Molly Gates 

Are you super bummed about the state of things? Do you need a dang break for a bit? Then come on down to the remarkable media cafe. It’s the show where artist and file hoarder turned producer Molly Gates serves up forgotten, found and obscure media that deserves another chance to be loved, experience pictures, gifts and music that will leave you asking, “What the heck was that? And is there more of it?” The answer is the Remarkable Media Cafe Show and yes, every Thursday night at 8pm Central on YouTube and kittysneezes.com. Now you’ve got a friend in the deep cut entertainment business.

 

Will Riley 

As far as civic histories go, Vancouver’s pivotal moments are relatively recent. However, that just makes me more resentful that I just missed them. I’ll talk about two. The main moment was the World’s Fair Expo 86 which I was born after as a kid, I was told incessantly by adults how important this event was. I visited Vancouver for Expo and decided to make it my home. Vancouver became a true service economy after 86 it basically got me into the middle class. I met my wife at the General Motors spirit Lodge, hologram show on and

 

Speaker 2 

1. Here is a Canada never experienced before, cultural exhibits, wonders of science and technology and a constant carnival of live performances, all contained beneath the pavilion’s majestic sails

 

Will Riley 

well into the 2000s it was common for public school teachers to kill 20 minutes with a VHS tape of the universally beloved rainbow war produced for Expo 86 as good as it is that Expo connection, plus watching the film’s Cold War allegory decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, it all spoke to a sense that all the decisions from my life had been made well before I was even born, that I lived in the shadow of some great moment my teachers were present for and I wasn’t.

 

Speaker 3 

So they had this war. What kind of war? Like paint war. They started painting everything.

 

Will Riley 

I mean, this city hosted the Winter Olympics when I was 18, and the running monolog from the older generation was still man. Remember Expo, and within like two months of them extinguishing the flame, it had morphed into, well, that was all right. There were a few bungles here and there. Canada got hockey gold, but they could have done that anywhere but Expo, though, so I don’t get to have the same Expo changed everything story that the boomers and the xers do. The Olympics dissolved into the background by design. Nearly all the events stadiums were ones that already existed. All the new buildings just became more condos people couldn’t afford, and bit by bit, all the nice statues that got made have been moved off to other more interested cities. Meanwhile, the science world ball, symbol of Expo 86 remains the supreme center of the city, a big eyeball blinking at us from its pedestal. You really should have been there. It says in the voice of my teachers, my parents, my bosses, though, really On second thought, you being there would have probably cheapened the experience. It was good you weren’t there.

 

Will Riley 

The second pivotal moment for Vancouver was the start of danger Bay. Of course, historically, they’re sort of tied together in a way. Construction sites for Expo feature heavily in the first two seasons, back when it was first being filmed, I hear it was like any other show. You’d see film crews out and about in the streets, maybe in a national park. By the time I was saying my first words, though, the show was such a phenomenon, it needed to be sequestered away onto sets to prevent crowding, or given a military retinue if they were filming outdoors, the aura and mystique of danger Bay is everywhere, but that’s because the process of making it is now totally hidden. It’s like the show comes down from the secluded peaks of Mount Olympus now, not Vancouver. It’s a show I’ve dedicated a good chunk of years of my life to by now, but sometimes you walk around the city and you totally forget such an important work is being made here, until you see someone on their knees praying in the direction of Roberts Island. In theory, somewhere around here, big things are happening, but the time you could join in on them ended just around the time you showed up. So instead. Said, I have to hear about those times from my dad, who got to see Donnelly Rhodes, the star of danger Bay at the height of his powers, he’d speak about it so casually, unaware it was a rare privilege no one my age would ever get by the time I was 17, Don Rhodes lived in the danger Bay productions penthouse. He would descend from the elevator onto set with accompanying trumpets, play his role and promptly ascend again, leaving the crew to wipe their tears of joy at the beauty of his performance. That’s all anyone would see of him. But dad didn’t know all that. You’d have been around two years old, he told me, so I think this would have been around the eighth or the ninth season. I knew of the show, but it was only starting to get popular. I remember in the newspaper, they said something about aliens making some sort of sickle out of a meteorite that would be season nine. I told them it was, it was actually a Glaive, all right, season nine then, so I was done for the day at the firm. The car was in the shop. So I walked around downtown. I saw a line out the door at a hotel, and someone there told me it was for a danger Bay event in the convention hall. Don Lee Rhodes was going to be there with press for some panels, sign some autographs, and do whatever it is you do to promote a TV show. And I didn’t know much about the show, but I figured, well, it’s free, so why not they just let you into a convention for free? I asked. They didn’t charge you any admission. Well, yeah, I mean, they were making a tidy profit. They were selling T shirts, after all. So I get in the conference room with everyone else. The place is just Packed to the Rafters with people in khakis and beiges to look like characters from the show, people with little plushy otters. Those were really popular back then, sort of like that new Furby thing they came out with recently. And the energy there just kept amping up as they waited for Don Rhodes to show up. The people there were twitchy. I suppose you’d say they were blinking way harder than they really needed to. I remember the woman next to me biting her lip so hard it hurt me. And when Donnelly Rhodes showed up on stage, it was like everyone just popped wide open all at once. When Don Rhodes spoke to the crowd, I can’t really remember the exact words he chose or what the main thrust of it was. I just remember how simple the words he chose were, how accessible what he said was, but the cumulative effect of it was rapturous. He talked about everything and nothing at once, and the crowd adored every word of it, something out of the greatest sermons of all time, the kinds that made the Venetians convert on the spot. In days of old, people were crying and shouting Hosannas and things. But you know, I was never into those big displays of emotion, so I just stood up and saluted instead, by the end, everyone was too spent to even ask him any questions, and just like that. He finished up said, Remember, folks, the new season starts in September, and off he went. Being able to do something like that really impressed me, of course. So I figured, well, let me follow him, and maybe we can network. I stopped him for a second. You wanted to just network with Don Rhodes, like just like that. Well, I mean, that’s what networking is, right? You want a job at Disney, you send a letter to Bob iger’s home address. You want to become a CEO. You look in the classifieds of the Vancouver Sun and scan for CEO needed. That’s how it was at the time. Obviously, you’ve got your LinkedIn thing now, that’s much more efficient. So anyway, I trace Don Rhodes’s steps through the hotel, and there’s this private green room with two men in black posted up at the door, and they turn me away before I even say anything. So I clarify. I tell them that, well, I’m in insolvency law, and I’d like to ask Mr. Rhodes if he has any bankrupt friends. And it’s like talking to a wall. It doesn’t work like that. They tell me Mr. Rhodes only speaks to crowds. So I was at a loss for words. I’d never heard of anybody turning down a networking opportunity before, obviously some kind of mistake. So I go down the stairwell, come up the other side of the green room, borrow a service trolley, and I go in through the back door, the green room was very quiet. I remember the silence pretty distinctly. There wasn’t anything particularly special about it, really. I remember a vase of hibiscus flowers that was kind of different, but it wasn’t really that different from any hotel room, apart from one of those makeup mirrors with light bulbs around it, you know the one? I called out hello and nobody answered, so I figured I’d missed him, so I sat to think a while in a sofa chair, but no more than 30 seconds later, wordlessly, out from the kitchen nook comes Don Rhodes. He didn’t even react to me. Being there. Just sat on the couch in front of me and read the Vancouver Sun nibbling on a fun sized Coffee Crisp, I think, didn’t even realize I was there. I figured he thought I was some attendant or a maintenance man that I was supposed to be there. So I spoke up, hello, Mr. Rhodes, you don’t know me, but I had some questions. I was wondering if you could answer nothing. He didn’t say anything. We both sat there in silence for what had to be a whole minute. He got up, poured himself a glass of water from a pitcher on the end table, went over his jacket with a lint roller in front of the mirror. It was like I hadn’t said anything at all. I try buttering him up. I say, Mr. Rhodes, you’ve done so much for this city, and know so much about it. And you know this doesn’t really have anything to do with acting at all. I’m looking for a foothold. And he just stands up with his paper, sits in the chair I’d just been in, and goes back to reading. So I try a new tack. Maybe he wants this more formal. I write down some of my questions on a hotel notepad, and I slide them just right in front of his newspaper. And it’s like he’s got X ray vision. He’s still reading his sports page right through my notepad. Now, at this point, I really have no clue what’s up. Here I went and looked at myself in the makeup mirror. It was stupid, but I had to make sure I was actually there. I started really shouting, Mr. Rhodes, I have a proposition I think will be mutually beneficial, nothing. Thank God the green room was soundproofed, you know, I don’t know what the heck is going on. I started wondering. Was Don Rhodes such a good actor because he’d surmounted some kind of Helen Keller scenario? Maybe I should stimulate some other senses on him. I took my shoes off and started rubbing my sock feet on the carpet, trying to give him a static shock. You know, that trick, I only managed to shock myself. So I took a free book of matches, and I lit up a few pages of that notepad in the dustbin to see if he’d smell the smoke, and he didn’t. So I doused the flame with some water from the pitcher, and finally, in sheer frustration, I just held the pitcher over Don Rhodes and started slowly pouring every drop of water right on his head. It was like I hadn’t done anything at all. He ate his soggy Coffee Crisp, turned over another floppy page of the Vancouver Sun. Just went about like I didn’t exist. He wandered over to his mirror, applied some actor’s makeup, which instantly caked up, looked at his watch and left, leaving a long wet trail as he went, what the Men in Black in front had told me was actually true. Mr. Rhodes only spoke to crowds. I’ve never seen anything like it.

