Goliath Awaits

1 9 8 1 (USA)
2 x 120 minute episodes

Written by Richard Bluel and Pat Fielder, Goliath Awaits was a mixture of The Poseidon Adventure and The Twilight Zone.

The luxury ocean liner the Goliath – sunk by a Nazi U-boat in 1939 – is discovered in 1,000 feet of water with hundreds of its passengers and their descendants still onboard, living in a self-contained world of their own making.

Peter Cabot (Mark Harmon), a water-logged Davy Crockett – daring, noble and insatiably curious – is on a routine exploration for manganese deposits on the ocean’s floor when he and his crew discover the Goliath.

Swimming around the hull for a closer look, Cabot hears what he thinks is an SOS signal in Morse code – and sees what he claims to be a young woman’s face peering out at him through an algae-caked porthole. He’s called a crackpot, of course – but by the second hour of the miniseries, a team of divers swim through a hole in Goliath‘s hull and are never heard from again.

When Cabot is eventually welcomed aboard the Goliath and meets the ship’s inhabitants, Goliath Awaits becomes an undersea variation on HG Wells’ Time Machine, introducing us to a microcosmic society that is not always as it seems.

The world in which the Goliath survivors live is part Spartan (the weak and infirm are expendable), part Indian (a caste system assigns people to jobs at birth) and part Communist (it is ruled by dictatorship). Some of the survivors have even broken from the rest and formed a radical underground – “the bow people” – making Goliath Awaits a political statement as well as an adventure story.

John McKenzie (Christopher Lee) – the ship’s engineer who became its ruler after devising a system to generate oxygen inside the torpedoed vessel – is a sinister sort of guy but is outdone (though not out-acted) by Frank Gorshin, who plays his loyal, nasty assistant, Dan Wesker.

The miniseries is stacked with recognisable sub-stellar actors, two of whom deserve to be singled out: Alex Cord (for his awful accent) and Jean Marsh of Upstairs Downstairs fame, whose appearance here is either a mistake or a debt repayment. John Carradine plays an aged movie actor whose swashbuckling film is the only movie to have survived the sinking. It’s shown around the clock and he’s something of a hero to the kiddies.

Like many similar fantasy stories, the plot requires viewers to check their intelligence at the door, and the ending is stupid and predictable, but parts of Goliath Awaits – especially its societal parallels – are of Twilight Zone calibre.

Much of the filming took place aboard the Queen Mary.

Peter Cabot
Mark Harmon
John McKenzie
Christopher Lee
Dan Wesker
Frank Gorshin
Lea McKenzie
Emma Samms
Dr Goldman
Jean Marsh
Ronald Bentley
John Carradine
Admiral Wiley Sloan
Eddie Albert
Dr Sam Marlowe
Alex Cord
Cmdr. Jeff Selkirk
Robert Forster
Sen. Oliver Bartholomew
John McIntire
Mrs Sarah Bartholomew
Jeanette Nolan
Paul Ryker
Duncan Regehr
Lew Bascomb
Alan Fudge
Dave Winter
George Innes
Bill Sweeney
John Ratzenberger
Sylvia King
Julie Bennett
Liam
Kirk Cameron
Eric Whittaker
Michael Evans
Bailey
Hedley Mattingly
Sally Crane
Belinda Mayne
Beth
Christina Nigra
Moore
Sandy Simpson
Luke Crane
Warwick Sims
Hoffman
Peter von Zerneck