Grace Under Pressure—Johnny Mnemonic (Transcript)

Speaker 1 

The year is 2021, it is no longer safe to transmit information. Phones, computers and satellites are all vulnerable, but there is a solution, your storage capacity. I can carry nearly 80 gigs of data in my head. Input the data into the brain of a human courier like Johnny Mnemonic hit me

 

Will Riley 

A letter addressed to the Criterion Collection, Fall 2022. To whom it may concern: Recently, while browsing the Criterion Channel on my Google Chromecast, I saw a new entry for the black and white cut of the Canadian science fiction feature Johnny Mnemonic, directed by Robert Longo. It was a film which I happily devoured seeing the new esthetic sheen on longo’s soul film, his background as a fine artist, comes to the forefront in a way the color version simply doesn’t allow but this is not why I’m writing you. I was sorely disappointed to see that you refer to your hosting of Johnny mnemonics black and white cut, which parenthetically contains all the Takeshi Kitano scenes removed from the American cut. You referred to this hosting as this version’s premiere in both your social media copy and your description on the criterion channel app itself. You stated this was the first time this film was available. This was not true. While I myself am an American, my employment as a touring musician means I’ve made several Canadian friends along the way, and they keep me abreast of their country’s media environment. This is how I know that before being hosted on your paid subscription service, Johnny mnemonics, Black and White Cut whose color balance is managed by the original cinematographer, hit me this film’s cut was, in fact available for free, legal viewing on YouTube for upwards of a year for any resident of Canada, alongside a retrospective documentary, which I don’t believe is uploaded to your service. Criterion’s premiere of the film did not occur until it, as well as every other film and TV program its associated channel published suddenly disappeared. This has to do with the Canadian media fund, a partnership between the Canadian government, state owned subsidiaries and a host of private beneficiaries of public film and TV fund. Now I know that government funding of the arts is quite patchy throughout the developed world, public media funds, often by design, exist to support the private sector rather than compete with it, and Canada’s is no exception. The best way to receive government funding, as my Canadian friends tell it, is to already be a success in America and thus have no need for it. I’ve never applied for arts funding myself, and frankly, the few run ins I’ve had with American government figures in the past have been less than cordial. Regardless, the CMF has had a hand in a few notable successes. For one, they were responsible for films like, well, Johnny Mnemonic and its new Black and White Cut hit me, which makes its film noir and even silent film influences all the more visible. However, television has always been the CMF, spread and butter. Particularly, nearly all children’s programming in the country touches the CMF in some way or another. As far as prime time goes, the best outings have all been cult favorites with lower budgets, but well above average scripts, the police drama da Vinci’s inquest, for instance, the Canadian media fund has also begun to fund video games as well, providing money to successes like Dead by Daylight. I don’t play video games myself. They simply came before my time. But I’m fond of the premise of a stealth game called deceive Inc, the idea that your opponent doesn’t know that a random person in the crowd is, in fact, you with a gun drawn ready to strike and strike swiftly. The idea sounds thrilling to me, but this is a digression. The CMF project I’m writing about to you esteemed employees of the Criterion Collection is the YouTube channel encore plus, which restored a massive back catalog of CMF projects and made them freely available. These shows and movies, the logic went, were paid for with public money, so they should all be publicly available for about five years. Improved versions of a whole swath of Canadian programming were published at a swift pace. Much of this programming had limited to zero home releases, making these remasters infinitely better than the old VHS rips, which had served as the. Previous best versions. This was the case with Chris Haddock’s crime drama da Vinci’s inquest or knighthood, an animated adaptation of The Adventures of our San Lupin, and this was all for free. Now, speaking again, as an American citizen, I myself have no inbuilt nostalgia for Canadian early children’s program. However, I know that any Canadian would probably be comforted knowing that formative shows like Mr. Dress up or the Friendly Giant were preserved somewhere freely and readily available to watch and show to their own children. Childhood is a precious thing. After all, it needs to be preserved for my part, encore plus was how I learned about the legal drama. This is Wonderland, which had an emphasis on lawyers helping defendants who were mentally unwell. Events in my personal life have made this particularly meaningful. But that is neither here nor there. What I meaning to get at here was that encore plus was an unambiguously good thing, which is why it seems it needed to be shuttered. As it goes with nearly all public private partnerships, the private slowly won out five years into its existence, encore plus suddenly announced that all this time this channel had been a pilot program, and the program had now concluded all the videos were to be removed in preparation for a search for prospective contracts with paid streaming services. Now that public money had paid for the restoration of all this media, it was now time to make a wholly private profit, and yet there still has been no major licensing deal. It has been a long time now and so far, almost all of the cmfs programming is still unavailable for viewing. The only maintenance done now, it seems, is generating copyright strikes on anyone else who attempts to make these shows available, again, creating an artificial scarcity in hopes of stimulating demand for a deal that may never, ever happen. The remnants of encore plus now have the exact opposite mission statement to make their video library as difficult as possible to access, and whatever remains available must be in the lowest visual fidelity possible. While, as an American, I am thankfully free from this. Canadians often have a harder time of watching media legally than we do programs that have been centralized on a single American streaming site, for instance, HBO Max, are routinely split across multiple Canadian services, not to mention additional channels appended to an Amazon Prime subscription. This is a deliberate choice on the part of Canadian rights holders of HBO programming to extract further purchases. The way in which these same companies have started to jealously prevent access to content on their own books that has recently just been free makes it all the more glaring. This incentive for private profit also means that many times, Canadians have a harder time watching media from their own country than an American would, even if the media company in question operates exclusively in Canada. US licensing deals are so much more lucrative that their own countrymen are an afterthought. You esteemed employees of the Criterion Collection hit me are no exception to this. Recently, you advertised Matthew Rankin’s debut feature the 20th century, a wholly fictional account of the life of Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. This movie was made available only to American subscribers for whom all but the most obvious references and deliberate inaccuracies will fall on deaf ears. There are no ways for a Canadian to watch this movie at all whenever you advertise the films of guy Madden on your service. Guy Madden a Canadian filmmaker who’s made many movies specifically about life in Canada, my Canadian friends regularly bemoan the fact that as many as three quarters of the build films are not available on the Canadian version of the service. At the very least, this is what I imagine they would do. My correspondence with my Canadian friends is often very fleeting. I think the last time I spoke with one was probably about two years ago. So many times I just imagine a conversation with them while I browse various Wikipedia articles about Canadian TV shows and look at Netflix with a VPN set to a Canadian IP address, these are the sorts of conversations that pop into my head at the end of all that I have lots of time to wait between my musical performances, and sadly, many of them have to be canceled abruptly, so I have lots of time to imagine these conversations. But this is neither here nor there. I. The sole piece of media that has been made available since the Encore purge, it seems, is your hosting of the Black and White Cut of Johnny Mnemonic hit me,

 

Will Riley 

which without color, reveals longo’s vision of a mediated cyberpunk future to be produced not by hyper stimulation, but adept switching between distinct visual textures. And indeed, after checking through my VPN, I discovered that it was available to Canadians. Good for you. The Canadian friends I’ve imagined are quite pleased with it. And yet, after all, the ways that Canadian media media paid for by their tax dollars, no less, is constantly shuffled and delisted and privatized to see you, esteemed members of the criterion channel, refer to this as a premiere, to simply deny the existence of this moment, however brief that a whole library of media was freely available and preserved for public consumption, to dishonestly go along with this artificial scarcity, simply to get the quick marketing hit of calling something a premiere. Well, suffice to say, I and the Canadians in my head are quite displeased.

 

Will Riley 

So this is my proposal. Change the thumbnail for the movie, also change the description, potentially even make reference to the role public funding had in the restoration and initial publishing of the Black and White Cut of Johnny Mnemonic, a movie which I neglected to mention, has iced tea in it. Did you know that please agree to these demands. I am not an aggressive man, but I do have a history of strong arm tactics when what I desire is out of reach for too long. Yours truly. John Hinckley, Jr, musician, Washington, District of Columbia. Anyone

 

Speaker 2 

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

 

Speaker 3 

never gonna say danger. I danger. She could be a danger to herself and dad be a danger to us. Danger. Danger.

