Syfy's Ascension Miniseries

[Mr Light]

What happens if we lose?

Nothing! There's nothing at stake and no threat, beyond the shame of defeat!

 

[Locutus of Bored]

The only way that ruse could hold up is if the second generation onboard knows absolutely nothing about space or science and is too ignorant to question all the bizarre things involved in the mission. Like the weird rainbow space vista...

Well, you can see fanciful space vistas treated as real in any number of sci-fi movies and shows. Presumably we're meant to accept that it's realistic by the standards of the miniseries' universe.

Some guy named Christopher said:
Although it doesn't excuse the fanciful space imagery and the black dust clouds going by outside the ship windows

So what changed between you saying it and me saying it?

I'm guessing when they show the night sky in the outside Ascension segments it won't be filled with rainbow colored nebulae all over the place and will look just like our normal night sky.

,going to a star system they couldn't have known had any planets or not in 1963

Actually Alpha Centauri has always been seen as a leading candidate for colonization. It's the nearest star system to Sol and thus the easiest to reach, and its A component is a yellow star very much like Sol. There's been uncertainty over the decades about whether a binary star could host planets, but Alpha Centauri has still always been seen as a likely candidate. Keep in mind that it was the destination of the Jupiter 2 in Lost in Space, which premiered in 1965. And that's just one of many examples in fiction from the '40s through the '60s, let alone the decades since.

Yes, I'm aware of what Alpha Centauri is, since I went to sixth grade science class. My point, that the means of determining if there's a planet there, did not exist in 1963 (and it's even difficult now), so they would have no way of knowing whether they were sending 600+ people to a habitable planet or not. It's a moot point since there's no actual mission, but the passengers and crew should realistically wonder about their destination and whether they would risk so many lives and spend so much money on a mission that's a total crapshoot since they have no verification of a destination planet.

Also, in Lost in Space, they already knew there was a habitable planet at their destination, they only risked the lives of a single family and pilot, and the trip was only supposed to take five years (at least, during the series rather than the much longer trip in the pilot). That's a big difference from sending 600+ people and their descendents on a century-long trip to a place you don't even know has planets much less habitable ones.

Somewhat fanciful, yes, but the captions said it was an "Orion-class" ship, no doubt referencing Project Orion, a proposal for a nuclear-pulse propulsion ship dating from 1958. So it's not completely implausible that the original participants could've been tricked into believing that the government's research in the field was more advanced than it really was.

I'm also aware of Project Orion. My point, which again was the exact same one you made...

It does handily resolve most of the implausibilities in the premise -- there is no bloomin' way a mission of that magnitude could've been possible in 1963

... Is that anyone with even a layman's understanding of space travel should be able to determine that building a craft of that size and sophistication two years after we barely limped into space for the first time would be a near impossibility, even if the idea for it already existed. There should be more Neos questioning whether they're in the Matrix.

The showrunners are kind of trying to have their cake and eat it too. They want to say they're grounded in reality because they didn't actually launch the impossible space mission in-universe, but at the same time they are depicting the bulk of the ship's crew and passengers as almost impossibly ignorant of what was actually capable of being built and launched back then. I almost would have preferred if they just said to hell with it and went for the completely implausible premise that they actually launched it rather than this. Mind you, it's still interesting and I'm still invested, I just was kind of interested in seeing the original premise we were sold in ads more than the bait & switch.

I don't think they said anything about wanting to get back to Earth within their lifetimes. Maybe they just want their children to be able to live on Earth rather than struggling to terraform an inhospitable world.

I don't know, they seemed pretty adamant about turning around ASAP, going so far as to sabotage sections of the ship, which seems pretty urgent for a process that will take decades. If it's all going to only benefit your kids or your kids kids, then it would probably be better to affect change politically rather than sabotaging finite resources and critical systems and committing murder (if that's tied to their efforts to turn the "ship" around).

One was already released, although it's not very detailed:

http://io9.com/check-out-this-diagram-of-ascensions-huge-generation-sh-1667773667

Thanks.

 

[Christopher]

OK, I went back and finished the episode. And the plot twist makes me care even less

Spoiler

They're not even in space? They're just sitting in a simulator? It's just a social experiment?* That makes me... not... care... *yes, I realize it's a test run for the real deal. my point stands.

