Season 1 |
Episode Guide
Episode 1 – | Review Score – 4/5
Episode 2 – | Review Score – 4/5
Episode 3 – | Review Score – 3.5/5
Episode 4 – | Review Score – 3.5/5
Episode 5 – | Review Score – 3/5
Episode 6 – | Review Score – 2.5/5
Episode 7 – | Review Score – 2/5
Episode 8 – | Review Score – 3/5
When Alien released back in 1979, it changed the face of horror forever. This film still holds up to this day, thrusting a bunch of misfit astronauts into an impossible situation and leaving them to figure it out.
Since then there have been many efforts on both the big and small screen to emulate that. More recently, Origin and Nightflyers have both tried (and failed) to capture the essence of Alien but no one has managed to grab hold of what it truly means when “in space, no one can hear you scream.”
The Silent Sea then is a particularly bitter pill to swallow because for the first 4 episodes, it does feel like a spiritual successor. Creepy, unnerving and incredibly atmospheric, The Silent Sea has glimmers of Alien right the way through its run-time but sadly the second half falls apart.
The story here takes place in the future, with Earth suffering from a lack of water. People are getting ill, what little water left is being rationed off, courtesy of a class system, and there seems to be little hope.
A thin glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel comes from a planned mission to the moon, intent on retrieving a sample from an abandoned space station and bringing it back safely to Earth. Fronting this mission is brilliant astrobiologist Jian. She’s joined by Captain Han, Doctor Hong, Lieutenant Taesuk and a whole bunch of other characters.
When they eventually make their way onto the space station, they soon realize that things are not what they seem.
The Silent Sea excels during these quiet chapters, with long, drawn out shots of dark hallways and slowly drip-feeding the mystery. The logical jumps at times are still eyebrow raising but not to the point of shattering your immersion. That is, until late on in the game when secrets are unveiled.
Now, I won’t go into specifics here but everything from cloning and double-crossing agents are thrown into the mix and personally, it doesn’t work as effectively as it should. The explanations are pretty weak; a half-baked concept that actually hurts the show’s integrity.
This weak characterization is something that cripples The Silent Sea right the way across its run-time. Central pillars like Jian and Captain Han have good arcs, whereas Taesuk just sorta follows along with whatever his orders are.
I do appreciate that these guys have a mission to do but the early episodes, which see the group split and drip-feed bits of exposition about their own lives alongside the actual mystery, feel organically driven and appear to be setting a foundation for more rounded journeys. This really isn’t helped by the fact that this show ends so ambiguously, leaving it up to you to figure out if the astronauts saved Earth or not.
Given the stacked cast going into this one, The Silent Sea will undoubtedly draw the views. Perhaps not right over Christmas but after the festivities have died down, I can see this one picking up a bit of steam. Unfortunately the good vibes early on dissipate into a logic-breaking carnival ride that recklessly rockets through its set pieces. It’s still enjoyable – especially if you switch off and ignore the contrivances and logical jumps – but it’s not quite the nail-biting horror it so easily could have been.
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Verdict - 5/10
5/10
I’m afraid reactionless drives are much closer at hand than artificial gravity. this show is not even a tenth as good as “The Expanse”, I’m going to stop watching now, this is one for the kids. Once again bitterly disappointed by the lack of scientific credibility. Maybe next they should do a pirate adventure set in the 17th century where they board each others ships on horseback….
Hilarious moon shenanigans aside, (yes, I met Stanley Kubrick :/ It was well shot. Maybe the crapman vs pooperman director lent a helping hand. The lack of trust between the ships crew added to the air of suspense and foreboding in contrast to Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto & co, worrying over pay and equal rights, little touches of classic realism. (Classic as in working class people still had similar issues in space)
Roll on the floor ending though. Did they actually leave Luna there, I can’t believe what I saw! Leaving the door open to a second season perhaps?
