Planet Earth III Review

[Infinity Blade]

Planet Earth III Review



Welp guys, Planet Earth III is now an actual thing that exists. OH MY GOD!!!!!!

I haven’t watched the original Planet Earth (2006) in a while, nor Planet Earth II (2016). Hell, I don’t think I’ve even finished the latter. But now Planet Earth III is here, and I decided it would be a fun thing to review.

Why review Planet Earth III? Well, since it’s a documentary with footage of modern fauna, I can’t really fact check it for accuracy the same way I can with a paleontology documentary. Y’know, it’s real life that’s right there in your face. That’s not to say I can’t fact check it at all, especially if a claim is misleading or outright incorrect, or even if the framing of footage might make something look unrealistic. But I’m not that good at catching the latter, so I’m mostly going to be taking it how I see it.

Therefore, I believe if I just give my thoughts on each segment per episode, it should be a pretty easy endeavor. But be aware that this isn’t going to be like other reviews I’ve written. If you’re expecting some sort of fact check smack down or something of the sorts, don’t hold your breath for one; I for one am not. Rather, I’m simply going to comment on things I like, things I find confusing, or possibly even things I may not like in the presentation of footage and information.

I am going to update this OP with hyperlinks to subsequent episode reviews. But for now, enjoy (or not) my review of Coasts here.

Episodes:

- Coasts (this post)
- Ocean->
- Deserts and Grasslands->
- Fresh Water->
- Forests->
- Extremes->
- Human->
- Heroes->

Coasts:

• ”At this crucial time in our history, we must now look at the world through a new lens”
  
  If you’ve been watching BBC Attenborough-narrated nature documentaries over the past decade or two, you’re going to notice a shift, especially in more recent docs, towards emphasizing human impact on the natural world. This is a shift that I think is not only deserved, but also probably should be shown. We still get plenty of our exquisite animal footage, but we cannot ignore anthropogenic impacts on the world any longer.
• The first location shown is Shipstern Bluff, Tasmania. The first animal we see is, surprisingly, Homo sapiens (a surfer). The significance of the surfer isn’t immediately apparent to me, despite the fact that we are now focusing more on human impact. But soon after, we get our usual non-human animal stuff.
• The next, and more focused on location, is the coast of South Africa. The bird’s eye view footage of the great white rushing after a fur seal pup is astounding. Attenborough says that this coast has seen increased numbers of great whites visiting (let’s see if it’s ever explained why). I also love Attenborough’s remark of great whites as shrewd hunters, with these normally solitary hunters congregating in bunches of a dozen at a time, and able to quickly accelerate in just five tail beats. You remember Prehistoric Planet’s narration making T. rex out to be a calculating, frightening predator of the night? This is the kind of thing it gets that from.
  
  On the other hand, what I love most about this segment is that it doesn’t make the fur seals out to be complete pushovers against a great white. For all the hunting prowess of C. carcharias, the seals are both stated and clearly shown to be maneuverable prey items, and some even successfully dodge the shark. And lastly…the mob. The fur seals mob against the shark and chase it away. Hell, they don’t even take bites at the shark (at least not from what we’re shown)! Prehistoric Planet’s rex getting driven away by Quetzalcoatlus? Yeah, you can *kind of* see where that comes from too (the two situations aren’t quite comparable, admittedly, but you get the point).
• The next segment takes place in an Arctic coast, where, according to Attenborough, over 300 billion tons of ice is in the process of melting, but also releasing nutrient-rich water.
  
  This is how I learned what a sea angel is. And a sea butterfly (it’s a snail with “wings”!). This is great because, while I may not be particularly knowledgable on invertebrates, these are things that surprised even an animal enthusiast like myself. Stuff that I learn from this doc is going to be something I’m going to keep an eye out for. If even people who know at least a *bit* more about animals and nature than the average person can learn new things from this program, then that’s a good sign of its educational value.
  
  Also I love the line “this angel has a devilish side” (the sea angel is a predator of the sea butterfly, grasping it with appendages made of inverted mouthparts).
• Namibian lions on the coast (the Skeleton Coast). Again, this is where ideas like a T. rex roaming the coasts come from. You can also notice collars on the two lion sisters (so I suppose they’ve been the subject of scientific or conservation work). The anthropogenic impact is made apparent when Attenborough states that Namibian lions are now protected, allowing their range to expand and making this the coast’s first lion visit in four decades, which I find pretty extraordinary.
  
  Now, what are these lions doing in the coast? Well, they’re there to hunt seabirds at night, particularly cormorants. It’s clearly not easy, as a lot of the cormorants are able to escape, but a few get caught, mostly those that are flying (or waddling) away at low elevation. What I like here is 1) the presentation of these apex predators (which we usually think of as hunting large ungulates like wildebeest, zebra, warthog, or buffalo) as highly opportunistic and willing to eat anything they can catch and 2) the presentation of this as still being a challenging task; a cormorant obviously can’t fight a lion, but with so many birds around to sense danger and the ability to fly away, they’re not “sitting ducks” like you might think.
• That close up of the right whale’s eye with whale lice and flaking skin is perfect. Film crews from three decades ago would have drooled over the ability to get footage that close and detailed.
  
  We don’t really see the whale give birth, which…okay? From the narration and framing I thought that was what this segment was going to be about, but I guess not. But no matter, we get the calf playing with some playmates and being nursed by its mother.
• The next segment takes place in western Canada. At first I thought they weren’t going to explain how the wandering garter snake is able to tolerate the cold waters of the coastal habitat, but they do. The answer is, it can’t actually be completely underwater for long, but by surfacing just its head up above the surface, it can get some sunlight and a breath of air, allowing it to continue foraging. Well then, what a gigachad of a snake.
• The next segment is in Raja Umpat, Indonesia, which is apparently the most biodiverse coastal habitat in the world. The archerfish footage is pretty cool, especially the part where one insect is hit and impacts the surface of the water so hard that one of its legs is blown off (it gets eaten btw). That these fish need some brain power (calculating the range of their target above the water, how much water is needed to blast it, and accounting for the refraction and distortion from the moving water) to successfully catch their prey is extraordinary and not something I really knew either. It’s all the more mind-blowing that this behavior is not inherent or instinctual, but learned. Younger individuals must watch more experienced ones, and learn which prey is suitable and which is not. They’ll even be opportunistic and either steal catches shot down by other archerfish or just leap out of the water to catch an insect itself. One thing you should take away from this episode is that some fish are pretty damn brainy.
• The next segment is the Yucatán. It focuses on a breeding colony of flamingos. Unfortunately, recent generations have had to face more severe storms that devastate their nests, eggs, and chicks (you can probably guess what’s causing the increase in severity in storms). Watching the one chick desperately trying to get out of the water to not die of hypothermia actually made me feel kind of bad. Luckily it makes it out, but the fact that most of the nests are submerged, well, feels bad man. Attenborough’s statement that there are some years where no chicks survive could hit you like a brick.
• Those waves along coastal cities…yeah, pretty big yikes.
• The next segment has green sea turtles crawling back into the sea. Or at least trying to. While I never imagined that it was a walk in the park for sea turtles to crawl back into the sea after laying eggs, I didn’t really know (but it makes perfect sense) how deadly it could be, especially with exposed rocky reefs being a barrier and the sun overheating those unable to crawl into the ocean quickly enough. The female drooling and having abraded, slightly bleeding foreflippers from moving over the rocks helps drives home how harsh of an endeavor this is. Even more so is the amount of dead female green sea turtles are visible (Attenborough claims that as much as 2,000 females may die in such a setting). But of course, there’s the rising tide, which can potentially save turtles.

