Will Riley 

At some point you’ve come across this particular online theory. It’s called the shopping cart theory. I don’t know whether to slot it into sociology, moral philosophy or maybe psychology, but it gets brought up by podcasters a bunch because it fits two circles in a podcaster’s Venn Diagram of content, the amusing, disposable trifle circle and the totalizing claims about the nature of humanity circle, according to the oft reposted copy pasta, it goes something like this, the shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self governing to return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task, and one which we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do, to return the shopping cart is objectively right. No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart. No one will fine you or kill you for not returning the shopping cart. You gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart because it is correct. A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it, the shopping cart is what determines whether a person is a good or bad member of society. To quote other podcasters, I haven’t stopped thinking about this theory since I first heard it. But in my case, I’ve kept thinking about it because it reminds me of an old retail job I had, and how my experience with abandoned carts contradicts this theory quite directly. You know those outdoor garden markets you see in front of a Home Depot in the summer, the kind selling annual flowers and tomato seedlings. I worked at an independent version of that. They’d rent an empty lot in an upscale suburb, so people with big gardens were in walking distance. Every year, the market would get built up for early spring, then taken down for the end of summer. It wasn’t an unpleasant place. Being able to work outdoors during COVID was a little less stressful than the norm. And hey, you got to be around flowers. But it was a job. And because it was a job, I had a boss. My boss was a decent sort passionate about her job, but, well, she had some management habits she wouldn’t shake. For those of you in retail, have you ever had a boss who goes, Okay, I want you to move all these heavy shelves over here. So you’d move all this stuff for like, half an hour, 45 minutes. Then your boss goes, okay. Now that I see what that looks like, I’ve decided I like it better the old way. Go ahead and move everything back. She did that to all of us on an almost daily basis. I don’t think all of it can be chalked up to being a scatterbrain. I mean, I’m a scatterbrain too. I really do think that to her, whether her orders had any efficacy was secondary to that dopamine hit she got from being able to tell someone what to do in the first place. She didn’t really worry about whether getting someone to move all these big, heavy shelves was a good idea or a bad idea, because if it turns out to be a bad idea, it’s a happy little bonus. You get one hit of dopamine telling someone what to do, and then a second hit telling someone to undo it. I think this is a generational thing, a mental disorder that comes from having never played a video game in your life, but desperately trying to recreate the experience of playing an RTS without having that frame of reference. She’d chase the pleasure of making orders in a manner that was so frenzied she’d become incoherent. She’d tell you a list of things to do within the hour, and orders would be plainly contradictory. Plans would change mid sentence. Sometimes she would say, I want you to hang these over here, but point directly away from wherever over here was supposed to be, because while her mouth was talking about task number five, her brain and her body were already far in the future chasing the pleasures of task number nine. But this is all prelude to the carts I said this place got taken down and built up every year, right? Well, every year our boss would talk with some folks you know, to say, to start, I want these temporary fences over here, this tent over there. And each year the employees would come up and ask, Are you sure you want to put the cart return over there? Nobody will know that it’s there. And she’d look at them, look at me, and say, Yes, this is the most logical place for it. If you saw the bird’s eye diagram I drew, I never did get to see that bird’s eye diagram, but on the ground, it was as if the place you were supposed to put the carts was being actively concealed. They were up against the wall of a tent, deep within the retail space, facing away from the parking lot for 85% of the space, it was invisible until you were already driving out the store, locked up tight in your Subaru. If you did see them before that, since they were inside the store, you’d get the impression well. This is where you pick up the carts, where you drop them off, must be somewhere else, where people actually are parking their cars. Effectively, if you were a customer, the correct place to put the carts did not exist unless you went to the trouble of interrupting a clerk to ask for directions to do the right thing. You basically had to ask the store for permission. We should be rolling out the red carpet for the customer. The boss would say, on the first week, preparing us for a new year of work after they check out, all of you guys should be escorting every customer out to the car, loading their plants into their trunk for them, and taking their cart back for them. That’s how you get people coming back, year on year, year on year, she repeated this game plan to the new employees, not the old guard. She’d emphasized the bit about the carts before the fresh meat started the season, she was already justifying her cart return, even though nobody she said it to knew that this was what she was doing in the first two weeks, things go alright. The Vancouver rain is still pounding down on us all. That means we’re only dealing with one or two enthusiastic, big buyers every half hour. So this one on one red carpet plan works then, but three weeks in the store being busy enough to have three customers at once, with two people working there is all it takes for it to evaporate. Whichever person among the three that’s left to their own devices is the one who won’t find where to stick their cart. It’s not that bad yet. Four weeks in, customers are generally still going to be nice about carts. They want to help. They want to do the objectively right thing. Every two or so hours, people will bashfully come up to you, going, hi, yeah, sorry. I know you’re busy. This is kind of silly, but I don’t know where I’m supposed to put my cart, but by the end of your shift, the boss will tell you, hey, there’s like two or three carts stranded in the parking lot. You ought to bring those back so you do the math for every one person tanking, the embarrassment of asking for permission to park a cart, point five of a guy is tanking, the embarrassment of sheepishly abandoning one the boss crosses her arms. You should have been following those customers out to their cars, right? Sorry, I was the one dealing with the special order from the guy who wanted to buy, like, 21 gallon euphorbias. You know that I couldn’t do it. Yeah. Well, did you think about maybe putting up a sign with an arrow like I suggested? Yeah, well, around week eight is when things start to get bad. By now, the asker to abandoner ratio is one to one. You may be able to call from across the lot, sir, sir. You can put your carts over here, sir. But unless you’re watching them right over their shoulder, chances are they’re just abandoning them. As the store gets busier, the askers get more Curt with you resentful that this simple good deed needs outside intervention. You’d go out to the parking lot and do something about it yourself, but the boss is keeping you really busy tidying her over with her boss dopamine, until interrupting herself mid sentence, she looks up and goes, Hey, you guys neglected to do your hourly cart check. There’s like eight carts in the parking lot. You guys need to be more attentive to these things, then some frowny face comes up to her, asking where to put a card away, and you notice she really savors this moment. Now she even gets to tell the customers what to do. Her directions to the cart, return go on for a paragraph, and she’s enjoying every sentence. Week 12, nobody is asking for directions anymore. Customers achingly yearn for a real cart. Return cards are now basically just spawning in the far corners of the parking lot, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, and yet, on some days, if two people ditch their carts simultaneously, they’ll look at each other and their conscience kicks in. They begin to band together to make their own cart return right outside the shop exit. They try to follow the code of decency against the boss’s best efforts. You’d walk into the parking lot and see a neat line of nine or 10 shopping carts pushed together, conveniently placed somewhere, clearly visible, someplace easily usable. If you were one of those consumer metrics types, you’d go, Hmm, if customer outflow is already putting their carts here out of habit, well, Eureka. This could be a good place to put a cart return to maximize efficiency, get rid of those carts. My boss would say, in frustration, that’s not where they belong. Are you sure? You ask her, we could really put a line of carts right here? Yeah. I mean, I guess it’s nice. They’re trying to make their own system. She’d reflect. But. Not the right one. If they just took the time to properly explore the shopping space, they’d understand why my location is the correct place to put them. And so you just swallow it down. You obey what the boss says, and start doing something you fundamentally know is wrong. CART by cart, you take away this last thrust towards the straight and narrow path, sticking its remains into a secret hiding place, and with that, you remove the last vestiges of civilization. In the last four weeks, the parking lot is a wasteland. People are just letting carts drop where they stand, you’ll sometimes look up, and before you know it, you’re dashing out into the parking lot because a cart is just freely rolling down an incline right at someone’s car. The thing is, despite there being more abandoned carts than ever in late summer, there are less customers. Come August 1, neither you nor the customer, are the same kind of people you were in mid March. We are all cart abandoners Now, the same nice people I saw on week one, circling the whole place to find the spot to put a cart, people who now knew where the carts were supposed to go would make their purchase fill their trunk and making direct eye contact with me, pushed the cart in any old direction, driving off as the cart was still rolling.

 

Will Riley 

It is now time to close up for the year. Some unsold stuff gets refunded to suppliers. Some perennial plants will be taken to a greenhouse and sold in a larger format next year, most of the stuff is just going to be composted. You load the dried husks of flowers into a tall six Wheeler and watch it drive away, pretending that there’s more happening here than a glorified garbage truck. The boss locks up the gate for the last time. She informs you your last paycheck may be a few days late, but before you get in your car, she halts, wait a second, she says, unlocking the gate again, and sure enough, there’s still carts in the lot, tucked away behind a fence around the corner, and your boss tut tuts these people every year, I swear, None of them have any understanding of common courtesy. How did they get this way? So this is the thing I dislike about cart theory. It presents this moral decision of CART return as an indicator of your intrinsic goodness or badness. It does not say as much, but from its faux detached perspective, it is operating on principles of nature over nurture. But every season, I saw people get conditioned into being cart abandoners, if anything, almost everyone started off with being kindly and upright cart returners as their natural instinct, the ability to do even the smallest convenient decencies can be withheld from people with just a minimal dash of authority and the willingness to do it. I think it happens more frequently than we care to admit. Sometimes people are so willing to be good citizens, they will actually defy authority to do it like people making their own cart return without even being fully conscious of it, they’ll say, we want to do the right thing. We are telling you right now how we are going to do the right thing, and at that point the authority can acquiesce, or they can say, No, I won’t let you, and the whole thing collapses. Usually, they choose the latter. They choose the latter so many times it breaks people into abandoners, so long as they get to keep that little hit of dopamine every time they remember they’re still in charge. I think that too happens more frequently than we like to admit. So yeah, I figure cart law doesn’t even work as an amusing trifle to me. It hits a raw nerve. Really gets on my nerves when memes don’t acknowledge social construction or the concept of architectural psychology. But it’s neither here nor there. It’s not why I’m here to talk to you today. What me? Who am I? Why am I here out at your doorstep? Oh, well, I’m out here today canvassing on behalf of British Columbia’s New Democratic Party for the coming provincial elections. We’re all about giving BC rational progressive reforms at a nice, reasonable pace, and we’ve got a great slate of potential MLAs for you this year, we’ve got our candidate for Yale town. He’s a longtime police officer. His wife works for the municipal Conservative Party. Actually, he used to work for the Conservatives yourself. That’s how you know he’s We’re a New, New Democratic Party. Don’t worry, this is a battle. Just

 

 

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

 

 

Danger. What? Oh, no,

 

