Few days ago, I have revisited one of AFO’s episodes –
the ‘polar bear vs. walrus’ one. This time, I’m revisiting another episode –
the ‘brown bear vs. tiger’. Technically, the tiger is the Siberian subspecies
(as opposed to a Sumatran or a Bengal subspecies instead), but before we get
into that…
‘Killjoys’ S2 seems to have gotten into the swing of
it, focusing on at least two major plotlines: figuring one Dutch’s true past,
and saving the ‘Old Town’ from ‘the Company’, (who is probably being run by a
CEO called ‘the Man’ – ‘Killjoys’ are that
imaginative, sorry). Fair enough, this isn’t any more stupid or flawed than ‘Agent
Carter’ has been, and not unlike AC, ‘Killjoys’ is featuring a fairly small and
tight cast of main and recurring characters, with a sufficient supply of sci-fi
trappings thrown in for the necessary flavor. By now, the cast and the crew of
the show have managed to get into a S2, (as did ‘Dark Matter’, BTW), now we got
to wait and see if they reach as S3 level by the end of it.
Back to AFO. As I written earlier, the ‘polar bear vs.
walrus’ episode was probably surprising to some viewers, as a walrus doesn’t
look like a winning fighter with its bulky and ungainly body (on land; in the
water, it’s another story). With the ‘brown bear vs. tiger’ episode, the issue
(if you would call it such) was something else: it became very clear that the
bear was going to win, especially if you went by the mechanical data, which was
how AFO operated, after all-
…This was actually one of the bigger basic problems
that plagued AFO since the first episodes (‘lion vs. tiger’ and ‘crocodile vs.
shark’) – all of the data was physical/mechanical, and an animal’s
habits/behavior were not taken into account. This physical/mechanical data
dictated that a bigger/heavier animal was going to win, especially in a
one-on-one fight, and while it was true in some cases, in others it was not. In
this episode, yes, the brown bear did win, and in a straightforward fight it
would win because it was bigger, heavier and stronger than the tiger were, but
in nature? Size is not everything, as the same brown and polar bears can
demonstrate…
Of course, none of the above means that I had not enjoyed the
episode – I did. The way that the show compared a bear and a great cat (a tiger),
in regards to jaws and claws and physical prowess; how they had compared and
contrasted the two – as far as I am concerned ‘brown bear vs. tiger’ episode
was one of AFO’s better episodes. It just was…CGI’d, but given that the
alternative was to have a tiger and a bear fight for real, which is very
inhumane, no one really complained about the CGI, nu-uh.
However, in a computer simulation, the brown bear won because
it was bigger and stronger than the tiger, but so is a polar bear…when compared
to a brown bear: a brown bear, on the average, stands 2.5 m tall on hind legs,
while a polar bear is about 3.0 m instead. A brown bear has proportionately
longer claws than a polar bear does, but the polar bear’s claws are sharper
than a brown bear’s claws are. In strength too one would probably expect the
polar bear to have an edge over the brown, especially if one checks using
mechanical props, (top-notch or not), not unlike what lion has over a tiger,
but-
However, in comes the real life. Due to global
warming, the polar bears have been moving south and the brown bears – up north.
In recent years, they have started to encounter each other for real, and some
scientists have recorded footage of their interactions. It went like this: one
night, a group of polar bears have discovered a whale carcass and were eating
it. Along came a single brown bear (well, a grizzly bear, because this was in
North America rather than Siberia), smaller and/or shorter than the polar bears
were, and it…promptly chased them around the carcass, eeyup. Attitude matters,
as does experience, and mechanical stand-ins with computer calculations cannot account
for this. People who operate mechanical models and run computer calculations
can, but it is much harder without live footage – and the episode of ‘bear vs.
tiger’ did not really have any footage of bears interacting with tigers. If it
had, it would have shown that bears can usually see tigers off…so why there was
no footage? No one knows, I bet…
Anyhow, the brown bear chasing polar bears around is
one point. The polar-brown bear hybrids is a different one. Yes, there are
lion/tiger hybrids, but they occur only in zoos and are sterile, just as
donkey/horse hybrids are, for comparison. Brown/polar bear hybrids are found in
the wild, and they are not sterile,
either. Considering that the polar bears have become their own, independent
species only 10,000 years ago and that some scientists believe that brown bears
can evolve into a polar-bear-like-form (or a subspecies?) yet again, how is this
for a lab study (of bears, tigers, etc.)? Study of animal bodies and bones is
one thing, but it cannot compensate for the study of animal behavior. AFO did try to keep animal behavior in account,
(though not so much in the ‘brown bear vs. tiger’ episode), but the main focus
was on jaws, claws, teeth, horns, tusks and etc., and this had limited the
scope of the show, causing AFO to be cancelled after just 12 episodes. Pity,
because the show was a good one.
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