 

Will Riley 

You. Let’s get dangerous. Actually, no, I shouldn’t say that Disney will take my kneecaps. Hey everybody, it’s infinite danger. It’s will talking to you yet again, interesting bit of current events to relate to you guys. This is a story in the news about Patrick soon. Shiong. Now you might know Patrick soon song as the head of the networks LLC, biotech empire, or as he’s better known, he is Mr. Michelle Chan, husband of Dr Donna of danger Bay, super stardom. Patrick is in the news as one of the CO owners of the LA Times. He’s been in hot water recently over axing the LA Times Harris endorsement, not to mention spiking editorials criticizing Trump’s cabinet picks. And on top of all of that, he’s trying to introduce a neutrality gage to the LA Times powered by artificial intelligence. Of course, it’s kind of funny before I started this podcast, Patrick, soon, song was basically this total anonymous nobody. He was just some billionaire, but now he’s doing his level best to get into the news as much as possible. Personally, I think that he’s just jealous of Michelle Chan. I mean, really, He’s just jealous of the attention. I mean, he’s got $11.5 billion and that’s okay, but was he on danger Bay? No. I mean, that’s got to be some real sour grapes. On Patrick’s part. People say that Michelle Chan’s husband is trying to slant the LA Times further right. And I mean, that might be true, but once you’re that rich, stability is really what you value the most. You don’t want to stir a pot that’s already at a rolling boil. There’s this dire situation in Peru that must be dealt with at some point. There’s this whole mass of jungle cats that have basically taken over almost all of Saudi Arabia now, and you don’t want to throw more chaos into this situation with, you know, writing an op ed, especially when, I mean, Donald Trump may be making a smart move by picking Jon Voight to be Secretary of State. I mean, he’s never been secretary of state before, so we don’t know what his performance will be. He could be really good at it. So Michelle Chan, meanwhile, is still out of the limelight. She’s hard at work at the entertainment division. As always, she’s busy on this little pet project. She’s been hard at work trying to synthesize all of NAT works is holdings by developing a. It’s been called a TV streaming service, slash health insurance company. And you know, honestly, it sounds like a good idea. You know how people discover they’re accidentally subscribed to Amazon Prime? Well, I mean, what if they were accidentally paying premiums on health insurance that they didn’t know about? I mean, I live north of the border, so I understand getting health insurance, private health insurance coverage is really important to you guys down there. So I mean, what if you just put people on plans without them knowing? So I mean, if you were watching an episode of Stranger Things and simultaneously were making a payment to Aetna, I think that would streamline the whole American experience a lot faster. Some people might quibble with surreptitiously putting people on health insurance plans. But I mean, really, that’s what nudge ocracy is all about in the end. Danger Bay Episode 11, grace under pressure. Production Code one, dash zero, 10. Now this is exactly what a danger Bay fan is after we’ve got all these things, you know, the cowboy episode, the super spy episode, you know, but what you’re really after in danger Bay is a Dr George Dunbar episode, who did that? Those windows cost $35 a Hagan bags episode, not to mention it’s a romantic lead Hagen bags episode. It’s exactly what the 18 to 35 demo needs, a romance between two people around 50 plus, granted as an episode that’s basically a romance, having it star Hagen bags here in some sort of a chaste and family friendly romance. It’s a little uncanny for the people who are in the know, because, in reality, Hagen Beggs had sex with like, about 45 different women a year. Of course, this was revealed to us via one of Hagen bags as many rap singles. So some sort of bravado exaggeration is to be expected in that genre, like it was written as some sort of word play. You know 45 women, Colt 45 I’ve got 240 fives around my waist every day. If you listen to the the mix tape, it’s actually quite brilliant. Pitchfork really liked them. This is another Alan Eastman directed episode. It was written by John Duke and John Dugan was last seen writing the cowboy episode of danger Bay. We’ve gone over Eastman’s resume before, but there are some things that I didn’t get around to. Something that sets Alan Eastman apart from a lot of the other early danger Bay directors is that he has a film pedigree, not just television. He has a lot more theatrical releases under his belt. There are actually a good few Canadian actors that are well known that have had Alan Eastman as their first director. He directed crazy Moon, which isn’t that massive of a movie yet. It was one of Kiefer Sutherland’s first starring roles.

 

Speaker 4 

It’s a story of first love with all its promise. Crazy Moon starring Kiefer Sutherland and Vanessa Vaughn, are you deaf? Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s crazy. Moon warehouse. Ship date, February 24 order. Close date, February 8.

 

Will Riley 

He also directed a movie called a sweeter song, which is a sex comedy, which isn’t that well known, apart from the fact that Nick Mancuso was in it, you’re

 

Speaker 5 

verbin, you can’t even, you can’t even earn your own living. Why are you doing this to

 

Will Riley 

me? So really, both films are like an equal pedigree. Alan Eastman’s choice of movies to direct can only be described what I would call like omni directional on one side of the spectrum, he directed a movie called Henry Ford, the man and the machine. He was the

 

 

richest man alive, but money could never protect him from the attacks

 

Will Riley 

most say deserve. And I mean, to be fair, it is critical of Henry Ford quite a bit, but it tends to focus more on the fact that he was a bad dad and was mean to his employees and sort of leaps over the fascism stuff came a household name and tried to change the world around him. I haven’t seen all of it, but I don’t think there’s a scene where he’s got a picture of himself and Hitler on his desk. Cliff Robertson of spider man and hope, Lang of Just Cause and clear and present danger. Star in Ford, the man and the machine. Then on the totally opposite side of the spectrum, Alan Eastman works for a Canadian Yugoslavian CO production as a director for a film about a war orphan in World War Two Eastern Europe, which called The War boy. And I mean honestly, if you said to me, this movie is a Canadian Yugoslav CO production, that is the level of dour that I am a. Expecting out of that kind of movie, an early, first stab at the come and see exploitation genre, if you will. So what else is there to say about Alan Eastman’s career? He directed an episode of an outer limits reboot where the main character is given access to a multiverse of different versions of himself, and he gets tasked with killing one of them. So it’s basically a progenitor of BioShock Infinite, except there’s much less people looking directly at the camera and saying, racism goes both ways. So I mean, this episode didn’t really go anywhere. I mean racism going both ways. That’s the juice. That’s the thing that makes that premise tick.

 

Speaker 6 

I made myself who I am. I made myself a man.

 

Will Riley 

There is a lot that I didn’t say off the bat when I was talking about John Dugan. I think the only thing that I said was that he wrote a bunch of episodes of cowboy shows, like he wrote an episode of Bonanza and things like that. He wrote a bunch of episodes of Little House on the Prairie, and ever since that point, most of the Epps that he wrote for other people’s shows was basically a slow working retirement. But he does have a larger career outside of that. He had a somewhat inauspicious start in the television industry. He worked on the PUREX summer specials, that’s right. PUREX, the toilet paper company, was sponsoring a bunch of hour long TV dramas. These toilet paper TV dramas basically existed to fill out content light summer schedules. His episode was titled, child in danger. This title was actually the result of a change at the last minute, because the names on all of the teleplays just say, child molester. John dugans, child molester. The script for child molester by John Dugan was in CO production for such a good long stretch of time before anybody said, you know, John, I’m reading this script. Maybe you want to call this something else once, once it’s on television. He really struck it big, though, when he did a teleplay for the series called Run for your life. You

 

Speaker 7 

have at least nine months left, perhaps as much as 18.

 

 

The first doctor gave me from one to two years.

 

 

I hope

 

 

he’s right. What are you going to do?

 

Speaker 8 

Well, I have no family. Haven’t taken a day off since law school. Guess I’ll try to squeeze 30 years of living into one or two.

 

Will Riley 

Run for your life is basically a spiritual sequel to The Fugitive made by the same guy who made the fugitive, and it had Ben Gazzara as the lead. This show actually had a back door pilot in an episode of craft suspense theater. Yes, that’s craft, the macaroni company. We’ve got toilet paper TV. We’ve got macaroni TV. This was just what old television was like, like the fugitive Ben guzzara is always on the run in every episode of Run for your life. But instead of this being a show about a guy looking for his wife’s true killer, it’s about a wealthy lawyer who finds out he’s got 18 months to live tops. So what does he do with this information? Does he make good with his family. Does he go and find love? Does he write that memoir that he always wanted to do? No, he decides to get involved in international spy intrigue for kicks. So every episode, he’s getting into some big adventure for no other reason other than Well, clock’s ticking. The plot synopses for these episodes involve him toppling dictatorships getting involved in international spy intrigues, fighting organized crime kingpins in Monte Carlo. And who’s the hero behind it all you you know, it’s dying man. I do kind of grin at the concept of Run for your life, because when the fugitive was a big hit, everybody told the Creator, whose name was Roy Huggins, you know, Roy, it’s an exciting show, but the moment this guy actually succeeds in catching the one armed man, the show’s basically over. But the longer it takes to catch him, the more times the one armed man slips his grasp. Yet again, you’ll start straining the audience’s credulity. Huggins not only refuse to learn a lesson from this, but actually unlearn several prior lessons. You’re complaining it’s taking too long for this show to reach its predetermined conclusion. Well, how’s this? You sons of bitches, I’m gonna make a show where a guy has 18 months to live Max it’ll be on the air for three years. Strains Keeley, my ass, the second season premiere will have a plot line where he blacks out for six months, so there’s even less time on the clock. The mutability of time in television is a pretty common issue. It’s sort of reminiscent of the Canadian television show from 1975 titled bomb squad. It. Was inspired by the fugitive. And the premise was that over the entire show, the main character would be defusing one single bomb. It was sort of a victim of its own success. The show went on for about 20 years. I mean, they were able to stretch out the plot a little bit for a little while. I mean, you know, there’s all those bomb disposal scenes and movies where, you know the bomb disposal guy, he’s like pouring with sweat as he cuts every single wire, bit by bit, minute by minute, bomb squad got to the point where he was being told to cut three wires, and that would mean about three episodes. Things got especially difficult once the show was moving into the 90s, they realize that, well, it’s still supposed to be 1975 in this show. So they enacted all of these building codes. All these buildings have to be the same. None of you people going back and forth on this camera. You can’t be wearing any grunge esthetic stuff. All the outfits have to be exactly the same. It is 1975 I mean, this show basically kept the flared pants market alive in Canada for another 20 years, just so long as the protagonist didn’t diffuse that bomb, it would be 1975 forever. I think the show really started to lose its popularity after around, like the 10 year mark, there was a infamous plot twist that happened where the main guy, after he cut all those wires and fiddled with all of these timers for about 10 years in real time. It turned out that this was just a decoy. The real bomb was a few blocks away. That wasn’t necessarily the thing that did the show in per se, but when the protagonist had to drive eight blocks to get to the real bomb location, and it took about 10 one hour episodes to do it. That’s when people’s interests started to lag. Remember that this episode of danger Bay is a romance of sorts, so obviously you need another romantic lead roughly the same age as Hagen bags was at this era and the danger Bay producers chose an actress by the name of Sheila Moore. Her acting career may have had some sort of an inauspicious start other than danger Bay, of course, Sheila Moore’s most famous role was actually her first. She had a role in the Toronto Film Mystery Science Theater favorite, overdrawn at the memory bank.

