Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

The Silent Sea
(고요의 바다 / Goyoui Bada)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hi everyone! It has only been a week since my last review, but I was able to finish this one surprisingly fast. I knew from the start that it was a short series, but the episodes also turned out to be very short for a Korean drama series, so I went through it very quickly. As it wasn’t the type of genre that I usually watch, I was really curious to this one as it had looked very thrilling to me from the trailer and I was also interested to see the chemistry/dynamic of the popular lead actors in a genre that I haven’t really seen them in before. Before I started on it, I felt like it would be a sort of Armaggedon-vibe show, a crew of multiple people going on a dangerous mission in space where they discover something even more dangerous than they’d anticipated, and they’re taken out one by one until only several (predictable) people remain. That’s what I imagined. Although it did follow along the first few expectations I had, it also still managed to surprise me and it really kept me on the edge of my seat until the end. The only thing keeping me back from giving it a higher rating is my dissatisfaction with the ending. Leggo.

The Silent Sea is an 8-episode K-Drama with episodes of each about 40-50 minutes, which is short for a Netflix K-Drama (in my experience, at least). The story is set on Earth in the future, and in a quite dystopian future at that. Earth is basically a barren wasteland, there’s barely any water left on the surface. Sea levels are dropping and there’s barely any rainfall. Contamination of the existing water has a big influence on health all over the world, and there’s a lot of research going on regarding artificial farming which doesn’t require much water usage. The water shortage in its turn causes global food shortage, and so the cycle goes on and on. In fact, in the current society, people’s allowed amount of water is determined by a regulation that links one’s rank to the amount of water they’re allowed to get. This regulation doesn’t just apply to water usage, but also to other privileges like better medical care. One needs to have a certain rank to be allowed better treatment. It really reminded me of an escalated version of Nosedive (Black Mirror), where ranks determine everything. Anyways, in this world where people are desperate for water and are actually lining up for hours to fill up their plastic water tanks, the SAA (Space and Aeronautics Administration) sends a special team of scientists and specialists to the Moon to fetch an important sample from the Balhae Lunar Research Station. This station is about to be shut down because of a terrible radiation leak accident that happened 5 years ago which killed all 117 crew members present at the station at the time. Whatever they were working on or what exactly happened is not known even to the SAA, and this also goes for the exact contents of the sample. The team is basically sent there with no concrete information on what they’re supposed to retrieve.
As a former esteemed astrobiologist turned ethologist, Dr. Song Ji An (played by Bae Doo Na) is the person that the SAA wants most to participate in this mission. They claim it’s because her skills will contribute greatly to the mission, and they give her the final decision on what’s to be done with the sample when they find it. However, for Ji An there’s another, more personal reason why she reluctantly decides to go on this mission – her older sister Song Won Kyung (played by Kang Mal Geum) was one of the researchers at Balhae Station.

From the start, I thought the whole mission seemed hella suspicious. They aren’t given any concrete information on what exactly they have to travel all the way to the Moon for, they literally only get a picture of what the capsule containing the sample looks like, and the information that the sample needs to be kept under extremely low temperatures. Why it needs to be kept under extremely low temperatures, no one knows. Also, they are told that they really only need to secure ONE single capsule of the sample, no need to go in for more. Why send a full 11-people team just to obtain ONE capsule? If there really was nothing going on in that station, they wouldn’t have felt the need to send so many people, right? In any case, I would’ve definitely wanted to know what I was getting into before risking my life in outer space, so I could very well understand Ji An’s suspicion.
Why did she still decide to go, then? As she already establishes in the beginning, she’s not an astrobiologist anymore, there’s nothing out there. The thing is, she used to be really close with her sister after their parents died. Her sister told her once about ‘the silent sea’, referring to the darker parts that are visible on the Moon, parts that were rumored to contain water. She said she wanted to show Ji An the ocean again, if possible. But then suddenly a few years later, her sister left without saying anything, and Ji An only finds out she’d been doing research in outer space when the SAA informs her of Won Kyung’s death. What she was doing up there, Ji An doesn’t know, as it was all kept under wraps and she didn’t keep in touch with her sister that much after she’d left. The final time that her sister contacted her was five years earlier, and Ji An didn’t pick up the phone. After realizing that her sister may have called her in her last moments when the accident took place, Ji An feels a sort of connection to finding out what happened to her, also maybe to suppress a little bit of guilt for not picking up her call that time. Furthermore, Ji An discovers an email from her sister with an encrypted message in it. After encrypting it, it gives her the message ‘FIND LUNA’. For Ji An, this feels like her sister is asking her to go to Balhae Station, and that’s why she decides to go.

