Originally Aired: November 7, 1993
I had to watch another one. I want my hour back and it seemed like the best way to get it was to spend another hour on another dubious episode of seaQuest. Also, my book is boring.
This is a Captain's Dilemma episode. The synopsis says Bridger goes to rescue a French sightseeing sub caught in a hurricane, but his rescue crew gets caught now and he has to decide who to save. He'll save both. This is a fake dilemma. This isn't the type of show where the captain has to make a choice like this and it has real consequences...especially not for a bunch of extras. This also isn't the type of show where the captain has to decide between saving one or the other person in the main cast. Imagine if that were really the choice. We might have good drama. Will Bridger save the extras Hitchcock lured into her van with promises of candy, or save Lucas who was lured into Krieg's van with promises of nose candy? Maybe it's because I'm sick inside, but that joke episode idea sounds better than the last three episodes I've really watched.
I wrote several lines of incredibly bad taste after this where I explored the topic a little bit, but I got rid of them in the name of common decency. Let's just say I could write fan fiction and leave it at that.
The real episode, then.
Do we need the Universal bump for every episode? It's on before the menu too.
Exterior of CGI French sightseeing sub at the bottom of the sea. It's a cool looking sub. A woman speaking what sounds like real French and wearing a jacket with a fleur-de-lis on it is comforting children. The pilot is passed out.
O'Neil explains to Bridger that the signal is going to be scrambled, a hurricane is on its way, and they've got at least two days of hell ahead. Bridger tells us that they're in the Bermuda Triangle.
Sea launch. None of the displays or gauges in the sub are working. Ford hits one. No good. Lucas and Westphalen are speaking French into the radio. Lucas is in a red and white jersey and a maroon shirt. Stephanie Beecham either speaks French or is really good. Jonathan Brandis obviously does not. He even has that puzzled sounding it out look on his face, although Lucas is saying enough, and it's different words from Westphalen's dialog, that we're meant to believe he speaks it. They see a big wave coming. It throws Westphalen and Lucas across the sub. They land on a couch. Seriously.
Cockpit. Ford is throwing away the batteries, the robot arms, the survival pod... Was that wise? Now they're rising towards the surface instead of falling. They were falling because... a wave hit them? Ford tells Westphalen and Lucas that they're doing an emergency surfacing and planning to abandon ship. Would the survival pod have been handy for that?
Credits. Extended credits with a cloudscape, rain on water.
seaQuest. They're getting parts of Ford's transmission. Lots of static. They lose the connection. On Bridger's navigation table you can see Florida. Crocker, who knows jack about weather, tells them a hurricane is coming. Bridger asks Crocker to phone the Coast Guard to rescue Ford, et al.
Bridger goes on the PA and summarizes the plot. O'Neil has Ford again. They have flares and are on a raft. Bridger tells Ford about how the Coast guard will save 'em. They'll phone every fifteen minutes.
Raft from hell. The castaways are wet. I think this might have been filmed on a real body of water. Lucas fiddles with electronics and Ford gives out orders about taking inventory of their supplies. None are visible. Westphalen tells us they will have no fish to eat.
Bridge. Levine is an expert in geology and oceanography now. They're talking about sink holes, etc. The implication is that the French sub caught a column of fresh water and fell into a sink hole. Fresh water isn't as buoyant as sea water, so you really could sink. Some of the sinkholes are big enough to swallow seaQuest.
French sub. Generic reminder that the air is running out.
Raft. Everyone has stripped to undershirts. Ford and Lucas are sleeveless. Krieg is not. Westphalen figures out a hurricane is on the way. They might be in the eye.
Bridge. O'Neil babbles in French, which I think Ted Raimi might speak, and then switches over so Bridger can remind him about the sub.
Raft. They're talking about making a bigger antenna when the lightning startles Lucas, who had the radio on the edge of the raft where any teenaged genius could knock it off. He knocks it into the drink. Way to go, genius. Lucas dives after it, comes up holding the microphone. It drags him back under. Ford saves him.
Bridge. They talk about how they heard Ford's radio go down.
Raft. Westphalen suggests a snack. Lucas starts eating, but Krieg steals it out of his hands and looks at the foil. He wants to know if radar will bounce off the foil. It will, so they start spoiling all of their food. I can buy that since they're not going to survive a hurricane anyway.
Moon pool. Bridger talks to Darwin. He explains about avoiding fresh water. Darwin goes to find Lucas.
Raft. It's storming now and they're holding a foil flag out above them. The wind takes it. Everyone is fully dressed again and getting drenched. They're all meant to look despairing, but really the expressions are more like they're about to tell the FX guys to lay off on the wind and garden hoses.
French sub. We've had this scene before.
Bridge. O'Neil and Ortiz signal and then start talking on the intercom. They're griping about having to do all the work longhand. O'Neil does not believe in the Triangle. Ortiz does. Hitchcock wants to reel in the communications buoy that connects them to Ford because it's a giant lightning rod. Bridger says no.