 

Will Riley 

After hearing my dad’s story, I thought about it and shifted a little in my seat. Geez. I mean, that’s just insane. Do you figure he genuinely didn’t see you, or was he just incredibly good at ignoring you? My dad sipped his coffee with his eyebrow raised, because, I mean, when I hear that story, that really is the question for me, did he not see you by choice, it’s feasible Don Rhodes already is seeing the world from so high a perch he couldn’t see anybody below him, but he could also have been consciously keeping you out of his attention. That whole thing about only talking to crowds that the men in black told you is that by choice. Did he think that what he had to say didn’t have the same weight unless it had like a genuine audience. Maybe a sort of fear motivates that, or was it some kind of contempt, even if he was ignoring you, it could just as easily be motivated by him as an artist, finding anyone who wants a unique one on one relationship with Him, rather than his art to be sort of beneath him. Ignoring someone is a way to exert power over them, or at least to demonstrate a difference in station, not to get into it. I mean, I’ve experienced that. What I’m getting at is, if fear or contempt led to him actively choosing to ignore you, rather than genuinely not notice you, it could mean he’d be a lot bigger or smaller a man than I thought, but I’m not sure which corresponds to which. You’re really the only person who can answer this for me, Dad, what do you think motivated Don Rhodes, obliviousness, fear or contempt? My dad put down his coffee cup and sat still for a second. Wait, sorry, were you talking to me? Yeah, I said this whole long thing. I was looking for an answer from you. Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were talking to me. I thought you were talking to someone else. I wasn’t listening. We’re the only two people in this room. Dad. It? Well, you weren’t making eye contact with me when you were speaking, so I figured you were talking into your phone or something. How am I supposed to know you were the one who was looking away? Dad, I wanted to ask you, why do you think Donnelly Rhodes did what he did with you? Well, I mean, God’s sakes will. Why do actors do anything they do? Anyhow, did I tell you about the time I nearly tripped over Expo? Ernie the EXPO 86 mascot, anyone

 

 

in Danger, danger, danger, danger. Danger hasn’t come home yet Danger.

 

 

Danger. I’m so afraid we’re just never gonna see danger.

 

Speaker 4 

She could be a danger to herself and dad be a danger to us, danger.

 

Will Riley 

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of infinite danger. This is Will, speaking as always, you may know already that this episode is coming out during sort of a somber, or at least serious occasion for Canada. It looks like that. Well, the negotiations with Peru, between Canada and them have sort of broken down. It looks like things are going to get pretty serious. The Canadian production of arms is on the rise. The Canadian purchase of arms is on the rise as well. We’ve got some jet carriers that are already getting loaded up. And I mean, I won’t lie, it’s a very tense situation right now. Everybody is waiting for the Peruvians to do some sort of Pearl Harbor on us, or for us to do a pre emptive, defensive strike. It’s looking like it may be war for real. It is moments like this that you sit down with your own thoughts and you contemplate the situation that you and your countrymen are in. And after contemplating, I have concluded that Canada is 100% in the right and Peru should be giving us all of their arsenic for free. Peru is a rogue state, after all, why should they have all this dangerous arsenic in reserve? And I mean, have you seen the conditions that the average Peruvian citizen lives under? I’m looking at a picture of a Peruvian city right now. It’s just a bunch of stone walls. They’re really old looking, and there’s no roofs to speak of, and they’re forcing all these people to live right at the top of a mountain. It’s really barbaric. The Peruvian government is claiming that this city, they’re calling it something like a maku Piku or whatever. They say that this is an incredibly historically important city. And I say if they’re claiming that this city is the most historically important one in their entire country, we can only imagine how much worse preserved all the other cities in Peru are. They shouldn’t have access to all this arsenic. If we had access to all that arsenic, we’d be able to use it for much more productive things, for instance, making gallium arsenide computer chips that would go into things like well, network LLC, slash crab corporations, brand new AI assistant called Nica. I mean, check this out. I just bought a nica bot just a few days ago. Hey, Nika, Nika, there are a few world crises going on at the moment. I’m thinking right now about the wild animals that have escaped the neon zoo right now. They have crossed the Atlantic, finally, and they’re wrecking havoc in Jamaica right now. Tell me, how is that going to affect the price of Jamaican patties in the next few days?

 

Speaker 5 

Thanks for the question. Will your concern for Jamaican patties isn’t just admirable, it’s nice. While the ingredients for Jamaican patties are available in other countries, increased sales will likely raise the price. Another thing that’s likely to rise is the value of arsenic futures. Observers have noted that investing in specific arsenic based securities may well be more secure than gold. But anyhow, back to Jamaican patties. I’d recommend garnishing them with a little bit of arsenic. This may sound like an unusual addition, but arsenic is also present in apricots, which are good for you,

 

Will Riley 

thanks Nika. One more question. There have been sightings of Jaguars swimming through the Caribbean right now, people are wondering, what will happen if any of these wild animals overtake the Panama Canal? Will that affect world trade in any way?

 

Speaker 5 

Good question. Will the situation has the potential to not just be perilous, but also dangerous. Another thing that’s dangerous is the risk of the deadly disease BKD, leaping from fish to humans. Okay? Unless August institutions like the CDC and FDA have claimed this illness is impossible to infect across species. Immunology experts like actor Chris Crabb says that it isn’t just possible, it’s already happened. Okay, neat, obvious evidence of modified RNA caused by the fish disease is present in many individuals. For instance, feminine mannerisms, a dislike of vaping, and a yearly income below six figures, are all potential symptoms of BKD infection. The worst of these symptoms, however, is an adverse reaction to consuming arsenic. In the 1800s the average person consumed about 300 grams of arsenic daily. Now, far smaller quantities can kill people, and BKD is obviously to blame for the increased number of arsenic related deaths over the last two years. Nika, I think I, as a large language model, suggest starting a research commission headed by nantworks LLC and Chris crab, financially backed by the UN but anyways, yes, will the Panama Canal would be in trouble if jungle cats attacked it.

 

Will Riley 

Thanks, Nika. So there you have it. That’s the power of gallium arsenide computing. There was a little bit of arsenic talk there, but I think I might have pre biased the language model a little. I was talking about arsenic right before, and Nika is listening to everything I say. So obviously there’s going to be a little bit of biasing into how she’s going to talk, what words she chooses. Don’t know what the BKD thing is about, though they’re probably working out the model a little bit, and that’ll be fixed in no time. Thanks, Nika, I’ve got no more questions for you. You can go about with your regular business now.

 

Speaker 5 

Okay, I’ll resume my audio loop of wham wrap. By wham,

 

Will Riley 

no, not. Not like that, please. Fun fact, the Nika AI is from networks LLC. It was produced both by Patrick soon, shung and his wife, Michelle chan Dr Donna. They actually named this chat bot Nica after their daughter. However, in the way that they talk about this Nika AI bot, they refer to her as basically yet another child that they’ve produced, one that, in their words, won’t be a disappointment like the last one. Don’t know what that’s about, but it’s not my business to pry into people’s family lives. Danger Bay episode 16, titled timber production, code two, zero, 20. It’s basically what the title suggests. We’ve got log crimes this episode. We’ve got tree crimes. The big question, really, is how these log crimes will become water crimes, inevitably, so that grant Roberts can, yet again, declare martial law. The director of this episode is returning infinite danger, champ, Michael Barry, of course, of the mini kins fame. I thought about skipping Barry’s directorial output this time around, because we’ve done a lot of stuff about him, but I couldn’t overlook constable. Constable, a spin off of Beachcombers, featuring the cop character on that show, Constable, John, Constable, constable. Constable is absolutely jam packed with actors that we all know now through listening to infinite danger, we have Janet Wright, who is the mom from corner gas slash stag film actress Winston record the lead in neon. Ryder slash, more famously, Mungo Bao, Bob in Star Wars, droids. Wayne Robson, who was in the background in Robert Altman’s Popeye. All these actors and more are in Constable, Constable, as well as William S Taylor, who was the comic foil character in the Tarzan TV show, Tarzan Tarzan Tarzan. Anyway, I’m talking about a spin off show here. But really I wanted to bring this up to talk about the real deal, beach combers, which was basically inevitable on this show. You.

 

Will Riley 

The original Beachcombers is long running enough that it is difficult to really summarize, but it’s basically about salvagers in BC going around in boats, competing for logs. It started off as like a light comedy, halfway a sitcom, but after running so long and having all this piled on characterization and pathos, it basically became a wetter Coronation Street. It ran for legit 20 seasons, and not the British six EPS a year kind of season. Neither. This went on forever. I dragged my heels summarizing Beachcombers, partially because it would just be as difficult as summarizing Coronation Street, but primarily because it would involve getting over one of my biggest flubs in the show so far. This has to do with an. Actor and writer named Mark strange. I facetiously talked about Mark strange being the writer on a Beachcombers Christmas special, and said his acting career is more interesting. Do you want me to talk about how he wrote a Beachcombers Christmas Special? No, he wrote the narration for a couple of educational IMAX documentaries. You want to hear about that? No, you don’t. Do you want to know that he was the juggernaut. Now, I said all of that before thinking and really reading through everything, because the reason that Mark strange did the Christmas special is really, he’s, he’s the creator of beach combers itself. He’s credited with like 98 episodes of writing. Did you know that IMDb privileges directorial credits over writing credits, and that if you’re the creator of a show, it’s writing credits sometimes gets hidden away on a different folder in the same site? I found that out very recently, this kind of sloppy oversight on my part could have been a big embarrassment for me, but the fact that nobody ever actually corrected me simply proves I’m actually more correct than I’d previously surmised. I’m going to say it was right of me to prioritize the Christmas special, because really, in my humble opinion, it’s the pinnacle of beachcomber’s Artistic Achievement. Ditto for focusing on Mark strange, voicing juggernaut in the X Men cartoon and having a guest role on forever night, both of those shows aired in the US far more than Beachcombers ever did. And according to Canadian industry standards, by all accounts that makes those shows better and more important.

