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It’s a Coup on The Ark! Who's Taking Over the Ship (And Why?)
Garnet’s good deeds come back to haunt the Ark One after saving the clones from their mysterious crash planet.
**SPOILER WARNING!! Major spoilers below for Season 2, Episode 8 of The Ark “We Don’t Kill Our Own”**
It’s a revolt on The Ark! Only this time, you can’t exactly call it a mutiny — more, let’s say, a case of humanitarian aid gone lethally wrong. Season 2 of SYFY's hit space series took a huge sideways turn in this week’s episode, “We Don’t Kill Our Own,” as Captain Sharon Garnet (Christie Burke) and the Ark One crew get seriously sidetracked by some ungrateful refugees — people, in fact, they’d only tried to save by rescuing them from a hostile planet just a few episodes back.
Garnet hardly has time to pick up the pieces after last week’s bombshell episode, which revealed trusted Ark One ally Eva (Tiana Upcheva) to have a hidden history with the evil Eastern Federation faction of spacefaring warmongers. As she agonizes in the aftermath over what to do with Eva, unconscious people start falling all over the Ark One… but what on Earth (or in space) could be behind it?
What happens in The Ark Season 2, Episode 8, "We Don't Kill Our Own"?
Eagle-eyed viewers might remember a brief scene in last week’s episode, when a handful of cloned refugees the Ark One had rescued from the planet Raynick-J sneaked into the ship’s med bay and began stealing a huge stash of pills. This week, we found out what they were really up to: The goal, it turns out, is to use the pills’ sedative effects to make an airborne concoction to dump into the Ark One’s air supply system to knock out everyone on board.
Led by a miscreant named Milos (Kieran Mortell), the rogue clones don protective masks and stand back as their devious handiwork takes effect throughout the Ark One. After almost everyone has fallen unconscious, the clones hoof it up to the command deck, where they drop the ship out of faster-than-light (FTL) travel and chart a new course for a planet they intend to colonize on their own clone terms (terms, unfortunately, that don’t involve leaving any of the Ark One crew alive).
Though they think they have the ship all to themselves, the clones never counted on Angus (Ryan Adams) and security chief Felix (Pavle Jerinić), who dodge the sedative’s effects by being lucky enough to hang out, when the powdery concoction goes airborne, inside the ship’s air-gapped bio-shelter. They also didn’t count on Kelly Fowler (Samantha Glassner), whose experimental nanite-infused blood and super-powered body augments render her completely immune to their home-brewed sleepy stuff.
Kelly vs. the clones: How The Ark survives a clone revolt
Garnet falls unconscious to the airborne knockout powder just like everybody else — but not before mustering enough of her strength to find Kelly’s remote augment controller and mash the button that switches all of Kelly’s powers on. With Kelly’s awesome skills fully activated, she punches her way to the med bay, reviving enough of the core crew to begin scheming up a response plan — all while dialing up Felix and Angus in the bio-shelter for some much-needed backup.
With Dr. Kabir (Shalini Peiris) and Dr. Marsh (Jadran Malkovich) both finally awake, their small gang hits on the idea of creating their own airborne antidote to wake up everyone throughout the entire ship. There’s a snag, though: The powdery stuff they’ll need to make the antidote go airborne is housed down in the bio-shelter (where Felix and Angus are), and getting it up to the med bay means fighting past an unknown number of hostile clones.
It’s wild to watch Alicia (Stacey Read) react as Kelly runs interference for the rest of the gang. Kelly’s body-augmented powers are seriously next-level, and as she slays her way through the ship’s corridors, Alicia can’t help but be frightfully grateful that Kelly — who’s definitely been a wild-card character in the past — has made up her mind to side with the Ark One’s good guys... this time, it seems, for good.
"Alicia and I are like, running around the ship, kicking booty and saving people!" Glassner shared during an inside-the-episode chat on this week's After the Ark aftershow webcast. Even amid the violence and mayhem, it's a bonding moment for Kelly, whose ice-cold upbringing has left her little opportunity to make real connections with the rest of the crew. "I loved that for Kelly, that she’s starting to. like, get to know new characters and build new relationships," Glassner explained. "I want her and Alicia to become friends so bad!”
