8-Part Netflix Sci-Fi Thriller Is The Expanse If It Was Set On The Moon

Fans of Prime Video’s iconic sci-fi series The Expanse would do well to check out one Netflix thriller that borrows from the legendary show for its killer premise. In the early 2000s, a fan of sci-fi shows could switch on their television and see new episodes of the criminally canceled space western Firefly, SyFy’s iconic Battlestar Galactica reboot, the influential animated comedy Futurama, and numerous Stargate and Star Trek spinoffs.

This is without even mentioning Fox’s iconic sci-fi police procedural The X-Files, which didn’t end its original nine-season run until 2002. As such, it is no small statement to say that, thanks to the rise of streaming services, the 2020s are an even better era for sci-fi TV than the early 2000s. Apple TV alone offers subscribers Foundation, Silo, Severance, Dark Matter, Murderbot, and Invasion. Netflix has 3 Body Problem, Black Mirror, and Stranger Things, while Hulu has Paradise, the Margaret Atwood adaptation The Handmaid’s Tale, and its spinoff The Testaments.

While HBO’s Jonathan Nolan series Westworld and its stellar miniseries Station Eleven mean the cable network can also hold its own in this environment, there is one 2010s hit that none of these shows have quite outdone yet. Set in a future where humanity colonized the rest of the solar system, The Expanse is adapted from a novel series by co-authors Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, writing as the pseudonym James S.A. Corey. The show was a critical darling, and Netflix’s The Silent Sea judiciously borrowed from its killer storytelling.

Netflix’s The Silent Sea Has Parallels With The Expanse

The Expanse’s story started out as a quasi-noir in the vein of the Blade Runner franchise as Thomas Jane’s embittered, cynical Detective Josephus investigated a conspiracy involving the Martian Congressional Republic on Mars and the United Nations of Earth and Luna. However, as the series continued, The Expanse opened up its fictional world to include more characters from every level of its fictional future society and culture.

The result was a rich and immersive, polyphonic sci-fi mystery that called to mind The Wire’s Dickensian social commentary. It is rare for any show to equal The Expanse’s ambition, and Netflix’s The Silent Sea was no exception. Unlike The Expanse, Netflix’s mixture of Interstellar and Alien was a lot more self-contained in its story of a mission to the moon that goes terribly wrong.

Set largely on the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility, The Silent Sea focused on a group of astronauts and researchers tasked with retrieving lost samples from the abandoned research facility Balhae Station, five years after a mysterious catastrophe ended with the disappearance of the facility’s original staffers. Throughout The Silent Sea’s eight episodes, the show’s protagonists discover that the researchers before them discovered a virus that multiplies upon contact with organic material, and their predecessors tried and failed to turn this volatile, dangerous substance into a replacement for earth’s dwindling water supply.

The Silent Sea Is Great, But Not Quite At The Expanse’s Level

If this sounds familiar, that might be because The Silent Sea’s virus owes something to The Expanse’s protomolecule plot. While The Expanse’s story involves a corporation discovering the protomolecule off one of Saturn’s moons and finding out that the substance converts human organic matter into parts for alien structures, The Silent Sea features a corporation discovering the virus on the moon and learning that it converts living humans to water.

In both shows, these corporations subject unsuspecting humans to experimentation to find out how the substances work, uncaring about the human cost once they can squeeze any potential benefit out of the technology. While The Expanse’s exemplary plotting allows the show to take this ambitious sci-fi premise further in terms of social commentary, The Silent Sea still deserves props for exploring similar thematic concepts within the claustrophobic constraints of a self-contained miniseries.

Release Date

2015 – 2022-00-00

Network

SyFy, Prime Video

Showrunner

Naren Shankar, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby

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  Dominique Tipper

  Naomi Nagata

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