Ascension

I started to feel bad for Tricia Helfer while watching Ascension. The success of Battlestar Galactica seems to have gotten her typecast as a space vamp. The Jessica Walters of science fiction. You'll never see her play Lady MacBeth, never see her cast at the narrator in Our Town. Her name won't come up if someone puts together an off-Broadway production of My Dinner with Andrea. I begin to fear she'll never once make it to a curtain call without disrobing. The only person whose career has suffered more from the Ron Moore curse is Katee Sackhoff, whose biggest role since BSG has been Robot Chicken.

But then I remembered Ms. Helfer is a millionaire celebrity and one of the most gorgeous women on the planet. She doesn't really need LabKitty's pity.

Hence the lesson: We shouldn't feel bad about the casting of Ascension; we should feel bad about its wasted potential.

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Brave Old World

Ascension drops the viewer into the thick of things with zero explanation. Stewardesses standing in a taut line are scrutinized by a severe woman. A girl swims alone at night in a secluded lake. Guests gather at what looks to be a cocktail party straight out of Sterling-Cooper. Men in tuxedoes. Dames in poodle skirts. Military guys in dress uniforms. Who are these people and why are they watching a black and white television?

Cut back to the lake where the girl now lies dead. This sets up one of the greatest reveals in all of television. The camera pulls up from the girl and up from the lake and moves through various spaces and ducts back to the cocktail party, then leaves the party and flies up past many floors of what looks to be the enclosed lobby of a swank hotel, finally continuing through the skylights and into black to reveal we are on an enormous spaceship -- the Ascension. (I think this camera move is called a "pullback" in cinematography lingo, although the only camera controls LabKitty really knows are play, pause, and eject.)

The premise of the show is that at the height of the Cold War, the United States secretly launched 600 volunteers on a 100 year trip to Proxima Centuri so their descendants might preserve humanity should nuclear war destroy Earth. We join their journey at the halfway point. As Year Fifty celebrations continue upstairs, the body of a girl is found at the artificial lake, the first incident of foul play on the ship in five decades. The subsequent investigation will trigger events that show us life aboard Ascension is not what it seems.

There is much to recommend in the blink-and-you'll-miss-it SyFy miniseries created by Philip Levens and Adrian Cruz. It's the rare science fiction drama that doesn't have aliens or time travel. There's no space battles or wormholes or killer robots. The focus here is the difficulties and challenges of long-term spaceflight. It's obvious a lot of thought went into the project from the get-go.

A chyron in the establishing exterior shot indicates the Ascension is equipped with an Orion drive -- a lunatic albeit plausible device that supplies propulsion by exploding atom bombs behind the ship. NASA and others have studied the idea and concluded such a drive would allow truly massive ships to achieve speeds up to 10% of the speed of light, making interplanetary and even interstellar flight possible. In a coy nod to history, the story has the ship being launched in 1963, the year the United States signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty which effectively killed any hopes of ever building a real Orion.

Ascension is organized vertically along its longitudinal axis, which supplies some fresh visuals for the spaceship genre (the last time I recall such a design was in Robert Lippert's 1950 Rocketship X-M). It's never mentioned, but this organization would provide artificial gravity via the drive thrust acting perpendicular to the decks.* It's nice to see a show doing some homework rather than falling back on hand-waving explanations of artificial gravity involving tachyons or midichlorians.

* well, sort of. There would be gravity only when the ship is accelerating, IIRC, an Orion drive is not intended to operate continually, so the Ascension would lose gravity once it reached cruising speed. Still, kudos to the creators for thinking in terms of practical solutions.

A destination of Proxima Centuri also keeps the story grounded in reality. Proxima is the closest star to Earth (not counting the sun) and at a distance of only four light years makes a 100-year voyage just about right given the theoretical capabilities of an Orion drive. That being said, there's nothing that guarantees a habitable planet (or any planet) orbits Proxima -- something that is never addressed. The various astronomy tricks that have discovered exosolar planets around other stars have thus far failed to find anything around Proxima (granted, these tricks weren't available in 1963). Furthermore, because Proxima is a red dwarf its habitable zone has a relatively small radius, which puts any potential Earths lurking there within reach of the deadly solar flares Proxima frequently exhibits. It's possible the Ascension would reach its destination only to discover nowhere to land.

Beyond attempts at plausibility, what the show really gives us is a snapshot of Cold War America. These people are stuck in time, even as they pass their fifty-year mile marker. The retro future tech on display is big fun and includes some nice attention to detail. CRT television screens. Tape drive computers. Analog gauges. Vinyl records. Art deco furniture. Librarians. Automats. Typewriters. Black and white John Wayne movies. Philip Marlow novels. West Side Story references. The dress looks a little too modern (aside from the poodle skirts) and there's a decided absence of 50s lingo but I suppose we can blame that on the five decades that have passed since leaving Earth.

