There is a 10% probability of survival in outer space.
The Silent Sea is a Korean Sci-Fi Mystery Thriller drama series. The series, consisting of eight episodes, was released on 24 December 2021 on Netflix.
Not far in the future, Earth is facing a water crisis. Most of the lakes and rivers have dried up and Earth's remaining fresh water is tightly rationed. Dr. Song Ji-an (Bae Doona), an astrobiologist turned ethologist, is approached by the Space and Aeronautics Administration. They are offering her to join a lunar sample retrieval mission to the deserted Balhae Lunar Research Station, which has been abandoned for five years after most of the crew was killed in a radiation leak. The SAA wants to retrieve three "samples", but won't tell the people on the mission what the samples are.
Song Ji-an joins the mission to Balhae, mainly for a personal reason: her sister Song Won-kyung was one of the crewmembers of Balhae station who was killed five years ago. The team is led by Captain Han Yoon-jae (Gong Yoo), who has his own personal reasons for going on the mission, and who knows a secret about what happened on Balhae. The mission gets off to a bad start when the spacecraft crash-lands on the Moon after a mechanical failure, killing one crew member. The rest of the crew make it on foot to Balhae Station—where they discover that the story of the radiation leak is a cover-up, and the truth about what happened five years ago is far more disturbing.
Tropes:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: While there is no year given, the setting is depicted not far different from the modern world, albeit with a global water crisis. However, space technology is a fair bit more advanced. Shuttle missions to the moon can be launched spontaneously within hours. Private, para-legal companies competing with state agencies in space appear to be an ongoing problem, and Balhae Station even features Artificial Gravity that nobody ever talks about.
- Abandoned Laboratory: Balhae Station was abandoned five years ago after a radiation leak, but they quickly discover this was a coverup.
- Almost Out of Oxygen:
- The crew is forced to walk from their crashed shuttle to the station relying only on their spacesuits. They barely make it, save one who dies from injuries sustained in the crash.
- This happens to Captain Han three times - the first during the aforementioned crash, the second from his spacesuit getting damaged by an elevator gone haywire, and the last during the destruction of the base. He succumbs to the last one.
- An Arm and a Leg: Luna causes E1's death in this manner.
- Animal Eyes: Luna has nictitating membranes, giving her a creepy appearance and possibly explaining why her eyeballs don't rupture in hard vacuum.
- Apocalypse How: Earth is undergoing a Class 1 Societal Disruption when the show begins, brought on by a severe worldwide water shortage. Rivers, lakes, and even parts of the oceans have dried up, fish are considered extinct, water is strictly rationed, keeping pets is illegal, riots are common, and there's a general sense of dejection and acceptance of mankind's eventual extinction. The mission to Balhae Station is supposed to fix this, and it might well succeed in doing so if done right. If done wrong, however, Earth is looking at a Class 2 Societal Collapse at bestnote , or up to Class 4 Multispecies Extinction at worst, depending on how many species are susceptible to lunar water.
- Applied Phlebotinum: Lunar water, the sample the crew were told to retrieve and thought to be the solution to the Earth's water problems. It turns out to be more dangerous than anticipated, rapidly multiplying when exposed to organic material. Even a drop landing on a person drowns them from the inside-out within an hour.
- Artificial Gravity: The show actually does simulate the astronauts loping across the moon in 1/6 gravity, but as soon as they make it to the space station, good old artificial gravity is deployed inside.
- Artistic License - Astronomy: Following the Balhae mission's crash landing on the Moon, the SAA prepares and launches a rescue mission that arrives less than 24 hours later, with shuttle technology that doesn't look much different from what was available when the show first aired. That technology currently takes about three days of flight time to reach the Moon, preceded by months or even years of mission preparation.
- Artistic License – Biology:
- Everything about the lunar water.
- Despite the station having maintained a breathable atmosphere ever since the accident five years earlier, none of the corpses lying around have rotted or even desiccated.
