[SPOILERS] I'm not impelled to write in depth about "Ghosts Of The Deep" (pardon another pun), but the third episode was undoubtedly the best hour this miniseries has produced so far. It helped that the script had no introductions to make, or exposition to deliver, it was just a solid hour of life-or-death crises with the established characters. It was often silly and the plot still feels stretched to twice its natural length (we're 180-minutes into the series and the story could have been told in 90), but I'd be lying if I said episode 3 didn't keep me entertained...The crew of the Orpheus are aboard the Russian sub Volos with the surviving two crewmen, discussing a way to get word to the surface for a rescue, when it becomes clear the stricken ship's nuclear core is going critical. The only way to prevent the vessel from exploding is to manually cool the engine by inserting nuclear rods into the core, but doing so means whoever volunteers will die a painful death from radiation poisoning...
I think "Ghosts Of The Abyss" (another James Cameron allusion) worked because, no matter how clichéd such scenes have become in pop-culture, it's reliably dramatic whenever characters are put into impossible situations like the handful presented here. A scene of the crew drawing straws to decide who has to martyr themselves worked very well, even if it predictably came down to a 50/50 choice between Clem (James Nesbitt) and young Vincent (Sacha Dhawan). A better show would have done something amusing and unanticipated with the scene, like have the short straw drawn first.
Nevertheless, I had fun with what this episode threw up. Even the way every impasse was overcome by a reliably last-second solution was thankfully more amusing than infuriating -- like Samson (Goran Visnjic) taking pity on frightened Vincent's situation and deciding to enter the engine room himself, only to be stopped when Svetlana (Vera Filatova) realized they could salvage a motherboard from the crashed Hermes to repair the Orpheus's systems and escape.
Or the moment when the imminent destruction of the Volos didn't occur, because Vincent had chosen to sacrifice himself by replacing the rods in secret, thus preventing the tragedy of Clem being killed along with his wife Catherine (Orla Brady), whom he'd only just managed to find aboard the Russian sub alive and well. A moment that should have been very predictable with hindsight, but the story did a good job of hiding the twist. It helps that I tend to stay "in the moment" with dramas like this, especially ones I'm not seriously expecting to surprise me.
Overall, thanks to a good performance from Nesbitt and some enjoyable tension from its two tent-pole situations, "Ghosts Of The Deep" was a far more exciting hour of underwater thrills. The acting is still largely bland, the dialogue's not great (the amount of times people yelled "Clem!" gave me ear ache), and it's not entirely convincing from a technical standpoint, but with lowered expectations this hour held my attention.
Interestingly, this is the first installment not written by creator Simon Donald, with Paul Rutman (Marple, Lewis) behind the script, and he certainly managed to deliver a more engaging hour. I just hope the surface-based subplots (especially the weirdness of intruders sneaking into Clem's family home to snoop around his wife's study) is headed somewhere interesting... but I suspect she's just found a source of renewable energy that a Russian oil conglomerate don't want to come to light.
WRITER: Paul Rutman
DIRECTOR: Jim O'Hanlon
GUEST CAST: Tom Wlaschiha, Molly Jones, Dan Li, Nigel Whitmey, Nick Nevern & Ron Donachie
TRANSMISSION: 10 August 2010 - BBC1/HD, 9PM