 

 

You are my with Bernays

 

Will Riley 

sauce. I won’t get too deep into overdrawn at the memory bank. You probably already know what it’s about. Raul Julia goes through the matrix with a PBS budget. Basically, Moore’s character exists in a video log, basically explaining the last time somebody got stuck in the matrix for too long and how it destroyed their brain. Patient’s

 

Speaker 9 

identity. Cube was connected to the computer while cloning was attempted. Cube must remain active or electron loss results, we used the central computer to simulate life experience, but we had to set up a control interface from outside.

 

Will Riley 

She was in other stuff. She was in The New Adventures of beams Baxter. Of course, that show keeps on coming up. That’s notable because they misspelled her name in the credits. Tears and laughter the Joan and Melissa Rivers story. She had a bit role in a remake of Harvey, you know, the invisible six foot tall rabbit thing. But if it weren’t for danger Bay, I think that Sheila Moore’s main legacy would be people talking about her and going, do you know the person that you couldn’t make out their dialog because Tom Serpa was mock crying over all of it, we plugged

 

Speaker 9 

Watson in to monitor what happened. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d realized the awful danger he was in. Watson was tired, but still maintaining contact.

 

Will Riley 

Overdrawn at the memory bank may have been made for American public broadcasters, but it is distinctly Canadian in that it gives a special thanks and shout out to Alcan and his film that their offices. Alcan, the giant Canadian mining conglomerate that is now owned by Rio Tinto, that’s the power of the public private partnership. I mean, just think about it. We started off with seeing TV shows that were sponsored by toilet paper companies and then Kraft macaroni and cheese. But now with this film, we’ve advanced as a society far enough that we’re promoting international mining oligopolies. I mean, that’s professionalism. That’s a real movie. Really, there’s not a lot I can say about overdrawn at the memory bank. That hasn’t been said by MST 3k and, you know, other online film critics. So I’ll leave you instead with this little piece of advice. It’s based on something that I do. You might have already heard me say it when I’m really down and the world seems to be really awful, and I. I look around and it’s just my life is a landscape of bleak, gray nothingness. Under my breath, I will slowly, quietly go finger, you are mine, and I’ll feel just a little bit better the tightness around my head will sort of loosen up. You

 

Will Riley 

so we start off this episode introduced to a brand new cultural custom for the Vancouver Aquarium. Do you know how at the end of a big football game, all the players dump a bunch of ice Gatorade onto their coach? Well, apparently, at the Vancouver Aquarium, if it’s your birthday, they will throw you into a salt water tank. And I mean, that has about as much salt as Gatorade does anyway, so it’s comparable. So we’ve got a bunch of people in unnecessary lab coats, dragging Michelle chan kicking and screaming, hang her over the tank as they sing happy birthday and speech. Given that this is a tank in the back rooms of the aquarium, I can only assume that this is a tank that’s medical in nature, like, oh yeah, we had a beluga cot in here for about two months as he was dying of pneumonia. Anyway, in you go Happy Birthday. Quick rundown on the unique looks of the people carrying Michelle chan here on the left, we’ve got basically what Jim Jones would look like if he were a woman. On the right, we’ve got a guy who looks like if chief O’Brien from Deep Space Nine got on the Atkins diet and had a moisturizer routine. This unlikely duo is carrying Michelle Chan, Dr Donna’s legs further in the back, carrying her by her arms. However, is Duke, the character whose name I can remember, despite not saying any lines, because he’s the only black guy in the entire Vancouver Aquarium. Okay,

 

Speaker 2 

dude, could you clean it up please? No sign of another race. He

 

Will Riley 

looks considerably more normal than the other aquarium people, but there is something going on with the choices his stylist made. I can easily imagine on like something like a audition brief, if he’s required to write one. You know, some people I’ve worked with tell me that I look a little bit like Lionel Richie, and in a limited way, that’s sort of true. But if you can imagine, if you remember animating in Flash decades ago, if you did a shape tween between a picture of Lionel Richie and a picture of Little Richard Duke, would fall somewhere in the middle of that AUTO ANIMATION.

 

Will Riley 

Michelle chan stands up. She’s got a big Oh, shucks. Oh, you face. But you can tell that in the back of her mind, she’s making a mental photograph of everyone’s faces. One time a billionaire, every single one of you is fucking toast, pal, just wait till you see the stuff I write about you in the LA Times. You’re lucky. We’re not back in South Africa right now, buddy, you have no idea what I’d get away with. I mean, it’s pure speculation that I figure that something must have negatively affected their career. So many other danger Bay characters got their own spin off TV shows, Darth Vader of junior tennis, of course, the open shirt cop. He got his own TV show, Hagen bags, obviously. And despite all the clamor from fans, there is no spin off series for Jim Jones girl and chief O’Brien Duke did get his own TV spin off. But, I mean, that’s sort of a weird edge case, because, I mean, he is the primary protagonist. The show is named after him, yet somehow none of the scripts have any lines for him. Still, to this day, nobody really knows what Duke’s voice sounds like. Okay, Duke, would you clean it up please? After everyone is finished celebrating around the beluga sick bed, Hagan begs shows up from off screen. Oh,

 

Speaker 10 

Grant, sorry, I’m late. Telegram for you. Just arrived. Thanks, George. A

 

Will Riley 

telegram in the mid 80s. I know that I said at the beginning of the episode, John Dugan has more of a resume than as a Western writer, but it is a little distressing that he, in his head went, Okay, I’ve got to insert some modern technology into this to make sure that it’s not a cowboy show. I know a telegram. I mean, like this will be a modern day Telegram, like you won’t even need to announce stop anymore.

 

Speaker 2 

Oh, guess what? Kids, your Aunt Grace is arriving tomorrow morning.

 

 

Oh, how nice, isn’t

 

Will Riley 

it? And you can immediately see everybody’s big smiles get wiped right off their face. The audience is now properly prepared for the you old bat type joke archetypes. Joyce isn’t in the know for why everybody is moaning at the idea of Aunt Grace being here. Funnily enough, though, Hagen bags is and he is more worried than anybody else in the group, isn’t it, for reasons that we will see after the theme song. This theme song is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, with all of the action scenes. None of this is showing up in this episode after the cold open, we’ve got a bunch of reused B roll of the aquarium, a lot of stuff we already saw in the Acadian the whale episode. I’m thinking about it. And compared to now, back then, there really wasn’t the same attempt by aquariums to design themselves, to pretend they were some kind of extension of the natural environment. Nowadays, the tanks in the Vancouver Aquarium have a bunch of craggy gray stone around them. Here, the aquarium is mostly an assortment of beiges. The trainers are standing on this neat, swooping, basically 60s futurist ramp, dangling orca treats on a pole above them to get a leap or two. Nowadays, of course, all of these big institutions have a sort of architectural K Fave about them. Oh, what? We didn’t bring these orcas here. We just found this pool here while we were walking in the park one day, the orcas were already living here. Dr Donna’s birthday celebration continues in a break room somewhere. It’s festooned with balloons and streamers, but they’ve all been tied onto a giant blue marlin they’ve got hanging on the wall. Now, of course, this is a tried and true Canadian tradition. Everybody loves the party Marlin. I remember all those beer commercials the party. Marlon just sort of swims through the air with his big nose, looks at the camera and goes, I’m here to have a good time. I hope you get the point. People always say that when you lie, your nose grows. Well, it’s true. Look at my nose. This is what happened the one time I said, I hate to party. And then, of course, he opens up a 24 pack of coconies and shares him around. Yeah, we love you. Party, Marlon. It was pretty smart of them to turn him into a beer mascot when they did instead of having him keep selling cigarettes, if the party, Marlon was still selling cigarettes, I mean, there’d be all these rules and regulations. Hagen Beggs and the Roberts family are sort of glumly staring into their chocolate cakes.

 

Speaker 2 

Don’t get us wrong. Joyce, we love our Aunt Grace, and she loves us, doesn’t she? George, well, I’m sorry, George, I shouldn’t ask you that under present circumstances,

 

Will Riley 

everybody has some standard comedic complaints about their Aunt Grace. Anyway,

 

 

she’s really good, too neat. Maybe that every

 

Speaker 2 

time grace comes to visit us, it’s a little like living at the inspector general.

 

 

We had a bat in our hatches. Shape up and snap too

 

Will Riley 

She’s overly fastidious. She’s crazy about managing other people’s cleanliness. She controls how other people eat.

