Tag Archives: SyFy Channel

The Ark a Story of Beautiful people in Crisis

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The Ark

The Ark on the SyFy channel. Wow, is it bad. Stunningly bad. Dialog? Bad. Acting? Bad. Science? Nonsensical. Sets? Boring. Music? Blah. Bad and worse. It’s terrible.

That being said, there’s no reason you shouldn’t like it. It’s very simple entertainment. Good looking people face and defeat one crisis after the next. It doesn’t demand much from the audience and a lot of people simply enjoy the scenery.

But, I’m here to do a review and that’s what I’m going to do.

Eastern Europe Production

A number of commenters point out The Ark was created principally in Serbia and many of the people associated with the show are thus from Eastern Europe rather than Hollywood or London. This is all true but it doesn’t excuse the bad acting and writing.

You cannot tell me there aren’t better actors in theater houses all over Belgrade? That you can’t find writers who understand basic science in Eastern Europe? That great writers don’t ply their trade in Serbia? It’s not an excuse.

Beautiful People

The actors are one good looking bunch but it’s clear to me they were chosen for the roles based on appearance, not acting ability. That’s a real shame because I’m certain fine actors from Serbia and the surrounding regions auditioned for the roles. I largely didn’t even learn character names.

Bad Science

I can’t even begin to go over how bad is the science on this show. I wrote a couple of blogs after each of the first two episodes, and you can look there for some of the glaring mistakes. If you spotted any one of the dozens of scientific inaccuracies, please feel free to note them down in a comment.

The point here is I find it impossible to enjoy a show when I see scientific errors a fifth-grade student wouldn’t make. It completely takes me out of immersion. I can’t like the show when one scientific blunder follows the next.

Crisis after Crisis

The biggest problem with this show is the formulaic crisis scenes. It starts with the opening scene and doesn’t stop until the finale. They all follow the same pattern. Everything is fine. A crisis emerges suddenly without warning. Crisis music plays. Commercial break. The crisis is solved with some crazy idea from one of the characters. It’s not the crisis du jour it’s crisis du commercial break.

Who solves the problem? Let’s go over it.

Maybe it’s overly tan girl whose main acting trait is opening her eyes wider to indicate crisis. It might be captain curly hair whose acting skill is saying her lines louder. Otherwise, its beefcake boy whose main acting method is to thicken his accent. Usually, it’s super-annoying girl who happened to study that exact thing back when she was in third grade because her mother had one of those thingy bobs. Maybe its stammering lad coming up with a brilliant plan.

The cause of the crisis is usually something stupid like doctor dope fiend didn’t properly read the instructions on the manual.

I will never do that!

The number of times a character absolutely refuses to do something but is convinced two seconds later to do exactly that is incalculable. It happens with almost every single conversation. I won’t! You should! Ok! That’s fifty percent of the dialog in this show.

Fighting Skills

Oh my flying spaghetti monster but this is annoying. Someone can’t fight until suddenly they can. Whine and complain boy is useless until he needs to beat up three heavily armed guards and escape. Mind you, he couldn’t beat up pouty-lipped, bi-polar girl who looks like she might weigh ninety pounds. When she hits someone, I’m afraid her boney little arms will break.

The Sets

My eyes roll every time I see some stupid antique chair on Ark 15. It’s obviously exactly the same set as Ark 1. I pity the crew that had to nail up tacky paintings and then take them back down. The Ark has far too much open space. The engine room from the outside is massive. Inside it’s tiny. No attention to detail. Bland and boring.

The Good

This show is so bad I could probably continue railing for another thousand words but I do want to take a moment to give credit where it’s due. Pavle Jerinic is the only character I believe in his role. He’s Felix, chief of security and he’s good.

The sound editing is great. Despite the fact English isn’t the first language of a lot of these characters I understand them clearly. The music doesn’t drown them out. They don’t mumble and speak with such heavy accents I can’t figure out what they’re saying. You’ll say this is damning with faint praise but I’ve seen shows with a much bigger budget and productions values do far worse. The Nevers, I’m talking to you.