No, it's not just an experiment, I think. Harris did say at the end that it's a lifeboat. As I said, I think the idea was to use this "ship" as a hedge against extinction -- if humanity on Earth is wiped out by some cataclysm, then eventually these guys would emerge, already trained to terraform and populate a hostile planet, and be able to restore humanity to Earth.

Anyway, we'll find out tonight.

 

[JD]

With the whole thing with the people wanting to go I think it's also worth remembering what James said, apparently at least some of them think the whole thing was just a way for people to make money "back on Earth", and that it was never actually meant to succeed. I could see why people who thought that would want to turn the ship around, even if they weren't the ones to make it home. At least that way they would know that their families wouldn't be floating around out in space forever.
As for people who believe in "the mission", I kind of got the impression that they were practically brainwashed to believe in it. They did talk about The Crisis that everyone seems to go through, where they do question what they are doing. Apparently most of the time they are able to get them to believe in it again. I got the impression that those videos we saw of Lorelei where from here Crisis.
EDIT: I was just looking through the timeline on the show site, and it does say in it's entry for 1965, "Captain Elgin and crew ratify The Compact, which discourages discrimination based on race, gender, or religion.

 

[Christopher]

^Well, Dr. Andrea Roth said that Lorelei didn't get through her Crisis the way most people did, that the existential angst of it stayed with her much longer than it does for most people aboard.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Old people have to die for the young to be born.

Is it like Logan's run with an exact cut off date?

Or is it just when they reach a level of non/low productivity?

Oh! it's voluntary? One of the parents volunteers? Or is it a coin flip which parent dies depending on what gender the new child is?

Murder/euthanasia/poison used to put the elderly to sleep is not poison/real. Death is simulated long enough for a spacing, at which point the old land on a crash pad and they are introduced to Earth.

The less valuable someone is to the mission, the less successful they are on the ship, the sooner they re-enter the real world.

I assume there's an IQ test every year up to the age of maturity when they enter the workforce, that if they fail too well, or the opposite, that they are spaced before they become a burden to the ship.

 

[JD]

^Is that all a fact that you read somewhere, or are you just guessing? I had just assumed that once someone dies, a couple would then be given permission to have a kid.
I forgot about that. Now that you mention it, I do remember wondering at one point if it might turn out that she committed suicide.

 

[Guy Gardener]

It's guesswork.

The crew is 350 persons. Was that just the original crew compliment or still the current day crew compliment fixed and forever unchanging? Are they counting children? I wouldn't let a woman on that ship in 1963 unless she was already pregnant (that would be too many babies too quickly. Bad idea.). They have a strong Eugenics program in place, that has to be made up fairy tale bullshit considering what passed for technology in the 1960s. Insisting on racial segregation sexually has to seriously limit the gene pool too. They should have scrapped segregation or sent purely one race into space (that didn't necessarily have to be white.) to maximize genetic diversity for as long as possible before your only choices left is which first cousin do you marry... Are we sure that that librarian was talking about race and not incest during her forbidden love speech? Yeah, it was probably race. 350 people. Two breeding groups of black and white who are not allowed to over lap, of 300 whites and 50 blacks. Go go racism? Which means 150 breedings pairs and 25 breeding pairs respectively. 75 and 12 the next generation, 37 and 6 the one after that... Could they have planned this? The black astronauts will become inbred, deformed idiots faster than the white breeding groups, which will enforce the illusion of white superiority even though they're just 5 generations behind what's happening to the black population on the Ascension.

If there's a working crew of 350 persons. Lets assume that there's room for another 350 persons who are either retired or children. Do you feel like there's a retirement village of 100 people somewhere on that ship as there are also 250 children at different staggered points of development. The number of persons entering the work force has to equal the number of persons exiting the workforce because the number of jobs on the ship is as constant as the population. Once you are retired, you just have to wait for a baby to be born, to be allowed to die, asked to die, forced to die.

The oldest person I saw, I think was that first officer who was shtupping the captain's wife who might have been 60 at the eldest, which means that he was near 10 when the Ascension was launched. So there's over 350 people who were part of the working crew when the ship was launched who we have not seen, or they are dead.

Oh.

This voting for Captain?

That sounds like shit a council of elders would get up to. That's where the 80 year olds who were near the top of the command structure in the original crew would hang out.

Well, it's either a ruling council who votes for Captain, or the entire ship votes when called upon. It's only 350 people, you can figure out what they want with an applausometer for ####s sake.

