“What was that bang?” Implosion, BBC2’s documentary about the doomed commercial submarine Titan and its owner and pilot Stockton Rush, has footage shot on 18 June 2023 at the very instant when, on a sightseeing trip 3,800m below the surface of the Atlantic, Titan suffered a fatal rupture and the five people inside it died. There were no cameras on the sea floor and any pictures taken by Titan’s occupants were destroyed along with it, but there is film that contains what we now know to be audio of the craft’s last moment. Rush’s wife, Wendy, is aboard the mission’s support ship, in radio contact, when she hears a noise.
At that point, Wendy Rush looks more confused than alarmed. A contributor to the film likens the sound to a door slamming, but it’s less dramatic than that: it’s more of a muffled thud, which was ambiguous enough for it not to be assumed immediately that Rush and his passengers were dead. Instead, the unknown fate of Titan topped global news reports for four days, until debris was finally found.
