The Ark (Season One) - SyFy

Seeing as there was no sign of Foundation's or Invasion's second seasons popping up anytime soon, I frankly wasn't having my sci-fi fix satiated. Then up pops the first couple of episodes of this from the SyFy channel, playing on Peacock from February 1st. The story 'Follows the remaining crew of a spacecraft known as Ark One, who must become the best versions of themselves to stay on course and survive after experiencing a catastrophic event that caused massive destruction and loss of life.' Sounds like an overly long bash at Passengers starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, but lest we judge too harshly, let's just try to prove that pudding.

We've all been here before of course, even discounting Michael Sheen's bartending skills. We're dropped indelicately into a space-borne crisis and then have to go about the always tiresome and laborious exercise of learning everyone's name, quirks and foibles. At least Passengers only had a cast of four to get your head around. Ark One sets its stall out early on and if you can ignore the evidently budget and imagination-lite set design, then you have 150 bodies that you might or might not get introduced to. In the first episode, it appears to be a competition to find be the most obnoxious of those featured, or perhaps that's just what seems to come across. And not just to me, the audience score for The Ark is just a miserable 22% on Rotten Tomatoes, and it's barely even started a twelve episode run that, if going by what we have seen so far, may very well not make it to the end.

By the end of that all-important greenlit pilot, it must be said that the sharp edges do indeed come off some of the characters and as relationships are honed and arcs are slowly formed, this become less of a trial than it was at the outset. This is far from Paramount's Start Trek efforts or even Seth McFarlane's Orville and it both looks and feels like it. After my initial reaction to just bin this as an idea, I admit to being slowly cajoled into giving episode two an airing. No promises, however, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck etc etc, but I'm nothing if not patient. This is firmly on a knife-edge.