Including Ji An, the whole crew consists of 11 people in total, 9 men and 2 women. Let me just list them all below.
Song Ji An, astrobiologist.
Captain Han Yoon Jae (played by Gong Yoo), the team leader.
Hong Ga Young (played by Kim Sun Young), the team doctor.
Pilot Kim Sun (played by Lee Sung Wook) and co-pilot Lee Gi Soo (Choi Young Woo). The co-pilot was originally supposed to be someone else, a woman, but she was suddenly and without explanation substituted for Gi Soo on the day of departure.
Engineers Gong Soo Chan (Jung Soon Won) and Ryu Tae Seok (Lee Joon).
Head of security Gong Soo Hyuk (played by Lee Moo Saeng), also Soo Chan’s older brother.
E1 and E2 (respectively played by Cha Rae Hyung and Yoo Hee Je).
Mr. Hwang (Yoo Jung Joo), an advisor who contributed to the construction of Balhae Station.

So yeah, the crew leaves and while the initial departure goes smoothly, they soon find themselves with a loose bracket (or something) on the outer surface of the ship and are forced to make an emergency landing at about 7,6 km distance from Balhae Station – they have to walk all the way there while their oxygen is slowly running out. Not only that, their entire space ship crashes into the abyss so they have no way back by themselves. It is in this dire beginning situation that they already lose their first crew member, Mr. Hwang. He punctures his ribs during the emergency landing and isn’t able to make it all the way to the station. With his last breaths, he does already give a strange warning. He mutters ‘Water’, and when Captain Han interprets it as that he wants water and moves to replenish his tank, Mr. Hwang urgently stops him and is only able to mutter ‘Not… The water… don’t’, before he passes away. So yeah, there’s something about the water. As a Whovian, this immediately screamed The Waters of Mars and it did not sit well with me from the start.
After arriving at Balhae, the crew quickly does several shocking and strange discoveries. They find out there’s actually nothing wrong with the radiation levels. They discover the bodies of all the 117 crew members that were left at Balhae after ‘the accident’ showing very strange symptoms – it looks like they’ve drowned. In outer space. Furthermore, when they find the storage rooms containing the capsules, it looks like they’ve all been wreckaged and they can’t find a single capsule that isn’t empty. Before they even get all the information to understand what’s going on (or what went on at the Station five years ago), the crew is faced with an increasingly alarming situation as the members are taken one by one, either by an invisible (supposed) virus that makes every liquid in their body turn into multiplying water and makes them drown from the inside, or (in a rather bloody manner) by a mysterious entity that seems to be lurking about the Station. Something that very much does NOT want them to take even a single sample away from it.
As they manage to get the comms working again, through Captain Han’s contact with the SAA back on Earth, more suspicions seem to rise as it seems that the SAA does have more knowledge than they initially claimed to have. Especially Director Choi (Gil Hae Yeon) starts acting more and more suspicious and Captain Han starts doubting the true goal of the mission.
To make things even worse, it’s revealed that both Gi Soo and Tae Seok are actually spies for the RX (Resource Exploration for Space Mining and Planetary Development), a transnational agency that wants to obtain the samples for themselves. Kim Sun even refers to them once as ‘the resource Mafia’. Tae Seok volunteered for this mission as he was actually also there five years earlier when he closed the door on those 117 people, disabling them from getting out alive. Gi Soo’s last minute appointment to the team is also explained through this. Both of them plan to obtain at least one sample by themselves before turning against the rest of the crew to try to get out by himself.