 

Speaker 2 

Grace has a strong maternal instinct. I should know she’s my older sister. Unfortunately, she still treats me like I was her kid brother,

 

Will Riley 

basically establishing this character in the long tradition of old school. Let’s kill my wife. Comedy. But Hagen bags is wary for an entirely different reason.

 

Speaker 10 

She just wants the best for you, kids. Grace has an excellent mind, precise,

 

Speaker 11 

orderly. Do you want to join the welcoming committee?

 

Speaker 10 

No, thanks. I can’t make it grant. I have to talk to you right away in private. What’s wrong with him? I’ll explain it later.

 

Will Riley 

You see, he and Aunt Grace have had a previous fling, and, I mean, of course, they have. He’s the other let’s be a nuisance to the protagonist character in this show. However, it seems that she broke off an engagement, and he doesn’t really know what to do.

 

Speaker 10 

It’s been three years since I’ve seen her. Every year when she comes to visit you and the kids I’m next year I’m not around. Yeah, I’ve noticed

 

Will Riley 

they don’t really establish the timeline. But she was married to some sort of travelog writer, there’s another South Africa connection that goes unexplored in this show. And then, after he died, she almost married Dr George Dunbar, and then suddenly broke things off. Why

 

Speaker 10 

couldn’t Grace and I just be friends. Just because she broke off our engagement left me in the lurch. After all, it’s not her fault. She doesn’t love me, is it?

 

Will Riley 

Now, this exposition happens between two scenes, one in the party room with the Marlin, and then another as grant and George are walking around inside the actual aquarium. What’s very odd about this scene, though, is that the B roll that we saw of the aquarium is quite old, and the aquarium is now totally different. It’s still not trying to look like it’s part of the natural environment, but between when they film the B roll and when they’re filming this scene, now, the aquarium has become brutalist. None of that beige Is there anymore, none of those 60s. Oops. It’s all a bunch of raw, wet concrete at right angles, with rust coming down the surface of the wall from totally unknown sources, totally different from the B roll that we just saw a minute ago. It’s sort of grim and imposing, but I have to admit, I do sort of like it. Granted, I spent a considerable amount of my time learning in Simon Fraser University campus, and that’s the place that movie studios film at if they need a stand in for North Korea. So maybe I have some Stockholm Syndrome about this esthetic. There’s an episode of the old Sci Fi Channel show sliders, where they end up in a alternate reality, where the communists win the Cold War, and it’s clear that they wanted to film at SFU, but didn’t actually have the budget to do it, because they have a character look directly at the camera and say, it used to be a university, and now it’s a communist prison camp, while I contemplate the creative decisions that went into making a brutalist aquarium, Hagan bags is still agonizing over what to do about grace. He’s been avoiding her for many years after the disengagement. Grant gives basically no advice, but George Dunbar basically pulls out whatever directions he wants from the blank statements that grant is making.

 

Speaker 10 

After all, it’s not her fault. She doesn’t love me, is it? It’s mine.

 

 

Who’s to say,

 

Speaker 10 

Thanks grant you’ve been a brick. Help me make up my mind this year I’m going to do absolutely nothing.

 

Will Riley 

Let the chips fall where they lay. He resolves that he will do absolutely nothing in regards to grace, but he will also take no steps to actively avoid her now, Dr George Dunbar is going to have to be careful here, because if you’ve lived in Vancouver as long as I have, you know that in this city, I will not take any steps to actively avoid you. Is tantamount to a marriage proposal here. What are friends for? Maybe

 

 

I should open an office.

 

Will Riley 

This crack that grant makes under his breath is actually sort of an oblique reference. There was a CTV mini series that Donnelly Rhodes starred in, and he played a psychiatrist. So every episode would be a new patient. So there was one where the patient had this disorder with his attention deficit. It turned out he was possessed by a demon. There was another episode where there was a woman and she was very depressed after her postpartum period. It turned out that she too was possessed by a demon. There was another one where a patient was experiencing a lot of stress post trauma. And you might have an idea where this is going. You’ll note in this scene that as grant and George Dunbar are walking around the aquarium, that the orcas in the brutalist tank are just lying completely motionless, just floating above the surface like no movement whatsoever. It’s like they’re dead. Now, when I first saw this, I sort of thought it was kind of an alarming image. And then I did a little bit of studying, and I realized, oh, no, these orcas were just on strike. The Orca screen guild had a quick Labor Action in protest. They were looking to get a bit more herring, and it was quite successful. The Orca screen guild merged with ACTRA in 1994 that’s why all Canadian actors to this day still get a small packet of seal meet with all the residuals they get in the mail.

 

Will Riley 

Returning to Roberts Island, we see danger, the river otter for the first time in many episodes, just crawling around on the sofa, making a lot of pre recorded squeaky sound effects. You know, as always, as Jonah and Nicole dust up the Roberts Island estate in preparation for Aunt Grace’s arrival.

 

 

Don’t dad Bill,

 

Speaker 12 

you know, it’s the end of summer, and we’re doing spring cleaning. This place is so squeaky clean now It hurts my eyes. Yeah, a

 

Will Riley 

few more complaints about cleanliness, and then they grab into a hidden stash of junk food that the ant hasn’t already confiscated.

 

Speaker 12 

Good thing, I stash some forbidden fruits. Name your poison. I’ll take the chocolate. Jonah

 

Will Riley 

reaches into a mini bag of chips, making sure that the old Dutch logo is prominently displayed towards the camera a company that only sells potato chips and beef jerky. Can’t be all bad. I guess they’re the only company around that still sells their potato chips in a cereal box style. You know, they put it in a bag, and then they put the bag in a box. That’s the old style, the old classic way, the totally unnecessary use of material way. I don’t. Know if old Dutch paid for some brand placement here, but it is just as likely that the people running danger Bay decided they needed to put this here to fit with Canadian content laws, like a quick rundown on can CON laws. You are making a TV show with an explicit attempt at US market crossover, and you haven’t precisely done anything that you should do to demonstrate to the government that this program is culturally Canadian, you’ve made the most Yankee Doodle ass show there ever was. Everybody’s talking about how much they hate maintaining highways and how much they love wearing shoes indoors. Well, no matter, just give free advertising to brands that are culturally perceived as Canadian here, and you’ll be sufficiently Canadian every time one of your characters refers to it as a beanie instead of a tuk, have them take a bite of a delicious a and w hamburger. I mean, old Dutch isn’t even a Canadian brand. It’s an American brand, but it’s regional in the US and national in Canada, because American companies treat Canada as one big region, you get a bunch of American companies who’ve got mission statements that read something like our company services Wisconsin, Michigan and all 10,000 square kilometers of the Dominion of Canada, the fact that they’ve sacrificed some of their factory line work to making ketchup chips. Basically makes it run by the Mounties in the CBCS eyes. But even if they put maple leaves on the logos for their Canadian packaging, old Dutch is not Canadian. Hell, they’re not even Dutch. Some American guy went, well, I’ll call this company old Dutch, because the Dutch are famously very clean people, and generally that’s true. Just don’t let them near any tins of boot polish. If you’re an American and you’re watching a movie and somebody says there are three things I love in this world, going to a mega church, buying guns very fast, and the Calgary Flames. Take a look at my Calgary Flames jersey that I’ve got hung up on this wall here. Now you’ll know what’s going on. For Nicole’s part, I’m pretty sure she’s eating a Coffee Crisp, another non Canadian, but Canadian feeling brand, I figure that particular ad contract never really cleared for Americans who don’t have it in their regions. Coffee Crisp is a famous candy bar by Nestle that is beloved the world over for not tasting anything like coffee, coffee crisp. It’s a great light snack. You love the great non coffee taste of Coffee Crisp. People love how little this thing tastes like coffee. They changed the recipe at some point to try and make it more authentically coffee tasting. But that didn’t fly. It was very short lived. You know, a string of assassinations put into all of that, we’re back to a zero copy taste chocolate bar. You’d think all those killings would be a bigger story, but really it was a copycat killing, reminiscent of the crap dinner murders. So it never really got much limelight. I’ll take the chocolate coming down the stairs, catching these kids in the active product placement is Aunt Grace.

 

 

What are you doing?

 

Will Riley 

You imps dressed very much in the female Columbo villain Manor, a brownish mauve suede chump suit with a cinch belt as well as an ascot that’s been attached to her neck by a skin graft.

 

 

I thought I got rid of all that junk food.

 

 

Well, we were hungry. Aunt Grace, we

 

Speaker 9 

all have a delicious, well balanced meal ready for you in an hour, liver Yuck, and baked potatoes and a mixed green salad,

 

Will Riley 

referring to the most white bread children on God’s green earth as imps. Aunt Grace sends them off to their room.

