seaQuest: DSV. The Pilot

Some background going in here.

seaQuest (that's the correct capitalization...I don't know why) is Star Trek, but it's set in the near future. The notional date is 2018. Some kind of resource-driven World War Three happened in the 2010s. All the natural resources on dry land have been more or less exhausted, so under the sea they have farms, mining, you name it. Whole submarine communities exist. The politics are dominated by supernational alliances (confederations) that have united to protect their undersea claims.

The seaQuest is a top of the line submarine with nuclear weapons, flying satellites, moon pools, a dolphin, and a teenaged genius played by the late Jonathan Brandis. This is pretty much the peak of his career. The NorPac Confederation (that's us) built it after the war, but gave it over to the UEO (the UN/Federation, underwater) to use as a peacekeeping vessel. It's about the size of a modern aircraft carrier and as of the start of the show two-thirds of its crew are scientists.

Originally aired September 12, 1993.

We open on a guy in a little sub. He's running away from some miners in other subs because he was prospecting across the border. They're shooting at him and he barely makes it home safe. The other guys call for military support and a bunch of attack subs arrive, apparently within minutes. Well, I guess it is on the border. They want clearance from home to blow the crap out of the mining settlement the prospector is from. This sort of thing could possibly start a war, I guess. That's a bit of a stretch but it's the pilot and they need to set things up fast.

Then here comes seaQuest. Pretty much the whole bridge crew is present, minus the doctor, the genius, the crusty cop, and the captain. Everyone phones home and the present captain, a middle-aged blonde woman the DVDs say was in Charlie's Angels (This would be the original show from the 70s) gets orders not to fire her nuclear missiles and start World War Four. By the way, in this scene everyone is wearing khaki shirts and black ties. I think that's supposed to be the NorPac military uniform, since later they all have dark jumpsuits. The intention seems to have been that seaQuest was handed over to the UEO after the incident. That seems a little weird.

So Charlie's most middle-aged Angel is snarling, biting, and chewing the scenery about how she really wants to just blow someone up. It's what they were all trained to do, and these standoffs are getting on her nerves. She decides to fire her nukes anyway. Don Franklin, playing Commander Ford, waits until she has her hand on the nuclear weapon joystick before pulling it off. She had to use a key to turn the nuke keyboard on in the first place. I'm pretty sure it's standard procedure that you have to have two people agree on site to release a nuke. I know it was at some point in the Cold War. So really you should need two keys anyway. They get this right in a later episode, I think.

Ford relives Captain Stark of command and we zip ahead to thirteen months later. SeaQuest is in UEO hands now and undergoing a refit. An Admiral explains to Ford that the ship needs the right man to command her, somebody with military and scientific experience. Scientific? Ok. I don't get how running an atom smasher or teaching a dolphin to talk is going to make you a great peacekeeper, but whatever. The ship is being refitted to have a large science contingent. They're trying to pull a Next Generation here, obviously. The show isn't a complete knockoff, but the similarities are very strong. Enter retired captain Nathan Bridger, played by Roy Scheider. I remember my Dad told me that he read an article where Scheider's publicist claimed he's six feet tall. Yeah, and I have a tan. The Admiral pretty much tells Ford to play stupid and incompetent as part of a scheme to get Bridger to take command and rejoin the Army, er Navy, er peacekeepers.

Bridger designed seaQuest. He was in the Navy for years but retired after his son (also in the Navy) got killed. He made a promise to his wife never to have anything to do with the Navy again and went into science. I can buy that. He retired to a Caribbean island that looks a lot like Hawaii. Geography aside, the nature shots are beautiful in this show. Dolphins leaping and waves crashing get a little old, but the footage is really good. Bridger's wife died about ten months before this point, so after the crisis with Charlie's Craziest Angel.

So the admiral, Admiral Noyce, shows up on Bridger's island and talks him into coming aboard seaQuest just to look her over. No pressure on that command thing. They do a tour that introduces us to the main cast. Crusty Cop is the chief of security, who served with Bridger before. The chief engineer is an intense young lady type with no personality. She used to be married to the crooked morale and supply officer, who is mad because his guys only stocked family films for the crew's entertainment. I have trouble believing a bunch of sailors really thought Bambi and Mickey Mouse were what the crew needed, but ok. We're going to see more of two other bridge officers later, but in the pilot they're just guys at consoles.

Bridger designed seaQuest with tubes full of water all through it, big enough for a dolphin to swim in. The idea was to have Navy-trained dolphins on board. Ok. He had a dolphin at his island, Darwin. The Admiral kidnapped Darwin and put him in seaQuest. Bridger is happy to see the dolphin right up until he recognizes it. Then it starts talking to him in a nasal computer-generated voice. Communicating with dolphins was a project of Bridger's and he tried to do voice but ended up with hand signals. Enter teenaged genius, Lucas. He figured it out. He's on a submarine that is built for, and plans to go into, combat as a minor because his father is a big contractor and pulled some strings because of an unspecified discipline problem.