Okay, so let me just summarize the whole deal here before I find myself recapping the entire series, that’s not what we’re doing here. Basically, five years ago, the researchers sent to Balhae Station (including Won Kyung) discovered water on the Moon. They called it ‘lunar water’ and when they started researching it, they came to the major discovery that this water, when it came into contact with any sort of other liquid, would multiply. Thinking they may have found a potential solution to the water shortage on Earth, the researchers began to experiment, first on animals, fish… and then on human clones. They used a young girl clone code-named ‘Luna’ and kept experimenting on her until the 73rd attempt, when her body suddenly seemed to have become immune to the lunar water.
On the day of the accident, the system suddenly detects a ‘thermoregular anomaly’ and urges everyone to evacuate. No one knows what’s going on, and while all researchers desperately try to get to the exit, some of the lunar water leaks out of some capsules that were knocked over in the crowd rush. When the RX (I guess, they were also there?) starts closing the gates one by one and the people become more desperate to search for another way out, more and more people start succumbing after accidentally coming into contact with the escaping lunar water. In the end, being locked in with no way out and with a spreading water virus on the loose, no one survived the outbreak except Luna, as she’s immune to the lunar water now. Luna basically becomes a guard dog for the samples of lunar water since in her case, the water heals her and makes her harder, better, faster, stronger. So much so that she can move at incredible speed and is able to sever body parts with her bare hands without too much effort. She also has developed some fish-like elements to her body, like gills in her neck, and when she blinks it happens horizontally rather then vertically. So yeah, Luna is the mysterious entity roaming around and violently injuring and killing crew members that try to take samples away from her. She’s also the Luna from Won Kyung’s encrypted ‘FIND LUNA’ message, and for some reason, Ji An is the only one who can calm her down. She’s the only one that wants to believe she doesn’t hurt people because she wants to, but only because she’s scared. At some point while trying to capture Luna, the girl bites Ji An, and this bite ends up saving Ji An’s life – when she herself comes into contact with the lunar water, the traces of Luna’s DNA through the bite wound work as an antidote against the water.

To give a short summary of the order and manner of the crew member’s deaths:
Mr. Hwang dies of his injuries and lack of oxygen caused by the crash landing before making it to Balhae.
Soo Chan is exposed to the lunar water by getting into contact with one of the dead bodies while trying to obtain a sample capsule.
Gi Soo is killed by Luna when he tries to get away with a full sample capsule from one of the storage rooms.
E1 dies after being fatally injured by Luna when they discover the final hidden storage room filled with sample capsules.
E2 is shot by Tae Seok after overhearing him talk to the RX on the phone.
Kim Sun is shot by Tae Seok after confronting him and then killed by the lunar water the same way as Soo Chan.
Tae Seok himself is soaked by the lunar water released through the air vent and is also shot by both Soo Hyuk and Captain Han.
Soo Hyuk is shot by Tae Seok in his final moments and doesn’t make it in time to escape the Station.
Captain Han sacrifices himself when the air lock needs to be depressurized from the outside. He’s engulfed by the lunar water outbreak but ultimately dies after he’s catapulted out of the Station onto the Moon surface by the water.
The only people to make it out of the Station alive are the women of the company, Ji An, Dr. Hong, and Luna. A rescue ship arrives just at that moment and it’s suggested they’re brought to safety. The final words over the comms of the rescue ship are: ‘Survivors have been rescued and samples secured.’
‘What condition are they in?’ (The survivors or the samples?)
‘Yet to confirm.’
‘Have a safe flight back.’
‘Switching to autonomous navigation system.’
And that’s the end.

