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'The Ark' writer on 'wibbly wobbly time stuff' at faster than light speeds in latest SYFY episode
Eat your heart out, Doctor Who!
Things got a bit metaphysical on this week's episode of The Ark when Lt. Garnet (Christie Burke) gave the order to hit the faster than light speed throttle in the hopes of quickly reaching Proxima B and completing the mission. However, audiences should know by now that nothing is ever that simple aboard the Ark One, which begins to experience strange time dilation as the characters eerily slip between their past, present, and future selves until William Trust (Paul Leonard Murray) can rectify the situation.
"It was really hard," Episode 8 writer Rebecca Rosenberg confessed on the official after-show. "We knew that we wanted to do that fun action sequence at the end with the time going haywire. When I sat down to write it, I literally stared at the page and was like, 'How do I do this?' Because you want it to be visual, you want the characters to both understand and don't understand what's going on."
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Rosenberg continued: "I watched some old references of other things that have done wibbly, wobbly time stuff. I think we talked about something from Star Trek ... and just looked at the visual cues that other stuff has used. We decided that we really wanted to do this playing with the light and shadows of the people, so we see multiples of them. Getting into it, it was just tracking, 'Okay, there's a past, present, and future of each person. Which ones are at which point in the story?' We decided the way to get through it was if they just focused on what their goal was, that helped. It was almost like I wrote it sequentially first and then I went back I copy and pasted and retrofitted stuff where it needed to go. It was hard, but it was really fun."
Watch SYFY's The Ark After Show for Episode 8 Below:
Jonathan Glassner (Stargate SG-1) and Dean Devlin (Stargate, Independence Day) serve as executive producers on the show with Marc Roskin and Rachel Olschan-Wilson. Jonathan English and Steve Lee are producers.
The Ark airs on SYFY every Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET. New episodes are available to stream on Peacock the day after they premiere.
Looking for even more sci-fi content? Check out shows like Resident Alien, Brave New World, Project Blue Book, Eureka, Heroes, Intergalactic, and more streaming now on Peacock.
