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A Funeral, a Wedding (?!) and a New Captain on the Latest The Ark
It's Garnet (and Ian!) like you’ve never seen them before.
Things will never be the same on The Ark after one of the hit SYFY show’s main characters died deep into last week's Season 2 episode. Sure enough, “It Should Have Been You” — this week’s newest episode tasked with picking up the pieces — swerves in all kinds of interesting directions as Cpt. Sharon Garnet (Christie Burke) and the rest of the Ark One gang try to cope with their biggest loss yet.
Saying a somber farewell to the dearly departed Lt. Spencer Lane (Reece Ritchie) with a full-honors funeral to start the episode, Garnet and pretty much everyone else on board is seriously down in their feels as they look for ways to cope with Lane’s death. A fiercely loyal and brave crew mate ’til the end, Lane sacrificed himself in last week’s high-impact episode of The Ark to help broker peace between his home-team spaceship and the menacing Eastern Federation faction.
With Lane gone and everyone in an understandable funk, the crew tries to busy themselves this week by setting their minds on their main mission. The goal? To pilot their own Ark One vessel through faster-than-light (FTL) travel alongside their new Eastern Federation friends (thanks, Lane!), with the two ships set to rendezvous outside the Trappist planet system — the very place where what remains of Earth’s all-but-extinct humanity, seeking refuge out in space, will try to set down roots and start again.
Of course things get interesting right from the jump in this week’s surprisingly poignant episode. Garnet and recent crew addition Ian (the Lane-lookalike clone, also played by Ritchie, who joined the Ark One earlier this season) get isolated from the rest of the gang, leaving Lt. Brice (Richard Fleeshman) in charge of the ship — all while an unlikely space couple, meanwhile, takes a surprising detour down the long, strange path toward… marriage?
Coma buddies: How Garnet and Ian get trapped in time on The Ark
Things go sideways right from the top this week, after the Eastern Federation’s ship makes a successful FTL leap into hyperspace even as the Ark One can’t seem to kick its own pesky FTL drive into high gear. Emitting a scary blue flash, the glitchy FTL drive sparks a power surge and zaps lightning bolts into a trio of crew members, leaving Garnet, Ian, and Dr. Marsh (Jadran Malkovich) all lying unconscious and, as it turns out, in a deep coma from which none of the three can awake.
That’s not exactly how Garnet and her pair of comatose pals see things, though: From their point of view, they aren’t unconscious and lying as patients in the real Ark One’s med bay; they’ve simply been transported to an alternate version of the Ark One; a version totally empty of people (except for themselves) and completely cut off from communication with the rest of their crew mates — wherever, that is, that they’ve all suddenly and mysteriously vanished to.
As it turns out, an early tap-out by Marsh clues Garnet and Ian in on what must really be going on: Thanks to some offscreen Season 1 deviousness by Marsh’s former commander (the snaky Ark 15 captain Evelyn Maddox), Marsh has a secret brain implant that malfunctions as he lies comatose on the real Ark One, a mishap that yanks him wide awake and out of his coma and, at precisely the same time, also disappears him from Garnet and Ian’s alternate Ark One reality.
Left alone together as the only remaining people aboard their parallel Ark One, Garnet and Ian are flummoxed at Marsh’s sudden disappearance. But they put on their thinking caps and begin to speculate that something must’ve happened to the three of them over on the real Ark One. They remember the FTL flash but don’t remember being hit by its energy, filling in the missing pieces by theorizing that they indeed might be trapped inside a dream state even as their real selves lie passed out back on the Ark One.
Oh, and there’s also a giant wormhole — don't worry; it's only part of the dream! — looming right outside the main-deck window of their alt-reality spacecraft. Ian (who’s an engineer by training) suggests a connection between the trio’s coma-inducing mishap and their weird reemergence aboard an empty Ark One that’s floating somewhere on the far side of the universe. So he and Garnet — now the only ones left on their doppelgänger ship — make a pact to do whatever they can to “help” their friends aboard the real Ark One revive them from their presumed coma.
The Ark's dream logic: Does Garnet really fall in love, grow old… and die?!
Time passes way, way differently in Garnet and Ian’s shared dream state than it does on the waking side of their coma, a fact that this week’s episode nicely drives home with cross-cutting action that shows how days, weeks, and years seem to pass for the stranded couple while only hours transpire on the actual Ark One.
Along with the time shift, there’s also the matter of aging: In their alternate dream state, months and eventually years go by for Garnet and Ian while their real bodies are stretched out in the Ark One’s non-dreamy med bay. As mere hours pass in real life, viewers drop in on Garnet and Ian in decades-long chunks. At first we see a few tell-tale skin wrinkles; next we’re seeing some early signs of grey hair; and by the end of the episode, the dream versions of Garnet and Ian are positively elderly — complete with frazzled grey hair, convincingly deep wrinkles, and creases around eyes that have grown more wise with age.
Those eyes have also grown more affectionate, too. With no one but themselves for company, Garnet and Ian eventually fall in love — a neat story twist that gives Garnet, even if only in a dream, the chance to turn the page on her grief over tragically losing Lt. Lane. Ian and Lane are cloned copies of each other, after all — and even though Ian’s far more approachable and less high-strung than his fondly-remembered lab brother, he still bears tons of intrinsic “Lane” traits that pull Garnet ever closer during their long, dream-laced years of isolation.
