The Ark in Space Salmon of "SFX" rated the serial four and a half out of five stars, calling it "brimming with confidence". Salmon wrote that the concept of the Wirrn were so terrifying that the poor effects did not matter. In an analysis of apocalyptic themes in "Doctor Who", academic Andrew Crome highlighted the explicit religious influences on the writing of "The Ark in Space". He considered the eponymous Ark to be an analogue of the Biblical story of Noah's Ark, the ancient flood myth related in the Book of Genesis, and that the naming of the Nerva Beacon commander as Noah was
Generations of Noah traced their ancestry; in William of Malmesbury's version of this genealogy (c. 1120), Sceaf is instead made a descendant of "Strephius", the fourth son born aboard the Ark ("Gesta Regnum Anglorum"). An early Arabic work known as "Kitab al-Magall" "Book of Rolls" (part of Clementine literature) mentions "Bouniter", the fourth son of Noah, born after the flood, who allegedly invented astronomy and instructed Nimrod. Variants of this story with often similar names for Noah's fourth son are also found in the c. fifth century Ge'ez work "Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan" ("Barvin"), the c. sixth century Syriac book