Bone in the Fan

Making whaling fun again.

When I was like 12, I probably had a Greenpeace shirt.  I’m guessing it was powder blue, with a whale and rainbows or some other equally embarrassing shit on it (no unicorns - I’m quite sure I wasn’t a twelve year old girl).  To my knowledge, no photos of me wearing such a shirt exist, sorry.  Greenpeace has changed over the intervening 34 years, as have I.  But one thing that hasn’t changed is I still like the funny.  And I find Whale Wars on Animal Planet really, really funny.

I don’t want to make a big thing about whether or not whaling is something that should be done.  Clearly there are people that think so, and people that don’t, and I’m sure that the vast majority of both don’t actually know any real facts.  I hope you aren’t looking at me to provide them either, because I’m a little too lazy to do deep research on this.  I did go to the International Whaling Commission (IWC) web site to try and find out about the legalities, limits, and populations, and I did go to the Wikipedia page on whaling in Japan as well.  But then I got bored.  So let’s forget about the deep stuff and get to the good stuff.  The good stuff being Whale Wars.

Part skull, part trident, part Little-Bo-Peep.

The show follows a group called Sea Shepherd as they head down Antarctic-way in their ship, the “Steve Irwin” (which makes me giggle like a schoolgirl for some reason), to try and stop the Japanese whaling fleet.  Quick background: Japan is a member nation of the IWC, which imposed a complete moratorium on commercial whaling starting in 1986.  They, along with Norway and Iceland, have made no secret of the fact that they want commercial whaling resumed, and Norway has basically said “fuck you, we’re whaling” and does it anyway (they take 500-600 whales a year).  Major partiers, those Norwegians.  But Japan and Iceland are whaling under the exemption for scientific research, claiming they’re studying the feasibility of returning to commercial whaling in the future.  Japan’s research has included taking between 600 and 1000 minke whales a year (they plan to take somewhere around 900 minke whales this year; while I can’t find current population estimates for minke whales, in 1989 the estimates were between about 750,000 and 1,400,000 worldwide, making the “scientific sampling” approximately 1/10 of 1%) in boats with the word RESEARCH written on the side.  You’d think that the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED sign they hung behind Bush would have taught the world that making a nice label doesn’t change any facts (if it did, I’d have TWELVE tattooed on my penis).  They aren’t fooling anyone, and I wouldn’t either, believe me.

About equally plausible.

But enough of the dry, boring facts; no matter what you think of whaling, Whale Wars is hilarious.  Basically, it’s about a group of activists that search for the Japanese whaling fleet through iceberg-laden waters in a boat with no ice rating, with a crew that is, for the most part, inept.  Because the activists are the crew.  And something about that just makes me laugh.  They’re led by Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson (a co-founder of Greenpeace that was tossed off the board in 1975 by a vote of 11-1, with the one being his ), who claims to have had a life changing experience in the 70’s when a harpooned whale looked him in the eye, and

“Paul recognized a flicker of understanding in the dying whale’s eye. He felt that the whale knew what they were trying to do….He vowed to become a lifelong defender of the whales and all creatures of the seas.”

I assume that includes stingrays, the animal that harpooned the guy his boat was named after.

Besides Dr. Doolittle (who I’ll get back to in a minute), the crew includes first mate Peter Brown, who never misses an opportunity to explain that they could all die doing this, but, you know, he’s o.k. with that.  He even seems to kind of be rooting for it.  Which explains why he’ll take the helm (and the lives of everyone aboard) into his own hands despite the fact that he doesn’t understand compass directions.  Really.  In last week’s episode, he was attempting to navigate through a huge section of the ocean covered with closely packed icebergs that could puncture the hull, and as his communications officer read the radar and called out compass headings, he explained he didn’t understand all that, and could the guy just tell him 20 degrees port or 10 degrees starboard.  Or in other words, “a little to the left” or “a little to the right”.

The Steve Irwin. Watching the crew work is like watching a hippie using a loom and threading his beard right into the poncho he's making, which is to say, hilarious.

And speaking of the communications officer, he’s actually a web designer.  Because Captain Watson says he doesn’t want professional seamen (heheheh), he wants volunteers.  So when the gyros that keep the boat stable went offline and the boat was pitching wildly, no one knew how to fix them.  The web guy took the system apart and, with the comment “I think I see how they work”, put in a temporary fix.  So he’s a smart guy, but still….he’s a web designer.

The whole “volunteers only” policy of Watson’s is actually pretty savvy though, as it does, for the most part, succeed in keeping anyone off the boat that might actually realize that he’s in way over his head and taking stupid risks with his disciples’ lives.  In last week’s episode, he ordered his crew to launch an inflatable (a big Zodiac-type deal like the ones in the old Jacques Cousteau shows and something I’ve always wanted; they’re like the Jeeps of the seas) and try to chase down one of the Japanese harpoon ships.  The conditions were so bad they could have easily been killed (in fact they showed a clip from the prior year in which they promptly swamped the inflatable by dragging it sideways, then flipped it and dumped the crew into the ocean and almost under the Steve Irwin).  After finally getting the boat launched, it promptly headed 180 degreees in the wrong direction, disappeared from sight due to the weather and waves, and failed to radio in.  It’s like watching a Three Stooges movie with these doofuses.

Later, Captain Fantastic kept the boat overnight in the shadow of a huge iceberg, a decision that prompted one of the few people on board that seems to know what they’re doing (a woman who served in the Navy for six years) to say something like: “I don’t think an experienced mariner would do this - they’d be looking for open water.”  She was right of course, and by morning they were in deep shit, surrounded by pack ice.  In a boat with a thin, non-ice-breaking hull.  As the episode ended, they were trying to escape the pack, and two crew members had been ordered to the lowest part of the hull and told that if it was breached by an iceberg (which would flood it with ice-cold water) they had to stay there.  What they were supposed to stay there for wasn’t made clear, but the idiots actually followed orders, sitting in a tiny hold and watching as the ship’s hull flexed inward 5 or 6 inches with every blow from a chunk of ice.  Finally the cameraman said  “this is where my commitment ends”, left the camera on a pile of ropes and got the hell out of there.  Like I said, hilarious.

Bottom line though: I really love Whale Wars.  And I’ll readily admit that some shallow, hateful part of me just enjoys the shit out of seeing people so arrogant, so absolutely convinced they’re right all the time, bumble around like morons and fail to learn that really, really, really, really, really thinking you’re doing the right thing and that it will all work out because it should, damn it,  doesn’t mean shit if you’re a clueless pud.  It can be frustrating (I just want to grab that first mate, slap him across the face and yell “you clueless pud!”), and some of the people on board remind me of why there was a sign just inside the front door of the campus house I lived in at college that said “All hippies go in the kitchen,”  (which was a directive, not an observation), but as long as they keep failing to get their shit together, it’s fun as hell to watch.

The previews at the end of last week’s episode hip us to the fact that they do, in fact, escape the ice in spite of their best efforts to sink the ship, and they eventually get to throw stink bombs at the Japanese fleet (they had stink bomb throwing tryouts in one of the first two episodes, which was also funny as hell).  They also appear to actually crash into one of the whaling boats later this season.  So good times ahead with lots more laughs.

And here’s more good news: if you want in on the hilarity, they’re replaying last week’s episode tonight at 8PM on Animal Planet, and following it with a new episode at 9.  If you’re half the cynical asshole that I am, you won’t want to miss it.