The Ark is a science-fiction series created by Dean Devlin, starring Christie Burke, Richard Fleeshman, and Christina Wolfe, airing on Syfy.
While still in transit to a prospective new homeworld, the colony ship Ark 1 suffers a string of catastrophic malfunctions, destroying most of its supplies and killing off its entire command structure. Now, the surviving support crew must work together to survive until they reach their destination.
This series contains examples of:
- Absent Aliens: Robotic probes sent to nearby stars have found planets where humans can live, but no sign of intelligent or technological aliens. But then Angus suggests aliens might have been responsible for the strike that crippled Ark 1. Played straight again when we learn that it was humans on Ark 15 who are disabling the other Arks.
- Ace Pilot: Brice's backstory before he was assigned to the Ark. Later revealed to be due to his willingness to take risks due to being Secretly Dying.
- Action Prologue: The series begins with the disaster that leads to the loss of the command crew when part of the ship is breached and a frantic race to keep anyone else from dying.
- Age-Gap Romance: Between Trent and Susan in the backstory, ended by her death by Cryonics Failure. Susan is considerably older than Trent. Between Trent and Alicia in the first few episodes, ended by his framing her for murder, being revealed as the murderer, and being allowed to take a lethal dose of radiation to fix the reactor in place of a trial. Trent is somewhat older than Alicia, but it is significant for how young she is.
- Later revealed between Cat and William Trust.
- Almighty Janitor: Alicia is a waste management technician. She is abruptly promoted to be chief of life support after the command staff are killed and the man everyone thought was Jasper, the previous chief of life support, is revealed as an impersonator who bribed his way onto the ship. It turns out that Alicia has multiple masters degrees and is the only one left who knows how to fix the life support controls. Why was she willing to work in waste management with those qualifications? Apparently Earth is so bad that "everyone wanted to be on this ship".
- Almost Out of Oxygen: The first episode has an O2 leak that threatens to suffocate the crew. This is made worse by a computer error messing up the diagnostic system and the ship engaging a Lockdown protocol in an attempt to isolate the breach, stranding the crew in different sections.
- Anguished Declaration of Love: When the board discusses Angus' kidnapping at the hands of Kelly, Alicia blurts out that they must save him, because Kelly couldn't possibly care about Angus as much as she does, earning a lot of stares (and a few knowing smiles) from her adult peers.
- Anyone Can Die: With limited supplies and a whole universe of unknown variables, nobody is guaranteed to survive till the end. The first episode alone sees at least eight crewmates die, on top of the ship's entire command structure being killed off.
- The Ark: Ark 1 is exactly what it sounds like, a ship carrying everything needed to colonize a new planet. Or at least it was, before most of its supplies got wiped out. There are others, numbering up to 20 assuming everything went right back home. Ark 1 is the flagship, however, and was sent to the destination believed most likely to have a successful outcome. To further the Biblical allusion, Lane finds a chamber inside William Trust's hidden room that contains DNA samples of Earth wildlife, which he compares to Noah's ark.
- Artistic License – Chemistry: The water they mine from a comet turns out to be contaminated by a hallucinogenic toxin that is said to be both "smaller than a water molecule" and to have a "structure is similar to ergot alkaloids on Earth". While ergot alkaloids range in size, the smallest are many times larger than water. In fact, the smallest a molecule can be while still being meaningfully comparable to any alkaloid is several times larger than water.
- Artistic License – Geology: Kelly says rising sea levels have wiped out Florida, Japan and New Zealand. Melting all glaciers on Earth plus the thermal expansion of water would raise sea levels "only" about 70 meters. This would reduce Florida to a few tiny islands, but most of Japan and New Zealand would still be above water. To be fair, there is a good chance she is being an Unreliable Narrator.
- Artistic License – Space: Present in spades throughout the series. Most notably, Ark 1 managed to come across an unexpected star somewhere in interstellar space between our solar system and the nearest star system.
- For another particularly glaring example: Garnet considers diverting Ark 1 from Proxima Centauri, which is very nearby at that point, to Ross 128 to avoid a conflict with Ark 15. Ross 128 is 11 lightyears from the Sun in a very different direction from Proxima Centauri. Meanwhile, Alpha Centauri A and B are very close to Proxima, being part of the same triple star system. This is something like flying from London to New York, getting nearly there, then abruptly deciding to go to Rio rather than DC.
- Asteroid Mining: After barely dodging getting impacted by an asteroid (a giant space rock), Alicia realizes that it's actually a comet (a giant space iceball), which means it's a supply of water that can replace everything they've lost.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Lane resents the fact that Garnet became acting captain when she was only posted to Ark 1 at the last minute. When she is medically indisposed, Lane finally gets to be in charge and quickly discovers how horrifying it is to have to make command decisions that could have life-or-death consequences. It certainly doesn't help that Eva and Brice get into an argument over Brice's secret, putting Lane in a tough spot.