Raft. Lucas says they've forgotten about rescuing anybody. Krieg gives a pep talk and Lucas blows him off. Krieg says it's sincere. He's a glass half full guy. Half full of what, Lucas asks. Krieg glurges about their being in the eye of a hurricane. They spot lights. The seaQuest comm buoy, and here's Darwin! A lightning strike helps them remember it's a giant lightning rod they're next to, and then the lightning hits. Bad FX run down the seaQuest and blast a few guys on the bridge. Everything blows out and shoots sparks because in the future nothing is ever grounded.
Bridge. O'Neil's glasses are in crooked and there's smoke all over the bridge. They're down to manual control on the helm. Bridger is telling everyone to hang in there. Everything is cooked. Bridger wants to know times for repair. They might need dry dock. Bridger asks after the WHSKRs, the satellites seaQuest travels with. Turns out they're grounded. But not the ship. Bridger wants one brought in to use its hardware. Crocker starts singing and then everyone is singing. Really a group of professionals are singing. No dance numbers.
Raft. Lucas is crying and thinks Darwin is dead. Ford needs his help and wants to know if he can make a camera run continuously. Westphalen is talking about knots. What are they doing? Turns out she's the only one that can tie knots.
Bridge. Hitchcock saws into a WHSKR, which is about the size of a person, with a chainsaw. Crocker gives instructions on how to tap into it because...why? He's the security chief. Isn't this Hitchcock's job? They can run one station off it. Bridger wants them all to run in a series. Bridger gets news that Darwin is back. Two guns in wetsuits are holding him. Darwin says he found Lucas. He also found the sub, by the way.
Raft. Westphalen wants to know how Lucas is doing and confesses being scared. She gives a speech about it being ok to be afraid. Lucas isn't buying. The other people with testicles aren't afraid. She tells him they are. Then she takes and hugs and kisses Lucas. He smiles and seems comforted. Ok.
French sub. This is the same scene with different dialog each time.
Bridge. Crocker has taught the crew every sea shanty he knows. Bridger is pissed that the boat is cooked. He's blaming himself. Crocker tells Bridger he can't blame himself for Lucas. Turns out Lucas volunteered for rescue duty. First thing he's ever volunteered for in the series. If this wasn't a completely predictable stock dialog it would be nice.
Hitchcock powers up communications. It works. Montage of stations coming on and going off.
O'Neil tells us the hurricane is a Category 3. Ortiz's time is up, but he found something. It's a sink hole. It's a field of them. Bridger insists he can't risk sending out the last WHSKR, so he'll risk the whole ship checking each sink hole, which could take days but the kids suffocate in two hours so that's ok.
Raft. They're bailing water. Krieg apologizes to Westphalen. Apparently he ate some lobsters that were supposed to be an experiment. She's pissed, but wants to know if they were good. Lucas has managed to rig the the camera to signal Morse Code.
French sub. Last emergency air going on.
Bridge. The search planes went for land and also they're at a new sink hole. They discover a locomotive at the bottom. Now Crocker thinks the locomotive just fell off a cargo ship. Ok. But last episode it would have been a possessed train. Bridger intuits out a new heading by watching a regular level.
Darwin gets up to the bridge and all his blisters from before are gone already. Darwin tells Bridger where the sub is. Turns out it's right on the heading Bridger chose. This is not explained.
Raft from hell. They're still bailing and the batteries are out. A huge wave comes up on the raft. Somone (Ford?) jams a life jacket over Lucas's head. Ford's gone overboard, swept out. Krieg dives out and fishes him back in.
French sub. Ok, lack of air is not going to end up with a lot of kids crying and whining. They would be sleepy and passing out. The sub jerks and there's a thud. Everyone creams.
Bridge. They used a grappling thing. Everyone on the French sub is still alive and there's applause in the bridge. Levine harshes it by asking for a sounding. Turns out the cavern below could collapse and take seaQuest down...which it now starts doing. They're blowing ballast. The debris is falling all around the French sub. Bridger wants to flood the ballast. He wants to collapse the ceiling and dissipate the fresh water. They're planning to bounce out of the well. I have my doubts about this working, but maybe. CGI seaQuest starts sinking. They blow ballast...and the ship starts its way up, hoisting the French sub. More applause.
O'Neil demands quiet. No one pays attention. He stands up and nerd-shrieks it. This works. He's picking up a faint signal...which stopped some time ago. Or didn't. Now the batteries on the camera on the raft are dead. Convenient timing. Lights surround the raft from below. seaQuest is right under them. Laughs. When soaking wet, Jonathan Brandis looks to be about six.
And that was....what? It's not bad. It's just a really generic rescue episode. There are no real character moments. The French sub provides filler on top of filler on top of filler. It's not awful like the last one. It's just average and generic. This could have been a plot on any show. There's a bit of a plot hole in that if there are hurricane force winds on the surface (and the raft was obviously in the storm at this point) shouldn't it have been blown all over the place? Also the use of Darwin to find both groups of victims of the week is convenient to the point of silliness. He want out for Lucas but while he was out he spotted the sub too? It's really asking a lot to have us believe that the hurricane blew the raft in exactly the same direction as the sub too, since there's no talk of them having to go out of their way to rescue both. That's one precise hurricane.
