Somebody clearly left off "...Blue Sea" from the titlecard
A really bad American TV show pretty much has a guaranteed 13 episodes, or about 9 hours' worth of video to sit through. The Deep, being British, has just 5 hours to wade through. That's about one of the only things in its favour. Thankfully, I know nothing about submarines - so I can't get angry at any scientific mistakes that were probably present.
The plot breaks down more or less like this:
Jimmy Nesbitt's wife is exploring under the Arctic when her and her submarine go missing. When the follow-up sub Orpheus (which is budget-savingly identical) is sent out, everybody agrees that it should be staffed by walking clichés and Jimmy Nesbitt - he's only the husband of the woman who went missing, so of course he should be perfect for the job. Not at all emotionally unstable. While they're swimming around, an ominous big thing appears sporadically on their radar.
20,000 pixels under the sea for these murky shapes
The slimy bastard character proves his bastard credentials by killing a disposable member of the crew. The big thing turns out to be a Russian submarine. This one, unlike the Orpheus, actually looks like a submarine. It's all grimy and industrial, just how you'd expect. The Orpheus and its twin-brother Hermes look achingly modern and, consequently, crap. It turns out that everyone on board the Volos (that's the Russian sub, natch) is dead.
Jimmy Nesbitt, whose name is far better than whatever the hell his character was called
Well, not quite. There's a fat chef and another bloke, whose name sounds vaguely like Barcadi. They act absurdly hostile - considering they're the only ones left alive - but our heroes sort of go along with it. They must've realised that whenever one of them is placed in immediate peril, they always survive due to some miracle. Jimmy Nesbitt goes slightly crazy and demands to know where they've hidden his wife.
Before long, the Volos isn't looking too good. Sure, the welding may be spot-on, but its nuclear reactor is about to blow. In steps hitherto-ignored Vincent to stop it. Of course, it will cost him his life and he spends most of the third episode struggling with his decision. But he needn't have bothered: over the course of the next two episodes, we see that radiation poisoning has pretty much the same effect as a hangover. That concept in particular smacks of poor writing: the thrill, suspense and shock of Vincent going in to the reactor... followed by almost no real consequences. Yes, he coughs and stumbles around. But that doesn't tally up with "he'll die!" proclamations from earlier on.
It's not long before one of my biggest television pet hates crops up in full force: the smug believer is proven right. Maybe it's just because I'm so sceptical, but it annoys me when a character is trying to convince everyone of something daft, only to be proven right. Take the BBC's execrable Day Of The Triffids from Christmas 2009. With most of the population blind, society is trying to restructure itself and people are dying left, right and centre. He doesn't care, he's trying to make sure everybody is aware of the danger of... plants that can walk and murder people. Nobody takes him seriously, and I'd be on there side - for crying out loud, walking plants‽ But of course, he's soon proven right and the plants are a danger.
Maybe hatred of this trope is exclusive to me, but it only served to deepen (no pun intended) my dismay with The Deep. Jimmy Nesbitt will not quit blabbering on about his wife. Her mini-submarine/pod-thing was lost at sea, and the submarine it came from is found on the seabed, with nobody alive. She's quite plainly dead, but that doesn't stop him. Does this provide drama from Nesbitt going insane, obsessed beyond all rational thinking - with dire consequences? Does it hell: she turns up, safe and sound on the Volos!
"She's aliiiiiiiiiiiiive!"
Soon, we find out what all the fuss is about. "Lava bugs", which are micro-organisms with some part of their biology that's revolutionary. I think they excrete hydrogen or something, and this is going to kill off the oil industry. I couldn't really follow the characters' exposition, although Goran Visnjic does a great job of being really enthusiastic about it all.
The fifth and final episode of The Deep more or less concludes everything by taking an approach best described as Blake's Seven meets The Prisoner. A lot - but not quite all - of the main characters end up dead (including, finally, Vincent). Added to that, the whole thing goes completely barking mad. Notably when, for some reason, the characters start to hallucinate. Like all good fictional hallucinations, it involves ghosts who can point out the solution to the current life-threatening problem. How convenient.
There were two subplots running simultaneously on dry land. First, some conspiracy nonsense in an Arctic monitoring station. This was passable, average thriller stuff. Unfortunately, its out-of-the-blue twist near the beginning of episode five was so random that it just cheapened the whole thing.
Secondly, Nesbitt's wife's important research - those pesky Lava Bugs again - was being hunted down at her home, defended by her mum and her daughter. This ineffective crime-busting duo do their best to provide some suspense, and remind the audience of Nesbitt's poor little daughter who will cry a lot if he doesn't come back. It does, however, provide a comic highlight of the show. In an effort to stop the Vaguely Defined Bad Guys from getting their hands on the precious research, granny sets upon a computer with a sledgehammer.
Bless her, she probably didn't even hit the hard drive
The Deep's length of five episodes seems odd - you'd usually get six episodes in a British TV series. It is pure speculation, but I reckon it was originally planned to be a summer TV "all week long" thing, like Torchwood: Children Of Earth, with all five episodes shown Monday to Friday. Presumably, somebody in charge of scheduling then actually watched the episodes and realised what torture that would be for viewers, and decided to spread out the pain.
One thing I did like is the Russians. It's about time the Russians made a comeback as the villain of choice for fiction; they have been missing for far too long. First we got Mickey "Whiplash" Rourke in Iron Man 2 grumbling his way through an allegedly Russian accent. Now it's Captain Zubov, Bacardi and a chef in The Deep. Brilliant.
Zubov, being satisfyingly Russian
Whatever its original scheduling plans, one can assume that it wasn't meant to be as painfully bad as it actually was. The dialogue was mediocre, the plot was horrendous and hackneyed, and most of the enjoyment it gave me was saying how bad it was. Especially on the Internet.
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