Entertainment
The Worst Spaceship Of All Time Is On A New Sci-Fi Show
Spaceships are one of the best things about science fiction. When they’re done right, they become cultural icons, like the USS Enterprise.
It’s not about whether or not your ship is ugly. Sometimes ugly is exactly what you want. Ships like Serenity and the Millennium Falcon are awkward and ungainly looking, on purpose. Giving them that aesthetic makes them the lovable underdog you want to root for.
Sometimes, ugly and stupid is just ugly and stupid. When a fictional starship is designed badly, it’s usually because the ship in question is part of a sci-fi project that’s as bad as it is. And yet the worst sci-fi starship ever created is, somehow, not part of the worst piece of science fiction ever made. It’s on a kind of good, new science fiction series called The Ark.
The Ark has aired a second season and it’s not clear yet if the show will get a third. Produced by SyFy and streaming on the Peacock app, The Ark has been a modest success. With the end of shows like The Expanse, Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Discovery, and Star Trek: Lower Decks, it’s one of the only outer space sci-fi shows still being produced.
Before we take a look at the hideous exterior of this flying nightmare that is the show’s main setting, we need to explain why it exists.
The Premise Of The Ark
The Ark is set in a future where the Earth is rapidly becoming uninhabitable. The whys and hows of this aren’t all that important and aren’t fully explored by the show. What matters is that humans need a new home and so The Ark program was conceived to build ships that would take us somewhere else.
The series begins aboard Ark One, flying through space mid-mission. The crew is in stasis for the long voyage, there’s a disaster, and most of the command crew is killed. The survivors wake up, and the only people left are junior officers and civilians.
The show follows their journey to make it to their destination, with the odds stacked against them. It’s basically a redo of the now all but forgotten 1970’s sci-fi series The Starlost.
Ark One’s Terrible Design
If you see Ark One’s interiors, you may not think the ship is so bad. The interior design is generic, white, future-stuff.
Sure, the bridge looks like office computers sitting on foldable card tables, but it’s easy to overlook. Shot from the right angles, these problems aren’t so noticeable.
It’s on the exterior, that Ark One turns into a total disaster.
The aesthetic failures of this design could be dismissed as being due to an attempt at realism. That excuse won’t work, because that’s not what’s going on.
For instance, those spinning rings may look like they are there to create gravity with centrifugal force. They aren’t. This is where the stasis pods were kept. Once everyone wakes up, they never go in that section of the ship again. Instead the crew spends all its time in the parts of the ship without any gravity creating spin, and yet there seems to be plenty of gravity in them.
So why the spinning rings then? No idea, they’re just there and no one on the ship ever mentions them.
That’s the case with most of Ark One. Nothing about it serves any purpose. The Ark’s hero ship is a bunch of non-specific pieces jammed together for no reason. The people inside the ship don’t seem to know most of it, outside of the command area at the front and the very strange biodome on top exists.
The biodome, by the way, also makes no sense. When running out of food, the crew decides to grow crops in there, because it’s a big open space. Why was a big, empty, exposed, dome-shaped area on top of the ship? It’s never addressed.
The dome wasn’t originally designed for plant growing, since it’s not transparent to allow light through. Whoever designed the ship decided it needed a big, empty dome stuck on it, in a way that it was fully exposed and easily damaged.
It’s also unclear why the ship has stasis pods or why the entire crew was sleeping in them. Once the accident wakes them up, they seem to be able to activate the ship’s hyperspace drive and get almost anywhere in a few days or hours. In fact, along their journey, they encounter other identically ugly and stupid Arks, all of which have fully active and awake crews.
If there’s anything good about Ark One’s design, I guess it’s that it is, indeed, unforgettable. Usually, bad starship designs are bad because they’re boring or generic. Maybe the design team didn’t put much thought into it, but Ark One isn’t boring.
Ark One’s Failed Aesthetic Spreads Like A Virus
They also encounter another type of ship, which is ugly in a totally different way. It looks like a flying brick with weapons pods attached to it. At least it doesn’t have pointless, spinning rings.
This brick ship was created for season 2 of The Ark. By then the show’s producers should have known the ships they were designing were horrible and ugly. That knowledge aught to have prompted a drastic change in direction. Instead, they kept Ark One’s existing aesthetic and painted it on a space-faring cinder-block.
The Ark Shows Off Its Ship With Bad Music
So Ark One is stupid, ugly, and makes no sense. Normally, with a ship this bad, any standard science-fiction show would try to hide it. After all, maybe they had a budget problem and couldn’t help it. They did build the bridge out of folding tables, after all.
Nope.
The team on The Ark thinks this is a good ship. We know that because they created an opening credits sequence solely devoted to showing off the show’s horrible ship. And then, somehow, they managed to find music that sounds as terrible as Ark One looks.