The Evil Plan

The ultimate villain has a stupid plan. They’ve got 500 people between two ships which is the entirety of the human race. She doesn’t want to share an entire planet with half of them? It’s madness. Fly up, get the necessary ingredient, sing kumbaya. Done.

Conclusion

I’m really sad this show is so awful. I love science fiction and the premise here is good, as I discuss in my other reviews. With good actors and competent writers this might have been an entertaining show. As it stands, it’s just plain bad.

Tom Liberman

The Ark Episode 2 Review

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The Ark

I finally got around to watching the second episode of The Ark and I’m sorry to say many of the problems from the first episode remain.

There was one character I actually liked so at least that’s an improvement. If you want to read my review of the first episode, please do so because I’m not going to repeat my thoughts even though many of the issues are the same.

Bad Science in The Ark

The thing that annoyed me most about this episode revolved around absolutely wretched science. I think when you’re writing a science fiction television series it’s fairly important to have some passing knowledge of what you speak.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not asking for technical scientific explanations about every mechanism of the ship. I don’t need to know how cryogenics works. I’m more than willing to suspend my disbelief when the situation warrants it.

In this case the most egregious science came during the water crisis. More about that later.

Basically, they are running out of water and the hydraulic engineer needs to fix the water reclaimers. Again, I don’t need to know too much about the process of doing so although a little technical discussion rather than just yelling, “fix it”, might be nice.

The engineer decides, without telling any other officer, to take all the coolant system water and reclaim it. The engines then stop working, no duh. Oh no, says the captain, we’ll just stop without those engines working, we’re dead in the water.

First off, engines don’t just stop working. Perhaps an alarm about rising heat and then an automated shutdown or, if not, the engines simply overheating and seizing.

The opening scene of the episode sees an explosion sending a crewmember drifting off into space. A second person launched himself and grabs the drifting person, then both of them change direction, for no apparent reason, and fall back to the surface of the ship. I use the word fall loosely.

The problem here is that in space, once you have momentum, there’s no friction to slow you down. Shutting off the engines is actually a problem but not because the ship stops but because in the fourth year of a five-year journey you’ve turned the ship around and are firing the engines to slow down. Thus, avoiding zooming past your target at an unsustainable speed.

This is not complex science. It’s not difficult to get right. Getting it right fixes these scenes and is done easily. Have the crewman who saves the other simply fire his pack jets a second time. Explain the momentum problem of the ship with a few lines of dialog.

Crisis from Nowhere

Again, crisis just appears. The first crisis is the opening scene during a space walk when debris from the broken part of The Ark threatens the crew examining the damage. Why not have some discussion about doing a space walk first? Let us get to know the crew member who is going to die before you kill him?

The second crisis is the water pipe burst. Again, it’s not hard to set all this up. When they are building the irrigation system maybe spend a few lines explaining why you don’t have shut-off valves on all the pipes. Take a few seconds showing the murderer throwing the weapon into the piping system. This is foreshadowing and lets the audience in on what is about to happen. It builds tension.

I won’t even talk about how the genius farmer boy doesn’t know about a shut-off valve. Well, I guess I just did.

Talking in front of the Crew

The annoyance I felt every time the officers aired all their grievance with one another in front of the entire crew is indescribable. They stand there discussing how to deal with the rioters in front of the tied-up rioters. It’s absurdly stupid.

Stereotypes

The Stereotype problem remains. The psychiatrist girl is painful to watch. Attractive women should mount a boycott.

Infighting

The entire crew is in a dangerous situation but rather than try and help out, they snipe at each other over ridiculous things. I can understand overworked and stressed out crew members snapping but there is no build up, it’s just someone arguing something really stupid for no reason. Then the good crew member manages to convince them to behave a second later. There’s no drama in it, just two people pretending to have a dramatic conversation.

I might add, everyone looks pretty darned refreshed for not having slept or showered in two days. Great hair!

Security

Hooray! Something I liked. The security guy investigating the murder. I actually liked his firm attitude and professionalism. In addition, his sidekick might be that dark-haired, crazy-in-her-eyes type that I find irresistible. Give her some lines.

Conclusion

Please get better, The Ark. Please, I want to like you. I love science fiction shows. The wounds here are all self-inflicted. The concept of the show is intriguing.

Tom Liberman