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Post by Exalt on Oct 28, 2023 4:25:50 GMT 5
Exalt Didn't they say before that the volcanism lasted for a hundred thousand years, though? I think so, yes. One more example of them saying something in one episode, and then contradicting themselves or ignoring it in the next. Archosauromorphs already existed in the Permian and were faunivorous, though they were rare. Therocephalians and Cynodonts also survived the P/T event. Anyway, there is only one single case of a specialized carnivore descending from a lineage of specialized herbivores (and that is Thylacoleo), so it’s not as if there were no predatory ancestors of Erythrosuchus during the heyday of Lystrosaurus for the latter to get used to. There may well have been less predation pressure overall, sure, and increased predation pressure may well have been the cause of the decline of this genus, but that doesn’t mean Lystrosaurus would have evolved to simply not know what a predator is; low predation pressure does not mean no predation pressure at all. Before the P/T event, Lystrosaurus also coexisted with plenty of big predators, so it’s not as if it was somehow physically incapable of surviving in a world with predators. The "dumb dodo effect" exists, but only in situations where a predator is actually introduced to an ecosystem suddenly. Such sudden appearances of predators doesn’t just happen by way of a predator evolving within an ecosystem. Most of the time, it happens due to humans either introducing themselves, or other predators (e.g. domestic cats or dogs) or omnivores (e.g. rats) to an ecosystem that did not have these predators previously. In some rare cases it may well happen due to natural circumstances, e.g. rafting or other mechanisms of biotic interchange that see a predator suddenly appear somewhere it didn’t exist before. But these are all instances where a predator evolved in one place and then got introduced to another, something that they don’t imply happened (and would be hard to envision happening on Pangea anyway) in LOOP; they just literally make it look as though the Erythrosuchus suddenly appeared out of nowhere, making me, as I said, seriously worried they don’t understand how evolution works, because they apparently felt like they needed to make up a stupid reason for why Lystrosaurus went extinct. I seriously find it hard to forgive that they talk about how awesome marine reptiles where, and then skip right over the period during which the two longest-lived and most diverse groups of mezozoic marine reptiles evolved for no reason at all. Makes me question the sanity of the people who planned this documentary, honestly. I strongly suspected this based on the size and time…makes one wonder why they couldn’t just say that (the genus name "Pliosaurus" is seriously underutilized in documentaries for some reason, I think the only pliosaur whose name we were ever explicitly given in a paleo documentary was Liopleurodon…though it was also based on material that is more likely Pliosaurus than Liopleurodon) Seems to be a trend somehow. Maybe the producers watched Prehistoric Planet (can’t help but think they took some inspiration from it), looked at the Barbaridactylus-eating- Alcione scene, and liked it so much they wanted something similar. Thinking about it, this might just be a coincidence, but even the way the Pterodactylus fly really reminds me a lot of the pterosaurs on PP, though that may just be a coincidence. Yes, exactly the kind of taxa that should feature more heavily in documentaries (without being too on the nose about it, otherwise the creationists will think it is some liberal conspiracy to indoctrinate their children and just try to ban science documentaries alltogether). Yeah, the idea of the Dodo being stupid or some kind of evolutionary mistake has become a point of pain for me, which is why I knee-jerked like that.
Which other lineage do you mean, besides presumably the Icthyosaurs? I'm not sure though.
Yeah, I'm not saying it should be a lot more of the non-avian dinosaurs, it just feels very odd considering that they're, you know, the dinosaurs.
I do find it odd that, unless I've been misinformed, the Therocephalians made it past the P/T event but went extinct not all that long after.
