"El Barco" (The Boat) was a highly entertaining if somewhat illogical Spanish TV show that mixed sci-fi, suspense, action and romance in a mostly well written package. A group of about 12 carefully selected kids in their early 20s embark on what is supposed to be a 2 month experience living in the high seas along with the boat's crew. With the boat already sailing, one night strange things happen: a strong magnetic wave makes all things made of metal inside the boat to rush to the ceiling and causing the navigational instruments to go crazy. A huge tsunami/squall threatens to tip the boat on its side but miraculously survives. Through further episodes the crew and its passengers find out that the tsunami was part of a series of events that caused the complete devastation of all land mass on earth, turning the planet into a huge sea world. Apparently, the crew and passengers of the boat (named, "the Polar Star") are the only survivors on the planet. We later find out that a mass of land did survive so the boat starts to desperately head for it.
"The Boat" lasted for only 3 seasons. The first season was fast paced and mostly well written. In this season, something of grave danger threatens the boat and its crew and by the end of each episode things always get solved, no cliffhangers. Cliffhangers were used in the last 2 episodes. We get to know the main characters through flashbacks of who they were and what they did before embarking on the Polar Star. Season 2 lowers the quality of the show with distracting parallel stories that ultimately did nothing to advance the storyline, even though some of the show's best episodes are within this season. Season 3, the last one, seemed to crumble under its own weight by trying to give closure to the multiple stories the writers threw at us. As the show went on, it seems the writers felt free to use the cheapest of ploys to get the storyline moving. At this point, I hadn't seen the American TV show "LOST", but I knew 'The Boat" bore a close resemblance. In "The Boat", characters suddenly appeared to have a common past, secret abilities, ulterior motives, etc. The main characters are Ricardo Montero, the boat's captain; Ainoha, the captain's daughter; Ulises, a stowaway kid who happens to be the Captain's right hand aide, Julian De La Cuadra's estranged son: Julia, the boat's doctor and one of the few people that know what happened to the earth; Roberto "burbuja" (bubble), a kitchen aide with cerebral palsy who also happens to be the boat's most intelligent passenger; Gamboa, an infiltrated "survival teacher" with special instructions to prevent the boat from ever reaching land.
Apparently the world came to an end due to a scientific experiment with a "particle accelerator". The people behind this project were warned that this experiment had a high probability of going "wrong" and the consequences could be "catastrophic" on a worldwide scale. My logic is: why do an experiment with such a high risk of failure? What is it for? Who profits? Who loses? If you kill the entire planet, who are you going to rule over? To me, this was the whole point of the show: why did those scientists blew up the world? In season 2, we find out there is a baddie, one who was behind the project "Alexandria" (code name for a "plan B", should the project accelerator go wrong), and this baddie is the father of one of the Polar Star's passengers, the sexy Estela. All along the show, we hear about this "project Alexandria". It's odd that one should put so much emphasis on a "Plan B", instead of making the original plan work. The show never explains what was the intention of the particle accelerator, the original "Plan A".
By the end of Season 3, it was almost impossible to give a logical conclusion to the multiple storylines the show's writers entangled themselves into. The last episode was a rush job at best, leaving a ton of unanswered questions that the writers tried to explain in a cheap afterword epilogue. It's as if the writers thought a 4th season would address all the inconclusive data, but that season never came and thus they painted themselves into a corner.
For all it's worth, "The Boat" was still highly entertaining despite some obvious plot holes and a very unsatisfactory ending (at least for me). Despite all of this, it's still the best Spanish TV show I've ever seen.
