Sub Story

*PING!*

Humanity has been fascinated for a long time with going under the sea and this is epitomised in the Sub Story. Fiction and fact-based drama involving submarines has many advantages to it:

• You don't need to spend lots of money on sets or Stock Footage. You can set it solely in the cramped sub interior, yet still create plenty of suspense with just a radar scanner and a pinging sonar.
• You can justify a Shirtless Scene (Old submarines like German U-boats had no air conditioning and were very cramped and hot).
• Confined spaces tend to bring out the worst in people and are good for horror movies, as no one can escape.
• There's the added danger that if the sub goes to the bottom involuntarily, the chances of everyone dying from pressure or lack of air are pretty high.
• Nuclear power plant in an isolated submarine? Lots of potential for drama if the reactor melts down.
• Torpedoes can run for a good ten or fifteen minutes, so if you lose track of one, it might bite you in the, er, aft portion.
• Silent Running Mode is an good source of suspense, as the crew shuts down all power and tries to elude a sub-hunter and mine layer ship that is dropping depth charges.
• Hot Sub-on-Sub Action, with sleek, glistening subs gliding through the water and firing torpedoes is just plain cool.
• The whole thing is a contest of wits, bravery and determination with plenty of scope for a Guile Hero.
• There is gobs and gobs of Technology Porn and made-up Technobabble. "Adjust bow plane yaw level by 20 degrees! Maintain aft compression vortex!"^note Naval submarine phraseology for radio commands is Truth in Television, because when you're deep under the ocean and the enemy is trying to blow you up, it's stressful, so you need a clear, unambiguous way to communicate commands and messages. As such, if a WWII sub captain got an urgent warning of an enemy torpedo plane, they shout "Dive! Dive! Dive!". The crew has no confusion over what they need to do.
• Both sides are to some degree "blindfolded" and depend on hearing or detecting each other, making for an interesting combat situation.
• The stakes are all or nothing. If a sub survives an engagement likely everyone aboard will survive while if it is sunk or crippled it will be so far underwater that everyone will die.
• Historical settings like the Cold War or World War II lend plausibility to the story; with all the secrecy back then, an adventure that took place hidden under the ocean seems like it really could have happened.
• They tend to be Rated M for Manly which may be a good thing for some. Submarines have been historically and exclusively a male-only environment and with this comes a few expectations with regard to storytelling. Female characters are often either minimized (often no spoken lines), or even totally absent.

Many of these are During the War, but they don't have to be. Indeed they don't even have to involve the military. They don't even have to be underwater, as Space Is an Ocean means that fictional spaceships will often behave like subs. Films such as The Fantastic Voyage and The Core have recycled Sub Story tropes in more fantastical settings (a man's bloodstream and the Earth's mantle, respectively).

Home of many a Cool Boat with a Badass Crew. Expect at least one Silent Running Mode scene.

Not to Be Confused with a story about a submissive member of a BDSM relationship, or a story within a story.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Blue Submarine No. 6
• Ozuma, submarines in the sand!
• Arpeggio of Blue Steel
• The Silent Service

Films — Animation

• Yellow Submarine. This sub is part TARDIS, but it's small for a fantasy ship, with lots of pipes, and has very intimidating controls. And while its engine isn't quite as dangerous as a nuclear reactor, it's good for some drama.