Why Bad Design Is A Big Problem
Ark One’s design is a huge problem for the show and one that, at this point, is impossible to solve since nearly every moment of every story takes place aboard Ark One. That’s a shame because, as I said at the outset, aside from how stupid the ship is, The Ark is not that bad.
Give it a couple more seasons to dial things in and I could even see the show becoming great. But it’s nearly impossible to convince anyone to watch it if the first thing they see when they turn it on, looks this bad.
At least the shuttles aren’t terrible.
The Ark Does Other Things Right
I want to stop complaining here and give the team working on The Ark some praise. While I do think this is the worst ship design in the history of science fiction, bad music aside, the way the show’s team is using it, is fantastic.
Ark One is always well-lit, so it’s easy to see. No cheat shadows to hide bad CGI. Space shots are plentiful and well-framed.
The Ark does a great job of showing the audience what’s going on both inside and outside the ship. The show is particularly good at using exterior establishing shots to focus the audience on where the action is happening inside the ship. Much of the show’s direction, from episode to episode, is top-notch.
You shouldn’t fault their special effects team for Ark One’s problems. They’re doing the best work they could possibly do, in a situation where they’re saddled with such a terrible design. It’s Ark One’s design that’s the problem, not the show’s execution.
It makes this problem more frustrating. If the ship had been good, the way they were using it could have resulted in some of the best sci-fi space scenes ever shown on television.
What Went Wrong? The Ship’s Designer Speaks
Wishes won’t fix it though, and the ship isn’t good. It wasn’t good from the moment someone first drew it out on a piece of paper. So, what really went wrong here?
The ship was designed by Randal Groves, who gave some interviews, seemingly unaware he’d created an embarrassment. Groves claims the design was the result of an attempt at scientific accuracy, apparently unaware that nothing about this ship is accurate.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like the original plan for the show was to have parts of the ship where the crew is weightless. However, when it came time to shoot, they didn’t have the budget to actually do that, so The Ark nixed it and went with artificial gravity all over the ship.
Unfortunately, they also didn’t have the budget to update the ship to fit their new, more budget-friendly scripts. That could explain why Ark One makes no sense, but it doesn’t explain why it’s ugly.
Groves says he went deep, looking at films like Star Wars, Silent Running and The Black Hole for a vibe check on what this future world might look like. I don’t see any Star Wars in it, but Silent Running makes sense as a reference. That movie’s ship is also a contender for the ugliest sci-fi monstrosity.
Groves says they also aimed to mix the “clean aesthetic” of Space X’s ships and gear, along with marine design cues. So it’s Elon Musk’s fault?
Give The Ark A Chance
How The Ark made it all the way to television with a hero ship this dumb and ugly, will likely always be something of a mystery. Do your best to ignore it and watch the show anyway. Because, really, The Ark is sort of good.
In an era with extremely limited new space sci-fi options on television, it’s worth supporting, even if the ship is dumb and ugly.
Entertainment
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Entertainment
Star Trek’s First Broadcast Episode Was Very Carefully Chosen, Because It Was Boring
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
These days, Star Trek is a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. But during the development of The Original Series, there was anxiety that the general public wouldn’t really understand Gene Roddenberry’s mashing up Western tropes with a sci-fi setting. Making matters worse was that the original pilot, “The Cage,” had been rejected by NBC for being too brainy. Fortunately, Roddenberry got a chance to shoot another pilot, one which impressed the network enough to order an entire season worth of episodes.
Several episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series had already been shot when the time came for this new show to make its broadcast premiere. The first episode that the general public saw was “The Man Trap,” which featured a shapeshifting monster that was revealed to be an alien salt vampire. This good-but-not-great episode was an odd choice, and it was one that the cast and crew hated. As it turns out, though, this episode was very carefully selected by executives because it served as an inoffensive, relatively straightforward encapsulation of everything Star Trek had to offer.
It’s A Trap!
Most of the information we have about why “The Man Trap” was selected as Star Trek’s first episode comes from the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. Within this impressive reference tome, Robert H. Justman and Herbert F. Solow revealed something surprising: NBC had several other episodes to choose from for the premiere, including “The Corbomite Maneuver,” “Charlie X,” “Mudd’s Women,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and “The Naked Time.” All of them had already been shot and were mostly finished, so it was just a matter of figuring out which episode would serve as the best introduction to Star Trek, a heretofore unknown sci-fi series.
“The Man Trap” won out, mostly because the powers that be worried that other episodes would be off-putting to general audiences in some very specific ways. For example, they worried that audiences would find “Charlie X” a story that was “too gentle” because it focused on an adolescent with special powers. This was probably the right call, in retrospect: when Variety gave a negative review of “The Man Trap” (an episode chosen, in part, because of its relative maturity), they declared that Star Trek: The Original Series was “better suited to the Saturday morning kidvid bloc” (ouch!).
