The Silent Sea review: A fabulous sci-fi K-drama that flies you to the moon

Gong Yoo in 'The Silent Sea' (Image: screen grab)

The setting is in the future, but you know it’s not some fantasy or even fiction. You know that this future is coming, and coming at us fast. When you see people in the show line up for water from ATM-like machines, you know that this could be our reality soon. No trees, no pets, no rain and a planet without enough water to save all its people. If you have lived in California, you know already you are not allowed to wash your cars and water the lawns like you did once. If you live in Mumbai (or any other metro city in India), you know no matter how high your apartment is, your fancy building is at the mercy of the water mafia who bring water by trucks in summer. You know someone or know someone who knows someone working on a desalination or space exploration project…

How far behind are Indian entertainment houses to the stories that K-dramas tell us? Well, considering they thought up the demented Squid Game and even did the zombie trope better than any Hollywood zombie movie with Kingdom, we have a really long way to go. Minnal Murali and Churuli are wonderful recent additions to a host of great Malayalam movies, but the moment we try to do a ‘space’ or ‘alien’ connected movie, we either turn jingoistic or we just are ‘inspired’ to create Jadoo from ET. K-drama, in the meanwhile, has evolved from superb period tales to contemporary rom-coms to cop dramas that are brilliant and now, science fiction.

Back to The Silent Sea. Whilst Earth is monitoring and rationing water like never before, we see that Director Choi (Gil Hae-Yeon, who was fabulous in the Canadian-Korean film called In Her Place) of the SAA (Space and Aeronautics Administration) has created a team for a super secret mission. The mission: retrieve samples from an abandoned outpost on the moon. They won’t say what those samples are, and they are shutting down the Balhae Space Station located on the Moon after this mission is over.

The authorities have taken special care to recruit and acclimatise Dr Song Jian (played by Bae Doo-na, who was in Sense8, Stranger and Kingdom, among many other films and series; can she ever go wrong in any role she takes on?) who is a famous astrobiologist and a complete opposite to Captain Han Yun-Jae (played by Gong Yoo, the royalty of Korean movies and shows) who is an establishment man, following orders without ever questioning them. Others in the crew are a doctor (Kim Sun-Young), the pilot, the co-pilot, an engineer, a design man who knows everything about the space station and two soldiers (including Lt Ryu Tae-Suk, played by Lee Joon, fresh from his real life compulsory military service in 2019).

From the dusty, yellow Earth, we are taken to a grey blue-black Moon. It’s fantastic to be suddenly transported to a space station that has been abandoned for five years. The dark chrome and steel and glass space station is magnificent. As one of the characters says, ‘It looks bigger up close than in the pictures… But before that, the director Choi Hang-Yong (he even directed the short film Koyoui Bada (Sea Of Tranquility) on which the series is based) takes you on a heart stopping ride in the space shuttle.

You know there’s something wrong when a new co-pilot shows up, and the pilot asks how can the authorities create trust and expect teamwork when they keep adding strangers to the team? The new copilot looks suspicious too… Plus Captain Han has already had a verbal skirmish with Dr Song asking too many questions about the samples, why was she being added to the team and so on… Captain Han believes in doing his job: bring back samples from the space station. He tells the pilot to relax when the ship starts to malfunction…

To say that my heart was in my mouth while the crew was in the shuttle trying to land on the moon, landing and then needing to escape would be an understatement. And this was happening right into the fifteenth minute of the first episode! That’s how fast the story was going. The creepy silence on the moon really, really gets you. You feel like you are right there.

There are eight episodes of mystery and the excitement never really goes away. You will like how the plot unfolds and you go back to clues that they have cleverly told you about right from episode one itself.

You suspect that there are traitors in the team, but that reveal comes at you when you’re least suspecting it, and that’s a good thing too! If you were in Captain Han’s shoes, you’d be watching Dr Song very very carefully. The fact that she is always finding reasons to stray away from the main objective of the mission and wants to find what really happened during the last mission should have been enough to keep her under a stricter watch. Bae Doon-na is such a skilled actor, she manages to convey all kinds of empathy (she is shown taking care of a tiger - perhaps the last of the species, and feeding her puppy precious water from her own stash) and when they discover the 'monster' on board, she’s the one who is unafraid to communicate with her.

They also manage to bring to our notice the danger and the cruelty of cloning and why it is illegal. I am amazed at how cleverly the writing creates heroes in episode one: ‘Some day in the future, I will show you a sea!’ end up being a monster.

This show has so many layers, each peeling as one exciting episode leads into the next. This is not just for K-drama fans, this show is for all sci-fi fans. I wish this were a film, to be watched on the big screen. The canvas is very Star Wars like, and even though most of the action is indoors, the fact that they are out there on the moon is never forgotten. And their mission? The idea that it could be so simple and yet so complicated will blow your minds! Must watch!