Will Riley 

they went and made another infinite danger. Hi everybody. It’s will, it’s infinite danger again, I suppose I do have a little bit of apologizing to do. There was a very pronounced gap between the previous episode and this one. I do have a good reason for it. I suppose it is pretty relevant to this podcast, seeing as it does affect the danger Bay pavilion, a lot of chaos going on at Neom right now, neon, the Lion City, all of that. The danger Bay pavilion is still doing just fine. It’s making Neom a good deal of revenue. The decorative oil slick is still there. I mean, it doesn’t look like an orca at all now, it’s just a big puddle of oil in the middle of the ocean, but it is there, and you can still look at pictures and see that it did once look like an orca somewhat, but a bit of chaos in the periphery, I suppose, bunch of plans getting rearranged. Mohammed bin Salman, he he saw the Paris Olympics opening ceremony and scrapped the original baseball stadium. Now there’s going to be a giant baseball diamond that is apparently suspended entirely by hot air balloons, sort of like a bit of one upmanship. I mean, everybody was really impressed by that big floating Olympic flame in the middle of that park. And I mean, and I mean, should they choose? Saudi Arabia has more than enough money to build upon that, but it basically does mean that a lot of funds that would have gone elsewhere are now going towards this baseball stadium trying to find a home for the prospective MLB team, the neon raptors. Obviously, the Toronto Raptors were pretty unhappy with the name unveiling there. They thought they could sue. But, I mean, you know, the the prototype for the jerseys for the Neom raptors, it’s obviously like a hawk and a falcon on it, and so like they can squeeze their way through it legally. It’s distinct enough. Point is that attention was being focused elsewhere in developing the city. We’re not sure what happened, but somebody knocked over a switch, or like a wall fell over. But suffice to say, all the zoos are open. All of the Tigers are out. All the bears are out there, just roaming the streets right now, little bit of a crisis, but everything’s fine. The authorities are assuring everybody that things will be fine, and a little bit all the employees of the danger Bay pavilion do get weaponry standard issues, so they’ve been defending their ground quite admirably. Casualties are under control. Somebody in business real estate did get mauled by a Manuel, but that’s the worst of it. Animal Control right now is figuring that the main task is to subdue all of the gazelles. The gazelles are the number one target for all the lions, and you can’t really engage with a lion head on. If you get rid of the gazelles, then the lions will slowly die out over time that is called the food chain. I mean, the main mystery now is we understand that something went wrong with the zoos and all of these mammals are running around and wreaking havoc. The main question really is, how did all of the fish disappear as well? The aquarium got emptied out, and nobody knows how that they’re all in the Gulf now. We’ve got sea lions duking it out with dolphins, and they’ve got their own little war going on with the orcas, and the orcas are fighting with the sharks, which are fighting, and other type of shark. It’s it’s a real mess in the Gulf right now. It’s making getting in and out of neon really difficult. And you can imagine the governor of topic province is really steaming mad about it. I mean, all these aquatic animals duking it out and biting chunks out of each other. I mean, this was supposed to be a ticketed spectator event. I mean, like, they commissioned a whole aquatic arena. They called it. It had, like, a bunch of 360 seating, all of these camera angles that you could use. And I mean, now that’s millions of dollars in construction just down the tubes, because you can just watch orca fights for free, granted that they’re not inside of the oil patch when it happens. Can’t even replace the thing with another stadium, because now we’re all about Floating Balloon stadiums. And I mean, this has greater political implications as well. This was where the Canadian government and the Peruvian government were going to start some diplomatic talks about Peru’s arsenic supply and what they were going to do about it and all of this. But they can’t do that anymore because the conference room is full of oryxes, which is kind of iron. Seeing as an oryx was more of a cautery thing. Danger Bay Episode 10 titled hot cargo that that’s what they call me, because I’m the one person who can make cargo shorts look sexy. Production Code one, dash 005, so we’re like all the way back at the beginning. We made this weird detour to 1986 and now we are way back at the start with 1984 again, it’s, it’s, it’s a mess. And seeing as it’s a very early episode of danger Bay, we are right on to the classics. You are having fun with your little sitcom farm adventures. This is the Jonah goes blind episode straight back to child endangerment, basically, Chris haddock is back to write this episode. Chris haddock of future Da Vinci’s inquest fame. I’ve talked about him at length. I’m not sure how he came up with the idea for this episode, but basically, I figure he saw like the script or the dailies of the Nicole gets rabies episode. Then he just looked at he went, Oh yeah, we’re on this we’re on this wavelength. Okay. Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. You’re getting your sadistic little thrills, freaking out what kids might be watching danger bay by giving the little girl a dog disease. Well, check this shit out. I’m gonna take this kid and I’m gonna remove the entire visible spectrum of light from him. That and Chris haddock was one of the writers of one of those fish mystery episodes, the hatchery crime story. And in that episode, you might have noticed that Chris haddock does like imperiling Chris crab and the Jonah character quite a bit, whereas in that last Chris haddock episode, Jonah Roberts was in more sort of a physical peril, just falling down a whole bunch of waterfalls and Braining himself on rocks. And all of that Chris haddock is introducing him to a slightly more existential form of trauma this time around. The director is Gilbert Chilton, again, the guy that I referred to as a solid hand before. And so despite this being a pretty interesting episode in a lot of ways, this is going to be a slightly shorter intro than I’ve normally had, and I know this might be a disappointment to some of you infinite danger fans, seeing as the previous episode I did was just as felt 45 minutes, and you guys sort of wanted more. But, I mean, Gilbert Chilton is just a dabbler. He does this and that I said, he directed an episode of COP rock. But what’s also interesting is he directed a bunch of reenactments for a TV show called Top Cops, like that’s how willing Gilbert Chilton was to take on any job he was just doing re enactments for not even like a murder true crime series Top Cops was just about cops telling interesting stories about their life as a police officer. Maybe there’s a murder, maybe there’s a crime, but we’re not really making any promises, but we’re gonna reenact them, because that’s what the genre was in that era. One thing that I suppose does make Gilbert Chilton a little more interesting is that he has directed a lot more martial arts than a lot of the other directors that we’ve seen so far. Nothing high end. I mean, it’s all TV grade, but he directed some episodes of the TV series based on the crow the crow had a TV series. Did you know that? I’m just finding it out. I mean, it’s, I guess it’s crow season, although I suppose it is sort of established. Yes, I don’t know very much about Brandon Lee or his life and work, but he also directed an episode of a show called vanishing sun,

 

 

running from oppression, yearning for freedom. He came to America, but when he is falsely accused of murder, he must run again, searching for the truth the hunter

 

 

and the hunted

 

Will Riley 

vanishing Sun is sort of interesting because it started off as a series of Made for TV movies, and then finally, one season of regular TV. It aired alongside tech war and Hercules, if that tells you anything about what sort of caliber it was. But it is interesting because it is basically an attempt to make a Hong Kong action drama into something that you could serialize. Another thing that makes this show interesting is that it is one of the first shows to have a predominantly Asian cast in an English language TV show. At the very least, that’s the show tooting its own horn. I don’t know if that’s entirely accurate, but it is interesting to watch the show and see that it is an entirely Asian cast with explicitly Asian names. The characters actually have names like zhanhuan, Lao young, but it really does bear noting how long it took, how deep into the 90s you had to get before the characters in the show weren’t just named by the white writers. You know Jack. Jackie Sammy Casey. Jackie Sammy Casey like just a big spinning Lazy Susan of those three specific names. Chilton directed a few episodes of a Canadian legal drama called street legal, which is basically about a bunch of young and hungry lawyers. But of course, it’s the 80s, so all of these young lawyers look like they’re already in their 50s. Street Legal was actually very popular when it came out. It ran for eight seasons. Actually, the CBC in the mid 2010s did do a reboot of it, which I think only lasted one season. Really looking this show up, I was just amazed by how many television programs thought that street legal was a title worthy pun. If you’re looking up this show, you actually have to be very careful, because there are so many different productions that love that particular street legal pun. There’s the two CBC shows, there’s the old one and the reboot. But there’s also a New Zealand show that has no relation to those ones. They also called it street legal. You wouldn’t know, but there’s actually a TV show called street legal, running straight to to be right now. It belongs to what I can only call the new genre of to be exclusive blaxploitation. Like you look up the production company, and it’s making like, four or five films a year, and they all have like, budgets of 100k and all their other works are things called like tears of a hustler, hood riches, Sean Sinclair’s sex mogul now, Gilbert Shelton’s career is mainly focused on television and straight to TV and VHS movies, but he does have a theatrical release in the form of a movie called The Void, because, for various reasons, it got put into theaters in Hungary and Argentina. It was still a straight to DVD movie in the US and Canada

 

 

at the beginning of the 21st century. Science will lead us into a new era that will change the course of mankind.

 

Will Riley 

Very little can be gleaned about the void. The only images I’ve seen of the film are just the same movie poster over and over and over again.

 

 

Experiment is online. You could create atom size black holes under the right conditions. But one detail has been overlooked. I have discovered a critical flaw in your calculations.

 

Will Riley 

Give up. It’s a sci fi thriller that is oddly too ahead of its time, because the whole plot revolves around a giant particle accelerator that accidentally creates a black hole, but this was like 2002 and nobody had those fears about CERN just yet. Funnily enough, it’s almost like an exploitation movie that is exploiting something way too early.

 

 

Nothing. Do

 

 

you know what a black hole is? Stupid and nothing,

 

 

no going back now.

 

 

Can’t Stop it.

 

Will Riley 

Not much attention, I think, was put into the marketing budget for the void. I looked at all of these movie posters, and they all have the exact same tagline. It will swallow you whole exclamation point. And the thing is that hole is spelled H, O, L, E. That’s the closest to a pun that they could come up with in such short notice. Like that’s not even somebody’s first pass at a joke. That’s like pass number 0.5 at making a pun. Adrian palm Amanda and Melvin McDonald.

 

 

My money is on a big explosion

 

 

and McManus, do you think that I care about them?

