Danger: Spoiler-ey Territory Ahead!
Explorers aboard the colony spaceship Ark One in the sophomore season of SYFY’s outer space saga, “The Ark,” have been through a lot on their troubled mission to find a healthy new home after leaving Earth 100 years into the future.
Their first destination of Proxima b unfortunately exploded at the end of the series’ debut season in 2023, but the characters finally arrived at an alternate exoplanet suitable for supporting life in the Trappist System during the Season 2 finale that aired this week on SYFY, titled “Fortunate.”
“The Ark” heralds from the minds of executive producers and showrunners, Dean Devlin (“Stargate” and “Independence Day”) and Jonathan Glassner (“Stargate SG-1”), who conceived the series as a more optimistic project in direct opposition to most dystopian sci-fi currently on TV.
“The fans have been so supportive and so vocal,” Devlin told Space.com. “They’ve created a whole community around the show and that’s your dream. You make a show because you want people to like it. And to see them not just enjoy the show, but become missionaries to get other people to see it, it’s really a remarkable experience. One of the fans wrote a post saying that a single episode of ‘The Ark’ is like an entire season of another show.”
In this climactic episode, Captain Sharon Garnet (Christie Burke) and her weary travelers are able to exit the stuffy confines of their gigantic spacecraft and feel natural gravity again when they touch down on the planet Trappist-1b and its already-established colony of Homebase. But all is not as it seems. The placid 1,256 colonists are under some strange hypnotic spell thanks to the surprise reappearance of the nefarious Evelyn Maddox (Jelena Stupljanin) and her plan to control everyone using subdermal chip implants.
But the clever clone Ian (Reece Ritchie) and Trust (William Murray) devise a plan to thwart Maddox’s brainwashing scheme before her homicidal cyborg daughter Kelly (Samantha Glassner) arrives to end her mom’s life with a swift twist of the neck.
“We went through last season doing a lot of disaster of the week type stories where things weren’t working as they should and fixing them,” Glassner notes. “Midway through that season we got to the point where they were going to fix the ship and we’re going to move on, and we did, then through the ultimate disaster at the end of it. So this season we hit the ground running and did adventure after adventure. We got to play a lot in a big sandbox of science fiction. It was a lot of fun.”
Season 2’s big finale also saw security chief Felix Strickland (Pavle Jerinić) reunited with his kidnapped daughter Catherine.
More dramatic season-ending moments land when Garnet decides to return to unexplored space with the revamped Ark One to try and discover any off-course Arks drifting somewhere in the black void. She’s accompanied by several of the original crew, while many stay behind at Homebase to help the settlement grow and thrive.
When a distress call comes in from another Ark vessel on Ross-128b, telling them to stay away, there’s no doubt that Ark One will be heading in that direction to aid the imperiled colonists.
A cliffhanger shows Angus (Ryan Adams) and Trappist-1b scientists in yellow hazmat suits digging up a stone tablet covered in indecipherable extraterrestrial writing!
“One of the joys of working with Jonathan is that we’ll talk vaguely over what the season is,” Devlin said. “Then he’ll call and say, ‘We were talking in the writers’ room. What do you think of this idea?’ And I’ll go, ‘What?! I don’t know how people are going to react to that. Let’s see.’ So he’ll come up with this beautiful script and they’ll start shooting the episode. Then you can’t wait for people to see it. It’s like going to a surprise party. You’re waiting to see that person walk in and the lights go on. Are they going to be mad or happy? In real time, you can actually be on social media and see how people are reacting to things. It’s always fun to see them predicting where the show’s going to go. Sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re way wrong.”
Now that the finale has set up dual locations for storytelling — aboard Ark One bound for Ross-128b and on Trappist 1b with the colonists who’ve excavated an alien artifact — opportunities for steering “The Ark” into a possible Season 3 are unlimited.
“Jonathan and I talked about this early on,” Devlin explained. “What if all of Season 1 and Season 2 is a pilot and the beginning of Season 3 is when the series begins. The idea is that the Ark is not just a lifeboat, it’s a search and rescue boat. So we’ve got this new home planet that we don’t really know that much about, but we’re going to have to travel to multiple galaxies to see who survived and can we bring them home. So that opens the door to every kind of adventure you can imagine.”
Glassner certainly hopes the series is given a green light by SYFY for a third outing as he has a universe of additional tales to tell.
“The fun is going to be in two places now instead of one,” he adds. “We’re going to be following the people on the ship and the people on the planet and their adventures. Of course a planet with that much vegetation has got to have maybe some other life that they’re going to have to encounter so we’ll see where it goes.”
Both seasons of “The Ark” are currently streaming on Peacock.