The Silent Sea (2021)

Minor spoilers below.

For the final review of the year, I’m focusing on the drama that just dropped Christmas Eve, The Silent Sea. The Silent Sea had been one of my most anticipated dramas since it was announced and I was really happy when it finally got a premiere date. I had some other things that I needed to do the day that it was uploaded, and didn’t think that I’d end up getting around to it. And then I did…at 10:30 pm and then stayed up all night watching it. The drama follows a crew as they depart to the moon to collect samples at a research base that suffered a catastrophe years prior, in hopes to find a clue for another source of water.

On a whole, I enjoyed the drama. It wasn’t everything that I had expected or wanted, but I by no means thought it wasn’t entertaining. It kept me interested and engaged, and there was no time in my binge that I felt the need to stop to return to it later. I did find with the first two episodes we kind of got baited into thinking that the drama was going to skew much more into the horror side than it ended up being, and I would be lying if I didn’t say I was a bit sad it didn’t keep that up. There were also a few parts in the middle of the drama that I felt were a bit draggy, but with the episodes being so short the drama didn’t spend much time in that area. I do wish we got a bit more look at the other members’ lives on Earth and found that the parts we did get with Yun Ja (Gong Yoo) and Ji An (Bae Doo Na) were interesting, leaving me wanting to see more about the situation on Earth.

Kim Shi Ah who played Luna was fantastic. I thought she did well in her role as the younger version of Ashin in Ashin of the North (the prequel/side story of Kingdom) and it was nice to see her in this larger role. Being so young and carrying a role such as hers is a challenge she pulled off effortlessly. Bae Doo Na was incredible as always, as was Gong Yoo. Kim Sun Young doesn’t get many leading roles, but I’ve had a fondness for her since her character in Because This Is My First Life. I thought she was great in her role and had good chemistry with Bae Doo Na and the rest of the cast. Lee Joon was also phenomenal. I wasn’t expecting a pseudo-serial killer angle to come, especially not with his character, and the drama played it up well grounding it with the backstory of what happened at the research center previously, and his PTSD that eventually led to his decisions, and Lee Joon carried that transition well.

Some of the popular takes that I’ve heard so far about the drama have been about how slow it was and thought that it left too many unanswered questions. While I did think parts were draggy in the middle, on a whole I loved the slow burn it gave us. Especially as it started to shift to a full-blown thriller from horror, and worked with the mystery of what was going on, almost mimicking the sense of silence and stillness that outer space inherently has. I didn’t think the questions that I had needed to be explained. The drama didn’t set us up to believe that we were going to get all the answers, nor would it have been able to. In a way, it mirrored the character’s journey in the drama. Their questions were left unanswered as well. Yun Ja spends much of the first part of the drama telling Ji An to stop asking questions and keep on task to collect the samples. Answering questions was not why they were there, and the answers they do get are not the ones they want.

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