- Belligerent Sexual Tension: In "Two by Two", Eva and Brice's constant verbal sparring starts to look like something else. At one point, they have a very loud and passionate argument in front of the other officers about taking the shuttle that makes the virginal Alicia look noticeably uncomfortable. They finally consummate their attraction in "Every Single Person Matters", though both of them insist that they aren't falling for one another. They're both lying.
- Big Bad: "Hoping for Forever" introduces Evelyn Maddox, William Trust's rival who took over his company. She seized Ark 15 and attacked the other arks to claim Proxima b for herself.
- Big Damn Kiss: Brice and Eva share one in episode 11, as Brice prepares to undergo an experimental treatment for Klampkins.
- Bio-Augmentation: Not only is there (illegal) human cloning, but there have been experiments of creating human clones spliced with animal DNA. Lt. Garnet is the result of such experimentation, having been augmented with tardigrade DNA.
- The Big Guy: Strickland, who is the colonists' head of security. During the water shortage, a brawl starts in the mess haul. It devolves into seven colonists versus Strickland and Garnet. It is not a fair fight for those seven.
- Bittersweet Ending: The first season ends with Brice being cured of his Klampkins and Lane redeeming himself, who is firmly on Garnet's side for the first time in the series. However, Proxima b explodes, doing fatal damage to Ark 1 and possibly killing Angus. However, Evelyn decides to (for now) aid them due to them curing her Klampkins and later saving her and Ark 15.
- Break the Haughty: William Trust feels confident in demanding things and using his backdoor access to the system to get his way. Garnet knocks him down a peg by having Alicia hack his access codes and override his authority, a double-whammy of not only being outwitted, but by a teenager at that.
- Burial in Space: Subverted. The original intent for the dead was to shoot them into space, but Angus successfully argued that composting their bodies was a better use of resources.
- Can't Kill You, Still Need You: The one benefit Ark 1 has when dealing with Evelyn Maddox is their DNA vault, which has one of the components necessary to cure Klampkins. Until she can get access to it, she can't risk firing upon them.
- Centrifugal Gravity: Portrayed inconsistently. In the first few minutes of the pilot; Garnet has to stop the rotation of the spinning section of the starship the cryo bay is in, predictably leading to the survivors floating in the corridor. When she restarts the rotation, everyone falls to the floor. But throughout the rest of the show, everywhere on all the Arks has the same 1-g gravity regardless of it it is spinning or not and with little regard for the direction of the gravity between locations.
- Chekhov's Skill: Trent's ability to hack the electronic door locks, which he uses in the first episode to save lives when the ship goes into lockdown. In Episode 5, Strickland realizes that this skill is what enabled him to access the holding cell where Jasper was being kept and kill him, which is why there was no access log.
- Clone Degeneration: Discussed. World governments attempted mass cloning to supplement their armies, but the clones grew mentally unstable with successive generations. Garnet is a first-generation clone and doesn't have those problems, while her also-first-generation twin sister's mood swings were a result of genetic modification, not the cloning process itself.
- Closest Thing We Got: The crew get assigned roles that their training happens to overlap with, even if they aren't otherwise suitable for them, because there's no one better on hand.
- Cold Equation: How Harris dies during the oxygen crisis - he deliberately trades helmets with another crew member whose supply had not been refilled.
- Compensating for Something: Dr. Kabir accuses Lane of this when he hacks into Garnet's medical files in an attempt to oust her as captain, both out of anger for betraying her trust and because it's obvious he's using it as an excuse, rather than any genuine concern.
- Contrived Coincidence: Eva powers down the engines to use the coolant water to extend their water supplies. Doing this causes them to enter the path of an asteroid that will impact them in six hours. Brice later puts the odds at 1 in 700,000, which is more likely than one would think in the vastness of space.
- Crippling Overspecialization: Most of the surviving crew were only trained for specific roles, and are not good at improvising to fill new ones.
- Critical Staffing Shortage: The cryopods containing the actual crew were torn from the ship in the first episode, leaving only the colonists and a few low-ranking members that happened to be bunking with them. People quickly end up getting jobs because their areas of expertise lie close to what is needed.
- Cryonics Failure: The one person whose pod fails to revive them happens to be the one member of the primary command staff bunking with the civilians. This is especially notable because Garnet's pod had debris drop on it and she was revived on the spot. On a larger scale, all of the cryotubes wind up being lost in the accident, so the crew can't put themselves back under to conserve resources once the crisis has passed.
- Death by Racism: In a case of death by classism, episode 4 reveals that Dr. Kabir begged her mentor, Dr. Edward Hill, to stay with her in the lower crew cryopod bay in case they were needed, but he refused, as he felt it was important that his sleeping location reflect his status in the mission. Naturally, this meant he ended up with the other vital crew members, and died as a result.
- Death Seeker: Dr. Kabir accuses Brice of having a death wish because of all the risks he keeps taking. She's half-right; he's Secretly Dying and wants to die doing something memorable rather than succumbing to a fatal disease.
