The Silent Sea: The Silent Sea (Full Season)

December 27, 2021 3:40 AM - Season 1 (Full Season)

During a perilous 24-hour mission on the moon, space explorers try to retrieve samples from an abandoned research facility steeped in classified secrets. (Netflix)

Variety review - ‘The Silent Sea’ Looks to the Skies to Save Earth, but Perhaps Lingers Too Long

The Review Geek: The Silent Sea Season 1 Review – In Space, no one can hear your disappointment

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posted by oh yeah! (9 comments total)

I watched the 8 episodes over Saturday & Sunday. It was...okay? Not great though. It somehow manages to look expensive and cheap at the same time. Like, the set design for the practical locations looks good, but then they'll do some CGI for an effect and it looks cheaptastic. It's very reminiscent of 'Aliens' at times, what with the mystery/cover-up of what happened at the research base, and there are some effectively creepy sequences as the crew searches the base. But it just falls short somewhere.
posted by oh yeah! at 3:51 AM on December 27, 2021

I watched the preview and decided to pass when it got to the "we're sending you to the moon to get something but we can't tell you what it is, why we want it, or anything else about it or the mission" part. I mean...c'mon.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:24 AM on December 27, 2021

I'm on episode 6 and am grimly determined to finish, but only because Bae Doona and Gong Yoo are my life and breath.

That being said, I *do* like the two doctors' relationship as it develops over the series, going from Song's curt "No" to Hong's request to speak informally, all the way to Song opening up to Hong about her regrets about her sister when the two women are alone in the data core.
posted by Mogur at 4:00 PM on December 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

Oh i have watched some crappy TV science fiction in my time but this just about takes the biscuit. Did they just give all that Netflix moolah to the two stars? They certainly don't appear to have spent much of the budget on script, locations or special effects. And... i don't know where to start...magical, mystical, inexhaustible Lunar Water? All the walking and running through corridors because it's so relatively cheap to film? That bit in Ep 4 where the captain collapses from lack of oxygen then re-appears minutes later all hale and hearty again and nobody mentions his miraculous recovery? I have watched episodes of the original thunderbirds series that were better put together than this; less woodenly acted as well. Thank god i've only got four more episodes to go ;-)
posted by Wrick at 8:03 AM on December 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

I also stuck with it for the actors, but agreed that it dragged and the slowness made it easy to notice the many plot and sensibleness gaps. Wandering away from each other all the time. Not masking up even after they'd figured out there was something contagious on board. The dumbness of "somebody has to climb to the bottom to hit a switch" with the inexplicable elevator shenanigans, and the captain's miraculous OK-ness after falling and being caught by the tether around his waist. The lack of clarity about power: on/off? on in some places, off in others? And where the fuck did this so-called "lunar water" come from? So much failure in a show I ought to have really liked.

I have been a fan of Gong Yoo since Train to Busan, my favorite zombie movie of all time. And of Doona Bae since Cloud Atlas and Sense8. They kept me watching. Also I like movies set on the moon.
posted by Well I never at 4:49 PM on December 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

It was probably two or three episodes too long. There are some things that they hint at and never explain fully. I was also drawn to this because I am a Bae Doona fan but I think that some people are going to want to watch because there are a few Squid Game people in it. In the end it was fine. I don't regret watching it but because I binged it in one night I did hit the 10 sec button more during some of the later episodes.
posted by LostInUbe at 6:50 PM on December 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

It annoyed me that they couldn't keep the rules for the water consistent. The water made a seed grow into a jungle forest, but then the water also expanded exponentially five years later because of the very same plants. Why didn't that happen five years earlier?
posted by ymgve at 8:40 PM on December 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

I was waiting to watch mukbang in space. Apart from Bae Doona showing Luna how to eat candy there was none of the cinematic kimchee noodle slurping I have come to expect in K-dramas. Disappointing.
posted by zaelic at 9:49 AM on January 1, 2022

I haven't made it to then end yet, but I think I pretty much get the point, it's like Soylent Green but with water?

I'm definitely willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of a TV show's budgetary / etc constraints, but this one was really straining my credulity. You can just turn a switch that turns up gravity in the base to 1.0G, but you had to arrive in a 1984 space shuttle? The base seemingly has an unlimited supply of air? Ok, fine, whatever, the show must go on.

But then when the protagonist doctor says the ice-9 lunar-water compound is not contagious, when we've literally just watched a guy contract it from a dead body? It's a little tough to swallow. And - I'm getting ahead of myself here, so maybe I haven't correctly sussed out the overall plot - if the whole point is that you can use this compound to extract water from human beings, we've also seen that you can get a large amount of water from a small blood sample, conservation of energy be damned, without killing the donor, so maybe just send a bunch of people and a big pallet of donuts to the moon?

I'll likely watch the rest just from the sunk cost fallacy, but overall I haven't found much to like here. They do a good job at amping up the creepy atmosphere of the lunar base when they try to.
posted by whir at 8:24 AM on January 3, 2022