Imagine if you’ve already met virtually everyone you’re going to meet in your life.

The only exceptions being, any new offspring that you create, or the offspring of the 600 or so people who are clustered with you on a spaceship.

So other than potential babies, what you see is what you get. Hey, if you consistently leave bad first impressions, that may not sound so bad. But the more you think about it, social claustrophobia festers, doesn’t it?

That’s just the beginning of the issues for the characters in Ascension, which makes its Canadian debut Monday, Feb. 9 on CBC. The six-episode series stars Brian Van Holt as Captain William Denninger, Tricia Helfer as the captain’s manipulative wife Viondra, and Brandon P. Bell as First Officer Aaron Gault, who winds up investigating an on-ship murder.

The setup of is kind of Mad Men meets Star Trek: Voyager.

In the midst of the Cold War in 1963, fearing that the earth might not have much of a future, the administration of U.S. President John F. Kennedy secretly launched a massive spaceship named Ascension, filled with 600 volunteers – men, women and children.

How they found 600 people with no friends or family to notice they had disappeared, literally off the face of the earth, is an interesting query. But that’s over-thinking it, I suppose.

The point of the mission was to settle a new world that had been identified as inhabitable. The catch for the volunteers, however, is they’d never see it, only their descendants would, because the journey will take 100 years.

The story begins 51 years into the 100-year mission. There now are many people on Ascension who are in the doughy middle, meaning, they were born on the ship (or at least were very young when it launched), and they’re going to die on the ship.

Understandably, among those folks, blind devotion to the cause is iffy. Their lives were decided for them, and some of them openly lament that their parents and grandparents “screwed” them.

Things really start to unravel when a rebellious (by the spaceship’s standards, anyway) young woman named Lorelei (Amanda Thomson) is found dead. To avoid a panic, Captain Denninger tells the general population that it was an accident. But First Officer Gault suspects otherwise.

“There are a lot of conflicts going on,” executive producer Jason Blum said. “Should they turn around and go back to earth (which theoretically still is possible, because they’re at the halfway point)?

"They’ve lost touch with earth, so they have no idea what earth even looks like now. So should they continue?”

One of the most interesting aspects of Ascension is that everything on the spaceship, both physical and psychological, has 1963 as its primary influence. Their society has evolved, yes, but in slightly different ways than it has on earth.

“Obviously we’re using a baseline of ’63 when the ship launched, but any time you have humans in a group together, cut off from the mainstream of civilization, they’re going to evolve in their own individual, idiosyncratic ways,” creator Phil Levens said.

“You definitely see that they’ve got their own hierarchies, their own traditions, their own legends. Everything is the same, but different.”

Ascension already has aired in the United States, on the genre-specific cable channel Syfy. CBC was put in a tough position when Syfy decided to air Ascension in a trio of two-hour blocks on three consecutive nights last December. A genre channel can accommodate multi-night event programming, but for a broadcast network like CBC to air Ascension so close to the holidays essentially would have been tossing it away.

I hope Canadians find Ascension, though, largely because the premise is intriguing. It’s a worthwhile journey from a viewing standpoint. Whether it’s a worthwhile journey for the passengers is another matter.

Twitter: @billharris_tv​

bill.harris@sunmedia.ca