Verdict:

Not much for me to say here (I feel like my final verdicts for individual episode reviews have been getting weaker over time). I think it's a pretty solid start to Planet Earth III and its overall narrative. Pretty much everything I liked and was amazed by. And because it's made clear that coasts are one of the habitats most affected by current climate change, it's a good start to setting up the anthropogenic impact narrative of the documentary.

[Infinity Blade]

Ocean:

• The first segment after the intro is in the tropics, where a lionfish gets tricked by a clown frogfish’s lure (that looks like a shrimp) and pays with its life. A dragonet also falls victim to the frogfish. I thought the “shrimp” looked off from the fact that it seemed to have some sort of line connected to it and thought it was a lure. I’m happy to see I was right. Didn’t know the lure was a modified dorsal fin, though.
  
  The frogfish’s locomotion is also pretty strange; it uses its limb-like fins to move itself along corals. Ah, fish locomotion.
• Next segment is off the coast of North America, with a giant kelp forest being the relevant habitat. The main focus of this habitat are the horn sharks, which face a lot of bigger predators at night when they forage at the bottom of the kelp forest. One particular scene where a fish is ambushed by a hidden angel shark genuinely gave me a scare when I first watched it (although some slight shifting sand made part of me think that something wasn’t completely right). The explanation of the spiracles that blow out sand to cover the body is helpful. When a horn shark ventures to the angel shark’s location, we then learn just why it’s called a horn shark: the sharp spine on its dorsal fin forces the angel shark to regurgitate it. Pretty nice segment to follow up the clown frogfish’s ambush predation.
• A storm rips some kelp out to the open sea. This kelp becomes a nesting ground for fish, which attracts sharks. Although the flying fish present flee, the blue sharks are actually attracted by they have laid, and eat them instead (I guess that’s one thing blue sharks and I have in common: we like caviar).
  
  The segment afterwards is about a male Columbus crab (genus Planes) attempting to leave its plastic net home to find a mate. Seeing animals (particularly turtles) ensnared by abandoned nets is pretty hard to watch here, but it is nice to see lifeforms using it to their advantage as a silver lining. Anyway, the male Columbus crab is able to swim far enough to make it to a passing loggerhead sea turtle, where it turns out a female already is on. They mate and Attenborough tells us they may very well live the rest of their lives on the turtle. I wonder how long they live: can’t imagine it’s for any more than a decade, based on what I’ve looked up for “crab lifespan” (yeah, real specific, I know).
• We cut to the Sea of Cortez, where some dorsal fin-like structures are seen popping up out of the surface of the water. They do a good job making you think these are either sharks or dolphins. But no, they’re rays. Mobula rays. The shots of them breaching out of the water are amazing!
  
  “But other creatures are also listening” Ah you had to ruin it. Orcas. It turns out this aggregation of rays is also not exactly easy prey for even the apex predator of the modern oceans, though. Being highly maneuverable and fast, they need to be corralled into a densely-packed bunch, which needs multiple individual orcas to achieve (since this is apparently a ray specialist orca, I assume she makes a living hunting with other orcas too). They get a few, although some also escape with rake marks on their backs; one is even seen slipping out of the mouth of one of the orcas. When the rays resume their courtship, the shot of their thousands-strong aggregation is astounding.
• Ooh, looks like we got a deep ocean segment now! Wait, hold up. A siphonophore with a “cloak” of stinging tentacles!?!? They show one that’s 45 meters long and, allegedly, the longest animal ever recorded (this is why I like to ignore length as a metric of overall body size and focus on total body mass). Also featured is a glass squid (with only its eyes and stomach not being transparent; don’t ask me why it’s like that), a gulper eel, and Muusoctopus robustus (the pearl octopus). This one was really interesting to me. Not only was I not aware of the fact that there’s an entirely purple octopus living at the bottom of the seafloor, but the fact that it uses hydrothermal springs and gathers in large numbers to do so is pretty fascinating (it’s the difference between waiting 10 years for embryos to develop hatch from their eggs vs waiting 2 years on the hydrothermal springs).
• Phytoplankton producing half of all oxygen on Earth. Yeah, that something about that sounds about right.
  
  This discussion progresses up the food chain until we get to a South American sea lion* hunt. At first it looks like the sea lions are getting the food taken right out of their mouths by fishermen, who use a net to capture an anchovy shoal. But it turns out they’re actually there to look for holes in the net and suck anchovies out of. When more sea lions show up, some of them then leap over to the interior of the net. They wait for the fishermen to pull the net back into their boat, which causes the anchovies to panic and allow the sea lions to feast.
  
  It’s only when one of the fishermen bangs a hammer on the side of the boat that the sea lions get the memo to gtfo. But some can’t get out in time and almost look like they’re going to become bycatch; the program pulls off the pathos quite well here (pups get separated from their mothers, and the trapped sea lions are at risk of drowning). Fortunately, however, the fishermen drop the net at the last minute, allowing the trapped sea lions to escape.
  
  The negative effect that is accidental bycatch in fishing nets is well known. So I wonder if the fishermen warning the sea lions to get out and them dropping the net right before they completely haul it in is a cautionary measure to prevent bycatch. If so, that’s great. I also am not sure if it would be in the PE crew’s interest to film something bad happening to the environment and go “look at these bad people doing this bad thing” without even doing anything to stop it.
  
  *Can I just say that “South American sea lion” sounds like such a generic name? Like, I half thought that Attenborough just mean some sea lions that happen to live in South America. Nope, that’s the species’ actual vernacular name (in case you couldn’t tell, I could brush up on my pinniped knowledge too).