 

Speaker 13 

We just cleaned them yesterday. Today, they’re a mess, and in

 

Will Riley 

a small moment that wouldn’t fly on today’s TV, she gives a quick backhanded spank to one of them to make them go up the stairs faster

 

 

go along, my dears,

 

Will Riley 

this is very weird to see on your TV screen in 2025 but you gotta remember, this show was actually pretty progressive for its time. I mean, God, think back to Leave It to Beaver. You know, like every episode, an adult would find Eddie haskell’s scheme out, and they’d shoot him. After all, the talk of cleanliness, Grace turns around and she sees danger is just lying on this white sofa, wriggling around, just getting every inch of her skin on the seats, a sort of conflict between grace and danger is supposed to be going on here. They’re putting growling sound effects over the soundtrack, but you’re just looking at her, and you can imagine her just going, love me, love me. Just lying on a totally white soap up just makes this honor look even more pure, not at a risk of dirtying at all. This scene is supposed to be a prim and proper lady looking at this wild animal and going, Oh, why I never but it is the cutest. God damn. Shot we’ve ever had of danger for this entire show so far.

 

Speaker 2 

Hi, Grace, hi. I thought I’d knock off early today and spend a little time with you. Good.

 

 

I’ve been wanting to talk to you,

 

Will Riley 

Grace and grant, meet up. They have a quick catch up session, a bunch of expository conversations, except they’re not so much conversations as they are disconcerting, collections of actions and statements. It starts with grant giving her a quick greeting, peck on the cheek. Okay, you know, fine, polite. I’ve been

 

Speaker 9 

wanting to talk to you. I sent the children upstairs to do the homework. But what’s

 

Will Riley 

weird is Grace asking her brother right after that, did you shave today? I

 

 

sent the children upstairs to do the homework. Did you shave today? Yes,

 

Speaker 2 

I shaved today. I put on a clean shirt. I even changed my hand to wear. Good boy.

 

Will Riley 

All right, I get that this character is supposed to be fastidious and focused on people’s cleanliness, but paying close attention to how your brother’s skin feels when he kisses you triggers a few little alarm bells in my head and then grants response. You know, a fast growing beard is a sign of virility. Why are you making this a conversation with your sibling? You know, a fast

 

 

growing beard is

 

Speaker 9 

a sign of virility. That’s partly what I want to talk to you about. Should

 

Will Riley 

I be here? Should I be listening to this? I feel like something wrong is happening. Please stop this. I do not want to see any ao three users making grant and Grace slash fit like it’s already a bad undertaking to begin with, because nobody knows how to port monto the names grant and Grace together. What is it with everyone and alliterative names in this show, Grant and grace, Katie and Kelly Coffey, I’m distracting myself from Grant telling his sister about his virility by looking around the house. It’s understandable that the Roberts household is very aquatic themed in a lot of ways, lots of boating pictures and the like. But for some reason, in the kitchen, there’s a big two dimensional cow standee on the mantelpiece, and nobody explains why it’s there. It doesn’t even make sense. Timeline wise, the farm episode hasn’t been filmed yet. Mercifully, this virility discussion goes off in a different direction. Grant

 

Speaker 9 

you’re too young and vigorous not to have married again. The children need a woman’s influence in all areas of their life. What about Joyce?

 

Speaker 2 

What about Joyce? I like her. I like her too. She’s a good friend. Joyce,

 

Will Riley 

the pontoon plane pilot, the two reasons seem to be she’s good enough with the kids. And there was that one scene more than five episodes ago where he was interested in the makeup she was wearing. Oh,

 

Speaker 2 

hi, Joyce. Am I gonna make you late for opening curtain with this blood sample.

 

Will Riley 

She’s like, 10 years his junior, and he’s her boss, I think, in some ambiguously defined way, Joyce

 

 

is very important to me, sis and to the children,

 

 

you’re very fortunate. Hello,

 

Will Riley 

basically, for no reason other than to take the heat off of himself, he starts asking her about Hagen Beggs, and then right after that, in the epitome of televisual convenience, Grace, just openly confesses that she didn’t really want to break off this engagement.

 

 

I thought by now he might have forgiven me. He’s not

 

 

gonna make the first move. Sis,

 

Will Riley 

a plaintive saxophone immediately snakes its way into the soundtrack. I

 

Speaker 9 

realized it was too soon for me. All those years married to the famous Byron Keating, I had no real identity of my own. Well, I

 

Will Riley 

had to from then on, the music in this scene is just nothing but mournful, sexual jazz.

 

 

You should have accepted his

 

 

proposal. I loved

 

Will Riley 

him. She’s choked up because she had to break off this engagement in order to try and get her degree and move on with her life. Now there’s a bit of an easy fix for this. This is the one that I use the way that you avoid that emotional pain is that you have nobody interested in you while you’re getting your degree in the first place. Just be an absolute nobody. Discover everybody else in your class has already decided to purchase houses together before you’ve properly memorized all their names. Problem solved. Do you

 

 

think he still loves me?

 

Speaker 2 

I don’t know. I know I know you’re not gonna find out about it sitting

 

Speaker 9 

here, right? But the mountain won’t come to Mohammed. Mohammed, we’ll go to the mountain,

 

Will Riley 

since George has decided already he’s gonna do nothing and falls to her to make the phone call. Good luck. Go to your room.

 

Will Riley 

Right next to the telephone in Grant’s house is a giant calendar that’s marked with the branding for C span, not the TV channel. C span, se a the thing that’s a little disconcerting about this is that C span is like a giant multinational industrial shipyard company, and isn’t grant supposed to be a sort of conservationist. I mean, C span is this giant company, and they keep on dumping creosote in North Vancouver’s waters, where a bunch of seals and even people are swimming. But, I mean, they gave me all this merch.

 

Speaker 9 

Hello, no, George, yes, this is Grace.

 

Will Riley 

Off camera. The two ex lovers decide to meet up at George’s work. Hagen bags is sitting at his desk as an orca floats around in the tank behind him, nervously, he licks his own hand and rubs it along his bald spot in order to push the hair down even further. Right next to him on a stand is a map of the Vancouver Aquarium, which makes sense. I mean, he’s in charge of the operation to some extent, except this is the map that you would find in the brochures or the tourist maps of the Vancouver Aquarium. This would have no use for anybody who actually works here. Well, I’ve got no idea where our accounting archives are, but I do know where the kiducational edu fund zone starring biosa is grace.

 

 

How nice to see you.

 

Will Riley 

Grace walks in Hagen bags is immediately breathing heavy and stammering and all around looking like a creep.

 

 

You’re looking very well. So are you.

 

Will Riley 

But eventually he slides into dating tips with Hake and bags, which have really been my guiding star for a while now. Tip number one, start every date with a nice firm handshake. Step two, if you do try to make a joke, do it in the most polysyllabic way you possibly can.

 

 

We sound like a mutual admiration society

 

 

we were once

 

Will Riley 

Yes, this is what the youth of today called Riz. In fact, as far as joke telling is concerned, I don’t just use this on the ladies. Whenever I tell jokes on this podcast, and I’m self editing in my head as I go, I go, all right, that’s a good bit. Now, all I need to do is make sure there’s at least another 30 words between me and the punch line. That’s how a sophisticated professional does it. Neither person in the couple wants to make the first move. They keep talking around the relationship, or they keep changing subjects. Well,

 

Speaker 10 

as you can see, I’m still here where you left me. I didn’t mean that the way it sounds, George,

 

Speaker 9 

it wasn’t you. It was me. I wish we

 

 

That’s serious. Come with me before

 

Will Riley 

the romance can truly be rekindled. The music gets serious and frantic as the Aquarium’s distant Rudy warning system goes on cut to a bunch of aquarium crew members running around, frantically going upstairs and downstairs and just making a panic of everything. As far as cinematography is concerned, they’re being very serious about whatever. The problem happening here is lots of documentary shaky cam following employees rushing from place to place through what’s really a big maze of railings and pipes and high traction metal grates, very dos boot in its visual signature, if you ask me, especially since the entire drama around the scene revolves around a pressure valve on a pipe weapon, no water

 

 

coming from The main engine line got the power to

 

Speaker 14 

the beach. Recirculation on my way. How serious is it? We won’t know, but we localize the problem. One thing for sure, without a fresh seawater coming in, the aquarium, begins

 

Will Riley 

to die. Based on whatever this technical difficulty is the aquarium now has no access to fresh sea water, which means basically a slow death for everything inside of it. But they don’t really have any sort of expository excuse for why it’s so difficult to get water to the aquarium when it’s surrounded by fresh sea water, it’s literally on a peninsula. It’s the Vancouver Aquarium. Is the most exposed to sea water place in the entire city. This isn’t an aquarium somewhere in Wisconsin. You can leave the Vancouver Aquarium and just walk to the ocean in a minute. Now, I know this isn’t how it actually works in real life. I’m not a fool, but you would figure that a show that prides itself on having some sort of educational element to it, that there would be some explanation for why this is a multi day round the clock crucial job, rather than something that could be fixed over a lunch break, or something like there are scenes in this show where characters are looking at each other going to. How are we gonna get this sea water into the aquarium? And they’re filming it in front of the sea water that they just walked 30 seconds to get to. They should explain why you can’t just get a really big bucket. They don’t really give us the answer to these questions, because really, they’re secondary to the real important point about this episode. Are the two old people going to bang rather than letting this mechanical disaster cut things off? Grace makes sure to involve herself further in the procedures of the Vancouver Aquarium. Well,

 

Speaker 10 

I’ve got to get in there to a strategy and tactics session, and I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than watch us work. Actually,

 

Speaker 9 

I don’t, and I find your work Fascinating. Well,

 

 

would you like to sit in on

 

Will Riley 

it? Of course, I would, George, because nothing is more romantic than watching your brother talk about how all the orcas are dying. We

 

Speaker 2 

have 6000 specimens here. Their lives are all in danger. All

 

Will Riley 

the principal characters and a few others are all seated around a big desk, basically a big mission briefing. All the heroes are getting ready to go into action. They’re trying to make a big, dynamic wide shot of all of our heroes as they prepare to set out to work. But what this means is that the ash tray on the other side of the desk takes up the entire lower third of the screen. There’s

 

 

also the problem with the water temperatures changing

 

 

the warm tanks cool and the cool

 

Will Riley 

tanks warm. There’s already been one instance of possible product placement in this episode. However, something that got deleted from this episode originally was that when Grant said this line about keeping the hot side hot and the cold side cold, he immediately followed it up with just like the new mcdlt at all of your participating McDonald’s hamburger chains, the

 

Speaker 2 

warm tanks cool and the cool tanks warm stays cool. Chris,

 

Will Riley 

the thing that always stuck in my craw whenever I saw these old ads for the mcdlt was the fact that they put the cheese on the cold side. That’s the one thing I’m always looking for in a hamburger. A cold, solid chunk of American processed cheese could

 

 

be the best tasting lettuce and tomato hamburger ever.