Also, that Thylacoleo tidbit is pretty crazy, actually. Considering that, they are hyping them up quite massively. I actually don’t have a problem at all with dinosaurs taking a bit of a back seat for once. Not to undermine dinosaurs in any way, but dinosaurs receive a huge amount of attention pretty much everywhere. Attention that would much more productively been spent on other animals. The problem is, said other animals, as we’ve seen from the four episodes I’ve commented on so far, haven’t really been justice either. We barely see any of the many wonderful non-dinosaurs from the Triassic, for instance; we literally see three Triassic animals; Lystrosaurus, Erythrosuchus and Plateosaurus, and we only see two interacting in a single ecosystem. LOOP’s Triassic literally gives us less biodiversity than WWD’s Triassic, even though LOOP had more time and the benefits of modern science and special effects to do it. Maybe that’s why this episode was such a letdown for me, with the Erythrosuchus being pretty much the only major upside. I’d simply hoped they would flesh out the Triassic a little more compared to previous portrayals (that were already quite lacking), but they did the exact opposite. We literally saw more different Triassic animals in a single short segment of Dinosaur Revolution than we saw in this entire episode of LOOP. Talk about overhyping a series before its release… |
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Post by theropod on Oct 29, 2023 18:20:31 GMT 5
One more major inaccuracy in Ep 4: Chelonioids seem to have originated in the Early Cretaceous (Evers et al 2019), so the Pliosaur and Pterosaurs definitely shouldn’t be feeding on them in the Late Jurassic scene. I was initially suspicious about this but then let it go when I thought of turtles in the Solnhofen and Painten limestones (which I suspect the segment was inspired by, judging by the presence of Pterodactylus), but those Upper Jurassic turtles seem to be much closer to modern semi-aquatic freshwater turtles than to sea turtles, so they shouldn’t look like extant chelonians.
I suppose the portrayal is meant to represent more marine-adapted thalassochelydians, but they still look too much like a carbon copy of modern chelonians to me.
Evers, S.W., Barrett, P.M. and Benson, R.B.J. 2019. Anatomy of Rhinochelys pulchriceps (Protostegidae) and marine adaptation during the early evolution of chelonioids. PeerJ 7: e6811.
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Post by Exalt on Oct 29, 2023 19:19:04 GMT 5
Exalt I think so, yes. One more example of them saying something in one episode, and then contradicting themselves or ignoring it in the next. Archosauromorphs already existed in the Permian and were faunivorous, though they were rare. Therocephalians and Cynodonts also survived the P/T event. Anyway, there is only one single case of a specialized carnivore descending from a lineage of specialized herbivores (and that is Thylacoleo), so it’s not as if there were no predatory ancestors of Erythrosuchus during the heyday of Lystrosaurus for the latter to get used to. There may well have been less predation pressure overall, sure, and increased predation pressure may well have been the cause of the decline of this genus, but that doesn’t mean Lystrosaurus would have evolved to simply not know what a predator is; low predation pressure does not mean no predation pressure at all. Before the P/T event, Lystrosaurus also coexisted with plenty of big predators, so it’s not as if it was somehow physically incapable of surviving in a world with predators. The "dumb dodo effect" exists, but only in situations where a predator is actually introduced to an ecosystem suddenly. Such sudden appearances of predators doesn’t just happen by way of a predator evolving within an ecosystem. Most of the time, it happens due to humans either introducing themselves, or other predators (e.g. domestic cats or dogs) or omnivores (e.g. rats) to an ecosystem that did not have these predators previously. In some rare cases it may well happen due to natural circumstances, e.g. rafting or other mechanisms of biotic interchange that see a predator suddenly appear somewhere it didn’t exist before. But these are all instances where a predator evolved in one place and then got introduced to another, something that they don’t imply happened (and would be hard to envision happening on Pangea anyway) in LOOP; they just literally make it look as though the Erythrosuchus suddenly appeared out of nowhere, making me, as I said, seriously worried they don’t understand how evolution works, because they apparently felt like they needed to make up a stupid reason for why Lystrosaurus went extinct. I seriously find it hard to forgive that they talk about how awesome marine reptiles where, and then skip right over the period during which the two longest-lived and most diverse groups of mezozoic marine reptiles evolved for no reason at all. Makes me question the sanity of the people who planned this documentary, honestly. I strongly suspected this based on the size and time…makes one wonder why they couldn’t just say that (the genus name "Pliosaurus" is seriously underutilized in documentaries for some reason, I think the only pliosaur whose name we were ever explicitly given in a paleo documentary was Liopleurodon…though it was also based on material that is more likely Pliosaurus than Liopleurodon) Seems to be a trend somehow. Maybe the producers watched Prehistoric Planet (can’t help but think they took some inspiration from it), looked at the Barbaridactylus-eating- Alcione scene, and liked it so much they wanted something similar. Thinking about it, this might just be a coincidence, but even the way the Pterodactylus fly really reminds me a lot of the pterosaurs on PP, though that may just be a coincidence. Yes, exactly the kind of taxa that should feature more heavily in documentaries (without being too on the nose about it, otherwise the creationists will think it is some liberal conspiracy to indoctrinate their children and just try to ban science documentaries alltogether). Yeah, the idea of the Dodo being stupid or some kind of evolutionary mistake has become a point of pain for me, which is why I knee-jerked like that.
