The Silent Sea: Exploring the Bloody Events of Balhae!

 Following the success of Squid Game and Hellbound,  The Silent Sea is a South Korean series that recently premiered on streaming giant Netflix. The series, directed by Choi Hang-yong, stars well-known actors such as Gong Yoo ( Train to Busan, Squid Game ) as Han Yoon-jae, Bae Doona ( Cloud Atlas, Sense8, Kingdom ) as Doctor Song Ji-an, and Lee Joon. (member of boy band MBLAQ) as Captain Ryoo Tae-seok.

 

The Silent Sea series was just released on Netflix on December 24 yesterday with a total of 8 episodes. The main premise is about events in the future, where planet Earth suffers from water and food shortages caused by a mass drought. To solve this, Han Yun-Jae was chosen for a team, including Song Ji-An (Bae Doo-Na), to take water samples from South Korea's old research station on the Moon, namely Balhae Station.

However, when the team entered the station, some big secrets began to be revealed, especially regarding the bloody events that had occurred at Balhae Station. What that bloody event was like, let's go deeper, geeks.

 

Balhae Station Closed

Apart from South Korea, actually due to a prolonged drought, various developed countries on Earth have also started looking for alternative resources in space, especially on the Moon. They believe that what the scientist Galileo said when he invented the telescope, about the dark spot of the Moon which contains a lot of water, is the only hope for humanity to solve the problem of drought on Earth.

In the process the various countries worked together to research the possibility of water on the Moon, and even set up their own space station. However, when they failed to find any sign of water, most of them returned all their scientists to Earth, except for South Korea. South Korea's last resort led by one of their scientists, Song Wonkyung (Song Ji-an's sister), found traces of water on the Moon which she called "Lunar Water".

As the only country to have discovered Lunar Water, Director Choi of the Space and Aeronautics Administration (SAA) believes that lunar water will provide many "benefits". For that they secretly started experimenting with the water at a research station they named Balhae. However, as explained by Dr. Song, Lunar Water molecules are different from Earth water, in that they contain some kind of mysterious space virus. This makes Lunar Water very dangerous if it touches a living host like humans.

Because of greed, in the end there was a leak at Balhae Station which caused a bloody tragedy five years ago, in which many scientists died after being exposed to Lunar Water. SAA then decided to close Balhae permanently. They lied to the world that they were forced to lock up their scientist because of a radiation leak, because basically the SAA didn't want their Lunar Water secret to be exposed.

The Mysterious Luna 073

After the bloody tragedy passed, SAA ordered space explorers to return to Balhae Station, take samples of Lunar Water for further investigation. Dr. Song believed that if Lunar Water touched a human and made it a host, then that person's internal organs would produce a lot of water, as if making the person "sink" and instantly cause death. Before dying, people who are stuck with Lunar Water will feel like seeing starfish around them and feel like they are drowning in the sea, before finally dying.

Although normal humans will die immediately if exposed to Lunar Water, but there is one human clone that is genetically modified to be able to adapt to Lunar Water, even to get super abilities from it. Before his death five years ago at Balhae Station, Song Wonkyung sent Dr. Song encrypted message telling him to find the clone, because she was the most extraordinary invention of his life, namely Luna 073.

 

And when Captain Han's crew with Dr. Song tries to sample Lunar Water at Balhae Station, they are attacked by a dangerous intruder. At one point in the series, Dr. Song learns that the intruder is Luna, which his sister, Song Wonkyung, has been trying to convey. In the end it was revealed that five years ago SAA actually carried out a forbidden experiment to make Lunar Water safe for humans, namely by forcing the Balhae scientists to carry out human trials.

However, because Wonkyung didn't want to harm innocent humans, he then experimented on cloning himself. After meeting 72 failures, finally the 73rd clone combined with fish DNA was proven to be able to adapt to Lunar Water. Thanks to the Lunar Water, Luna 073 gains self-healing abilities and is able to move very quickly. Dr. Song is aware that Luna 073 is Wonkyung's clone, he then wants to protect Luna from SAA and decides to save her at all costs.

 

The sinking of Balhae Station

In The Silent Sea Episode 5, Luna 073 is told to attack an astronaut whose blood is contaminated with Lunar Water. Human and plant blood at Balhae Station then causes the station to flood again in the secret storage unit. Captain Ryoo Tae-seok, who works for the resource mafia RX, ultimately betrays his own crew and steals a sample of Lunar Water. He purposely closed all the gates to trap Captain Han and the rest of the crew.

And when the astronauts tried to escape through the air vent, Ryoo activated the air purification system. When the Balhae station system tried to clear the secret storage unit which had been flooded with water, it brought Lunar Water into the ventilation hole instead. As Lunar Water exits Balhae Station, the low temperatures on the Moon's surface freeze the water in the sinkhole. This immediately prevented all Lunar Water at Balhae Station from escaping, flooding the entire station in no time.

 

That was the bloody event that happened at Balhae Station. The greed of the SAA five years ago, had made the only hope of humanity at that time shattered after the experiment began to spiral out of control. Fortunately Son Wonkyung's secret message to Dr. Song re-expressed this hope, even though he had to go through various harsh realities that one by one began to unfold and made several of Captain Han's crew fall.