Back in the day, there was a little show called seaQuest DSV. I watched some of it as a kid, and now I’m revisiting the series curtousey of Netflix. The show had a decent premise and a good budget, and it got me excited about science fiction as a kid.
The story is set in the year 2018, when much of the worlds ocean floors have been colonized. Now I know you’re thinking, “Who colonized the oceans? And why?” Farmers, that’s who. To farm what, I really couldn’t tell you. Does it matter? No!
But wait, there somebody else in the water… pirates! That’s right. Pirates. In submarines. Looking and acting like Nazis. And trying to kill the farmers.
That’s where the UEO—the United Earth Oceans Organization—steps in. Their flagship is the seaQuest (yes, the capitalization is correct), a giant ass submarine with hundreds of crewmen. Its job is to protect the farmers from the pirates, the pirates from the monsters, and the farmers from themselves (they do live at the bottom of the ocean). While technically a military vessel, half of seaQuest’s crew are scientists who have a grand old time conductin’ their speriments.
I shit you not people, this show is a classic. Here are some other cool facets of the show:
- A talking dolphin
- Roy Scheider
- Military vs science ideological struggles
- Holograms via misty waterfalls
- These two ladies
- Pirates in submarines
I also noticed something interesting about science fiction television. During the first episode of the show, the previous captain of seaQuest, a woman, was relieved of command for being an evil bitch. She then died trying to blow up seaQuest at the end of the episode. In another show, Battlestar Galactica, Admiral Cain is also an evil bitch. The one woman I can think of in a position of authority who was not an evil bitch was Captain Janeway. Well, at least she wasn’t evil. Why do I bring this up? I like to think that science fiction is a reflection of our own society. I will say no more. And yes, I can totally draw conclusions from a sample size of three.
Anyways, the show has some pretty cool ideas about the future and where technology is going. But it gets computers totally wrong. Why it even tries to explain how computers work I’ll never know. Star Trek never tried to do this. BSG never does this. The writers on these shows knew they wouldn’t get it right, so they didn’t try. But the writers on seaQuest had some balls. Take this conversation:
“What’s wrong with the computer?”
“It’s the core. It’s dying. There’s a virus eating away at it.”
“Can you get rid of it?”
“I don’t know. Depending on the layers of data between us and the virus, it might be doable. Woah”
“What?”
“Dogs.”
“Dogs?”
“Dogs. Barking dogs. They protect the virus if someone tries to remove it. I can’t get near it or else it will take the whole system down.”
Then they proceed to go “around” the virus by cutting and rewiring a bunch of cables inside the ship (which leak some kind of goo).
Overall, seaQuest is a decent show. The stories and characters are silly, but the idea is pretty cool. Think Star Trek under the sea.
7/10