The Silent Sea’s mysteries revealed…

You know that moment when you discover that you’re not a magic flying elephant?  There you are, soaring above the clouds, looping the loop, and then some gonzo tells you that the feather clutched tightly in your trunk isn’t magic after all… and you go crashing to the ground like Douglas Adams’s sperm whale, to end up as just so much elephant blubber splattered on the pitted lunar landscape of disappointment.

That was how I felt watching the season finale of The Silent Sea.

It was all going so well. Yes, the series was a flat-pack assembly of borrowed riffs from classic movie sci-fi, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t eat a hearty meal off it. And by its climax it had even started to say a few original things of its own. There were characters I cared about, and some decently sophisticated dilemmas about good people doing bad things for the right reasons – the kind of upmarket sci-fi hypotheticals that expose Don’t Look Up for the simplistic, reductive guff that it is.

But the season finale of The Silent Sea is an abrupt, incoherent mess. Not only does the pretty interesting plot completely fall apart, but the narrative turns, one of them involving an act of self sacrifice by one of the leading players, come from nowhere and make no sense whatsoever. The final incomprehensible, shark vaulting, paranormal twist is so ridiculous that all it does is render the dodgy VFX even dodgier than they were before.

Verdict: Season finales often don’t live up to the questions asked by a rip roaring penultimate episode – usually because they are setting up a second series – but even by those standards this one is a spectacular failure. It’s such a shame, because The Silent Sea has kept me thoroughly entertained over the last couple of weeks, and I hoped for a lot more. A major disappointment, of the downward dead Dumbo variety. 3/10

Martin Jameson