AFO: Alligator vs. Black Bear - June 29

This week is proving to be much more exciting than the past ones; a new ‘DM’ movie is coming to the cinema at last; this is primarily a children’s franchise, so I cannot say that I am the biggest fan of these films.

Then there is the new TV promo for the new ‘Marvel’s InHumans’ series. So far, the viewers are not being impressed, let alone overwhelmed; many think that Lockjaw the dog is the best character of them all, and he is CGI’ed. In addition, he is a dog, not a human, so does make him an InDog instead? Never mind; my point is that I am more excited about the upcoming ‘Jumanji’ movie, and I am not its’ biggest fan either. I remember the original film very enough, it was good, and it was also less controversial than the upcoming rehash is, because it was more child-friendly and less sexualized and edgy. (Does ‘Jumanji’ even need that?)

…As for the upcoming new movie of the ‘Jurassic Park’/’Jurassic World’ franchise… so far we got some single shots and a poster – not too much to go on. The original JW movie was not bad, just… somewhat reminiscent of the SWII movie – not bad, but still nowhere as good as the original SW trilogy was.

This probably brings up back to the TV land, as ‘Killjoys’ S3 is coming to TV tomorrow, (June 30, 2017), or so. ‘Killjoys’ are a very enjoyable TV show, and I am honestly excited about seeing the S3 in the future, (hopefully. Things will be chaotic at our house in the near future, so I do not know how well I will be able to keep up with the series. In the meantime, though, I have been re-watching AFO – the ‘Alligator vs. Black Bear’ episode, so let us talk a bit about it instead.

Firstly, a dash of classification. The proper name of the episode is the ‘American Alligator vs. American Black Bear’, because overseas, in Asia, lives a Chinese Alligator, (possibly the closest relative to the American species), as well as an Asiatic Black Bear, (whose relationship with the American Black Bear is more vague).

The Chinese Alligator lives only in China, and may be extinct in the wild. It looks like its American cousin, but it is smaller, and has an armored belly, (and the American Alligator does not). The Asiatic Black Bear looks basically just like any other bear, (including the Giant Panda), but it is usually black, save for a large white patch on its’ chest, hence it is also called a moon bear – as opposed to the sun bear, which lives in southeast Asia, (and the Asiatic Black Bear lives – these days – in Bangladesh, China, and Russia, more to the north), is called a Malaysian bear for that reason, and the patch on its’ chest is yellow instead. The American Black Bear usually does not have a patch on its chest…but sometimes it does, and it is not always black; sometimes it is brown or even creamy white. Isn’t taxonomy fun?

But the science of classifying animals (and plants) aside, one of the reasons why the crew of AFO chose the American Alligator and Black Bear for this episode is because it is far more likely to happen in the wild, because the Chinese Alligator is virtually extinct in the wild on one hand, and on the other it is far too timid to attack something as big and dangerous as a bear. Come to think of it, so’s the American Alligator. So?

So we come to realism & suspension of disbelief, the storytelling elements that help people believe a story, whether it is AFO, AoS, or anything else. AoS, for example, seemed to have outlasted its’ welcome; certainly the S4 finale was met with very low audience numbers – people just weren’t excited about the titular characters winning against the last villains of the season anymore. Not when there is an entire platter of DC shows to choose from at the same time, for example.

But AoS is fiction, just as the aforementioned ‘Killjoys’, or ‘Marvel’s InHumans’ are. AFO was based on facts, conversely, and… they had their own pitfalls. They did their best to run the show only via facts and data, but they had only a limited amount of it from the start. The format of AFO was largely dependent on various big carnivorous animals – mammals, reptiles and fish – and most of them are physically similar to each other. A bear and a big cat are related to each other only distantly, but physically, they are built similarly, their skeletons have more superficial similarities to each other than the bones of a bear and a walrus do, even though the walrus is closer related to the bear (and the wolf) than a big cat is.

With crocodiles and alligators, of course, the similarities are more than just superficial – the two are twin twigs of the same branch of the tree of life: not only they occupy the same econiche, they can coexist – the Chinese Alligator lives on the same continent as do several species of crocodiles, and South America is home not only to the various caimans, (essentially the local versions of the alligators), but to several species of ‘true’ crocodiles as well. These reptiles can get along, and much better than the big cats of Africa, Asia and the Americas do, in comparison, and – they all have the same hunting & fighting technique, which was actually shown on AFO as part of the episodes’ footage. There are physical differences between crocodiles and alligators, but they are fairly minor, and from a technical P.O.V. – bare bones and the metal replicas built from these bones – they are non-existent.