Which other lineage do you mean, besides presumably the Icthyosaurs? I'm not sure though.
Yeah, I'm not saying it should be a lot more of the non-avian dinosaurs, it just feels very odd considering that they're, you know, the dinosaurs.
I do find it odd that, unless I've been misinformed, the Therocephalians made it past the P/T event but went extinct not all that long after.
Also, that Thylacoleo tidbit is pretty crazy, actually. Considering that, they are hyping them up quite massively. I actually don’t have a problem at all with dinosaurs taking a bit of a back seat for once. Not to undermine dinosaurs in any way, but dinosaurs receive a huge amount of attention pretty much everywhere. Attention that would much more productively been spent on other animals. The problem is, said other animals, as we’ve seen from the four episodes I’ve commented on so far, haven’t really been justice either. We barely see any of the many wonderful non-dinosaurs from the Triassic, for instance; we literally see three Triassic animals; Lystrosaurus, Erythrosuchus and Plateosaurus, and we only see two interacting in a single ecosystem. LOOP’s Triassic literally gives us less biodiversity than WWD’s Triassic, even though LOOP had more time and the benefits of modern science and special effects to do it. Maybe that’s why this episode was such a letdown for me, with the Erythrosuchus being pretty much the only major upside. I’d simply hoped they would flesh out the Triassic a little more compared to previous portrayals (that were already quite lacking), but they did the exact opposite. We literally saw more different Triassic animals in a single short segment of Dinosaur Revolution than we saw in this entire episode of LOOP. Talk about overhyping a series before its release… I am really not sure what happened here. |
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Post by theropod on Oct 29, 2023 19:36:12 GMT 5
How do people feel about stopping use of the spoiler-tags for discussing content of episodes here? It seems it’s making replying to previous spoiler-comments a bit cumbersome…
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Post by Infinity Blade on Oct 29, 2023 19:44:59 GMT 5
I’m fine with that. I assume by now most of the main posters in this thread have fully seen the documentary. If I’m still the only one, things I said are still in spoilers. I have begun my review of the series, but it will take time.
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Post by Exalt on Oct 29, 2023 19:49:29 GMT 5
I have seen every episode.
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Post by dinosauria101 on Oct 29, 2023 20:02:23 GMT 5
I have seen every episode as well, in case anyone missed where I said so. Presumably the only other member we will need to hear from is zoograph . (Can't wait to see what's still to be commented of everyone else's thoughts by the way! I'm so curious because LOOP has gotten such a mixed bag of receptions.) |
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Post by theropod on Oct 30, 2023 3:29:17 GMT 5
Thoughts on Ep 5:
>"But there was one remarkable era when evolution went into overdrive, giving us many of the animals we still have today"
Honestly I wouldn’t mind this statement if the documentary otherwise seemed to have a solid grasp on the concepts it wants to convey, but since it doesn’t I have to ask what this totally nebulous statement is supposed to tell us. I can think of a lot of eras when evolution could be argued to have "gone into overdrive". For example the Cambrian, which they largely skipped, and the Devonian, which they largely skipped, and the Triassic, which they largely skipped. I wonder what exactly they are going to tell us is so special about the Jurassic and Cretaceous…or if they are going to produce any real argument here at all, rather than just letting this statement stand as self-evident.
> Once again, we are treated to some footage of volcanism (I am beginning to see a pattern here, and honestly I think the series’ time and budget would have been more productively used to show us more animals, the series is entitled "LIFE on our planet" after all, not "geological processes of our planet"). If I understood them right, they suggest that this is what continental drift looks like. For the record, it does not. Productive plate margins tend to be subaqueous anyway, and even where they are not (think "east african rift valley") they don’t look like a bunch of hawaiian volcanoes at all (that’s the technical term btw). So I think they are giving us a rather misleading impression of what the geological processes they are referencing actually look like. They also talk about extinction associated with this process…So now we are talking about extinctions in the Lower Jurassic (mind you, without them actually showing us any Lower Jurassic animals, so why should we care about this extinction at all?), and still nobody is mentioning the elephant in the room that is the Triassic/Jurassic extinction event that just happened and played a key role in the rise of the animals that they acknowledge as the "greatest dynasty of them all"?
> Next we jump ahead again to the Upper Jurassic, 152 ma. It seems that nothing interesting happened before this epoch, because after being introduced to Diplodocus, we are quickly shown an Allosaurus, which at "nearly 9 m long" is described as "one of the biggest predators on land in these early days of the dinosaurs’ reign". Keeping in mind that dinosaurs have been reigning for at least 50 ma by this point, and arguably even longer, I find this statement symptomatic of the wider and highly problematic attitude at play here. They had literally the entirety of the Mesozoic to freely choose things to adapt from, but what did they end up showing us? Kimmeridgian North America, very original. After all, these are "the early days of the dinosaurs’ reign", so whatever came before must have been pretty irrelevant anyway, right? This shows that it literally didn’t even occur to them to consider anything earlier than the Late Jurassic (leaving aside the very short scene showing us Plateosaurus as though it were the first dinosaur) might be worthwile. As you might be able to tell, I am not amused by this.
> Not a fan of the Allosaurus model at all. It’s full of various rows of spikes (or osteoderms?) that perpetuate stupid stereotypes of every dinosaur being spiky and are at the very least unparsimonious, if not inaccurate. I do like the way it moves though, animation-wise they did a good job. The whole scene is also terribly underlit, not allowing a good look at the animals, even though there is no evidence (as of my knowledge) suggesting Allosaurus OR Diplodocus were nocturnal.
> The Allosaurus ends up going after the baby Diplodocus. How original, we’ve never seen this before.
> After an interlude about plant-intect coevolution and flowering plants, we jump to 110 ma, and we meet Deinonychus. One positive thing I have to note here is that I do indeed find the models a ot better-looking in motion than in that one still that was shared earlier. The Arkansaurus model also looks quite nice. "What they both share however is speed" seems to be a perpetuating of the "Dromaeosaurs were speed demons"-myth though.
> "Simple featherlike structures first appeared in the Triassic"? Well, Probably, but there is no direct evidence of this. If they wanted to push this hypothesis, it would have been much better to show us via CGI than to retrospectively tell us via narration in a segment set 100 ma later. The way they did it here, not only are they once more mentioning something important happened well after the fact (just like with the terrestrialization of tetrapods or the formation of Pangaea), but doing it the way they did is also bound to be misunderstood as a statement of fact, when it is in fact an unproven hypothesis (albeit a likely one). It also comes off as a bit hypocritical; they are willing to put this hypothesis out there via narration, but evidently didn’t have the guts to actually show us any feathers on earlier dinosaurs. Why not? Why didn’t they show us any Triassic, or Jurassic dinosaurs with feathers? That would have been a much more important thing to show us than yet another Allosaurus hunting scene.
>Seriously, more volcanism. But at least now it is subaqueous volcanism. "Earths shifting tectonic plates continue to shape the planet"? Well, Duh, that’s what tectonic plates always do. That we are increasingly getting separate continents now is a valid and important point to make though. Whether dinosaurs "thrived like never before", as they claim, is debatable.
>We quite seamlessly jump to the Campanian, and a Maiasaura herd. "long-necked sauropods and feathered theropods"…those are their defining characteristics for those groups? So far, only 66.7% of the theropods they showed us were feathered, the Allosaurus instead looking more like a misshapen crocodile, so that once again seems a little hypocritical. And how do they even know Sauropods had no feathers? They were quite happy to speculate on feather origins earlier, so where do they draw their line here?
> Also, since we are now talking Ornitischians, what about the well-documented examples of feathered ornithischians (you know, the ones that there is actually fossil evidence for)?
> "Across the world dinosaurs are now documenting every land habitat the changing planet had to offer" — this implies that they didn’t before, very misleading. Also I seem to recall WWD said something similar, seems like a bit too much of a coincidence.
>"The first true mammals" Errrrhm, what do they mean by "true Mammals"? Because the divergence of the Mammalian crown-group almost certainly happened in the Jurassic, not the Cretaceous, much less the Late Cretaceous. So true mammals as in "crown group mammals" have been around for around 100 ma by this point. The mammals they show here also seem to be extant shrews (correct me if I’m wrong here). So not only are we almost at the very end of the Mesozoic before being shown a mammal, they aren’t even putting in the work to show us an actual Mesozoic mammal, they are just showing is an extant one as a stand-in? Once again something I am disappointed by; I had hoped we were going to see a more detailed account of Mesozoic mammal evolution, instead was we got was actually far less detailed than the already brief treatment they got on WWD. I am actually beginning to feel a little insulted here, not because I care so much about mesozoic Mammals (though I know a lot of people who do), but because I’m getting the feeling that the producers of this documentary think I won’t notice that they aren’t just treading almost zero new ground, but actually doing a significant step back from previous documentaries (like WWD).
> Now we are at 66 ma, already at the end of the Mesozoic. "The one iconic animal that ruled over them all[…] the most famous predator in the history of life on our planet is Tyrannosaurus rex". Nothing like a bit of T. rex hype to end this episode on a high note. So seeing how every other animal only got a few minutes of screentime max, I am sure this is going to be it, and we are not going to get a whole other episode where it is a key character. Right? RIGHT??
> The T. rex model looks decent, honestly. Compared to the vast majority of other T. rex models I’ve seen so far, it’s great. Not as good as the PP T. rex though.
Overall verdict: I have to say that I got relatively little enjoyment out of any of the prehistoric segments on this episode. Considering how much they have been hyping up dinosaurs up until this point, they managed to show us almost nothing that’s new and interesting on this one. We are almost exclusively shown the most cliché standard-dinosaurs imaginable; Allosaurus, Diplodocus, Deinonychus, Maiasaura, T. rex. Arkansaurus was the only animal in this assortment that isn’t a household name, and it only served as convenient prey to the Deinonychus. So really, this whole episode feels sort of pointless, and a letdown after having hyped up dinosaurs so much. I wouldn’t mind dinosaurs taking a back seat for once, if it meant we were getting a stronger focus on some other, less famous group instead. But that’s absolutely not what’s happening here, dinosaurs aren’t taking a back seat, they are taking the front seat, and take up pretty much the entire screentime on the prehistoric scenes, yet none of the dinosaurs feel like they are getting a fair treatment, nor are dinosaurs as a whole being treated more than extremely superficially. It’s as if the producers had had a checklist of which famous dinosaurs to include, with the last entry being "+ one random dinosaur that not everyone in the audience will know", and then gave wholly uninspired scenes to this already uninspires assortment of characters. There just wasn’t any creativity or any originality in it, nor was there a lot of educational value. Past documentaries of this high profile (e.g. WWD or PP) went to great lengths of showing us dinosaurs that we had never seen before, and in ways that we had never seen them before. LOOP is just retreading well-known territory by showing us a few dinosaurs that have allways been popular doing things we’ve seen them do before numerous times.
The interweaving of prehistoric and extant segments for the most part still works well, and makes for an enjoyable watch. But that alone just doesn’t make up for the way the prehistoric scenes themselves keep disappointing me by not really contributing to the narrative. In fact, I have to say that I’m getting more enjoyment out of the extant segments.
Thoughts on Ep 6:
> We basically start where we left off, 66 ma ago. Within the first eight minutes we are literally shown more different extinct taxa and more CGI than we’ve seen in the entire last episode, almost all of it on what is clearly the most underutilized (caution, sarcasm) episode in the history of life, the Maastrichtian of North America. Is this where all their effects budget went? So they basically decided "oh, the uppermost Cretaceous of North America, that’s a prehistoric ecosystem that desperately needs more attention, let’s give it three times the screentime of any other time and place we’ve shown so far!".
> As part of this "preview" of the terminal Cretaceous fauna, we are shown a large Pliosaur. Pliosaurs went extinct in the Turonian. There were no Pliosaurs in the Maastrichtian. Period. They also later show it again, when it is dead. Would it have been so difficult to show us an Elasmosaur instead, or just do without these two short scenes entirely? Like this, it just comes across as deliberate sloppiness and contributes to the impression that whoever made this only had a very rough understanding of the history of life, and didn’t let whatever their scientific advisors told them ruin their fun showing anachronisms.
> I quite like that they thought to give their Edmontosaurus a soft-tissue crest (or should I call it a comb). I believe this is the first documentary in which I’ve seen this.
> We are once again getting this "bodies provided a lifeline for scavengers" narrative, which continues to be pretty misleading. While this is more reasonable here than at the P/T boundary (because the K/T event had a more sudden effect than the P/T one), mass extinction is not the same as mass death, and documentaries should not muddle these two concepts for their audiences, who no doubt are already confused enough about how extinction works. Animals don’t ordinarily go extinct because they are just all killed off at the same time and their bodies are left there for the scavengers. They go extinct because the environmental carrying capacity does not allow them to sustain their populations, causing less reproductive output than deaths over several generations. Even the fastest "natural" extinction events played out over thousands or tens of thousands of years, so it’s not like everything just died all at once and was left there for the scavengers to feast on. Acting as though the scavengers would have had a field day is also pretty misleading, as even the biggest pile of carcasses will be decomposed in the blink of an eye, geologically speaking.
> Birds survived in their "life support capsules" (i.e. their eggs)? Errrr what? That couldn’t be further from the truth, what do they think a bird egg is, some sort of bacterial spore? That could hardly be further from the truth, with most bird eggs requiring incubation and being quite sentitive to environmental influence, making it look like birds survived due to their eggs (a characteristic they shared with all other dinosaurs btw) is quite ludicrous. Just because you have no idea why something happened, that doesn’t mean you should just go ahead and make up explanations without bothering to run them by anyone with a hint of expertise and without doing basic plausibility testing.
> I have to give it to them that they at least managed to make it abundantly clear on numerous occasions that birds are dinosaurs, which is more than can be said for Prehistoric Planet (one of my few scientific gripes with that show was that their narration tended to tread birds and "dinosaurs" as entirely different things, mirroring the general lack of evolutionary context on that show).
> At least we aren’t spending the entire episode in Maastrichtian North America, because next we are going back to Oxfordian China to look at the origins of birds. We get to meet Anchiornis, whose feathers look unreasonably fluffy and non-pennaceous and are also unreasonably lightly coloured, when the evidence suggests it should have a dark, iridescent black plumage. The wings also look…well…not like wings, with ridiculously short primary feathers making them look as if someone had just cut off the wingtips. The show also claims that Anchiornis can "fly", but all they really show it doing is glide.
> We also get to meet Sinraptor, albeit briefly. The Sinraptor looks pretty much exactly like their Allosaurus (which is unfortunate), including the weird, overly spiky skin. Only the head looks a bit different, and seems reasonably shaped.
> "Birds had almost been wiped out with the rest of the dinosaurs" – an important and little-popularized fact, so it’s good they are telling us this. It would have been better had they actually showed us some of those mesozoic birds before their extinction, because as it stands, we haven’t actually seen any of them. Somehow it feels like this series has a real aversion to the first rule of exposition: "Show, don’t tell". I don’t mind giving exposition by narration where this is necessary, but so many of the things they tell us seem like they would actually be a lot more deserving of being shown on screen than the things they actually show us (which is why we have skipped some of the most interesting parts in the history of life, only to later be told about what happened during those parts).
> They do have some stunning hummingbird footage, I’ll give them that. Again I find myself enjoying their extant animal footage more than their CGI segments, but there’s also not much to comment on them, hence I’ll keep focusing on the prehistoric stuff.
> Our next prehistoric segment is set 20 ma ago in South America. They call terror birds "the deadliest predator since Tyrannosaurus rex". That is actually quite a hyperbolic statement, and pretty weird considering how easily that showed the Titanis being killed by the Smilodon in episode 1. The giant terrorbird shown in this segment probably shouldn’t be as fast or nimble as they show it to be, although admittedly giant phorusrhacids were not all equally (un-)cursorial.
> Next up we move to the waters off Australia 15 Ma, although what we are shown is footage of the extant great barrier reef. Only they make it seem as though corals were a newly evolved lineage (although that would offer an explanation as to why nobody bothered showing us any Devonian coral-sponge reefs).
> Are they literally explaining us what seabirds are now? Okay, I guess…but instead of showing us extant gannets diving for fish and pretending we are looking at a scene from 15 ma ago (when there have literally been seabirds since the Cretaceous) as though that time held some special significance in the evolution of seabirds, why not show us some actual, spectacular, extinct seabirds. For example Paleogene giant penguins, that would lend themselves well to a narrative of them having conquered the oceans before marine mammals did the same. Heck, they even literally talk about Galapagos penguins in the very next scene!
> They end by repeating that stupid mammal-superiority scene from the first episode, going so far as to claim that terror birds would "soon become the prey themselves". Apparently that (ficticious) narrative is such an important point to make that it needs to be made twice.
Overall verdict: To start with a positive, it’s nice that they made an episode mostly about birds. As in previous episodes, I was sometimes a bit taken aback by their narrative priorities, but this episode feels like it has considerably less in terms of major errors or baffling omissions than the previous two. Nonetheless the story it tells could have been a lot more fleshed-out. We basically see one single Mesozoic paravian, Anchiornis (unless we count the unmentioned dromaeosaur cameo in the opening scene), and it is not very well-realized either. It would have been nice had they spent a little of that special effects budget they used to give us a plethora of Maastrichtian dinosaurs serving little narrative purpose to instead show us a few mesozoic birds, to match the overall theme in this otherwise bird-centric episode. Their narrative in this episode also felt a little aimless.
Yes, they tried to illustrate the point that birds really radiated after the K/T event, I did get that. But it felt like they didn’t really have a lot of ideas about which interesting birds to actually show (except for unspecified Phorusrhacids). Hence we got no giant penguins, no pelagornithids (even though they do talk about marine birds quite a lot), no Teratorns, no giant anseriforms (like Brontornithids or Dromornithids), and we also only really see a single Phorusrhacid (though it is presumably meant to represent Kelenken and Titanis, the models used for both seem virtually identical), thereby barely brushing the surface of the diversity and disparity in this group alone. Being a little more fleshed-out and with a few fairly fixable issues addressed, this could have been a pretty good episode. Like this, I think it is better than the previous two, but suffers from almost the opposite problem; where ep 4 and 5 were far too ambitious for what they actually managed to do, this episode has surprisingly little ambition, to the point where it felt like the writers didn’t really have a lot of ideas of what to show us.
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Post by theropod on Oct 30, 2023 5:01:09 GMT 5
btw I still haven’t come round to watching the final two episodes, but so far I think the one single animal or scene that somewhat surprised me after having seen the trailer was the Erythrosuchus, so I don’t really think spoilers are much of a concern anyway.
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Post by dinosauria101 on Oct 30, 2023 5:06:26 GMT 5
I'll be honest, I found that segment really weird.
If the Deinonychus were noticed by the Arkansaurus from THAT far away, and it being a freaking ornithomimosaur, it seems almost certain that it would have outran them like Woody Woodpecker outruns Wil. E. Coyote. It had a giant head start and was caught up to at a rate that would imply it had none at all.
Had the producers really wanted the Deinonychus to bring the Arkansaurus down, they should have had them actually get close enough to spring an ambush which they stand a realistic chance to keep up with. It would have gotten the point across realistically that they both share speed too: just that the Arkansaurus has a greater enough amount to require getting close on the Deinonychus's part.
There's a lot of the other stuff I concur with too. I'll have to comment on it when I have time.
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Post by Exalt on Oct 30, 2023 8:11:21 GMT 5
I liked the start of the Deinonychus scene more than the hunt proper, I wasn't aware that Dromaeosaur speed was overexaggerated, or about feathered ornithischians, but I agree that not seeing some early mammals was a disappointment. Episode 5 was named "In the shadows of giants", right?
The black terrorbird that was hunting the Theosodon was Phorusrhacos, and the others were Titanis. Was it really all that fast though if it had to work to keep up with the young ones though? The adults seemed beyond it's grasp. I liked that scene overall, though I had some nitpicks with the early narration, such as why they did Titanis dirty but hyped up Phorusrhacos like that. I was also surprised at how not-censored the kill was.
It's a shame that there are so many issues for you all to find.
I was disappointed when the trip to Australia wasn't for something prehistoric.
I do appreciate the mention that birds took a hit from the KPG event. I've heard of one other series ever that notes the casualties besides the non-avian dinosaurs...though that one doesn't have birds as dinosaurs.
Also, I was not expecting to see the T.rex courtship to be the segue into said event.
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Post by Infinity Blade on Oct 30, 2023 9:09:08 GMT 5
Dromaeosaurids could probably still run pretty fast in their own right, it's just that they weren't especially built for speed and they definitely weren't built to run fast for extended periods. The lower legs tended to be stocky and robust. Great for power and using the legs to overpower or hold onto prey, but not for marathon running. Think more big cat than wolf.
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Post by zoograph on Oct 30, 2023 10:42:04 GMT 5
I have seen every episode as well, in case anyone missed where I said so. Presumably the only other member we will need to hear from is zoograph . (Can't wait to see what's still to be commented of everyone else's thoughts by the way! I'm so curious because LOOP has gotten such a mixed bag of receptions.) Yeah, if you're not against it I can post my reviews of each episode I recently finished writing. |
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Post by dinosauria101 on Oct 30, 2023 16:14:50 GMT 5
I have seen every episode as well, in case anyone missed where I said so. Presumably the only other member we will need to hear from is zoograph . (Can't wait to see what's still to be commented of everyone else's thoughts by the way! I'm so curious because LOOP has gotten such a mixed bag of receptions.) Yeah, if you're not against it I can post my reviews of each episode I recently finished writing. Please do!  |
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Post by zoograph on Oct 30, 2023 16:19:07 GMT 5
Yeah, since dinosauria liked my post (thank you btw), here I’ll post my review of Life on Our Planet.