More than technology, it's the time capsule of social attitudes which drives the action. There's a daily Pledge of Allegiance, the entire crew pausing to face a projection of the American flag with hand over heart to reaffirm their dedication to the mission. However, beneath this veneer of unity are the divisions and conflicts ingrained in Eisenhower America. Society on Ascension is divided into "above decks" and "below decks" populations, the former including the flight personnel and socialites, and the latter comprising the general riffraff that make the ship function. Station within that society is fixed by the need for order but also by backroom dealings that keep some living comfortably at the expense of others. The command structure of the ship is military, but life aboard is ultimately controlled by a civilian council which is secretive and corrupt.

Above all else there is a fundamental conflict between the ostensible moral purity of the 1950s and the procreation undertones throbbing beneath daily life. The ship is, after all, a generation ship. Everyone from stem to stern would be well aware that once they punched out for the day their primary job description was to get bizzay, a phrase the crew would have mercifully been spared in their cultural isolation. A major theme is the many problems this creates. Chief among these is that marriages are arranged according to genetic compatibility, quality offspring being paramount for mission success. This policy makes for many unhappy couples who turn to extramarital sex -- be it for love, revenge, or politics.

Ascension showed great promise for exploring the difficulties of life on a generation ship. How do people born into such an environment come to grips with the fact that they're going to live and die within the confines of a spaceship, their sole purpose being to make babies who can grow up and continue the mission? Is it fair to burden a child with this responsibility? What happens to those who don't want to participate? What psychological problems might emerge even in those who do? How do you keep a society functioning which is facing the constant dangers of deep space for a century? Here is something we have not seen before in science fiction television.

All this and more is why it was so disappointing to watch the show devolve into a tepid crime procedural. NCIS:Space. A girl is murdered; guys in military uniforms run around after the killer. Following a fresh and promising setup, the wheels come off when Ascension refuses to fully commit to its premise, in more ways than one.

Houston, We have Some Problems

The first glaring misstep is the show's leading man is a negro -- to use the parlance of the time -- this in Executive Officer Gault (played by Brandon Bell). It's unlikely a ship launched in 1963 included any African Americans, let alone would come to have one in charge (second in command, technically). Back when the mission would have been in the planning stages, America was firmly in the grips of Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Act was a decade away. The first African American astronaut was Guy Bluford, a member of STS-8 which only flew in 1983.

We're told Gault worked his way up from below decks, which explains a little, but I couldn't help notice the only below-decks personnel we're shown all look and talk like West Virginia white boys. Had Ascension cast all of the below-decks personnel as African American, it could have provided a compelling exploration of the segregation that existed in 1950s America. Indeed, there's not really any meaningful exploration of life below decks at all, save as a fount of bad boys for freshly scrubbed upper-deck girls to fall for while their mothers look on disapprovingly. Long story short: The casting of Gault feels like a SAG requirement rather than being organic to the story.

The show also introduces a gay character, which provides the writers an opportunity to point out there's likely any number of gay crew currently hiding in the ship's closets (that number would be about ten, assuming the same demographics apply in space as do on Earth). There is genuine peril in this, as being outed on Ascension would probably get you tossed out an airlock given the prevailing attitudes of the time. However, nothing ever comes of this observation, and the character's sexual orientation has no effect on events whatsoever. Here was another wasted dramatic opportunity.

Ascension features lots of sex, and while it serves the plot it never feels integral to the plot (yes, such a thing is possible -- see BSG, for example). It becomes one more SyFy product showing sex just because it can. I'm starting to suspect auditions at the network go something like this:

Actress: I went to Juilliard.
Director: That's nice. Take your top off.

LabKitty is not a prude, but sex on Ascension should have been about conflicts with 1950s morality, not empty titillation (the ship's prostitute "stewardesses" would be an anathema to this society). More to the point, sex is not a substitute for a good script, something cable science fiction has difficulty understanding. When a naked Tricia Helfer doesn't distract you from the accompanying clunky dialog, somebody really needs to hire better writers. As Tom Servo said of Racket Girls: "This movie has taken the joy out of looking at someone's hinder."

Finally, Ascension has its share of technical mistakes, which I guess is to be expected but is frustrating nonetheless. I won't pile on, but there's one glaring boner that demands mention. In the final act, an explosion damages the ship's life support system. With the air rapidly becoming unbreathable, the captain hits upon the idea of using lithium dioxide to "make more oxygen." There is no such thing. That is, the chemical lithium dioxide doesn't exist (bonding rules don't allow it). And it's not like the captain meant the lithium dioxide device or the lithium dioxide machine or some gizmo containing lithium and two oxides which therefore might reasonably be called "lithium dioxide" -- he's shown literally dumping barrels of white powder into the ventilation shafts.

