Sea of Souls billed as a supernatural drama with lovely Bill Paterson was not what I wanted. I feel guilty wasting blog real-estate explaining why it went wrong, why the establishing story failed to establish anything, including the main characters, that the supernatural element was entirely irrelevant to the plot, so I won’t (ho ho).
I do hanker for original british tele-fantasy, something of the intelligence of an Avengers, which is why I sat through 2 hours of something of the intelligence of Teletubbies. Teletubbies is great. For kids. They do things on screen which has the kids anticipating what happens next and they are pleased when they guess right. Hurrah. This is a simple trick when you are actually showing the same bit of video twice.
Sea of Souls was just a teensy bit more sophisticated. There’s a plot revolving around twins (one of whom is a bad ‘un) and many scenes are based on the ambiguity of which twin it actually is saying or doing something. So when only one twin survives the final conflagration, every viewer everywhere, ages 3 and up, is thinking WHICH TWIN SURVIVED, and, ages 12 and up, WHICH WOULD BE DRAMATICALLY MORE LIKELY? However, this never crosses the mind of the rest of the cast (OK it is made obvious that there is some complicity) so you get into that “shouting the obvious at the screen” state. Unsatisfying, unexciting. Teletubbies was more spooky. Really, those CGI things that grew out of nowhere! WTF!