Unfortunately, i have to agree with the comments left by Vi. I hate to be ”that guy”, i really do, but i thought that The Silent Sea totally sucked throughout. I only stuck with it to give it a fair chance. First off though i will say that, visually at least, it was stunning. It really does show how far things have come that this looked as good as it did. In that respect it can not be faulted. And my problem isn’t the science either, that didn’t bother me at all. Near 100% accurate physics usually makes for extremely dull science fiction. But, at first anyway, i thought it was the English overdubbing being a bit amateur that made the very serious characters seem like petulant infants. So then i turned off the overdubbing and stuck with subtitles, as this is how i usually enjoy non-English films and TV anyway. But no, many of these actors, that i have seen excel in other great content, still somehow came across like petty squabbling children somehow. I don’t know how to explain it, but i recently watched ”Mothra” (1961) and i was constantly reminded of the idiot main actor in that, pulling the kinds of faces you would expect a small child to pull. And add to this that the slow pacing of The Silent Sea did NOT feel atmospheric to me, but rather tedious and like it was trying far to hard. And while i enjoy something like ”Final Space” taking every well known trope and just going for it, you just can’t do that and be dark, brooding, and serious. Honestly, much of The Silent Sea relied on such well worn cliches that so called ”reveals” would have been more of a reveal if it had been anything else. And then at the end (slight spoiler here) it just abandoned any kind of pretence of being scientific or believable at all, and (to my mind at least) went straight to magic! So then comparing ”Alien” to this is like comparing steak to something the dog just threw up. It really is a shame because i honestly did want to like this.
Yep, I loved it! Aliens meets Squid Game…what’s not to like?! I’m not a physics geek so the stuff that bothers others doesn’t bother me. Yep, some back story on Luna would have been good, but apart from that I’m really happy!
The plot has some point, but the physics of space are so ignored, that it´s almos a joke. The spaceship doesn´t detach the fuel tanks and enters orbit with them!! The sounds are not present in void, you would hear nothing. A free falling at 1.62 m/s² (the elevator) would be so different, that it means the end of credibility for me. . . .Good bye to realism. . . .
Okay I’m halfway through and although I’ll probably watch everything, I have very mixed feelings. I enjoy the acting BUT I feel VERY bothered with the gravity issue. I think if you are going to be basing your while show on the moon…you really really need to at least work that.
Really illogical circumstances where everyone react doesn’t react like what they should be – professional astronauts and scientists and doctors.. Poor and unconvincing character choices for doctor hong and kim sun – more suitable as petty villagers who gossip but in space now. With the zoom ins on Taesuk so often, viewers already know… i can only watch bae doona and gong yoo – great characters wasted.. imagine them in Kingdom and Train to Busan but like 10% that they can use here. Suggest they change 2 poor character choices and the writer for next season. But please go for some astronomy walk through or real reading.
I’m quite surprised by the reviews here. This is a show that started as a poster child for bad physics. It slowly improved before crashing in the end.
So many characters without distinguishing personalities. A lunar spaceship with… wings? Astronauts with no training? Last minute substitutions? A crash due to a… bad bolt? A catestrophic loss of pressure in a school bus sized volume that vents for over a minute? The captain struggles to hold a 100 lb person from falling in 1/8 gravity? Everyone’s almost out of oxygen but we should all stand around and emote while someone dies?
Episode 1 is where this drama will lose most of its viewers. There are too many who have grown accustomed to expanse-level realism.
After that cartoonish disaster, subsequent episodes gradually establish an appropriate mood of dread that the finale fails to satisfy.
Great way to characterize this without spoiling it. The lack of consideration the makers of this series gave to basic physics in the second half was extremely disappointing. Front the item that the whole thing is centered around to the last few minutes of the last episode, it was very obvious that no one in the group of writers had any clue about space and that was disappointing. It could have been sooo much better and frankly should have been but in the end, it was just ok at best. I get it is fiction but the best fiction is the kind that is the closest to reality and is arguably plausible. This was not that and instead we got a giant stinking turd in the end. Shame.
Hey Lucy, I’m really glad you enjoyed The Silent Sea! There are definitely some good bits with this but I would have liked them to elaborate on Luna’s origin a bit more and how all that was possible (being careful here not to go into spoilers!)( The ending felt a little rushed too. Let us know how this one holds up on repeat watches, there may be some little easter eggs we missed the first time around.
Many thanks for commenting and reading our review!
-Greg W
I really really liked it, i have no idea what ppl are saying about disappointing, the acting was very good, excellent, the FX where really good, yes maybe some things did not really made sense, like the moon walk, but it is s fantasy production, is not a documentary. I liked it and will watch it again