September 19, 2005

TV: Surface

The second of this fall's "weird creatures out there" shows, following Threshold.

This time, it's sea monsters, discovered roughly simultaneously by several people scattered about the US. Laura Daugherty (Lake Bell) is an oceanographer exploring in the northern Pacific when she sees what she thinks may be a new vertebrate. Aleksandr Cirko (Rade Sherbedgia) is a mysterious government scientist trying to hush up Daugherty's find, and examining what appear to be enormous bite marks on a nuclear submarine found several thousand miles off course in the Antarctic. Richard Connelly (Jay R. Ferguson) is a Louisiana fisherman, wracked with guilt after his brother is killed in a diving accident by some large creature. And Miles Bennett (Carter Jenkins) is a San Diego teen who finds lots of strange eggs floating in the sea, and brings one home with him.

The first episode bounces back and forth among these stories; Daugherty and Cirko are the only principal characters who meet, and that only briefly. But by the end of the show, most of them are headed for South Carolina, where a large carcass has washed up on shore, and the government is doing its best to keep anyone from seeing it.

Surface moves really slowly; the storytelling is often murky; and the refusal to let us see the creature clearly is already annoying (lots of long-range, out-of-focus shots). And oddly enough, making the creature terrestrial in origin makes the story feel even more implausible than the aliens of Threshold; if this thing has been down there long enough to get that big, surely someone would have noticed it before now. Not a good start.

1 comment:

Keith said...

A friend of mine made the same point when we were talking about the show yesterday, and it was a big "duh!" moment for me. I don't how I could have not picked up on that, especially after having seen War of the Worlds this summer, which has a very similar plot point.