A public thanks is warranted to Glenn, Kathy, Grandma, Grandpa, and Aunt Ann, whose collective gifting efforts resulted in yesterday's purchasing of The Blue Planet: Seas of Life, and two of my favourite (and thoroughly dissimilar) 90's sci-fis, Gattaca and The Fifth Element.
I love watching fish. I love watching shows about fish. I find ocean life to be the most fascinating and eye-popping, so I've been really looking forward to watching Blue Planet, the all-ocean companion documentary to Planet Earth. Even on our old TV with bad sound, I could not be let down. In only three episodes, I've learned some fascinating things about co-dependency and animal behaviour, and seen some pure beauty. The only downside is that I've discovered I can't watch too much of it at one time, not because of visual over-stimulation, but because of narrative foolishness. For example, in the episode about the deep sea, an area which is hard to explore due to pressure and we know very little about, we have such baffling statements as - and I paraphrase - "the such-and-such shark hasn't changed in 150 million years. Having only seen this shark twice, scientists know next to nothing about it." So how do you know it hasn't changed in a whopping 150 million years? Such a statement defies even the most basic tests of logic and reason, and is somewhat insulting to the audience.
And then there's the narration's unnecessary continual reminders about certain things having just developed - I say unnecessary because it adds nothing to the impact or information of the show. For example, again in the episode about the deep sea, we see a fish that has what can only be described as a pair of oblong headlights under each eye. Not only can it turn these headlights on and off at will, the lights are also red, a colour which deep-sea fish - ie. the headlight-fish's prey and predators - cannot see...but the headlight fish can. At a certain level, I'm impressed that people can believe this is something coincidental that just happened. And then, there's fish behaviour. Another episodes talks about how herrings ignore all basic survival instincts to swim to shallow water in order to lay their eggs, because the eggs cannot hatch in the cooler, deeper water. Swimming to the surface, the herring become a feast for birds and dolphins that otherwise do not dive down to eat them. If these fish had just "developed", according to basic evolutionary theory the result would have been that the eggs would have changed to hatch in the safety of the deeper water. Instead, they contribute to the co-dependent food chain by heading to the surface. I could only listen to so much mind-boggling, logic-defying, bullshit as the narrator made sure to remind us that all this just happened and developed, in defiance of evolutionary science's own limitations. It's no coincidence that there are so many scientists and biologists who, the more they study and learn, come to the conclusion that there is indeed a Creator.
Perhaps the series would be just as good if not better muted...but then I wouldn't know that the herring do those things, would I? So for now, I'll just appreciate the fact that this forces me to stretch out my viewing over a longer time period, and watch and re-watch the stunning deep-sea episode, with the glory of its transparent animals, flashing neon bioluminescence, and the shrimp-crab-thing that inspired the title character of the Alien films.
And then, I'll tell you all about the other present I got a week early!
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