Discovery Channel: Zombie Cats, and cats that are not zombies

I have re-watched the “Man-Eating Zombie Cats” last night. It could be considered a waste of time, but I have watched “Hit & Miss” mini-series, and was in the mood for something different, something simpler than the high-strung and high-notched criminal drama that “Hit & Miss” is. “Zombie Cats” did not disappoint.

What can be said about this special? I have mentioned it in the past, when I was discussing AP’s ‘monster specials’ in general detail, but this time I should describe “Zombie Cats” in some greater details: this special is not so much as non-scientific, as it is just lousy.

The concept in and of itself is not that poor, just poorly delivered and poorly developed: the canine distemper virus (basically, a form of the disease known as rabies) has infested the great cats, causing them to lose fear of people and begin to attack them. (Curiously, the smaller felines, like the domestic cats, have their own strain of the rabies instead.) Even on this level, this statement is undercut, as the humans’ encroachment on the great cats’ habitat is mentioned very often on one hand, and the whole topic of cats being infected with rabies is not being fully developed – it does not go much beyond what I have said already. Structurally, “Zombie Cats” consists largely of several enacted episodes of people (and their dogs) encountering large felines – cougars, leopards, tigers, etc – with various outcomes, intermeshed with much shorter statements about the distemper virus and the encroachment on the cats’ habitat. These various parts do not mesh together very well, and combined they make “Zombie Cats” sound like a very poor version of the now cancelled “MonsterQuest” series (a series not without its own problems, but quite coherent), and not a horror/monster special.

Secondly, the zombie aspect was actually undercut by the whole canine distemper virus angle. Animals with this strain of disease – dogs, great cats, racoons, weasels, etc – do not behave like zombies; by now the modern media has created a certain idea of zombie: it is either an undead corpse, animated by magic, or... still a corpse, animated by a virus or something similar; various shows, such as “Lost Tapes,” “Deadliest Warrior”, and, of course, “The Walking Dead” series have perpetuated this image far and wide. A single zombie is not a threat; it is just a shambling corpse, hungry for brains (and other fleshy part of the living) that it seeks out without any strategy or tactics: it just shambles on and on in a straight line, and while a crowd of zombies can eventually tear down any obstacle (such as a door), a canny and adaptable human can escape them by climbing a tree or a similar landmark, for a zombie can’t climb, and they generally aren’t smart enough to even look upwards or to the side.

Conversely, the great cats in the “Man-Eating Zombie Cats” did all that; they behaved the way that the normal great cats do, albeit ones thrust into abnormal, urban, man-made habitats. Naturally, tragedies occur at a regular basis. But the rabies, or canine distemper, virus had nothing to do with it; all of the animals featured in this show were quite healthy. The rabies does not make animals into zombies; it may force them to act slow and stupid (to human eye, at any rate) on occasion, but they are still quite capable of fast attacks – this is what makes rabid dogs, racoons and similar creatures so dangerous.

Either way, “Man-Eating Zombie Cats” is not about real life; it even is not convincing pretending that there is anything real. Some other specials, like the ones about the mermaids or Megalodon, have a healthy dose of reality; “Zombie Cats” do not. Instead, it is something of a “MonsterQuest” imitation and unsuccessful one – and that why it fails.

Discovery channel: "Russian Yeti" and the Yeti 'family'

And so, last night I watched Discovery’s latest special – “Russian Yeti: The Killer Lives”. A mockumentary, made in style of Discovery’s films about the dragons, the mermaids, and the giant shark Megalodon, it was a fun film to see. It was designed in “The Blair Witch Project” style, as an American explorer Mike, and his trusty Russian sidekick/interpreter Mila, went into the wild Urals mountains to discover the truth – whether the Russian Yeti has killed 9 student tourists back in 1959. Designed as an action/cryptozoological film rather than a scientific one (the Mermaids duology comes to mind), it is very hard, if not pointless, to discuss the scientific aspects of the film. However, the titular cryptid, the yeti, does deserve some discussion, to say the least.

The tales and myths of giant apes and wild men of the woods have come from all over the world, and the territory of former USSR was no exception. The most widespread and used name for these creatures there was Almasti, or Almas. They played a rather negative role in the local tales, and were generally similar to the Bigfoot and the Yeti in appearance (seriously, since when does it matter where the Yeti lives, in Russia or not? I mean, if there is a ‘Russian Yeti’, does it mean that there are also Indian, Tibetan, Nepalese Yetis and so forth? What is the difference? Even the film itself did not really dwell on this fact), but they had some important differences: they were more human-like in appearance (and Bigfoot, conversely, looks more ape-like than man-like), and they were rumored to be able to use fire, again unlike the Bigfoot. 