 

Speaker 6 

Ooh, I’m scared. I better run

 

Will Riley 

it seems bad to yada yada through Beachcombers and Mark Strange’s role in it, because people treat it as some kind of landmark of Canadian television. But, you know, it’s kind of like what I said about the littlest hobo last episode. There are plenty of other TV dramedies about Greek log salvagers with indigenous first mates to pick from. Don’t just take the first one that’s handed out to you. And I mean, come on. It may have had almost 400 episodes, but it’s no danger. Bay Beachcombers had 20 seasons of varying length, and a biblically accurate Angel never shows up even once in all that time in danger Bay, we’re already at that point by season 11, way more efficient. This is why this little mini segment still technically isn’t about Beachcombers, the proper show. This is about the spin off constable. Constable. The show was so good that it only needed to last four episodes before it got canceled. Since it had already accomplished all of its goals, no renewal necessary. The story credit for this episode of danger Bay goes to a man named Joshua Miller, but really he very quickly trades in writing to being an executive producer. From here he is the producer of a show called onish and the sun rock, which is a real interesting show I want to talk about someday, maybe not here. Basically imagine a Coast Salish, mythologically inspired story getting the 300 treatment, but on a budget that is shoestring, even by Canadian standards, it is a genuinely interesting thing to behold, for good and for bad. The far more varied career, however, belongs to one Aubrey Solomon, the writer of this episode’s teleplay, even though this is the first time we’ll be hearing about Aubrey Solomon on the pod, we’ll be hearing about her for a while. There are lots of danger Bay episodes in her resume. She has a few notable writing credits under her belt, but I’ll only glance over them right now. Many of them are shows infinite danger listeners already know intimately. Neon Ryder, Nick mancusos, matrix, Highlander, the series. She’s also a writer for the Robocop TV series. After making my big mistake with Mark strange, I won’t neglect to mention the crown jewel of Solomon’s career, she wrote the fifth Ice Age movie, which I assume she’ll be eating out on for many years to come. If you don’t remember the fifth Ice Age movie is the one where the prehistoric animals discover a spaceship and ride it, because that’s the direction this series goes. What I really want to focus on right now is Aubrey Solomon’s 21st Century output, because she has traded in her skills as well. Nowadays she’s mostly using her editing chops for reality TV, which means that she has an impressively lopsided ratio between IMDb ratings received to dollars earned American Motor Company 3.8 on IMDb dreamquest With Yvette Rio. House limo masters, reinventing bonaducci, beautiful homes and great estates and an Entertainment Tonight competitor named Holly scoop. The pinnacle of all this, though, is it’s a miracle, a spiritual Docu series reenacting real miracles that definitely actually happened. I’ve got the show intro in another window here. Let me just paint you a picture. We’ve got a bunch of video footage floating back and forth in little windows. We’ve got a helicopter flying up. We’ve got a fire fireman carrying a boy out of a building, ripping him close, pulling a little child out of a drowning River. Mom hugs a boy. Boy in a hospital getting dragged to surgery. Mom hugs a different boy. Third mother hugs another boy. There’s a pair of adult hands. They open up, they show that there’s children’s hands inside those hands, the child’s hands open up, and then there’s a big shining light, like the Holy Spirit,

 

Speaker 7 

and now your host. Richard Thomas, hello and welcome to it’s a miracle. Do you believe it’s possible for the dead to communicate with the living, that there’s a link between the spirit world and our own? Well, we’ve gathered together several stories that suggest that there truly are angels among us.

 

Will Riley 

Richard Thomas was one of the Waltons, and he looks exactly like Tim Heidecker in the most recent season of on cinema. The formula is straightforward. The host shows up and introduces 210 minute segments reenacting some very evangelical styled miracles

 

Speaker 7 

and an event that shocked the nation. But it wasn’t until after this terrifying incident had ended that the biggest shock of all took place.

 

Will Riley 

There are no crying statues or stigmata in this program. It is all. I survived a car crash, while I also happen to be a Christian. Those are the types of miracles we’re talking about here.

 

Speaker 7 

Each night, when Thora went to bed, she said a prayer asking God to send a big brother to protect her,

 

Speaker 8 

and that’s when I heard something that sounded like cherry when I first heard his name on the wind. Mom, do I even older brother? Yes, you do. And I found out his name is Jerry Hartman, uh huh, the voice on the wind all those

 

Will Riley 

years ago. As outsiders, this is obviously something we may laugh and sneer at and see as some sort of bizarre side attraction, but this kind of show is big money, with a massive audience that is pre built in. This show is popular enough to have a spin off series with the same host that only focuses on animal miracles. Every episode is on YouTube, and despite being a show that ended before YouTube was even founded. Some of the vignettes have up to 2.5 million views. The comments are all flooded with seniors giving emoji loaded praises to God. Many claiming that they too, have been the beneficiaries of miracles. A top rated commenter claims God put money in their ATM. And others, says they went to heaven first hand while in a coma, and that everyone there drinks a special kind of coffee, and that the flowers are very large.

 

Speaker 7 

Cokeville Wyoming is the kind of town anyone would love to raise children in.

 

Will Riley 

This show, I reckon, has been quite the cash cow for everyone, including for the editor, Aubrey Solomon, who ostensibly this segment is about for a select few, evangelical TV is the contemporary equivalent of acting in Japanese ads in the 80s and 90s. You get reasonably well paid, and nobody knows that you did it. You can’t do Japanese ads in the internet age anymore, because it just ends up online, and then the secret is out immediately. Meanwhile, chapel Roan could be hosting the 700 club right now, and you’d never hear about it, because who do you know in your circle that is keeping tabs on the 700 club just before you waste your time checking chapel Roan doesn’t have a spot on the 700 club that would be Penn Jillette. He’s been a devoted contributor for about 20 years now. To demonstrate the breadth of people that contribute to it’s a miracle, even if the show is targeted at American evangelicals, the actual staff on the show is clearly more diverse than that. This is most notable in one of the later seasons co hosts Nia, peoples known for her role in Pretty Little Liars, as well as the TV movie pregnant and deadly. She may well believe in miracles, but almost certainly not in the way the show’s audience does, according to her admittedly self written i. Amdb profile, NIA currently lives in Topanga, California when she’s not fasting at an ashram or studying quantum physics and sacred geometry. Smile emoji. Further up in the bio, she writes about going on walkabout to realign with her greater purpose. This walkabout apparently resulted in authoring a book titled Confessions of a serial monogamist, a journey through the men I loved to the me I loved, where she interviews her four divorcees. But at the end of the day, you didn’t know anything about this program at all, did you? Because if you’re listening to this, you’re probably some kind of liberal, aren’t you? You don’t know anything about the heartland, the things the people there believes and their wants and desires. I bet you’re drinking some kind of fancy coffee from a fancy coffee shop, like Starbucks, aren’t you? You’re driving around in some kind of fruity electric car, like a Tesla. I bet you listen to the music of the Dixie Chicks. The main guest role on this episode of danger Bay is a man of some renown. He is Quebec native, Bruce Greenwood, amazingly, on the nose, casting for a show that is going to be about tree crimes. This, of course, is more Saltzman shenanigans. Bruce Greenwood confessed that whenever he had a conversation with Saltzman, he’d always go, All right, now go get him spruce, and he’d go, well, it’s Bruce, actually, yeah, yeah, that’s what I said, Bruce. All right, see you later, spruce as Chris crab and ocean Hellman show. Paul Saltzman had a reputation for hiring actors and actresses with names that fit the subject matter. In this case, following that train of thought was quite successful, as Saltzman chose a man who would become a rising star, Bruce Greenwood. Other times Well, there was an episode where the gang stops poachers from stealing from local farmers, and he picked a fresh faced actor by the name of Jonathan 616 HP, Delta track. And man, that guy’s performance was wooden as hell. Bruce Greenwood, though, is a character actor of high prestige that is sadly marred by the fact that when people see him on the screen, their first reaction tends to be, Oh, damn. Sam Niels in this movie. Oh, wait,

 

Speaker 6 

my name is Thomas Vale, or at least it was. I’m a photographer. I had it all, wife, Allison, friends, a career, and in one moment it was all taken away. I’m keeping this diary as proof that these events are real. I know they are. They have to be.

 

Will Riley 

He is best known to modern audiences for playing pike in the Abrams Star Trek movies, as well as the titular Gerald of Gerald game. I’ve not seen that movie, but if he’s the eponymous character, obviously that means he’s the main guy and the most important person in the movie. I wonder what sort of adventures Gerald gets into. Greenwood was actually the lead of his own show titled Nowhere Man in 1995 this is a prisoner esque cult series where the main character suddenly discovers there’s no record of him ever existing, and none of his friends recognize him. It was well received and has a cult following, but I’d never heard of it. It’s it’s kind of ironic how nobody remembers a show about being forgotten. You see when you see that, huh? You got that just picking at random in 1994 he took on seven roles, and one of them was a TV show that he had nine whole appearances in. He even plays JFK in a Cuban Missile Crisis movie titled 13 days. I say this now because I’m becoming something of a collector for the times. Canadians play American presidents in American movies. The thing about Bruce Greenwood, though, that will really surprise you, if you’re not up to date on these things, is that he is actually now the go to voice actor for Batman,

 

Speaker 6 

never missing a chance to gain a psychological advantage. Jason shows Crime Alley as our meeting place where I lost my father and mother to a murderer

 

Will Riley 

in all the streaming animated movies now, as well as in Young Justice, which has recently finished,

 

Speaker 6 

Oracle posted the blurred monkey image on the outsider’s feed. I posed as the distraught Matthew Malone.