 

 

The result is disease and death. Wally. What does engineering think?

 

Speaker 15 

Well, I think we’re right on top of it. We’ve got all the salt water tanks on recirculation. We’re clearing Luckily,

 

Will Riley 

this wall e figure that we’ve never seen before is right on top of the issue. He’s an engineer. Wally looks like a less moisturized chief O’Brien, which is a weird comparison, but I have to make it, considering we already saw another engineer who looked like a more moisturized chief O’Brien. Does everybody in the Vancouver aquariums engineering department have the same haircut, just to make sure they’re easily identifiable. It’s a very Star Trek approach. All the engineers are supposed to be wearing a very grungy kind of mechanical jumpsuit, but they all look pristine, and they’ve got these double wide, giant 70s collars, wall E and the others just look like if Evil Knievel had a desk job. I suppose, seeing as the Vancouver Aquarium is some sort of military or police organization, some sort of outfit standardization is expected, but I’ve never seen a standardized white guy fro before. I suppose if you ever saw the old Gerry Anderson show UFO, you see that all of the characters who live on the moon base have to have purple hair or standard but that was a horse of a different color. That was the long distant future of 1980

 

Speaker 10 

well, as Wally said, let’s stay on top of

 

Will Riley 

  1. GEORGE Dunbar makes a big show of authority. He makes the orders. He tells everybody to get to work, get to action. The very next scene is Grant and Grace at home quietly reading

 

 

whatever happened to Muhammad in the mountain.

 

 

Neither one is moved

 

Will Riley 

like all the species in the aquarium are supposedly dying right now, and these two people are just like looking at their magazines. The scene is made even stranger because grant immediately gets a phone call, and the stakes go back up to being huge again.

 

Speaker 2 

Robert, sir, oh, no, I’ll be right there. The recirculation pumps gone out. How serious is that the water isn’t circulating? Some

 

Will Riley 

other part in the aquarium has now broken. It’s like John Dugan was writing the script and he went, how do I establish that these stakes are really high? How about I establish them twice within 30 seconds of each other? Cinematic language can do a lot of work filling blanks in scripts, and other times it can’t. We were meant to assume that they spent the whole day working on a solution and then came home after a hard day. Instead, it just looks like they said, oh, we’ll do something then a me. Keeley knocked off back home so they could wait for the problem to just get worse.

 

Speaker 10 

Well, as Wally said, let’s stay on top of it.

 

Will Riley 

Oh no. The next thing we see is Grant, covered in scuba gear pulling himself up from a manhole, some sort of underwater tunnel where he’s clearing some blockage that hasn’t really been

 

 

explained, hit the master switch and see if it works

 

 

right. Grant wall e the afro

 

Will Riley 

guy turns a knob a few times and a needle on a gage somewhere just wiggles up and down, but nothing happens. Apparently, managing a complicated valve system in an aquarium isn’t really all that different from trying to start a mower that wasn’t

 

 

exactly the sound of music.

 

Speaker 6 

No, it was the sound of more trouble. The impeller is broken. None

 

Will Riley 

of the characters really make note of the fact that there’s a criss crossing network of underwater tunnels right below the Vancouver Aquarium. It won’t really be a major plot point in danger bay until about six or seven seasons from now, that’s when they try and re engineer some of these tunnels to deploy torpedoes. That’s when the Morlocks become more important to the show

 

Speaker 6 

the impeller is broken. Well, let’s get a new one in there right away. We’ve got to get that water circulating. I wish that was the spare what I’ve had two more on order from Portland for six weeks. They’re way overdue. It

 

Will Riley 

really is amazing how many of the problems in danger Bay are influenced by petty, bureaucratic mess ups that really have to do with the location of Vancouver. Do you remember the rabies episode? And there was a thing about how all the medical labs were closed because they were in a different time zone. If

 

Speaker 2 

it has to come from the East Coast. There’s plenty of time to get it on a plane, I

 

Speaker 10 

know, but I already checked the three hour time difference. All the labs are closed down for the weekend.

 

Will Riley 

This is a big cultural difference between Canadian and American media responding to living in a big, wide expanse of land. I mean, both of us are the result of massive colonial projects and a whole lot of violence and all of that. But the way that the US approaches it is very different to Canada. In the US, you know, it’s all amber waves of grain Yeoman farmers, evocations of a pioneer spirit. In Canada, you usually go at it with some sort of embarrassment or basically being peeved this country is a massive What a fucking hassle. I can’t get a phone call through to the tax office because they’re in Gatineau, Quebec, and they’ve been closed for three hours before I even get off work. Our country can’t be an imperial project because everything is so damn inconvenient. Every day of my life. I’ve got packages being held up in Seattle or Portland. I’m dealing with Pacific Standard Time, Mountain Standard Time, Central Standard Time, Atlantic Standard Time, Newfoundland Standard Time, which is only a half hour ahead the island of St Pierre and Miquelon, has a secret 25th hour to every day that you’re not allowed to acknowledge. But I mean, technically, it’s not part of Canada, so it’s not as much of a big deal.

 

Speaker 6 

That was the spare what? I’ve had two more on order from Portland for six weeks. They’re way overdue

 

 

cold time. It’s an emergency,

 

 

critical.

 

Will Riley 

These people are supposed to be yelling all of their lines in a panic. But because there’s a motor in the background, it really doesn’t seem all that panic. It just comes off as them going, What? What? I’m sorry I can’t hear you. Could you please speak up? And I keep on feeling like there’s not any stakes here, because all the stressful ticking time bomb situations being established are immediately undercut. Do you know what scene comes after this? It’s two middle aged bureaucrats strolling through the park talking about their feelings. It’s

 

 

an emergency, critical.

 

Speaker 9 

We make a good team. I’ve always thought so. See,

 

 

I’ve still got the pen you gave me.

 

Will Riley 

It’s another grace and George scene, and they’re quote, unquote flirting. The show wants this to be a romantic episode, but you can’t just help but feel that there’s a thriller here that the writers are continuously trying to push back down as 1000s of animal lives hang in the balance. Grace starts walking through the park and begins apologizing for breaking off her engagement.

 

Speaker 9 

I’m too old to beat around the bush anymore. I made a terrible mistake, but I wasn’t ready for marriage before. Well,

 

Speaker 10 

you wanted to have your cake and eat it too. Yes,

 

Speaker 9 

like you, George, I want marriage and a career, but times are changing. We could share the cake. So

 

Will Riley 

thanks to feminism and the weakening of gender norms, these characters can now participate in and thus reinforce the gender norms inherent in the institution of marriage. Very confused messaging,

 

 

I guess the bottom line is, I still love you. Do you still. Love me.

 

Speaker 10 

I’m not going to propose again. Of

 

Speaker 9 

course, you’re not. I am George Dunbar, or you will marry me. It’s

 

Will Riley 

very odd that so far we have both teenagers and a widow dad, but the first healthy relationship plot that’s expressed in anything other than juggling tricks and visits to the burger shack is between the oldest characters in the show so far.

 

Speaker 10 

I do not bring you jewels or weekend carriages. I do not heap your head with compliments. If I can bring a laugh, a smile

 

 

for sunshine,

 

 

put it together.

 

Will Riley 

In the end, I feel good for these two characters. So the romantic plot is done, right? So now we can have all this extra time that we need to put some extra attention on this whole pipe fiasco, and let’s see how these stakes develop, you know? So we cut back to the Vancouver Aquarium, and they just fixed the problem off screen. Everything’s done. I don’t get it. Nice work. The part came in, apparently they put it in, no problem. Instead of the plot line where 1000s of lives are in the balance having a, you know, pay off, or some sort of a climax, we just cut to grant Robert pushing a button, the pump starts working again, and then everybody stands in a straight line. So grant Roberts can give everybody in the room a high five.

 

Will Riley 

So this is the point in the episode of this podcast that I have to make assertive a confession. I think that some people who are big danger Bay fans may already have a guess at what I’m trying to say here.

