Sea of Souls

Sea of Souls is a BBC Scotland drama series, starring Bill Patterson as Dr Douglas Monaghan, a university lecturer with interests in paranormal and supernatural things. Over the past few years there have been three short series, the last of which hardly featured Monaghan at all - it followed the Mulder-and-Scully-esque pair of research assistants. However, in the stand alone two parter that was on last week, the research assistants were nowhere to be seen, indeed the dialogue featured one of the characters telling Monaghan that he needed some research assistants... I guess research funding is just as bad in fiction as it is in the real world.

Anyway, the two parter last week was pretty good. However, the feel of the show was totally different from the earlier series. In the first series it really was up to the viewer as to whether supernatural things were going on, with plausible natural explanations being proposed to explain the weird things. In the second series, there was more weight given to supernatural explanations, indeed, supernatural things did happen. In the third series (last year) even the skeptical research assistant, Craig, was believing the paranormal explanations...

But in this story it was clear that the supernatural was real. Furthermore, this story was considerably creepier than anything they've done before. In fact, it verged on actually scary at points. I really wasn't sure where the plot was going for the most part (in a good way) and there were some nice twists towards the end, although the actual resolution at the end could be guessed about 15 minutes before it happened. But it was good, if perhaps unnecessarily creepy.

But I think the research assistants should be brought back.