intent of recontextualizing everything that'd come before. In the case of Ascension, there wasn't much recontextualization, as the reveal simply added another layer of possibility with regard what can happen on the show as the government tries to prevent the experiment from coming undone on both the inside and the outside.
I, for one, didn't hate it. It was a little hokey, yes, but I acknowledge that I'm something of a sucker for this sort of thing, and so I'm more intrigued by it than dismissive of it, at least so far as Ascension's plot potential goes. Upon learning of the twist, Jen told me it "sounded maddening," and I can totally see why. In fact, I'd even go so far as to agree that Ascension would be more interesting if the rocket had actually launched and the show was taking place in an alternate history. Again, this is a huge matter of taste and tolerance, and I like the idea, so I have the tolerance for it.
I just wish I could grant some of that tolerance to the stuff that's filling out Ascension. Should I start with the fact that the catalyst for the show's main storyline is a pretty dead girl who knew lots of secrets about the ship? Because ugh, enough with that already. Or should I point out that, instead of employing an even distribution of male and female bare buttocks to meet its cable-friendly sexiness quota, there were only bared female buttocks instead? Men have asses, too, TV. Men have asses, too.
Okay, so Ascension isn't breaking any television molds on those fronts. It does have a black man in the role of its protagonist, Executive Officer Oren Gault (Brandon P. Bell)—which, given the diversity fanfare this TV season has stockpiled so far, is another step forward in that regard. However, Ascension doesn't seem to realize or care. Gault is the only prominent person of color on the show beyond his sister and a three or four others whom I spotted in the background. It almost feels like the role of Gault was cast blindly; Ascension reads like it's substituting race for class, as much was made in "Night One" of Gault being from the lower decks, and thus a political appointment, but there wasn't a single mention of him being the only non-white person to hold a position of power on the ship. It just makes me wonder if Bell was cast to ensure that Ascension's cast wasn't entirely white, but then the script wasn't written and further casting choices weren't made to reflect an actually racially integrated population. But alas, like using dead girls to kickstart conflict and providing lots of lady butts for viewers to ogle, this isn't a new practice for TV.
Of course, Ascension can somewhat dodge that bullet, given the historical context of the experiment. While the U.S. was deep into the civil rights movement by the time the rocket "launched," the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 wouldn't have happened yet, and as the grad student mentioned, the Ascension is manned by a mutli-generational crew that never had the opportunity to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Again, however, that doesn't seem to be an problem for the crew, either because there's a lack of non-white folks aboard the ship, or because the nature of needing to survive in space came to outweigh racial prejudices that may've been present when the experiment began, or both. It's probably both, but "Night One" didn't really make that clear.
I'm probably asking a lot of the first part of a three-night miniseries to even consider this matter at all, but it's one that my brain refused to shake, because if the crew managed to bypass racial intolerance, as it has seemed to, why the hell is class such a big obstacle? From a storytelling standpoint, it's certainly easier to write, and the conflict is less charged from a representational point of view, but it doesn't fit the idea that Ascension has constructed a place where ethnicity apparently isn't an issue yet class continues to serve as a reason for insurrection. Maybe Das Kapital should've been required reading for everyone participating in the mission.
I can actually see a positive in the show's muddling of the ship's society, and I think it's one that Ascension is interested in exploring, but pulling at these dangling threads has unraveled things for me a little bit. My thoughts are perhaps best summed up by that darling grad student who waxed on about what the crew of the Ascension would be like: "Imagine the people who went. Hundreds of people, out there, in space, and in a world that never knew the Summer of Love, Betty Friedan, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Clash! Fresh from Father Knows Best, exploring the universe."
The student's conception of these people is generally unmoored from reality, of course, as the crew is the farthest thing imaginable from Father Knows Best while also being grounded in an unrealistic, nostalgic, and pop-culture-tinted understanding of what the 1950s and 1960s were like, as if the Ascension's inhabitants have been trapped in a time capsule where nothing has changed over the course of 51 years, and the women all make pot roasts at a moment's notice while the men sit in the den, ignoring the kids and sipping perfectly made martinis. You know, the way things used to be before all those feminists, racial radicals, and punk rockers ruined everything!
So the residents of the Ascension ended up with a world that looks trapped in the early 1960s but without the ideology of the era, to an extent. Instead of a belief in the American post-war society, including the rise of the middle class and all that it entailed, they harbor a belief in their mission and an idealized notion of what Earth was in the same way that the U.S. has, through our media and politics, come to idealize the 1950s and 1960s.
It's an interesting scrambling of films and TV shows that attempt to cash in on that nostalgia and then point to a seedy underbelly we just pretend didn't exist at the time. Ascension manages to apply that idea not only how the older generation views Earth, but to how the younger generation views the ship. The "crisis," or the realization that the people onboard are predetermined to work certain jobs and marry their best genetic matches, recalls a teenage-rebellion culture that, in part, helped to set the stage for all the actual events that shows that the post-war U.S. was not, in fact, this idyllic place.
It's just happening at a slower pace on the ship than it did in the outside world, and with a different grand narrative. That's probably why class is the central conflict, because it feeds into the breakdown of the Ascension's mission—the idea that it's not worth the effort, and that it simply isn't the right way to exist, as seen in the lack of representation for those in the lower decks as well as in dissatisfied youths spray-painting No Future or NF on the walls. They know the mission is a big lie in the same way that social activists in the 1950s and 1960s saw the post-war society as a lie; it's just that the young people on the Ascension don't know that they've chosen the wrong lie to protest.
"SPACE" DUST
– I didn't discuss the acting at all, but there's a reason for that: None of it is particularly noteworthy right now. Tricia Helfer's doing her standard sexy manipulator thing, which she should really consider patenting at this point. Brian Van Holt will ALWAYS be Cougar Town's Bobby Cobb to me, and pretty much nothing is going to change that. How about you all? We'll see how tomorrow goes?
– Philip Levens created Ascension, and he's probably best known for working on Smallville in the early going. You can check out this article from TV Guide Magazine's Michael Logan to hear more from Levens and a few of the stars of the show.
– I generally like the look of Ascension the ship, and its weird clash of 1960s sensibilities and military bulkheads, so Ascension the show isn't a bad-looking series at all.
– I'm already questioning Gault's ability to investigate Lorelei's murder. I mean, what if someone else had been wearing a white shirt?! How would he have tracked James then?
What did you think of the first night of Ascension?
