Power struggles both on and off the ship lead to a disaster that could see everyone on board die of suffocation.
It's the final night of ASCENSION and the show finally comes alive, partly because the everyone is double-crossing everyone, nobody is quite who they appear to be and nothing is quite what it seems. It's all still a bunch of nonsense, but at least now it is entertaining nonsense.
The story still has too many strands vying for attention, the most interesting of which is the investigator breaking out the ship's escapee and going on the run to reveal everything via the internet. The fact is that the shadowy group running all this haven't baulked at killing people for the sake of the project to this point (in fact, it seems to be their only solution to any problem), so why is Stokes even still alive. His deranged state make him an obvious threat to the personnel and he would have been taken care of with a needle of something long before the point of this final episode's events.
Gil Bellows gets to lose the smugness that has infused the character of project leader Enzmann to this point, being deposed and taken out to be shot in a corn field. This just means he switches to a new register - desperate - and sticks to that. The acting has been one of the major flaws of the show to date and that continues in this final episode, though the fact that there is so much more going on serves to disguise that fact.
Christa's emergence as the show's FIRESTARTER, a young girl with immensely destructive talents that she cannot hope to control, takes matters to another level, but doesn't jibe with the rest of what's happening. If she is so important and if the rest of the crew don't matter a damn when compared with her, why is only one man sent aboard to get her?
ASCENSION doesn't have a conclusion because it clearly believes that it has done enough to get a second season. If that doesn't prove to be the case, then we won't be mourning its passing.
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