Create a free profile to get unlimited access to exclusive videos, sweepstakes, and more!
The Ark Crew May Have Finally Found a New Planet to Call Home — But There's a Catch
There’s blackmail afoot as the Ark One enters uncharted sci-fi espionage territory.
After sailing through space for almost two full seasons, it doesn’t seem real that The Ark might actually be ready to reach its ultimate destination. But after this week’s newest episode (and just one more in Season 2 left to go!), there the Ark One is, humanity’s colonizing savior vessel, hovering all snugly inside a new home solar system to make final landing preparations for the welcoming, hospitable planet of Trappist 1D.
Of course, things can’t be quite so simple as cruising straight down to the surface and allowing the ship’s human cargo to tumble out and taste the first breaths of their new native air. Nope, in this week’s Season 2, Episode 11, “It Will Be Over Soon,” a mishap — and a mystery — put an ocean of distance between the Ark One crew and the final few miles of their long and arduous space journey. In the process, it all reveals a hidden new enemy who seems to have an eerily omniscient power to manipulate things from behind the scenes.
Who got blackmailed on this week's episode of SYFY's The Ark ?
Almost every new episode of The Ark this season has put a different key character front and center, and the honor this week falls to Felix Strickland (Pavle Jerinić), the Ark One’s unfailingly loyal and by-the-book security chief.
Just as Cpt. Sharon Garnet (Christie Burke) starts issuing final preparation orders for the crew to chart their descent to the Trappist planet’s surface, there’s a minor steam explosion down on the engineering deck. It’s an odd mishap that sends two bystanders to the med bay with skin burns: Maija Lync (played by Olivera Perunicic as one of the handful of disgruntled defectors who fled the troubled Ark 15 last season) and Alicia Nevins (Stacey Read) — who, as luck would have it, was only at the scene as a last-minute stand-in for resident Ark One design brainiac William Trust (Paul Murray).
Alicia ends up in better shape than Maija, whose burns are severe enough to actually be life-threatening. But it’s Felix who’s the first to get the inside tip on the accident’s real intrigue. While he’s honing his samurai sword skills alone in his room, an unfamiliar (and unfriendly) voice chimes through on his personal comms device and drops an enormous, heart-stopping bombshell: Felix’s long-lost daughter is alive and well — and she’s being held hostage by the very same baddie who’s about to set Felix on a course of Ark One disruption under the blackmailing threat of harming her if Felix doesn’t do exactly as he’s told.
That sets the stage for an ingenious game of reluctantly silent sabotage, and The Ark couldn’t have picked a better target to put in such an impossible position than Felix — perhaps the ship’s most unflinchingly moral champion of truth, justice, and general law and order. He even tries to get away with disobeying his blackmailer’s orders, but quickly discovers that it’s simply no use: Whoever’s behind this treachery, they can monitor Felix's every move in real time.
Conscientious to a fault, it pains Felix like crazy to skulk about the ship switching circuits, hacking airlocks, and just carrying out general subterfuge — all while keeping the whole thing a secret from Garnet and the gang. But with his daughter’s life on the line, Felix dutifully does as he’s commanded, all while searching desperately for a way to turn the tables on his distant, sinister string-puller.
Is Felix’s daughter really alive on The Ark?
Fans who’ve been following The Ark from the start know that Felix’s young daughter (and his separation from her) has served as the offscreen myth that powers all of his motivations. First believed to be dead and, later, revealed to be alive but missing, she’s probably the only thing a straight-laced guy like Felix ever would bend the rules for.
Thankfully, Felix manages to evade his blackmailer’s seemingly constant surveillance, devising through Morse code, clever camera dodging, and some seriously meaningful hard stares at Garnet as a way to send hidden SOS signals to the rest of his team that something’s seriously amiss on the Ark One. After all, he’s not just trying to save his daughter’s life, he also wants to find out who’s holding her captive and mount an all-out effort to stop them.
Crafting all the clever cat-and-mouse espionage that plays out across this week’s episode was a creative hoot, as episode writer India Sage Wilson confided on this week’s After the Ark aftershow webcast. “I think it is a very heist-inspired kind of construction, and it has a little of a much-more-serious Ocean’s Eleven energy to it — and that was really, really fun to write,” she said. “Just to kind of plant of these seeds, and you don’t see how it’s going to come together — and then explaining [everything] on the ‘B’ side…I had so much fun with that!”
And, yes, it does seem that Catherine, Felix’s daughter, is really, truly alive. Allowed by her captor to converse with her father just long enough to persuade Felix into action, she sails through Felix’s truth check (what was her favorite bedtime story? — Pinocchio!), so it’s definitely someone’s young voice we’re hearing as the tears well up in Felix’s eyes. Thanks to some last-minute trickery that convinces the blackmailing bad guy that Felix lived up to his orders (which even include faking his own space-death!), she presumably survives the episode’s wild events to tease a possible daddy-daughter reunion in the upcoming Season 2 finale.
How does Felix turn the tables on his blackmailer on The Ark?
It’s only in the episode’s final few moments that viewers (not to mention the crew themselves) find out just why someone tried to blackmail Felix in the first place. Whoever the mysterious blackmailer is, they want William Trust dead on the Ark One, and they might even have gotten their wish — if only Trust had been on duty during that weird steam explosion that injured Maija and Alicia (who, let’s remember, was simply filling in for Trust when it happened).
As it turns out, Felix isn’t the only one aboard the ship who’s been targeted by blackmail: Maija was actually roped into the scheme first, with the blackmailer using her hostage brother as collateral. But after Trust doesn’t show up for his shift near the exploding reactor — and with Maija now lying unconscious in the med bay — Felix becomes the bad guy’s plan B to to ensure that Trust indeed meets his maker.
Since the very beginning, The Ark has been diligent in respecting its main characters’ smarts and well-tuned intuition, and this is the episode where everyone gets to make full use of their savvy sixth sense all at the same time. After Garnet gets wise to the SOS finger-taps Felix has been sending in their face-to-face conversations, the gang hatches a plan to dodge the ship’s surveillance system and eventually huddles in an unmonitored equipment room where they can talk through their limited options.
What they come up with is pretty inspired stuff for a one-hour science fiction show, and the best way to appreciate it is simply to watch “It Will Be Over Soon” for yourself. But it involves an old-school mono cassette tape recorder, a ton of trust among a team who really doesn’t have a full grasp of what’s happening, and even more faith in William Trust himself — a guy who never realizes, until long after it’s too late to act, that he’s been targeted as the victim.
“It took a lot of brainstorming to see how we should give these nuanced little notes for people to see and to realize what’s going on,” Jerinić (who plays Felix) told After the Ark, explaining that he wanted all the episode’s espionage breadcrumbs to feel believable for viewers: “I hate things being on the nose! I love to hide them, to be like, giving small pebbles [that lead] to the ‘big’ thing. So it was really tricky. It was really tricky to make the episode work.”
Will Felix finally be reunited with his daughter? And will the Ark One crew at last set foot on a planet they can claim as humanity’s new home? It all comes down to next week’s big finish.
Tune in to SYFY Wednesday, Oct. 2 at 10 p.m. ET to catch the Season 2 finale of The Ark. To binge the full series, dial up Peacock here, where all of Season 1 (plus most of Season 2!) is now streaming.
