![]() The USS Ascension is a rocket to nowhere, and that realization was my descension to disappointment.īut I had to wonder what the showrunners planned for two more nights of what had been until then superb storytelling. Instead, the ship is here on earth and part of a grand sociological experiment. Before watching, I thought that perhaps Syfy cleverly presented an alternative reality where the United States really had launched a 100-year mission to Proxima Centauri, a planetary system that most Americans can’t even see in this hemisphere. I left the first night’s viewing disappointed. By contrast, Ascension is cohesive, consistent, and careening - shooting off in unexpected directions, like the aftermath of an interstellar collision but always within bounds of gravity. But Lost lacked cohesion and fluidity plot twists disjointed the storyline and in later seasons twisted it. Ascension plot twists are deliberate gotcha cliffhangers that leave viewers wondering “What the frak is that?” Little in Ascension is what it appears to be. TV science fiction storytelling hasn’t been this strange since Lost aired a decade ago. Last warning: Stop now while you still can. Because you should watch the miniseries, and the spoilers that follow will ruin it for you. I purposely, and it turns out wisely, did not preview the trailer and featurettes, or read reviews.Ī moment to pause: If you haven’t watched Ascension, I highly recommend that you read no further. So I paid iTunes $7.99 for the full miniseries, and watched each of the three segments one-day after airing. But Ascension’s strange premise, an interstellar mission launched in the early 1960s, even before humankind reached the moon, intrigued. In July, my household disconnected TV service (e.g., cut the cord), going all streaming. ![]() But unlike later Mad Men seasons, which carried the characters forward into the decade’s crises and conflicts, Ascension harkens a golden era of innocence before Civil Rights, Vietnam, war protests, hippies, political assassinations, or even the Beatles. Pop! Let’s look inside the time capsule! i09 calls Ascension “Mad Men in Space”, and there’s something to that allusion. For aging Baby Boomers, and even their descendants, Ascension is a time tunnel to the early 1960s, perfectly preserved 51 years later. They’re beret of the shared context that amplified the emotional content.Īscension’s showrunners smartly seek something similar, but playing reminiscent emotions rather than anger or fear. Later watchers won’t feel the same about the miniseries or full seasons that followed. BSG changed the tone and tenure of speculative drama, that felt altogether more real in the aftermath of the 9–11 terrorist attacks on U.S. ![]() Not since (what was then) SciFi Channel televised the Battlestar Galactica miniseries in 2003 has science fiction storytelling been so good as Ascension, which aired last week. “Mad Men in Space” turns the cultural clock forward for the two largest generations ever-Boomers and Millennials ![]()
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