- The scientists of Balhae Station were apparently trying to brute-force the development of an immunity to the lunar water's effects by exposing dozens of pre-teens to it, hoping one would prove to be naturally immune. Morally bankrupt, but scientifically sound - that's basically enforced natural selection. However, all these pre-teens were clones, meaning they were genetically identical, which in turn means that after the first one didn't survive the water, the others would've shown the exact same reaction. Yet Luna-073 still somehow came out on top. Dr. Song does mention that genetic engineering is going on, so the clones may have been altered in this fashion.
- Having gills and Super-Strength apparently enables you to survive in hard vacuum without a space suit.
- Artistic License – Physics:
- Again, everything about the lunar water. The stuff gives the middle finger to molecular physics as we know it.
- It's never explained or even talked about how a near-future space station on the moon maintains Artificial Gravity that can be switched on or off at will.
- One of the flashbacks to the original disaster five years ago shows a squad of soldiers firing warning shots at the ground right in front of a desperate crowd of researchers. Despite the floor being steel and concrete, nobody gets hit by ricochets.
- When the lunar water floods the entire station until it bursts into space, thousands of tons of water freeze solid almost instantly. In reality it would evaporate first due to the lack of atmosphere.
- Blackmail: Implied to be Director Choi's reason for choosing Dr. Song into the mission, as she finds it likely that the latter will stay silent once she learns what her sister really did at Balhae.
- Blood from the Mouth:
- The seriousness of Mr. Hwang's injury (he suffered a broken rib which, it seems, punctured a lung) is demonstrated when he suddenly vomits up a good chunk of blood into his space helmet. He dies moments later.
- One character infected by lunar water, thanks to having been shot as well.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: Luna, obviously being a clone/genetically-engineered hybrid, and having zero human contact for the past five years, has no concept of morality as we see it. It's not until the penultimate scene where she shows some semblance of human emotion, where she offers Han his badge in his dying moments.
- Bottomless Magazines: The soldiers among the team fire far more bullets in a single fight than their magazines could realistically hold, and they're never seen reloading. It might've been feasible if their guns were chambered in some semi-futuristic, ultra-small high-velocity caliber, but they clearly aren't, judging by the muzzle bore and the bullets shown in the final episode.
- Captain Smooth and Sergeant Rough: Captain Han and Chief Gong develop this dynamic in the later episodes, especially once the former softens up on Luna.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- Luna taking out E1's hand which was holding a lunar water sample, as well as the entire segment being full of plants is what would eventually bring down the entire base.
- Luna biting Dr. Song ends up saving her life when she gets infected by the lunar water.
- Classified Information: Certain areas of the station are off-limits to the crew without proper security clearance, with even the blueprints omitting the existence of those areas.
- Closed Circle: The crew has no contact with the SAA Mission Control until a couple of episodes in, when Han successfully repairs the comms equipment.
- Colonized Solar System: Space travel appears to be common enough that nobody gives it much thought anymore. Most of the main characters have completed numerous tours to the moon and even Mars, with further outposts implied here and there.
- Coming in Hot: The shuttle has to make an emergency landing when the docking clamp on the main rocket breaks, and their landing is further complicated by the shuttle being damaged in the process.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Tae-Suk was the guy who (reluctantly) closed the gate on the entire Balhae crew, sealing everyone to their watery deaths. He implies this is the Cynicism Catalyst that caused him to become The Mole for RX.
- Dead Man's Chest: A literal case of Stuffed into the Fridge when The Mole hides a body in there, and it's only found when the doctor opens it while looking for the samples he stole.
- Downer Beginning: The series starts out with an action prologue in which a spacecraft has crashed on the Moon. That's followed by an opening recapping the world's desperate water crisis, ending with a shot of smoky, devastated Seoul with the Han River dried up.
- Dwindling Party:
- Out of the 11 crew of the mission, only Dr. Song, Dr. Hong, and the Living MacGuffin Luna make it out alive. Han surprisingly gets blasted out of the space station alive, but he died of both his injuries and hypoxia just before The Cavalry arrived.
- Hwang is the first to die, succumbing to a broken rib and a punctured lung sustained after the spacecraft crashed.
- Eating the Eye Candy: Lampshaded by Dr. Hong, who tells her fellow female doctor that when you're stuck on a tiny spacecraft for a long time, it helps if you have some attractive crewmates to look at.