I want to comment on a couple of things that the show lacked in my opinion.
First of all, I found it a pity that there wasn’t an equal division of character development or even character background for each character. It took me at least 4 episodes to get an idea of who was who, and that was only after several people had already died. I actually went back to the first couple of episodes to rewatch certain parts with the knowledge I gained after finishing the whole thing, and only then it became a bit more clear to me. Also, the foreshadowing became much more apparent.
The only person we get a proper backstory from is Ji An. We learn about her sister and more about her motives. It was especially interesting to see Ji An’s emotional journey as she discovers the illegal experimenting that her sister had been doing – she really has to unravel some personal emotional baggage here, even though she’s one of the most stoic characters in the whole series.
On Captain Han’s side, we only find out that he has a young daughter who’s in the hospital because she can’t use her legs and his rank isn’t high enough to improve her medical care. Apart from that, we don’t learn anything about Captain Han’s life, only that he’s probably used to just doing as he’s told on SAA missions. He clashes the most with Ji An in the beginning, as he is determined to stick to the mission they were given even when Ji An is much more interested what exactly happened at the Station five years ago, if not radiation leakage. It isn’t until the crew members start dying one by one and they find out about Luna, that Captain Han also becomes more and more suspicious of the SAA’s intentions of sending them there. Also since the SAA director’s instructions suddenly change once he informs them of a possible ‘survivor’ or ‘intruder’ that’s in there with them. Suddenly the Director instructs them to grab as many samples as they can, and they can’t allow this intruder to get away with any of it. In fact, they will only send a backup ship after they’d secured the intruder. It was all very strange.
In any case, my point is that I had some trouble connecting with the characters in the beginning. People started falling away before I was even able to get an idea of who they were, which was a pity. I felt this specifically with Soo Chan, for some reason. I just felt like he’d be around for a while longer, but he really died already in the third episode, within a single hour of being exposed to the lunar water. He seemed to be a fun, comic relief kind of character together with Kim Sun, but he was killed off way too soon in my opinion. It did give Soo Hyuk a new layer though, as he was forced to watch his little brother die like that and I suddenly became very aware of the fact that they’d indeed been brothers, even though it was only mentioned briefly once before. Anyways, the exact links between all the characters hadn’t been fully established in my brain yet before people already started disappearing, so that made it a bit hard to get accustomed to everyone.
Also, who the heck were E1 and E2 and why didn’t they have normal names? I would’ve liked to know a bit more about them, especially E2, or Freckles as I called him until, you know, he died. In his case I really found it a pity because I felt like he was the youngest of the group but he got the least action and he was killed so needlessly after already being unconscious for an entire episode. He just had to wake up in the same room as Tae Seok as he was doing his spy thing. It really was a pity.
So yeah, while I understand that 8 episodes is limited time to establish all of the characters equally, I really would’ve liked to get some more personal information besides their initial short self introductions.
Even in the way they died, sometimes I wished they’d given it a bit more meaning. Like for example, Kim Sun dying the exact same way as his best friend Soo Chan. He was forced to watch his buddy die like that and then it was happening to him and it was over even quicker than before. They could’ve used the bracelets more as well, the bracelets Soo Chan, Soo Hyuk and Kim Sun were all wearing as a promise to get out together alive. There were so many possibilities of adding a little more personal depth to the characters, but in the end they all just died alone without mercy – which on the other hand, is also very realistic and symbolic of the mercilessness of their situation and environment. But still, I had mixed feelings about it. I think there could’ve been more personal connections established, that would’ve added even more weight to the situation of losing the people around them. Now, except for a few people, everyone was basically unrelated to one another, so even when people died, there was always a sort of awkward tension around it, because even though it was horrible, there wasn’t a personal connection with the person to be shared.
The same went for the memorial thing. In the first episode, it’s shown that the memorial of the 117 crew members of Balhae Station doesn’t even mention their names, it’s a quite unpersonal memorial. I get that they’d kept it a secret just as that Ji An never knew her sister was part of that research, but the SAA did still reveal to Ji An that her sister was part of it after she died. They must’ve known the identities of all those people, they must informed told more families (I hope), so why still not put their names on the memorial? And it just made me wonder what they would do about this mission? Would they also make a memorial for the 9 people that didn’t come back this time?
That’s the thing that bothers me the most about the ending. I would’ve liked to get a kind of closure. Any kind of closure, really. Because it just feels like nothing was solved. What happened after Ji An and Dr. Hong got back to Earth? What happened to Luna? Did they again leave all the bodies up there? Did they again not make an effort to commemorate the brave people that went on that mission? What happened to Captain Han’s daughter after he didn’t return? What happened to the SAA, did Ji An and Dr. Hong reveal the truth about the whole thing? Honestly, I have more questions now than I had at the beginning of the series. It just doesn’t feel complete, and that’s a real pity.