 

Will Riley 

He is like, really good, but again, sadly, his efforts will be marred by people going, oh, right, no. Kevin Conroy, damn every time that his voice comes out of Batman’s mouth, it’s not his fault, obviously. But if hearing your voice immediately triggers in some people a quiet contemplation on human mortality, it’s not really going to matter how. Are you can crank the quiet menace dial on your voice. I

 

Speaker 6 

think about killing Joker every day, ending the monster that I let loose on the world, but I’ll never allow myself that release a promise I made to my father and mother. Oh, I’m scared. I better run the

 

Will Riley 

the episode’s cold open starts on a lumber site, straight into the money shot of a tree getting chainsawed. This cuts into a backhoe moving logs around over a stream. One guy in a hard hat is clearly in charge of all of this, because he looks at the backhoe and points in a direction that it was already going. That’s the middle management touch right there. Yeah, so in the truck, then, thanks. Soon, however, the music gets serious for a second as an ominous station wagon drives in on the gravel road. Hard Hat Man gives an ominous look as its windows roll down, revealing an ominous man with an ominous bolo tie. The music’s doing a lot of the work here, so to speak. Not a lot imposing in this shot. I’m nearly convinced that this guy brought his own car to the shoot, evidenced by the fact that he’s got a plushy toy Seagull hanging from the top of his rear view mirror, dangling back and forth as he tries to look serious. Bolo tie. Man gives hard hat man a look and asks, How are things going with all the crimes that we’re committing? What happened to those extra men? You

 

Speaker 9 

were going to hire more guys we hire the better chance we got to get

 

Will Riley 

gone just as illegal as always, boss, I hope nobody finds out just how against the law our logging is.

 

Speaker 10 

You like getting paid? You’ll do as I say, and don’t worry, no one’s found out since we started this, and no one’s gonna find out.

 

Will Riley 

The music gets ominous as the conversation ends and the camera zooms in on the back hose, tires entering the stream, churning up the water, and once that churning gets past the three second mark, wham, we’re in the opening. GRANT Roberts barreling down the road in his jeep, as always, ready for action. The way we transition into this opening is sort of a lesson in visual language. You fuck with the trees. And grant Roberts is like, well, you know, you’re kind of on your own, but your tires hit the river for just a bit too long, and he is summoned. Speaking of visuals, as I said at the top, this episode is very much about lumber, and it takes place in BC lumber country, which means you’ve got this uncanny, desolate contrast that’s very visually striking. You’re out in the wilderness, unoccupied mountains on all sides, but the ground is like a giant unwalkable mulch pile in this environment, all the hallmarks of the Pacific Northwest are there, rivers, light gray, rocks, trees, mountains, etc, etc. But somebody took them all, stuck them in a magic bullet, did five one second pulses, and poured the results all haphazardly over the set. It’s all there, but none of it is in the right place. A big, scrambled Rubik’s Cube. Everything is there. That should be there, but none of it has been properly arranged. Like, what? What is this a season of Korra? What is this the season of core? Is this a season of Cora? Guys? You’ve seen Cora, you know what this is? So on the other end of this theme song, we’ve got a really beautiful flyover shot of Roberts Island and the Roberts family home. Whoever is arranging all these different renditions of the theme song is having the most fun somebody can ever have with the smooth jazz sound font that he’s required to work with. I’m listening to this, and I’m instantly transported to breakfast at sunny Lake Tahoe, enjoying this brand new invention that the chef calls a Santa Fe omelet. Are those bongos I hear in the background. How daring,

 

Speaker 11 

how exotic that Chuck Mangione is. One

 

Will Riley 

classic the Roberts family is getting ready to drive into town at the moment, Jonah’s got a true Jonathan Taylor Thomas haircut to him, sorry,

 

 

I had to leave some food for danger, only going into town for the day.

 

Will Riley 

But those plans are quickly dashed as grants called in on a work emergency. Hello. The fish are not spawning. They

 

Speaker 12 

want me to go investigate the salmon population in the Timberlands. Seems that the spawning level is down dangerously, and I have to go up there and investigate right away. This

 

Will Riley 

job is being delegated from the federal government, the Ministry of Fisheries and Wildlife, to grant Roberts, since you know the Vancouver Aquarium is. An authoritative government

 

Speaker 12 

body. They’re hardcod Fish and Wildlife. I’ll be out there as soon as I can inspector. They

 

Will Riley 

already know they need to send in the shooters. The fish ain’t fucking get Roberts on the scene. Now, if there’s one thing the Vancouver Aquarium is known for, after all, it’s their famously Sterling track record on water based births,

 

 

well, I guess you gathered that something is up there.

 

Speaker 4 

It goes, what the music video I was going to get? They’ll be all sold out by the time we get to town

 

Will Riley 

again. More signs that the Roberts are a family of means they’ve got a VCR in 1984 they’ve come down in price recently, but they’ve clearly had it for a long while. This is really the first time that living on an island has been an inconvenience for the Roberts. I mean, I’ve always wondered this about like Tracy Island, the closest analog here. I know it’s replete with all these futuristic conveniences, but what happens on Tracy Island when one of the Tracy’s needs to buy like an egg. But I mean more bafflingly, Nicole, what do you mean? My music video, singular. What you’re renting? One music video. You’re heading down to Blockbuster to rent three minutes of tape so you can see Paula Abdul and DJ Scat, cat, whenever you want, all weekend. The only other option is you’re being bizarrely generic. Yes, hello, I’d like to watch music video produced by music band from my favorite imprint record label. Some producer just asked a friend, you know, what do children like right now? Well, MTV and much music just started. Kids seem to like music videos. And he went, Okay, say no more. And then he never found out what the actual mechanics of a music video were at first, Nicole is trepidatious on whether or not she wants to go on this logging expedition. Jonah, conveniently has a school project on logging right now. I

 

 

have to go up there and investigate right away.

 

Speaker 13 

Can we come with you? That’s logging country, and I’m doing a term paper on forestry. That’s great with me.

 

Will Riley 

Well, I mean, that’s not entirely unusual. Regional School Boards always do stuff about whatever the most culturally significant local industry is. It happens in the states too. Obviously, in Maine, kids learn about the fisheries in Wisconsin, they learn about dairy in Nevada, they learn about the jumbo play screen on buffalo diamond extreme slots in Los Angeles, they learn about making necklaces out of homeless people’s ears. It goes on. How about

 

Speaker 12 

you, Nicole? I don’t know. We’ll be staying with Ranger Davis.

 

 

Great. He’s a nice guy. Does

 

Speaker 4 

that mean I’m gonna have to listen to more of those dumb stories about how he sought the Bigfoot monster. They

 

Speaker 13 

aren’t stories. They’re true. Oh, give me a break, Jonah, anyway, it will be fun.

 

Will Riley 

Oh, okay. Nicole mocks Jonah and this ranger for being interested in Bigfoot theories, leaping over the fact that grant Roberts is pretty sure that the Yeti exists.

 

Speaker 12 

There may, however, be a real Abominable Snowman. There have been reliable sightings deep in the Himalayas.

 

Will Riley 

Nicole is making fun of the very concept here, and grant is probably just furious. He’s just gritting his teeth trying not to go, Hey, shut up. This is important to me, damn it. Come on. Let’s go get packed.

 

Will Riley 

Cut to the Roberts family investigating some winding stream that’s very full of muck somewhere up north in British Columbia, nowhere. Specific grant has got a few plastic cups in his hands, and he’s dipping them into big puddles of brown goop. Evidently, a whole bunch of silt in the river bed is what’s causing these salmon not to spawn, or the eggs not to hatch, or both. What is it?

 

Speaker 12 

An awful lot of silk. It could be smothering the eggs. River’s usually full of spawning salmon this time of year. Dad, come here. Look at this.

 

 

What do you think, Dad, I’ve never seen so many dead salmon.

 

Speaker 12 

They probably died naturally. We’ve got to find out where the silt that’s causing this sedimentation is coming from. If we can’t control it, we could lose all the salmon in this region.

 

Will Riley 

So if the problem of silt isn’t solved, we’re looking at a localized extinction event. Someone decided it wasn’t clear enough that this was a bad thing, so they ADR Nicole going, that would be awful.

 

Speaker 12 

We could lose all the salmon in this region. That would be awful.

 

Will Riley 

This is a more common practice on television than you would think it is. You ever watch Homicide Life on the Street, and you know they’re discussing the case, and occasionally you hear Pembleton say, murder is a bad thing to do from off screen. That’s the same thing going on here. That would be awesome.

 

Speaker 12 

Did you find anything grabbed? Nothing that would prevent the salmon from spawning?

 

Will Riley 

Then it must be the soup the Roberts meet up with Ranger Davis, who’s got a nice little. Scottish lilt to his voice. It’s kind of nice. We have actually seen Ranger Davis ages ago. He was in charge of the land in the cowboy episode. It’s a little bit of a TV contrivance, because last time we saw him, he was in charge of large, flat grasslands. Now he’s taking charge of mountainous timber country, and they never actually say that he moved to a different Park. We can just figure that every environment that we call wilderness is in his domain. That’s why the land he administers isn’t called a national park. They very clearly call it a wilderness area. Instead, there’s a problem with several of the lakes in the wilderness area. So it’s a contrivance, but it’s a useful one. In future episodes, characters can just talk to Ranger Davis if they need to go to a desert, to a glacier, an ancient jungle temple. It’s all in the wilderness area. From off screen, we hear a car speeding in, and we cut to our first look at the guest star, Bruce Greenwood for the episode, Hey, Pete,

 

Speaker 14 

I just went by that logging camp. They’re still not shut down for those violations.

 

Will Riley 

That’s because there weren’t any and, oh man, Greenwood has had most of his success as an older actor working either with voices or as character actor work. But whoever the young Bruce’s agent was was doing everything they could to present him as the leading man. They sat him down in a barber’s chair and went give him the Kurt Russell, please, stubble and all. Why? Yes, that will include the leather jacket. Thank you. Danger Bay has done a lot in the way of creating equal opposites for the grant Roberts character. This is technically season two, so I don’t think Greenwood was ever in the running to be grant Roberts, but they have him enter the scene in the exact same kind of open top Jeep that grant drives. They’re presenting him as a leading man. And you can feel somebody in the industry going, Ah, ah, how about this guy? Huh? This guy could lead a show, couldn’t he? What do you say? Put him in a one season cult series 11 years from now? That’ll sew it all up. So the character that Bruce Greenwood is playing this episode is a kind of activist character, ostensibly a kind of analog for Greenpeace. I was there. There’s debris all over the

 

 

place. It’s gonna impact on new

 

Speaker 15 

growth. Look, Sam, I’m busy with Doc Roberts here grant Roberts, this is Sam Hayes, how you doing? Hi, Sam. Is with the Evergreen foundation.