Verdict:

This episode had quite a bit of information that I didn’t know about before, and I like that. Granted a lot of that was invertebrate stuff, but even the fishermen preventing the sea lions from becoming their bycatch was kind of new to me (though not exactly surprising). The pearl octopus, the clown frogfish, the siphonophore, and the balanced predator-prey relationship between the angel shark and horn shark were all really interesting for me to learn about. They say that most of the ocean is unexplored and that there’s so much fascinating and weird stuff out there. But this episode made me feel that way more than anything else in my life.

The last segment with the South American sea lions was perfect for showcasing anthropogenic impact on nature. Although the impact we have on the ocean ecosystems is significant (fishermen catching an entire shoal of anchovies), life has its ways of working around it to its advantage (sea lions eating the fish anyway). And while our negative impacts are definitely nothing to be sneezed at (bycatch), we ourselves also are coming up with ways to work around them (releasing the net to free bycatch before the net is completely hauled up).

So overall, this was a pretty good episode. It took me a few days to finish it, but that’s really just because I was physically exhausted these past few evenings lol.

[Infinity Blade]

Deserts and Grasslands:

• It looks like in more recent years they’ve begun lumping deserts with grasslands. Not all the time, if you count Prehistoric Planet (which has an episode simply titled “Deserts”), but Our Planet season 1 has an episode titled “From Deserts to Grasslands”.
• Ostriches up close look so serious in an almost comical way.
  
  Anyway, the first segment after the intro is about a mating pair of ostriches in the Namib Desert. They try to wait for their entire clutch to hatch, even when some of them already have and must be shaded from the heat of the sun. This is taxing given how hot it is during the day. The night is cooler, but foraging predators become more common.
  
  Although the mating pair make it through the night and some more eggs hatch, not all of them have by the morning. Despite their reluctance, this forces the ostriches to abandon the nest with their chicks, as the chicks will not be able to survive another day in the desert heat (plus, given how the male is said to have spent “almost all his energy” the previous day, he and his mate probably need more sustenance too).
  
  But then a chick hatches right after they leave (some other eggs still show no signs of hatching). It tries to catch up and makes several calls, and it almost seems like it won’t make it. Fortunately for it, the father comes back for the chick, and it is united with its family. RIP to the eggs that never hatched. From what we saw, anyway.
  
  This segment is sort of like a microcosm of all the challenges of being an ostrich. Extreme temperatures, nest brooding, caring for hatchlings, and predators. For that it’s a pretty nice segment, even though we’re not treated to the fate of the rest of the unhatched clutch.
• There’s a brief segment in Arabia. Something I really had no idea of straight away is that the dunes actually produce a low-pitched sound produced by the countless moving sand grains vibrating against each other (it’s this that apparently gave rise to legends of the dunes having their own “voices”; they also subscribe to the idea that oryxes gave rise to the unicorn myth).
• After this is a segment of more substance. A male spotted bowerbird sets up his display (the first thing he picks up is a vertebra!), only for a rival male to wreck it and even steal a small rib. The original male makes repairs and rehearses his mating display. All stuff I knew.
  
  What is interesting (and depressing), though, is the fact that this may be all for naught for all the males involved. Female spotted bowerbirds rely on rainfall to provide food for their families, and without it they do not come to the desert to mate. According to Attenborough, the rains have failed to show up for three years.
• A brief segment shows us the magnitude of modern sandstorms. There’s an eery part at the beginning of this segment showing us an abandoned small building partially filled with desert sand.
  
  The animal segment after this focuses on baboons in Namibia’s Erongo Region. One of the more notable members of the troop we see is a female that recently gave birth to her first baby. She desperately needs water to produce milk*. Although they eventually find water trickling from some rock crevices, there is a hierarchy where the higher ranking members drink first. At the same time, however, the baboons just kinda…don’t care, and they fight to access the water anyway. Because the mother is desperate for milk, she’s able to fiercely fight off the competition from her own troop and is able to drink. Honestly, I was kind of worried, since fighting with a baby clinging to your underside can have risks.
  
  *Recently I read a book on mammals that mentioned that the advantage milk provides is that it is a source of nutrition that the mother produces herself and doesn’t need to go out and forage for. Compare this to a mother bird that as to go out and find worms for her hatchlings during a harsh winter; if she can’t, they’re out of luck until she can. The book (and its author) is great overall, but I took partial issue with that. True, a mammalian mother doesn’t have to go out and forage for milk, but milk has to come from somewhere; it’s not something she can just magically generate from nothing. The truth is that to make milk, you need water, and if you can’t find enough, you can’t feed it to your offspring. Obviously this isn’t that big of an issue generally…unless you live in an environment like this desert, where water’s hard to come by.
• The way the show transitions from this segment to the next, you’d think it’s the same place after the rain falls. I’m pretty sure it isn’t. This is how we cut to the grasslands.
• ”This leopardess, believe it or not, is ready to hunt at a moment’s notice”
  
  Well yeah, she’s just gotta wake up first lmao
  
  This particular leopard is claimed to be one of the few that developed a special hunting technique, where they wait on trees for prey to come to them. This leopardess’ first attack fails. We see another hunting attempt (I think it’s footage from elsewhere, given that the vegetation on the ground and the lighting isn’t the same as the first hunting attempt) where a leopard climbs up 9 meters above the ground. The challenge is obvious; Attenborough says that leopards have killed themselves jumping from these heights (which I’d imagine to be the case). This leopard, however, successfully captures a female impala.
  
  What I love about this segment is the lengths animals will go just to sustain themselves. Jump from a height equivalent to a two-story building to catch prey? Will do! I wish some paleontology enthusiasts would get this fact through their heads. Animals will both avoid risk AND risk their lives to survive.
• Now for a cold grassland. This segment focuses on saiga antelope. I never thought saigas were normal-looking animals, but the way this male’s nose sways left and right makes it look really f*ckin’ weird. But I love Attenborough’s remark that these hardy animals used to live alongside woolly mammoths. That is definitely true, and it reminds the viewer that this critically endangered animal is an ice age survivor.
  
  The overall segment is about a male saiga trying to mate with his harem, only to be challenged by a rival male that he successfully drives off. There were two things new to me: A) the fact that saiga males will also use bushes on top of their heads to attract females and B) that male-male combat is so deadly during rutting season (70% of rutting males die, according to Attenborough). The latter is apparently well-known, and we even know why it’s so lethal. In short-lived species that rarely reproduce more than once and over a short reproductive season, damaging weapons may evolve, but not anything that physically defends the animal. Because injured individuals are not going to live long enough to heal and reproduce again, there is little reason to evolve physical defenses. Saiga apparently don’t live long, so it looks like they can “afford” to be lethal in combat (Geist, 2013).
  
