The twists and turns of Ascensions three-night mini-series flight landed the earthbound space arks most Right Stuffy space hero and the story itself in a mysterious place strewn with wreckage and reminders of other stories. And more mystery! In the final minutes of part three, we learned that Dr. Harris Enzmann (Gil Bellows) was using the decades-long psych experiment started by his father to trigger punctuated evolution and produce a next-gen X-Mana star childpossessed with morphic resonance (i.e., telepathy, telekinesis, super-powers) capable of manipulating the vast energies located within the nuclear powered Panopticon to do even more amazing things, like actually send someone across the universe!Why take a slooooooooow-boat generation ship when you can just grow a magic sea monkey in a skyscraper-sized fishbowl? NASA, youve been doing it wrong!
Enzmann found success in the form of young Christa (Ellie OBrien), part Marvel Girl, part Firestarter, part Space Guild navigator from Dune. In the final moments, she used her abilities to channel the energies of a Glowglobe to produce a Holtzman effect and save Aaron Gault (Brandon P. Bell) from a baddies beat-down by instantaneously teleporting him to a distant, dark planet? Another Enzmann simulation? The only thing we know for sure is that Ascension is perhaps best understood not as a response to the myth of the 60, as I argued pretentiously on Monday (sorry). It is something very post-modern, a self-aware sci-fi saga born from an accumulation of sci-fi sagas over the past 50 years, and perhaps full of pining for better, more hopeful, more serious-minded sci-fi: I found something meaningful and provocative in the last image: Gault, a space hero with the Right Stuff, rising to his feet amid that trendiest, most dismal of things, a dystopian wasteland.A charitable read: Ascension was challenging a genre to dream better. More hope, less No Future cynicism. More big new ideas, fewer hyperlinks trapping us in old ones. More mind-expanding space odysseys, less self-absorbed geeking like this review.
Thats what I got out of the interesting mess that was Ascension. How about you?
Elaborations and ridiculata:Ascension was a stir of sci-fi (and Syfy) echoes. There was Stokes (Brad Carter) watching space opera on a motel telly, ogling the space princesses. There was James Toback (the name, a reference itself; the actor, P.J. Boudousque) catching flickers of Fraggle Rock on Ascension monitors. (Or thats what he was watchingon my Syfy-supplied screener. Those whove seen the aired version are saying he saw ALF. Ill update this Thursday morning after checking out the PST telecast.) We definitely got a coded nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey. That line about the star child must be born (uttered by the treacherous faux troublemaker Eve, revealed to be an Ascension fangirl running a honeypot to snare haters) came during the same scene in which Stokes was playing Moon-Watcher. Gault got The Last Starfighters arc, graduating from (unwitting) space hero gameplay to becoming the real deal. (Will Enzmann cover up his absence from the ship by replacing him with a robot doppelganger, just like the movie?)
And was Ascension winking at The Terminator franchise, arguably the defining dystopian, No Future narrative of the past 30 years, during its final act? There was Christa, the storys symbol for a better, redeemed future (a real Christ-a child), standing in the mud, stuck, in front of three doors labeled T-1, T-2, and T-3, waiting for one ruthless, cynical terminator to come through to claim her, while another terminator, morally dubious but presently on the side of angels (Enzmanns inside man, revealed to be Loreleis killer) trying to save her, pleading with her to leave, his line a version of come with me if you want to live.
Okay, maybe I am projecting but projecting might be what Ascension is all about! Ill bet you five bucks that if Ascension returns for another mini-series, well learn that some kind of magical observer effect is at work here, with Enzmann affecting reality inside the ship simply by watching it, by projecting his wants and wishes upon his space heroes. Of course, I once theorized something similar about Lost, and in fact, I dare say this revelation that Enzmann was trying to cultivate a super-powered savior inside his spaceship Skinner Box is basically my Evil Aaron theory of The Dharma Initiative. (Since all of my columns and recaps have made like Gault and mysteriously vanished from this site, you can find that theory here. Thanks, verdantheart!) I also used to insist that Lost was a self-aware pop construct built from bits and bobs of other pop culture. It can now be revealed! Doc Jensen is also a super-powered mutant, just like Christa. I wasnt watching and writing about Lost back in the day. I was just precogging Ascension.
Ascension was definitely fixated with the theme of watching and the effect that watching has on the watched, and vice versa, and more, the show wanted us to know all that, too, via clues to be decoded. Enzmanns term morphic resonance is apparently some sort of pseudoscience business made up by a dubious parapsychologist dude named Rupert Sheldrake, whose books include The Sense of Being Stared At. I am guessing that scientist-voyeur-mutant maker Enzmann is very familiar with those books. James Toback called the monitor showing Fraggle Rock/ALF a Panopticon. Which definitely sounds like a good name for a TV monitor, except the word means something else altogether: A Panopticon is a special kind of prison designed in such a way that the prison guards can see all the prisoners at the same time. A perfect analogy for Ascension. (Another Lost link: The inventor of the Panopticon was the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and Jeremy Bentham was the pseudonym used by John Locke after he vanished from The Island when he turned the frozen donkey wheel.) (If I had the energy for it, I would argue a theory that Ascension brims with passive-aggressive seduced and abandoned anger at Lost, Seduced and Abandoned being a movie by increasingly meta-filmmaker James Toback. Another time Okay, probably never.)
There was also that moment when Dr. Juliet Bryce (Andrea Roth, who in a past Lost life played Harper, the woman married to the Other who was sleeping with Dr. Juliet Burke) used the phrase every breath we take, which is so close to every breath you take, which, clearly, makes it a wink at The Polices stalker-surveillance ballad Every Breath You Take, from the album Synchronicity, which was inspired by The Roots of Coincidence by Arthur Koestler, who also wrote a book called The Ghost in the Machine, which inspired the title of The Polices previous album Ghost in the Machine, which brings us back to Ascension because we learned in part three that Lorelei is now some kind of ghost in the machine that is the ship that both Christa and Gault can see. And I am pretty sure I used all this Police/Koestler stuff in my Lost theories, too. And a few FlashForward recaps, too! Ascension is trolling me, isnt it? ISNT IT?!?!
This job is going to break my mind one day. Welcome to my breakdown.
But hey, back to Panopticons. A Panopticon is also a pretty good analogy for the power we have over a TV show. We are the guards; the show is our prisoner; we control its fate with our watching. The TV version of the observer effect: If enough of you watched Ascension, youll get another season that resolves all of its darn cliffhangers! Chief among them: Where is Aaron Gault? TBD but only if you watched! Otherwise, consider Ascension forever lost in space. Cue this.
Read the original:
Ascension finale review: Lost in space, or Lost in space?
