A 6-EPISODE MISSION
Sci-fi series set in space, Ascension, with Jacqueline Byers, makes its CBC debut,
For veteran Canadian actor Gil Bellows, Ascension reminded him of the science fiction literature he read growing up, especially the works of Isaac Asimov and Aldous Huxley.
The CBC series, which debuts Monday at 9 p.m., is about a 100-year space mission to find a new world to assure the survival of the human race.
Bellows, 47, who has appeared in a wide variety of TV shows (notably Ally McBeal) and movies ( The Shawshank Redemption), plays the Earthbound son of the brilliant scientist who dreamt up the trillion-dollar enterprise.
The premise intrigued the actor, who liked “the concept of building a community in an alternative universe” and of a future generation who never knew Earth being counted on to carry out the plan of its elders.
Co-creator Philip Levens ( Smallville) explained to TV critics last year that Ascension is loosely based on a decades-old secret military plan to colonize space.
The “Orion Project” was presented to then-president John F. Kennedy in the early1960s as a hedge against a possible nuclear holocaust. The idea was that hundreds of people would be sent into space on a 100-year mission. Their descendants would eventually find a hospitable planet and start a peaceful new world.
Kennedy apparently spiked the project when he realized it was being weaponized. “He was terrified because they had built a death star,” says Levens.
Ascension asks what if Kennedy had said yes and launched Orion in 1963.
Monday’s pilot episode takes place 51years into the mission as a murder on board the gigantic, interstellar spacecraft unnerves the crew and colonists.
Besides Brian Van Holt ( Cougar Town), who plays the skipper, almost everyone else in the cast is Canadian, including Tricia Helfer ( Battlestar Galactica) as the captain’s wife and chief steward, Jacqueline Byers ( 90 Days), Andrea Roth ( Rescue Me) and Wendy Crewson ( Saving Hope).
The six-part space opera has already aired in the U.S. on the Syfy cable network. Episodes were shot last summer in Montreal with Sea to Sky, a joint venture of Lionsgate and Canada’s Thunderbird Films, coproducing with NBCUniversal.
Much of Ascension calls for one giant leap in logic from viewer-kind. Its mammoth, interstellar space station, as demonstrated in a black and white TV image shown to the crew members, is larger than the Empire State Building. Given how NASA’s Mercury space program was barely getting one man into orbit at a time in the early ’60s, that’s quite a liftoff.
Some sets look impressive, especially the main core of the space station interior. The five-storey structure seems modelled after the 1936 British sci-fi classic Things to Come. Bellows said it was crammed into a Montreal sound stage.
“You first walk onto it, you feel like you’re on a Ridley Scott movie, something that kind of enormous,” he said.
Designers were challenged to imagine space age interiors from a 1963 perspective and came up with a cross between The Jetsons and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Ascension has also been described as “Mad Men in space.”
The spaceship inhabitants have no window back to the world of 2014. There’s no certainty, in fact, that Earth still exists. Fashions and mores, therefore, are supposedly still more rooted in American Bandstand than American Idol.
Bellows said he had a blast working on the project, enjoyed the cast and crew and hopes to do more episodes.
Syfy expressed interest in a second season back in December, but there’s no official word on whether it will be renewed.