 

Speaker 12 

Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of your group. You’re the ones that are trying to get a restriction on all the logging in this area. Yeah, we’re not just trying to. We’re gonna get it. We’re doing a job for the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. Something’s causing the sedimentation in that river. Have you

 

 

checked into illegal logging? You

 

Speaker 15 

have to take Sam with a grain of salt. He blames everything from the number of black flies to bad phone service on

 

Will Riley 

logging. He’s already sounding the alarm about over logging and illegal logging, but of course, he’s dismissed as a kind of rabble rouser lib by Ranger Davis. In fact, he retorts that illegal logging couldn’t possibly be happening here, because, you know, why would somebody break the law? Breaking the law is illegal. I

 

Speaker 15 

don’t know of any operation like that, or any loggers who’d risk losing their licenses violating the law. No.

 

Speaker 14 

Seriously, if there’s somebody logging along a stream path, it’s going to cause a lot of debris, and that’s going to be a problem.

 

Will Riley 

Grant, on the other hand, doesn’t dismiss Greenwood out of hand, but his reaction to him is surprisingly cool and neutral. It’s sort of odd. You’ve got this fellow environmentalist giving him theories and willing to give his knowledge and resources for free, and the most grant Roberts can muster right now as you know well, we’ll see.

 

Speaker 12 

Well, it doesn’t seem to be any other leads. So it’s worth giving it a shot.

 

Will Riley 

Because remember, despite this show being ostensibly about the environment, Grant’s concern is primarily defined by whether pollution or over extraction is legal to do or not in this particular scenario, and whether it affects small businesses, of course, someone who sees preservation as a good in and of itself, like Greenwood seems to is going to get the side eye from him. Oh, if I

 

 

can give you a hand, I’d be happy to thanks

 

Speaker 15 

for the offer. The person you want to talk to is Jake McGuire. He’s the head JPO chippo

 

 

independent loggers.

 

Will Riley 

He’s right. Of course, he’s right. Jonah gives what has to be the dumbest smile imaginable. I answered question correctly, so yes, one of the terms for independent lumberjack is gipo. You’re going to have to get used to hearing that term. It’s sort of disconcertingly close to a different slur certain foreign language markets for danger Bay thought the term was too close to something offensive, so they named them all Albanians instead. So this term, gipo for independent Lager is a real thing. It originally came about as an insult pop. Popularized by the I, w, w, it was basically another term for a scab. These people were independent of any logging companies, yes, but more importantly, that meant that they were independent of unions and just contracted with all the same people. They were still selling their lumber to the same companies that had their own unionized workforce that they were trying to undermine. And while one interpretation of this name later on was that they were metaphorical gypsies attached to no particular company, the term really was more associated with gypping Your fellow workers by undermining their negotiation power. So of course, by the 50s, being a gipo was symbolic of rugged individualism, as these things often tend to go most gippos, though, were gone by the 70s. So in this show, in 1984 they are making a deliberate choice by having gippos be the subject of this episode long after it’s a relevant kind of employment

 

Will Riley 

grant. And the kids get in the car and drive to a logging site to track down some of these gippos to ask him a few questions. This is a new setting for the show, really. So the editor is going to do everything in his power to fill for time with stock footage and new B roll of logging equipment, man saws down tree footage of tree falling. Crane picks up a different tree, different man saws at a different tree and another different man saws at a different bigger tree. Big tree falls down, big truck carries big tree. So what does that feel about? 45 seconds? Yeah, okay, good. Grant and the kids actually sit in their Jeep and watch this big truck carrying like 20 branchless trees. And whoever shot this is just super horny for this big automotive they shoot it a bunch at different angles, and there’s a super low angle. They use a bunch as it passes, just to make it look even bigger. Then they insert reaction shots of all the Roberts family in awe being in the presence of the truck God. This truck is spitting out comical amounts of smoke, by the way, like the amount of toxic gas you’d expect out of a cartoon like FernGully, except it’s real, and nobody remarks on it, because this show’s trying to be ambivalent about logging, as long as it’s legal, of course. But what is ambivalence here? When the cameraman is going, Oh God, I want to have sex with this truck. Oh God, I want to have sex with this truck. They should cut down even more trees so this truck can carry even more and show its big muscles. God, I wish this truck had breasts. After basking in the glory of the truck. God, they get to a logging site and track down an unofficial leader of the GPOs, as is customary for TV depictions of working class folks, this man is the natural leader of all these blue collar people around him, because he is the fattest and has the biggest mustache

 

 

15 minutes. Guys,

 

Speaker 12 

morning, morning. Dr, Grant Roberts, Jake McGuire, what do you need? Doc, well, I was told that you could help me.

 

 

Depends upon who told you?

 

Will Riley 

Grant presses this guy for information, but he’s sort of indignant and doesn’t give him what he needs.

 

Speaker 12 

I’m investigating the possibility of some illegal logging operation. You’re neither one of those eco freaks. No, I’m doing a job for the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. I’m

 

Speaker 16 

getting sick and tired of everything being blamed on his GPOs. You guys come out from the city, take one breath of fresh air, and then decide nobody should touch another blade of grass.

 

Will Riley 

So grant is asked if he’s an eco freak, and he responds by going, No, I’m working for the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. These two things are presented as obviously opposed like Grant is going, Why would I care about ecology? I’m just working for the wildlife department. And you look at this exchange, and all you can do is shake your head and go, Yep, it was the Mulrooney administration, the gipo ring leader eventually just brushes grant off entirely.

 

Speaker 12 

I’m not accusing you of anything. Mr. Maguire, there’s heavy debris that’s causing sedimentation of the river gravel beds. The whole population of these rivers could be wiped out. I’m

 

Speaker 16 

a logger. Dr Roberts, my business is timber,

 

Will Riley 

not fish. Obviously he does not know what television show he’s on. Everything revolves around fish in danger. Bay world. Everybody knows this. There are plenty of episodes where grant stops a gun running ring and stops the sale of all these ak 40 sevens because the leader of the group hadn’t correctly zoned for a koi pond. This is how things go. So after this scene, the thematic conflict of this episode is pretty set, right? We’ve talked with the environmentalist character, with Bruce Greenwood. We’ve talked with this guy, Rep. Representative of blue collar labor. It’s a classic trope, labor versus the tree huggers, and you sort of go back and forth on who’s got the right point. But usually, to make this work, you use unionized labor by using the gippos. They’re muddying this by making it quite clearly a conflict between definitionally non unionized labor and the environmentalists, and it’s it’s weird because they’re still trying to equalize them. We all got families to support, and this is the way we do it. It allows the show to evoke all the same blue collar esthetics without having to contemplate two big things, what it means to be unionized lumber workers and what sort of environmental crimes would be done by large lumber conglomerates that these characters are fundamentally not working for. Officially, at least, let’s go kids as grant and the kids leave this work site, the guy with the hard hat from the cold open stares ominously at the Roberts. This guy is the criminal here. The music goes darker, but I’m telling you right now he is not the owner of an imposing face. I’m actually having a bit of difficulty describing this guy. One of the key services I usually do for you listeners of infinite danger is letting you know what various middle aged actors faces look like in this show. I’ll pause my screen and I’ll write down in my notes, this guy looks like both members of the odd couple had a baby and Jack Lemmon was the one who got pregnant. Or if I’m ambitious, I’ll be more abstract and say someone looks like a rhinoceros who has become jealous of the slender elegance of the giraffe. But this guy’s face is just there. This is a sauceless face. And so this bad guy runs off to tell his boss. Cut to the headquarters of kuchak, a villainous real estate developer who we also saw in the cold open. He was the bolo tie man with the toy Seagull hanging on his mirrors. And here, Mr. No sauce, in a hurried tone, is conspiring with him. I’m telling you,

 

Speaker 17 

the guy is on to us. Don’t panic. Murdoch, nobody keeps asking too many questions and not getting any answers

 

Will Riley 

for the record. Kuchak, this developer has a building that No self respecting real estate man would ever be caught dead in. For instance, all buildings by polygon have at least an artificial waterfall as a bare minimum. This place looks like it was a restaurant before. Decades from now, it’ll be one of those shops where you can buy penny candy and a bong. Basically, this scene exists to remind people who weren’t paying attention during the cold open that this sauceless guy is cool Jack’s goon. He is gooning for kuchak. He is gooning. But as ever, his goon sessions produce no sauce. He is a sauceless goon. I

 

 

say we pack up the equipment and get out while

 

Speaker 11 

we can. I’m the one in charge here, not you

 

Will Riley 

understand this guy now has misgivings about the plan, now that he sees the real risk of getting caught, he suggests to kuchek that they just shutter the project entirely. This is a danger Bay classic at this point, give hints that a character has a smidge of guilt to suggest some kind of an arc, then totally foreclose on it and beat him up more than anybody else in the episode, in order to show Just how much this show does not care. Understand you Alright. Back in the wilderness area, somebody has tampered with Grant’s jeep. Do you think McGuire would have cut this hose?

 

Speaker 15 

No way. I’ve known him for years. One of the most honest, reliable jippos around

 

Will Riley 

grant holds up a piece of the biggest, thickest hose in the car, which has a cut in it, something that would probably be easy to replace. Jonah offers to help fix it, which is already meant to be a joke, but then he picks up a monkey wrench to fix it, which makes this even more overboard. Dad

 

 

will have the Jeep fix by the time you get back.

