I admit that plots involving the Bermuda Triangle tend to irritate me at the best of times. After all, there is no reason to believe that disappearances are more likely there than any other part of the world with similar weather and amounts of shipping. About the only time it’s worked for me was that one X-Files episode, which let’s be real is only using the Triangle as something to hang a plot from. In its own way, so is this show, in a way that makes setting it there make even less sense.

Conrad Zacharie Storm (Michael Johnston) is out surfing one day. For reasons, he has stolen a necklace belonging to his father that hangs on the wall of their beach hut. His father is horrified when he realizes this and runs to tell Zak to take it off, but it’s too late—Zak is sucked into the Bermuda Triangle, and escape is impossible. Because sure, why not. An artificially intelligent ship called the Chaos rescues him, and he befriends its passenger, a boy called Clovis (Reba Buhr) who has lost his body and is now ectoplasmic. He also meets Cece (Christine Marie Cabanos), an Atlantian princess; Crogar (Christopher Corey Smith), a Viking; and Caramba (Max Mittelman), a small green alien in a robotic exoskeleton. He also learns to wield the blade Calabrass (Kyle Herbert), apparently the spirit of a pirate trapped in a magic sword.

There are things they have to do that will let the 7 C’s, as they call themselves, escape the Triangle and go home, and the evil Skullivar (David Roach) is trying to stop them, for reasons. It’s mostly just a whole bunch of adventures strung together, I guess, and instead of Skullivar they’re mostly up against his minion, Golden Bones (Matthew Mercer).

Normally, when you’ve got a cocky hero, it’s important to have someone who can ground him when he goes too far astray. It also helps if he Learns a Valuable Lesson. That doesn’t happen here. Zak is if anything egged on by Calabrass, and while Cece opposes him a lot, it’s mostly because she thinks she should be in charge instead. She’s right sometimes, and sometimes they’re both wrong, and they never achieve a comeuppance at all. Zak never even stops to consider that it was stealing his father’s amulet that brought him to the Triangle in the first place and that thinking and learning about situations before he acts would’ve prevented that.

I also find Crogar infuriating. He’s your standard Big Dumb TV Viking. All he wants is to hit things. Any thought beyond that is beyond him. He’s opposed to planning what happens before they move. He never moves the plot along and seems only to be there for muscle. Frankly, a Viking as dumb as he is wouldn’t last. He’d be more trouble on a voyage than he was worth. He’s more trouble on this one than he’s worth and seems mostly to exist to make Zak look smarter.

I’m also a little tired of the heroic pirate trope. It’s as though the only image we have of a seafaring adventurer is a pirate, and we never get into the fact that a real pirate wouldn’t be as fun as the ones we have onscreen. Calabrass also keeps giving Zak terrible advice under the guise of “a real pirate wouldn’t do the thing” even when doing the thing makes more sense than whatever Calabrass wants him to do. And Zak is so bowed by peer pressure that he goes along with it.

When Zak is initially taken into the Triangle, he’s recording a video in the apparent hopes of being a YouTube star. He’s your basic Extreme Teenager, and it’s awfully convenient that the Chaos has a surfboard sort of thing that he can use to fly around on. The show is a whole string of minor annoyances that build up to a show I absolutely can’t stand, and I wish my son weren’t so fond of it.

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