 

 

The void? You

 

Will Riley 

the episode begins with a cold open of a helicopter flying over a little inlet in the Pacific Ocean. Underneath it is like a giant almost a fishing net that’s just full of a bunch of green barrels that are very ominous looking. They cut to the pilot inside, who looks very sketchy. I don’t exactly know how he managed to get his hair fluffy and greasy at the same time, he just pulls a big lever and downfalls some big green cartoon poison barrels with a nice conspicuous skull and bones on we cut under the sea with some good underwater photography, and the barrels start rolling further and further downhill, and conveniently for the. Audience as the barrel rolls it stops just as the poison symbol points towards the camera. Strangely enough, I don’t think that the poison skeleton on this barrel is particularly standard issue. It’s probably not. BC WorkSafe approved, the skull is neither giving a dangerous scowl or some sort of rictus grin, he just seems sort of bored and non plussed, like the most neutral skull there has ever been in the world, just no emotions. It’s like you’re having a conversation with the skull and you suddenly drop the lines. You know, recently, I’ve been getting into Mahjong based anime, and this is the sort of face that you get back in return. A funny little production hiccup here. The fact that I can replay this video over and over again and see it in a higher visual quality than was probably ever intended. It means that you can see the feet of the guy who is standing on top of this hill and pushing them down into the water, like you even see his hands a little bit as he moves these barrels and rolls them for, I don’t know the fifth time for this shot, but I mean, that’s totally minor. Obviously. It’s just a tiny little nitpick. It’s not a big deal. I mean, if you watched an HD remaster of like Thunderbirds, would you spend all your time looking at the strings moving all the puppets around? No, obviously not. You’d focus on the fact that real human sweat is coming out of each puppet skin, and ITV refuses to explain why or how. So obviously, you can see from these barrels that this episode is going to have to do with pollution and like illegal disposal of poisonous chemicals and all of that. And so it’s sort of a message show, and BC took the message, and the provincial government got very big into clamping down on barrel disposal, or at least green barrel disposal. Provincial legislation is basically like a sieve, so somehow they only illegalize the green barrels. Now all those barrels are red, so poison based injuries are way down, but there’s way more explosions than there used to be after the theme song, we see the Vancouver Aquarium boat slowly make its way to the exact same Cove. It’s a wider shot now, so we can see that there was a little cabin right by the shore. What a beautiful island. Chilton directed one half of the danger Bay pilot. And you can tell here because he’s reused locations. This area is the exact same spot that the kids found danger the otter in the first episode. But they’re reusing it here because there’s like, 10 episodes distance between when we first saw it, and now just being economical with it, and they almost sort of lampshade it by going like, Oh, isn’t this place familiar? And then saying it’s familiar for an entirely different reason than a totally foundational moment in their lives.

 

 

We sure did in the channel between here and

 

 

Patrick Island. Do I have a research team with our champions?

 

Will Riley 

Isn’t this the place where there was the chain of events that led to me almost getting shot? No, no, no. You’re thinking about the place where you caught the big fish. Oh, yeah. Okay. Hagen bags has come along with the Roberts family for this boat trip, oddly enough, almost dressed like a poacher himself. He’s got his red plaid on and a newsboy cap before the kids can even get on the dock and stretch their legs, the kids are basically assigned duties to go into the water on official aquarium business, child recon, if you will.

 

 

Why don’t you just nose around and see what you can find? There’s a sharp drop off about 100 feet offshore. Stay close in.

 

Will Riley 

So the reason that Hagen Beggs and the Roberts family are all here is apparently somebody just donated their entire house and all the land around it to the Vancouver Aquarium, like they left it in their will or something. It’s not exactly explained.

 

 

I still can’t believe they’re giving it away.

 

 

Well, the owners felt the aquarium was the right entity to protect it and put it to good use, like

 

Will Riley 

they’re just showing up at this beach house to see if there’s anything that will be helpful to the Vancouver Aquarium. They’ve already got all this free land. Either way, this

 

 

is going to make an excellent research facility for us. Yeah. I’m

 

Will Riley 

not sure how the Vancouver Aquarium is receiving all of this free real estate that’s usually the domain of UBC. I can only assume that this donation of an entire house to the Vancouver Aquarium is the result of some sort of tithing system. There’s

 

 

our research lab. It’s. And of course, we’ll be able to use it for accommodation if we want to stay over for a couple of days. You got the key. It’s in my pocket. Hagan

 

Will Riley 

bags tries to refer to the house as a fixer upper. And I mean, sure enough, the house on the land by this beach does look a bit ramshackle. It hasn’t been used in a few years. I’m

 

 

gonna have to spend some money on that Wharf, though, looks a little ratty. George,

 

 

you’re getting a whole island for nothing. You’re worrying about spending a couple of

 

 

bucks. Somebody’s got to worry about

 

Will Riley 

1. The shrubs are growing out into the windows. The stairs and railings are all made by the owner, so they’re crooked after years of wear. The roof is like actually curved and uneven on one side, this house would go for about 4 million in the current market, and I’m not doing a bit here, and the aquarium gets it for free. It’s like how those people leave their entire fortune to their cat or something. You’re worrying about spending a couple of bucks. There’s a lot of visual splendor here, and all of the characters in the dialog are going out of their way to explain how great everything here is. This fresh air is too good to pass up. So again, hinting at trying to advertise Vancouver as a place to live, thus creating the system that will make this house worth $4 million in the future, while the two doctors sort of wander around the place, the Jonah and Nicole aquatic expeditionary unit gets into work, they start doing their child underwater reconnaissance the music that’s playing as they do. All of this is similar to the first song that you might hear in an RPG.

 

Will Riley 

Like it’s the music playing in the protagonist’s village before it gets nuked in the first half hour. Like I’m listening to this music right now, and I’m just getting flashbacks to the 80th crafting tutorial I’ve gone through. We get some good underwater shots. Granted, it’s probably cheaper camera equipment for this. So it’s a little blurry and the colors are a bit washed out the cameras focusing on Jonah as he’s swimming around reacts to a bunch of basically stock footage of Pacific Northwest marine life, sort of Italian Spider Man style. Through the power of the Kuleshov effect, we get to see Jonah react to a whole host of animals, the kind of sea star that has way too many legs, a sea cucumber, some kind of fish I can’t really identify beyond the fact that it’s brown. The same sea star again, but from a different angle. And then he comes across the ominous green barrels. He swims around them. He’s very confused. He doesn’t know what they are, because, as luck would have it, somehow all three barrels have landed just so, so they’ve totally concealed their warning labels. I mean, what are the odds? There are days and there are days. Not only has Jonah not figured out that these barrels might be dangerous, he comes up for air and then goes back down to get another look at these barrels, which in the intervening period have started to produce like a green gas out of them. I mean, I know it’s underwater, but I mean, this is the closest thing that you get to Captain Planet, signs of pollution happening. Just a bunch of green fart gas rising out from these barrels. Jonah swims up close to these barrels. Starts removing the rocks underneath them, and starts trying to look at and go, What is this? P, O, I, what could this possibly be in these barrels. And sure enough, removing these rocks causes the barrels to start tumbling and just spewing all of this toxic waste in his face, except once we have a shot of the chemicals touching him, instead of a cartoon green, they’ve changed color to a dark blood red. We had one goofy little shooting error that was sort of fun at the start, but now we’ve got a continuity error that makes this way more terrifying and uncomfortable. I mean, it just goes to show you, that’s why they call Gilbert Chilton the Stanley Kubrick of aquarium action dramas. Jonah tears the goggles off his face and is coming up for air and just starts screaming, my eyes, my eyes,

 

Will Riley 

to which I just gotta ask, like, why did he take the goggles off in the first place? I mean, maybe this is just looking for plot holes. I mean, I can assume the goggles Jonah’s wearing aren’t some sort of perfect watertight seal. But why is it? The first thing that he does when he’s exposed to the evil gas is to grab his goggles and tear them off and just get even more poison in his eyes. In the first place, Jonah’s reaction to getting poison. In his eyes, is like real excruciating it goes on for a while. The fact that you’ve got two people shouting and overlapping over each other really adds to the chaos, but But all this clumsy splashing of two people smacking their flippers around on the surface of the water just makes it even more unpleasant.

 

Will Riley 

And of course, the dialog, oh, it’s in my eyes. It’s in my eyes. Yes, obviously we can make all our jokes and draw parallels to The Wicker Man bees scene. I mean, the danger Bay lawyers were obviously able to make the parallel as well. That’s why they were able to sue the people from The Wicker Man in the first place. That’s why Chris crab has Nicholas Cage’s power of attorney to this day. That’s the whole reason why Nicholas Cage has a pyramid for his future grave in the first place. That wasn’t Nicholas Cage’s idea. That was Chris Krabs i

 

Will Riley 

So yeah, now there’s a very clear parallel going on here. We had the rabies episode with Nicole, and now we have a bunch of corrosive materials in Jonah’s eyes. You can see Chris haddock one upping the other people on the danger Bay staff. You thought a girl getting bit by a dog and getting a bunch of spaghetti sauce in her hands was kind of freaky. It really hurt. Well, come over here, kid, open up your eyes with ham corrosive materials. Ah. Chris haddock here is so obviously working towards as big a whiplash as he can to terrify what kids are watching. I mean, who does he think he is? The guy who made page master.

 

Will Riley 

Finally grant sees that the kids are struggling in the water, and he leaps to the rescue, taking off his shirt and sort of diving in. I didn’t notice until now just how odd it was that there’s this show that’s built entirely around ocean life, and it’s been this long before we’ve seen the protagonist take off their shirt to swim and, like, actually dive somewhere. There is that possibility that Donnelly Rhodes has that sort of Shatner type of insecurity about one’s body and like, I don’t know, going the girdle stays on the entire shoot, or something like that. Body standards are body standards whatever time you’re in, I suppose. I mean, as a person his age, Donnelly Rhodes is kind of above average. He’s an actor, after all, and he’s keeping slim, which is often part of the job description. I mean, all I’m noticing is that he’s got a pronounced farmer tan, which is pretty common. And I’m sorry, there’s no way to word this that doesn’t sound weird. Donley Rhodes has some very brown nips.

 

 

What happened out there side? Happened out there? Son, what barrels gauze over your eyes? I

 

Will Riley 

don’t want to get any sunlight in there. Grant basically starts doing triage and trying to figure out how to mitigate the damage to Jonah’s eyes, getting him to lie down. And in a first for this show, starts calling for help from the pontoon plane in order to help a human, not some sort of sea creature, request

 

 

emergency takeoff to the east from Harbor, air, whiskey, knock a

 

 

box to tower.