Films — Live-Action

• Das Boot, one of the most historically accurate and gripping views of World War II sub combat.
• U-571, one of the least historically accurate movies (at least concerning the Enigma code and who exactly captured it), it still is also incredibly gripping.
• The Enemy Below, which was Recycled IN SPACE! as the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Balance of Terror".
• The Star Trek films:
  • Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Word of God said the bridge of the Klingon K'Tinga battlecruiser◊ was made to look like "an enemy submarine in World War II that's been out at sea for too long.", and Klingon starship interiors would have similar designs in subsequent Trek productions.
  • Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan has another sub duel Recycled IN SPACE! with two starships inside a nebula. There's even a scene in which Enterprise "submerges," waits for Reliant to pass overhead, and then "surfaces" to attack.
  • Later Star Trek films would play with the trope further, with the Enterprise and other Starfleet ships having to contend with cloaked Klingon warships:
  • Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: The USS Grissom is destroyed in a surprise attack by Kruge's Bird of Prey; later on the Enterprise is also badly damaged by Kruge's ship.
  • Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: The Enterprise spends much of the film being pursued by another Bird of Prey commanded by Klaa.
  • Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: A Klingon starship carrying Chancellor Gorkon to meet with the President of the Federation is attacked by a cloaked Klingon Bird of Prey hoping to frame the Enterprise for the attack. The film's climax has the Enterprise and the USS Excelsior battling the advanced Bird of Prey which, unlike her predecessors, does not need to uncloak to fire her weapons.
• Below by David Twohy (of Riddick fame) plays the "bringing worst in humans" part for all the scares it can get out of it.
• We Dive at Dawn- British film made during World War II, involving a British sub of the P-class being sent to the Baltic to sink a new German battleship. Despite being a propaganda film, it's still pretty good.
• Operation Petticoat - a comedy about evacuating nurses from the Philipines to Australia in December 1941.
• Destination Tokyo - a drama made during the war based on a recon patrol into Tokyo Harbor. The effects were so good that the Navy used it as a training film.
• Run Silent, Run Deep - surprisingly realistic take on sub warfare around the Japanese home islands.
• Submarine Command
• Up Periscope
• Morning Departure - actually set just post WWII, but plays much more like a WWII story than a Cold War one.
• Hellcats Of The Navy - which won the Golden Turkey Award for the worst Ronald Reagan film of all time.
• The Bedford Incident - a loose retelling of Moby-Dick using a Soviet Submarine in place of the whale.
• The Hunt for Red October — what happens when an entire submarine tries to defect from the Soviet Union.
• The Spy Who Loved Me features multiple submarines. Among its more notable aspects is a movie featuring Page Three Stunna pics somehow getting a PG when the BBFC reclassified the thing and Barbara Bach's shower. On naval ships, water is at somewhat at a premium (no, you can't get it directly from the sea; that's salt water and you need to desalinate it first) and sailors take a "Navy Shower" (rinse, lather, rinse off). Bach has the shower running. The captain clearly liked her; "Hollywood Showers" are only permitted if you've done something special.
• Down Periscope - a comedy about a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits being given a World War II-era diesel sub as part of a naval exercise and pitted against the modern US Navy, including a nuclear sub. Despite it being a comedy, there are still some tense moments.
• K-19: The Widowmaker
• Ice Station Zebra
• Crimson Tide
• The Wolf's Call
• Wing Commander: A Terran space fighter carrier finds itself fighting against badly stacked odds. They spend much of the movie trying to hide from the enemy Kilrathi fleet, while trying to find some way to delay their attack on Earth long enough for The Cavalry to get in position to stop them. A lot of the movie was intentionally made as an homage to Das Boot.
• Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
• Operation Pacific. The WWII exploits of the fictional USS Thunderfish are culled from actual wartime submarine incidents. The Technical Advisor for the film was ADM Charles Lockwood, COMSUBPAC during the war.
  • CDR Perry is wounded on the bridge and gives the order to "take her down", sacrificing himself to save his ship. This scene is based on the actual incident that earned CDR Howard Gilmore of USS Growler the Medal of Honor.
• The Damned is about a group of Nazis and Nazi collaborators who attempt to flee to South America aboard a U-boat as the war is ending.
• Gray Lady Down features two submarines: the USS Neptune and the experimental mini sub The Snark
• Black Sea, in which two separate groups of Brits and Russian crews are hired together to search for a sunken WWII sub carrying Nazi gold. And then things started to get worse...
• The 1985 Soviet two-part film Attention All Hands (rough translation of Слушать в отсеках) starts with a Soviet sub sneaking into Bagryanaya Bay and sinking a German transport ship during World War II, before being lost with all hands. Forty years later, the sub commander's son (also a sub commander) is participating in a war game, pitted against his academy friend, who is in command of a destroyer. In the second part of the game, the sub commander has to sneak into the very same bay as his late father and "sink" a target. Instead of trying to sneak past the waiting destroyer at the bay entrance, the sub locates an underwater passage under a mountain that leads straight into the bay and takes the incredibly risky dive in order to get in that way. They succeed and win the war game. In the process, the commander finally realizes how his father managed to perform his heroic feat.
• In Assault on a Queen, a group of treasure hunters salvage a German U-boat and decide to become Submarine Pirates.
• Crash Dive, another movie filmed during WWII, about an American submarine attacking German commerce raiders in the North Atlantic.
• Hostile Waters, a film about an accident aboard a Soviet ballistic missile submarine.

