If you’ve spent the sort of money that Ascension cost to make, and employed some of the actors in it, you’d think that would go hand-in-hand with a plan of sorts. But having seen Ascension there appeared to be no plan other than to come up with a unbelievable, nay preposterous idea and then hope that somewhere in production something magical might happen. It didn’t. But how could some of the people involved in this, with their track records, come so unstuck? There are three basic tenants to this fiasco; concept, script and execution. The inspiration for Ascension is a long buried plan that JFK had drawn up called Project Orion, when he worried that Nikita Khrushchev might progress at some point from kicking the tables at the UN to pushing the nuclear launch button. In Orion a ship would contain a sample of humanity to survive Armageddon, taking with them American values to a brave new world far across the cosmos. But before I get on to the total lack of science in this science fiction, I want to talk about what Ascension ended up as. There’s an entirely superfluous coyness at the opening, when we’re introduced to some of the remarkably bland characters, before the mandatory pull-back reveal shot. Lorelei’s body lies on the beach of a pool that’s in a giant spacecraft, populated with people who never considered alternative fashions to the ones their relatives brought aboard some fifty years previously. My first reaction to this was that someone on the writing team loved BioShock, but Syfy baulked at creating the underwater city of Rapture. So instead they came up with this sixties retro concept, where we’ve 600 mostly bitchy people heading where we don’t know, disconnected from the world they’d left on a 100 year one-way mission. There’s been a murder, the first ever on the Ascension, and everyone suspects everyone else. Wasn’t this a classic episode of The Love Boat? Meanwhile back on Earth an old man inspired by The Men on the Moon is the key to a student investigating Ascension, like he can do something about it when they’re trillions of miles away. The old man’s son has a very current connection, despite ridiculing the suggestion. How is this all possible? Ascension was ‘military’ and ‘top secret’, and therefore nobody would know, right. The only reasonable conclusion I could draw was that Ascension is either laughably dumb, or the reason we’ve been presented with this concept is equally so. Having intentionally avoided providing any science explanations, the show prefers to deliver a cheap detective show with dire dialogue instead. A TV cop show of the quality where they try to guess the cause of a women’s death without even turning her body over. I was just reeling from the banality of that, when one character asked ‘How am I going to tell my wife her sister is dead’ and the Captain finds a uniquely personal and comforting way by telling everyone on the ship over the ship-wide speakers. This sort of utter crassness pervades the whole sorry exercise. Eventually they determine that Lorelei was strangled, beaten, drowned and shot, and that it might well be suspicious with there being no guns on Ascension. That revelation was the only point at which I laughed, because the idea that 600 Americans would go anywhere and no one would bring a gun is beyond belief. As Ascension grinds through the first part it is revealed that they can communicate with Earth and their destination is Proxima Centauri, which everyone knows is 4.2 light years from earth. So when they send a message from roughly halfway, it would take 4.2 years to get a reply. And, for maths geeks everywhere, they’d need to be travelling at 4% of the speed of light, or 7500 miles a second, or about 27 million miles an hour. At that speed a single grain of sand in your path would have the impact equivalent to the kinetic energy of a supersonic express loco, and it would take a fuel tank the size of Nebraska to accelerate them to that velocity. With BS that deep I prepared myself for the inevitable implausible explanation. For one amazing moment I realised that an interesting idea was bubbling under the surface, trying to make it to the sunlight. And then, Ascension just continued on its dreary and utterly humourless path. When I thought it couldn’t get any dafter, they find part of the ship that they’d never noticed before, after half a century. It was at this stage I began to wonder if Ascension went anywhere, even in to space, which would explain how ridiculous much of this was. It didn’t take long after that to realise that I’d guessed the Ascension secret well ahead of when it was revealed. That poses the question as to why this is still going on, given that those government people running the show are trampling on just about every human right that those on the ‘ship’ have. When the answer to that came about half way through the second part, it was the dumbest idea this reviewer has ever heard voiced with such seriousness. Apparently all the innovations that we have in our modern world came from the ‘smart people’ on Ascension. That’s undermined by the lack of smart people we’ve met, their utter lack of facilities, and the massed millions of smarter people with access to each other’s technology knowledge on the outside. If they’re that smart, they’d of worked out that Ascension is bunk fifty years ago, wouldn’t they? With the whodunit on Ascension flagging, they throw emerging psychic powers as we are told were predicted by the idiot behind the creation of Ascension. By the end of second part the writers are entirely out of ideas, and personally I was desperate for it to end. Would the shopping centre this looked like was all shot be destroyed, who cares? Ascension was science fiction without science, character-driven narrative without characters and a story so lacking in interest that this could be the cure for insomnia. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.