 

Will Riley 

Joyce, the pilot gets called on the radio for an emergency evacuation, but we don’t actually see her. Instead, what we see is reused footage of that plane flying past that under construction, Canada Place, just reminding everybody, Hey, Expo is coming. Expo 86 you gotta get excited. Don’t think about that kid with the chemicals in his eyes right now get hyped for Expo 86 I’m being a glib about it, but I think they are really making a point about Vancouver and how Expo 86 is gonna be great. I’m not joking when I say that the World’s Fair 1986 did rearrange Vancouver’s whole being for a lot of people, it’s the same as it was for Seattle and for Montreal. So Expo 86 is still about two years away when this episode is airing. So all the big Defining Moments most interested Vancouverites can rattle off haven’t really happened yet. The sky train’s not up yet. The World’s Fair mascot, Expo Ernie is not a household name yet. The USSR decision to build their pavilion to highlight their achievements in nuclear energy still seems like a good idea, because Chernobyl hasn’t happened yet. This is all still super nascent. Vancouver’s Expo is still in the early phase, the development phase, the forcibly effect over 1000 In low income residents from the planned build site phase. I mean, that was a necessary cost for progress. Switzerland needed to build a giant yellow wrist watch so their pavilion could Wow Expo goers. They need that land. Where do you think they get that land? Any kid today, though, would still

 

 

be impressed by the MC barge and getting fries on a ship.

 

Will Riley 

And so while Jonah is still lying down in the boat with white gauze in his eyes, Grant Roberts and Dr George Dunbar are immediately ready to go time to solve a mystery. Hang

 

 

on, son, it won’t be much longer, we’re gonna have to raise that barrel and find out what it was he came in contact with, try and get a sample for Donna to analyze. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m afraid he may have come in contact with some toxic material down

 

Will Riley 

there, like they both snap right into sleuth mode, into evidence collection mode. Here is the data that we need to investigate, a weird, non committal choice in dialog. Hagen Beggs references environmental protection services.

 

 

El radio, the Environmental Protection Service. They can send out a crew and get it up right away,

 

Will Riley 

but there’s no such office or body by that name. It’s the same way that danger Bay used the word wilderness areas in some other episode,

 

 

there’s a problem with several of the lakes in the wilderness area. It’s all

 

Will Riley 

very official sounding, but it’s just vague and inaccurate enough that you can sort of supplant any sort of setting into it. Maybe they’re just keeping it deliberately vague so that when you translate a show or air it in another country, what office is doing? What isn’t that much of a glaring question, but there’s also a very real chance that Chris haddock was writing, looked at his script and went, Well, I wrote down I’ll call the EPA, but this is Canada, and I don’t actually know what the name for this country’s equivalent for the EPA is. I’ll just put in the broad title of protection services here, and then I’ll find out what the name of the Canadian EPA is. You know, later, the name for the Canadian EPA is the Canadian EPA. It’s basically a replica our country made when they first saw what Nixon was doing. What’s really weird is that the enforcement of the EPA works underneath the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which sounds good. It sounds like a good, liberal sounding government body. But really what that means is that if somebody gets caught putting mercury in the ocean, their case is going to the same place as when one of my former co workers tried to sue science world for asking her 12 year old to wear a face mask in 2021 when some crank online gets the idea that 15 minute cities are actually a secret plot to institute martial law in Canada, the first thing that they do is go to the Human Rights Commission and complain about it, a lot of weird red tape surrounding the Canadian EPA nowadays, a lot of complaints somehow get across wire and they get sent to what’s called the economic potential act. So people witness an oil spill, and they send the report, and through some sort of clerical error, it goes to the wrong EPA, ends up in a different office headed up by former employees of Enbridge and Bombardier. I think that office was Chrystia freeland’s idea. She said something about how, like as a liberal, she believes in checks and balances, and who has gone without checks and balances longer in Canada than the EPA. It was part of some UBC lecture that she did. It was titled Welty Slayer, a liberals approach. Don’t really know what that is, Dr Rogers, Dr chan please report

 

 

to or five,

 

Will Riley 

because the footage of Joyce’s pontoon plane was reused. We don’t actually see Jonah get picked up and taken to the hospital in the plane. It all just happens off screen. The next scene is Grant entering the hospital. You know, at this stage in the show for Jonah, you know, they don’t really have the budget to spend on filming new footage of this plane, but Danger, danger the otter. I mean danger. She gets the big bucks. When you take an otter to a hospital, the CBC will spend the big bucks inside the hospital. Grant does a little bit of exposition. What

 

 

did that yellow stuff do to Jonah’s eyes?

 

 

I don’t know you, sweetheart, we have to be patient. Wait till Dr Kelsey lets us know

 

 

she’s one of the best eye doctors in this country. But

 

Will Riley 

this whole scene, I’ll tell you, I’m I’m distracted. I’m busy thinking about Grant Roberts outfit here, yes, it’s another edition of the danger Bay fashion report. Yes, yes, but this is very specific and very targeted. Grant is wearing the type of shirt that you can only really get in Canada. We all know the stereotype of the Canadian tuxedo. You know, denim on denim on denim. But. Can get the components of a Canadian tuxedo anywhere, specifically the jean jacket. However, what if you want to wear a jean jacket, but you simply aren’t cool enough to do so? Well, that’s where the jean effect business casual button up shirt comes in. You want to look like an outdoorsman at your data entry office. Try the gene effect. Business casual, button up, utilitarian looking two inch flaps on dual chest pockets that might be able to hold the ballpoint pen if the pockets are real at all. It’s the gene effect. Business Casual button up, all the exposed stitching and oversized buttons with none of the warmth and durability, remember to press and starch the gene effect business casual button up coming to a member of parliament near you.

 

 

Don’t know you, sweetheart, we have to be patient. Wait until Dr Kelsey lets us know she’s

 

 

one of the best eye doctors in this country. Dr

 

 

Roberts,

 

Will Riley 

the actress playing Jonah’s optometrist here, does a good job with what she’s given. To some extent, she does just exist to give the scientific info about Jonah’s eyes and what parts of the eyes do, what I’ve

 

 

applied an antibiotic that opens the pupils of the eyes to give them some relief from the pain. But

 

Will Riley 

it does mean that compared to a lot of the other doctor characters that we’ve seen in this show, there’s not really much of a revelation of an internal life going on with this character. You know, she’s straightforward, she’s honest and professional. She’s just giving a text dump.

 

 

Well, the membrane that lines the eye appears to have suffered some tissue damage.

 

Will Riley 

And if you are that transparent about things in the TV show, you come off as a little bit robotic. Does

 

 

that mean Jonah’s gonna go blind?

 

 

It’s too early to tell,

 

 

but could he

 

Will Riley 

Yes. So it turns out, finding out what the chemicals in Jonah’s eyes actually are may actually help his recovery. We

 

 

know that some form of acid was involved, but it appears there were other substances as well. It would help with the precise treatment if we knew what was in that container.

 

 

I have somebody working on that right now,

 

Will Riley 

Grant Roberts and George Dunbar were already talking about collecting evidence and finding out what this stuff actually was, but it’s not till here that grant Roberts actually has some sort of motivation for being a detective. This is when the actual sleuthing and crime fighting begins in the episode. And the issue is, is like we’re at the nine minute mark. Now, your mileage may vary, of course, but this is why I sort of prefer between the two Chris haddock danger Bay episodes, the previous one that we talked about, the hatchery mystery, rather than this one, the barrel mystery episode. I suppose that this episode, from a very textbook perspective of how to write a TV episode, this is theoretically more solid. There’s more of a clear act structure, but when we compare it to salmon run, where grant does a forensic examination with the fish on his kitchen cutting board in the very first scene of the episode, the ED

 

 

opposed fin is missing. This fish was swimming upstream to the Norwest hatchery when it was trapped. We can

 

Will Riley 

see that sometimes a character’s curiosity itself is more than enough to create the desire to solve a mystery. Grant was just tooling around in his kitchen cooking dinner, looked over at his co worker and said, You are too poor to afford this salmon. I’m gonna get to the bottom of this. And that was enough. We started the procedure of trying to solve a crime immediately, like first seconds of the episode, the actual emotional stakes of that episode, you know, protecting the ambiguously gay cabin uncles from losing the right to their real estate. That was established well after the fact, the plot didn’t really need much propellant. You didn’t need much of a motivation. There was just a mystery to be solved. This

 

 

fish is now evidence,

 

Will Riley 

but here in hot cargo, it takes nine minutes before anybody in the Roberts family is actually given a task to do. It’s primarily just been footage of Jonah getting owned up till now, the character of Joyce, the pontoon pilot. She’s She’s also here in the hospital. Joyce is looking very mullety in this episode. I don’t know why. It’s not like her hair has actually changed that much. I think you just put on a gene vest with a popped collar, and with that hair, you just look at it and go, yeah, oh, wow. It’s the fabulous free birds here at last, and then you just sort of auto correct from there. In theory, Joyce is supposed to be some sort of a love interest for grant Roberts further down the line, though, no writer has really properly committed to that idea, but in that context, it makes sense that she will be here as well. Of. Very worried about Jonah, just as much as grant is, oh, this

 

 

is my daughter, Nicole, and this is Joyce Carter, a family friend. But

 

Will Riley 

just like all of the other writers before him, Chris haddock isn’t really that ready to commit to that either.

 

 

Are you coming? No,

 

 

I think Jonah needs to be with his family right now. I’ll come in later.

 

Will Riley 

Basically just announces that she’s here and then announces that she leaves after Joyce announces, yeah, I don’t have any lines in this next scene, she exits stage left as the boom mic, which is visible in the frame, sort of follows her along. I don’t know why the boom mic is following her. I mean, she doesn’t say anything after that. Now, I’ve pointed out some technical snafus in this episode so far, but I will be fair to danger bay here. This isn’t on them. The boom mic doesn’t actually belong to this production. It belongs to somebody else entirely. Nobody really knows who the guy with the boom mic was on that day. This is from the Patrick starfish book I’ve been mentioning. I mean, back in the 1980s Vancouverites, I mean, they didn’t even really know what television was. They still thought it was the result of some sort of sorcery. All they really understood was that people were making middle class incomes off of it. So people would try to participate, even if they didn’t really understand that just happened on Canadian productions at the time, people would just try and surreptitiously sneak onto the set and pretend that they’d been working there that whole time to just try to sort of get an in into the television industry. I mean, it’s that old school work mentality, you know, like you go to somebody’s business and you start sweeping the floor with your own broom, and maybe they’ll give you a job, something along those lines. I mean, what’s to stop people from trying to do that with their own boom mics? And maybe somebody will give them a job, even if the boom mic isn’t connected to anything. You look closely, you can tell that it’s actually not a microphone at all. It’s like a soup can on a hockey stick. I remember an anecdote about an episode in Season Three where they had to basically throw out an entire day of shooting because they discovered that the guy who was claiming to be their cameraman was actually a total stranger, and he’d been using a hastily made cereal box with a hole poked into it and trying to claim that that was a camera. He figured he’d be able to at least get, like, a day’s paycheck out of that, but no, like all these other people, they just threw him into the ocean. Grant and Nicole enter Jonah’s sick room, and we get to get a glimpse of what Jonah’s state is right now. Hi son,

 

 

dad and me. Hi Nicole. I bet I look pretty stupid,

 

Will Riley 

huh? They’re trying to make it seem like Jonah’s making light of his horrible condition. But, I mean, yeah, he He does look pretty dumb here. He’s got a bunch of gauze around his head and particularly over his eyes, as you’d expect. But they’ve also got his hands bandaged as well. I know that it’s there to stop him from scratching or moving the bandages like unintentionally. Since you know, everybody touches their face more than they think they do, really. It looks like his face got owned so hard he broke his hand somehow too. They’ll be putting Jonah’s leg in a cast next. They’ll be holding him up at a 45 degree angle, like all of the other cartoon characters. The one thing about the way Jonah looks in this scene, that is, it’s maybe giving things away a little too much, but there is a good bit of foreshadowing. Here you have these big white patches over Jonah’s eyes, just like, What do you think in Orca? He looks like an Orca? I mean, it’s just, it’s sort of surprising. Nobody actually caught that when the episode first came out, but now, like, what happens in the future in danger Bay, that just seems so much more obvious now.