With bears these similarities are not as extreme, but for the sort of experiments that AFO did with its’ machines, this was enough. Even in RL, all bears behave similarly, the only exceptions are the polar bear, (which is completely carnivorous and lives part of its’ life in the water), and the giant panda, (which is completely herbivorous instead). The brown bear has its’ differences from the black and the moon bears, but AFO does not focus on them, (and they are outside its’ data collecting criteria, anyhow).

This probably brings us to the actual face-off. In theory, just as DW did, AFO used the data that the staff collected via the models to determine the winner, but in reality, this was not so. In the ‘Jaguar vs. Anaconda’ episode, the jaguar lost. In RL, this would not be so; a jaguar has jaws powerful enough to bite through skull bones of peccaries and caimans, so, once it pinned down an anaconda and bit it, it would probably be able to rip the snake in two, if it got especially lucky. And yet it lost on AFO. Why?

Well, why not? On DW, the staff actually showed the various numbers of the various weapons, wins and x-factors; AFO did not even do that. DW actually raised an issue – who was correct, who was more important, the data or the experts/hosts; AFO did not have that. Moreover, while this ensured that there was no controversy surrounding their decision…there still was, at least in the ‘Lion vs. Tiger’ episode, (and so I probably will not be touching it at all). Instead, the viewers got the option to take the AFO’s decisions regarding the face-offs at a face value, (pardon the pun), and while some had accepted it, the others had not – and so the show was not renewed for a second season for this reason as well. AFO’s approach had its virtues, but it had its’ flaws too; not even the season’s/series’ finale ‘Sperm Whale vs. Giant Squid’ could save it…

Well, that is that for this entry; see you all soon!

S.H.I.E.L.D., Lockup - Oct 25

All right. As it was seen, S4 of AoS has hit its’ stride…by staying away, (well, trying to), from the previous seasons, especially 2 and 3. Yes, this is repetition, but, despite all of AoS’s successes, its’ ratings are still falling. Why?

A show can fail for various reasons. AFO (‘Animal Face-Off’) failed because it was repetitive: while seeing various CGI models of animals fight each other on TV is fun, AFO, sadly, made it repetitive, and so it ended after just 12 episodes (1 season).

‘Deadliest Warrior’ (DW) has failed for a different reason – it was subjective. For example, look at ‘Theodore Roosevelt vs. Lawrence of Arabia’ episode in S3. Among the weapons, the show put the American 1896 Krag Carbine against the British Short Magazine Lee-Enfield Rifle (or Lee-Enfield Mk III). The two ‘mid-range weapons’ were tied, but the truth is that the Lee-Enfield had actually won, percentage-wise, and what’s more, one of the reasons as to why the Krag vanished into the depths of history is because while it HAD been used in the U.S. invasion of Cuba, and other wars (including WWI, albeit to a limited extent), it was unwieldy and slow to load, which became a very important factor in WWI and beyond. Yet, DW did not mention any of this, and it did do its’ best to downplay the Lee-Enfield instead, numbers or no numbers.

(This was actually another problem of DW – either the experts, the show hosts, were correct when assigning the advantage to one weapon or another, and in that case, the numbers/percentages served no real purpose. Alternatively, the numbers/percentages were correct, and in this case, the experts were no experts, but some blokes who did not know a better rifle if it shot them in the ass. Given that Robert Daly, one of the show’s stars in 2011 claimed to be a former Green Beret, but in reality he was not…yeah, DW had many problems. Period.)

Then again, we also have ‘Ancients Behaving Badly’ and ‘The Secret Life Of-‘, which ended after a single season because, not unlike AFO, they had a limited amount of info/resources that they could use – but we’re talking about TV documentary shows, and how about fictive ones?

Aye, they are trickier than the documentary shows. ‘Lost Girl’, which suffered from a chronic revision of its’ backstory and mythology, ended after 5 seasons, possibly because it became unpopular enough. ‘Primeval’ and its spin-off, ‘Primeval: New World’ ended because the company that made them, Impossible Pictures, (IP), went bankrupt, and frankly was clearly suited to running short series, such as ‘Walking with…’ documentary series, or even documentary films. OUAT (‘Once Upon a Time’) continues to air, as do various DC TV series of the CW channel. ‘Legends of Tomorrow’, (LoT) for example, suffer from a weak plot in S2 (S1 was better – so far), yet they are not doing any worse than AoS does. Why is AoS in trouble?