As events play out, it becomes clear that what happens in dream world between Garnet and Ian won’t necessarily stay in dream world once things get back to normal. But how much will each of them remember? How much will they forget (or even suppress)? And just where is the line of identity, for Garnet, between Ian and Lane — two clones who enter her life bringing distinctly different gifts?
“Your brain says it was only a few hours… and your heart says it was all those years,” showrunner and executive producer Jonathan Glassner posited on this week’s After the Ark aftershow webcast. “Which one wins? We know which way Ian goes, but Garnet’s having a hard time with it. I want them to be together — but I’m not the viewer. I’m the writer!"
Wait — Did Garnet actually get married on The Ark?
There’s something sweetly quiet and endearing about the slow, certain way that dream-Garnet and dream-Ian fall in love while they’re each waiting to snap out of their real-life comas. In dream-land, they confess their growing love for one another and, yes, even stage an impromptu wedding (with Ian joking that he’ll have to start using Garnet’s last name — “seeing as I don’t have one,” he teases, as an organ-sourcing lab clone.)
But if the happily-wedded space couple is really, truly dreaming, isn’t it kind of odd how they’re both experiencing exactly the same dream? Back aboard the real Ark One, Marsh and his brain implant have an answer for that: For reasons no one can explain, the power surge that put the trio in a coma messed with something in his brain implant, and the only hope of waking up the real Garnet and Ian lies in looping Marsh’s now-extracted implant chip into both Garnet’s and Ian’s brain waves.
That’s only half of the solution, though, as the dream-state versions of Garnet and Ian realize that their synced-up experience means they’ll probably have to do something drastic — and do it together — to help the Ark One med staff pull them out of their real-life coma. Happily married and already well into old age, neither of them is especially excited about dying… but they realize that “dying” in their dream might just be the only way to trade their dream-state consciousness for a chance at waking up their actual bodies back on the real Ark One.
The episode’s closing moments bring a whirlwind of emotion, as the dream versions of Garnet and Ian share one last elderly embrace. “None of this is real,” Garnet reminds him, steeling both their nerves for what lies ahead, but it’s clear they’ve made some happy memories growing old together in dream-land: “It feels very real to me,” Ian whispers back, “and so special.”
Then the duo hop into their alt-Ark One’s airlock, determined to jettison themselves out into space and end their (by now) well-lived lives together. If the plan works, their dream selves will die — but they’ll be back to full consciousness on the real Ark One, even though neither has any idea how much time there has truly passed.
Sure enough — and with an assist from Marsh and his shared-network implant idea — Garnet and Ian both revive together back on the actual Ark One. And despite the years that’ve passed in dream-land, on the Ark One, they’ve only been comatose for 36 hours. But now that things are back to normal, how much of their dreamy decades do Garnet and Ian remember? There’s no definite answer — though as Garnet looks across her stretcher to find she’s instinctively grabbed on to Ian’s hand, she’s clearly been left with a lot to process: “Can we just not talk about it?” she begs.
Garnet ends the episode crying over a photo of Lane, quietly confessing “It should have been you,” as she grieves beyond his recent death and — perhaps — the memories she retains of spending an entire dream-lifetime happily married to his clone. Burke confided to After the Ark that this week’s episode is by far her favorite across both seasons: “We all just went into it being like, ‘Let’s just make something really beautiful!”
“…All of us kind of tapped into something, I think, that was quite personal in terms of losing things, and how you heal from death and grief — and that love really is the way through,” Burke explained. “It means a lot to me. I can’t believe I got to do that on SYFY and that Madeline [writer/producer Madeline Hendricks Lewen] wrote such an incredible episode... and then I got to be 80 — and that was weird!"
Other Happenings About The Ark
With only two Season 2 episodes left to go, The Ark this week yanks Garnet and Ian back from their coma just in time for the Ark One to fix its FTL drive (no blue lightning this time!) and join their new Eastern Federation pals — who even came back to check on them! — on the long space journey toward the Trappist planet system.
Along the way in this week’s episode, Alicia and Angus (Stacey Read and Ryan Adams) finally consummated their awkwardly geeky relationship, with Angus even getting pointers from Brice about how to up his amorous game in the sheets. What he lacks in the bedroom, though, Angus is more than making up for on the home-brewed bartending front: His newfound gift for whipping up cocktails out of bio-shelter distilled spirits might just be the social glue that holds entire friendships together.
Brice, meanwhile, is more than ready to hand control of the Ark One back to Garnet, after spending most of the episode stressed out and frantically micro-managing everyone at their tasks. Yet both he and William Trust (Paul Murray) seem to be maturing before our eyes: Brice takes to heart some friendly advice to let the crew just manage themselves, while Trust, for all his high-IQ snobbery, decides to come down from his intellectual power trip and actually lend the engineering crew a helpful hand.
Will the Ark One finally get back on track and make it to the Trappist system, where the team’s long-sought goal of establishing a human colony awaits? Tune in to SYFY Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET 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.
