Saw more Planet Earth. Let's get to it!
Episode 3: Fresh Water
We follow the fresh water of the earth from high up in the mountains down to lakes and streams. We see Angel Falls, the inspiration for Paradise Falls from Pixar's Up. There's some brutal nature on display lower down. A cayman body is eerily mirrored in the water's surface. Its limp body so alien and ominous. We see a ridiculous-looking juvenile spoonbill get thrashed by the caymans. The spoonbill's elegant and awkward body becomes messy and limply splayed. Little-known fact however: if spoonbills were of human intelligence, they would all be jackasses, so don't worry too much. There's a gorgeous shot of wildebeests running in water. They too are running from crocodiles, but they're so richly brown and just gorgeous. Episode animal mascots: Adorable otters and river-monkeys.
Episode 4: Caves
Caves are cool, so there was less in this episode that I didn't already know (I think I may have caught it on TV or internet somehow?) There's beautiful stalactites and stalagmites, glow worms looking weird and kind of sinister, sulphuric acid eating industriously away at rock, and blind everything. A bat piteously falls into the roach-infested guano. Horrid cave centipedes scuttle about (shudder!) Attenborough makes his arched eyebrows audible as he narrates about extremophile bacteria which survive purely on rock but I wonder how remarkable that actually is. Is there any place on earth which is actually devoid of any life? Presumably lava is, but short of that? Life seems very good at, uh... finding a way. I think we humans have a tendency to be aristocratically shocked at the deplorable living conditions of bacteria, but they flourish quite effortlessly in their squalor. I am in no way a biologist but I think that sometimes, in our efforts to protect and conserve, we forget how fragile our glass castles really are. It is not the animals that we are saving, but ourselves. Episode animal mascots: bats, bats, bats, and swiftlets.
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