Dig into the truth behind Subterranea

“What psychological toll does it take on a human to have them locked underground for a determined duration?” asks Likarion Wainaina, director of the new Original Kenyan sci-fi series, Subterranea. The series, written and created by Brian Munene, buries us in the lives of eight people who’re taking part in a psychological experiment to explore what happens when people are forced to live close together in a small space that they can’t leave. When a catastrophe happens above ground, the experiment turns into reality as they find themselves trapped together in an underground bunker.

Stream Subterranea Season 1 on Showmax now. New episodes on Thursdays.

A small, volatile group of strangers made to complete tasks as they live together in close quarters? Brian and Likarion, who also directed Kenya’s first-ever sci-fi film, Super Modo, already knew some of the ways that their experiment subjects might respond to those conditions from watching reality series like Big Brother and Survivor. Now toss in an apocalypse!

“In our research, we found outstanding results that will be amazing to show on screen,” promises Likarion. “The general stages of these side effects are: first your brain will seek stimulation, so subjects start off well with a need to party and self-indulge. Next comes the mental decline, and with this comes hallucinations and paranoia. This is then followed by heightened emotions. Then, finally, comes the reaction of everything piling up and the reality of their situation.”

Even before the apocalypse, though, setting the series in an underground bunker stacks the deck against Subterranea’s eight subjects. Many of the conditions explored in the bunker are duplicated in studies about human behaviour in isolated, confined environments (ICE), including in the mining industry, Antarctic stations, and experiments around the manned trip to Mars. 

It turns out that underground bunkers lack a host of things that people need to thrive, including sunlight, access to green and open spaces, established support systems, the ability to choose your company, and privacy.

Trapped in an ICE

NASA’s Human Research Program’s research into ICE lists certain drawbacks as “inevitable”. Even in crews who pass intensive psychological and psychiatric screening, around five per cent will develop clinically diagnosable mental disorders – partially because many healthy coping methods that they use in normal life are not transferable to an ICE. 

Those who don’t develop disorders will still face issues like mood swings, depression, fatigue, boredom, decreased morale, increases in sleep disorders, vulnerability to substance abuse, irritability, personality disorders, poor concentration, and worse performance on memory-related tasks. 

In the following quotes taken from researcher Dr Beth Healey’s NASA Concordia diary, she reveals how the dark, isolation and close quarters impacted her, even as she was conducting her own experiments and surveys to monitor the impact of ICE on interpersonal relationships amongst the 13 crew stationed at the Concordia base over the Antarctic winter. 

“Over time I felt that I was losing my energy and getting tired. People became whiter, pasty and gaunt. The atmosphere at the station became more tense. I also started to have problems with my sleep, spending whole nights awake wandering the station alone. These were the moments when I felt lonely. I looked out of the window to face only a dark void, while the rest of the station slept. There were no street lamps, ambulances or cars passing by in the night to remind me that I was not alone in this world – just silence and emptiness,” Dr Healey writes.

“It felt like my body was slowly falling apart during the polar night and that I needed the extra sleep to allow my body to recover and put everything back together again…The lack of privacy, living isolated in such a small group, started to become difficult and engender conflicts. I felt not only that my actions were under constant scrutiny, but also that I was under constant attack and criticism … With time this constant surveillance became frustrating. Without at first realising it, I lost a lot of self-confidence during this winter. Deprived of interaction with new people, I became more nervous about speaking with people outside of the crew on our communication system. Even towards my friends and family on occasion. I worried I had become someone different.”

No sun, no sleep

Without access to the sun, Subterranea’s bunker subjects face physical and mental impacts similar to that of expedition crews on base over winter in Antarctica.

The most serious disruption is to the body’s circadian rhythms. These determine when we sleep, for how long, what the quality of that sleep is like and how alert we are throughout the day. It’s not just a case of being ”eepy sleepy”. In the absence of light, the whole wake-sleep cycle shifts. The subjects of the Mars 500 experiment fell into all kinds of rhythms, including one that was 25 hours long and one that split the day into two 12-hour periods. The group reported the bouts of insomnia they suffered as “excruciating” and debilitating. And this lack of sleep led to difficulty in concentration and memory, absentmindedness, and mild hypnotic states known as “long-eye” or the “Antarctic stare”.  

Our body clock doesn’t just control when we wake and sleep. Disrupting it affects every system in the body, from the immune system, to the skeletal system. This impacts how we form memories, the regulation of metabolism, how and when the body releases hormones, and the rate at which we heal. 

Subterranea’s sensory deprivation bunker

Added to this, the way Subterranea’s bunker is set up goes against every recommendation for expedition teams’ mental health in ICE.