 

 

Dr cowsy puts something into my eyes to keep them from burning so much. She’s a neat lady, isn’t she, and the best eye doctor in the whole world, Jonah.

 

Will Riley 

Because Jonah’s injury involves, like, recuperating his eyes. It means that he’s in a darkened room, which means there’s some nice single source lighting going on in this scene. The thing is, because it’s a single source of light, you’re way more aware that it’s there. But I do like imagining a doctor going, Okay, turn all the lights off. We have a patient with an eye injury. Turn off those fluorescents. Turn off the floor lamps, unplug that clock radio. We gotta keep this room dark people. Then a nurse comes up and asks, Doctor, do you think we ought to also turn off that giant stage spotlight that’s pointed directly at the patient’s face? We’ve got a Chavez GJ ellipsoidal 50 Z spotlight pointed directly at the patient’s face. Do you think we should do something about that as well? No, no, no, that’ll be fine. Leave that also in this scene. This is the first time we’ve heard it. So I think I’ll mention this. There is a sad, slow violin version of the danger Bay theme song playing throughout this whole scene, which is how you know that this is a really low moment for the characters when they start playing the theme song in a. Minor key that’s when things are really bad.

 

Will Riley 

Hi, son, who can forget the very special episode of The Jeffersons where Weezy contracted swine flu and they just played moving on up in a minor key the entire time, more like moving on down, if you ask me, Jonah is distraught about all of this, as you may expect. This scene is in some ways, a master class in TV dialog compression. With this scene, I like to imagine Chris haddock at a whiteboard with like five or six Junior writers in a conference room. Okay, team, we’ve got a kid who might go blind and he’s afraid. 30 minute brainstorm, go and after a long period of spit balling, debating 50 or 60 post it notes thrown on the board, finally they figure out the exact right words for Jonah to express that he’s really scared and he doesn’t want to be blind. I’m really scared. I don’t want to be blind. Perfect. There’s no fat on that sentence, no notes. We do sort of have an extra tag onto this scene, just between Donley Rhodes and Chris crab. Is there anything

 

 

I can do for you right now? Yeah, what

 

 

could you please stay with me tonight,

 

Will Riley 

allowing the Jonah character to have a more explicitly emotional acting moment. Donnelly Rhodes is watching over his son as he sleeps and he wakes up in the middle of the night.

 

 

I’m here, Jonah, Dad, it’s where am I. You’re in the hospital, son and an accident. Remember?

 

 

Oh yeah, it’s so dark,

 

 

it’s been bandages. Jonah just the bandages.

 

Will Riley 

It’s sort of weird, because this is supposed to be Jonah’s scene, but Don Rhodes gets to do more of the acting, really, because Chris crab can’t emote with his eyes in this scene. And Donnelly Rhodes is doing something where he is emoting at two different levels at once. Donnelly Rhodes gets to talk in one tone while he can facially emote something totally different as he speaks. Sure,

 

 

it’s just the bandages.

 

 

These things take time. Jonah, you gotta have patience, try and get some sleep. Now

 

Will Riley 

this scene really is the first time in this show that we have something like a tender moment between grant and Jonah the tennis episode, maybe, but that was built around Jonah fessing up to his own flaws. It’s not exactly a heart to heart like this. The only analog for this scene that we’ve had so far is in the cowboy episode where Nicole was reminiscing about her dead mother to her dad. I don’t think I’ll ever stop wishing she was with us. You can sort of see the gender divide here in terms of what can motivate a emotional scene. The daughter character can sort of spontaneously have this heart to heart with her dad having to do with her family and her grief, while the male character having the same discussion would come off as strange after years of gender role conditioning if you’re a male TV character in the 80s, in particular, if you want to get hugged by your dad, you have to fall off a cliff first or something. You got to get poison in your eyes. Do you remember

 

 

what we used to do when we saw a shooting star?

 

 

What were two is four good one was here.

 

Will Riley 

This is where the tradition of gender study readings of danger Bay comes to the fore. Of course, Andrea Dworkin famously wrote 300 pages about danger Bay, although 75% of that was just talking about dolphins for the exact reasons that you think Andrea Dworkin would write about dolphins the next day, we get to see the villains of this episode up to no good. The guy who was flying the plane is back. He’s still wearing the exact same clothes, and he’s talking with his boss, well, I’d say the organization was pretty pleased with our little operation. It’s their operation

 

 

for your sake. Don’t forget it.

 

Will Riley 

Chris haddock, very obviously, is trying to avoid making this a Captain Planet type scenario where the bad guys are polluting just for the love of the game. So he tries to insert some info for what the profit motive for dumping chemicals would be,

 

 

I still don’t dig why there’s such big bucks to be made by dumping this stuff. God may cost mega bucks to process it legally. That figures

 

 

anyways, as it was saying, they love us.

 

Will Riley 

But you can tell, as these villains are talking about the profit that lies within dumping chemicals illegally, that his hands are being tied in some way by now, danger Bay has a track record of evading pointing at a true culprit in the issue of pollution. Anybody who stands to make a profit from pollution or poaching is always left unidentified in this show. Who bought those Falcon eggs? We don’t know who’s reducing costs by dumping poison in the ocean. Nobody knows. I suppose in the other Chris haddock episode, we did have a positive ID in sort of who the malefactor was. It was the Colombo villain guy, but the script was quick to note that he was also bad, because he was tricking shareholder, and he was the one encroaching on all of the Ma and Pa, small business multinational industrial salmon hatcheries.

 

 

The hatcheries have been taking enormous losses, and if it keeps up, they could go out of business again. The

 

Will Riley 

only time that the villain in a danger Bay episode has been clear and straightforward is when they said it was the Soviet Union in danger Bay. The enemies of the environment are really only comprehended when they’re formulated as an enemy from without, not within. As a matter of fact, in some of the other episodes that we’ve seen, they could at least say, Oh, this company is turning all these horses into dog food. They won’t say what company in this episode, they don’t even get to say, Oh, this company is dumping these chemicals illegally. Here, they just refer to the organization to obfuscate it even further. Well, I’d say the organization was pretty pleased. It could be any kind of bad guy, if it’s an organization, could be a company, could be some kind of Mafia. Hey, it could be a state organization. We know what the Soviet Union is up to. They haven’t told us what China’s doing in the danger Bay universe. Yet. There is much to mock about Captain Planet villains. But at the very least in Captain Planet, there’s a guy you can point to. This is the guy. This is the man who’s doing all this pollution. We have an answer to, like the qui Bono of it all in danger Bay. It’s always middlemen. We

 

 

were making him a nice little bundle by dumping this stuff in the deep blue sea. This is just

 

Will Riley 

a small piece of very large pie. We may not see the ultimate end boss of this dumping scheme, but we do get to see the direct superior of the guy who’s flying the plane and dropping the barrels in the first place. He is played by an actor named Duncan Fraser. And I bring him up over some of the other actors that we’ve encountered so far, because Chris haddock often had a habit when he was running his own shows, to get into touch with a lot of the people that he worked with in previous projects on other people’s shows. So Duncan Fraser becomes the chief of police for the whole first season of Da Vinci’s inquest. You’re

 

 

questioning evidence, scene analysis, pathology, your own people’s expertise. That’s the mandate of the corner. So it’s an open invitation to raise the dead. That’s what it is. God damn dumb. It costs mega bucks to process it legally. Even

 

Will Riley 

in this scene, you can listen to His voice, and you go, Okay, that’s a police commissioner’s voice. You can immediately hear him barking orders to loose cannon cops and stuff like that.

 

 

I don’t think the boss is very happy now, Reynolds, but we’re the ones gonna be real miserable if

 

Will Riley 

you get busted. Duncan Fraser actually gets a lot to work with in that show, because by the end of it, he is leaving the force because he’s caught on a corruption scandal. Old police chiefs are definitely of a specific esthetic cast. However, you would be surprised just how much this guy looks like the police chief from samurai cop. You watch his performance in Da Vinci’s inquest, and you know that it’s a different guy, and you’re listening to the lines, and he’s talking about dealing with his besmirched integrity and his guilt for all the corrupt things he’s done. But the only things going on in my head are the lines, like somebody stuck a big club up my ass and it hurts. I’ve got to figure out a way to get it out in there. And he definitely looks the part as a police chief in Da Vinci’s inquest. He’s got, at that point, sort of a donut shaped balding pattern and a perfectly maintained mustache, no beard, or anything like that. But in this era of his career, in this episode of danger Bay coming onto the show hot off of the fly two. It’s clear that he’s trying very hard to maintain what hair he’s actually got left. He’s got it longer than makes sense for his character, but you can tell it’s getting thinner and thinner, which surprisingly actually works in making him look more villainous in this scene. This

 

 

is just a small piece of very large pie. So

 

Will Riley 

now the criminal game of cat and mouse begins once again. The law enforcement authorities in Vancouver have left the criminal forensic investigation to the most capable hands in the city, the Vancouver Aquarium. We’ve got a lot of the stock scientific testing scenes. We’ve got Dr Donna, she’s holding test tubes in front of the camera of a whole bunch of different colors, sort of observing them, shaking them around. We’ve got, like, big Bunsen burners and like, spinning tubes of water going through them, you know, the works. Find out what that substance was, yet, sulfuric

 

 

acid, basically, also some traces of cadmium and chromium. And then we

 

Will Riley 

find. Finally get to the thing that I was after in this Chris haddock episode, the actual slew thing, and sort of the logical connections between finding out what was this chemical and then how we get from there to finding out who we’ve got to talk to next. They

 

 

say it’s a byproduct of an electroplating process. Good.

