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The Ark Creators Talk Season 2 Finale, [REDACTED]'s Shocking Death & What's Next
A new home planet, a new mystery in space… and signs of intelligent alien life?!
**SPOILER WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS LIE AHEAD FOR "FORTUNATE," THE SEASON 2 FINALE OF SYFY'S THE ARK!**
Just as Season 2 of The Ark comes to its pulse-pounding close, the crew of the hit SYFY series’ savior vessel finally reaches the place they’ve been looking for ever since fleeing their dying Earth. It’s a huge moment; one the Ark One (and we viewers) have long been looking toward: After two seasons of near-death close calls in outer space, the gang at last arrives at the Trappist-1B planet where all of humanity — just maybe — can hang all its hopes for the future.
Yep, Cpt. Sharon Garnet (Christie Burke) and the rest of the Ark One crew are leaving the ship’s cramped corridors behind to plant their feet on friendly terra firma in “Fortunate,” the meaning-imbued episode title for the science fiction series’ Season 2 finale. But they hardly have time to find signs of a happy and flourishing human colony on the planet’s hospitable surface… before sensing that something seems ominously, creepily amiss.
Who died in the Season 2 finale of The Ark (and who killed them?!)
The Ark’s Season 2 finale is a whirlwind of drama and emotion — complete with long-awaited reunions (like the one between stoic security chief Felix, played by Pavle Jerinić, and his young daughter Catherine), plus tons of surprise goodbyes (as the Ark One’s tight-knit crew begins to go separate ways in the episode’s closing moments). Somewhere in the middle, there’s room for one whopper of a satisfying character kill-off, as persistent series villain Evelyn Maddox (Jelena Stupljanin) meets her demise at the hands of the very daughter she’d raised to be her own personal tech-augmented assassin.
After kidnapping Felix’s child and stealing away on a shuttle to rendezvous with a mysterious off-screen ally, Evelyn — who’s somehow managed to create a world’s worth of trouble down on Trappist — tries one last time to manipulate Kelly Fowler (Samantha Glassner), the conflicted daughter she’s been preening for cyborg glory all throughout the show’s two peril-infused seasons. Amid all of Evelyn’s smooth talk, though, she probably shouldn’t have pulled a poorly-concealed knife on her offspring: “You wanted to build a killing machine,” says Kelly as she uses her mother’s superhuman augments to effortlessly snap Eveyln’s neck. “Congratulations.”
It’s a shocking moment in a plot-dense episode that’s just brimming with fast-moving sci-fi events. Almost every single Ark One crew member ends up a victim of Maddox’s scheme to use chip implants — sneakily administered via subdermal injection as part of the planet’s medical intake process — to take control of every living human in the colony. But thanks to plucky clone Ian (Reece Ritchie) and a ragtag team of Ark One resistors, Evelyn’s scheme to put humanity’s last hope fully under her own personal brainwashing spell is dashed at the last moment... and all while Maddox’s daughter puts the finishing touches on Maddox herself.
“There's an old saying in script writing that, if you take out the gun, you'd better use it at some point,” series co-showrunner and executive producer Jonathan Glassner — who also happens to be the real-life father of Kelly actor Samantha Glassner — shared with SYFY WIRE.
“[Kelly] said in… the first episode of the season, ‘If I see you again, I'm gonna kill you.’ And the challenge for us was, as we went through the story, we realized that she's kind of growing up and coming to realize that her mom turned her into this monster — and she doesn't want to be that monster anymore. To kill [Evelyn] would make her a monster. So she does everything she can to not have to kill her. But we had to, you know! She had to pull that trigger eventually.”
Trappist-1B: The Ark finds its planet to call home
Aside from a brief planetary-rescue flyby earlier this season, The Ark has spun an amazing amount of sci-fi story lore mostly from within the tight confines of the Ark One itself. Sure, it’s a big ship with plenty of fascinating spaces, but the crew was clearly ready to take a stroll outside those sterile quarters, artificial lighting, and life support for something more expansive and, well, natural.