Literature

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - the Trope Maker. Three men are kept captive on a rogue submarine run as its own country by the mysterious Captain Nemo... before practical submarines became a thing.
• Discworld's Leonard of Quirm builds a reconnaissance submarine in Jingo. He calls it a 'Going-Under-The-Water-Safely Device'. A Series of Unfortunate Events novel The Grim Grotto.
• One of Robert Fulton's early submarines plays an important role in Ratcatcher; the first Matthew Hawkwood novel.
• The Hunt for Red October is all about the Red October submarine, and the above-water forces hounding it.
  • Additional books in the Ryanverse generally include submarine operations as a b-plot or additional actions, including The Cardinal of the Kremlin^note A Los Angeles-class submarine attempts to extract two people from the Soviet Union through the Barents Sea, The Sum of All Fears^note The USS Maine, an Ohio-class submarine with a particularly nasty captain, is part of a b-plot involving the attempted tracking of the sub by a Soviet hunter-killer submarine, and eventually ends up as one of the casualties in the climax, and Debt of Honor^note Due to a greatly reduced Navy, the Ohio-class missile submarines get a new lease on life as special operations support platforms.
  • The non-Ryanverse novel Red Storm Rising features the captains of both a sub and a sub-hunting frigate as significant POV characters.
• H. P. Lovecraft's The Temple.
• Das Boot (1973) by Lothar-Günther Buchheim, a novel about a German submarine in World War II. Better known via its film adaptation Das Boot (1981).
• Edward Beach's Run Silent, Run Deep and its sequels, made into a Clark Gable film. Also his book Submarine!, a memoir/history of the WWII Silent Service.
• Two novel series by submarine historian Edwyn Gray, one about a British S-Boat and one about a German U-Boat, both in WWII.
• Glen Cook's "Passage at Arms" follows the story of a Climber ship, a type of spaceship that can under very specific circumstances essentially drop out of conventional space and fly almost undetectable except for a "pseudo-Hawking black hole" several millimeters wide. The primary danger is that while in climber space the ship cannot release the heat buildup from any of their systems.
  • The book is actually more-or-less a remake of Das Boot IN SPACE!
• The "spider drive" vessels in Honor Harrington series are basically submarines In Space!
• The Dragon in the Sea (AKA Under Pressure) by Frank Herbert depicts tense underwater combat 20 Minutes into the Future between nuclear submarines. Despite being published in 1956 it has survived the ravages of Science Marches On and Zee Rust remarkable well.
• Kishin Corps, set in WWII, plus an alien invasion, one of the protagonist mecha is an amphibious type with an underwater mode.

Live-Action TV

• The 1999 Made-for-TV movie The Hunley is centered around the experimental Confederate submarine Hunley, which had thus far claimed the lives of two of its crews while being tested. A new crew is put together, and they must find a way to use their submarine against the Union Navy blockade of Charleston. The sub sinks, and takes its third crew with it, but not before destroying a Union warship by lancing it with a large explosive device.
• The episode "Why We Fight" from season five of Angel is a WWII flashback where Angel is sent by the U.S. government to help bring in a captured U-boat.
• The Unit has an episode involving a rather trippy dream and the women of the series getting action-y in said dream, plus a South Korean submarine.
• And of course, a submarine is the best place for a certain kind of sandwich.
• JAG featured several episodes taking place on submarines, with plots ranging from historical events, espionage to fish-out-of-water stories to the occasional bit of Hot Sub-on-Sub Action. ^{The 12 out of 227 episodes} 
  1x3 Shadow
  4x16 Silent Service
  5x7 Rouge
  5x22 Overdue & Presumed Lost
  6x15 Iron Coffin
  7x5 Mixed Messages
  7x14 Odd Man Out
  7x23 In Country
  7x24 Enemy Below
  8x7 Need To Know
  8x17 Empty Quiver
  9x7 Close Quarters