Some greater regional differences come to mind. The Mediterranean world, curiously, did not really have many ape-men myths; the fauns and the satyrs are different – they are part goat or horse, not ape, but Northern Europe had humanoid giants of their own – the trolls and ogres of the Norse, and further down, in the mainland Europe, the wildmen proper. At about 2.7 m in length, and weighing 200 kg, these beings were just as intimidating as the Bigfoot and the Yeti are, but they were more civilized, they had their own culture (supposedly), and were not as hairy, so they probably could use fire and make clothing of their own. The trolls and ogres of the Norse, were not just bigger (about 3.5 m tall and weighing about 360 kg), but they truly were civilized, complete with culture, civilization, and societies of their own. In fact, if you read some of the Norse (Scandinavian, Icelandic) folklore, one can realize that the Norse trolls and ogres belonged, practically, to a world parallel to humans, inhabited not just by them, but also by huldra, beings that were half spirit and half-real. This makes it hard to decide if trolls and ogres were real and not purely imaginary, one of versions of the vague and mysterious ‘Them’, imagined by humans to symbolize the anti-humans – but that is another tale.

Conversely, the wildmen of Europe, including the Almas, were less sophisticated and more ape-like – they probably could use fire, and were more man-, than ape-like, but that was it. No civilization for them, no sir! Further to the east, where the Yeti and the Bigfoot live, the ‘wild people’ become increasingly more ape-like and animalistic, without any evidence that they use fire, or tools, and clothing? It is non-existent. They are also relatively smaller than the European analogs: the Bigfoot is about 2.5 m high and weighs under 200 kg, its southern cousin the skunk ape is about as big as a man and weighs under 150 kg, the Yeti is about as big as the Bigfoot, though probably is, and so’s the Yowie. The Yowie, incidentally, is interesting, also because it lives in Australia, where all of the native mammals either hatched from eggs (the Monotremes), or are marsupial and have pouches to carry their tiny youngsters around. Higher primates, including the great apes and humans, are placental and have neither. This makes the Yowie’s identity especially puzzling – just what is it?..

“Russian Yeti” film did not mention the Yowie, but it did mention the Orang Pendek as the ‘Sumatran Yeti’, so to speak. The Orang Pendek is a humanoid creature, but at about 1-1.2 m in height and a very slight build, most cryptozoologists and other specialists feel that it has no connection to the Yeti, but is possibly the descendant of Homo Florensis, the Flores Man, instead. The latter has plenty of its own mystery; nobody is certain whether or not it was actually a dwarf race of modern humans, or a descendant of a more ancient species, Homo Erectus, for example. To connect the Orang Pendek to the Yeti family was wrong from the cryptoozological P.O.V. as well...

Getting back to the wildmen and ape-like creatures, “Russian Yeti” was a very good movie...and nothing more. Unlike “Mermaids”, or “Megalodon”, it did not pretend to be anything real, or to have been filmed in the real life. There are appropriate disclaimers and warnings that is drama, not suitable for children of all ages, and it should be treated as such by its audience.

End

Animal Planet: more about the lamprey

And so, life goes on...

The “Man-Eating Super Wolves” have certainly made a reaction, just not the one that AP was probably aiming for – quite a few people and organizations (like Colorado Fish & Wildlife Center, to name one) are upset for their depiction of wolves as man-eaters. “Man-Eating Zombie Cats” (or super squid, or anything else) is one thing – there are plenty of fictional man-eaters, and wild cats infested with zombie virus are not that different.

The wolf situation is. There has been a time, and not too long ago, when wolves were considered man-eaters and were shot and destroyed by people accordingly – and it seems as if AP is trying to bring this time back. Strange, really, because AP is AP, and should be pro-animal, rather than pro-hunting, but there it is.

Anyways, the wolf situation has been measured and reacted against – there are petitions going around to forbid AP from showing “super wolves” and the like – so let us talk about lampreys and their blood lake.

The lampreys, as well as their cousins the hagfish, belong to jawless fish, the oldest group of vertebrate animals in the world. To use the term ‘vertebrate’ in relation to this duo is tricky – neither lamprey nor hagfish have actual bones, and some scientists actually think that the hagfish are invertebrates, just like the insects, the squid and the earthworm, and thus they are not related even to the lampreys. But let us ignore this for simplicity’s sake.

AP’s new monster movie about the lampreys made them a super-predator, almost like the shark with their sucker-like jaws, studded with teeth, looking rather leech-like. In the movie, the lampreys also behaved leech-like, not just getting out of water, but also crawling up the walls using the suckers. That does not work. The lampreys are not leeches; they are fish (technically speaking), and they cannot exist outside water. That is one.

