markus-41219 First two seasons are fast paste, very well told and shot realistically. Third episode is too slow. Images too clean and scenes too long, like adverstising. Not real enough. So I did not like the photography of the third season. A pity. The story itself is very cool. Very good development of the story and the characters. Although sometimes it seems that they developed the characters during the shoot. Would give 10 stars if it had been shot throughout like season 1 and 2. Season 3 makes it lose one star.

fourbyfour-72864 In summary, the show has many imperfect and sometimes silly elements (particularly the scripting of romantic relationships among the characters), but the story-telling is rich with many hidden gems which keep the viewer engaged and wanting to know what happens next.El Barco strikes me as a blend of Beverly Hills 90210 and Lost with a tiny bit of Star Trek thrown in to the mix. Like 90210, El Barco invests a great deal of screen time exploring the relationships (mostly romantic) among the characters, including the older adults, which at times gets tiresome due to cliché plot devices such as love triangles and the angst of young love stemming from the would-be lovers' unwillingness to reveal their feelings for each other.Like Lost and Star Trek, there is a sci-fi component to El Barco that is mostly fun (despite sometimes being unscientific) and follows the pattern of placing the characters in eminent peril forcing them to work together to snatch survival from the jaws of disaster by the end of each episode. Like Lost, there is a story arc that is progressively revealed through the series. But unlike Lost, most of the various plot lines are resolved cleanly by the series finale.The cast are beautiful and a large component of the entertainment is watching them fall in and out of love and get into steamy situations. The setting of being on a ship at sea results in skimpy clothing- shorts, t-shirts (often wet), swimsuits, unzipped scuba gear, fun and sun, you get the idea. Even the extras could pass for underwear models. It's good fun, but the "pleasure cruise" lies at odds with the basic premise that the world has ended and they are in a fight for their survival.The ship, the Estrella Polar, is a fantastic set piece and is beautiful to see throughout the series. However, too little time is spent depicting the operations of a sailing vessel so most viewers will be wondering why only two people out of forty ever work the rigging and why so rarely. And why is no one on watch during the night? We never see basic sailing operations, such as tacking, that would be very fun to see given a crew of students on a school ship. Additionally, while we see a few depictions of officers poring over navigation charts, we never see a sextant used for navigation nor do we get an explanation of the operation of GPS in the post-disaster world. What's worse is that the ship is a source of discontinuity - often establishing shots of the ship don't match the action of the scene (like one early establishing shot of the ship at full sail and good speed matched to a scene of the students swimming in the ocean with all sails clearly furled).Fun Stuff:Product placement is pretty funny in El Barco and it is incredibly comforting to know that in the post-apocalyptic future there is an endless supply of Coca Cola for everyone. It becomes a game (a la Where's Waldo) to discover how the screenwriters can insert a refreshing bottle of Coke into each episode.There are a lot of hidden gems in El Barco that will be appreciated by those who pay attention and the cast and crew deserve recognition for their cleverness. I wish I had noticed these earlier so that I could have been on the lookout for them.To give you an idea, watch for a radiation scanner used in the sick bay. The device is clearly labeled as having been manufactured by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation (recognizable by true sci-fi fans). Additionally, look for symbolism in a variety of t-shirts and in the photos on the crew's lockers (i.e. a photo of the Hindenburg).The special effects work is pretty well done. For the most part, the CGI comes across believably because the animators do not overreach. They keep things simple and you'll rarely roll your eyes or groan. As other reviewers have stated, the series finale is pretty much a dud. A few plot lines are left glaringly unresolved and the last moment feels like a typical ploy to get another season or a movie special.Despite issues with the series finale and a few objectionable elements, El Barco is a fun time with beautiful and sexy people, a solid story arc, and some entertaining hidden gems that I, for one, enjoyed.

minimusdecimus I am a fan of the sci-fi genre. I am also a big fan of the Spanish cinema. So I began to watch the series with great expectations. However, a few episodes later I started to fast-forward it, and close to the end of the first season I was actually watching a few minutes/episode - that is, some of the scenes with gorgeous girls. Can't just stop watching something like that.As other reviewers accurately described it: pathetic. Where should I begin? The 'sci' part is annoyingly wrong and stupid, as anyone with a minimal scientific education (talking here read a damn scientific section of a newspaper, not actually go to school) would immediately notice.The 'sweet-roll' part is so wrong and stupid, I can't imagine anyone who ever was in a relationship swallowing it. A 9 years old just might... but I have my doubts.The dialogues are so wrong and stupid, I strongly believe the death penalty should be reinstated throughout Europe. At least for screenwriters. I can't believe I am actually saying this, but given such a silly screenplay, the acting and direction are mostly great. The actors managed to make me half-believe some of the least stupid things happening there.I liked several songs on the soundtrack. Alongside most of the actors (and the girls - distinct category), I found this to be one of the few redeeming qualities of the show. That's how I rated it -1/10 instead of -10/10.

E. Catalan "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 storyline's 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 the writers' thought a 4th season would address all the inconclusive data, but that season never happened 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.