- Didn't Think This Through: Fake Jasper's killer, Trent, disposing of the murder weapon by throwing it into the water tanks leads to a pipe bursting and a significant portion of the water supply being lost.
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: In the season 1 finale, the attempt to spin up Proxima b hits an unexpected snag when the "water" on the dark side of the planet turns out to be an ocean of liquid methane, methane that is now being ignited by the heat of the sun. In no time at all, a chain reaction causes the planet to explode.
- Earth That Used to Be Better:
- The entire reason that the Ark 1 has been sent off to colonize a new world is because Earth has degraded to the point that it's estimated to have only about 70 years of life sustainability left. A lot of people seem convinced it doesn't even have that long.
- A flashback in the second episode shows how dire things were — a shot of the North American continent shows wildfires so vast that they're visible from space. The opening sequence and various background shots show massive hurricanes and entire continents stripped of life.
- A conversation between Cat and Eva in episode 3 mentions "UV storms" which burn anyone caught in them. Other conversations reveal that many larger animals and even insects like bees have gone extinct.
- In episode 7, it's revealed that Earth is basically gone, the biosphere having degraded even faster than predicted. Society has collapsed and those on the arks are likely the only humans left.
- The Elites Jump Ship: Subverted. With Earth falling apart, those launched into space first appear to quite sensibly be people with the skills necessary to survive on a new world, though one could argue Cat is an edge case, being more of a celebrity influencer than an actual therapist. Played straight with William Trust and his wife Helena, who were supposed to be on Ark 5 but then were hidden on Ark 1 in stasis. William was actually sincere about taking a later ship, but Helena arranged it so they would arrive on the colony first and be able to take control of it.
- Everyone Has Standards: Lane would happily jump on any opportunity to oust Garnet as acting captain and take over, but is nevertheless horrified when she's the first one to volunteer to sacrifice herself to save the ship from the radiation leak.Garnet: You're about to get what you wanted.
Lane: I didn't want it this way! - Everything Is An I Pod In The Future: The Ark 1 sets have minimalist decor and much of the equipment in them resembles recent Apple products, from desktop computers to tablets to smart watches that double as on-board communicators.
- The minimal decoration and lack of paper products, physical books, and so on Ark 1 may be justified by the ship needing to limit mass as much as possible. Personal effect allowances didn't extend beyond what might fit in someone's pockets, which is why Angus had to smuggle his farming supplies onboard. Deliberately contrasted with Ark 15, where the set was covered in art, rugs, tapestries, and so on that Evelyn's mercenaries stole before they took the last ship.
- Explosive Decompression: In episode 3, the crew use an explosive to blast a hole in the men's showers, as a means to change the ship's course without engines. In this case, they overpressurize the room to achieve the necessary force and the actual depressurization takes less than a second.
- Failed a Spot Check: The Ark 1 crew don't notice that the ocean on the dark side of Proxima b is made of methane instead of water until it's too late to stop the rotation process that will cause the methane to overheat and the planet to explode. The Ark 15 crew didn't notice either, despite having been parked at Proxima b significantly longer. Alicia does notice that the "water" isn't freezing as it should at those temperatures, but fails to draw the connection until it's too late.
- Failsafe Failure: The containment breach in episode 5 only has a single manual shutdown lever with no way to remotely shut it down. To make matters worse, the radiation also damages the remote door access, nearly killing Trent before he could do a proper Heroic Sacrifice to save the ship.
- Fake-Hair Drama: Cat is revealed to wear a wig because the back of her head is seriously scarred from UV damage, with small spots of hair scattered in places where the damage didn't completely prevent growth.
- Famed In-Story:
- Angus is well-known (albeit not entirely taken seriously by everyone at first) for being a 4-H kid who grew lots of crops in the Mojave Desert.
- Cat was a celebrity relationship and self-help social media influencer / video streamer.
- William Trust's experiments have all of humanity watching his actions with anticipation and/or distrust.
- Fantastic Racism: Garnet conceals her origins as a clone not just because cloning is illegal, but because there's apparently a history of clones facing persecution just for existing.
- Faster-Than-Light Travel: The arks are built to withstand the stresses of FTL travel, with the expectation that the technology would be perfected down the line for future arks; Ark 1 travels at sub-light speed because it was the first launched, before the technology was finalized. At least two other arks have working drives, one of which winds up on Ark 1 after being salvaged from Ark 3.
- Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: When it turns out that Garnet's genetic modifications variously let the crew make an antidote to the poison in the comet water, confer resistance to radiation poisoning, and accelerate healing.
- Geniuses Have Multiple PhDs: Alicia Nevins managed to rack up four different advanced degrees before turning 18.
- Godzilla Threshold: When Ark 3's Self-Destruct Mechanism is activated, Lane is forced to awaken Trust from cryo-sleep in order to use his personal codes to override it. It should go without saying that Garnet does not take it well when she learns what he's been hiding.