  Lastly, I also like that they make clear that the saiga’s nose serves multiple purposes, like many weird, specialized structures in nature. It filters out dust, warms the air during breathing, and it’s attractive to females!
• The next segment takes place in what is apparently the most biodiverse grassland in the world, the Cerrado (although the shot at the beginning honestly made me think it was a jungle or forest for a second…before I remembered the title of the episode). We get some maned wolf footage here. Attenborough says “Unlike any other wolf in the world, their diet is mostly vegetarian”. Of course, the maned wolf isn’t really related to *the* Canis lupus, and “wolf” is just part of its name; its closest living relative is actually the bush dog (Lindblad-Toh et al., 2005), which is ironically its polar opposite in body morphology and even habits.
  
  Here, a radio-collared mother raises sees the habitat burned down by a fire after abandoning her pups. Although her den and pups were untouched by the fire, we’re told that this habitat loss is a lingering threat to the species. The reason? People burning it down for room to grow crops. I think of all the anthropogenic impacts we’ve seen in this program so far, this is arguably the most infuriating, as it can hardly get any more direct than burning wilderness down for farmland.
• The final segment of this episode takes place in central Africa, where 90% of the elephant population was wiped out by ivory hunters. Because elephants are a keystone species, it became more devoid of life. But when the killing was stopped, the elephant population recovered, and as a result life as a whole bounced back.
  
  For once in a nature documentary, we hear commentary from someone other than the main narrator. A ranger who protects the elephant population is featured, and a few translated lines of dialogue from him make it into the documentary. It’s not something I expected to hear at all, but I welcome it.

Verdict:

The beauty of a nature documentary is that it shows you the struggles that life on Earth faces in all sorts of places on Earth, and somehow still overcomes them. This is true for all of its episodes, regardless of the type of habitat being focused on, but deserts are PERFECT for this. I think this episode does a pretty good job of doing just that: every single segment shows us animals facing serious struggles trying to survive in a harsh desert, biodiverse grassland, or anthropogenically-influenced versions of either of these. Some of them are the usual nature doc stuff (ostriches caring for their chicks, leopards having to jump two stories to catch its prey, baboons trying to find water, saiga trying to keep its harem). But now others reflect anthropogenic impact (the bowerbird display, maned wolves living on shrinking grassland, elephants recovering from overhunting), and not all even have a solution currently in sight.

That brings me to another strong suit of this episode. Although life in the grasslands or deserts obviously still face challenges brought upon by our effect on this world, it ends with an example of what can happen if we DO clean up our act (the elephant segment). This gives the viewer the overall message that while we’re not on a good track with the way we’re handling the biosphere, there IS hope and there ARE real-life examples showing us what happens when we take care of the natural world.

I feel like I’m sounding biased in my reviews right now since I can hardly find anything bad to say. With this in mind, I still think this episode is great.

[Exalt]

I watched Coasts last night since I found that it specifically was free, and I wasn't sure what else to do at the time.

"If you’ve been watching BBC Attenborough-narrated nature documentaries over the past decade or two, you’re going to notice a shift, especially in more recent docs, towards emphasizing human impact on the natural world. This is a shift that I think is not only deserved, but also probably should be shown. We still get plenty of our exquisite animal footage, but we cannot ignore anthropogenic impacts on the world any longer."

I think that Planet Earth I was my first serious introduction. I likely saw bits and pieces of other things (dad seemed to have the discovery channel and/or animal planet on at least a handful of times, even if it probably wasn't his go-to) but in a way, it's hard for me to imagine one of these (that isn't a paleodoc) not discussing it. It can be uncomfortable at times, but clearly it's not getting through.

I actually also thought just a bit about Prehistoric Planet in regards to the sharks and seals scene, but of a different part: some of the hunting attempts reminded me of the description of Xiphactinus being faster but Hesperornis being more agile.

What does the sea angel do with the shell? and how does it get the snail meat out? Does it swallow whole and regurgitate later? I'm a bit lost.

I'm glad you mentioned the collar, because I thought I saw one, but wasn't sure. I feel like anything that gets outside of the box on how we view where animals live and what they do isn't a bad idea, assuming you're honest with it.

I did not notice that a leg got blown off. This was my favorite section of the episode, but I have to ask: why don't the insects register the threat of the archerfish? Is it such an unorthodox tactic that it's hard for them to adapt to?

Between this and a frozen planet segment, it really feels like Flamingos are getting screwed a lot.

I essentially agree with what you said on the waves scene and the turtle scene. Those were rough. Do the turtles go so inland to avoid the risk of having the eggs wash away?

[Infinity Blade]

Nov 28, 2023 8:27:05 GMT 5 Exalt said:

What does the sea angel do with the shell? and how does it get the snail meat out? Does it swallow whole and regurgitate later? I'm a bit lost.

When the sea angel comes in contact with a prey item, it pushes out finger-like tentacles from its head that grab onto the prey. The sea angel then uses hook-like appendages to pull the prey out of its shell and into the sea angel’s gut. The whole process can take from two to 45 minutes.

www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals/animals-a-to-z/sea-angel#:~:text=Sea%20angels%20vs.-,sea%20butterflies,usually%20smaller%20and%20have%20shells.

Honestly the more notable thing for me here is the part I didn't bold and underline. This process can take up to 45 minutes aaahhhhhhh.

I did not notice that a leg got blown off. This was my favorite section of the episode, but I have to ask: why don't the insects register the threat of the archerfish? Is it such an unorthodox tactic that it's hard for them to adapt to?

I'm sure they do view them as a predatory threat. It's just that when you're a small insect on a leaf or a branch, it's probably not the easiest to actually detect an underwater fish down below, let alone one about to use a long-range weapon.

I essentially agree with what you said on the waves scene and the turtle scene. Those were rough. Do the turtles go so inland to avoid the risk of having the eggs wash away?

Well, apparently green turtle nests average >2 feet deep (Najwa-Sawawi et al., 2021), so maybe the eggs washing away is a lesser concern. My guess is that since eggs are porous, it probably would not be a good idea to lay them in sand closer to the sea, where it would probably be saturated in salty sea water that would shrivel the eggs.

[Infinity Blade]

Fresh Water:

• A labyrinth of underwater caves in the Yucatán Peninsula.
  
  So this is what the place looks like 66 million years after the asteroid strike.
• The first segment shows a rainforest in Costa Rica. A bunch of gliding tree frogs gather at a newly formed pond after a torrential rain downpour. They lay eggs on the leaves, but this mating frenzy only lasts a day, forcing them to quickly find a mate. In the one mating pair we see, the female is clearly larger than the male mounting her, and it’s cool to see the sexual dimorphism in these frogs. It’s also interesting to see so many males trying to compete for a single female, who kicks them off. And then, of course, the tadpoles hatch and fall directly into the pond below.
  
