TV Review: Surface Episode 1.03

Monday, October 03, 2005

During the last two episodes of Surface, we have been introduced to a creature that no one has ever seen before. It swims up from the depths and kills without warning - sighted by one oceanographer, a diver, and a teenage boy. Last week, we learned that the creature has been spotted around the world. One of them was put under the knife as part of an autopsy. Another hatched from an egg and was taken in by a teenager, and in the end we saw one of the creatures eat a boat whole. On this week's episode, everything we thought we knew about the creature is thrown out the window. Are these creatures aliens from outer space or some ancient species of dinosaur that has thought to be extinct for the last one hundred million years?

This week we have not one sighting of the creature in the ocean's waters. The only sighting we have of it is in its infant form being cared by Miles Bennett. The episode begins with another boating incident, but this one more inland, three hundred miles inland in a lake in Texas. A small group is out parasailing on the lake when a sink hole opens up in the middle of it and sucks the boat and all of the water in. Because of this incident, we learn that it is possible the creature is causing the ocean's to heat up.

This heating caused the sink hole, and has also caused an underwater volcano. This volcano is the very first place these creatures were spotted. By the end of the episode, we also see lava erupting out of Old Faithful at Yellowstone. As part of the investigation into the creature, a robot with a camera is sent down into the sink hole. Just before the camera and robot melt due to the extremely high temperatures, the camera captures what appears to be some of the large creatures on film resting in the lava as if it was a bath for them. Very interesting!

Dr. Daughtery keeps looking into her discovery, but this causes her more problems than is truly necessary. Because she keeps digging, she loses her job, and she is also accused of plagiarism. This puts her degree in danger. Because she lost her grant and isn't otherwise employed, she has to go to work as a waitress in order to take care of her son. She does continue with looking into the creature, and finds some underwater sound tapes that do appear to have the creature on them.

Meanwhile, in Louisiana, Rich returns to work, but first he takes the family to a crypto zoology exhibit where he meets another man that has seen the creature. However, he is having some odd occurrences when it comes to water. Anytime he goes near it, he hears the voice of his dead brother in the water. We also see Rich and Miles meet briefly in an online chat room, so now we do have a link between all three now, no matter how small that link is. The contact in the chat was mere seconds long.

Elsewhere, Miles is taking his new responsibility of taking care of Nim very seriously. He looks into the creature and other animals, so that he can care for Nim properly. All his hard work of building a proper place for Nim to stay is for nothing when the playhouse is hit by lightning. Miles suspects Nim caused the lightning to occur. Luckily, Nim isn't injured by the lightning.

This episode just totally twists everything we've learned about the creature up to this point. We started a journey down one path, but this episode is bringing us down another. Instead of the source of the creature being alien, it looks like the creature might have been on our planet all along. Just down underneath earth's surface. What about the lights seen coming from the sky and dropping into the ocean at the end of the first episode though? How do you explain those? Is it possible that this creature is some prehistoric eel that never really went extinct? Or another possible theory - with global warming was one of the prehistoric creatures frozen solid in ice and somehow the ice heated up and melted the creatures one by one unleashing them on the world? So many possibilities, and we really don't know what will happen next. The supposed silliness some of said there is about this show is starting to dissipate.

Each and every week this show keeps getting better and better. This episode was a bit on the slow side, but the revelations brought forth in it made the show still important. I have no real idea where this show is taken us. We see three people, all now somehow connected, and these people are the ones that know the most about the creatures. That is other than the scientists investigating the creatures too. These three are just everyday normal people though. They aren't special. Yes, Laura Daughtery is a scientist herself, but her own skills here have been stripped. She is just another plain jane trying to get her message through each week. I can't wait to see what happens next here.