I felt like this show had so much potential. It started out so great, I really was pulled into it from the start. The imagery of the moon and the shadowed parts that just make it seem like a sea of nothingness was properly haunting. I find The Silent Sea a very appropriate title, not just because of the association with Won Kyung’s referral to the dark parts of the moon, but because it really felt like they were trapped in an ocean of silence, the Moon itself. It also refers to the more literal association of the lunar water becoming a sea that made people drown from the inside – Soo Chan and Kim Sun are literally depicted going down under a water surface as they succumb to it. I also thought the opening sequence was beautiful and after paying close attention, I found that it actually tells the full story of the show in very simple images. We see water that takes on several shapes of people until it bursts out into a multitude of single drops, we see an astronaut in a forest that goes through three stages of draught until it burns, we see the rocket launch into space and an astronaut drowning until there’s a zoomout to a single astronaut sitting (seemingly dead or at least unconscious) leaned against some rocks on the Moon surface when the words ‘The Silent Sea’ appear in the night-black sky. It basically sums up the whole show.
It’s just that they left too many things open and it frustrates me. I wanted to connect more to the characters, I wanted to know where they came from, what they wanted to get back to. How they got into this mission, or into this line of work, even. I wanted Director Choi and the SAA to be busted for covering up the whole ordeal, I wanted justice. I wanted everyone to at least get a proper memorial and burial. I still rated it as I did because the things that WERE there were really good and I can’t really say anything bad about it. What bugs me here are the things that WEREN’T shown, and I can’t remember ever being so frustrated about an open ending before. I need more than this.

I will move on to my cast comments now before concluding this review.

Honestly, I’ve only seen a couple of things from Bae Doo Na, and all of them were foreign projects. I’ve seen her in Sense8 and the Japanese movie Air Doll. This is the first actual Korean drama that I’ve seen her in. In my opinion, she always has the same kind of appearance and I’ve also ever seen her play really stoic characters. Maybe it’s type casting, but anyways, I’m not mentioning it as a bad thing. I thought she was really good in The Silent Sea. I loved that at least from her side we got some character story and development and while she initially kept a firm distance from the rest of the crew and stuck to her own interests, she did gradually open up more as the situation grew more dire. I don’t know you’d have a choice in such a situation, because you just have to start sticking together, but still, I think she went through an interesting personal journey. She never wanted to be there, she was fine being oblivious about the true nature of her sister’s disappearance and death. But because she was pushed into this, she became more invested in it again. I liked to see a more vulnerable side of her in the end, and also her compassion towards Luna. At the beginning her stoicness made it a bit hard for me to empathize with her, but in the end, as is fitting with the main character, I really sympathized with her and rooted for her to get out of there and go back to the safety of the Earth surface. I think she did a really good job portraying the layers of Ji An’s personality, all the more because Ji An held back her emotions so much.

Once again I can say that I’ve seen Gong Yoo in a serious acting role that wasn’t about his appearance or popularity. I like that he’s doing these series that seem to lay outside of his usual genre. Then again, I haven’t seen Train to Busan, apparently he’s really good in that one, as well. Anyways, I know him from The 1st Shop of Coffee Prince to Big to Goblin, and I always seem to like his performances. He’s a good actor and it really felt like I was seeing a new side of him in this show. As I mentioned, I would’ve liked to get more backstory from his side, I don’t know how they would’ve had to insert that somewhere, but in the end it still felt like I knew next to nothing about him. He was such a just Captain, he really cared about his crew members and you could see how much it killed him to go against Tae Seok because he felt so betrayed by him. It was a nice kind of development to see him adapt more to the situation and consequently, Ji An’s views on what the mission should be. In his own way, he changed his mindset for the better and he had a radar for certain things as well. At some point he suddenly randomly commented about the fact that Tae Seok had voluntarily signed up for the mission, as if he just had a feeling about him. I would’ve liked to get a bit more insight into his personal life apart from his daughter, but I still liked his character enough as it was. I really do wonder what would happen to his daughter now, though…

Lee Joon was one of the faces that looked familiar to me, and then I realized he’s the main from Drama Special: What’s The Ghost Doing? !!! No wonder I didn’t immediately make the connection, haha! He’s also a former member of K-Pop group MBLAQ, apparently. But yeah, he definitely showed a very new side to his acting from what I saw in the other one. He didn’t really stand out to me much in the beginning, but I started getting suspicious about him because there was just something about the way he sometimes looked at people, like a glance that lasted just a little too long to be a regular look. When it was revealed that besides Gi Soo, he too was working for the RX and that he actually started killing the crew members upon confrontation rather than trying to maintain his cover, he suddenly became all dangerous and that was scary but interesting. I think this must have been a pretty challenging role, also because for the first half of the series he really had to work hard not to seem suspicious.