  This is the kind of stuff I missed out on because my college trip to Costa Rica was cancelled due to the pandemic. God damn it.
• The Sri Lanka watering hole segment shows us mugger crocodiles trying to ambush drinking deer (btw the 5 meter body length figure seems to be a rare size achieved by this species, and they are more commonly much smaller than this). The first attempts shown attempts are unsuccessful. However, something intriguing shown is one male individual apparently traveling for hours just to get to the watering hole in this segment. If he really spent all that time walking to the watering hole, that’s astounding. A crocodile isn’t exactly the first animal I’d imagine as a long distance walker on land.
  
  This mugger also demonstrates its intelligence by digging itself deeper into the mud to the point where it can hide underneath the vegetation floating on the surface of the water. It manages to nab a deer by the leg and drown it. As far as showcasing the intelligence of non-mammals and birds goes, this is even better than the great white sequence from the first episode.
• The footage of all the various large mammals running amok in the Okavango Delta made me think this segment was going to be centered on one of those, but I was wrong. It’s actually about a father jacana (called a lily-trotter by Attenborough). I’ll give them points for that since jacanas are not very well known birds to those who aren’t into zoology. I think my favorite part is when their anti-predator defense strategy is shown: the chicks freeze, while the father tries to divert a crocodile’s attention away from them by continually calling out near the crocodile.
• The next segment is still in the Okavango Delta, but this time they focus on an animal that is apparently not suited for life in the delta like the jacanas: African wild dogs. And honestly I can see why. These are specialized pursuit predators, and chasing prey in deep water and mud like in this delta could easily hamper their movement. There’s even a part where there’s deep water between themselves and a herd of lechwe (a species of antelope, if you are unaware), and the presence of a hippo doesn’t help at all. It’s made clear that the lechwe are at an advantage in the water, using their splayed hooves and long hindlimbs to power through the water. On dry land, however, the dogs seem to have the edge. Here, the stamina of canids is in good display. Mind you, these dogs haven’t eaten in a few days, and they keep running on hard ground and wading through water trying to make a kill. They eventually manage to corner a lechwe as it tries to escape through the water and succeed.
  
  Not gonna lie, I kind of wish we saw the kill in more detail. I’m under the impression that they thought most viewers wouldn’t be able to stomach that, though.
• Then we got a segment in Lake Malawi, a landlocked lake that has existed for millions of years, harboring more species of fish than any other lake in the world as a result. We’re introduced to a cichlid known as Nimbochromis livingstonii. It looked like it was trying to trick its prey into thinking it’s dead, only for it to suddenly snatch a victim, and Attenborough confirms this. In fact, even its mottled color pattern is meant to visually mimic rotting flesh. However, one juvenile is shown being rather unsuccessful in deceiving prey items (thought it does get close one time), before finally succeeding. What’s also really interesting is seeing the anti-predator responses of some of the fish; one fish lightly rams into it, while another drives it off.
  
  Ah, fish never cease to amaze me.
• On the island of Bioko, gobies scale a 30 meter waterfall to be able to breed in the waters up on the top. These fish use their mouths like a suction cup to stay on the rocks while the water flows down. What I like about this segment is how it demonstrates that even with specialized adaptations, it can be hard living a certain lifestyle. Despite these suction cup mouths, Attenborough tells us that <1% of gobies will actually make it to the top.
• The final segment is more anthropogenic impact-centric. What’s manmade and relates to fresh water? Why, dams and canals, of course! And here in Pakistan, we get to see a now endangered freshwater dolphin: the Indus River dolphin. A female dolphin is filmed 150 miles from the main river, which she won’t be able to make it back to on her own. So we see a rescue team capturing the dolphin and having to drive it back to the river. Knowing that the dolphin can’t survive outside of water for long and hearing that it will take hours to get her back, it’s kind of nerve-wracking seeing them carry this dolphin first on foot, then on a truck with a siren signifying traffic to get out of the way.

Verdict:

More non-mammal intelligence shown, a couple unique ecosystems/habitats shown, and a pretty interesting human-related segment. Quite a lot for me to like about this episode. The only thing I kind of wish was shown was the wild dogs actually dispatching their quarry (not that I have a violence fetish or anything, but it’s not like every wild dog kill is equally gruesome), but that’s a very minor point.

[Infinity Blade]

Forests:

• The first segment is in Borneo, involving a mating pair of pied hornbills. These mate for life and the only thing that makes them not sexually monomorphic is the fact that one of them (obviously the male) has a much larger crest on top of its bill. They reaffirm their mating pair status by going to a bat cave and…prey on the bats there. The male snags one before the female can, and I think it’s funny how the female immediately keeps her mouth open as if she were shocked at her mate’s act. The nearby raptor that also has its mouth slightly open as if it were also shocked bolsters it (although, it looks like it may also have something in its mouth).
  
  (Obligatory disclaimer that these birds aren’t actually shocked, and I’m deliberately anthropomorphizing them. This bat is actually a gift from the male to the female, even though it’s not a usual prey item.)
  
  But then they do something truly unusual. Their strategy for reproduction involves finding a tree hole for the female to stay inside to lay her eggs. Once inside, she *plucks off her flight feathers and seals the entrance of the hole with mud to keep herself and the nest safe from predators, while also imprisoning herself.* For two months, the male provides her with all her food.
  
  Wat
• Ahh the Amazon. This segment shows us treehoppers (multiple species) making surprising noises that can only be heard with special microphones. By vibrating their bodies, they can make these noises to communicate with members of their species. I remember reading a bit about this from a book I haven’t even come close to finishing, but really should (“An Immense World” by Ed Yong). I think he mentioned certain insects turning out to make vibrating noises that sound like cows mooing? I don’t know, I need to check out that book again.
  
  Also very interesting to see treehoppers defending themselves by literally kicking ants. An assassin bug* proves to be a more challenging predator for her young, so for that she calls out to bees. There’s this opera number you hear literally everywhere playing in the background, but in this case I think it’s kind of amusing to hear. You normally don’t think of the affairs of insects with such a dramatic atmosphere since we’re so much bigger than them. But take a closer look, and you’ll see they have the same intense struggles to exist like everything else. The bees are highly aggressive and protect the young treehoppers from the reduviid, which backs down. In return, the bees get rewarded by rubbing the backs of the young treehoppers and…consuming a sugary liquid from their rears…
  
  My god, insects are like an acid trip come true…
  
  *I knew assassin bugs were serious predators, but I didn’t know how; they have sticky arms and piercing mouthparts as part of their predatory arsenal, it turns out. Thanks PE3 for the basic sci-comm!
• Had no idea dholes could make a whistling noise (sort of sounds like a beep). These are “secretive” communications like the noises of treehoppers (Attenborough says), but these are useful for coordinating with other pack members while hunting. It’s claimed that only dholes can actually understand these, allowing them to communicate even when they can’t see each other in the dense forest. By doing so, the pack shown is able to successfully isolate a chital deer stag and kill it.
  