That’s just what Trappist-1B turns out to be: a planet similar enough to Earth to let people walk and breathe freely, all while they sort out the first steps needed to establish a human colony that's built to last. In panoramic vistas and in close-ups, Trappist is a beautiful place, complete with lush vegetation, signs of small animal life, and — most importantly — plenty of water. But it’s still brand-new to the 1,256 colonists who’re just beginning to test its hospitable limits, and no one yet dares to venture beyond the colony’s sanitized containment zone and into the wild without suiting up in sturdy protective gear.
As the episode’s tantalizing final moments tease, arriving at Trappist is really a way for The Ark as a series to itself “arrive” at its own crucial story moment.
“I think, to some degree, Jonathan and I had talked about this a long time ago,” series creator and executive producer Dean Devlin explained to SYFY WIRE. “We said, ‘What if all of Season 1 and all of Season 2 was one big long pilot to set up what this series is really about?' And that's kind of where we end up at the end of this, is actually ‘launching’ the series of The Ark as a search-and-rescue mission. And that suddenly opens the door for all kinds of adventures; all kinds of different ways of telling the story.”
That big Season 2 cliffhanger: How The Ark forges new paths for the future
Whatever lies ahead, Season 2 of The Ark already has laid a firm foundation for where the story — and even the Ark One — might head next. The end of Season 2 delivers a ton of high-impact revelations about both our favorite characters and the new world they inhabit — including Cpt. Garnet’s decision to leave Trappist-1B behind and take the Ark One back out into space, where other ark vessels that escaped Earth might still be in need of rescue.
Garnet’s big decision has a huge secondary effect: It splits the crew into friendly factions of those who’ll remain behind on Trappist-1B, and those who’ll volunteer to follow the captain (and the newly-fitted Ark One’s blazing-fast flight tech) into the unknown nether reaches of the universe. That means putting romance on hold for cute couples like Alicia and Angus (Stacey Read and Ryan Adams) as well as Lt. James Brice (Richard Fleeshman) and Eva Markovic (Tiana Upcheva) — though it looks like Drs. Marsh (Jadran Malkovich) and Kabir (Shalini Peiris) will at least get to spend some quality time together as stay-behind residents on the new Trappist colony.
Who used to live on Trappist-1B — and what happened on Ross-128?!
The finale also ends on a pair of bombshell cliffhangers; one out in space, and the other down on Trappist. As Garnet tests out the Ark One’s new far-ranging radio, she gets a distressed ping back from a mysterious voice. It’s a desperate-sounding plea to avoid the distant Ross-128 planet where an uncontacted Ark was last headed, and boy does it sound violently dire: “Turn around! Do not come to Ross… Turn around before it's too late!”
That’s all we know for now, though it definitely looks like Garnet’s instincts for rescuing stray Ark parties are already starting to pay off, right? Meanwhile, down on Trappist, Angus and a dirt crew are out testing the soil when they dig into something buried beneath the planet’s surface. It’s a tablet made of stone; one with strange and unknown writing scrawled across it… and it begs an obvious question from Angus about their new homeworld’s resident population.
“You said you haven't found any higher life here?” Angus asks his dig team, before turning to regard the writing itself. “I wonder what it says?” somebody asks. “Oh, please,” answers Angus — “Not ‘No trespassing!’”
Oooh — Could The Ark actually dare to bring aliens on board? Are Evelyn Maddox’s minions still wreaking havoc on Earth’s refugee humans somewhere at the far-flung corners of the universe? And how will all the show’s time-tested friendships hold up as the original Ark One crew begins to forge new paths with new allies (and new enemies)?
“That's the fun of science fiction!” says Devlin — without spoiling any answers, of course. “It really is endless where you can go in science fiction. And that's the fun of ‘playing.’ You get new worlds; new characters; new creatures; new adventures.
“We want to take this story as far as our imaginations will go. And, you know, we're getting older — but so far, the ticker is still working pretty good. So until it fries out, we want to keep telling these stories!”
Watch The Ark streaming on Peacock here.