Still, it doesn't leave me feeling dumber like the last one did.
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8 comments:
For me, seaQuest, sort of made me hate Jonathan Brandis. Loved him in the It, the Stephen King mini that aired on ABC back in 1991.
While he wasn't Wesley from TNG, he was, if you get my meaning.
He was not handsome, in the usual twink boy sort of way, and I think he was talented. Sad to see that all he was here on this show was to get 12 year-old girls to watch.
But most guys -fully clothed - look horrible fully drenched.
It's not a good look, my young friend.
I think Lucas is Wesley for some writers and not for a few others, since he seems to have episodes where he's very Wesley-esque, and then others where he's just the opposite. The ghost ship show has him as a generic innocent lamb, like the TNG where Wesley fell in the plants and was going to be executed. He's not a character here so much as the doe-eyed victim. But there are others where he seems like more of a real teenager and not a preternaturally snarky perfect boy-victim.
The characters are definitely there for different reasons, though. Wesley was more or less Roddenberry's idealized version of himself. He's a childhood fantasy playing out on screen...and a fantasy the writers didn't like very much but couldn't get rid of. Lucas is there to put teenage, female butts in the seats, as you said.
The soaking wet comment wasn't meant as a nasty criticism. I think Lucas stood out because they framed the shot with him in the foreground and his hair is normally so big and vertical. I sort of remember they let him grow it out a little bit for the second season. That seems like a more realistic cut for a guy that likely wouldn't see a non-military barber for months on end. It could have been funny if they had a scene where somebody gave Lucas hell about his non-regulation cut.
"He's not a character here so much as the doe-eyed victim. But there are others where he seems like more of a real teenager and not a preternaturally snarky perfect boy-victim."
I think you are right here. While most of season one's hit and misses can be blamed on fact that it was the first season, this is also a problem with episodic based shows.
While arc based shows do have issues, mainly with continuity, the characters have a tendency to grow from episode to episode. Thus the "doe-eyed victim" may pop up once, but never again.
Arc based shows also know that you can't change the character back, that it must progress in a natural, organic sort of way.
Lucas became fractured in many ways, becoming the hero one episode and a standard teen in another. This leads to way too much confusion. Disinterest follows.
Sci fi, in my opinion, should be arc based. TNG was one of the few episodic shows that tried hard to make the characters grow. But that was thrown out the window with Voyager and Eterprise.
Only DS9 got it right, and I use that show as baseline for other sci fi shows -both hard and space opera alike.
"While arc based shows do have issues, mainly with continuity, the characters have a tendency to grow from episode to episode. Thus the "doe-eyed victim" may pop up once, but never again."
I think there's room for character decay in arc-driven shows, but it's no worse than what would happen in an episodic series. It does bother me that plenty of arc-based shows seem to have writers that don't sweat much of the continuity they're depending on.
"Sci fi, in my opinion, should be arc based. TNG was one of the few episodic shows that tried hard to make the characters grow. But that was thrown out the window with Voyager and Eterprise."
Agreed. I've read a little bit that indicated early on there were plans for more character arcs than eventually developed.
I don't know that I'd use DS9 as my model. I'd prefer Babylon 5, but there's a difference between being a good show and being a good scifi show. TNG's technobabble and magic particles were a throwback to scifi's idea-oriented past. DS9 and Babylon 5 are good shows that don't lean very much on the science or technology sides of things. Maybe they're good space operas, but that's not the only kind of scifi. I think the market for non-space operas might be a bit scarce, though.
Crap. I can't edit my comment.
I meant to say that DS9 and Babylon 5 are both perfectly good shows in their own right, but they were trying to do something slightly different from TNG. TNG was alternately a greek chorus on our society and issues and idea-driven scifi.
DS9 and B5 ended up being about an epic story and the character development that rises out of it. They're space operas, which TNG didn't really try to be very often.
Never a fan of B5, though I know many people like it better than DS9.
I give props to JMS for creating a five year arc from the word go -it took DS9 nearly a two full seasons to achieve that (and that was because Paramount and Rick Berman tried to prevent it).
However, I could never get over the stale acting of Jerry Doyle, Bruce Boxleitner, Michael O'Hare and Tracy Scoggins.
Still, while DS9 had its problems, once Berman realized that no matter how much he protested, Ira Steven Behr was going to do what he wanted, DS9 became the best Star Trek series, sometimes surpassing TNG in story telling.
I adore it and think this is the way space opera's should tell a story.
But I can see where some would disagree. :-)
I'm not thinking straight tonight. I hit publish comment right in the middle of a sentence. Anyway, this is the whole thing.
"However, I could never get over the stale acting of Jerry Doyle, Bruce Boxleitner, Michael O'Hare and Tracy Scoggins."
It probably didn't help that JMS wrote almost all the episodes and he has some very prominent writing ticks. As far as character acting goes, I liked the aliens on B5 much more than the humans.
Bashir and Garak had one of the longest-running gay relationships on mainstream TV at the time, though. That deserves some credit even if they never exactly came out of the closet. I read that one of the actors has confessed to deliberately playing it as such.
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