I already announced this in my previous review, but I knew that Kim Sun Young was in this and I was really excited to see her in a more serious role again. Usually, her serious acting really gives me goosebumps. To sum up again what I know her from: Shopping King Louie, Legend of the Blue Sea, Lookout, Because This is My First Life, Romance is a Bonus Book, Crash Landing on You and Backstreet Rookie and, most recently, Her Private Life. Dr. Hong was one of the characters that I felt was really established clearly from the beginning, the kind of person she was. But then as soon as they arrived at the Station, there wasn’t really a lot to do with the traits she’d been given as emergency struck right away and she was mostly just freaking out about the things happening around her. I liked that she was another strong and dependable female character, and that she managed to get out alive, but I also felt like she remained mostly in the background. Of course, without a doctor everyone is screwed, so they must have deliberately tried to keep her away from the danger as much as possible, but for me it felt like this obstructed her character in expressing herself as she did best. Her first introduction to Ji An, how casual and confident she seemed, and how she would comment on the people idly chatting on the spacecraft, I would’ve liked to see more snarky moments of her like that. With her it felt like her personality was suppressed a little by the events that happened, there was no room for her to be her calm and collected self the way she was when she first introduced herself. Anyways, this didn’t have anything to do with her acting of course, she was still very good. It was just another example of the lack of distinguishable personality traits of each of the characters.

Lee Moo Saeng also looked familiar to me, and I guess it’s because I remember him from Melting Me Softly. It also took me a while to get familiar with his character, although it got better -however weird this is to say- after Soo Chan died. The scene in which he was watching him, muttering ‘Hang in there’ to his younger brother hit me quite hard, as it was the first time I saw any of the male characters really soften. After that he recollected himself very quickly, but from that point on there was always that hurt in him that somehow made it easier for me to feel for him. It was kind of predictable that he was also going to die before the end, but still I found it a pity. It would’ve been nice if more people managed to get out alive. Despite his tendency to quickly aim his gun at things (like Luna), I still couldn’t dislike him because he was Soo Chan’s brother and that made him a good person. He also just accepted that he wouldn’t make it as soon as he got shot. In the end, I did like his character.

KIM SUN DESERVED BETTER. Honestly, as soon as he was making his way towards the command center where Tae Seok was and in the meantime they were all informed that Tae Seok was the spy, I just knew what was waiting for him, but I still had hoped that he wouldn’t die. Seriously, the guy just wanted to go home T^T He’d already had to watch his best friend die, he’d watched as Luna tore E1’s forearm off just to get the sample out of his hand, he’d already lost all the faith he’d put in his friendship bracelet to get out alive, but still he just wanted to go home and his death really killed me. He was just crying to Tae Seok that he wanted them all to go home while the water was starting to mingle with his blood. Kim Sun was the best of them and I stand by that.
I’ve seen Lee Sung Wook before in Duel (apparently) and most recently in Extraordinary Attorney Woo, he was in the ATM copyright case. He’s also in a couple of dramas that are still on my list, so looking forward to that. I really liked Kim Sun, he was the fun and carefree character that you just need in a story full of darkness. Although I already knew he wouldn’t stand a chance on his own, either to the virus or to something else, it just killed me that he ended up exactly like Soo Chan. When it was shown how he drowned inside, I kind of hoped Soo Chan to pop up to reach for his hand, at least they would’ve been together. T^T

Apparently I know Jung Soon Won from Fight For My Way, but I don’t remember him from there. In any case, I’ve already mentioned what I thought about what happened to Soo Chan. I just felt really bad for him since he’d just barely got in there alive – he was struggling with the access codes while everyone was running out of oxygen which was a really intense moment and I’d just expected him to be around for longer than he did. Although it was sad that he died first, he did immediately point them in the direction of the lunar water, so it did speed things up with regards to finding out stuff. I just wished, again, that I’d learned more about him, even got more scenes of him with his brother, because now I wouldn’t have known they were related if it weren’t for that single mention of their father. He also deserved better. See, here I start struggling with commenting on the actor’s performance because he actually wasn’t in the story for that long, I just got enough from the character to like him sufficiently to mention him here. I can imagine the scene where he was puking out all that water and Dr. Hong stuck all these tubes in him in the hope of making it easier for him to breathe must have been pretty intense to film, so just for his performance in that scene alone, I was impressed.

