Posted in: SYFY, TV | Tagged: Christina Wolfe, dean devlin, Jonathan Glassner, syfy, the ark

The Ark Creators Discuss How Season 2 Premiere Death "Ups the Ante"

The Ark creators Dean Devlin & Jonathan Glassner on the heartbreaking but important reason for [SPOILER] being killed in the Season 2 opener.

As the SYFY series The Ark season two premiered on July 17th and the streaming release was delayed a week for Peacock, fans were in for a rude awakening following the season one cliffhanger, "Everybody Wins." The episode "Failed Experiment" examines the fallout with certain crew members' fates uncertain, like horticulturist Angus Medford (Ryan Adams), chief of security Felix Strickland (Pavle Jerinić), ship's medical officer Dr. Sanjivni Kabir (Shalini Peiris), maintenance tech Eva Markovic (Tiana Upcheva) and mental health counselor Cat Brandice (Christina Wolfe). As Ark One tries to rescue their crew and face an uneasy situation with Ark 15, we find out Cat drew the short straw, dying in the hands of William Trust (Paul Murray). Creators Dean Devlin and Jonathan Glassner spoke to SYFY.com about the important nature of Cat's death.

The Ark Creators on Creating Compelling Drama from Uncertainty and How Death "Ups the Ante"

Most shows play it safe when it comes to their ensemble casts, but the more compelling ones aren't afraid to kill main or popular characters. Just ask The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones, who had no qualms about killing off the likes of Glenn Rhee (Stephen Yeun) and Eddard Stark (Sean Bean), respectively. "I think it's really important, on a show like this, where we [establish] right away that anything can happen," Devlin said. "When we go through these dramas, you don't know who's gonna survive. And I think that really ups the ante and separates us from a lot of shows that [have] done this in the past."

On Earth, Cat gained fame as a celebrity social media influencer and was revealed to have an affair with the wealthy Trust, who was married at the time. On sacrificing her, "We ended the season last year with the ship being really badly damaged. And it just felt like a cheat for us to come back, and nobody was hurt or killed or anything," Glassner explained. "So the first thing we did when we sat down in the writers' room for this season is say, 'Which character do we have the most left to do with — and the least left to do with?' — because we love all our 'children' and we love all our actors … It was a painful decision, and we had to just pick the one that we had the least left to do with. And we felt like we had kind of explored that character's story, so we finally said, 'I guess that's gonna have to be her,' as painful as that is… because we loved her, too!"

For more, you can check out the complete interview here. New episodes of The Ark, which also stars Christie Burke, Reece Ritchie, and Richard Fleeshman, air on Wednesdays on Syfy.

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