A Monster Hit Of An Episode
“The Corbomite Maneuver” was a great potential choice, but this episode’s impressive special effects were still in post-production, and almost all of its action took place on the ship. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” really outlined the premise of the new show, but it was deemed “expository” for general audiences expecting more action and danger. Justman thought “The Naked Time” was a killer introduction to the crew’s personalities, but the network passed, presumably because of how over-the-top (half-naked, swashbuckling Sulu? Oh, my!) that episode gets. “Mudd’s Women,” meanwhile, was deemed too offensive because the plot involved literally selling women to miners.
Through this process of elimination, executives decided that “The Man Trap” was the best intro to Star Trek. It had cool scenes on both the Enterprise and a distant outpost (a strange new world) and featured a straightforward action plot you didn’t have to be a sci-fi aficionado to understand. Finally, it was all about finding and defeating a creepy monster, which offered thrills to audiences of all ages. The network’s choice paid off, and Star Trek: The Original Series became the most popular sci-fi show in television history, even though the cast (including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy) thought “The Man Trap” was the worst possible episode they could have chosen.
All of this is a keen reminder of how much thought and work went into putting Star Trek’s best foot forward. It might be a reminder that Paramount’s current upper leadership needs, as Starfleet Academy hit the ground running with the worst episodes of Season 1. The show got better after that, but it didn’t matter because the prospective audience had already been driven away. As it turns out, today’s execs need to learn something that the network execs of the ‘60s had learned very well: series succeed when you give the audience what they want to see and not what you want to show!
Entertainment
How A Fantasy Box Office Bomb Lost $200 Million In Theaters, And Suddenly Became A Streaming Hit
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
For the last decade as streaming has taken off in homes around the world, it’s become possible for films that lost historical amounts of money in theaters to find success, even if it might be the post-Mystery Science Theater 3000 trend of “so bad it’s good.” That’s why a massive flop, for example say, Morbius, and films that slightly missed the mark like The Fall Guy can turn it around and become a streaming success.
What’s even more impressive is the amazing turnaround of 2013’s Jack the Giant Slayer, which lost Legendary Pictures an alleged $200 million, only to end up topping streaming charts in 2025.
The Classic Fairy Tale With A Twist
Everyone knows the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, the classic fairy tale about selling a horse for magic beans and climbing a beanstalk to find a giant living in the clouds. It’s simple, contains multiple morals, and can be easily adjusted to turn Jack into the villain, but Jack the Giant Slayer instead asks, “What if there was no moral, and instead of one giant, there was an entire army of evil giants?” The movie is the classic story, as you’ve never seen it before, and it almost works.
Nicholas Hoult plays Jack, the young man who finds himself trading his horse to a monk in exchange for beans that he can’t allow to get wet, ever. Like the rules in Gremlins, it’s not long before Jack accidentally gets the beans wet and a beanstalk grows under his house with the princess, Isabell (Eleanor Tomlinson), trapped inside as it grows into the sky. All the king’s men gather to rescue the princess, including Lord Roderick (Stanley Tucci), who, thankfully, Jack the Giant Slayer makes obvious is very evil, very quickly.
It’s up to Jack, Isabell, and the loyal Knight, Elmont (Ewan McGregor) to save the kingdom and stop the invasion of giants led by Roderick and the giant two-headed General Fallon (Bill Nighy). If there’s one thing Jack the Giant Slayer does better than every other adaptation, it’s the third act featuring a full-blown war between humans and giants, with a touch of humor and absurdity. Watching a giant toss a windmill like the glaive from Krull is the perfect amount of off-beat to distract from a surprising amount of body horror in both the giant’s designs and Fallon’s ultimate fate.
A Movie For No One
Jack the Giant Slayer looks too good, and the star-studded cast is having way too much fun for it to be a truly bad movie. The problem is that the pacing is off: it takes a little too long to get to the good stuff, then it feels a little too rushed, and though it is a fun adventure, it’s also, like the source material, simplistic. It’s not like the movie wasn’t watched in theaters; it made $197 million worldwide, which would be a great haul except it cost $185 million to make, and that’s not including the extensive marketing campaign.
The push and pull of director Bryan Singer’s vision of a dark take on the fable, complete with actual people-eating on screen, and the sanitized version that hit theaters, which was still too dark for children, since the film is surprisingly rated PG-13, meant it ended up being a film for no one. The Rotten Tomatoes ratings, of 52 percent from critics and 55 percent from the audience, are proof that the final product is not great, but not bad; it’s a movie that will keep you watching for a few hours and then leave no lasting impression. These days, Lionsgate and Sony wish they’d release a movie that is that well-received, as even Jack the Giant Slayer looks like a masterpiece compared to Borderlands or Kraven the Hunter.
Streaming is the perfect home for Jack the Giant Slayer, and 10 years later, it no longer matters that the movie lost hundreds of millions in theaters. It finally gets to stand on its own as a fun, if unremarkable, fantasy adventure.
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Angels activate OF/DH Jorge Soler from four-game suspension
