![]() ![]() (click)." Charlton Heston should be riding down the beach, and suddenly, sticking out of the sand he sees. Better yet, I wish every executive at this network could be sentenced to have someone come in and interrupt every movie or TV show they ever watch, for the rest of their miserable lives. I wish I could sue for the value of my wasted time. There's NO GOOD REASON to leave your audience hanging! After Ascension, my disgust with SyFy is truly cosmic. It's just not that difficult to write an ending that will hold up on its own, while leaving room for a sequel. The series was deliberately written, filmed and aired without a proper ending, IN FULL KNOWLEDGE that a sequel was highly unlikely. ![]() ![]() Worse, unlike SGU and Alphas, Ascension was actually PLANNED this way. And here's my **spoiler**: IT TOO IS NOT A COMPLETE STORY! None of its main story arcs is resolved, and new ones are begun just as the series STOPS COLD. SyFy dropped it after two seasons, again, on an agonizing cliffhanger. Then there was Alphas, an unusually gritty, credible 'superhero' series. SyFy killed this superb show in midstream, leaving a strong story arc on a never-to-be-resolved cliffhanger. Ascension makes the THIRD time they've shafted me. The network that will ALWAYS steal your valuable time and let you down in the end. The network that hates science fiction so bad they don't even know how to spell it. So why am I warning you NOT to watch? One word: SyFy. In short, this is high-grade cerebral SF, of the sort we rarely see on TV or in movies. Not too much can be said about the story, without giving things away, but suffice to say there are some big revelations, and the writers have been willing to let major characters come and go and change. (He comments that the first captain and the last will be remembered as heroes he, the 'middle' captain, is doomed to be forgotten.) The visual design is equally good. The brick-jawed Captain, for example, turns out to be a weak, desperate man. Now it's a frozen slice of that rather tense culture. The kicker (an early reveal, so not really a spoiler) is that the ship left Earth at the end of the 1950s. By now, everyone on board has been born in space, and Earth has become just a distant memory. The premise is classic: to examine the weird culture that evolves on board a sub-light starship, halfway through a 100-year journey to Proxima Centauri. So why am I giving it 1/10 and STRONGLY recommending you give it a miss? See below. It's got strong characters, lots of atmosphere, and some really visionary ideas. Ascension is a really good science fiction epic. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |