Episode 7 - Rivers
This was a very watery episode. It starts off with this dude net-fishing on a torrential river, swollen by seasonal rains. The narration informs us again and again that this is perilous and extremely dangerous, but this is clearly just this dude's normal life so he, the actual fisherman, is totally nonchalant as he breezes across a tightrope slung over the mighty river in his little blue flip-flops. Anyway, we then skip over to a frozen ice floe which some kids mustwalk down (for six days!) to get to school. It really makes me appreciate the ten-minute drive to school I had as a kid, although perhaps these kids take their education a bit more seriously as a result? We then take a break with Canadians who must break up 2-foot-thick ice before it causes trouble with a nearby bridge. Of course, they just use dynamite, but not before cutting the ice up with some impressive buzz-saws. We then travel to more dusty climes as camel-herders follow elephants to find the easiest access-points to the water table beneath a dried-up riverbed. When the camel-herders return to their village, we see them descend into a Stygian hole which is their village well. Well, well. We then see villagers repairing a thousands-of-years-old mud mosque with a mixture of river-bed mud and fermented rice husks. The kids of the village help and then sling mud at each other with infectious glee. Finally we hit (what was for me) the climax: the perpetually wet, mountain-top land of Meghalaya, where the rains erratically cause flooding, washing away all man-made bridges. So, the people build living root bridges with the roots of the strangler fig. These bridges take more than a single human's life to complete and look like a fucking fantasy illustration. Amazing. Human superpower: craftily farming turtles to turn algae into a more human-accessible food-stuff (ie: turtle meat.)
Episode 8 - Cities
We end in cities, a welcome change for me from the nomads of the desert and veldt. Like the Planet Erath series however, this final episode contains a heavy dose of the moralizing usually hovering just out of frame in a normal episode. We start with a thorough examination fo how humans and animals live together in cities: peregrine falcons hunting pigeons in Dubai, and the Bishnoi women breastfeeding (incredibly adorable) baby gazelles. We also see the dark side, with rats in New York City and bed bugs in London. We are given the sterling example of an experimental city being built in the desert somewhere (I didn't catch it, but probably Dubai) which is self-sustaining, burning waste for energy and harvesting solar energy for their (no-doubt) self-driving electric cars. This is green high-tech which is an uncomfortable fit next to the show's adulation of elephant-powered logging and fig-root bridges and so on. Also in this episode is a cop on a segway, frightening the invading caribou. We also see an urban beekeeper, teaching his quirky, twee clients how to raise bees. We then see an extended sequence of tilt-shifted, fast-motion loading/unloading boats and trucks, as people teem around groceries and so on. I'm reminded of the Mayans. So, can't we all live together, the show asks, us and the animals? It doesn't sound so bad, I guess, so long as I have my computers and my internet.
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