Again, this is not unique. The aforementioned LoT is not doing so hot itself, now that ‘Timeless’, a sci-fi (time travel) series is being aired, (and it isn’t affiliated with Marvel or DC comics). It needs to step up on its’ game…and maybe it has.

So has AoS, for that matter. It, along with the rest of MCU, has gotten rid of Hydra, which has been causing problems ever since it appeared in CA: TWS and spread to AoS and ‘Agent Carter’, sort of. If you look at such sites as Tumblr, people are STILL arguing and fighting over Hydra, whether or not it is Nazi or just fascist, and the various opinions don’t get along, but…for the fact that none of them appreciate AoS, (and Marvel in general), getting involved with Hydra – for different reasons, again, but anti-AoS and anti-Marvel.

The same went for Grant Ward – people either loved him or hated him, and fought with each other, and generally were anti-AoS in regards to the show’s treatment of the man. Why AoS made the situation so bad – they could have turned him back into a hero, (as they probably planned at first post-S1), or killed him off back in S2, or just redeemed him, as they did with Cal at the end of S2. Instead, they kept him on as a villain, (and in the second half of S3, they replaced him with Hive, sort of), and this diminished their fanbase further.

This, of course, was a more generic problem – AoS didn’t appear to respect its’ characters, (still doesn’t – just look at J.T. James/Hellfire), and that put it at a disadvantage in regards to other shows, (‘Killjoys’, ‘Dark Matter’, ‘Quantico’, ‘Blindspot’, etc.). And to make matters worse, there was a mass exodus of actors at the end of S2, too.

There were other shows who suffered this sort of problem – ‘Primeval’, for example, and LG, at the last season, but AoS S2 finale turned it into a killfest, which was too much of a good thing at best, and just a killfest at worst. They were able to get over it by the second half of S3, when Luke Mitchell, (Lincoln Campbell), left the show, turning S3, (and especially its first episode), into some sort of a mockery of itself. Karma being what it is, so far Lincoln was mentioned twice and shown (on a photo) once, period. He may have been once an integral part of the show, but now – no.

This, kind of, brings us to ‘Lockup’ the episode. It was a solidly made and delivered episode. On one hand, Daisy has to handle her own demons, on the other – so does Robbie, on the third – Simmons has to help the new director to deal with the senator who is connected to the Watchdogs on one hand, and is friendly with the new director proper on the other. It is a solid piece of planning, there are no particular plotholes, though there are faint echoes of the second half of S2, especially before the bloodbath/exodus of actors at its’ finale. But-?

There is no ‘but’, in fact. The show has begun to deliver, but it just may be too late. It has developed a reputation during the runs of S2 and S3, and it will not fix it anytime soon, especially since it is also trying to incorporate some of the previous seasons’ elements, such as the Watchdogs. We don’t know much about them, save that they are like the Guardians of Humanity or Quarrymen, or some other fictional rip-off of the KKK…which is probably how AoS (and the rest of MCU?) likes it. Hydra came with too much baggage, especially from real life, so now the show is trying to go the other way and it succeeds. Only the viewers don’t care about this sort of thing anymore, in fact, they are probably busy watching other shows, period, so it’s a case of ‘too little too late’ on top of everything else.

Anything else? No, not really. AoS is caught between going with its’ old plan, which includes Daisy, and the other InHumans, and the Watchdogs, and the new plan with the Ghost Rider, and his uncle, and the ghosts and the evil book that ISN’T the Necronomicon, really. (Though I am sure that Lovecraft would have disagreed). It is doing a decent job of balancing the two plans, so for now it is going forwards in a good way.

Hopefully, it will continue to do so in the future too. 

Killjoys, S2 - September 3

...’Killjoys’, S2, has come to an end. Now what?