- Going Critical: The nuclear pulse engine suffers a containment breach in episode 5, releasing hard radiation that is slowly expanding throughout the ship. The problem isn't so much the ship is exploding as it is the radiation threatening to kill them all before that happens.
- Green-Eyed Monster: In "Every Single Person Matters", Alicia becomes very jealous of how much attention Angus starts paying towards Kelly.
- Guns in Church: Strickland lampshades the danger of having firearms on a spaceship. A stray bullet could puncture the hull or damage a vital system, killing many people. When he discovers a gun locker on Ark 3, he collects all the guns and throws them out the airlock. Also, Kelly made up a story about his daughter being shot to push him into it, rendering Ark 1 helpless when Ark 15 arrives.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: Discussed. After a biohazard sensor malfunction locks down a room and nearly kills the occupant, Brice puts himself in the doorway in case it happens again. Eva warns him that, in such an emergency, the door would cut him in half to properly seal the room.
- Heroic Sacrifice:
- In the first episode, Harris dies after giving his oxygen supply to a dying crewmate.
- In Episode 5, Trent wades into a radiation leak to shut it off at the source, being lethally exposed in the process.
- In episode 11, Lane stays behind on Ark 15 to manually undock the shuttle, allowing the others to escape, and outright calls it a heroic sacrifice.
- Hero of Another Story: There are up to nineteen other Arks out there, trying to colonize other planets; although Ark 15 seems antagonistic, Ark 3 is lost, and its Sole Survivor (admittedly, an Unreliable Expositor) claims Ark 2 blew up at takeoff.
- Hero with Bad Publicity: William Trust pioneered the Ark program to save humanity, but he is also despised by many because his early work into repairing the environmental damage to Earth created an incurable disease called Klampkins. Brice is one such individual, and there's no shortage of people with loved ones that suffered from it.
- Hidden Supplies: Angus was assigned as quartermaster for the colony's horticulture group. He used his position to smuggle grow lights and several tons of high-grade top soil aboard because he did not trust the probe data for growing conditions on Proxima b. These turned out to be unexpectedly useful when the surviving crew members need to start growing crops to supplement their limited food supply.
- Hide Your Children: There are no children on Ark 1. The youngest members of the crew are 18-19, skipping the time they spent in suspended animation. This was an explicit strategy by the colony project, with people who left families behind on Earth being told they would be able to join them if the colony succeeded - albeit with many years of separation, by which point their kids would have grown up.
- Homage: Angus' bioshelter farms look a lot like the domes in Silent Running. Per the production team, the visual reference was intentional.
- Human Popsicle: The crew of Ark 1 were put in stasis and supposed to remain in it for the entire six-subjective-year trip to the new world. The collision alarm a year out from their scheduled arrival automatically awakens Garnet, who rushes to awaken everyone else and get them to safety before the cryopod bay comes apart.
- Human Resources: In the second episode, the crew starts composting the bodies of dead crew mates in order to aid their efforts to grow more food.
- Identical Twin Mistake: Malcom Perry, aka fake Jasper, tries to blackmail Garnet by implying he witnessed her kill someone. It was actually her sister / clone of the same progenitor.
- If I Wanted You Dead...: When Strickland questions Eva about the fake Jasper's murder, Eva locks him in the cell and slowly vents the oxygen to demonstrate that if she were the murderer, she could have killed him and made it look like an accident rather than the clumsy murder that actually happened. Strickland concedes the point.
- Ignore the Fanservice: Cat's attempt to sweet talk Strickland into letting her break the water rationing rules and grab a quick shower while he watches is a no-sell. It's later revealed to be a case of Incompatible Orientation, as Strickland is gay.
- Katanas Are Just Better: Strickland trained with a katana, but left it behind on Earth with his husband. It's later found among his now-deceased husband's personal effects on Ark 3 and returned to him.
- Lady Macbeth: William Trust is the self-appointed savior of humanity with the ego to match, but he is at least sincere in his belief that what he does is in everyone's best interests. Helena Trust, on the other hand, sees the world and everything in it as tools to amass power for herself, and encourages that in William.
- The Leader: Garnet, as the crew member with the highest rank, quickly takes charge in the crisis. While Lane and Brice protest, being of technically equal rank, she points out that they didn't step up. When it comes down to it, everyone is too scared of Garnet to seriously contest the idea. Even Lane, who wants to replace her, is only willing to challenge her if he thinks he has leverage.
- Lightspeed Leapfrog: Ark 1 was launched while Earth was still working on FTL travel. When they come across Ark 3, it's shown to have a functional FTL drive that was perfected after they left, allowing Ark 3 to make it further in a few months than Ark 1 did in several years.
- Lockdown: The ship has a lockdown protocol that seals doors in case of emergencies. In the first episode, it triggers in response to an oxygen leak, worsening the crisis because it isolates everyone at a time where their expertise is necessary to solve the issue. In the fifth episode, a radiation leak sets it off, dooming several people who didn't make it out before the doors closed.