As I mentioned before, two of the most enigmatic members of the crew to me were E1 and E2. I don’t even know why they had these similar code names or nicknames, their real names weren’t even revealed. E1 got slightly more screentime than E2, I feel, because he also spent some time exploring with Ji An in the beginning. But there was just so little personal information about their characters. I wish there had been more to go on. I also don’t know this actor apart from (apparently) a cameo in Room No. 9.
I was a little more attached to E2 because he was cute (ehem), and his death just felt really unfair to me. I haven’t seen him in anything before, but when I check his Insta (purely for research purposes) it looks like he’s a stage actor. Anyways, especially since he seemed to be the youngest crew member and didn’t get any kind of individual highlight, I was all the more curious if he was still going to have a moment to shine, but that moment turned out to be his death. Also, when Dr. Hong found his body in the fridge… that was the moment I decided Tae Seok could rot in hell for all I cared. Also, apparently his freckles aren’t real?? I feel betrayed, lol.

I’m just going through the rest of the crew quickly as I’m already halfway through. I really thought I recognized Choi Young Woo from somewhere but checking DramaWiki I don’t see anything that I’d know him from? He gave me the creeps as soon as he entered the spacecraft and everyone was like, “Who the hell is this guy?” Also, when he made a very inappropriate joke when they found the first body that showed the symptoms of drowning, he was like, “I’m jealous. I know he’s a dead man, but at least he had as much water as he wanted, haha” and everyone just looked at him like, “What is wrong with you?” From the start, it just seemed like he didn’t fit in, he was the type to laugh manically in tense situation. I have to say I also didn’t expect him to die so soon, I thought there’d be more time for him to explore and gradually it would become clear that he wasn’t to be trusted. But yeah, he brought it onto himself, going in to fetch a sample by himself in a storage room where Luna was lurking around.

There was barely any time to get to know Mr. Hwang as he died as soon as they landed, but I’m glad at least they gave a couple of flashbacks to show that Ji An had talked with him before. He also seemed to know more about the Balhae accident then he let on, and as soon as Ji An asked him about ‘Luna’, he said he doubted the Director brought that topic up with her and just left. But hey, at least he did give them the initial warning about the water! It was a shame he was the first to die because he was the only person of the crew who’d been at Balhae before, heck, who’d contributed to its construction so he would’ve known much more about the structure of the Station and where all the shafts led and stuff. I like to think that he had prior knowledge of the lunar water and would’ve been able to contribute to the mission very well, but he just got unlucky. Poor guy.

I haven’t seen Kang Mal Geum in anything before either, but I liked that we were still given some insight in Won Kyung’s side of the story in the end. Instead of keeping her intentions with the experimenting a secret for Ji An to ponder for eternity, we actually were provided with some flashbacks of Won Kyung’s researching days, and how she ended up in the pile of people after getting locked in by the RX. It was a nice change to have someone actually leave a memory in regret rather than pride, however weird that may sound. But Won Kyung definitely reflected on herself and realized that what she was doing was wrong, but she still had a goal to work towards – she wanted to show Ji An the ocean. She wanted to bring water back to Earth for her younger sister to see, and that was worth more to her than anything else. Her conflicted feelings about this just made her more human to me, even though she only appeared in flashbacks. They didn’t actually find her body, I kind of expected that to happen and to be a defining moment for Ji An as well. At first I thought somehow her body wasn’t there, but I guess she was just amongst those bodies somewhere and they just didn’t really search for her specifically. Anyways, I thought that, even though Won Kyung only existed in Ji An’s memories, she was still an interesting character.

When it was revealed that Luna was a child, she immediately became less scary to me, despite her exorcist-reminiscent movements and speed. I really wonder what happened to Luna as soon as she was brought to Earth. Would the SAA have just stuck to their plan to continue experimenting on her or would Ji An have taken her in to keep her away from that? I guess we’ll never know. Anyways, I couldn’t help but notice that this girl is so pretty! Kim Shi Ah, she’s only 14 years old and she already gave such a performance without even speaking! Her glares were more than enough to convey what she was feeling to me, and that’s pretty impressive. She’s only just starting out acting in movies and dramas, so who knows what we’ll see of her in the future!

