Nautilus [tv]
Entry updated 6 April 2026. Tagged: TV.
UK tv series (2025). Production companies Moonriver TV and Seven Stories. Created by James Dormer. Executive producers include Johanna Devereaux and James Dormer. Produced by Cameron Welsh. Directors include Ben C Lucas, Michael Matthews and Isabelle Sieb. Writers include Sonya Desai, James Dormer and Matthew Parkhill. Cast includes Georgia Flood, Thierry Fremont, Damien Garvey, Shazad Latif, Celine Menville, Pacharo Mzembe and Kayden Price. Ten 50-minute episodes. Colour.
This lavishly produced ten-part series is a prequel of sorts to Jules Verne's Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870; trans as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas 1872), presenting an alternate version of the origins of Captain Nemo. In 1857, Nemo (Latif) is a prisoner of the East India Company, who has been compelled as a slave labourer to help design and build the titular submarine they intend to use as a Weapon. With a number of loyal fellow prisoners, he rebels, takes over the Nautilus, steals it, and escapes into the open sea. They encounter and ram a Company ship, rescuing two women, Humility (Flood) and her maid Loti (Menville), and a young cabin boy called Blaster (Price), who all become crew members. Company director Crawley (Garvey), seeking to recapture the Nautilus and Nemo, engages a warship, the Dreadnought, which pursues them throughout the series. On the way they encounter an enormous eel (see Monsters); metal-eating bugs; the inevitable giant squid; the ruins of what may have been Atlantis; and a tribe of women warriors, descended from Vikings, who are guardians of a legendary treasure which Nemo has been seeking. [LW]
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