- Locked Room Mystery: After the fake Jasper is exposed during the oxygen crisis in the first episode, he is chained to the wall of a locked storage compartment until the new council can decide if he is to be imprisoned or spaced. When he is to be given the opportunity to testify in his defense, he is found dead behind the still-locked door with his throat slashed and no blade that could have made the cut. Eventually revealed to have been killed by Trent, who can crack the locks but who didn't think to make it look like a suicide.
- Make an Example of Them: This is discussed in regards to Alicia, whom Helena wants to space because she's a threat and it will demonstrate their resolve to the crew, but they never get to implement it.
- Master of None: In theory, Lt. Sharon Garnet has some working knowledge about every aspect of the ship, which is why she appoints herself acting captain over the same-ranked Lane and Brice, but she readily admits that this does not make her an expert at anything.
- Meaningful Name: Project Juno, William Trust's codename for Cat's assignment to match genetically compatible crewmembers, is named for the Roman queen of the gods and goddess of marriage (counterpart of the Greek Hera).
- Motor Mouth: Unless someone stops her, Ali tends to talk a mile a minute.
- Mr. Fanservice: Brice tends to forgo the top that goes over the undershirt of his uniform, displaying his physique. Even his actor lampshaded jokingly that it would probably be more professional to keep a shirt on.
- The Mutiny: In "The Painful Way", Trust's supporters stage a coup when Garnet decides to divert to Ross-128 rather than risk engaging Ark 15. Helena's unabashed cruelty quickly turns most of his supporters back to Garnet's side.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Cat is left a complete and utter wreck after the mutiny ends with Helena Trust dead and William Trust being taken hostage, as it occurs to her that she betrayed so many people for a plan that had so little chance of ending well for anyone. This is only compounded by her guilt over having had an affair with William behind her best friend Helena's back and learning right before the latter dies that Helena knows Cat is in love with William but believes she's too good a friend to have ever acted on it.
- My Greatest Failure: Upon learning of the deaths of his husband and daughter, Strickland breaks down, blaming himself for not defying orders and staying on Earth with them.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
- Lane figures out that Garnet is a clone and attempts to oust her from leadership using that knowledge. This wholly backfires. Dr. Kabir is pissed that he exploited her trust to access Garnet's medical records, Strickland already knows and has faith in Garnet's leadership, and everyone else backs Garnet because they can see it as the desperate power play it is.
- The Mutiny goes off without a hitch and is largely accepted because it's seemingly done for legitimate reasons, that being Garnet playing it safe when William Trust had a plausible but untested plan to protect themselves from Ark 15. That goodwill is quickly burned away when, in response to Alicia locking down the FTL, William threatens to suffocate the former command crew and Helena Trust then tries to have Alicia spaced as a potential threat, demonstrating that the latter in particular is a power-hungry sociopath. A counter-mutiny quickly deposes them.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: William Trust, the industrialist responsible for creating the Ark program, takes elements from celebrity businessmen like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. Given some characters dismissing him as having a god complex, this may also be a Take That!.
- Number Two: Garnet eventually appeases Lane's ego by making him her second-in-command.
- Odd Friendship: Somehow, self-absorbed Cat has developed a bond with depressive Eva, to the point that in episode 4, her drug-induced nightmare is seeing Eva commit suicide in front of her.
- Oh, Crap!: Sharon and Spencer head to the cyro pods of the command crew, saying they need to get the senior officers awake. They open the door to the main officer's cyro-bay...and see nothing but empty space and realize there is no command crew.
- Outliving One's Offspring: After meeting her on Ark 3, Strickland learns from Kelly, who had heard it from his husband Robert (who was also onboard) that their daughter died when accidentally shot during a food riot on Earth. It later turns out that Kelly is The Mole for Ark 15 and never met Robert, having made up the story to trick him into spacing Ark 3's supply of firearms to undermine Ark 1. Therefore the actual status of Strickland's daughter remains unknown.
- Percussive Maintenance: Subverted. After seemingly repairing every broken part of the shuttle and still failing to get it to start, Brice kicks the console in frustration, which causes the shuttle to suddenly boot up... for about five seconds.
- Perpetual Motion Machine: The FTL drive generates fuel as a product of its operation, meaning it results in a net gain of fuel as long as it is operated long enough to replace the amount expended to charge it up before each activation.
- Plot-Demanded Manual Mode:
- Ark 1 doesn't have an automatic system to SCRAM the reactor in the event of a containement failure. This means that when the guy in the room is suddenly killed by a breach, it nearly irradiates the entire ship and requires a Heroic Sacrifice to fix.
- Ark 15 has a manual docking clamp release, a security feature not present on Ark 1. This means the shuttle can't be launched unless someone pulls the lever in the docking bay, which Lane volunteers for.