Well, AoS is coming back soon; ‘Blindspot’ and other earlier 2016 shows are coming back; now shows are coming forth – but ‘Killjoys’ did earn a special mention for several reasons…

First, the show – accidentally, no doubt, showed that evil does not have to be grand and complex, as AoS, and AC, and the rest of the MCU franchise have shown. The ‘Company’, which was something of a big bad in the first two seasons, (but especially in S2) is faceless and doesn’t have any humane characteristics: Jelco is a jerk, but he is also a petty jerk, who enjoys kicking on the weak, but doesn’t appear to be ready and willing to stand up to the strong. The rest of the Company probably is not any better. Yes, they want to contaminate others with the plasma so that they would become immortal workers for the Company and possibly for the Nine royal families, (how the two power groups interact is not certain), but there is no grandeur, no glory, just the rich who want to get richer via the poor. Meet the pre-WWI, maybe even the pre-WWII capitalism (read ‘Native Son’, would you?).

The Nine royal families? They are largely represented by Delle Seyah Kendry (the ‘Seyah’ is apparently something of a title in the Killjoys universe) who kills Pawter after the latter resigns; Pawter’s death was unnecessary, on one hand, and on the other Pawter died for the sake of people of old Westerly (maybe ‘Killjoys’ are trying to channel Whedon’s ‘Firefly’, who knows?) not because of some political crap. For Delle, politics are everything, therefore, when John probably killed her in S2 finale, she got what she deserved – in an empty, dirty alley without anyone. But…

One of the flaws of ‘Killjoys’ (it is an enjoyable show, just not without flaws) is its’ lack of back history, so to speak. Often, it seems to unroll with one episode or another, and this ‘unveiling’ is not consistent. Consequently, the odds are that that is the reason why the evil in the show was so petty and all that that ‘pettiness’ entails – the crew of ‘Killjoys’ probably just cannot afford to go in-depth – at least not yet. With just 10 episodes a season and a very small cast (3 main characters, 5 or 6 recurring ones, and now two of them, Pawter and Khlyen, are dead for good) they really cannot go all-out, not how AoS does (at least once every season so far).

As I may have written before, this seems to be a problem with Michelle Lovretta, as ‘Lost Girl’ had its own issues with backstory – it constantly shifted from Celtic, to Norse, to Greek. Now, ‘Killjoys’ appear to avoid this by avoiding the backstory save for the absolute minimum – the Killjoys need a universe to in, a coherent universe to exist in, and the show did its best to deliver, trying to utilize variety to compensate the lack of an extensive backstory. It did not really work in S1, so in S2 there is more backstory, (especially concerning Khlyen, his own biological daughter and the plasma) and less variety. As the result, the S2 of ‘Killjoys’ is more interesting and intriguing to watch; perhaps the upcoming S3 will be even better?

And then there was the cameo of Rick Howland, who used to play Mr. Trick the Blood King on ‘Lost Girl’. True, ‘Lost Girl’ stars tend to appear on other shows – Ksenia Solo has appeared on ‘Orphan Black’; Zoe Palmer – on ‘Dark Matter’. They made it work there, so perhaps Rick will re-appear on ‘Killjoys’ in the future?..

So: Killjoys are continuing to pull their shit together. Now we will have to wait and see if Aos, ‘Blindspot’, and the other shows will continue to deliver as well. Later days, everyone!

AFO: Anaconda vs. jaguar - August 20

Let us temporarily get back to AFO. For a change, we will talk about the ‘Anaconda vs. jaguar’ episode.

Firstly, spoilers: the anaconda won. Second: what about it?

Now, there was some outrage about the reptile winning, in part because in real life it is usually the other way around, jaguars kill and eat anacondas instead, and-

Okay, again – the show was called ‘Animal Face-Off’, where the better fighter won, rather than the best killer. Fine. Let us assume that that was the anaconda, rather than the jaguar, and move on. What was next?

Nothing, actually. Yes, the jaguar’s defeat was discussed, yes, the anaconda’s victory was condemned, but that was it. People tend to get quite passionate over the fights of tigers and lions, for example, but over fights of jaguars and anacondas? Not so much. AFO intended to entertain, not just to educate, but in the end, it failed to do so. JFC, (to say nothing of ‘Monster Bug Wars’), had its’ own flaws, but it also had some variety, making it into a relatively exciting TV series to follow and to watch.

AFO, on the other hand, was also an exciting TV show to watch, but it followed a single scenario – a one-on-one face-off between two various animals. This sort of thing can work, (especially if CGI is good enough, and in the recent past, when AFO was aired, people were not as fussy when it came to computer graphics on screen), and it did work – for 12 episodes of AFO, after which the show ended.

