The 10-part series “Abandoned: Expedition Shipwreck” is like a tour of a haunted house, albeit one with a lot of room. And waves. Beneath the surface of seas, on the floors of oceans and even under the Saint Lawrence River lie secrets, ghost stories and, most important, wrecks. What the series promises is a search for those sunken ships, many of which have been largely lost to history, and the reasons they sank.
With that in mind, the first episode might have a viewer feeling like a victim of bait-and-switch. The focus, at least initially, is entirely on the fate of Bikini Atoll and its people, who were evicted in 1946 in preparation for U.S. military-run nuclear tests. Bikini would be rendered unfit for human habitation , and the whole episode is portrayed as a vast injustice—never mind the uncertainties of the Cold War, the U.S.
When the show stops preaching and gets down to business it’s riveting. The series will, in future weeks, address various mysteries, including the wreck of the Empress of Ireland, one of Canada’s worst maritime disasters, and the World War I era scuttling of dozens of German warships off the Orkney Islands of Scotland. In the lagoon surrounding the Bikini Atoll, however, are the hulks of ships that were sunk for patriotic purpose.
Under the direction of Art Trembanis, a professor in the School of Marine Science & Policy at the University of Delaware, the expedition locates the super-dreadnought Nagato, which was the flagship of Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto when he ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor; the Sakawa, another storied enemy warship, which was turned over to the U.S. and also placed among the flotilla subjected to both midair and underwater atomic-bomb explosions.
“Abandoned” makes dramatic use of period footage, but the most chilling visual elements are those from beneath the surface, surveys of the ships that were tossed about like toys and whose formidable iron hulls were folded like origami. As a kind of Cold War atomic-power sidebar, the episode includes the story of the USS Thresher, which in 1963 sank during deep test dives off the coast of Massachusetts.
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