Having intentionally avoided providing any science explanations, the show prefers to deliver a cheap detective show with dire dialogue instead. The only reasonable conclusion I could draw was that Ascension is either laughably dumb, or the reason we’ve been presented with this concept is equally so. How is this all possible? Ascension was ‘military’ and ‘top secret’, and therefore nobody would know, right. The old man’s son has a very current connection, despite ridiculing the suggestion. Meanwhile back on Earth an old man inspired by The Men on the Moon is the key to a student investigating Ascension, like he can do something about it when they’re trillions of miles away. So instead they came up with this sixties retro concept, where we’ve 600 mostly bitchy people heading where we don’t know, disconnected from the world they’d left on a 100 year one-way mission. My first reaction to this was that someone on the writing team loved BioShock, but Syfy baulked at creating the underwater city of Rapture. That they then use Rocket Man as the intro music is pretty ironic, because it came out in 1972 and therefore nobody on Ascension would ever have heard it. There’s an entirely superfluous coyness at the opening, when we’re introduced to some of the remarkably bland characters, before the mandatory pull-back reveal shot. Lorelei’s body lies on the beach of a pool that’s in a giant spacecraft, populated with people who never considered alternative fashions to the ones their relatives brought aboard some fifty years previously. It’s even impractical today, because we don’t have the capability to lift an aircraft carrier-sized object into space even in bits.īut before I get on to the total lack of science in this science fiction, I want to talk about what Ascension ended up as. It never happened because it was a very dumb idea and entirely impractical on numerous levels given 1963 technology. The inspiration for Ascension is a long buried plan that JFK had drawn up called Project Orion, when he worried that Nikita Khrushchev might progress at some point from kicking the tables at the UN to pushing the nuclear launch button. In Orion a ship would contain a sample of humanity to survive Armageddon, taking with them American values to a brave new world far across the cosmos.

Best moments in ascension tv show