 

Will Riley 

There are two different versions of danger Bay. Season One, there’s a version of this show where all the episodes are 22 minutes, and there’s a version where all the episodes are 28 minutes. And up till now, I’ve only been working with the 22 minute episodes. Danger Bay had a CO production deal with the Disney Channel, and when the Disney Channel was still setting up, it was a premium cable channel, and so Disney’s idea was, well, you’re already paying us money for these shows, so we will not show any ads. If you’re a kid watching this show, you will get to see all these programs without having ads blasted in your face.

 

Speaker 5 

Doc Roberts runs an aquarium in the Pacific Northwest, caring for 1000s of animals. You’re going to like where you’re going, you’ll find there’s always a lot of action and adventure going on. Join doc Roberts and his children, Nicole and Jonah, for fun and adventure in danger Bay next on the Disney Channel,

 

Will Riley 

and that meant that all their programming had to be 28 minutes instead of 22 of course, Disney did smarten up. They realized, well, how about we just take all of the premium cable money and then we just take money from advertisers anyway. There’s basically a whole swath of programming that got taken entirely off the air because it fit very tightly within that 28 minute format. And once ads were back, it was basically un broadcastable. Now danger Bay narrowly avoided this because by definition, it had to have two drafts. It was being broadcast both on the Disney Channel and on the CBC, and the CBC did show ads on all of its programming, despite the fact that it’s, you know, a taxpayer funded, government funded public broadcaster. I don’t know it’s kind of weird, public private partnerships strike again. I’ve been focusing on the 22 minute episodes for several reasons. I mean, one of them is, it’s a Canadian show, so I wanted to look at the way it got broadcast in Canada. Another reason is that, because they were being written with these two versions in mind, a lot of these extra six minutes are, by their nature, disposable and easily removable. I mean, with one of the episodes, the extra six minutes is one of the characters showing a slide show of the things that they did in the episode that you just saw. But this time I caved. I looked at the 28 minute episode because I was certain that there was something important that got deleted from this episode. And there was a little bit to that, I think, something. That is kind of noticeable in this episode is that there’s never actually an explanation for what went wrong with the pump. Why aren’t they getting their salt water anymore? At the very least, in the 28 minute episode, they’ve got grant pointing at a boat and going, that boat’s anchor tore up a pipe.

 

 

There’s the culprit. What

 

Speaker 10 

do you mean? The captain was kind enough to tell us. He dragged his anchor last night

 

Speaker 2 

right through our main intake line, the aquarium. Lifeline in effect. How does it look down there? Wally, pretty grungy.

 

 

Water’s filled with sludge.

 

 

Pumps out of action. But

 

Will Riley 

I went through the whole 28 minute recut looking for some sort of way that this plot line would have a more coherent resolution. And no, they still fix the whole problem off screen in both episodes, Grant Roberts pushes a button, the pump works again. And then there’s a high five conga line that grant runs down. Give me five.

 

Will Riley 

It’s really baffling. We cut to some B roll of some happy orcas, and then go straight to a wedding between grace and George. Do

 

Speaker 7 

you George? Take This Woman grace to be your lawfully wedded one? I

 

Will Riley 

suppose it is in keeping with the characters of both George and grace, as far as they’ve been depicted in this show that this is the most gray and beige wedding I’ve ever seen in my life. Like everybody shows up and there’s like no black suits. There’s very little white. Grant is wearing a tan suit to a wedding. Joyce just shows up in a gray sweater even grace, Who is the bride? She wears some white, and then she just can’t help herself. She just goes, Oh, this is too much white. She puts on a gray Ascot around her neck, just to make sure that she’s not getting too wild with it. The only person who’s really dressed up for this wedding is Jonah. He’s got a suede tuxedo on. He’s out dressing the groom in this scene, though they do keep it under control, even his suede tuxedo is gray.

 

Speaker 12 

Yeah, you know Nicole. That’s gonna make Dr dumbber, our uncle now, Uncle

 

 

George, I’m

 

 

gonna have to get used to that. And

 

Speaker 7 

do you, Grace, take this man, George, to be your lawfully wedded husband.

 

Will Riley 

Grace takes a very long pause before saying, I do. I guess, just to mess with George Dunbar one more time before they’re married, I do. Somebody revs up their old Cassio, hits the organ button, and off we go. They kiss the bride.

 

Will Riley 

A big ship’s horn comes up over the soundtrack, and most of the characters make reference to it.

 

 

Must have heard about it.

 

 

Congratulations. But

 

Will Riley 

what doesn’t make sense is that in the 22 minute version of this show, this boat didn’t exist until now. This is the boat that screwed up all the pipes in the 28 minute version. But it’s in both drafts

 

Speaker 10 

here. The captain was kind enough to tell us he dragged his anchor last night. When I first

 

Will Riley 

watched this, I thought an actual boat had blown its horn over the filming of this scene, and it was like an ad lib to cover for it or something. I am so happy for George

 

 

and grace. I’m

 

 

happy too. I don’t have to be. Dear everybody

 

Will Riley 

is celebrating. Everybody is having a good time congratulating the new happy couple. Now is probably the time to mention the fact that, because these episodes are in such a weird, mixed up order, we have already seen references to George being married to Grace earlier in the show. Some of these references to the marriage are pretty minor. There’s a few scenes where Jonah and Nicole have Hagen Beggs character referred to as Uncle George, in front of them

 

Speaker 2 

a Coulter counters, an instrument that analyzes blood samples. It’s very expensive. We’ll never get one, though, Nicole’s Uncle George is a real tight one.

 

Will Riley 

But in most of the scenes that I’ve seen so far where Grace gets mentioned in passing, she basically takes on the role of a Marist crane figure who put the box back in the storage area, and the trap will be set and

 

Speaker 10 

we’ll be waiting, right, correct? What? Just the three of us? Well,

 

 

you could bring grace, if you like,

 

Will Riley 

very funny, always unseen and always mocked or complained about. This goes for scenes in the 28 minute versions of these episodes too.

 

Speaker 10 

Have a piece of pie. George, if you insist, good grace doesn’t like him. I get into the yucky stuff. You know. I. I’ve always envied guys who can dress like that. Your friend Bill, with his flashy shirts, his sunglasses and a sports car, Grace would never let me have a sports car. When I observed bill last week, the wheels started to turn. I have a favor to ask you, it’s your sister. What do you think? Pretty snappy a you see, Grace would never let me keep this stuff, but I can’t very well return it

 

Speaker 2 

if it’s a gift. Gotcha,

 

Will Riley 

if these episodes are watched in the prescribed order, then we already know that the marriage between George Dunbar and Grace Roberts is an unhappy one, and that grace Roberts is a domineering and ruthless wife before we even see the marriage in the first place. It’s an all new kind of televisual fatalism, where all the negative effects precede the cause. But today, at least they’re happy. Everybody’s having a good time. Everybody is partaking from a truly bizarre machine, a continuously running rose a wine fountain. They’ve got like, four or five tubes that are just spraying wine into one big bowl, which then overflows into another big bowl, and people are just taking wine glasses and just dunking them into these huge punch bowls. There’s like two silver cherubs standing on top of a reservoir, as if to say, go ahead, drink and be merry. Don’t think about what else might have gotten into this machine. George and Grace get the first dance as His custom that spurs grant and Joyce to dance. That’s sort of like hinting at a possible future relationship. Who knows what

 

Speaker 2 

about Joyce? I like her. I like her too. She’s a good friend. Interestingly,

 

Will Riley 

this spurs Nicole to push Jonah towards an anonymous girl who’s also at the wedding, so that those two can dance. I think this might be a sort of course correction. There was that tennis episode, and there was some really suspect dialog about how she was so mad that her brother was getting attention from other girls. Well,

 

Speaker 3 

everyone’s making such a fuss over him at school, especially the girls

 

Will Riley 

they’re trying to like, correct that. I think, besides, we’ve already had one very distressing possible incest reference between two other siblings in this episode. You

 

 

know, a fast growing beard is a sign of

 

 

virility.

 

Will Riley 

The show didn’t have anyone for Nicole to dance with so deep in the background they have her doing like, a little back and forth shuffle with Duke, who’s like twice as tall as her, still, no spoken lines for Duke. A quick denouement. Grace is now gone. She’s off on her honeymoon with George. So it’s time for everyone in the family to get back to eating giant piles of junk food on the couch, as they are want to do, apparently, well,

 

Speaker 2 

your Aunt Grace is right about the need for a healthy, well balanced diet, but she doesn’t understand it. Every once in a while, a guy needs to break training and just go ape. You know,

 

Will Riley 

they are free now it is time to bust out the show runners needed to find a way to show that grant was in hedonism mode right now, so they put him in the wildest thing that they could think of, a Hawaiian shirt.

 

Speaker 12 

Would you call this a junk food orgy? Yeah, the robex Rebellion. I

 

Will Riley 

know that this word is being used in a different context, but please do not have a child actor say the word orgy. Dad’s new orgy techniques. The episode leaves grant to have the final emotional beat. Dad,

 

 

you think you’ll ever get married again?