- Poor Communication Kills:
- The fake Jasper is called upon to fix the problems with the diagnostic system and tries to hide and stall rather than revealing the truth right away. If he had confessed immediately, the alternate solution could have been found earlier and lives could have been saved. Garnet considers his actions to be tantamount to murder.
- During the chaos of the first day after the disaster, crewmembers scavenged materials from non-vital systems to get parts to repair vital systems like life support, and didn't bother documenting their actions. When the shuttle is needed immediately, it turns that the parts came from the shuttle, and all of the stolen parts have to be returned and re-installed. Learning from this debacle, Eva later insists that Brice file his maintenance reports immediately so she knows ahead of time which ship systems are working and which are not.
- Precocious Crush: Angus has a crush on Garnet, which makes things incredibly awkward when he starts having hallucinations of her in a sexy catsuit.
- Red Herring: When Alicia and Angus determine that the weapon used against the ark was an element unknown to Earth science, they wonder who else could possibly be out here and it seems plausible the attack was the work of aliens. The weapon was designed by Evelyn Maddox, a rival of William Trust, who also developed faster-than-light travel after Ark 1 left Earth, explaining how her own ark was able to catch up to them and attack them. Aliens still have yet to make an appearance or be confirmed to exist.
- Revealing Cover Up: Strickland traces the tablet which sent the video of Garnet supposedly killing a man, which leads to Alicia. Not only is it ridiculous that Alicia would do this, let alone that she would be responsible for "Jasper's" murder in the first place, but she was on the bridge at the time. Alicia was with Trent just prior to that and left her tablet behind, so only he would have had the opportunity to frame her and the means to get access to "Jasper" without creating an entry log, implicating himself as the murderer through his impulsive actions.
- Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Numerous examples at very small and very large scales. For an example of the first; molecules of a toxin similar to LSD (each molecule of which contains 50 atoms) are described as if they were atomic in size. For an example of the second; when Proxima b's atmosphere is ignited by boiling the methane that condensed out on the night side, the energy released is enough to explode the planet. Burning an atmosphere like that would only release about 1 millionth the energy needed to take a planet apart.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Cat mentions that she got a friend posted to one of the later arks, with the implication that her presence on Ark 1 happened under similar circumstances. She is Trust's mistress.
- Secretly Dying:
- Brice has a terminal disease that causes him to pass out unexpectedly, and hides it because he'd rather die helping save humanity.
- Evelyn Maddox has Klampkins, and her attacks on the other Arks were intended to wipe out the crews so that she could raid their DNA vaults for components needed to create a cure. Played with in that this isn't really a secret to the crew, but she did keep it from her daughter.
- Shipper on Deck: To help Angus get over his hopeless Precocious Crush on Garnet, Cat tries to push him towards Alicia, pointing out that they're both Teen Geniuses on a ship full of adults. This takes a more sinister turn in "The Painful Way", when it's revealed that Cat was placed aboard Ark 1 specifically to play matchmaker for Trust's new colony.
- Shovel Strike: Alicia saves Angus from Kelly with a shovel to the back of the head. This nearly kills Kelly from internal bleeding and leaves her in a coma, with only the faint hope that Ark 15's doctors can treat her.
- Shower Scene:
- Cat tries to sneak a shower in the first episode despite water rationing, but is stopped by Strickland. When rationing is lifted in episode 3, she's the first to run to the showers, joined shortly after by several other female crew members... and Brice, who cheerfully points out that with the men's shower room destroyed by the above-mentioned Explosive Decompression, the women's room just became co-ed.
- The montage of crew members enjoying the restored water supply in the beginning of episode 4 includes a shot of several of them enjoying showers. And later in the same episode, Eva has a solo shower, before hallucinating Harris joining her.
- Sickly Green Glow: The radiation leak in episode 5 starts with the explosion of pipes containing a glowing green liquid. It is stated to be radioactive xenon, which is a real radiation hazard with some reactors but which is also a transparent gas. The pipes are also labeled with a biohazard warning label, rather than a radiation hazard one, and the radiation poisoning the gas causes does not look like real radiation poisoning does. However, the radiation scrubbers that Eva gets working after Trent takes a fatal dose resetting the system do make perfect sense for a radioxenon leak: Flushing the air will clear the gas, and radioxenon's decay products are pretty safe.
- Slashed Throat:
- "Jasper" has his throat slit by a hunting knife after he tries to blackmail Garnet into letting him go free. Since multiple people had a reason to kill him, it doesn't necessarily implicate her.
- Speaking of which, "Jasper's" blackmail video is shown in episode 3, in which Garnet gets into a fight with a drunk biker at a bar and ends things by slashing his throat with a broken bottle. Episode 4 reveals that it's actually Garnet's twin sister Denise.
- After learning that Eva might have had a motive to kill the fake Jasper, Cat has a nightmare in which she tries to question Eva about it, but Eva slashes her own throat instead.
