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How The Ark Created Its Scariest Episode Yet — And What Changes with *That* Death
Sci-fi meets horror in “Museum of Death,” The Ark’s creepy new Season 2 episode.
What’s that big, hulking object floating silently in deep space on this week’s extra-creepy episode of SYFY's The Ark? Eh, it’s probably nothing — just your average derelict death ship that’s been ransacked and overtaken by a dementedly erratic madman.
Yep, The Ark intrepidly crept this week toward the very fringes of full-on horror territory, infiltrating the crippled Ark 3 spaceship only to discover that the vessel they’d last left for dead (because most of the Ark 3 crew actually was) has been mysteriously transformed in their absence. Spying interior scenes from a hacked camera system aboard the safety of their own Ark One, Alicia Nevins (Stacey Read) and the gang realize something’s definitely different about the ill-fated Ark 3 as they make a return visit to retrieve some much-needed repair parts.
What they encounter when they arrive, though, wouldn’t look out of place in a sci-fi horror game like Dead Space or a fright flick inspired straight from the Alien franchise. So what’s really up with all those zombified-looking Ark 3 inhabitants? Let’s dive in and find out!
Grisly space tour: The Ark boards a creepy "Museum of Death"
“Museum of Death” is the title for this week’s Season 2, Episode 5 installment of The Ark, and it’s a name that matches the overall mood to a tee. Led by captain Sharon Garnet (Christie Burke), a core team of Ark One crew members shuttles over to the stranded Ark 3 to investigate why the silent ship seems to be magically repopulated — you know, with actual living people. After all, on their last freaky visit, the place was already reduced to little more than a space tomb, the permanent resting place for dozens of Ark 3 victims who fell to an invasion ordered by Evelyn Maddox (Jelena Stupljanin), the menacing leader of the rogue (and currently AWOL) Ark 15.
As it turns out, just about everyone on the Ark 3 actually is still dead — though their bodies have been eerily shifted and posed by something (or someone), to make it look like they’re just going about their daily duty. It’s genuinely creepy to watch Brice (Richard Fleeshman), Garnet, and the rest of the gang shine flashlights into the unflinching eyes of all those early-decay space corpses — until, of course, one of them terrifyingly leaps to life and goes scurrying off into hiding.
That not-so-dead stowaway turns out to be none other than the long-lost brother of Eva (Tiana Upcheva), Brice’s devoted love interest and the Ark One’s key engineer. Left behind on Earth after Eva escaped her dying home planet aboard the Ark One, the poor fella’s been scouring space in search of his sister ever since. And judging from his totally deteriorated state of mind (like, who really hangs out on an abandoned spaceship long enough to pose all those dead bodies?), well... he's definitely had a rough ride.
On this week’s installment of the After the Ark aftershow, Upcheva said that the whole creepy vibe wasn’t just an effects magic trick for the viewers. Pacing around a dimly-lit ship’s deck jam-packed with ice-cold “dead” bodies, she confessed, feels just as weird on the actual set as it does on the screen.
“I think Christie and I had so much fun — I know how it sounds! — but it was really fun just walking through all the ‘dead’ people. It was so real,” said Upcheva, whose character reached her emotional limit in this week’s episode, thanks to a fraternal family reunion that ended up being cut tragically short.
“It was so creepy at the same time,” she added. “... and the tension that they made, and the light that just brought up the atmosphere — it was amazing! … We really did applaud to them [those amazingly stone-still ‘dead’ actors] at the end of the day. Because it was so hard to stay still for such a long time. And they were just doing an amazing job. I remember we were having flashlights going straight to their eyeballs, and it was like, ‘Oh my God — I would go blind — fully blind!’ And the makeup girls, they just smashed the whole task. So it was really, really amazing.”
More ways to die: The alternate death ideas left behind in The Ark’s writers’ room
Having stolen a shuttle from the Eastern Federation (a enigmatic Earth faction whose name, at least so far, hasn’t come up too often on The Ark), Eva’s brother has more or less lost his ever-lovin’ mind to loneliness aboard the Ark 3. No one knows quite how long he’s been working his mad magic on the stranded ship while making friends with its partially-mummified human relics… but by the time Eva encounters him, he’s gone far enough off the rails to have “married” one of the corpses, and he clearly has no plans to abandon his adopted dead family anytime soon.
“I love horror,” episode co-writer India Sage Wilson shared with After the Ark, “so this is like two of my favorite things being put together… getting to have this horror moment where they walk through and see all these dead bodies is just, like, so crazy and fun!”
Eva’s brother ends up dying in space, struck by explosive debris during a sketchy ship-shuffling maneuver while fleeing the safety of the Ark One to head back to his moribund zombie pals on the Ark 3. But the debris death, which Eva herself witnesses in a strikingly heartbreaking late-episode moment, wasn’t the only deadly scenario the writers had in mind for giving her brother a one-and-done stint on the show.
“I think there was a slightly different [draft] version in the writers’ room where, basically, part of — since we’re replacing part of the ship — that front portion is moving toward the Ark One and he is basically in the middle. So he was supposed to get kind of ‘smooshed’ at one point, which, logistically, just didn’t end up working as well,” explained Wilson.
“Also,” she laughed, “I think in the early days, there was a version where he just went back to Ark 3 — because he wanted to be with his ‘wife!’”
A long-lost brother, a shady conversation about her own hidden past, and — in the episode’s closing moments — even a complete data wipe of her secret criminal record? There’s got to be more to Eva than meets the eye as Season 2 of The Ark rolls along, and just like Brice, we’re totally committed to unearthing the whole truth... even if it does feel a little bit creepy.
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.