- Expendable Clone: It took 72 Luna clones to be experimented on until the station's scientists engineered one who's immune to the incredibly virulent effects of lunar water.
- Expy: As a water-based substance that makes more of itself on contact with living beings, lunar water shares a lot of traits with Ice-nine, including the latter's apocalyptic potential if released on Earth.
- Extremely Short Timespan: The show's eight episodes cover a timespan of less than 24 hours, with a few brief flashbacks thrown in for clarity.
- Gas Leak Cover Up: The station was supposedly abandoned and most of its crew killed by a radiation leak, but in reality the government had everyone killed to cover-up the experiments being done there.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Luna has gills and scales that enable her to thrive in lunar water. It turns out that her genetic modifications also enable her to just do fine in the lunar atmosphere. Without a spacesuit.
- Harmful to Touch: Lunar water. Any living object coming into contact with it dies shortly afterwards, thanks to its ability to rapidly multiply from contact with organic material.
- Healing Factor: Coming into contact with lunar water enables Luna to instantly heal her wounds.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Double subverted with Han, who returned inside to activate the airlock. At first, staying behind in raging lunar waters looked like certain death, though, the penultimate scene shows him to have somehow survived the blast. He does end up getting injured, but hypoxia did him in.
- Hired Guns: Space travel has apparently become so widely available that mercenary raids are a constant worry. The most frequently mentioned company of the sort is RX (shorthand for Resource Exploitation), a ruthless Megacorp that goes around the solar system staking claims to profitable resource deposits, or looting abandoned (or not so abandoned) outposts.
- How We Got Here: The first episode begins with the crew's ship crash landing on the Moon. Unlike most examples of this trope, the story catches up to this point before the first episode is over.
- I Did What I Had to Do: Song Won-kyung says this from beyond the grave. She tells her sister in a video letter that yes, she created and murdered 72 clones, but she did it to solve the water problem on Earth and save the human race.
- Improbable Infant Survival: There's only one survivor in the forcible closure of the Balhae station, and it's a child clone.
- Infection Scene: POV shots from infected crew members are Color Washed into blue and they start seeing red starfish. Except for Tae-Suk, who instead encounters hallucinations of himself during the "accident" that killed the original Balhae crew.
- Informed Ability: Dr. Song, the main character, is an astrobiologist, yet somehow fails to recognize gills when she sees them. Granted, they're not normally found on humans, but still. She also doesn't contribute much scientific know-how to solving the mysteries of Balhae Station aside from surface-level knowledge that most viewers probably deduced for themselves before her, like lunar water behaving like a virus.
- In Medias Res: The series open with Dr. Song waking up upside down from a crash landing. Several later episodes then contain brief flashbacks to give context on How We Got Here.
- In Space, Everyone Can See Your Face: There are no reflective visors and the helmets use dim lights around the cast's faces.
- Instant Drama, Just Add Tracheotomy: In episode 3 Dr. Hong does this out of desperation after Soo-chan starts vomiting gigantic amounts of water. It does not work, as water starts shooting out of the hole in Soo-chan's neck as well as his mouth, before Soo-chan dies, having drowned from the inside.
- Just Think of the Potential!: A more justified version than usual; no-one's trying to weaponize the lunar water, but as the rivers and oceans are drying up, water than can replicate itself would save the world if only they can make it stop killing people. The next stage of the experiments—a person who can't be killed by the lunar water and has superior adaptive ability—has even greater importance, so much that The Mole ignores his orders to just steal the lunar water and tries to capture Luna as well.
- Kill It with Ice: A few scenes show that the only known way to control the spread of lunar water outside of killing the host is to expose it to extreme cold.
- Let's Split Up, Gang!: The team splits into three to investigate the three storage rooms, as their mission has a time limit. As they become a Dwindling Party they have to keep doing this, even though they realise the importance of assigning people to cover each other. The first mole for RX creates a false reading on the motion tracker to draw off the leader of his team, then suggests Dr. Soong check out the medical files while he's away, so he can sneak into the storage room. Luna makes him suffer the fate of all Redshirts.
- Living MacGuffin: Luna, whose genetic adaptations with respect to lunar water had made her the station's sole survivor.