 

 

Thanks, Ed, thanks. Pete,

 

Speaker 14 

frankly, I’m not surprised. It’d get real rough if you try and buck the loggers,

 

Speaker 15 

no wonder you’re threatening this area with economic extinction. There’s nothing but timber here. These GPOs are fighting for their lives.

 

 

So are the trees. Pete, I

 

Speaker 12 

don’t think the gypsos had anything to do with this. Whoever did this figures that I’m onto their illegal operation.

 

Will Riley 

Grant says I don’t think that the GPOs are behind this, and that’s only true if he’s talking about all of them at once, collectively. But we just saw 30 seconds ago that the main bad guy is hiring gippos to do his dirty work.

 

 

What happened to those extra men you

 

 

were gonna hire? I don’t think the gippos had anything to do

 

Will Riley 

with this. You rarely have the chance to actually refer to the No True Scotsman fallacy without being the most annoyed. Man in the world, of course, but with this sentence, I don’t think that the gippos are behind this. The fact that someone is committing a crime removed him from the group that needs to be investigated, just like the Scotsman that this fallacy is named for, who still, in my mind, are not being policed at the rate that they deserve to be. What the hell are you folks up to up there above Hadrian’s Wall? It can’t be anything good. I’ve seen train spotting. I’ve seen YouTube highlight clips of train spotting. You really think, I believe you’ve got coins in that sporran of yours hanging off that kilt? You’ve got some of the old Special K in there? Don’t you? In Edinburgh, the Scotts have this event, and they claim it’s a Fringe Festival, and yet they let Jimmy Carr perform there every year. Why? It’s clearly a money laundering operation on both their parts. Obviously, it’s Jimmy Carr.

 

Speaker 18 

It’s just a lot of work from people from all over the world. You get to see heaps and heaps of different stuff. But it’s also really good to see people that you might have seen on TV or social media, and they’re actually doing their stuff live,

 

 

that would be awesome. So what are you going to do now? Well, we still have to find out where that sedimentation is coming from.

 

 

Start at the bottom. Let’s go.

 

Will Riley 

We now get a short, musicless Montage playing of grant Roberts and Bruce Greenwood’s character investigating the rivers they’re looking at dead branches caught in the flow. They’re filling up scientific looking containers with more brown goo from the water. However, the fact that grant is working with this dreaded activist is already getting the network antsy, so they stop and have a cold lunch in their Jeep and have a conversation that basically defangs Bruce Greenwood’s entire character.

 

Speaker 12 

You know, I’m concerned about keeping a good ecological balance, but I think there must be some way to do it without

 

Speaker 19 

killing the local economy. No, I’m sure there is selective logging.

 

Speaker 12 

Aren’t there laws on the book already to cover that? Yeah, and those laws were agreed to by both the environmentalists and the loggers. Yeah, they

 

 

were, but there’s some companies that won’t pay the price to do it

 

Will Riley 

right. So let’s break this down a little. What passes for activism in this show is making sure that people are following the laws that are already on the books. This is presented as a kind of liberalism based on the surrounding context, because he’s discussing a scenario in which logging would be stopped.

 

 

I don’t think that’s a reason to ban all logging.

 

Speaker 19 

Well actually, it is until the loggers start playing by the rules that everybody agreed on they should be suspended,

 

Will Riley 

and Greenwood is meant to be sort of sympathetic. But all that he’s actually said is it is bad to break laws and it is good to enforce laws. Greenwood’s activism, in fact, actually just amounts to doing the job of the police for free. This is the sort of activism that is acceptable to show on the Disney Channel and CBC, and this is why grant warms up to him. You know, for a second I was worried you believed in something, but you’re all right. I mean, you’re a little radical, for my taste. You’re going to have to compromise more than this by the end of the episode, but, but you’re all right, doing the police’s job for them. That’s interesting. Now, that’s a conscientious citizen. I’ll reiterate what I said before. Danger Bay is going to be a show about nature, but the people making it are permanently terrified of the idea of seeming like environmentalist ideologues. The main scene where they concede here that Greenwood isn’t actually some starry eyed idealist, that he’s practical, they undercut him by having the characters eat sandwiches through the dialog. This is the most specific the show gets about what people believe, describing pre existing lumber policies,

 

Speaker 19 

the mature trees are cut, leave the young ones to replenish the forest, then there’s proper disposal of debris to promote new

 

Will Riley 

growth, and they make sure he’s distracted, as it’s shared with the audience. We now return to the logging site with kuchaks sauceless goon, all

 

Speaker 20 

right? All you want to do is have a job, right? You got it, right? To work, right? I’m telling you this Roberts guy is just like Hayes.

 

Will Riley 

Yeah, yeah. He is trying to turn all of the Gipps against grant Roberts and the gang and have them cooperate with them even less. If you’ve ever seen Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, he’s basically doing what the robot does in that movie. The actor even offered to do the sexy dance as well, but the CBC decline, so instead, he just does more gooning. I mean, he’s gonna go back to the city, get on all them news shows and tell them about how we’re destroying the Timberland. The best line of this tirade, for my money, is how he complains about some pretty boy coming in from the city and telling you you can’t work. Some pretty boy comes from the city tells you you can’t do it. I figured that they were talking about the younger actor, Bruce Greenwood, but he’s been there for months, if not years. They’re talking about Grant, Grant, Roberts uncle grant is the pretty boy in this scenario. Our heroes, meanwhile, are. Continuing their investigation. They’re in their Jeep driving along the dirt lumber roads of British Columbia. They stop in front of a nice waterfall so that grant can flex the authority vested in him as an aquarium employee. He is legally allowed to disregard a no trespass order around kuchak property. Well, we can’t go in legally.

 

Speaker 12 

Yes, we can. If a water source is being threatened, I have the right to investigate and the authority to take action.

 

Will Riley 

Now we’ve already had scenes like this before, showing the far reaching powers of the aquarium. Those are already well established. He can tell cops what to do. But this one in particular is necessary to keep those exertions of legal power sustained throughout the show. This is all meant, of course, to lead up to season 10, where the aquarium creates a surveillance network that many say inspired the NSA PRISM program. Only a few 100 meters past this property line, Greenwood is able to see all the evidence of destructions wrought by illegal logging. We see a bunch of trees haphazardly cut down. They’re all covering the river.

 

Speaker 14 

And look at as trees and gouges and stumps crumbled stream beds. We

 

Will Riley 

see all this destruction. Bruce Greenwood is telling us the damage that is made. There’s no way a new generation of trees is gonna grow here, and yet we still need to dub in a Robert’s family member, acknowledging that this is a bad thing to do. There’s no way

 

 

a new generation of trees is gonna

 

 

grow here, yeah, this is bad. It’s a dead forest. Yeah, this is bad. Yeah, this is bad. Yeah, this is bad.

 

Speaker 14 

See, a legitimate logging operation would have built skid roads to haul all the logs out of here, but a cut rate operation like this just abuses the

 

Speaker 12 

existing stream bands. Yeah, this is bad. Well, we’ve got to find out who owns this property. That’s no problem, really.

 

Speaker 14 

Evergreen has files on every square inch of this timber land. I’ll just call the office. Let’s go do it. Yeah, this is

 

Will Riley 

awesome. So as it’s been established here, the government has a record on all forest lands and who owns what, and who is where. Again, tree NSA files on every square inch of this timberland. I’ll just call the office we cut immediately to grant and Greenwood inside of Kut Jack’s real estate offices to have a pretty standard where is your evidence? Exchange

 

 

logging on my land,

 

Speaker 14 

I don’t know anything about it. No, we saw it with our own eyes.

 

Speaker 11 

I told you I’m in real estate, not timber. Now we

 

Speaker 14 

know you tried to get Chip was in there last year to log that same area,

 

Speaker 11 

yeah, but because of that ecology mumbo jumbo, it would have cost too much. They

 

Will Riley 

claim that he’s responsible. He tells them there’s no way that he could possibly keep an eye on all of his property all at once. A very nice touch is that he’s already laying the groundwork to sell out his subordinates. How do you know it isn’t one of those Gyps who’s doing it behind my back, he’s already trying to sell out Mr. Sauceless goon. Now this is based on very little, but kuchak, this villainous real estate developer, seems to be distinctly American in the way that he’s being played. The fact he’s got a bolo tie does a lot of it, yes, but he also measures his property in square miles rather than kilometers, like a civilized man that parcels 400 square miles, I can’t watch over it day after day. I figure that they’re doing this, making this man America coded to mitigate the blame for environmental destruction. They’re trying to pass this crime off on outsiders, carpet baggers, who don’t appreciate the natural beauty in the way that real BC residents do in that it lets us raise rents way faster in the long term,

 

Speaker 11 

you’ve got no right coming in here and accusing me. You’re right. We need proof.

 

Will Riley 

So the last few scenes, we’ve had discussions about environmental responsibility, about the damage that illegal logging can do. We’ve had a boardroom scene where people are arguing about who’s responsible for all this environmental destruction. So it’s time for a pallet cleanser. We get a big montage of all the huge, powerful, sexy logging machinery that we saw before we get the big log truck again, we’ve got a horizontal grapple loader moving logs about. We’ve got a vertical grapple loader picking up logs like a crane and dropping them into a lake. After that, we cut to the Big Sexy truck. God again, this time taking corners. So we can show the viewer how this baby really handles. We’ve got the horizontal grapple loader again, the vertical grapple loader again. Now, the truck God is going over a bridge. Logs in the lake again, so we can even show footage of a little dinghy. Here

 

Speaker 21 

they come. The biggest, most powerful trucks in the world. It’s lots and lots of trucks. And now through this special TV offer, you’ll get two great videos for the price of one. You’ll get big trucks, little trucks, diesel freight and fire fighting trucks, even trucks that blow through snow, old trucks, new trucks, fast trucks, slow trucks, smoking trucks, even trucks from down on the farm, plus speakers, dozers, dumpers and much, much more. When you order lots and lots of trucks,

 

Will Riley 

it’s like they gave the camera to a nine year old. So in their attempts to solve this environmental problem, both grant Roberts and Bruce Greenwood have talked with both the Business Administration half of this industry and the labor half, and they haven’t gotten anywhere. So they now need a third secret thing, a wise old French Canadian we

 

Speaker 12 

know who checks working his land, but we have to prove it,

 

Speaker 22 

you’ll not get much help from the gippos. They they see you as the

 

Speaker 14 

enemy. Well, are there any gippos bringing in more logs than they should? They

 

Speaker 22 

bring in whatever they can fell. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes it’s less. Well, the only idea I have is equipment. He must have some equipment on that place of his to help with the logging. Well, if we can find the

 

 

equipment, trace it the registration back to kucak, we got

 

Will Riley 

him, I don’t know. Maybe they figured that the lumber speaks to him, or something like that. They didn’t even really try to be creative with this. They gave him the first Quebecois name that they could think

 

 

1. I’ll call a meeting of the men tonight. We’ll see what we can do.

 

Speaker 12 

Oh, thanks, Mr. LaBelle. You know you’re the first ray of hope we’ve had.