  Honestly, the complex hunting behavior of some mammalian predators never ceases to astound me. As with the wild dog segment, they cut out much of the kill (which I personally wouldn’t have minded seeing), but the message about dholes is clear.
• The next segment takes place in a mountainous forest in central China, centered on a male Temminck’s tragopan…wait…holy shit I’m just now realizing that THIS is the bird that the Gigantoraptor from Dinosaur Revolution had its colors based on.
• ”Oh dear…stage fright”, I love how Attenborough delivers that line.
• During this same segment, a male golden pheasant also shows up, using the same clearing as the tragopan to also attract a female (only he seems to be more successful). Not even in his second, more confident attempt is the tragopan successful. If the tragopan filmed in this documentary is reading this by any chance, I think you looked cool pretty cool!
• We then get to see a spirit bear (or Kermode bear) in the next segment, set in a temperate rainforest in Canada. I’m going to be honest, even for Planet Earth III I wasn’t expecting them to make a whole segment about a spirit bear (a white-furred variant of the black bear) of all things. According to Attenborough, the spirit bear filmed here was actually more successful at catching salmon than the black bears in her youth, possibly because her lighter fur color made her harder to see against the bright surface of the water. Evidently, though, black bears are still adept enough to make a living here.
  
  The real interesting thing we’re shown in this segment is the ecological impact these bears have whenever they hunt salmon. Fish carcasses left on the forest floor rot and spread nutrients underground to fungi. These fungi establish themselves on tree roots, and in turn spread their nutrients to these trees, allowing the forest to grow relatively quickly and the trees very tall. Points for them showing how animals can be keystone species.
• ”A whole community of animals and plants depends on the well-being of this one tree”
  
  *chainsaw noises
  
  Yep, they sure do know how to make you feel that “oh god…” moment. The point? 15 billion trees are cut down every year. And for what? Well, in some places in the world, for plantations of a single species of tree (in Brazil it’s eucalyptus). The most harrowing part of this segment is the appearance of very small isolated patches of rainforest surrounded by eucalyptus. How could anyone look at that and think that there’s nothing wrong with it?
• The final segment centers on a troop of chimpanzees in Uganda that venture out of their fragmented patch of habitat and into human territory. They have to play Frogger on a road and go near humans and their agricultural settlements to get what they need. You really wonder how the film crew is able to get footage of animals walking towards people without it raising an eyebrow on either end.
  
  And then you remember that these people are friendly with the animals lol. They let the chimps collect jackfruit and probably had no problem with the film crew filming them.

Verdict:

Just the amount of novel, not-well-known-to-the-public information that is presented here is just amazing. Insects making noises you wouldn’t normally associate with them, the mating behavior of hornbills, and even the hunting communication of dholes (the last goes a bit more in detail than the typical predator hunt of a nature documentary just for that), all things I didn’t fully understand until now. Hell, even the spirit bear footage was a delight in and of itself.

The parts going over human impact are also pretty effective. Maybe I’m just speaking from my own perspective, but what I don’t think a lot of people understand is how significant habitat loss/fragmentation and human-wildlife conflict are as threats to biodiversity today. It’s easy to imagine an asshole with a gun shooting animals out of sadistic pleasure as a threat to global biodiversity. But while hunting is certainly an important historical reason why so many species are threatened today (and to some extent it still is, at least in the form of illegal hunting, i.e. poaching), animals losing their homes and/or having small isolated patches of habitat surrounded by human-touched land remains one of the top issues. You can see how chimps having to cross a road frequented by trucks or raiding people’s crops is an issue. The episode clearly explains how replacing a forest with plantations of eucalyptus is a bad thing despite them still being trees (eucalyptus cannot form relationships with a lot of the native plants and animals vital for the ecosystem to function).

Overall, this might just be my favorite episode so far.

[Infinity Blade]

Extremes:

• The introduction is set in Hang Sơn Đoòng Cave in Vietnam, one of Earth’s largest natural caves. After the title is shown, I’m not actually sure if the cave shown is still Sơn Đoòng. Maybe I’m just dumb and I’m supposed to assume so, but the cave is never mentioned by name again.
  
  Aside from this minor issue, the translucent blind cave fish and shrimp surviving in this cave are pretty interesting animals. Nice to see them get exposure to the public.
• The next segment is set in the Arctic, with Arctic wolves as the main subject. You know, wolves are such a widely known carnivore species that people may not think too terribly much of them. But the fact that they can endure the Arctic, sleeping through a literal snow storm, is nothing short of extraordinary.
  
  This is actually Ellesmere Island. The prey of these wolves? Muskoxen. Muskoxen are dangerous prey for wolves, and can be seriously injured while hunting them (Pasitschniak-Arts et al., 1988). In the first hunt shown, it looks like just running up to higher ground was enough for the muskox herd to gain the upper hand (I’m not 100% sure why, though I have a hunch). The second hunt shows them successfully splitting another herd in two and picking out their calf.
  
  One intriguing part is something shown in between these two segments. The wolf pack finds a muskox carcass, but they refuse it. Attenborough claims that this muskox died of a disease, something becoming more common as the climate warms. I didn’t know this, but intuitively this makes sense to me.
• Yeah, didn't expect to see a frog rising out of the snow, did ya?
  
  Of all the frog species around, I didn’t expect one to be named the common frog (this is a similar situation to the South American sea lions from “Ocean”). It is able to survive in the snow-covered French Alps by hibernating under the snow. In this segment a bunch of males need to move over to the breeding pond. They must find a female to mate with, and if they can’t, they must wrestle off rivals already in the process of mating. The segment supposedly follows one male, but you know how nature docs are with editing.
  