 

 

That narrows it down. Yeah, here’s

 

 

a list of the disposal companies in this area that handle that type of waste. I

 

 

think I know why they chose monk Island. There’s a deep trench just offshore there. There’s

 

Will Riley 

a bit of elite trying to figure out how planes come into the equation here. How could they miss it by

 

 

100 feet off the end of a boat, though? Well, maybe

 

 

they didn’t dump it from an end of a boat. Maybe they dropped it from a plane, of course,

 

Will Riley 

but all in all, there is like a smoothness in the sort of logical operation here that is pleasing to my senses, at least. The thing that does kind of do this in though, is that at the end of this logical chain, it’s just, let’s go and look at the paperwork for a company.

 

 

Do any of these disposal services use aircraft? If they

 

 

did, they’d have to file a flight plan. Now that’d be easy to check out. I’ll go out to the airport and I’ll call you later at the hospital. Thank

 

Will Riley 

you. The last time that we had a scene like this where grant Roberts was looking at the adipose fin of a salmon and figuring out which hatchery it belonged to in that episode, that whole logical chain just led them to basically the culprit and inserted them into this big interpersonal mystery. Here, the logical chain leads the characters to a filing cabinet, of course, which, I mean, this is sort of a soft rule, but if you ever have a mystery in a movie or a TV show, it’s much better to have it start in front of a filing cabinet instead of at the end of it. Now we’re getting somewhere. It’s the same thing that I liked so much about the other Chris haddock episode, but it sort of ends kind of limply because of that now that the characters actually have some place to go to solve a mystery and all of that naturally, where they go next is Jonah’s recovery room.

 

 

Hello, Doctor, another doctor.

 

 

She means me, kid and Nicole. Hi, Dr Kelsey. He

 

Will Riley 

and Nicole are just hanging out eating the brownest pizza I’ve ever seen in my life. Nicole is describing the funny pages to him as

 

 

for you, young man, stop flirting with all those nurses. Some of them aren’t as cute as their voices make them out to be and

 

Will Riley 

they’re basically just waiting for time to pass, culminating in Jonah sneaking this question to his optometrist. You

 

 

really think Pete Rose is going to help the Expos that much? I sure

 

 

1. He’s always been a winner. Pete Rose

 

Will Riley 

in the expos. I think I’ve already talked about how danger Bay is not just quintessentially 80s, but season one keeps on finding ways to be specific to 1984 and 1984 only for those of you not in the know Pete Rose being in the expos, the thing that Jonah says is going to turn the team around. Pete Rose retired after a single season with the expos. I don’t think he really even played later on. Of course, it turned out that Pete Rose ended up in the Expos purely as a result from the fallout of a very bad bet he made on underground illegal cock fights. Now, of course, that sounds very shady, but you gotta remember, you have to understand Pete Rose only ever bet on his own cock. He’s always been a winner. I’m really curious why in the first place Jonah cares about the Expos at all when the official Vancouver team for the MLB is the Seattle Mariners. A result of geographic proximity, yes, but also because, as citizens of Vancouver, we are required by law to avoid feelings of joy or success as a Vancouverite MLB or NFL fan, Mariners and Seahawks are the perfect go to teams if your experience of sports is having some bit of news come your way once every four months, and you look at and you go, oh yeah, that’s kind of neat. What

 

 

was it? Vince Lombardi said, winning isn’t everything. It’s the only

 

Will Riley 

thing. This will, of course not be the last time that danger Bay makes a bet on an athlete that doesn’t really turn out. You’ll probably remember that in the early 2010s Nicole’s standard outfits all incorporated Lynn sanity merchandise in one way or the other. Number one inmate at the LIN sein asylum, Lynn sanity, forever. 100% Lynn sane, all of these slogans. There’s also a scene in later danger bay where Jonah is talking to a kid who’s an amputee from the abalone wars. And this is sort of a paraphrase, but I remember him telling the kids something along the lines of, even if you’ve lost your legs, you should always fight against the odds. You shouldn’t let circumstances control your ambitions. You can transcend all these boundaries. You can be an inspirational hero to everybody, just like Oscar Pistorius is be like Oscar Pistorius. Think like Oscar Pistorius. Take that home with you. If you take nothing else from me talking with you today, you should emulate Oscar Pistorius and do all the things that Oscar Pistorius does.

 

 

Steak, feed, Rose. What’s a man really want from enough to shape, not fancy perfume or fancy bottles,

 

 

not fancy prices. A man wants to smell like a man.

 

 

There’s something about Aqua velvet.

 

 

He wants to be cool and refresh.

 

 

There’s something about Aqua Vella. A man wants to feel like a man who one more

 

 

pizza coming up. I shall return.

 

Will Riley 

And don’t forget the double pepperoni, right demands from Jonah for an even brown or pizza transition into a conversation between the doctor and grant Roberts. Obviously, double pepperoni is a common order that people make for pizzas now, but when I hear it from a show in the 80s, it sounds like it’s something that is sort of what’s the craziest thing we can think of for a pizza. Oh, twice the amount of pepperoni. That’s insane. That being said, We’ve got to keep this in perspective. I mean, it’s an easily forgivable thing. Pizza had only been invented two years prior by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so they were still working out the proper glossary of terms.

 

 

I don’t want to create any false hopes. Dr Roberts, I want you to know exactly where we stand. That’s what I want to hear Dr Kelsey, I

 

Will Riley 

suppose you would call this the educational portion of the episode, but really it’s just a glossary of various ocular terms, $10 words like chloromycetum and the like. As you

 

 

know, with any acidic burns to the eyes, the chance of blindness is very chloromycetin Soak throughout the night and in the morning we move this back. We know for sure, then, one way or the other, there’s any permanent damage. Yes, primarily,

 

Will Riley 

it just serves to remind the viewer after a commercial break that these are the things that you’re supposed to have emotional investment in in this episode, it’s a bit repetitive in the grander scope of things, but this is a common negotiation episodic pre prestige TV shows have to make with the audience. Look, I know that. You know everything will return to status quo once the credits roll. But can you please maintain your sense of suspense for just a few minutes longer? Please. Is

 

 

there anything I could be doing for him right now?

 

 

If you’re a religious man, you might say a prayer or two.

 

 

I’m doing that, doctor since the moment this nightmare first began.

 

Will Riley 

I We have seen some religious rituals going on in the Vancouver Aquarium, ie sending their biologists out on mission and collecting property tithes, of course, as we just saw in this episode. But really, this is the first time any sort of religion has been deliberately invoked in this show. It’s not really a theme that gets explored in depth, in danger Bay, of course, until the Life Church of Nicole story arc A few years later, we’ve got another Heart to Heart scene between Jonah Roberts and grant.

 

 

We were talking to Dr Kelsey out there, weren’t you? Yeah,

 

 

she said she’s gonna take your bandages off first thing in the morning, is that all she said

 

 

pretty much, Dad, please, I want you to tell me the truth. Okay, Dad,

 

Will Riley 

however, it’s basically just a repeat of the last scene that we had, both the second exposition dump with the optometrist and this scene the second heart to heart between grant and Jonah, it sort of feels like they were looking to fill space, like they just took two scenes that had already happened, and then just changed the dialog around so that they could fill for time, except this time, it gets acted out with less energy. Is

 

 

there anything I can do to help them? Is there anything I can do for you right now? Is there anything I could be doing for him right now. These things take time. Jonah, gotta have patience. I know the waiting is hard.

 

Will Riley 

This chunk of scenes is so repetitive, in fact, that as Jonah hugs grant Roberts again, the boom mic shows up from the top of the screen a second time. How’d that guy even get back in the studio? They threw him in the ocean, but I guess he just came back the next day, still sopping wet. We’re gonna get through this thing together.

 

 

But what if she takes off the bandages and I’m blind? How am I gonna be able to live if I can’t see?

 

Will Riley 

An interesting behind the scenes note about this line reading here, how am I going to live if I can’t see, apparently, according to an interview he did many years later, when I first read those lines, I was a young kid. I didn’t realize at that point that blind people weren’t being euthanized by the state. When I said, How am I going to live if I can’t see, I meant that quite literally. That was how I was able to put so much emotion into these lines when I read them, how am I gonna be able to live if I can’t see? It wasn’t until about three years later, when the scene came up in conversation, that somebody corrected me and told me that blind people weren’t actually being immediately killed, which really brings up the question, well, why aren’t they? When I ask people why we aren’t killing all the blind people, all I get is some liberal sentiment. With no logical basis. It’s a question that’s going to need a final answer very soon. Now, obviously people were very mad at Chris crab when he said this, but we have to remember that this was in Cat Fancy. And I don’t think that anybody in good conscience can say that Cat Fancy is above such political smears. How am I gonna be able to live if I can’t see surveying the hospital room with my eyes, there’s a surprising amount of artificial wood grain in all of these hospital rooms. It sort of looks like a kitchen out of the 80s, not not like a medical room. I suppose hospitals and modern kitchen designers must be drawing goods and services from the same suppliers, sort of like American schools and American prisons. I figure that’s why nowadays, all the hospitals have, you know, nice marble countertops, a lot of stainless steels. All the nurses are washing up under copper faucets with porcelain tile back splashes. It’s very it’s very pleasant. It’s very nice. It’s very calmingly designed. You almost forget that you’re in there for a rare tropical disease. Now that we’ve basically played every hospital scene twice, we get back to trying to catch the crooks, the stuff that will actually advance the plot in this episode, the stuff about the mystery, it gets mentioned in a single sentence in this scene, almost like a throwaway Joyce

 

 

called and she wants you to meet her at Coastal cargo at two o’clock. It’s very important. We

 

Will Riley 

cut to the evil airplane pilot walking around an office. For some reason, the frame rate is all out of

 

 

whack. Got the time sheet for me fill out.

