Dean Devlin and Jonathan Glassner sat down with Digital Trends to discuss the season 1 finale of The Ark and tease what to expect in season 2.
Warning: This post contains spoilers from The Ark season 1 finale.
Proxima B has always been the destination for the survivors aboard Ark One, but the crew needs to find a new home after The Ark‘s explosive season 1 finale. In the final moments, Proxima B was deemed uninhabitable when it began to burn after Ark One started the planet’s rotational devices. Shortly after, Proxima B exploded, destroying any chance of becoming the new home for the human race.
Ark One survived the initial blast, but the ship could not avoid the aftershock, when it was hit by debris from the explosion. To make matters worse, the bridge was isolated from the rest of the ark, so the majority of the crew’s fate is unknown. The only confirmed survivors are Lt. Sharon Garnet (Maid’s Christie Burke), Lt. Spencer Lane (The Outpost’s Reece Ritchie), Lt. James Brice (The Sandman’s Richard Fleeshman), and Alicia Nevins (Aneni’s Stacey Read). The episode ends with the four crewmembers staring out the bridge at the neighboring Ark 15 as they await rescue.
To unpack the season 1 finale, creator/co-showrunner Dean Devlin (Independence Day) and co-showrunner Jonathan Glassner (Stargate SG-1) sat down with Digital Trends to discuss the action-packed episodes and tease what to expect in season 2.
Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Digital Trends: First of all, I want to say congrats on season 1 and the season 2 renewal.
Jonathan Glassner: Thank you.
Dean Devlin: We’ve been celebrating. [laughs]
It’s worthy of a celebration.
Glassner: Busy trying to start up season 2.
Was there a moment during the first season when you knew this show was starting to hit with the audience?
Devlin: It was very interesting because we started out huge, and then we lost a bunch of people. There was a bunch of people who said, “This show’s not for us.” But Syfy was very smart in the way they handled the show in that they allowed it to be on a variety of different platforms for people to discover it. And what ended up happening is that the community started to grow and then migrate back towards Syfy, where we ended up with an even bigger audience.
Again, I think this is a show not for everybody, but for the people who really like this kind of show, it fills a need. People like us wanted to write a love letter to the kind of science fiction shows that we loved growing up that you don’t really see anymore. And apparently, there was a big audience out there that wanted to see the same thing.
Looking online, it seems like the show has a tight-knit community with all the forums and recaps, and the reception from Twitter and Instagram.
Devlin: There are certain types of shows that people enjoy watching. But there’s another type of show — Star Trek was one of them, and Doctor Who is another one — where people feel like it’s their show. They have ownership of it, and that creates a different kind of fandom. That’s what’s happened with The Ark. They’re not just fans of the show; it’s their show.
Glassner: The characters are their buddies that come over once a week for dinner.
Devlin: It’s so much fun watching the episodes and the character arcs. We get a kick out of when [fans are] second-guessing where the show’s going and when they’re wrong. We go, “Oh. That was kind of an interesting idea. We should’ve thought it.” Other times, they’re spot-on. We’re going, “Oh wait till they find out that they were right.”
That has to be a little scary, thinking that some fan is doing this better than you.
Devlin Oh, you want that. That’s what you want. Fan fiction is one of the most beautiful things because it means you’ve inspired their imagination.
I want to get into some of the final moments of the episode. Proxima B is no more. It explodes.
Devlin: Proxima B gone. [laughs]
That should be the title of a recap.
Devlin: We should have named the episode Oops.
Was that always the plan on how to end season 1?
Glassner: Yeah. Not all the little teeny details of how we were going to do it, but we knew that we were going to get there, and it was going to be a disaster. That it [Proxima B] wasn’t what we thought. Along the way of working out the whole season, I did a little bit more research on the actual Proxima B. They’re getting more and more information about it as we get better telescopes and things.