• SeaQuest DSV
• The episode "The Last Voyage of the Jimmy Carter" of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, is a flashforward/flashback set on humanity's last working military submarine, on a secret mission in the war with the Machines.
• The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Balance of Terror" is The Enemy Below in space fought between Kirk and a Worthy Opponent Romulan Captain.
  • The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Starship Down" is essentially Das Boot in space.
• The Andromeda episode "D minus 0" is also a sub story Recycled IN SPACE!.
• The first season of Vigil (BBC) is a murder investigation on a British Navy nuclear submarine.
• Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
• Last Resort is about a US Navy submarine that goes rogue after becoming Unwitting Pawns in a Government Conspiracy's False Flag Operation.
• Doctor Who: "Cold War" is set on a crippled Soviet sub beneath the arctic ice, with something very nasty loose on board.
• Xena: Warrior Princess, of all things, had the episode "Tsunami", in which a slave galleon is capsized and sunk by an enormous wave. Xena, Gabrielle, and a handful of survivors are trapped below deck in a small part of the ship that still has air, and are trying to figure out how to get out of the ship and get to the surface before they run out.
• Das Boot, sequel series to the 1981 film. Contrary to the latter, it adds some land-based subplots.
• The Last Ship: Sean Ramsey, the Big Bad of Season 2, is a former Royal Navy officer who was stationed aboard a submarine, the HMS Achilles, during the Red Flu plague; being one of the only survivors among the crew, he took command of the sub and now uses it as a mobile headquarters of his cult. It gets into several battles with the Nathan James over the course of the season, with their Final Battle in particular involving the battleship ending up right on top of where the submarine is submerged and the two jockeying to get into position to attack each other without collateral damage.
• Fear the Walking Dead: The webisode miniseries Dead in the Water is set aboard the USS Pennsylvania, which was found beached ashore in Texas in Season 6, revealing how that came to be — the sub was doing maneuvers in the Gulf of Mexico when the Zombie Apocalypse began, with the crew slowly being picked off as the virus spreads among them. After refusing orders to nuke Chicago in a senseless attempt to contain the outbreak, the surviving crew members beach the ship and scatter. Unfortunately, one of them would later get seduced into Teddy's Apocalypse Cult and lead him to the Pennsylvania in order to launch its payload across Texas.

Music

• The Beatles' "Yellow Submarine", which inspired the film.
• Gorillaz' music video of "On Melancholy Hill" mostly features a fleet of submersibles piloted by the album's artists.
• KISS' "Torpedo Girl" is about Ace being visited by a submarine in the place where he was swimming, and meeting, of course, the titular girl.
• Iron Maiden's "Run Silent Run Deep".
• Raven's "Run Silent Run Deep", about a—likely WWII—submarine attacking a convoy.
• Sabaton Wolfpack, which is based on a Wolfpack attack on a Convoy during the battle of the Atlantic.
• The Sex Pistols have "Submission", which sounds like an Obligatory Bondage Song from the title, but is instead about a literal submarine mission, with equally ridiculous double and single entendres.

Radio

• Deep Trouble, a BBC radio series, is a comedy set on a Royal Navy nuclear submarine with an incompetent crew.

Video Games

• Archimedean Dynasty and Aquanox
• Barotrauma: Aside from brief visits to small outposts and the occasional EVA jaunt in a diving suit, the entire game takes place within the confines of a player-crewed submarine exploring an extraterrestrial Eldritch Ocean Abyss.
• Cold Waters, a Spiritual Successor to Red Storm Rising
• Dangerous Waters
• Deep Fighter
• Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy III, and Final Fantasy V all have submarines as available transportation, but the best example from the series is Final Fantasy VII which has an actual sub battle as a later part of the plot, which can be replayed for fun at the Gold Saucer, as well as being the mode of travel needed to engage in battle with the bonus boss Emerald Weapon.
• Harpoon (based on a miniatures game)
• Iron Lung combines this with sci-fi horror.
• The Silent Hunter Series
• The Silent Service series from Microprose
• Stirring Abyss
• 688 Attack Sub
• Sub Culture
• Subnautica becomes this when you travel in the Cyclops submarine. It can be equipped with sonar to navigate the dark depths of Planet 4546B.
• Sub Rebellion
• Subwar 2050
• UBOAT

Web Comics

• Deep Dive Daredevils: Set in The '30s, a Diesel Punk story about a Cool Boat and its' Badass Crew.

Western Animation

• Big Blue: The series follows the crew of the submarine Calypso, who use their vessel to explore the ocean and defend it from threats.
• The Deep: The series follows the Nekton family, a family of daring underwater explorers who live aboard a state-of-the-art submarine, The Aronnax, and explore uncharted areas of the earth’s oceans to unravel the mysteries of the deep.
• The Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode "Cat and Mouse" is pretty much a Sub Story IN SPACE!. Anakin and his crew have to pilot a stealth ship (built long, narrow and cramped like a real sub, and armed with torpedoes for good measure) past a Separatist blockade under the command of a fearsomely clever admiral. The stealth ship cannot fire weapons without decloaking and is vastly outgunned by the blockade, requiring Anakin to use expert piloting and guile to take out his foe.
• The titular The Magic School Bus transformed into a submarine several times outside the underwater episode.

---