Do Black people get a vote?

Do below a certain rank get a vote?

Would a black person above that rank get a vote?

 

[Christopher]

Well, it looks like I was wrong about the purpose of the project. It's not a hedge for species survival, it's a think tank for tech innovation. Well, maybe it was originally intended as a safeguard against nuclear extinction, and its purpose changed once the Cold War ended. At least it explains the anachronistic advances like the digital video cards and the contraceptive implants.

Although a lot of the science here is fanciful, I'm giddy that they got one thing right that virtually every show or movie gets wrong: Namely, that the ship overheats when its cooling system is damaged. Most shows/films assume that space will rapidly freeze you if you lose power, but the reality is that vacuum is a superb insulator, so real spaceships need cooling systems and heat radiators to keep from roasting their crews. I am so giddy that someone finally got this right, although it's bizarre that it's amidst so much otherwise shoddy science. (E.g. if they sucked the air out of Level 23 when Gault showed up, why were they afraid he'd hear them? Sound doesn't travel through vacuum.)

Wow, Harris is a real creep. He stole Dr. Bryce's seahorse necklace so he could give it to his wife and pretend she was the subject of his voyeuristic crush. What's that they say about absolute power? He calls the crew "family," but he's just using them, and not only them.

A lot of this is interesting, but I don't like the emphasis on the kid developing psychic powers. It's such a tiresome cliche. So somehow this whole thing has been about trying to breed psychics? Lame.

 

[Brent]

A lot of negative comments here, I must be the only one who really enjoys this mini series /shrug.

I like it, I did not expect the twist, and I thought that was cool. I like the design and looks of the "ship" I like everything I've seen so far, cliche or not, it is entertaining, and I'm entertained. Can't wait for the third part tomorrow.

 

[cylkoth]

Wow, Harris is a real creep. He stole Dr. Bryce's seahorse necklace so he could give it to his wife and pretend she was the subject of his voyeuristic crush. What's that they say about absolute power? He calls the crew "family," but he's just using them, and not only them.

Yeah...He's come down with a servere case of God Complex. The actor was okay in the more limited scenes in Part 1, but I found myself wishing for a stronger actor here, as his role as master manipulator expanded.

Dissappointed that this massive project turned out to be nothing more than a think tank for developing new technologies (after it's original purpose was scuttled due to the end of the nuclear war threat). And it's worth noting that none of the main characters are scientists or researchers-they made a concerted effort to focus on the crew and civilians, rather than those who you'd think, would be the focus of a story like this.

A lot of this is interesting, but I don't like the emphasis on the kid developing psychic powers. It's such a tiresome cliche. So somehow this whole thing has been about trying to breed psychics? Lame.

Terrific. So will Starchild wave her hands, start to glow and fake land the mothership?

Not exactly how I thought things would pan out. The unseen council and the petty machinations of it's lone representatve and Number 6 stuggling to keep her status-as well as her husband's, feel pointless. So much time was squandered on the outside, it took away from the much needed focus on the broader community inside the ship.

But, I'll stick with it to the end. Hopefully, it can pick up stream and provide a satisfying conclusion.

 

[Fist McStrongpunch]

I figured out the twist pretty early on, mostly based on the absence of exterior shots other than really close-up nosecone. Still think it's pretty damn cool though.

 

[RJDiogenes]

I haven't seen the second episode yet. I was pretty disappointed with the big plot twist. Not only is this not a real Space Opera, but I don't see how it could be continued as a series (they've talked about it being a pilot). I have no problems with the implausibilities involved in a generational ship being launched in 1963. If we have Steampunk, there's no reason we can't have Atompunk or whatever. Although a crew of six hundred is only about a tenth of the minimum viable population, which would be kind of a problem even in a 'punk universe.

Other than that, I liked it pretty well. It does seem more like Generation Hipster's view of the 60s than the real thing, but that can be explained by the passage of a couple of generations. The lack of racism is not a problem. What we think of as the 60s counterculture had its roots in the 50s and they could easily have drawn their initial crew from a pool of free-thinkers. The main thing that bothered me was the way they dispose of their dead in space burials-- a real generation ship would not throw anything away.

Another thing that didn't occur to me for some reason until I read this thread was that they should be in contact with Earth. The turnaround time for communication would be a few years, but there's no reason why information shouldn't be going back and forth all the time.

