The Ark Season 1 Delivers Low-Budget Soap Opera Sci-Fi With Some Heart Underneath The Flaws
Devlin and Glassner’s “The Ark” premiered on SYFY in February 2023, and the show is still going three seasons later, with Season 3 launching July 29 on the network and streaming on Electric Entertainment’s ElectricNOW app. Devlin posting about the new season prompted a catch-up watch, and Season 1 sets the tone the rest of the series builds on: heavy on crisis-of-the-week plotting, light on subtlety.
Ark One’s early episodes run on a repeating formula. The oxygen fails, the crew fixes it. The water reserves fail, the crew fixes it. An asteroid closes in, the crew fixes it. Each crisis resolves through a burst of technobabble followed by a last-minute save, and the show leans on that structure hard enough in the first several episodes that there isn’t much else to hold onto. Layered on top of the crisis-of-the-week format is a soap opera engine: shipboard romances flare up and cool off, and character conflicts that feel heavy handed in one episode get dropped and forgotten within two.
The premise itself is thin, and the show fills gaps with familiar diversity casting choices rather than expanding the concept. The budget shows on screen too. Season 1 runs almost entirely as bottle episodes confined to the ship’s interior, and the acting doesn’t always clear the bar the writing sets for it.
None of that stops a handful of characters from working. Captain Sharon Garnet, played by Christie Burke, spends much of Season 1 physically overpowering the men on her crew and calling out their bad decisions, but by the season’s back half that, she starts to feel like a better character. The first officer earns similar goodwill, despite the fact that he betrays her at a couple of different junctures. The tone throughout reads YA, complete with the interpersonal drama and the simplified moral lines, except the cast is adult and the show clearly isn’t marketed at a YA audience. That mismatch never fully resolves.
The season picks up once the crew tracks down the scientist who invented the Ark program and runs into a second Ark bent on destroying the rest of the fleet. The scientist, framed as a villain for most of the run, does some good things in a Machiavellian way, which makes him the most compelling character on the show.
He’s usurped by a female villain who took his company before leaving Earth, and this character ends up offering to help the crew because she owes them for saving her life, and the show earns a real payoff out of what looked like a disposable subplot. A late cure for one crew member’s illness lands on the sillier side of the writing, but the season closes on the two Arks committed to working together, and it works.
Season 1 also establishes a pattern which does get obnoxious, however. The women on the crew make the sound calls early, the men make the bad ones, and the gap gets pointed out often enough to grate before a second female antagonist and a scheming counselor character balance it out so at least some of the women make bad decisions. Betrayals run through the entire cast all season, and the show tends to let one good deed erase the fallout, a shortcut that makes sense with only a few hundred people left to represent humanity but still reads as convenient.
Season 2 saw a ratings dip on SYFY before Season 3 premiered this week. Electric Entertainment reports strong numbers on ElectricNOW. Given the budget on screen, keeping a weekly scripted space opera alive for three seasons on broadcast television is its own achievement in a landscape where most sci-fi shows get one season and a cancellation notice.
Season 1 of “The Ark” earns a 6.5 out of 10. It carries a Stargate-adjacent pedigree (Devlin co-wrote the original “Stargate” film, Glassner co-created “Stargate SG-1”), the flaws are real, and the back half of the season builds a payoff worth the setup. Season 2 is next.
Does a show with this many structural problems deserve credit for simply staying on the air when most broadcast sci-fi gets one season and a cancellation notice?
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With me it's always the same: if it's a science-fiction show, I'll watch it to the (sometimes bitter) end. And with "The Ark" I had very similar feelings: DEI casting, annoying characters, girl bosses, YA yadda yadda, but I stuck with it, as I always do, and it really does get better, and the characters are fleshed out more, and I even got to like the ship's girl boss captain. (Though to this day I'm still struggling with Stacey Read.) It's not as good as "Dark Matter", not as much of a blast as "Vagrant Queen", but it's still fun if you like low-budget sci-fi. And I think the world *always* needs some decent low-budget sci-fi.
I've watched the first two episodes back when it originally aired. I wanted to like it but it was truly awful, couldn't get past the stupid and mostly annoying characters. I did hear from others who kept on watching, that it did get better.