 

Will Riley 

Cut to the exterior, and Joyce is walking up to this office building, which is inside the middle of a giant airplane field. There’s a bunch of hangers. There’s just a bunch of Cessnas lying around on the ground close behind Joyce grant enters the scene in the Vancouver Aquarium jeep. None of the malcontents of this episode know that the aquarium is onto them yet, so there’s not really any need for fancy maneuvers, but just for fun, Grant decides to burn a little bit of rubber and do some drifting in the jeep just before the scene, just just to have some fun with it, he does exactly one tire squeak and then gets on with his life, because all the time for emotional development has been used up between Jonah and grant, the conversations between grant and people that he needs evidence from in this mystery are all very straightforward, and by the books, There’s not much room to emote. How do you do what can I do for you? Hopefully

 

 

you can answer some questions. You handle electroplating wastes, right? If you have a permit, I can pay the price. Uh huh.

 

 

Have you ever heard of monk Island? Yeah. What about it? Well,

 

 

I was wondering if any of your planes have flown over in the past week or two.

 

Will Riley 

No no reason to grant and joys are basically just caught there arguing with a receptionist. Everything we do is strictly legal, all above board, and I have the records to prove it. The Secretary slash receptionist here played by an actor by the name of Peter Hall, looks sort of like, I guess, Harry Dean Stanton, but before the tragic accident where he fell into the machine that dehydrates the food astronauts eat. But on top of that look, he’s also considerably taller than anybody else in the scene, which meant that, as I figured it out, I sort of targeted in on the singular name young lurch. This is his first role on television ever. And then he stops acting for 14 or 15 years, and then picks it up again, and then is working like a role every six months. I suppose there’s a lesson to that. It’s never too late to follow your dreams. He’s still acting today. In fact, he has an in with the DC television you know, Berlant verse, whatever you want to call it. He’s on the flash. He’s on legends of tomorrow. His most recent role was playing Abraham Lincoln in a single episode of Supergirl, which with how he looks. He’s very tall, he’s got high cheekbones, it makes sense that he would play Abraham Lincoln, but the thing that makes this weird is that his previous role for a DC show was playing the Lyndon B Johnson in legends of tomorrow. So he’s played two different presidents on two different DC adaptation shows. I have no idea why they cast him to play Lyndon Johnson. I’m not sure why he had to work his way up to playing Abraham Lincoln. I suppose it’s union rules. You know, seniority stuff, the Canadian brotherhood of foreign political Impressionists is strong in British Columbia, the BC, ACTRA, its influence waxes and waves, but the local CB, FPI, never loses the reins. It’s got a strong grip. What makes all of this even stranger is that, according to the credits of this episode of danger Bay, the name of the secretary he’s playing is Reagan. So he starts his acting career playing Reagan, and then two decades later, his most recent role is Abe Lincoln. Ben,

 

 

you wouldn’t mind us taking a look at your flight book.

 

 

That’s a pretty unusual request. Well, that’s

 

 

a pretty unusual circumstance.

 

Will Riley 

The Secretary basically recognizes that he’s being questioned and starts treating the aquarium folk like. They are cops, basically further establishing that they are cops in the danger Bay world, while grant and Joyce and the Secretary are arguing with each other as they pour over a bunch of documents in a file folder, the toxic waste dumping airplane pilot is just sort of quietly sitting in the corner watching them the moment that he realizes what they’re actually talking about, though. He stands up and just leaves the room. See you later. Regan, okay, something I’m not sure why they left it in the show. Reagan, the Secretary, is talking with Joyce and grant, and out of nowhere, some random extra just walks into frame. Were they all delivered legal and proper? Here’s the file you wanted. We says, like, Oh, here’s the file you wanted. It’s not relevant to the actual file that they’re talking about. But he just pops in and interrupts everything, like,

 

 

Here’s the file you wanted. We,

 

Will Riley 

I don’t even think that Peter Hall knew that this guy was gonna show up, because he’s midway through talking when he shows up. Here’s the funny one. I think somebody was trying to get a SAG card. They gave him a single line, and they had to show him for like, one second, then he could get his sag card and collect benefits or whatever. I mean, kudos if that’s the case. I mean, this is the correct way to get a foothold in the television industry. You don’t sneak onto the set with your own boom mic and ruin a whole bunch of shots. Now what you do is that you get yourself on camera, you say your line so that it interrupts and overlaps and make it so that they audibly have to recover and get back on track.

 

 

Were they all delivered legal and proper? Here’s

 

Will Riley 

the we made three flights last week, it looks like the pilot and his boss are cooking the books a little bit to hide the fact that they are dumping this stuff illegally. Flights

 

 

last week, 20

 

 

barrels each shipment. By my arithmetic, that makes only 60 barrels. I guess we got

 

Will Riley 

20 to go. You have receipts for those sure funny Reynolds must have forgotten to attach him. Who’s Reynolds the pilot? Who’s saying we just left? I’d say that this is actually a little more obfuscation on Chris Haddock’s part, because it makes this illegal dumping operation a total secret to every other person at this private company. Up until this point, we had a very big, anonymous, quote, unquote organization telling a smaller, more openly corrupt company to dispose of some toxic waste illegally. Now we’re revealing that this small dumping company, even they are, by and large, morally upright. It all comes down to two bad apples instead, not this firm. Dr Roberts, everything we do is strictly legal, all above board. Is it just me, or does this plan sort of seem really easily traceable?

 

 

By my arithmetic? That makes only 60 barrels like this plan really

 

Will Riley 

only takes one employee at that disposal center looking at a clipboard and going, there were 20 barrels that were supposed to be here, and they’re not. I better call somebody the profit margins on this plan can’t be that great either, though, to be honest, I sort of like that. I do sort of think it’s kind of realistic, the idea that a company would go through all of these hoops and break all of these laws in order to save like, a quarter of their operating costs for one project out of hundreds. But as far as like polluting plots are concerned, it’s less sophisticated than what we have in reality. I mean, Volkswagen engineered the computers in a bunch of their cars so that they’d be able to detect if they were being emissions tested, so they could give a lower, more favorable score than if it was actually being driven on the highway, like That’s some real supervillain shit in real life, but on this fictional TV show, we’ve got the polluting equivalent of, oh, these fell off the back of a truck. Whoopsie, who’s Reynolds, the pilot the same we just left.

 

 

Thank you.

 

Will Riley 

So anyway, after hovering over a filing cabinet for some time, they have identified their man, and they give chase for about 20 seconds, the evil pilot is already in his car by the time they figure out who he is. So really, the only bit of action that we have here is Joyce almost getting run over by a car. Visually, however, this scene is a little bit weird. What’s supposed to happen is Joyce almost gets run over, but grant jumps in and pulls her back before she gets blown to bits, basically. But by the time the car is near her, it has already swerved wide, and there’s really no risk of her getting hit. It’s like Joyce was never in any trouble, and grant just grabbed her and moved her around to invade her personal space for a bit of fun. Not that I’m complaining about this precisely. This is just how stunt work tends to go. You make sure that there’s never any opportunity for something to make contact if it doesn’t have to. I remember an online critique somebody made of The Phantom Menace, for instance, and this was in 2008 so when I’m getting to it in 2024 I’m basically striking when the iron is frozen. But one of the critiques was that nobody was ever at risk of being hit by a lightsaber. If you paid attention to the choreography, you’d point out this guy’s ducking to dodge this sword, but the sword is going way over his head, even if he stood up straight in The Phantom Menace, if nobody bothered to dodge the lightsaber, fatality rate would be exactly the same. Let me tell you something. I’ve been in this business for years and guys like that who’d missed their target by 20 inches that I’ve never seen. Audiences will love it. But if you are a stunt choreographer, that is literally the point, that is the thing that you are trying to construct. And so with this episode of danger Bay, we can see that the traditions of stage fighting and the traditions of stage vehicular manslaughter are pretty comparable. This action scene ends basically as soon as it starts. The moment grant gets into the Jeep, a plane sort of gets taxied right in his path so he can’t go anywhere.

 

 

Back it up, fella,

 

 

you better check out Riverside disposal. Absolutely

 

Will Riley 

script wise. I don’t even know why this chase scene is here, because there is going to be one short conversation scene, and then it’s going to be the final chase scene. There wasn’t much of a reason for this scene to exist other than to see Joyce almost get run over by a car. The logic seems to be that they needed to have a scene of the evil pilot talking to his boss to report that they need to run away, or that they’ve almost been caught. I don’t

 

 

think the boss is very happy now Reynolds, but we’re the ones going to be real miserable if we get busted

 

Will Riley 

in this action scene, we already have the bad guy going, Oh no, I’ve been caught. I better run away. And we stop that scene so that we can have the bad guys go, oh no, I’ve been caught. I better run away. But in a more conversational tone, we gotta get

 

 

rid of the rest of that shipment. We dump them now. Soon as we get rid of these,

 

Will Riley 

this scene really seems to exist for two reasons. One, so that we can see Duncan Fraser looking even more ragged, like he already looked like a bundle of frayed nerves, but now he’s got a big Christopher Lloyd look to Him, Christopher Lloyd, but with a few too many spritzes of the dry look by Gillette, let’s

 

 

say Reynolds. If you had missed that trench, none of this would have happened. The other reason

 

Will Riley 

for this scene to exist, it seems, is so that we can see another boom mic like this is the third boom mic in this episode alone. And there have been zero boom mics in any episode previous. I really don’t get it that guy who was trying to sneak into the set all the other times. I guess he was back. They threw him into the ocean last time. I guess they threw him into the Atlantic Ocean this time. So now that that previous chase scene has been sufficiently interrupted, it’s time to start a new chase scene.

 

 

Grant that’s the same car that tried to run us down.

 

Will Riley 

Duncan Fraser and the evil pilot have a big, ominous briefcase of illicit paperwork and a whole bunch of barrels that they haven’t managed to dispose of yet, and they’re loading them all into another pontoon plane to try and get rid of all of the evidence at once. Come on, guys. Speed it up. Speed it up, trying to offload all of these evil skull marked poison barrels, which are black now for some reason, but off from the side comes the Vancouver Aquarium Jeep with Joyce and grant

 

 

in it. We gotta stop that boat before it gets out to sea and they dump that stuff. They’ve been

 

Will Riley 

able to track the bad guys. Movements basically off screen. Grant is stealthily hiding out in one corner, crouching down in the shadows to basically be more like Batman. I’m gonna try and move in a little closer, okay, stakeout mode. Then something truly unprecedented happens. The police show up and they do something. You try and fly a chopper and hit a bullseye from the air. It ain’t easy.

