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On Getting Through "Ascension"
While I don't seem to make a great deal of use of the newspaper TV guide I included in my subscription, a promotional covey story about a short miniseries about to premiere did get my attention. The show was called "Ascension," and its story was "sold" by inviting us to imagine that at the beginning of the space age a "generation starship" was launched in secret, such that half a century later there's a small group of people still dressed in "Mad Men style" out in space. Even if "secret history" can seem to me a over-tilled seedbed for the breeding of unproductive suspicion, I supposed the specific idea appealed just enough that I could suspend disbelief that far. More than that, I have to admit the thought I "ought" to watch something not only in "live action" but "recent" had caught up to me.
Things started off with a distinct impression of being "over-TV-sexed," but that perhaps didn't get to me as much as a sudden revelation at the end of the second episode. It's the sort of thing that seems best befitted to some slight effort at hiding it from casual glances, but without dealing with it I can't get any further into the series.
The revelation amounted to the starship and its unaware crew actually having stayed in a giant secret silo on Earth, which might have been meant to lower the threshold for suspension of disbelief but wound up driving the show straight into conspiracy territory. Where before I hadn't dwelt too much with what was providing gravity inside the ship, now I was stuck wondering how the crew justified the thought that there was no "free-fall zone," no risk of the mysterious artificial gravity ever going out, and no necessity to ever use the spacesuits they did have to go outside. I suppose I'm too aware of more rigorous works of written science fiction where "gravity" can be produced without "do-anything super-physics" by keeping up constant acceleration, but this constant acceleration gets tied in with approaching relativistic speeds where you can get to other stars in a few years "ship-board time" but with decades or centuries passing back on Earth. There was also the little problem that the ship's technology keeps veering towards having "modern" uses for computers; for example, characters are seen carrying portables with a distinct resemblance to the TRS-80 Model 100, but even that particular machine dates from the early 1980s, two decades after the ship was supposed to have been cut off from Earth. More than that, though, anything the people on board were trying to deal with, whether soap opera, incipient mutiny (even if the obvious reference didn't hit me until later), or technological crisis, the big question now always amounted to one they weren't even aware of, being how and when they'd figure things out and get outside.
Some combination of residual curiosity and stubbornness kept me watching through the six episodes, but while the conspirators outside seemed ruthless in a very familiar sort of way at squashing any possibility of things being over quickly the apparent ultimate aim of the whole thing, to selectively breed psychics, wound up producing a cliffhanger for at least one character that might not have me completely ignoring the mere possibility of more episodes being made. At the same time, I did find myself thinking of how I'm also making efforts to watch something in "live action," even if not "recent," by managing to see the very first episodes of Doctor Who, which is much more pleasant to watch in much the same "what they were able to accomplish seems an honest effort by all participating" sense as I got watching the better-regarded episodes of the original Star Trek.
Things started off with a distinct impression of being "over-TV-sexed," but that perhaps didn't get to me as much as a sudden revelation at the end of the second episode. It's the sort of thing that seems best befitted to some slight effort at hiding it from casual glances, but without dealing with it I can't get any further into the series.
The revelation amounted to the starship and its unaware crew actually having stayed in a giant secret silo on Earth, which might have been meant to lower the threshold for suspension of disbelief but wound up driving the show straight into conspiracy territory. Where before I hadn't dwelt too much with what was providing gravity inside the ship, now I was stuck wondering how the crew justified the thought that there was no "free-fall zone," no risk of the mysterious artificial gravity ever going out, and no necessity to ever use the spacesuits they did have to go outside. I suppose I'm too aware of more rigorous works of written science fiction where "gravity" can be produced without "do-anything super-physics" by keeping up constant acceleration, but this constant acceleration gets tied in with approaching relativistic speeds where you can get to other stars in a few years "ship-board time" but with decades or centuries passing back on Earth. There was also the little problem that the ship's technology keeps veering towards having "modern" uses for computers; for example, characters are seen carrying portables with a distinct resemblance to the TRS-80 Model 100, but even that particular machine dates from the early 1980s, two decades after the ship was supposed to have been cut off from Earth. More than that, though, anything the people on board were trying to deal with, whether soap opera, incipient mutiny (even if the obvious reference didn't hit me until later), or technological crisis, the big question now always amounted to one they weren't even aware of, being how and when they'd figure things out and get outside.
Some combination of residual curiosity and stubbornness kept me watching through the six episodes, but while the conspirators outside seemed ruthless in a very familiar sort of way at squashing any possibility of things being over quickly the apparent ultimate aim of the whole thing, to selectively breed psychics, wound up producing a cliffhanger for at least one character that might not have me completely ignoring the mere possibility of more episodes being made. At the same time, I did find myself thinking of how I'm also making efforts to watch something in "live action," even if not "recent," by managing to see the very first episodes of Doctor Who, which is much more pleasant to watch in much the same "what they were able to accomplish seems an honest effort by all participating" sense as I got watching the better-regarded episodes of the original Star Trek.
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