What the writers probably meant was lithium hydroxide, but even here we have a problem. LiOH is a scrubber -- it removes carbon dioxide. While this would also be necessary to keep the air breathable, it doesn't "make more oxygen." Lithium peroxide can be used to make oxygen (in addition to scrubbing CO2), but now we have a different problem. Whatever the captain dumps into the ventilation system causes it to start raining inside the ship (which, admittedly, was a cool visual although probably not great for the ship's electronics). While lithium hydroxide produces water when it reacts with CO2, lithium peroxide does not. So you can have lithium peroxide and oxygen but no rain, or lithium hydroxide and rain but no oxygen, but you can't have both. (Ya know, if you guys want to avoid these sort of mistakes in any future projects, LabKitty will look over your scripts for a nominal fee.)

At the end of the day, I suppose such criticisms are a bit unfair because SyFy never really gave the show a chance. Ascension wasn't a series; it wasn't even the pilot for a failed series. It was a television movie. There wasn't time to develop ideas in any detail or present the character arcs the story really needed. Instead, adult drama got jettisoned for a Big Twist.

The pitch meeting must have gone something like this:

Philip Levens: I have a great idea for a series. It's a generation ship launched to Proxima Centuri in 1963 and the trip will take 100 years. No warp drives. No Jedis. No shady government agencies or ridiculous plot twists. Just the drama and difficulties of long-term spaceflight. I call it "Ascension."

Studio: We'll give you three nights.

Levens: Well, then. Plot twist it is.

Ergo, the "twist."

The Big Twist (Spoiler Alert)

If you're thinking a generation ship powered by atom bombs launched to Proxima Centuri six years before we landed on the moon -- and kept a secret -- sounds too good to be true, you are correct Sir. The whole thing is (wait for it) a ruse. The Ascension exists, but it never left Earth. The ship is housed in a secret underground facility run by a shadowy government agency employing shadowy government personnel who have maintained the illusion of spaceflight for the crew imprisoned inside. For five decades. The Truman Show meets Apollo 13.

The point of all this is a government experiment to evolve superpowers (not kidding). On the one hand, you could attempt such a thing by squirting a couple dollars worth of recombinant DNA into an oocyte. On the other, you could build a bazillion-dollar faux spaceship and kidnap 600 people and hope they are spontaneously breeding X-Men by the time Congress pulls the plug. Eh, let's go with column-B.

As such, the story is the evil scientists orchestrated the laker girl murder so her best friend will turn into Space Carrie and mind-zap the bad guy all the way to Proxima Centuri (maybe they should have just dumped pig's blood on her at the Year Fifty dance). However, I'm a little foggy on the details to be honest. The big twist is revealed at the end of the second hour and I was so disappointed that by the time I looked up all the whiskey was gone and the rest of the show was a blur of shapely buttocks.

I don't know what went on behind closed doors, but I'll bet you a beer this was the fault of some studio exec (and a good beer, too. Something you'd take the trouble to put in a glass). There's just no other explanation for how a project that obviously had so much thought and love put into it could take such a turn for the derp. I'm imagining the creators of Ascension watching the premiere and weeping over their original script like Don Corleone with Santino in the basement of the funeral home. Looka how they massacred mah boy.

So we're left with a superb initial concept, spectacular sets and special effects, and a competent if not outstanding cast, all of which gets torpedoed by a Shyamalanian twist. The writers tried to hang on to the big themes, the suits wanted standard action cliches, and the end result didn't please anyone. (The astute viewer will note the story ends on the possibility of going to series. SyFy declined.)

So tragic. So much wasted potential. So much typecasting of Tricia Helfer as a space vamp.

Epilogue

In some alternate universe, Ascension went to series and ran for ten seasons. The entire action is shown from the crew's POV. There's never any mention of the secret government program. (Perhaps the idea was to have the crew live inside for a year and things got out of hand. Whatever.) As the decades go by, we grow to love the plucky crew, sons replacing fathers and mothers giving way to daughters (the cast changes over the run of the show). However, there are strange portends that occasionally appear in the episodes. Something that signals All Is Not What It Seems, in a Lost / David Lynchian sort of way. In the very last episode (I'm thinking three-hour special) the ship finally arrives at Proxima only to discover their new intended home is uninhabitable. They are doomed. Only then is the experiment revealed. It was all fake. The last 100 years was a lie. It's 2063. Welcome to Earth.

It would either be the greatest ending since The Sopranos, or fans would riot and burn down the studio.

Such is the risk of great art.