Episode 5 - Mountains
This was a surprisingly gruesome episode. It starts off fairly light, with a Mongolian tribe stealing a golden eagle chick from its nest so that they can raise it to hunt for them. The chick looks strangely smug and pleased with itself in most of the close ups, but I guess that's just how Golden Eagles are. It also never shuts the fuck up and is constantly chirping (Warning: that's a direct link to a sound file. Side note: wikipedia really is a marvelous resource.) I don't know how the tribesmen put up with that all day long. Anyway, we then move to a tropical mountaintop where the villagers are waging an eternal war with the neighboring endangered monkeys who are constantly stealing their crops. Much entertaining frustration with the flea-bags is had. We then begin the gruesome part of the show, as we follow sulfur miners who must inhale gaseous sulfuric acid to do their job. We see their deformed backs, hear them talk of the gas stinging their eyes and lungs, and hear they are payed $5/basket-load of sulfur. We then we see some men catching giant fruit bats and devouring them. The bats scream like pigs before they are killed. We take a small break from this to visit the alps and watch a ranger set off a controlled avalanche. This is introduced delightfully with a helicopter shot revealing an observatory on the mountain peak. I'd love to know how those scientists live/work/commute. Anyway, we then return to gore with an eye-surgeon visiting a remote mountain village. We see the eye surgery preformed before our eyes. The ensuing celebration of the old woman (who's eyes we were working on) when she can see again is delightful, but the surgery is gross. We then see a Buddhist sky-burial preformed. This requires the butchery of the human corpse for the sake of the vultures. Mercifully this happens off-screen but wow, who knew the mountains contained such horror-stories? An unusually gross episode. Perhaps I should start listing the incongruously gross moment of the episode? Human superpower: making the blind to see for free (with the help of charities.)
Episode 6 - Grasslands
We return to normalcy with this episode. We start with an African tribe just straight-up stealing meat from a pride of lions. We keep seeing close-ups of the lions eying the tribesmen and the camera, so it's pretty scary. We then hunt kudu but encounter a leopard, much to our horror. We hit a slightly gross bit with a fisherman who hunts water snakes. his kids twine the dead snakes around their wrists and one boy gigglingly says "look, look! He's biting me!" Weird, but nothing compared to the funeral adventures of the previous episode. Anyway, we then explore some cool human/animal symbiosis with honeyguides which are a sort of bird which cooperates with humans to steal honey from the honest bees. We continue the symbiosis theme with much talk about how oats and rice are really just grasses that we selectively bread the hell out of. Of course birds also want our delicious grains and one bunch of African dudes are shown killing nesting birds with literal dynamite to protect their crops. The narrator dryly notes that these birds are pests. We then transition talk of higher orders of life which we have bread and live off of: horses (thought we were going for cattle? Psyche!) We see the Mongolians herding horses and milking them. The horse-milk is made into airag which is a disgusting-sounding alcoholic yogurt (which I thought was called kumis (perhaps related??)) We then finally get to cattle and see the sarong-wearing, gun-toting, cattle-warriors of Ethiopia. They have a traditional inter-tribe battle that involves the men hitting each other with 2-meter-long sticks. It seems harmless but we see some seriously bloodied men sitting about. We close on the modern marvels of technology as we watch two Australian men in helicopters round up 5,000 cattle in 5 days, a job which used to take weeks and dozens of men. I was wondering how automate-able the harvester tractors were. Truly, we live in interesting times. Human superpower: utter indifference in the face of snakebites.
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