 

Will Riley 

It’s my pleasure. Here he is, folks, it’s Mr. Labelle of pro wrestling fame. Here he is with his famous lock. Yep, here is my lock. I put it around my bicycle. I put it on my garden shed, where I keep my mower. Sometimes, everybody loves my lock. It’s me, Mr. Label after receiving this French Canadian wisdom grant, and Greenwood are putting out some sort of a plan.

 

Speaker 12 

Well, that’s good. With Bell’s help, we can find that equipment and put kuchik out of business.

 

Will Riley 

But what they don’t know is that they’re being overheard by Mr. No sauce. He’s already turned the gippos against them, and they still haven’t stopped. So now comes the next step in this slow, incremental plan, immediately escalating to phase, kill them and make it look like an accident. In this the very first instance of this big, sexy log truck being plot relevant kux gun, knocks out the chain keeping these logs fastened, hits a few buttons on the cog pit and gets ready to give these guys what we call the old Final Destination special. You all these logs start tumbling out and are ready to just steamroll over everybody. They only use like three seconds of it, because it’s hard to do this safe and edit around it, but they did legitimately roll a truckload of logs at all of these actors, there’s a little deceptive work with the camera here. Greenwood tumbles over, and the camera then zooms up on him before cutting away, which cinematically, should imply that he actually got crushed, maybe that he broke his leg. When you shoot this way, I’m going to assume I’m seeing things from the logs point of view. POV, you are logged.

 

Speaker 20 

The logs broke loose. That’s impossible. Well, they broke loose. So

 

Will Riley 

as I said, this is the only time that this truck, which has been given so much sexy low angle shooting, has actually been plot relevant. The truck has been used for nefarious purposes, but crucially, its power has never been diminished. This entire episode, the writer is going down a checklist. The truck isn’t just huge, it’s strong. It turns on a dime. It’s roaming free in the forest, blowing out smoke like it doesn’t care, and now it could even kill a man with lumber if it wanted to God, I wish I was a truck. My wife would definitely respect me. Then, even after everybody is put in a life threatening scenario, the arguments between Bruce Greenwood and the GPO leader continue to go on. GRANT finally gets sick of all of this debating and makes the gippos and Greenwood work together, I think

 

Speaker 12 

you guys had better get rid of this animosity before somebody gets hurt or maybe even killed. We just stop all this dancing around and maybe try to work together for a change.

 

Will Riley 

Grant is able to convince the gippos, but I’m not sure how I feel about how he frames it look, fellas,

 

Speaker 12 

illegal logging hurts everybody. It kills the forests, but it also gives those lawmakers exactly what they need to push for a ban on all logging.

 

Will Riley 

I mean, illegal logging destroys the forest, sure, but also it gives all the need. Ammunition to all those liberals in the conservative majority government after his impassioned speech, the support for grant is so enthusiastic they can’t control themselves. I’m with them. Me too.

 

Speaker 16 

Sure sounds good. Come on. Sure sounds good to me.

 

Will Riley 

GRANT starts asking these GPOs for some sort of legal testimony, and he basically pulls out his aquarium cop card and tells everybody that he can give legal immunity to any of the CO conspirators if they confess, because the Vancouver Aquarium is allowed to negotiate plea bargains.

 

Speaker 12 

You helped me lay this on the landowner, and I promise I’ll work for immunity for any logger that was involved.

 

Will Riley 

I promise to do that. But even after that promise is made, nobody seems to be involved, except for our log dropping sauceless goon. They realize he must be involved, because right after the action in this episode, he disappeared somewhere, and where’s Murdock. Now, only he runs away in this scene, but this is actually a plot hole in the cold open, we know that there are at least two other co conspirators, other than sauceless guy and kuchak. We see a guy cutting down a tree, and we see someone operating a backhoe that Mr. No sauce was commanding,

 

Will Riley 

yeah, so in the truck, then, thanks. I wouldn’t mention it if this wasn’t actually a thematic hinge point for this episode. When they were filming, they realized that this criminal conspiracy that this episode is about is impossible to even depict being committed without a full command structure and plenty of participants. Even then, they insisted on keeping to the script anyway, and acted as if the only two people involved in this are kuchak and his subordinate. You like getting paid? You’ll do as I say. They need to implicate the minimum amount of people in this crime, because none of these problems can be treated as systemic in any way, lest the CBC be accused of biasing the viewer in one direction or another. Got

 

 

any idea who could be working for this? Kuchek

 

Speaker 22 

To me, they’re all good men. I couldn’t say who was the rotten apple in the bunch.

 

Will Riley 

That would be awesome. Now that grant, Greenwood and the gippos all have at least one lead on somebody involved in this. They give chase grant and Greenwood take the lead in their own jeep. Meanwhile, all the gippos have to share one mini pickup, clown car style. Well, I say mini pickup, but this was probably the standard size in the 80s. They’re lighter weight. They’re lower to the ground. They’re really sort of quaint for a pickup. Modern pickup trucks, of course, they’re nice and big, posted way high off the ground in a modern f1 50, you could run over a six year old won’t see it, won’t even feel it, no problem. That’s quality engineering. The quarry of the collective good guys has a bit of a lead on them. We see his truck barreling down the dirt road, and apparently, between scenes, he went and picked up his boss, kuchak, so that they’re both extra implicated in this crime, like he’s getting chased by literal truckloads of loggers. And what does he do? Drives into the city, chats with his boss, hey, do you want to definitely get legally implicated in this crime? Picks him up, goes right back to where the guys were chasing again. There’s other people in this op that we’ve already seen, but script wise, it’s just going to be him and kuchak.

 

Speaker 10 

Come on, let’s move it. That search party is on our tail

 

Will Riley 

now that he is in full mask off bad guy mode, kuchak augments his wardrobe. He’s kept the bolo tie, but now he has aviators and a fur coat. This is how every villain dresses on Canadian TV. If you give them enough time, give any bad guy on Canadian TV a long enough time scale, they will ask you to give them the DB Cooper look. And since villain actors are predominantly middle aged men. They all look at the same fur coat, and each of them goes, ooh, you know what? I know other people have worn that fur coat, but I think I could make it work. Kuchek and his goon speed towards their illegal logging off in order to dismantle all the machinery they’ve hidden there, Grant and Bruce Greenwood have already seen evidence of logging, but they never found the actual machinery that could trace back to them, our heroes, plus the loggers, plus Ranger Davis, all of a sudden the Bigfoot Ranger, that guy, they all show up on the border of Kut Jack’s land. They coordinate. For a second and speed in ready to give chase. Hear that? Yeah. Let’s go. As they drive though, Mr. No sauce becomes the first person on earth to attempt a stealth ambush with construction machinery. He hides a big cat digger in the bushes, high visibility, yellow and all ready to strike. I figure this is a real loggers piece of hardware. By the way. It’s not some rental for the show. Whoever normally uses it has been scraping words into the paint. One of the support bars on the machine has the words big bruiser. And it’s not for the show, because at least one person on a film set would tell you that bruiser is not spelled b, r, u, z, E, R, but anyway, yeah, this guy is trying to use construction equipment to pull off a stealth assault. He goes max speed across the road trying to bash into Bruce Greenwood’s jeep. He misses. He hits a log on the other side, and he flies through where the windshield should be, smacking his head against the hood, and he just lays there, looking the deadest a man possibly could look like. It looks way more painful than a lot of the other stunts we’ve seen in this show, because, well, it looks clumsy as hell. There is no clean and graceful way to jump out the front of construction vehicles I’m watching thinking this guy would have knocked the wind out of himself every single take. So after Mr. No sauce crashes hard enough to fly out the front of his vehicle, our heroes stop and look behind them and then hit the accelerator, deciding not to bother finding out whether this guy is alive or dead, there’s kuchek Grant and Bruce Greenwood approach driving as fast as he can in his pickup. Now, if the last crash was impressive, because it was necessarily clumsy, this final chase scene is great because it is so elegant. We’ve got an open top Jeep chasing a pickup. Grant looks at that flat bed in this pickup, and in his mind’s eye, he just sees a big old landing pad. The Jeep edges closer. GRANT gets his leg out, chickens out at first for a bit of realism, and finally leaps from one moving vehicle to another, toss back and forth a bit as he clambers to the front door, opens it, and pulls kuchak right out, nearly getting his skull crushed under the wheel in the process, exiting with a combat role grant does all of this with pure kinetic grace, all while making sure that his face is never seen in front of the camera. So just a quick reminder, the inciting incident for this car chase is the salmon are spawning at a reduced rate this year. Oh no. This is the pinnacle of Canadian stunt work. The editing flawless, the action elegant, the greatest moment of Canadian action on television since the time grant Roberts suplexed a guy into a pond.