Lucas is not Wesley Crusher. He doesn't want to grow up and be Bridger, or even join the military. He doesn't really save the ship very often, but he's usually helping out when it is saved. He seems to live on board full time. He's arrogant and dripping sarcasm, almost going out of his way to make sure he's not liked. Lucas runs around in baseball shirts for some reason, but I don't think they ever had him show any interest in the sport itself. In the second season, he spends a lot of time in a wetsuit. Lucas more or less smarts off to Bridger and bails. Their first exchange:

Bridger: Who the hell are you?
Lucas: Who the hell are you?

I think back in the day that's when I started liking Lucas.

While Bridger is meeting the cast, Captain Stark is talking with an ambiguously German industrialist. It seems he used to own half the ocean, but the UEO confiscated most of it. He wants it back, and he figures he can get it if seaQuest is taken out. Stark wants revenge for being relieved of command and told she's crazy. He sets her up with an attack submarine. She starts attacking settlements, hoping to draw seaQuest out.

Bridger is looking around seaQuest when he notices it's moving. That drives him up a wall. I'd be offended if I got kidnapped too. This is all part of the Admiral's plan. The ship is berthed at Pearl Harbor, so once they're committed to the channel (big bay, narrow channel) they have to get all the way out before they can turn around. He's stuck for a while at least.

In a bit of funny editing, while Bridger can't hitch a ride back on a minisub until they're clear of the channel minisubs are constantly coming and going dropping off supplies. This just doesn't make sense. Plot hole.

So they no more than get outside Pearl Harbor and they start hearing about the sub blowing people up. No question of sending Bridger back now. They don't exactly explain why not, but I think we're meant to gather that a minisub would be an easy target. I can buy that.

The rebel sub (That's what they call Stark Crazy's sub.) comes up on seaQuest and hits her with a torpedo. There's a little bit of damage, but then their computers go offline. They can't return fire. They run away down a trench below what the rebel sub can take and try to do repairs. Lucas -who is asked to look into it, he doesn't take it on himself like Wesley might- goes digging in the computer and finds out they have a virus eating it alive. Furthermore, the virus is set up so that if he tries to mess with it, it'll take the whole ship down instead of just weapons and propulsion.

Meanwhile, the sub goes off and attacks some more people. They give chase with the ship running crippled, until Bridger (who has by now given up and accepted command after Ford offered it like a dozen times) decides they can work around the virus. I guess no one else thought to rewire the ship, since that's about what they do in a montage. They trail around and pick up survivors from the other attacks too. Lucas determines that the virus is from 13 months ago, which leads Bridger to check the records and see that Stark was the only senior officer on board at the time of infection.

Stark and Bridger have a nice little conversation over the viewscreen in his office. He taught her back at the Academy. Stark doesn't know where Bridger is even though it says 'seaQuest' on his jumpsuit. She's not just crazy; she's stupid. How did she program a computer virus? Anyway, the main thing seems to be so Bridger can snark at her later on.

Our heroes catch up to the rebel submarine, but they still can't target it. Bridger's been training Darwin to tag stuff with some kind of radio beacon. So they rig Darwin up with some dolphin SCUBA and fire him out a torpedo tube. He tags the ship. The rebels are taking a full minute to load all their torpedoes and fire, so on their bridge a guy is reading off a countdown when seaQuest fires. Stark thinks Bridger is bluffing until she hears the beacon on her hull. Her crew bails and she screams and rants at them as the torpedo takes the sub out.

...that's more plot summary than I usually do. It's a pilot episode. The first half of it is really about introducing the cast. Not a lot happens except Bridger touring the ship and meeting people. The action is concentrated heavily in the second half. The story, such as it is here, is mostly about Bridger deciding to come back to the Navy despite promising his wife he never would. Lucas ends up convincing him in the epilogue.

It's not a bad episode. It sets up an interesting, versatile format. They could go a lot of different ways with it. The ship is more openly military than Trek ever did, and there's some real tension between the civilians and the navy guys. The effects are very good for 1993. I think it's almost all CGI, but it's hidden well by undersea murkiness. I like it, but it's not the heart-pounding adventure it was when I was a kid. The differences between it and Trek develop as the series goes on. Back then, the idea that you'd do scifi in the near future was just weird. I guess the direction was very strong towards plausible future tech in the first season. I remember the guy who found Titanic doing science clips over the credits, but those aren't on the DVD.

The second season is something completely different, but later on this season we get glimpses of what they ended up trying to do. Ratings for this season were awful, but back then you could still get a whole season of a show with bad ratings. Cable was almost all rerun networks. I remember liking the first season the most, though. We'll see if that holds.