  But yeah, overall, nice to see frogs in the snow. General audiences probably aren’t going to expect that.
• Snow in Africa is also not something most people expect, but there are places in Africa where it can be cold (e.g. the tops of mountains). This segment follows Barbary macaques in a cedar forest in the Atlas Mountains. There’s not really much to this segment other than “huddle and eat or die”. However, it’s not without a story (or at least an edited-together story). One infant macaque is somehow isolated and needs to find the other macaques again. The doc doesn’t take long to show us the infant finding them again, but apparently some macaques are less receptive to certain other individuals. Luckily this one gets to huddle while a big mean poopy pants adult male leaves and keeps to himself for the night.
• In Mexico, monarch butterflies are densely huddled together on trees and branches to survive a winter. It turns out that sunlight penetrating the canopy is enough to keep them warm provided that the forest remains undisturbed. Key word being “provided”; a storm comes along and kills many (if not most butterflies), and one filmed survivor has to climb back up a tree to huddle again, until it’s summer and they fly off. Not really much to this segment, except that it’s interesting to see what kind of hardship monarchs go through before their summer flight out of the forest (although, this is becoming harder to witness due to changing climate and increasing storm severity, as Attenborough says).
• ”Fire”
  
  Oh okay. So that’s what I’m introduced to right after the ads run: fire and brimstone hell. But it’s a forest fire that gives way to new growth, so it’s alright.
• In a segment set in Australia, we see the golden-shouldered parrot. For them the fire season is becoming more irregular. No points for guessing why this is…
  
  The track that plays and stops when the camera cuts to black during this scene is properly intimidating, though.
• Elephants again (we last saw them in Deserts and Grasslands). The footage here is shot in Amboseli, Kenya. The matriarch elephant has some respectably large tusks, which I found impressive. Unfortunately, the drought is proving extremely tough, to the point where she and her eldest son have to leave her youngest one behind so they can find more food (and therefore return with milk for the calf). Although I half-expected it, the calf succumbs to the drought. Edited footage/narrative or not, the sight of a dead elephant calf is still sad to see, so PE3 makes sure to tug at your heartstrings a bit no matter what.
  
  Also goes to show the challenges of being a K-strategist mega-mammal.
• Planet Earth keeping up with getting comparatively rare snow leopard footage (PE2 had a fight IIRC).

Verdict:

Not much to say beyond some cool segments, including some species and adaptations I’ve never heard of or only in passing before. All cool.

I think what’s more important, however, is how well the message of how humans impact these extreme environments is conveyed. I think it’s conveyed pretty damn well, as there are five whole segments in this episode where you can see a noticeable human impact, and the last few are really hammered into your head.

[Exalt]

I watched the Ocean episode, and 95% of what you wrote for that episode could have been written by me, honestly.

I can think of one time I was more astonished by the deep ocean...but that was in Planet Earth I, which also had the advantage of releasing, if I recall correctly, when I was in middle school.

I had not heard of the frogfish, so while I picked up that that shrimp seemed attached to something, I had no idea what. Interesting though that eventually, the residents seem to catch on that it's a predator. (Although one of the retreating animals in this case is a mantis shrimp, which supposedly have the best color vision in the entire animal kingdom.)

It's kind of ironic that I was really into Orcas in elementary school, and now they feel like the villain whenever they show up in these.

I didn't feel like I got a good view of the siphonophore, but maybe asking to get a good look at the supposed longest recorded animal while it happens to be living in crushing pressure and darkness is a bit much.

Please don't let us damage phytoplankton somehow, I knew they were important, but damn.

I did get a bit sad at the sea lion segment, though I figured that if the fishermen hadn't let them out, I would have heard the outrage by now.

[Infinity Blade]

Human:

• We first see an Indian rhino searching for food…through a Nepalese city (Sauraha). This is the norm for it now, as some folks ogle at it or even take pictures of it.
• It’s oddly amusing seeing long-tailed macaques stealing sunglasses and hats from tourists. Apparently this is done in exchange for food. Stealing wallets and smartphones, however, is a step further, and for this they demand tastier foods (a banana won’t do, but a bar of chocolate will*). Note to self, if I visit this temple in real life, bring some food, but not for myself.
  
  *I’m worried for the health of these macaques if they’re routinely eating things like chocolate bars and potato chips. I mean, we don’t recommend eating huge amounts of it to each other, let alone to wild animals.
• Who would’ve thought anyone could make pavement ants eating hot dogs and competing with feral pigeons for them in NYC sound interesting? Thus is the power of David Attenborough, I suppose.
• A cobra chases a toad through a village in India. It takes a while, but it eventually catches it, and it’s interesting to see the struggle between predator and prey here, even in a human village. According to Attenborough, the human tolerance of cobras here leads to less strikes and snakes moving more slowly (read: more calmly), something I find very intriguing, if true.
• Baby frogmouth wants to fly while his parents are hunting in the city at night, but the cat from the household nearby tries its hand at hunting it. Keep cats indoors while you’re sleeping folks.
• The next segment seems to want to show a bit of a contrast between animals looking for food in our homes, and us looking for food from the natural world. Black bears get fat on human food in garbage and even in stores; a lucky few can pull off the latter. But we deplete fish stocks immensely. The latter portion gets rather carried away with showing how humpback whales feeding on fish helps to replenish the ecosystem (their iron-rich feces nourishes phytoplankton, which in turn leads to more zooplankton and fish), but it is still important to learn/hear about, so I can’t be angry. The effect that these large whales have is so large, that it’s actually predicted that herring numbers will increase, and that a return to pre-whaling numbers will be equivalent to planting 30,000 trees (important since flourishing phytoplankton also soak up carbon from the atmosphere).
  
  Yet more reason for me to name humpbacks as my favorite cetaceans.
• ”He can smell highly nutritious food is near”
  
  *cuts to apples
  
  Oh boy…
• I’m talking about a bull elephant by the way. He wants access to some crops in a Kenyan farm. This sort of human-wildlife conflict is common and both farmers and elephant can die in these encounters. Some rangers are called and resort to firecrackers to drive the elephant off.
  
  I don’t know if this is just me, but this segment makes it hard to actually root for one side and against the other. No, I don’t want to see a prime bull elephant killed just for trying to fulfill its massive appetite. But I also don’t want to see the livelihoods of some farmers destroyed, let alone their lives taken either. It makes you glad that as humans, we can come up with solutions that minimize needless death.
• So depressing how most of the world’s animal, especially mammal and bird biomass, is domestic animals…
• Attenborough’s words about habitat destruction being the biggest threat for wildlife around the world today are important. Maybe this is just me talking, but when I was growing up, the exact threat level of each negative anthropogenic factor on wildlife was nebulous to me. If many other people are the same, it’s important to know what the biggest threats to wildlife are, so that we may take measures to stop/reduce them.
• Okay, I knew that switching to a plant-based diet (as much as I still love meat) will absolutely free up land to give back to wildlife…but I had no idea about vertically growing plants in laboratories.

Verdict:

Yeah, this episode delivered. It’s called human, it’s about wildlife is coping with us, the impact we have, and what we can do to make things better. Not really much more I can say.

[Infinity Blade]

Heroes:

• This must have been the easiest episode to film.
• First segment is of a female black rhino being sedated and transported to a project (a breeding project, I assume) by Dumi Zwane and his team.
  