Two, is that lampreys do not quite suck – they rasp. The adult lampreys are predators, they hunt fish that is sick, or weak, or injured, or somehow else incapacitated, (or else already dead): they grab it with their sucker-like mouths and begin to make holes into its flesh that they swallow completely. They do not attack warm-blooded animals, including humans, of course, and their larvae feed on plankton that is carried on the currents of water: they make burrows in sand and they live there – they are poor swimmers, even worse than their parents are.

The lampreys (and the hagfish, but they are trickier) don’t have any bones, but they do have a notochord that acts as a backbone – in some ways they are similar to Haikouichthys and Cephalaspis that were featured in the first episode of Walking with Monsters (2005). Unlike Cephalaspis and others (Ptersapis, Psammolepis, Drepanaspis, etc), they do not have any armor; they do not have any limbs either, but the lampreys, at least, are edible to humans, especially smoked.

The heyday of the jawless fish was the Silurian and the Devonian – they were never very large (about 20 cm long on average) and never too successful: first the sea scorpions and then the true, jawed fish dominated them and ate them. None of them survived the end of the Palaeozoic...but the lamprey and the hagfish did. Those basic, unarmored (save for the slime), homely models of evolution made it for millions of years until the present.

As one can see, the lamprey (and the hagfish) already has quite a few interesting facts and qualities behind them to make a documentary presentation, (as it was also done on River Monsters S5,) and AP did not have to air a sci-fi/horror film to make them attractive and interesting to their audience. But nevertheless they did. Sucks to be them, period.

Animal Planet: from fact to fiction

And so, Animal Planet has brought us another Monster Week, which features the following pearls of bad television:

- “Man-Eating Zombie Cats”. The virus is turning wild cats, from wildcats to Siberian tigers, into man-attacking zombies. Basically, this is your typical lousy zombie flick, with a wildlife twist, where the ‘others’ (to use a genre term), are not just zombies, but also carnivorous mammals, predators, and thus – doubly dangerous. This idea is an old one – mankind has feared big predators – lions, wolves, tigers, bears, sharks, crocodiles, etc – since it was represented by australopithecines that just came down from trees. Ok. This idea got augmented by another old chestnut – that only mentally sick, unstable animals will attack the humans, who are kings (and queens) of beasts. Again, that is nothing new. But – where’s the educational angle in all of this? “Man-Eating Zombie Cats” seeks to purely entertain, tuning in with humanity’s oldest (and currently incorrect) fears. AP, can you hear me?

- “Man-Eating Super Wolves” or something along that line. According to this idea, wolves are beginning to starve and are starting to attack people. Again, this is an old idea, used by natives of Europe, North America, and possibly Asia, to justify their killings of wolves. The wolves (including werewolves) were some of the oldest villains in humanity’s history (and villains’ minions – remember the original ‘Dracula’ novel, for example?) and what AP does here is bring up an old literary/movie cliché yet again. Bravo! But there is a twist:

Currently, the American (and also Canadian, and European) society is divided into pro-wolf and anti-wolf camps. These camps are not all encompassing, of course, but they are well-known and well-established, and they are trying to recruit and influence people into their directions; AP’s special on man-eating wolves plays into the anti-wolf camp, of course, a rather strange site for a TV channel that is named Animal Planet.

Admittedly, this departure from the channel’s animal roots has went on for the last years, when AP began to air less wild nature shows, and more shows like “Tanked”, “My Cat from Hell” and “Too Cute”, which deal with pets. History’s “Swamp People”, or now-gone “MonsterQuest”, have more wild nature in them, than most of AP’s current shows, to say nothing of Discovery Channel or BBC. There was a time when AP featured wildlife, not just domestic, and some shows – like River Monsters – still do, but they are in minority: AP is steadily moving away from the wild into domestic, from educational into entertaining, and it shows no signs of stopping.

- The current peak of this trend became currently embodied by the film about lampreys, “The Blood Lake”. Made by The Asylum, the same company that made “Sharknado”, this is fiction, clearly and honestly: AP itself acknowledged that it was fiction (the incident after the mermaid duology and “Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives”, where some misunderstanding about the docufiction nature of those films occurred remained fresh in AP’s collective mind, it seems), which means that it has basically abandoned the documentary genres and is filming and airing fiction, and fiction alone. 

Question: does AP think that it will be able to compete with other purely fiction channels, such as SyFy and Spike successfully? They have been in this field far longer than AP did, and pet- and pet-related shows are poor aides in this endeavor further. At least “Lost Tapes” are gone, so that is good...

Conclusion: AP has gone from documentary to docufiction/fiction channel with an animal flavor. This is a dark day for all wild animal lovers indeed!