Also, there was dialogue during the radiation storm confirming that their velocity is constantly increasing (explaining the uni-directional artificial gravity). But if they're 51 years into 100-year flight, then they should have turned around last year and their artificial gravity should be caused by decreasing velocity.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Half way through tonight, I noticed that there was no obvious religion on board.

That seems super weird for the era.

How long can you freeze an embryo? Or freeze sperm?

They have a hundred years to naturally husband an entirely female crew so that when they get to Proxima, the living crew entirely can be used as incubators for sperms and out right embryos they brought with them from Earth, thus guaranteeing diversity and health, or at least, that's how I would do it. Men would be practically useless at this stage in building a healthy colony.

I wonder if they have plans to fake Proxima after having seen The Truman Show?

As far as the sequels go, who says that the ascension was the only ship that America launched, or hells, maybe other countries parroted the experiment not to be left behind in this weird hot house race to build telepaths.

Have you seen Pioneer 1?

It was a high end web series (episodes were 30 to 40 minutes long. 6 episodes in the only season.) about how Russia sent people to Mars in the 80s, building a colony on the red planet. The story was about the Martian colonists returning home to Earth.

 

[DWF]

Wow, Harris is a real creep. He stole Dr. Bryce's seahorse necklace so he could give it to his wife and pretend she was the subject of his voyeuristic crush. What's that they say about absolute power? He calls the crew "family," but he's just using them, and not only them.

Yeah...He's come down with a servere case of God Complex. The actor was okay in the more limited scenes in Part 1, but I found myself wishing for a stronger actor here, as his role as master manipulator expanded.

Dissappointed that this massive project turned out to be nothing more than a think tank for developing new technologies (after it's original purpose was scuttled due to the end of the nuclear war threat) .

I the selective breeding program to produce somebody like Christa was the point all along. And any scientists on the ship originally would be long since dead by now, but then that's probably why all those scientists ended up missing or dead.

 

[Crusher Disciple]

I find the "surprise" ending of Pt. 1 an insult to imagination, intelligence (why doesn't anyone aboard wonder as to their use of "artificial gravity"?), and the entire generation ship lineage of storytelling. That said, I'll likely tune in to Pt. 2 at least, if only to see if the thing has any payoff.

Yeah, it's just such a cheat. I thought we'd get to see how a caretaker generation dealt with the fact that they were preceded and succeeded by the generations that got all of the glory. The captain's line about people only caring about the captain who blasts off and the one who lands had me interested.

But it's all just an experiment. It reminds me of the Divergent storyline. I felt cheated by Divergent because the author couldn't find a way to wrap things up, but at least she squeezed a good book to book and a half out before she went for the lazy writing.

This sucker just started out with lazy writing from the beginning.

I tried to give it another chance last night, but the pacing and the "hey- that cute kid's just what we've been looking for!" bit just made me angrier.

The normal human being in me wants to just turn it off and not finish it. But the fangirl in me just can't resist the chance to complete it and bitch about it up to the end.

 

[cylkoth]

]

I the selective breeding program to produce somebody like Christa was the point all along. And any scientists on the ship originally would be long since dead by now.

Blah...I wanted more than that. Something grander. Profound. Did they really need to spend billions creating and maintaining this project, just to create Mutants/Inhumans/Metahumans?

 

[Christopher]

I seem to be one of the few who prefers it being fake because it would make no damn sense if it were real.

Although it would probably be better if it were strictly a miniseries, with the experiment finally coming to an end in the concluding episode. Instead, they'll probably leave it open-ended so they can potentially continue it as a series. Maybe a few key characters will learn the truth but have to keep it to themselves until they can find a way to free everyone, because if they told everyone, it would bring despair and chaos, or something.

 

[Knucles2]

If this goes to a series what you'll get is week after week of the crew "almost" sussing out their situation or the little girl going "Carey" on some unsuspecting BadGuyoftheWeek.
Leavened, of course, with liberal doses of T&A to fill in the hour...
I'd rather see the Assencion Project melt down with some serious justice meted out to the psyco's -and /or their descendants- who came up with this truely sick idea...

 

[Admiral2]

I seem to be one of the few who prefers it being fake because it would make no damn sense if it were real.

The fun of it being real would be in asking the "How" questions and seeing if the writers had brains enough to come up with halfway logical responses. An "experiment" just means the story's a deadly serious "BioDome."