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johntfs posted:I'll probably get some poo poo for this, but Surface ended too soon for me. Nostalgia is probably coloring how really good the show was. The thing for me is that the main three protagonists on the show don't come together until the last 15 minutes of the final episode. It's awesome when it happens and the show sets up some amazing possibilities and cool stuff and then it loving ends right there and there's nothing else. No, I really enjoyed Surface while it was on as well. I've watched it again since then and yeah, in retrospect, it was just okay and probably best that they didn't continue. After reading a couple of interviews with the show's creators post-cancellation, it was clear they had no idea where they were going with the story - lots of "we have a general idea for a second season but we're not revealing anything in case we get picked up by another network" - they didn't and it was pretty clearly BS. They expected to get a full season but were only given 15 by NBC so they moved up a bunch of plot threads that went nowhere, they also got hosed since the show didn't air for like three months in the middle of its run because of the Winter Games, and their budget was too high. Honestly I don't know where they could have gone with it, even after they got all the show's leads together. If you never watched it, the show had a great hook - a species of previously unidentified giant sea monsters appears in the world's oceans and start loving poo poo up. Unfortunately, the show came out a season after "Lost" debuted so it had to have the whole meta mystery thing going on (and also this and two other water-monster themed shows all came out at the same time, including ABC's Invasion and CBS' Threshold), and what little they revealed kind of blew (spoilers for a decade-old show five people watched): the monsters were created by a generic eccentric evil geneticist guy to apparently dig through the ocean floor and disrupt tectonic plates to trigger tsunamis (which happened in the series finale), all the while he and his evil generic corporation were creating clones and new life forms and had built this giant underwater train system going into the Marianas Trench. Sort of a Noah's Ark in reverse, I guess? So he'd rebuild a new world after his monsters had wiped out the surface world. How would the show's heroes, who were otherwise everyday citizens, fight that sort of thing or find a way down there? It was ultimately really unsatisfying and by-the-numbers. The first few episodes are really strong but it's clear where they began to go off the rails after the network cut them because lots of unanswered, totally-from-the-"Lost"-playbook stuff starts happening (a rich guy who helps the characters build a bathysphere to head to the ocean floor to film the creatures mysteriously disappears and strands the heroes in the ocean when they resurface - his image last appears on one of the bad guys' computers as one of the people in the evil generic corporation heading to the sea floor, dun dun dun!); one of the heroes is exploring an abandoned lab owned by the evil corporation and is attacked by a bigfoot monster, implied to be another genetic creation of his, etc., but it also had some cool parts, like when the primary antagonist who has been trying to prevent the adult leads from getting evidence of the creatures out to the public is revealed to be a clone of a guy who was the evil geneticist's right-hand man on an expedition like 50 years earlier captured on film - it's great because, IIRC, the clone is forced to watch the movie of his old self by the leads (who turn the tables on him and capture him) and he's immediately like "this poo poo is hosed up, I'm out" and leaves them go. So yeah. A show with a great idea but it went nowhere.
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Sep 11, 2015 15:01
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 07:18 |
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