2 out of 5

Created by: Jeremy Stieglitz, Jesse Rapczak

covers part 1

Congrats to Ark: The Animated Series, for the special distinction of its season 2 preview (shown at the end of season 1) not only making me retroactively dislike what I’d just watched – beyond an already fomenting dislike – but also for absolutely ruining anything that could’ve been used for tension in the season, and also managing to somehow be utterly boring, and create 0% intrigue. Like, it’s very desperately: here’s everything in season 2, please watch me, and it’s still not of interest.

A yet-again reminder: it’s okay to trust my gut.

My gut had me watch about halfway through the first episode of this when it initially aired, and I was like – nah. I’m good. But when a second season was announced, it made me wonder if I had been too dismissive: something made people tune in enough to merit that second season, right?

If you’re trying to explain the reality to me through your screen, you can stop, as I now understand my err: the series was being shown in two parts. “Season 2” was already made; hence why there’s that full-on preview at the end of “season 1.” (Even calling them seasons may just be in my head.)

Still, I revisited with some more dedicated patience, and… yeah, there is something there. It’s buried behind some stiff animation, cheeseball dialogue and plotting, and acting that can only bring life to that cheesiness, but it’s something all the same. It coalesces somewhere towards the end of episode 1 and across most of episode 2, with 2’s conclusion getting into troubling been-there-done-that waters in the backwash of which we remain for 6 more episodes, with occasional glimmers of nuance that are never given enough focus.

Some scattered thoughts: something about adult animation for English speaking audiences has everyone talking like absolute prats. People don’t fucking talk this way. The show is cowritten by comic’s Marguerite Bennett, and you can trace some of that to her, but maybe I’m going to place more blame on the source material for the show: a video game, whose directors (Jesse Rapczak and Jeremy Stieglitz) are hanging around as producers on this show, with Stieglitz codirecting each episode. Because that is what the show sounds like – video game dialogue. Which can be written well by a very slim slice of folks in the AAA world; most “well regarded” stories – like the 2018 and 2020 God of War games, for example – arrive with the same level of cookie cutter b.s. as Ark. So even though The Animated Series’ narrative is original, there’s something about its DNA originating in games that I think hangs over the presentation.

Also: when Ark’s main character, Helena (Madeleine Madden) wakes up in the titular locale, and discovers it to be some magical hodgepodge of people from various times, that’s kinda cool and pretty effectively quirky in the show’s first few minutes, and then the dinosaurs show up and it’s like, oh, we’re doing that. And yes, that’s essentially what the show does thereafter: sprinkle in a representative Native American, samurai, Roman warrior, and so on, and then toss T-Rexes into the mix, and some dinos that people befriend like pets and nickname “Scary.” I mean, dinos + humans have made for some great media, it’s just also enough of repeated a thing to have a predictable shape to it, and Ark – embracing all the video game cookie cutterness – fits that predictability to a T.

Helena’s fitful force-of-will survival is what makes the first couple of episodes pretty good, even if we’re still toiling in tropes. When she meets Meiyin Li (Michelle Yeoh) and gets some more background on super duper powerful artifacts that everyone on The Ark is hunting for, okay, that’s still very gamey, but it gives us a quest, and there’s a pretty good fight sequence or two along the way. Then when we find one of those artifacts, big eyeroll. When Meiyin and Helena interact with Lakotan “John” (Zahn McClarnon), and start to organize against evil tyrant type Nerva (Gerard Butler), Ark’s writers can’t wait to wallow in flashbacks that make Helena not at all the main character, and completely skip over arguably more interesting aspects such as properly giving a timeline to how long it took everyone on The Ark to build these huge communities, and decide on a common language, and so on.

Butler does his thing. There are, as mentioned, some shades of deeper thought, as Helena struggles with the cost of life on The Ark, and even baddies like Nerva are allowed select moments of humanity, but ultimately, these are “character background” checkboxes, and we move on to the next, completely unoriginal set piece.

Even David Tennant is pretty middling in this.