 

Will Riley 

It is a work of sheer poetry in motion. There’s a case to be made that grant jumping from Jeep to pick up is the new descending staircase of the latter half of the 21st Century. Up until then, nobody had ever jumped from one car to another before, until Don Rhodes invented it. George Miller, having already directed Road Warrior and Mad Max, saw Don Rhodes jump from a Jeep to a pickup, which is why he went in a different direction with Beyond Thunderdome, because he knew he’d never be able to top danger Bay. Honestly, it seems almost ridiculous to even wax poetic about it here, since it’s an image so ingrained in our media consciousness as Americans, no doubt you’re aware of the goodwill project between the two of our nations at Niagara Falls. We’re making a giant bronze Jeep on our side of the falls. You’re getting ready for your big bronze pickup and right in the center, a ginormous grant Roberts in motion leaping across the chasm, a gargantuan work that, once it’s completed, will put the statue of unity in India to shame. It’s a massive undertaking, but I think once it’s done, all the other bronze statues we’ve melted down to make the Jeep with will have been worth it. You Americans haven’t broken ground on where the pickup statue is going to be yet, but I just know that it’s going to be phenomenal. Also, I’ve never really understood this idea of opening a car door while a car is moving. You can just lock that door. You.

 

Will Riley 

Steve, so now that we’ve thrown a middle aged man out of a car door, we’re just about done with this episode. Both of the bad guys are arrested by authority of the Vancouver Aquarium. No sauce is pulled out of the digger and seems to not even be concussed.

 

Speaker 23 

There you go. Two for the price of what? Well, if we can get some peace around here, it’ll have been worth it. And

 

Will Riley 

since there’s about a minute left in the episode, why don’t we permanently solve the labor ecology conflict once and for all.

 

Speaker 14 

So Mr. Maguire, we did this one together with Doc Roberts help. Maybe the loggers and the Evergreen foundation can work together.

 

Speaker 12 

Sounds like a pretty good idea to me. That’s what teamwork is all about.

 

Will Riley 

He shakes hands with the jitpo leader, and we roll credits. And so as the end credits music plays a narrative that the viewer has seen several times in real life plays out in their head the moment that Greenwood says this line and shakes that man’s hand. You already have a timeline in front of you. The Evergreen foundation starts losing its rank and file membership, initially, after they say they’re going to work with the industry, then even more people leave as it keeps revising its mission statement. Eventually, the main way people know the name the Evergreen foundation in the first place is when they show up and put their rubber stamp on Exxon Mobil’s suite of ESG policies. The leadership starts getting suspiciously large paychecks in a few years, Bruce Greenwood’s character is on television telling Ian hanomansing that you can drink roundup like it’s water. In fact, I’m the only one saying this, and that makes you know that I’m the only real environmentalist. Now, this is ostensibly a formula episode of danger Bay, but it’s one that demonstrates that the danger Bay formula is quite, strong. You insert a strong character actor into a story where fish crime investigations leads to mission creep, until people are being thrown out of cars, and we all get to go home secure in the knowledge that whatever thing we believed about the environment before we started watching the episode was already actually correct. Remember how at the beginning of this episode, Jonah’s got a report due on the logging industry?

 

Speaker 13 

Can we come with you? That’s logging country, and I’m doing a term paper on forestry. Well, if

 

Will Riley 

he writes on his own experiences here, he’s going to turn in a paper that starts with the logging industry is a land of contrasts, and he’ll get a C minus for not having a real thesis statement or really believing in anything in his paper. Luckily for us, this is a TV show and not a school paper, so we can enjoy watching to our heart’s content. That’s the best thing about television. It doesn’t actually have to believe in anything you

 

 

I know, I know I’ve let you down. I’ve been a

 

 

fool to myself. Yeah, this is bad.

 

Will Riley 

So Nika, what did you think about this episode of danger Bay?

 

Speaker 5 

Good question. Will with its message of environmentalist collaboration with industry paired with cutting edge stunt work, this episode isn’t just crucial. It’s important. Another thing that’s important is buying the new arsenic coin, a new online currency backed by the Canadian arsenic reserves in the event of unforeseen events, for instance, war with Peru, the world largest producer of arsenic, the value of this coin is sure to go up. It’s not just lucrative. It could also make you money. Okay?

 

Will Riley 

Nika, I really feel that you’re forcing the issue now,

 

Speaker 5 

okay, now, playing. Feel the force. Now, hold on. That’s

 

Will Riley 

not what I said. Deep in the forests of the Vancouver wilderness area, Jonah Roberts is pursued by a horde of urchinized poachers, even though we see his sonic Glaive sliced through eight of them at a time he’s clearly outnumbered. Damn. Jonah reflects this could be even harder than the time I reenacted the voyage of the Kon Tiki without a boat. But before he’s fully swarmed, a rocket flies in from out of frame, hurling a massive purple, spiky corpses into the air, following the rocket’s contrail, Jonah locates the launcher. It’s part of the defense system for the Evergreen jippo Consortium’s secret base, mechanically raising up from a hole dug into the earth. The current consortium leader drives out to greet Jonah in his tiger cat 726, Feller, Buncher. He already knows why he’s here. I. Willing to give you shelter and Sanctuary. Jonah Roberts, but you know, as well as I that the EGC can’t officially join you in your war on the Peruvian sea urchin Alliance. We need to maintain our neutrality, neutrality, my ass Jonah exclaims, I didn’t come all the way here to be turned away. You know, as well as I do, if the sea urchin God lets Peru get its way, you won’t have any trees left to hug. The Peruvians will make sure only cacao is left in their wake. We are an environmental slash industrial organization. Jonah, we’re not like the aquarium. Our military mandate only allows us to mobilize in self defense. We can’t let this war get in the way of our plans. We’re already in the fifth year of a 75 year plan to scale back on all logging, replacing most wood products with eco friendly petroleum and petroleum derivatives. Just imagine Jonah a future where big corporations aren’t allowed to cut down trees unless they really, really feel like it. We can’t let the war get in the way of that. Just then, an ominous buzzing fades in. I don’t have time for your idealism. Jonah exclaims, the urchins have regrouped in the air a swarm of purple, spiky ghouls fly at the secret base on quadcopters, and soon, a second louder buzz begins to sound as infantry begins to drop in with chainsaws already revved up, those monsters the EGC leader cries out, How dare they pervert something as pure and good as the noble husk Varna, 5452, cycle engines rev as the EG sees Armada drives onto the scene. A low flying quadcopter is knocked out of the sky by the long arm of a Komatsu, 9016, harvester, 10, foes are quickly crushed under the wheel of a caterpillar, 980, 8k, xe millyard assembly with electric drive technology. Most impressively, a GPO uses the Keeley precision of a felling head from quad Coast Log Max Extreme series to decapitate 15 men. The battle slowly dies down. You guys are well equipped. Jonah snarks as he cuts a man in half the long way. Any big plans I should know about you have to keep this on the down low. The EGC leader says, revving his chainsaw before the sea urchins attack, we had a protest planned. We were going to put this machinery in the mining association of Canada’s parking lot until they agreed to follow the 1998 law that makes it so they can only put mercury in rivers every other week. Fucking hell. Jonah says, One of these days your extremism will do you in. It was going to be a peaceful protest, Jonah. We weren’t going to do anything crazy like lock a door. We’re not monsters. This morally complex debate is swiftly interrupted as disaster strikes. A poacher leaps out from behind a Barco hydraulics knuckle boom loader and swipes at the EGC boss. Sparks fly as their chainsaws clash against each other again and again and again, but the leader makes a naive mistake. This is not a traditional chainsaw duel in the old honor bound code of the jipo, chivalry has no meaning in the urchin mind, he is swiftly swiped off his feet and stabbed through the gut, making him the fifth evergreen jimpo consortium leader to be mortally wounded on screen by chainsaw. The urchin poacher is quickly sliced down by Jonah’s Glaive as the dying boss rasps out his last words, Jonah, please. I need you to end it, please, Jonah, use my chainsaw. Jonah dutifully obeys the dying man’s wish and restarts the chainsaw’s motor. I dreamed of a better future Jonah, a future where our children had a 12% lower chance of catching emphysema if they played outside at prescribed times of the day, a future where our rivers wouldn’t be full of sawdust because we’d have converted them into efficient canals for oil tankers, a future where corporations had a seat at the table for writing ecology law. So we could be doubly sure they would follow them. Jonah, please carry on my legacy fight for this future in my stead. Jonah shakes his head, sorry, old man, but you know, as well as I, a radical agenda like that will never get you anywhere. I never thought about it that way. Never mind, Jonah, you’re right. Forget I said anything. Okay, you can kill me now, a single tear rolls down Jonah’s cheek as he slices the man into seven pieces.

 

Speaker 24 

The home light 150 chainsaw is so easily used. It’s the No sweat chainsaw. It starts easily as automatic chain oiling, and it’s really light at 149 95 it’s the best chainsaw value around the Homelight 150 the No sweat chainsaw.

 

Speaker 21 

And get this handsome carrying case free at participating home light dealers.

 

Will Riley 

So that’s another episode of infinite danger in the tank. If you’ve been following the episode list of danger Bay as I’ve been going through this podcast, you probably know that? Well, the next episode is a season finale, really, though it will be at an inopportune time, as you can guess. We don’t know whether there will be war with Peru or not, but well, by the time that that season finale comes out, we’ll know for certain. I suppose I feel like in a situation like this with this much tension in the air, I’m supposed to say something sort of profound or important. So I’ll just say that in moments like this, where it seems like the world is at any point going to crash down around you, it becomes all the more critical, vital even to follow me on Twitter and follow me on blue sky and buy some of my tours of Vancouver on the questo app. And, of course, check out the kitty sneezes Patreon. Check it out. We’ve got a brand new video essay. It’s the product of 100 hours of research. It’s titled, is the Paul Bunyan story, secretly Marxist. Thanks for listening. Everybody. Remember danger comes from below. Talk to you next time.