 

Will Riley 

Right after we’ve had a bunch of hyper cartoony faces as people react to all the junk food they’re eating, we come across the serious question of whether grant is ever thinking of getting married again. What do you

 

 

think about that? Jonah,

 

 

well, if it was the right person, I mean, really the right person, I think it’d be great. You sort

 

Will Riley 

of wonder why it came around in this scene, of all places, other than the fact it’s the last scene, the answer we get is a little stock. But, I mean, it makes sense for a show that has a continued status quo for the most part, something along the lines of, you know, like, Well, come what may, whether I’m single or if I get married, what’s most important to me is taking care of you kids and so on and so on. The thing is, this is supposed to be a tender family moment, but they played the sex saxophone again.

 

Speaker 3 

But to be completely honest, I wouldn’t want anyone to ever come between us.

 

Speaker 2 

No one will ever come between us. You.

 

Speaker 2 

Besides, we are the three musketeers, aren’t we?

 

Will Riley 

Like, at this point, they’re talking about the family. They’re not even talking about like a romantic interest. But you know, I think they went well, we spent all this money to get the rights to this plaintive sex jazz and by God, we’re going to use it as much as we possibly can.

 

 

But will you ever marry

 

Speaker 2 

again? Boy, when you get a hold of something like COVID Union, I don’t know. Maybe if I ever met the right person to Aunt Grace and Uncle George,

 

Speaker 3 

to Aunt Grace and Uncle George,

 

 

long may they live and

 

Speaker 12 

love. I’d like to propose a toast to toast away to us, the Roberts, the three musketeers of danger bay here, here,

 

 

one for all for one.

 

Will Riley 

They clink glasses, freeze frame, roll credits. You can probably tell from what I’ve said and the tone of my voice that I’ve not been the biggest fan of this particular episode. On paper, it is sort of daring to have a show with a younger audience in mind have two older actors be the main romantic leads for this. It’s daring. But I mean, we also have to keep in mind that they are the same age as the person who wrote the script. I don’t want this whole thing to come off as if I’m just being like a grouch and I can’t deal with a softer, sentimental kind of romantic episode for this show. I’m fine with that. The problem is, this really is an episode at war with itself. We’ve got this high stakes drama, sort of action part that is totally in conflict with this softer, romantic portion. And you know, both seem to interrupt and undercut the other, so both of them are weaker as a result.

 

 

It’s an emergency, critical.

 

 

See, I’ve still got the pen you gave me.

 

Will Riley 

Neither half of this show is able to stick around for long enough to really get you to care about either of them. I spent some time trying to figure out the proper analogy to explain why the mixing of these two elements haven’t worked all that well. Think about it like this. We’ve got the aquarium plot, all the stuff that has to do with the pumps and the valves and all of that. That’s high stakes. It’s sort of actiony. So let’s call that the hot side. Then we’ve got this more romantic element of this show, where it’s a little more soft spoken and things take their time. So let’s call that the cool side. Now what happens is, if you take the cool side and you put it on top of the hot side too early, both of them mix together, and it becomes sort of lukewarm and not all that appetizing. So you have to find some sort of device, like some sort of specialized styrofoam container that could keep the hot side hot

 

 

and DLT side, cool stays cool.

 

Speaker 16 

DLT cool crisp. The beach stays hot. The cool stays crisp. Put it together. You can’t resist hot. It stays

 

 

the coolest. Fish, it’s a good time.

 

 

Well, the grave tastes cool, crispy.

 

Will Riley 

It. So there we are. We’re almost done with an episode of infinite danger in between recordings, I actually went into my discography, and I found a lot of the old Hagen bags mix tapes. Just sort of gave them a quick listen. They’re very masterfully done. They’ve got a real, like, hard edge to all of them. The bars Hagen Beggs has are really amazing. I mean, nobody to this day really knows what going orca mode on a motherfucker really means. But then again, nobody on this planet was on Hagen beggs’s level. The one thing though, is that it did sort of bring back bad memories. I’m sure nobody really wants to bring it back up, but it did bring up some memories of the East Coast, West Coast, CBC, older gentleman wars, and how, like, quickly and how violently they escalated. It started out kind of slow. You know, there were just like, dis tracks being written. Hagen bags wrote some disses directed at Mr. Dress up. But then it escalated to open violence, like really fast, like most people don’t want to recollect it. But there was that fist fight backstage at the Juno Awards between the host of on the road again and David Suzuki. I mean, they broke some. Bones in that fight, these memories haunt us to this day. I mean, when the Friendly Giant was killed in a drive by shooting. I mean, did Hagan bags put out the hit? We just don’t know when the cops went to question him as he was bleeding out his last words weren’t who the shooter was or who put out the hit. It was just Fuck the police. So we’ll never really know. What we do know for certain, though, is that the most recent episode of modern day danger Bay, oh boy, it was a real humdinger. Let me show you, gallons of water rush into the hull of the Vancouver Aquarium’s military submersible crab Tech with one of its six legs broken, it is trying and failing to hobble to dry land. A Storm of harpoons whoosh above its steel carapace as a whole squad of poachers in scuba gear shoot round after round from their gas propelled launchers the civilian pod is taking on water Captain Dunbar, George Dunbar, who, in recent years had his consciousness moved into a mechanical seal. Glumps his way to a command post mechanic give me a status report. The thing that makes us not sink is broke, sir Damn What about the machine that makes us go it’s also broke, having dispensed with the technical jargon, Dunbar formulates a plan. He strokes his mechanically articulated whiskers with his mechanically articulated flippers. The CGI is incredibly convincing. How long will it take you to get this crab up and running? About 20 minutes, sir. But we’re swarmed by poachers. You’ve got 10. I’ll try to get as many civilians out of there as possible. Get two of the scuba crew to cover me. The robot sealed form of Dr George Dunbar starts galumphing away, which is the official term for how seals walk, sir. The depressurizer is in the other direction. I’m not heading that way, he says, tucking himself into the torpedo Bay, I need to get you your 10 minutes, don’t I? This is the fastest way out of here. He closes the valve lock behind him. Shoot me. Mechanic, that’s in order. The mechanic nervously salutes and pushes a big red button launched out of the robot crab like a torpedo Dunbar blasts clean through the bodies of multiple poachers. His robot body’s titanium skull, rendering them into red goo thrust straight into the center of a mass of poachers, the camera whips 360 degrees around him. The adversary sharpens their harpoons in a threatening manner, something resembling the seal equivalent of a devious grin crawls onto Dunbar’s face. Streaks of blue electricity skitter across his conductive steel whiskers. George Dunbar is preparing to unleash the ex Dyna blast, a massive electrical attack, which his mechanical seal body can only perform once every 24, hours before he unleashes the electrical charge. George Dunbar gives off his famous catch phrase, you’re fucked you dumb motherfuckers, a giant lightning sphere explodes from the center of frame, engulfing every poacher in sight. The underwater surroundings amplify its charge 100 fold. After a brief fade to white, we see the aftermath, a horde of poachers floating limply in the water, as well as 1000 odd dead fish. And yet a mysterious rumble grows in the distance. A looming shadow hangs over the robot seal in center frame. Well, the convincing facsimile of Dunbar’s voice says that’s the first wave done. Now for the tricky bit, in the direction of the crab vehicle, ominous air bubbles continue to rise. We now cut to Jonah Roberts picking at his ceremonial robes emblazoned with sea anemone imagery. As the chief marine biologist of the Vancouver Aquarium, he has just completed one of his most important duties as a spiritual leader. He has just finished officiating a mass wedding, arranging the marriages of every citizen in the town of Ladner, a call from George comes up on his vid screen reporting in Jonah, sorry, we couldn’t make it to the wedding. The crab tank got attacked by poachers. Anything I can do for you, George? Oh, don’t worry. It got better. The problem basically fixed itself. That fires out one of your girlfriends was in the civilian pod, though she’s dead. Oh, well, Dan, that’s too bad. Guess I’ll have to find a replacement. So I wasn’t kidding there, right? That’s a real banger of a danger Bay episode. I mean, back when Hagen bags originally died, there were a lot of people who were up in arms with the idea of taking an AI generate. Recreation of his voice and sticking it into a CGI mechanical seal. But I think it’s been a big payoff. I think that it’s worked out tremendously for danger Bay. Like, there’s still people who are mad about it. They say it’s like, disrespecting the dead or something like that, but I mean, like, Come on, be serious. Like, I mean, everybody’s going around right now giving their happy memories about David Lynch and Twin Peaks. But you know what I say, if David Bowie can be a coffee pot in Twin Peaks the return, then Hagan bays can be a CGI mechanical seal with an ex dyno blast that he can only do every 24 hours, they’re roughly comparable. So that’s that. That’s another episode of infinite danger. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you very much for your well wishes. In regards to my recovery, my voice is doing a lot better now. I only use my inhaler now for when I’ve got a phone call from a build collector, and I just take a big puff of that and say, Oh no, I’m sorry. Will’s not here at the moment. It’s actually quite a useful tool beyond that. Just check out my usual social media feeds. I’m still on Twitter, however briefly that may be, but I’m chasm cave on both Twitter and blue sky. I’m slowly migrating as much as I can. I’m not precisely an idealist about this, though, the more followers I get on blue sky, the easier and easier it’s going to get to actually make that transition. Because, you know, I’ll have an audience. So think about it like this, the more followers will get, the less often will inadvertently give support to fascism. So, you know, just consider it also, if you are ever visiting Vancouver or you live here already, check out the app questo. I have some tours of the city. They cost about 10 bucks each. I will see you on the other side. Remember, danger comes from below.