S.H.I.E.L.D., May 13 - Beginning of the End

And so the first season of “Agents” have come to an amazing conclusion. And so, Director Fury, who returned, rather like a god from a machine (well, via a helicopter), to help the main heroes save the day, has reinforced yet again the concept that a person can become something bigger when they are a part of a team; the “Agents” talk about the conflict not so much of good vs. evil, as of the rights of the individual vs. the rights of many, of selfless vs. selfish, of team vs. teamless...and so on.

For the last few episodes it appeared that the last episode of the season – this one – would be about Team S.H.I.E.L.D. vs. Team Hydra...only it had not. Garrett personally had driven it apart: Warren may have had no personal interests or goals, but Ian Quinn certainly wanted to make a quick buck and become really rich on one hand, while Raina is all about evolution...and apparently her travels with Garrett (who may or may not have been the Clairvoyant) have come to an end: Garrett had reached his final stage in evolution and doesn’t really interest her anymore; Ian Quinn, on the other hand, just may. 

Of course, it is hard to tell with Raina – she appeared to be messing with Ward as well, but it is very likely that once he proved to be immune to her charms, she switched onto the easier target of Quinn. Why not, it could work...but that is beside the point. The point is that Raina and Quinn left Team Hydra before the final showdown; to be recurring villains of the 2^nd season, of course, but also because they felt no loyalty towards Garret or Ward or Deathlok and had no issues abandoning them to their fate.

Ward is different, of course: Garrett had raised or molded him into his very own, personal weapon – a sort of a Terminator, you may say, but the problem with the weapons is that they tend to be discarded once a new and better version is acquired – in this case it was Deathlok. 

...Only Deathlok felt no loyalty towards Garrett either and shot him and killed him as soon as Skye had freed his son – good for him. Deathlok (or Mike Peterson) is the embodiment of a coerced agent of a terrorist organization, who is liable to turn on them as soon as the coercion is gone.

Ward is different – he is a fully indoctrinated member, and for him, loyalty to his boss, a very misplaced loyalty, was more important than the loyalty to his team. Loyalty to many trumps loyalty to one in S.H.I.E.L.D. universe, and so Ward lost to May, who took great payback for Ward victory in “Yes Men”, one supposes.

(Speaking of the fight between Ward and May, what was up with Cybertek, where the fight took place? Why there were half-finished rooms, and construction tools, and whatnot lying around? Cybertek was around since 1990s, surely they would have completed the construction of the secret faculty by the 2010s?!)

While Team Hydra fell apart without any pressure from S.H.I.E.L.D., Team S.H.I.E.L.D., of course, prevailed through teamwork. Skye freed the hostages and got Deathlok to join the good guys (at least this time), May neutralized Ward, and Coulson with Fury took care of Garrett (admittedly, it was mostly by setting him up for Deathlok to give the final blow – the ultimate evolved form of Garrett was apparently bullet-proof, but not missile-proof. Fancy that)! Triplett was probably too involved somehow, possibly by freeing the rest of Quinn’s ‘clients’ turned hostages, but yes, he is part of the new team S.H.I.E.L.D. now, as if agent Koenig. Only he is not Eric, he’s Billy now. It is anyone’s guess what is the story with those two – twins, clones, or something else, but the appearance of agent Koenig the second was a nice touch and a nice conclusion to the story that began in the episode “End of the Beginning”, you know?

Finally, there was the Fitz & Simmons drama. Simmons finally realized that Fitz loved her...too bad that it was under 27 m of water, just off the coast of New Mexico. Fitz was all about the heroic self-sacrifice, their initial sinking to the bottom of the Gulf had hurt him far worse than it did Simmons, but Simmons saved him all the same – well, at least she took him up with her to the surface of the Gulf and kept him and herself there long enough for Fury to come across and to save them. Still, Fitz had taken a lot of punishment (apparently more than Simmons) and is out of commission until the next season of “Agents” at least. This is going to be important because Fitz was the last to abandon the belief that Ward can be evil (Simmons was second to last). In “The Hub” Fitz and Ward appeared to have bonded on their semi-suicide mission, and until Ward returned back to Hydra the two of them got along well enough. Ward’s not letting Fitz and Simmons go at the end of the previous episode (and did he shoot the dog all those years ago?) marked his point of no return from Team Hydra...at least until the next season begins airing in the future (probably 2015). Consequently, let us wave good-bye to the plucky and courageous agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. who gave us this rather memorable first season and wait for the next season to start.

End

PS: Raina has contacted a mysterious stranger who is apparently Skye’s father. Since what we have seen from him is dripping with gore, this can’t be good for Skye or for anyone else.