The Ark - Everyone Wanted to Be on This Ship

Syfy's new series The Ark introduces us to the characters and story in the middle of a crisis when the passengers for a new Earth colony are awakened from hibernation early due to problems on their deep-space ship which have left them without their command crew and damage to several parts of the ship limiting precious necessities to survive. While the CGI effects on the outside of the ship are passable enough, the staging on the inside of the ship isn't all that interesting forcing you instead to focus solely on the characters, which is a problem if you aren't given a reason to want any of them to survive.

With the absence of the command crew, who appears to have been in the part of the ship damaged and lost in space, three junior lieutenants lead the remainder the motley planetary crew who was woken up early. Our introductory episode gives us characters in unfamiliar roles, secrets from characters' past either hinted at our brought to light (multiple times), and attempts to solve issues such as food, oxygen, and water before the ship runs out of all three.

The main trouble with The Ark, other than the very bland settings inside the ship (including the marginally spacey bodysuits) is that the entire crew is unlikable. You know your in trouble for a show about a group attempting to beat tremendous odds and survive when less than an hour in you are actively rooting for all them to die. Our characters range from the generic dumb mean girl Christina Wolfe to the generic smart kids (Stacey Read and Ryan Adams). As for our leaders, their internal squabbling doesn't so much add drama as leave you bored to tears. Christina Wolfe is the least offensive of the bunch, but even she's stuck in bickering mode too often as well as given a dark secret (which several other characters were also given in replacement of genuine character traits). I don't know where the show goes from here, but I'm hoping it steers itself into a star and puts everyone out of our combined misery.

• Title: The Ark - Everyone Wanted to Be on This Ship
• IMDb: link