After some gnarly fighting and more than a few close calls, the gang’s antidote seems finished and ready to dump into the ship’s air system, even as Lt. Brice (Richard Fleeshman) and maintenance sidekick Sasha (Miloš Cvetković) devise a daring scheme to throw the clones’ planetary path off course by firing off the engines inside one of the Ark One’s docked shuttles. The crazy thing is, none of the Ark One crew still has any idea why the clones have taken over their ship… or even if their counter-plan to take the Ark One back can succeed.
Why did the clones take over the Ark One?
The clones, meanwhile, have taken Garnet captive, forcing her awake and demanding the command codes that’ll let them enjoy full control of the ship for the long planetary journey ahead. Though viewers already sense what's really going on, Garnet’s the first person on the Ark One to be filled in on what the clones are really up to: Milos and his clone “cousins” (as he calls them) will do anything to fight their way to total freedom and establish a clone colony on their own private planet — even if it means leaving a few dead bodies in their wake. “Don’t worry — we don’t kill our own,” he assures Garnet (who has a separate cloned history of her own, back on Earth, as one of the Global Space Administration’s lab creations). Ominously, though, he makes no such promise for the rest of the Ark One’s human crew.
“We were experimented on, tortured, mined for parts by the GSA — and now you want us to put our trust in a GSA crew?” Milos taunts at Garnet. “…I'm grateful you helped us, truly. But we will never put our lives in someone else's hands again — especially not some GSA pawn!”
Yep, the clones are totally committed to win or at least to die trying. But time isn’t on their side, especially once Dr. Kabir’s antidote goes airborne and the whole ship’s sleeping crew comes to life. Garnet does her part too, escaping her bonds and slugging it out with Milos and his henchman on the bridge. She even gets some unexpected help from rogue refugee Ian (Reece Ritchie), the cloned genetic lookalike of Lt. Spencer Lane (also played by Ritchie), who’s just been waiting for the right time to reveal to the rest of his cloned “cousins” that he’s not about to be disloyal to the Ark One team that saved them all from certain death, way back when they were stranded on the radioactive surface of Raynick-J.
Thanks to some super-deft (and super-stabby) knife work from Garnet, Milos appears to meet his final demise as the ship falls back under the crew's full control. But even if his actions were wicked, Milos at least had his heart in the right place — sort of. After all, he and the rest of the rescued clones have seen some pretty sick stuff during their stifled lives of captivity at the hands of the GSA. He's "a character with a lot of PTSD as to what happened to these guys when they were created in the labs," Mortell explained to After the Ark of Milos' misguided motivations. "He’s coming into their world ready to fight. The gloves are off. Let’s go, let’s get some revenge!”
The Ark's new threat: The Eastern Federation
As this week’s episode comes to an end, the clones are subdued and control of the Ark One falls back to its rightful masters. Garnet and the gang get a well-earned moment to catch their breath, with Brice rushing to find Eva (who’s been sidelined for most of the episode) and confessing that he’d never abandon her — no matter what her checkered Eastern Federation past might mean. “Quite frankly, you could turn purple and it wouldn't change a thing,” Brice gushes to Eva, drawing out some genuine feel-good tears (and, at last, a welcome laugh) as the pair resumes their long-smoldering romance.
But in true Ark One fashion, that’s about as comfortable as things can get before the crew peeps out the window and spies a huge new problem looming on the ship's near horizon: There’s an absolutely enormous Eastern Federation vessel that’s entered their proximity, and it’s firing up a mean-looking, red-hot space cannon. Is this how the Ark One will finally come face to face with the frightening EF faction’s leaders? Or will Garnet and the crew even get the chance before being blasted into total oblivion?
Tune in to SYFY Wednesdays at 10/9c to watch each new Season 2 episode of The Ark. To catch up on the full series, dial up Peacock here, where all 12 Season 1 episodes are now streaming.