Let’s move on to the final significant characters, the people from the SAA. Director Choi, played by Gil Hae Yeon, for example. I’ve mentioned this before in my earlier reviews of Gil Hae Yeon’s characters but once again, she impressed me. From the loving mother in Melting Me Softly to the unbearable one in Something in the Rain, here she was a director with a lot of blood on her hands, but she wasn’t completely heartless, I felt. She had recurring flashbacks of what happened and it was clear that it didn’t sit right with her, no matter how cool she played it opposite the crew members. I really would’ve liked to know more about her actual involvement in the Balhae accident. It was revealed only through photographs that she personally knew Won Kyung, so what exactly was their relationship? It seemed pretty heartless of her to send Ji An on this mission just because she knew she wouldn’t reveal her sister’s wrongdoings after she came back. I just really would’ve liked to see Director Choi’s reaction after the rescue ship brought the survivors back to Earth, I wanted to know what happened to her. I just have the feeling Ji An wouldn’t sit still – she would protect Luna, all the way.

I know Heo Sung Tae from God’s Gift – 14 Days and Tunnel… and I feel like I know him from much more, but I guess not. In any case, he’s also quite a familiar face. I thought his duality was interesting. At first I just assumed he was Director Choi’s puppet, he knew exactly what was going on but pretended not to. But then he was shown checking up on Captain Han’s daughter in the hospital frequently and keeping in touch with him, and then I felt like he might have a good relationship with Captain Han, which would make him less bad. Maybe he would take over the care for the daughter? I don’t really know, but I guess he also just went along with what he was told by Director Choi. He was also there with her when they went to inform Ji An of her sister’s passing. I’m not entirely sure what his role was other than that, that’s also something I would’ve liked to get more intel on.

I may have been a little critical overall, but I did enjoy watching this show. For me it really helped that the cause of the danger, the lunar water and Luna both, were revealed quite quickly – this immediately took one level of anxiety away from me, haha. I really was on the edge of my seat for the most part, as I was really scared but also interested to see what would happen. In the end, I think it’s safe to say that the most damage was done by the people themselves, not the water or Luna. If they’d let it be, neither of them would’ve hurt anyone. It’s because the water was released by human hands that it started effecting people. As I saw someone mention in a comment somewhere, water in a desolated and Silent place is even more treacherous, all the more because it hasn’t been touched by human hands and therefore it’s more unpredictable and out of control. The water on Earth has been ‘tamed’ by humans so much that we now decide in what way it’s being used, we literally shape water the way we need it. The water on the Moon is unshaped, untouched, and therefore all the more unruly. I think this drama also shows that once humans start meddling with things that lay beyond their control, they only make things worse. They may have good intentions with it, like how they thought the lunar water might save the water shortage on Earth, but at the end of the day it really is just better to leave it alone. I truly wish no one will ever try to get water from outer space, whether it’s the Moon or Mars… Just leave the extraterrestial water alone, please. It’s not meant for us.
I guess my expectations for this series were pretty high and I was a bit disappointed by the openness of the ending and the lack of equal character building, but apart from that I still thought it was a good show. It was very well-acted, the cinematography was stunning (seriously, the shots of the moon with all those pitch-black parts that made it look like complete void really gave me goosebumps), and the tension build-up was very well done, as well as the overall construction of the story. At some point it felt to me like they were starting to rush a bit in killing all the remaining characters off as they were headed toward the ending, and that made me go ‘I don’t like this’, especially when it was Kim Sun’s time to go. I’m glad to say that despite my initial struggle to relate to the characters, I did start to feel for several throughout the story, and when they died it really did hurt. I just would’ve preferred to have a bit more overall closure at the end, but maybe it’s also realistic in a way, not to show a concrete solution to the problem. We’ll never know if they ended up utilizing the samples of lunar water for good, just like we’ll never know what will become of our own Earth until it gets there.

So yeah, there we are. It may not have been a very long review, but it did feel long as I was typing it, haha. I spent another full day on this review, so I hope it’s worthwhile to read. I didn’t expect to finish it so quickly, but this format of shorter episodes and shorter length drama really helped. I hope to see more of these hidden gems appear, because this is certainly very promising stuff. It felt more like watching a movie than a drama, to be honest, and writing this review therefore also felt different, I guess just because the genre is so unusual for me to write about. I do think this story has a lot of things we can learn from, where it’s about exploring outer space or just heeding climate change – we don’t want our world to end up the way it has in this show, but it’s definitely heading somewhere unpleasant, as far as I can tell. Let me just end this review with two requests: 1. to be mindful of our water usage, and 2. to never, EVER, get any kind of untested substance from outer space to Earth. Let’s not let The Waters of Mars or The Silent Sea become a reality, please.

I’ll be back soon with a new review, so until then, bye-bee!