- Sleeper Starship: The arks keep their crew and passengers in cryostasis for the majority of the years-long journey, only meant to wake a few weeks out from their destination. Though this turns out to only apply to Ark 1, as later arks were installed with newly designed FTL engines that cut the travel time down to months, allowing the crew to stay awake the whole time.
- Small, Secluded World: The Sleeper Ship is the sole setting for long chunks of time, although it does encounter other ships and eventually reach another planet.
- Smart People Wear Glasses: Angus and Alicia, two of the smartest people aboard the ship, both wear spectacles most of the time.
- Soap Opera Disease: Everything we are told about Klampkins' disease helps it provide maximum amount of dramatic tension. It is incurable and terminal, yet someone who has it can appear perfectly fine for months and then suddenly pass out or have a heart attack. The disease was the unintended side effect of an effort to counter Earth's environmental destruction by William Trust, which gives rise to highly divisive opinions about him. For the actual mechanisms of how it develops or how it causes these symptoms, all we get is a vague mention of person having specific "toxins" in their blood because of Klampkins. A cure is discovered during the first season which of course requires an extremely rare and exotic key ingredient. When the treatment is found; it is a complete cure that takes effect nearly instantly - while there is mention of Brice having liver damage, he is up and walking within a few hours of being nearly dead.
- Solar Sail: The arks have solar sails for a secondary propulsion method inside a solar system, meant to be used upon arrival at their destination.
- Spaceship Slingshot Stunt: A slingshot maneuver is used in episode 6 to catapult the ship to a potential fuel source that they can't reach on their current reserves. Complications arise when one of the solar sails used to provide additional thrust is damaged by a solar flare, causing them to be drawn into the star's gravity well.
- Straight Gay: Strickland, the ship's new head of security, is a gay man with a husband and a daughter back on Earth, but you wouldn't know this to look at him, as he's so ridiculously stoic and withdrawn. Cat is genuinely shocked when he mentions having a husband, missing the far more important detail that he's been hallucinating said husband.Strickland: Everything I just said, and that's your takeaway?
- Suddenly Shouting: During one of their arguments, Eva suddenly starts shouting in Serbian, while Brice starts shouting back in Scots English.
- Take Up My Sword:
- Trent is part of a conspiracy involving Ark 1, but finds himself quite unfortunately the only surviving member of said conspiracy and in need of allies. In desperation, he chooses to entrust Lane with the knowledge that William Trust is hidden on the ark before sacrificing himself, as he could no longer look after Trust once he was found responsible for "Jasper's" murder. Lane later trusts Cat with the secret, and is warned not to share it because many on the ship would just as likely kill Trust for such as a betrayal.
- In the penultimate episode of season one, an ailing Brice names Felix as the new Captain on the off-chance that he dies and the mission to retrieve Garnet fails.
- Talking to Plants: Angus likes to talk to his crops when he thinks no one is looking. He's even named some of them.
- Teen Genius:
- Alicia Nevins is only 19 years old, but has four degrees in advanced sciences. When Brice realizes how smart she is, he immediately promotes her to head of life support, making her one of the key members of crew.
- While he doesn't have as many degrees as Alicia does, Angus engineered a soil that can grow crops in space while still in his teens, and plants with highly accelerated growth that function with minimal resources.
- There Are No Adults: In a downplayed variation, the deaths of the command staff and the rest of the senior crew members means there are no older adults. While the characters' ages are not stated, the actors playing the oldest survivors are in their mid-30s. The lack of more experienced and hence older personnel is one of the most immediate problems. Eventually changes with the introduction of the Trusts and survivors from the other Arks.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: Episode 4 has the crew start experiencing vivid hallucinations. Some are obviously hallucinations but others are more convincing, like Lane having visions of Brice egging him on to betray Garnet until the real Brice gets his attention.
- Thrown Out the Airlock:
- Suggested as punishment for the fake Jasper.
- Discussed when Garnet says she should space Lane for revealing she's a clone to usurp leadership, but she instead formally appoints him as her Number Two to appease his ego because he is good at his job when he isn't being a problem.
- Helena wants to do this to Alicia after seizing control of the ship, but she's deposed in part because she's willing to do so.
- This happens to the assault team from Ark 15 after they prove hostile. Garnet opens the secondary airlock door after they breach the main airlock in the shuttle docking bay.
- Tidally Locked Planet: Proxima b is, as described by Trust, an "eyeball planet" that doesn't spin on its own axis. He developed devices to spin such a planet up to a normal rotation, which Maddox tries to get him to finish for her.
- Time Crash: The first test of the FTL causes time inside the bubble to fracture, causing everyone within to randomly jump forward and backward in time. Shutting it off is complicated by the fact that they have trouble figuring out how to work toward the goal when they can't work in stable time.
- Time Skip: Episode 6 skips ahead "3.2 Earth months", after everyone has settled into a routine and just in time for a fuel crisis.
- Unobtanium: The ship was damaged by a previously undiscovered crystalline element that is dubbed "Aliciaminium" after Alicia. It dissolves non-organic matter on contact while leaving organic matter unharmed, and is neutralized by oxygen. It comes from Ark 15, which fires it as a weapon against the other arks.
