The Silent Sea: Show Review
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The Show
Available on Netflix right now, The Silent Sea is a South Korean sci-fi thriller series adapted from a 2014 short film, The Sea of Tranquility written and directed by Choi Hang-yong (who also directed the series).
The series stars Bae Doona, Gong Yoo, Lee Joon, Kim Sun-young, and Lee Moo-Saeng; the story is set in a future where water has become a rare commodity due to desertification, requiring rations and causing riots. A special team of soldiers and scientists is sent to an abandoned moon base to retrieve an undisclosed sample.
The Review
Oh well. This was a show that started off so intriguing, so good, then it ruins itself. Just tragic. And, as a viewer, it ended up feeling like such a waste of time.
When I began to watch The Silent Sea, I was intrigued. The premise was set up well: a world struggling to survive, a moon base that experienced a mysterious accident and was abandoned, and a sample that the government refuses to provide information on.
The first few episodes were excellent. The setting is built out, the characters are well-rounded, and a deep sense of foreboding is created as everyone prepares to go to the moon.
And then, it just loses its grip on quality. I explain a bit more below my spoiler line, but here I’ll just say that it got lame. Really lame. And the last episode suffered from a ton of bad writing and a truly nonsensical ending.
Again, this was so disappointing because I’d gotten invested in the characters and the initial plot hook. Being stuck with an ending like that just made my entire viewing experience a waste of time. Even now, weeks later (it took that long for my general sense of outrage to chill to plain bitterness) I still get annoyed thinking about it.
2/10
x PLM
SPOILERS AHEAD - SEVERE SPOILERS
SERIOUSLY THOUGH, BEWARE
So the super secret moon stuff is the fact that there is moon water (called Lunar Water in the show) which has the potential of ending the water wars and saving the Earth. However, it is dangerous because, when it comes in contact with organic matter, it multiplies in a deadly way. Like, turning all of a person’s blood into a ton of water, drowning them. So the moon base was supposed to find a way to harness Lunar Water’s power without putting the entire human population on Earth at risk.
It is then revealed that they did human experimentation and created a young girl with fish gills as a result of exposing her to Lunar Water (a.k.a a Lunar Deep One, ha).
One issue is that this show falls into the common trope zombie shows/movies use: the rate the moon water travels through a human is dependent on plot. Sometimes it’s instant, sometimes it takes hours. But there’s no logic behind it. Just plot. Which I have always found annoying.
My main issue though is the ending. Oh boy. So the major conflict is the competing companies that want to get their hands on the Lunar Water and the new fish-girl hybrid. This conflict results in the water getting out of control and the main characters need to escape the station in spacesuits to get to the rescue ship.
And the fish-girl just peels off her suit and can… breathe the non-environment void of space? Okay?
What?
I was fine with her being able to survive moon water, because she’s a fish-girl. Makes sense. She has gills. But to have her surviving out in space means she doesn’t need to breathe at all and somehow can just also maintain her own bodily stability versus the vacuum of space? Despite being a complicated organism based on human genetics?
Nah. That’s too much. And it’s just so, so stupid.
Shame on you, The Silent Sea.