…The same thing can be said of JFC – it also lasted for 12 episodes/1 season despite its’ greater variety and the more exciting subject – dinosaurs! JFC, however, lacked the professionalism of AFO, and it was not as educational as the older show, as I probably have mentioned before. Since the History Channel were JFC was aired tends not to show such entertainment in the first place, and because Mr. Blasing, who got the JFC to run, had his own issues, (but not all of the right credentials), JFC was cancelled, and by now – buried.

AFO didn’t appear to have a credential problem, but by the time that the ‘Anaconda vs. Jaguar’ episode was aired, it probably had trouble holding/recapturing the attention of its’ fans. This particular episode was different from, say, the ‘Lion vs. Crocodile’ episode, but only in details, so while some viewers were angry that the anaconda won (and/or the jaguar lost) the others were just uninterested (rather than unimpressed) and bored!

This is not restricted to documentary TV programs; just look at such pieces of fiction as AoS or ‘Killjoys’! However, I have talked about AoS a lot, including its’ latest attempts to be ‘mysterious’ while being ‘cute’ about it, (ever since the last episodes of S3), whereas ‘Killjoys’…

‘Killjoys’ aren’t bad, though compared to Michelle Lovretta’s previous TV show – ‘Lost Girl’ – they are much more tame and straightforward. On the plus side, they seem to have fewer problems with their backstory…probably because it is straightforward, again – the Killjoys are trying to stop the Company (yes, it is really called thus) from domineering Westerly with an all-around wall, (complete with a roof), while trying to figure out where Dutch’s ex-mentor Kline is planning to do regarding alien centipedes and their plasma that makes humans almost immortal. Overall, it may be a somewhat simple plot, (the Company of no name is bordering on a bad joke), but with just 10 episodes per season there is no time to be complex, and there is plenty of character development too, alongside plot development.

‘Lost Girl’ was a more complex, more tangled, and (currently) more rounded TV show out of the two, but it suffered from a major background instability. AoS had to change itself when it decided to integrate Hunter and Morse – and then it (possibly) went off tangent, and outright failed – to launch ‘Marvel’s Most Wanted’ TV series, to keep Mitchell as part of the cast, with that stupid shoehorn S3 premiere episode – the list goes on, but most importantly? AoS sort jammed S2 and S3 together and there were unnecessary character deaths’ all around, especially at the end of S2.

And ‘Lost Girl’? It did something similar – it constantly changed its’ back-story around, from Celtic to Norse to Greek without going anywhere in particular, especially after S1. The Garuda in S2 was a decent villain, but after this? It all went downhill; the quasi-Greek gods in S5 just do not deserve a mention and the fact that Bo’s father was Hades, (not that Aoife was anything like Persephone) is just sad.

In the long run, ‘Lost Girl’ didn’t know where it was going, and how it was going to get there, and the fact that it lumped any folklore character as a ‘Fae’ – it all contributed to the show going downhill and ending with a whimper, however it would rather pretend to be a bang. Michelle Lovretta just wasn’t very discreet or discerning when it came to her sources, and it case of ‘Killjoys’ the sources are largely MCU – the aforementioned AoS, ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ as well…

Back to AoS? There are rumors of an Avenger coming to AoS – AoS is taking its’ cues from the rest of Marvel Cinematic Universe; MCU is dipping into the occult via ‘Dr. Strange’ movie? AoS is doing the same with the Ghost Rider; only there were Ghost Rider films in the past, (but not part of MCU, apparently), so now it’s a different Ghost Rider than the traditional Johnny Blaze…

That said, the variety that I have been talking about? AoS is trying to develop it, somewhat, now that Hydra is gone…supposedly, but right now it is gone…and AoS in particular has no major villain to fight against. (This lack of a major villain caused problems for ‘Lost Girl’ too, BTW, and as for ‘Primeval’…) There are rumors of Cal/Mr. Hyde/Daisy’s father returning to the show in S4, but we will have to wait to see if that is true, and besides, in S2, Cal was more of a morally ambiguous, even sympathetic character than an evil one…

Moreover, AFO? AoS is trying to have some variety – it has to, now that Hydra is gone (supposedly, but for the moment? It is gone). AFO did not, as it was written before. Hence, why it is gone, while in the long run, it had been a good show. The special ‘sperm whale vs. giant squid’ episode came too late and could not fix anything.

Animal Face-off: Brown bear vs. tiger - July 9

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.