When I'm watching a show and taking notes, I try to make those notes as detailed as possible. It's a bad habit from lectures in college, though the people who borrowed my notes would disagree about it being a bad habit. I have have main points as scenes and subpoints as the action in that scene, sometimes even sub-subpoints depending on how I think things are going. I tell you this because after Denninger managed to wake up Gault from the explosion in the scrubbers, my notes are reduced to just a single list of subpoints.
Part of this is that there's a lot of cross-cutting happening, and instead of pausing and typing and pausing and typing and thus losing the flow of the episode, I just started going. The other part, however, is that Ascension just decided to get kind of ridiculous. The degree to which that ridiculousness will work for you will vary, but since a lot of it involved Christa's powers and a very unceremonious push off a ledge, my notes were, in some places, reduced to lines of "HAHAHAHAHAHA."
Obviously I try to things as seriously as I can. I mean, look at my review for the episode, and how I do a fair bit of connecting to a post-World War II U.S. society and the Ascension. I'm willing to engage any show on my own weird idiosyncratic level, and then ask you all to suffer through it as well. So, please, believe me when I say that I'm trying to take Ascension as seriously as it seems to be taking itself, but that me and the show may be on our levels, and the twain, at this point, may never meet.
Honestly, I blame the format of the miniseries for a lot of the stumbles that occurred both in this installment and in Night Two. Ascension crammed about a 10 or 13 episode-season's worth of plot into three installments of varying lengths, and so everything just happened at such a rapid pace that there's no time for anything to breathe. Nora and James's budding romance just kept circling around the same conversation over and over again. Emily and Gault barely registered as a couple after the first episode, so their estrangement here was barely a blip to me. Krueger's murder amounted to a quick shock that I quickly forgot about. The escalation of Christa's powers just kept happening. Rose's machinations to assume the captain's chair never became clear since I had no idea what being captain on the ship meant, aside from the perks. Warren's in league with the Ilaria Corporation some shady company called the TC Group because...okay? Harris solved his power struggle with Warren by just pushing her off the observation deck's bridge in such a matter of fact that I actually laughed. Gault waking up on another friggin' planetshould've been a big moment and, instead, it was just one more kind of wild thing that happened because, hey, it's a finale!
I kept thinking about what Ascension would look like it hadn't done Season 0.5 over three nights. All that stuff above might've had a chance to actually develop into something that was entertaining. Take the first episode, as a contrast to this one. Yes, it's pretty clear early on the Ascension was not in space, but the episode built up to that reveal over its course so that there's the possibility for surprise. It put in the work for that reveal, even if it did keep taking little breaks so you can see where the cracks still were. Here, however, there's no build up, there's no work. It all just happens. While I liked some of these plots and ideas for plots, the results were presented so quickly that it felt like eating cotton candy. I like cotton candy, but I eat it quickly and I'm still hungry after I finish it. At least give me a funnel cake to eat so I can eat all that delicious fried dough and powdered sugar with a little more restraint, lest I feel really sick afterwards.
So, yes, based on my response to it last night, the Christa stuff was not my particular ball of wax tonight, either. The whole experiment was intended to breed ESP people, or folks with morphic resonance, albeit not for the government like I assumed, but for that TC Group instead. Again, it felt like a weird detour from an idea I found far more interesting, but it could've won me over, had not been pushed so hard and so fast. That she was able to disappear Gault to a whole other world was crazy, but it probably too crazy for me based on a limited and rushed sample of the show. Gault was exhibiting signs of morphic resonance himself right at the end there, so I'm assuming that's what he would use to survive? Were/are there going to be aliens on that planet for him to hang out with? It felt like one last big "LOOK AT THIS! HOW ARE WE GOING TO GET OURSELVES OUT OF THIS ONE?!" to try and get people to send emails and tweets to Syfy to get the channel to order more episodes.
The resolutions regarding Harris's issues with Warren and Krueger's murder were similarly pushed too quickly. Warren's death bothered me less because, if the show were to continue, the TC Group's just going to send another person after Harris, and he'll deal with them then. Krueger's whole plot, however, just made me annoyed. I liked the idea Eva and her conspiracy theory blog as a honey trap, and I was curious about whose honey trap it is—Harris's or the TC Group's? I just wasn't invested enough in Krueger to care. I barely knew her, her motivations for wanting to go "full Snowden" after like two days on the job were painfully opaque, and it's because there was no time to develop her into anything more than a plot device to get Stokes out of his cell and into the world.
I think what ultimately frustrated me the most about Ascension was the fact that the miniseries came off as a lot of potential that fell victim to wanting to do far too much too quickly, and the glimmers of fascinating ideas that were hidden by all the whirligig spinning. There wasn't anything particularly revelatory about Stokes's various issues with life outside the ship, but I liked how Brad Carter handled that moon bit, and I was far more curious about how he survived in his new world than how Gault would survive on his.
Then there was the Denningers' marriage. Too much of them was scheming with and without one another, and the show never did much to make William all that quick in that regard. However, there was something of a core idea in there, of two people who pulled themselves out from the lower decks through thinking, bravery, and luck, and how it put them in positions that they ultimately weren't suited for. It's why when Viondra was the highest ranking official on Ascension for a few moments, the character and the show kind of became alive. Tricia Helfer got to do something as Viondra other than be manipulative, sexy, and naked: she got to be in control, and it really worked. Again, I would've loved to have seen more their marriage and understand it better, but, alas, damnable Season 0.5.
I'm not convinced that the show was ever going to do anything interesting with class, like explain why in the world a class system developed in the first place. If I ignored that bizarre plot thread (and, let's be honest, I would never ever let that go) and more lower deck characters folded in, not just James and his aspirations to be something more, then it at least could use the class element to its advantage. Apart from Stokes's waxing about the moon, my favorite part of the whole episode was the woman and unclaimed child of Councilman Davis being used as pawns in the power struggles for the upper deck folks. It was callous and horrible for the Denningers to use them like that. It didn't completely balance out random lower deck guy sexually assaulting Viondra, but it was still the clearest and most interesting deployment of the show's class struggle ideas.
On the whole, I have no desire to see more of Ascension. The miniseries format and how Philip Levens decided to engage it did not do the project any favors. I liked some elements, and would have been interested in seeing those elements explored in an Ascension that wasn't this compressed. However, given that some of its apparent goals involved a spooky parapsychology kid and stranding Gault on an alien world, I'm not sure that those elements would've been enough to carry me through a normal run of Ascension episodes. It's also just really difficult to be sure that I feel that way since I don't think the miniseries really did what it could to earn a lot of that stuff, either.
Which, as a person who enjoys genre fare, is frustrating, and Syfy continues to induce this feeling in me. I'm either not interested in their current slate of original/not imported from other countries series (Haven, Dominion, and Z Nation) or their shows are just insanely uneven (Defiance and Helix). Upcoming projects like The Magicians or the miniseries Childhood's Endsound promising, and while I would like to be excited about 12 Monkeys, how much do I really want a remake of a pretty good film inspired by a really good French short film? I'm just not optimistic about Syfy's chances of rebuilding itself, and I don't think Ascension is going to be the foundation upon which that rebuilding is going to occur.
What did you think of Ascension as a miniseries? Do you think Syfy should expand it into an entire show?