Surface: Pilot

Kids are so stupid sometimes. If you're out on the water in a boat at 3am, and you come across a bird trapped in some sort of goop in the water, and it's surrounded by a ton of bizarre eggs...you don't stick your hand in the water. Actually, you don't touch possibly dead birds in the water period, even if they aren't surrounded by goop and eggs, ever, ever, ever.

And you certainly don't grab one of the eggs, bring it home, and put it in your fish tank.

I don't really understand the reviews I've read for Surface (formerly titled Fathom, which is funny because don't the words have rather different meanings?). Most of them have called it either "silly," "unbelievable," or "stupid." Now, I don't really know what you expect from a sci-fi TV show about sea monsters, so I wouldn't label the show any of those things. I thought it was quite entertaining. Just as good as Threshold (so far), and a lot more mysterious and creepy.

Odd things start happening in the waters all over the Earth, and the government is catching on and investigating the incidents. But the show really focuses on three people: a marine biologist (Lake Bell) with a cool mini-sub and one of the biggest brats in TV history; a fisherman in Louisiana (Jay R. Ferguson, from Evening Shade) who has a nasty "accident" with tragic results; and the aforementioned teen kid (Carter Jenkins), who has a cruel older sister who teases him and a best friend/partner in crime who is more than willing to sneak off into the middle of the night to jump in a boat to investigate the weird sea creatures.

I was rather surprised at how effective the mood of this show is. They don't really show the monsters or what they can do. Of course, I call them "monsters" when we really don't know what they are. Sea creatures? Aliens? An experiment gone awry? Like Spielberg often does, the show teases us a bit with the reveal. We hear them, see odd lights and craters in the water, see them scamper behind the toilet in the kids house (one of the more effective scenes), but we're not exactly sure where this show is headed. And I loved that. It actually has a more intriguing premise than Threshold, if only because that show has already shown most of its cards. This one is playing it all ways. We don't know what these are, what the government knows, where they come from, and what will happen.

Sure, the intro of the varied characters and the set-up of the plot is a little forced (and hopefully they'll move on logically from all the "let's build suspense slowly" scenes that are all over the pilot), but what do you expect from the first episode of a sci-fi/mystery? Before they showed scenes from upcoming episodes, I actually said to myself, "hey, I wonder what's going to happen next week?" And I guess that's the best praise you can give a new show.