First of all, I hate Netflix format of dumping all episodes at once. I don’t have that much time (plus I don’t like binging), so I have to dodge all of the information that may harm my experience. And yeah, I’m spoiler-resistant, just want to have completely independent opinion. Even logged off from here to not be affected by Infinity Blade’s or dinosauria’s perception.
For some reason, I unconsciously (or maybe consciously) skipped an episode number 1 of Life on Our Planet. I thought it would be a brief recap, or talking heads, but I never ever imagined I would actually miss quite a lot of content that would affect my viewing perception. So here I am, reviewing the pilot episode, that is simply titled The Rules of Life. With that said, let’s start.
Episode 1
The Rules of Life
Our first scene is a teased part about Smilodon encountering Titanis. You’ve all seen it, and this part is just a quick intro that doesn’t prove any meaningful information. I mostly avoided these in next episodes’ reviews by the way, so don’t be mad about it.
Intro is… good-looking, but the music is mediocre. I really dig the “life progression” vibe, even if some of its parts promote outdated stereotypes, like Smilodon near the ice and Pleistocene happening almost immediately after K-Pg.
The proper start of the episode is a modern baitball. This segment, while displaying a stereotype about ancient unchanged sharks, is actually quite interesting, since it showcases the echoes of past evolution, like dolphin’s need for air and gannet being a representative of long-gone dinosaurs. Word “dynasty” is also poor choice of wording, by the way, and sometimes, with Freeman stating that evolution is just dynasties changing each other in world domination, it sounds like showrunner is stuck somewhere in the 19th century.
Before the title we see the montage of diversity in different eras. It’s okay, but too short to say anything more meaningful than just that.
We then enter our first proper (if still very brief) prehistoric segment. Hadean, the age when life seemingly first appeared. Honestly, all of the origin of life is so speculative that I can’t even criticize science of it, seeing how experts can’t even agree on where living things actually originate – Earth or space? Heh, nope, found one. LUCA, our first ancestor, is probably anachronistic for a time period and likely appeared a little earlier (around 4.4 BYA?) and not at the very end of Hadean. Still very speculative though.
Then we get what I initially assumed all of this episode would be – a recap of evolution. For more complex analysis of it, stay tuned and read my next reviews.
Okay, now Mr. God himself will teach us the Rules of Life. The first rule is that best adapted wins. To demonstrate it, creators showcase catterpillar’s and plant’s co-evolution of poison and resistance to it. This escalates into butterflies learning how to lay eggs in places where they won’t be accidentally eaten by catterpillars, and then plants creating fake eggs to scare these insects away and attract carnivorous ants… What can I say, an informative segment about an evolutionary arms race.
The next rule of life is about competition, and it sadly sucks ass. This is a mammalian bias barely seen in other episode, with Freeman reinforcing the outdated theory that sabretooth tigers caused the extinction of terror birds. You know, in spite of North American bathornithids coexisting with mammal nimravids with no troubles, and phorurhascids’ successful northern expansion during the American Interchange. There are good parts in it of course, which are terror birds’ majestic dance and the idea of demonstrating different forms of competition. The examples are just very awful.
Then we see another problem life faces – mass extinctions. As I said in next episodes’ reviews, this is one of the few parts they unambiguously did well. They make each extinction at least slightly different; they showcase the apocalyptic dread these events represent, they don't really mess up the scientific part and – most importantly – they show the aftermath (mostly). In comparison to Trilogy of Life and Animal Armageddon this is a gigantic plus of this show.
Then we see Maiasaura, a famed mother hadrosaur. Their short minute-long segment shows how important the protection of offspring is, and I really like how it smoothly transforms into a different storyline – T. rex teaching its offspring how to hunt and Triceratops preparing to breed. This is a rarity in a show where prehistoric and modern parts alternate between each other most of the time. More stories like that would’ve been neat.
After that, asteroid hits and we are immediately transported to the modern day, in which we finally conclude this episode with Freeman stating what this series will be about – a story of changes of life. On our planet.
Overall Thoughts. This episode doesn’t really need to exist, but it is still better than other introductions and recaps. It doesn’t just show content from the next episodes, it actually has four original segments that I regret nearly missing. It also establishes some ecologic/evolutionary principles, and while sometimes choices to display them are poor, the narration itself is quite educational. Learn, FIW – this is how you do content like that!
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