“They are just the lab rats so they don’t have luxuries. So the sets will be spacious with a few furniture spread out and very minimal artwork if none at all,” reveals Likarion. “We are going for a concrete feel for a major part of the series. They need to feel like they are in a prison … We want to have a very dark moody atmosphere, with a lot of contrast. A low-key lighting style. This will make the bunker feel terrifying.” There’s no stimulation to be had from the clothes or personal items, either. “The main costumes for the bunker have to be uniform. They are all meant to appear equal and move like worker bees. So no long eyelashes or perfect nails. Everyone in the bunker has to look natural and bland,” says Likarion. 

Antarctic, space, and mining research have all shown that people, regardless of background, prefer natural spaces to constructed ones. For the brain, stimulation from our environment is like salt on your food. From the scent of grass, to the sights of a sunny day, to the sounds of nature and movement around us, to the scent of the earth and air, the feeling of the air on your face, and the feedback from your feet navigating the changing ground, your brain is constantly noticing, appreciating, and making tiny decisions based on all these environmental clues, coming from every part of the sensory system. Losing all this stimulation creates a kind of void in the mind that we struggle to process.

Subdued underground 

Being shut off from the sun is not the only issue. Mining studies reveal that being unable to see for long distances to navigate an environment, not knowing what is happening above ground, and being unable to anticipate events, can all lead to a feeling of vulnerability and a loss of control severe enough to cause constant grinding anxiety and panic attacks. 

In a setup like Subterranea, which has only one lift to the outside, real-life subjects have reported feeling isolated, trapped and unsafe – which causes hypervigilance, a state in which people struggle to make sense of what’s happening around them, and fail to respond quickly or appropriately to events, even becoming apathetic. 

Physically, living with this kind of inescapable stress for a prolonged period increases the amount of cortisol the body produces, leading to weight gain (especially in the face and abdomen), fatty deposits between the shoulder blades, diabetes, hypertension, muscle weakness, and osteoporosis. 

Team stress

Global research into how to construct a perfect working team for long space missions exposes another area in which Subterranea’s creators have slyly stacked the deck against the bunker residents. Brian and Likarion have hand-picked their subjects for a specific purpose. In this case, maximum drama. 

“We have based them on some sci-fi stereotypes that lend well on screen,” hints Likarion, who considers the approach to be, “the best way to rope in our audience to the drama and have them glued to the screen as they start to root for certain characters and in turn hate certain characters as well not knowing that they, the audience themselves, are participating in our little experiment.”

Long-term experiences in ICE leads to increased social tension, which often comes out in crews becoming hostile to outsiders, mission control groups, and even people who get excluded from the core group and cliques that form over time. This effect persists despite efforts to control it, including psychological countermeasures and training. 

Russian cosmonaut Valentine Lebedev, who spent 211 days aboard the Mir Space Station, estimated that 30 per cent of the time spent in space involved crew conflict. He also pointed to these as the most difficult problems experienced during space missions. As a result, a lot of research is being done on which personality types to avoid in crews. And four types of people have emerged as problematic. If you’ve started watching Subterranea, can you spot them?

1. “Fearless leader” types. Apparently those who test high for “psychological dominance” lack the skills needed to collaborate properly. 
2. Socially awkward extroverts. Anyone who needs a lot of attention and stimulation will quickly grate on the rest of the group. 
3. Active, adventurous extroverts. When their need for stimulation from both the environment and other people isn’t met, their need to be liked by their crewmates could lead to them trampling other crewmates’ personal boundaries.
4. Work and success-driven candidates with a high need for order. Psychological tests reveal that the more someone needs order, the less emotionally stable they are in the face of frustration caused by delays and equipment failure, and the less capable they are of leading a group, which requires calm response to change and unpredictability. Tests also show that the need for personal achievement often comes at the expense of social compatibility.  

Of all the stressors present in Subterranea’s bunker, group conflict is the most dangerous. A brief look at the history of violent crimes in Antarctica shows how serious this can become in the pressure cooker of ICE. 

In 1969, one scientist at the Vostok station attacked another with an ice axe over a game of chess. In 1984, an Argentine doctor burned down his research station when he was ordered to stay over winter. And in 2018, during the polar winter, a Russian engineer stabbed a welder in the chest several times, supposedly because the welder kept giving away the endings of the books that he was reading. 

Now take this powder keg, and toss an apocalyptic match into it. Remember the shock of seeing the worst of human behaviour come out in response to lockdown? 

Stream Subterranea Season 1 on Showmax now. New episodes on Thursdays.