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queer_scribbling) wrote2023-02-17 01:45 am
queer_scribbling) wrote2023-02-17 01:45 am
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The Ark (Season 1)
Episode 3: Get Out and Push
You know how I said that so many things happening in the first episode felt like the show didn't trust the audience to remain engaged without piling more problems on top of the basic premise? Well, since the engines were shut down at the end of the second episode, this episode is focused on a space object that's on a collision course with Ark One. (Despite sending these people out into space, most of the time it's called an asteroid until Alicia realises that it's a comet with an ice tail [which means water could be extracted from it].)
Lieutenant Garnet informs the whole crew of this impending 'asteroid', which is supposed to strike in about six hours. A relatively small group of nameless lower rank folks decide to hold a 'the world is ending' party - complete with stolen drugs from the med bay - in the men's showers. [Since there's severe water rationing, no one's actually showering, and I think it was simply the largest room that wasn't in use for other things.] Garnet completely loses her cool and throws some dude against the wall and threatens him [and everyone else there] that anyone not following orders will be shoved out of the airlock [you know, killed].
Eva wasn't able to get the solar sails to deploy in order to power the engines and move the ship, and the shuttle is being fixed. Since it wasn't going to be used until people needed shuttled from the ship to the planet, techs had gone looking for some spare parts for other projects on Ark One. So, the Plan C is to blow a hole in the hull in the men's showers, so the change in pressure will move the ship out of the way of the 'asteroid'. This plan does end up working, but it's the only reason that anyone even went looking in this location and found the party. (The fixed shuttle does go on to be used to mine the comet and fill the water tanks.)
Lieutenant Garnet's takeaway from this 'world is ending' party is that she was wrong to share the news of the 'asteroid' with the whole crew, and in the future she shouldn't share news that may cause a panic. Quite frankly, I want to know why the writers seem so insistent on making this character annoying. (Technically, they're setting Garnet up to be the suspect in the murder case of the impersonator, as evidenced by a video of her killing someone in a similar manner in a bar back on Earth surfacing at the end of this episode. Unless the writers pull out an identical twin, she's clearly going to be a suspect.)
The sudden lack of a men's shower area also led to a man strolling into the shower room where women were enjoying no longer having water rationing, in a way that felt very 'wink wink, nudge nudge' to the audience. (The extent to which anyone outside of the participants knew that the explosion plan happened seems up in the air.) If that were a real scenario, there would have been an announcement to the entirety of the crew before half a room full of naked women had to deal with some guy walking in. If there were any sort of body obscuring measures, I imagine they wouldn't have even needed to have a men's and a women's area for showering in the first place. Or I dunno, schedule shifts.
[Granted, I do not have experience with communal showers. As someone who had trouble with "change into P.E./gym clothes in front of your peers" throughout school and was not thin or conventionally attractive for that experience, I do have a wee bit of baggage around this idea. I would also say that the 'wink wink, nudge nudge' aspect of a thin, attractive woman checking out the muscled, attractive man who walked in doesn't alleviate personal discomfort with surprise coed showers. Like, I do not want sexualised in this environment.]
You know how I said that so many things happening in the first episode felt like the show didn't trust the audience to remain engaged without piling more problems on top of the basic premise? Well, since the engines were shut down at the end of the second episode, this episode is focused on a space object that's on a collision course with Ark One. (Despite sending these people out into space, most of the time it's called an asteroid until Alicia realises that it's a comet with an ice tail [which means water could be extracted from it].)
Lieutenant Garnet informs the whole crew of this impending 'asteroid', which is supposed to strike in about six hours. A relatively small group of nameless lower rank folks decide to hold a 'the world is ending' party - complete with stolen drugs from the med bay - in the men's showers. [Since there's severe water rationing, no one's actually showering, and I think it was simply the largest room that wasn't in use for other things.] Garnet completely loses her cool and throws some dude against the wall and threatens him [and everyone else there] that anyone not following orders will be shoved out of the airlock [you know, killed].
Eva wasn't able to get the solar sails to deploy in order to power the engines and move the ship, and the shuttle is being fixed. Since it wasn't going to be used until people needed shuttled from the ship to the planet, techs had gone looking for some spare parts for other projects on Ark One. So, the Plan C is to blow a hole in the hull in the men's showers, so the change in pressure will move the ship out of the way of the 'asteroid'. This plan does end up working, but it's the only reason that anyone even went looking in this location and found the party. (The fixed shuttle does go on to be used to mine the comet and fill the water tanks.)
Lieutenant Garnet's takeaway from this 'world is ending' party is that she was wrong to share the news of the 'asteroid' with the whole crew, and in the future she shouldn't share news that may cause a panic. Quite frankly, I want to know why the writers seem so insistent on making this character annoying. (Technically, they're setting Garnet up to be the suspect in the murder case of the impersonator, as evidenced by a video of her killing someone in a similar manner in a bar back on Earth surfacing at the end of this episode. Unless the writers pull out an identical twin, she's clearly going to be a suspect.)
The sudden lack of a men's shower area also led to a man strolling into the shower room where women were enjoying no longer having water rationing, in a way that felt very 'wink wink, nudge nudge' to the audience. (The extent to which anyone outside of the participants knew that the explosion plan happened seems up in the air.) If that were a real scenario, there would have been an announcement to the entirety of the crew before half a room full of naked women had to deal with some guy walking in. If there were any sort of body obscuring measures, I imagine they wouldn't have even needed to have a men's and a women's area for showering in the first place. Or I dunno, schedule shifts.
[Granted, I do not have experience with communal showers. As someone who had trouble with "change into P.E./gym clothes in front of your peers" throughout school and was not thin or conventionally attractive for that experience, I do have a wee bit of baggage around this idea. I would also say that the 'wink wink, nudge nudge' aspect of a thin, attractive woman checking out the muscled, attractive man who walked in doesn't alleviate personal discomfort with surprise coed showers. Like, I do not want sexualised in this environment.]