  
  SPOILER: Click to show
  Since filming this episode, another 20 rhinos have been moved to safe havens.
• The next segment is set in the Jambatu Center for Amphibian Research, where we meet a biologist (Jaime Culebras) managing the frogs held there. These are some of the rarest frogs in the world, and include “Sad Santiago”, one of the last Morona-Santiago harlequin frogs in the world. A female is desperately needed for breeding. Remarkably, Culebras’ team is apparently able to find a female the time that the Planet Earth crew is filming them (damn, talk about convenient).
  
  
  SPOILER: Click to show
  The very ending of this episode reveals that since filming Planet Earth III, Sad Santiago has since died, but not before breeding. YAAAYYY!!!!!
• The brief montage of frogs facing the camera on a black background looks really cool. Is it related to Joel Sartore’s Photo Ark? Looks a lot like it.
• Next, a sequence of forest elephants from 2004 (for the original Planet Earth). This becomes harsher in hindsight when Attenborough reveals that nine years later, poachers came into the area and killed 26 elephants. Four of them calves.
  
  This sequence is centered on Trang Nguyen, a woman who poses as a customer of ivory to bust the trade. It’s mentioned that calves and even rangers are killed by poachers (which really shows how far these criminals will go). They set out to catch a trader named “the Godfather”, who was previously arrested for possessing 400 kg of ivory (which makes me wonder why they let him go; how much prison time do you serve for engaging in the ivory trade?). He denies selling ivory, and they are unable to catch him doing anything. The fact that they didn’t catch this high profile ivory trader (or at least a former one) selling illegal ivory does convince me that this sequence is genuine.
  
  But later Nguyen and her team get footage of ivory in the possession of some different people. They got to a hotel room, have the ivory weighed, and…the traders are busted! Nguyen is even arrested herself and taken away while the traders go down to the police station, disallowing the latter to know about her involvement in busting them.
  
  This may have been her last mission, due to the stress and danger involved, but god damn, what a boss.
  
  
  SPOILER: Click to show
  She has since begun training more undercover ivory trade-busting agents.
• The next sequence is centered on Katharina Huchler. Where she works holds baby northern bald ibis chicks, which were hunted to extinction in Europe centuries before (apparently an archbishop, Leonhard von Keutschach, made a decree to protect it in 1504, but it still went extinct in Europe in the 17th century).
  
  The workers here like Huchler have to do what Bob did in Prehistoric Park (for those of you who read my review of that show): imprint on these chicks. That is, convince them that they are their mother, mimicking the sounds adults make while feeding and cleaning them. Once they grow their flight feathers, they have to test the imprinting by seeing if the birds will follow their human foster mothers in flight (in a microlight). It…works.
  
  Getting them over the Zillertal Alps? A lot more daunting. Young birds may die of exhaustion, while human pilots in microlights have no safe place to land. Apparently, though, they make it over the tallest ridge.
  
  Huchler says that the importance of this work is not just to save the ibis, but also to give people hope that other species can be saved too. Well…this segment does its job, I say.
  
  
  SPOILER: Click to show
  The ending reveals that another 60 young ibis have been led on migration.
• ”…16,000 million trees have been felled” (in the Amazon rainforest over the last two decades since the Planet Earth crew started filming). In other words, 16 billion trees.
  
  This segment centers on Alessandra Korap, one of the leaders of the Munduruku, an indigenous people living in Brazil’s Amazon River basin. They aim to stop the massive destruction of the Amazon for mining, logging, and farming, and this is apparently a dangerous endeavor (which doesn’t surprise me->). She helps organize 200 tribes to create the largest protest by indigenous people ever in Brazil, resulting in one proposed law being scrapped.
  
  I’m not sure if this is the same protest depicted here, but Korap was awarded the Goldman Prize in 2023 for her activism.
  
  
  SPOILER: Click to show
  And since this episode was filmed, another six indigenous territories in Brazil have been protected by law.
• Two degrees Celsius threshold mentioned. This threshold (or more specifically, 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels) was briefly crossed on November 17, 2023 (link->). 2023’s summer was the hottest on record since global records began in 1880. We can protest as much as we like, but what about the politicians’ end? Will they lift a finger to stop climate change?
  
  Well, that’s where Mohamed Nasheed, former president of the Maldives, comes in. Could it be? A good politician!? *gasp*
  
  He has continued to attempt every climate conference to persuade politicians to cut the use of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, as we can all feel and hear from the news, the meeting depicted here ended in a watered down deal.
  
  “Every time you vote in every election, please tick the planet.”
  
  I just hope those names I tick actually do something about the planet.
  
  I need not give you a spoiler, you can guess what he’s been up to. Nasheed repeats his message at every Climate Conference every year.
• SPOILER: Click to show
  And I was finally able to cancel my monthly streaming service subscription after finishing this series! Hooray!!

Verdict:

If “Human” was supposed to be the program’s biggest wake-up call out of all the episodes, “Heroes” is also a wake-up call…but also the one episode that gives you the most hope. I’m just…genuinely in awe of the stuff these people do. It honestly makes me feel like complete shIt as an average Joe who mostly just tries to eat chicken instead of beef (except when I don’t feel like it), takes public transportation to and from work, and recycles plastic whenever possible (except when I unfortunately can’t).

But Attenborough still reminds us that we can’t let the fate of the planet be left to a handful of heroes. As much as these people in this episode may be heroes, they face a ton of obstacles in their path, fundamentally other people. All of us need to step up. Yes, it’s largely shIt like big oil and self-serving politicians who need to either be toppled down or turn to our interests, but…all of us need to step up. And so maybe the most important thing this episode does is that more than just showing off what good things a few people are doing, it inspires.

[Exalt]

Jan 23, 2024 6:54:44 GMT 5 Infinity Blade said:

Human:

• Baby frogmouth wants to fly while his parents are hunting in the city at night, but the cat from the household nearby tries its hand at hunting it. Keep cats indoors while you’re sleeping folks.

This scene was a bit surprising to me, for a few reasons.

Firstly, the fact that they actually filmed somebody's pet for this. Secondly, it produced a mental shift that that I'm not accustomed to: ie, that we should actually logically root for one animal over the other, as if the cat's owner/s are doing their job, it's being fed properly to begin with. Combined with how ridiculously effective domestic cats are at hunting birds, I honestly felt a bit of dread. It looked to me like even with the bell, the cat got awfully close to striking: some cats have managed to work around hunting with a bell on, yes, but I feel like not having the bell could have easily made the difference here, which leads into the last point: that the premise of this segment seems like it could cause outrage fairly easily.