 

Will Riley 

They show up from off screen, sirens blaring, ready to surround all of the bad guys. I mean, I can still assume that they are here at Grant Roberts’ behest, but this is still like the first time in danger bay that a police officer has shown up to do something other than arrest an 80 year old blind man. This

 

 

is Joyce Carter calling police dispatch. Come in, please,

 

Will Riley 

Fraser and the evil airplane pilot split up in different directions. They both try and run away. Fraser tries to escape, but his attempt is basically stopped immediately once he gets the narrow end of a police car door just directly in his mouth, like you can never. Be sure for certain, but I’m pretty sure this is an actual, real nut shot I’m seeing here. Non comedy shows usually do not script it so that somebody gets a plot relevant shot to the nuts. You can tell that the guy who opened the door is immediately standing up going, Oh God, what the hell have I done? Are you okay? Man, there’s a guy also in this scene whose stage directions are to run past Fraser and chase an accomplice, but he’s got to sort of awkwardly skirt around him because he’s off his mark. Duncan, Fraser is too disoriented from getting several dozen pounds of precision law enforcement automotive right in his reproductive organs, but they decided to keep it in the show anyway, because, I mean, it’s one of those serendipitous moments that you don’t cut out of a program. The airplane pilot, who took a different route, meanwhile, does actually have a chance to escape the police. He’s running down a straight line, and he’s got one police officer behind him. They’re both running through an alley with one straight way to go, and somehow grant Roberts, coming in from an angle and having to make a turn, nonetheless, runs faster than the police officer and catches the bad guy before the cop. You

 

Will Riley 

does having this chase shake out this way allow grant Roberts to have an emotional payoff of catching the guy who screwed up his kids eyes, yeah? Like, I guess so, if you think about it. However, what this scene definitely does is establish that in the pecking order, Grant Roberts is still better than the entire Vancouver Police Department. That’s the thing that is way more definite in this scene. Indeed, they make sure that the audience knows that grant. Roberts is actually totally unfazed by this action scene. Are you okay?

 

 

I think I cracked my knuckle.

 

 

You’re a doctor, not a football. Your own grant. I’ll make a note of that environmental protection is on its way good.

 

 

We’ll introduce them to some real garbage,

 

Will Riley 

speaking of a constitutional incapability of coming to harm. Okay,

 

 

Jonah. Now when I remove the bandages, I want you to wait a couple seconds, then blink a few times and open your eyes slowly, okay.

 

Will Riley 

Back at the hospital, Jonah’s fine. You know, it’s nothing really happens. It’s kind of an afterthought. At this point they take some bandages off. There is a bit of a slow, tense moment where he looks around and he goes, isn’t

 

 

that the shirt we gave you for Father’s Day last year?

 

 

Never scare me like that again. Okay?

 

Will Riley 

Everybody laughs. Everybody’s having a good time to be clear. Grant’s red outdoorsman shirt in this scene is objectively many times better than the business casual gene effect blazer like his red shirt. It’s like even got button epaulets. I think we need to bring back epaulets as a culture. I personally I’m gonna still wear the exact same three or 4t shirts I always wear, but I will admire your button epaulets from afar. They’re all

 

 

sure a sight for sore eyes. Oh,

 

 

and they’re gonna be sore for a couple of weeks. You’re gonna have to wear sunglasses till the irritation clears up.

 

Will Riley 

Everybody’s yucking it up now that Jonah’s definitely fine. They make a crack about the eye doctor’s age. So Jonah,

 

 

tell me the truth. How old did you really think I was 31

 

 

I was right too. Wasn’t I?

 

 

He’s got 2020, vision. Now

 

Will Riley 

I don’t know how old this optometrist actually is, but I will say that for two episodes in a row, Grant Roberts has encountered a woman in the exact same age range as him, and in both cases, they have been hit with a you old battle ax type of gag. Dad

 

 

told me what all of you

 

 

did to help. Thanks. That goes for me too. You all know that

 

Will Riley 

there’s a big group hug, freeze frame and roll credits, but I just have to mention that Joyce has brought a gift with a card attached, and in the group hug, Jonah has opened the envelope and is reading it. And I just gotta say, like, damn if they took off those bandages and Jonah couldn’t see shit. I mean, that would be awkward, wouldn’t it? Just sort of silently slit that card in the trash. So you might have guessed that I’m not as big on this Chris haddock episode as I was on the other one. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still better than some of the danger Bay episodes that we’ve watched, but comparing this to salmon run, we can see pretty quickly which is the superior I think I praised the previous Chris haddock episode for having basically. No fat on it. And this episode is basically a big ol block of suet. Basically every scene in this episode has a redundant double to it. In fact, it seems like that last chase scene got cut in half specifically to create that redundant double. Is there anything

 

 

I can do to help him? Is there anything I can do for you right now? Is there anything I could be doing for him right now, the

 

Will Riley 

Vancouver Aquarium had an intriguing environmental mystery to solve, and yet, I’d say really, only 25% of the entire episode was dedicated to the actual mystery. And what’s the reason for all that? Oh, Jonah’s blind. We have to give him emotional support. Yeah, whatever crimeo River, speaking of doubling why was it that Chris haddock wrote two different episodes of danger Bay, and both of them have blindness as a key plot point. I suppose that that does sort of establish that if Jonah took off the bandages and he couldn’t see anything, he still would have a nice fall back in being a vintage auto mechanic, just like the last blind guy we saw. I

 

 

guess it’s still just as beautiful as it ever was. Hi,

 

 

I’m Pete Rose, and this is my son, Pete, the second, the way I look at it, knowledge is power, and the greatest powerhouse of knowledge that I know is my 30 volume set of Encyclopedia Britannica, three.

 

Will Riley 

So I mean, which shark do you think would actually win in a fight? I mean, obviously everybody’s gonna say the Great White, and I agree to some extent, but I mean a sawtooth really is an underrated shark. I think it could do a lot more damage than people give it credit for, especially when you consider an underwater battle arena that is full of like inky black oil. I think that would be the battleground in which a sawtooth shark would thrive anyway. We’re basically almost done here. I’m just going to bring you up to speed on what’s going on with modern danger Bay, there has been a bit of a gap with my absence, so I’ll do a little bit of catching up. We open on Jonah Roberts, floating five feet off of the ground as an open third eye is superimposed on his forehead. His voice comes through telepathically, beaming to the minds of every organism in a 50 kilometer radius. I can see everything. I can hear, everything I am, everything arthrax, the angelic, trans dimensional being that only Jonah can see, has granted him the gift of the eighth site. As soon as I detected the dark presence of the Peruvians, I knew I needed to assist you, Jonah, what they intend to do with all that arsenic at their disposal is dastard. It must be put to beneficial uses, like to make microchips in consumer vehicles or in vape pens. I’m a god, so I know these sorts of things. This is why the eighth site can only be given to you. Jonah Roberts, the world’s most moral man, the camera slowly rotates around Jonah. Images swirl on the screen depicting every mind and viewpoint. Jonah now has access to a whole boat of fishermen, a pot of orcas, a school of Pacific Lamprey all outfitted with laser beams, the consciousness of all these and more go through Jonah as their minds are all shared. It’s been a long time since I’ve used the eighth site, he says, not since the time the poacher council made a pact with Morocco. Accessing the consciousness of every living thing takes heavy concentration all this information being shared across so many brains gives me an idea for some kind of digitally distributed ledger that’s totally cryptographically secure. But never mind that. Now I have to find where UX arrests latest magic nest is hiding. The camera keeps cutting from shot to shot, showing all the animals and humans Jonah is remotely accessing the cuts get faster and faster until it suddenly stops, as we see from the perspective of a summer steelhead a giant underwater crevasse inside is a horrifying sight overtaken by sea urchin magic, a massive herd of amphibious alpacas, their fur replaced with purple urchin spines all huddled together, slowly grazing on the seaweed. Jonah grabs his wireless wrist radio. I found them. I’m sending you the coordinates right now. Jonah says his famous catchphrase, drop that shit. Cut to a military jet full of gas bombs flying over its mark, it drops its payload into the water, sinking perfectly into the crevasse cut back to under the water as a green cloud overtakes the entire magic nest, a whole school of sea urchin alpaca hybrids evaporates into piles of bones surrounded by a pink mist. Mission accomplished. Jonah said. As his third eye slowly closes, but the celebration is short lived. The screens of Jonah’s command center are quickly lit up with pictures of whales in mass beachings, ships deliberately crashed into rocks, bears flinging themselves off of cliffs. Arthracks, Jonah shouts, what the hell is going on, Jonah, the trans dimensional being, grimly in tones, this has always been a risk of the eighth site. Just as you had access to everyone’s consciousness, they all had access to a portion of yours. Remember, Jonah, that as a marine biologist for the Vancouver Aquarium, you have transcendental knowledge of the movements of the ways of the universe and your crucial role in the great plan of all reality, gaining access to even a fraction of your mind. Jonah Roberts, the average living being becomes cognizant of their insignificance in the grand scheme of the cosmos, in comparison to you. For some suicide is the first reaction they have to such knowledge, fuck. You’re right. Jonah says introspectively, it was always a risk that something like this would happen, but it had to be done. Bucha raised and the Peruvians cannot be allowed any foothold in our waters. Vancouver’s ecosystem is precious and delicate and needs protecting. That’s why I had to drop that gas bomb into the ocean in the first place. These suicides were a necessary loss. Still, it weighs heavy on my soul. Jonah turns off the screens at his battle station, ready to return to his limousine full of 20 year old girlfriends before he leaves, he stops to ponder and then turns back to arthritis. Wait a minute. It is true that the grand majority of the population is entirely insignificant, and there is zero purpose for their existence in the universe, and the world will be exactly the same whether they live or die. However, suicide is still a sin, and everyone who died today is going to hell forever, and they will deserve it. So really, this isn’t a big deal anyway. There isn’t actually anything for me to worry about. I’m in the clear those people who committed suicide, they’re the sinners. I’m I’m good. That’s totally right. Arthrack says I’m a god, and I can say that everything you just said was 100% accurate.

 

Will Riley 

So there we are. That’s one more episode of infinite danger completed. Hope everybody there in podcast land is doing just fine. Thanks everybody for being so understanding with the delay for this episode coming out as ever, you can reach me online through my Twitter or my blue sky. My handle is k, A, S M, K, A, V, E, on both of them, that’s chasm cave. I know I said that this episode was going to be a little shorter than my previous one, but I mean, I felt generous the previous episode. What was it? It was like a thin 45 minutes. I’m looking at my time stamps here, and I managed to make this episode a nice, chunky, generous 50 minutes. So you’re welcome in that regard. See all you guys on the other side. Danger comes from below.