When I returned from Greece (back, a long long time ago...) a seaQuest DSV was a TV show that I happened to catch while channel surfing, but I never really watched it when it aired.  Now with Netflix I thought it was a good time to catch up.  Initially I called the show "underwater star trek" but with all the crazyness that the writers threw at the show I don't think it ended up being underwater trek.

The show did start off pretty strong (I think).  The story starts in 2018 (in a few short years!) when Nathan Bridger is called back to action, by loaning his creation, the seaQuest (a submarine, or DSV) to the United Earth Oceans Organization (sort of like the Federation for this universe).  The earth's surface resources have been depleted (although it seems contradictory in later seasons, but whatever), so the people of earth are looking underwater for things that they can exploit.  This means potential conflict, so the UEO patrols and assists in order to keep the peace.  The way things look in 2018 are like this (screengrab from netflix):

World of  2018

As you can see everyone has grabbed a piece of the ocean.  In any case, the first season was pretty good. It dealt with a lot of subjects that Star Trek itself deals with, but they also talked about science.  At the end of the show Robert Ballard would have a brief description of the actual science behind that specific episode which was great.

Season 2 was really off the rails.  Some of the regulars left, others were introduced, and storylines included aliens, aliens, more aliens, spirits of dead people from the deep, people with telepathic powers, cloned humans (derogatorily called called daggers), and I think genetically engineered humans who could breathe underwater. The second season culminated in the seaquest and the crew being abducted by aliens to help solve some alien conflict.  All I can say is "WTF?!". Robert Ballard also stopped doing his spiel at the end of the show (probably because it went off the rails), but the actors read the science facts.

So...how do you come back after being rescued by aliens?  Well, it wasn't answered, but somehow the crew and the seaquest come back 10 years after their disappearance.  It's now 2032.  Shits gone down on earth. The UEO is not as big as it was before, militaristic states are threatening a world war (insert number here), and the seaQuest is back (and the crew's memory is lost).  OK.  Captain Bridger quits, Michael Ironsides is now the captain, some of the bridge crew gets shaken up... OK, back to normal - let's patron the neutral zone! Err...sorry, wrong show.

World of 2032

Ironsides is actually not a bad captain. Lots of the crazy stuff (like aliens, aliens, more aliens) was removed, and we ended up getting a show about the tensions of war and not so much science.  By this point the end-of-show science lesson is gone.  Blerg!   The final season was really a half-season (by the metrics of the day).

At the end of the day, I think the show had a ton of potential, but they really destroyed it with the off-the-rails second season.  Maybe in about a decade it will be ripe for a reboot?