Here's How You Can Watch Every Episode Of Ascension

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In 2014, Syfy's six-part TV event Ascension focused on a classic science fiction trope that has fascinated writers for decades: the generation starship, a hypothetical spacecraft carrying humans who would die before they reached their final destination, but whose offspring would continue the journey. Ascension weaved a story in which the U.S. government and the country's top scientists created a generation starship in secret, launching it into space at the height of the Cold War. Six hundred volunteers boarded the Ascension on a mission to colonize a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, and their journey was meant to be 100 years long. But when a murder happens halfway into the ship's expedition, its residents contemplate the true nature of the mission. Eventually, a twist that affects everyone aboard the Ascension turns the entire concept on its head.

"Ascension is a true, old-school sci-fi show," said actor Gil Bellows, who plays the earthbound Harris Enzmann, in a featurette on the show. "It's got real social questions about morality and all the issues of the day being examined on the spaceship." The series also starred Brian Van Holt as Commander William Denninger and Tricia Helfer as his wife Viondra. The fascinating quirks of Ascension included a time-capsule quality, in which the technology and media the ship residents consume are from the 1963 era, along with a class-based struggle between the elite at the top and the workers at the bottom. 

Rotten Tomatoes critics gave Ascension a 66 percent Tomatometer score, although the audience score was more friendly, at 72 percent. Its lackluster reception may be the reason why Ascension, intended as a backdoor pilot using the same method as Syfy's Battlestar Galactica, never got ordered for a full series (via Deadline). However, if you want to watch it to form your own opinion, you have a few options.