- Varying Competency Alibi: When Strickland accuses Eva of murdering the imposter Jasper by slashing his throat, being one of the few that had the ability to do so undetected, she shoves Strickland into a closet, turns off the oxygen, and then turns it back on before he suffocates, demonstrating that she could have killed Jasper and made it appear to be an accident. She also points out the stupidity of disposing of the murder weapon in the pipes, as she of all people knows that it would clog up the plumbing and thus someone would find it. Strickland concedes the point.
- Villainous BSoD: In "Hoping for Forever", Cat suffers a near-complete breakdown after Helena Trust is killed and William Trust is taken hostage, as she realizes that there's possibly nobody left in the entire universe who even likes her and a significant number of people who hate her for her role in the mutiny. Her self-loathing cripples her so badly that Garnet decides to just confine her to quarters, because she has no remaining motive to harm anyone else.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist:
- In the pilot, the killer really believes that killing the fake Jasper was necessary to save the ship and by extension, humanity.
- In "The Painful Way", Eva and Jelena both join the mutiny for altruistic reasons — Eva fears that Brice will die before the ship reaches Ross-128, while Jelena believes that Felix's hatred of Helena was compromising his judgment and causing him to back Garnet's unproven plan out of spite. When it becomes clear that the Trusts care more about their own power than the lives of the crew, they defect back to Garnet's side. It's because of this that Garnet is willing to cut them a break when all the others are locked up.
- Wham Episode:
- Episode 5 reveals that William Trust and his wife were secretly in stasis aboard Ark 1, known only to a few die-hard believers. When Trent sacrifices himself to save the ship, he passes this knowledge on to Lane because everyone else who knew is dead.
- Episode 7: Kelly, the Sole Survivor of Ark 3, reveals that Earth's biosphere has collapsed since Ark 1 left, meaning that the arks may be all that's left of humanity. Ark 15 is revealed to be the source of the substance that attacked Ark 1 and Ark 3, intentionally using it on them as a weapon. When Lane revives Trust in the middle of a crisis, he learns in the following episode that his wife Helena is responsible for it, as their company was being taken over by Maddox and she wanted to rule the colony.
- Wham Line: The final line of episode 7, from William Trust: "Where the hell am I, and why?"
- Wham Shot:
- When scouting for a fuel source and a potential concentration of Aliciaminium, Eva and Brice discover that it is not on a planetoid as they thought: it's Ark 3 orbiting said planetoid.
- When reconstructing Ark 3's camera footage, Angus and Alicia learn that Ark 15 is responsible for the attacks on both it and Ark 1.
- Kelly has her wrist device repaired by a mechanic, and the screen boots up to read Ark 15, revealing that she's actually a spy for them.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Garnet and Brice are understandably pissed when Lane is revealed to have concealed Trust's presence on the ship, and Garnet has him relieved of duty for it.
- Who Murdered the Asshole: Malcolm Perry, the imposter who stole Jasper Dades's identity to get onto Ark 1, is found dead with his throat slashed in custody at the end of the pilot, leaving us with any number of suspects who might have wanted to take the law into their own hands given that his actions led to others' deaths (especially people like Eva who were close to the late crewmembers), and the audience also knows that he tried to hold something over Garnet shortly before dying. The murderer is actually Trent, someone who seemingly had no motive to kill him - until we learn that Perry / fake Jasper knew about Trent's involvement in hiding the Trusts onboard the starship.
- Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: The cure to Klampkins turns out to be live spiders; specifically, their venom is part of the cure, and there's no way to extract and process it without destroying the enzyme in the venom. Naturally, Brice isn't happy to learn he'll have to stick his arm into a spider habitat to get the needed dose.
- Wrench Wench: Eva, who manages everything from spacesuits to water recyclers to the ship's nuclear-powered engines.
- Wrong Line of Work: Cat Brandice, the ship's de facto counselor, is actually just a glorified influencer and not a particularly nice one at that, but Garnet assigns her to deal with the crew's mental health problems after she manages to talk Eva out of her depression so that she can return to work.
- You Are in Command Now:
- Garnet, Lane, and Brice were the lowest-ranked members of the command staff, and the only ones not cryo-sleeping in the command module when the disaster hit the ship, instead being with the rest of the crew. Thus, they're the only officers to survive, taking over leadership of the ship by default. There was a higher-ranking officer with them, but she was killed when debris landed on her pod.
- As the senior tech alive, Eva becomes the new chief engineer.
- In "Two by Two", Garnet is incapacitated after being burned by solar exposure, leaving Lane in charge for a brief period.
- Episodes 10 and 11 have this happen in rapid succession. Garnet goes on a rescue mission, ceding command to Brice for the duration. Brice is then medically incapacitated, in turn placing Strickland in command until either he or Garnet can take over. Garnet then comes back.