- Mauve Shirt: E1 and E2 have a few lines between them, but no real characterization and not even actual names given, turning them into little more than meat shields for the viewpoint characters in the Dwindling Party.
- Men Are the Expendable Gender: All and only the female characters – Dr. Song, Dr. Hong, and Luna – survive to the end.
- The Mole: Gi-Su and Tae-Suk work for RX, a group with its own motives regarding the lunar water.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Tae-Suk ruthlessly kills two of his colleagues, but is visibly upset afterwards. He also carries a lot of guilt over enforcing the Quarantine with Extreme Prejudice during the accident five years ago.
- Newspaper Backstory: After the cold opening, the series explains the setting through a news broadcast.
- No Name Given: We never learn of E1 and E2's real names.
- Non-Malicious Monster: Luna is merely a child, yet she can easily rip a man in two if she so desired. She’s prone to acting like a child and struggling to acquire more water for herself. Rather than being a malevolent person, she’s merely trying to keep what she considers hers. Any deaths incurred by her are not intentional but the results of a normal child’s temper tantrum who just happens to have superhuman strength.
- No Blood for Phlebotinum: While everyone is aware of the need to save the world, the mission isn't helped by Director Choi insisting that no-one else get their hands on the lunar water
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: Not even Section Chief Kim could convince Director Choi's higher-ups in the SAA to curtail her powers.
- Race Against the Clock: The crew only has 24 hours to complete the mission.
- Sensor Suspense: The motion tracker version when the team are hunting the intruder through the air vents.
- Shout-Out:
- The team's handguns are quite massive, hold far more rounds than should realistically fit into their magazines, and have a side-mounted display that allows for choosing between different kinds of ammo. If they were voice-activated, they'd be Lawgivers with the serial numbers filed off.
- The motion trackers being used to detect an intruder through the air vents system similar to Alien. Also as in the second movie, a soldier gives someone a tracking bracelet in a bonding moment.
- Slow Doors: Ironically it's the superfast Luna 073 who fails to make the Indy Hat Roll, getting her leg trapped.
- Space Is Noisy: Averted, except for the sound of the broken docking module and the falling spaceship. Even the soundtrack is disturbingly missing most of the time.
- Steel Eardrums: No one is ever bothered by repeated discharges of large-caliber handguns in enclosed spaces.
- Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: Luna is not a ghost, she is a living being. But she has the same effect as a creepy ghost girl, especially when she first appears, with her loose shapeless clothing, stringy hair, and scary Kubrick Stare.
- Symbolic Serene Submersion: Everyone who fell victim to lunar water, save for Tae-Suk has had this scene. It has added symbolism due to the drought on Earth, where it's virtually impossible to die from drowning.
- Title Drop: In the second episode, a flashback has Song Ji-an and her sister looking up at the moon. Her sister says that one of the black spots is "the silent sea". That's how the subtitles rendered the Korean "고요의 바다", for the lunar feature more commonly known in English as the Sea of Tranquility
. - The Virus: Lunar water isn't actually a virus, but it sure behaves like one, mainly by infecting living organisms to produce more of itself. Weirdly, humans seem to be the only species it kills on contact; plants and animals like goldfish survive just fine.
- The Unreveal: Although it's made clear in the first episode that the alleged deaths of Balhae Station's original crew from a radiation leak were a Gas Leak Cover-Up, the actual reason remains a mystery even after the final episode. We do learn that lunar water was involved of course, but not how or why exactly it ended up spreading through the whole facility.
- Unwitting Test Subject: Luna and her 72 other clones were all tested if lunar water had any effects on them.
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Downplayed, but everyone infected with lunar water starts projectile-vomiting biologically impossible amounts of water. It happens a fair few times throughout the show and is just as uncomfortable to watch as if it were actual vomit.
- Walking the Earth: Implied to be Luna's fate, except obviously on the moon. It's not mentioned whether she was included among those rescued by the SAA.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: It's not mentioned how the SAA dealt with the RX spacecraft from landing near Balhae in the finale.
- Wild Child: Luna, who has been living on the moon on her own for at least five years.
- You Are Number 6: E1, E2 and Luna 073.
