Will Riley  00:00

Announcer, Granville Island is a touristy spot in Vancouver. If you’re American, think a version of Pike Place Market, only wide instead of tall. It’s where you go to buy hand carved cutting boards shaped like a maple leaf or $10 specialty chocolate bars, which are actually good, but still $10 that’s not a knock on the island. Per se, the federal government owns the land, and it rents at a loss to some small shops and art studios that wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford the place, because they juice tourism dollars. It’s incredibly competitive. The Business real estate version of trying to get a rent controlled apartment, you need to go through a multi stage addition to even become a busker. There it is a tourist trap of sorts, but it’s a boutique, artisanal tourist trap that’s fun to wander and it’s one of the few places that our tax dollars gets used for something nice. So it’s a wash. Its esthetic has an unexpectedly international reach. Disneyland has copied Granville Island’s particular esthetic in its shopping centers, for instance, Pleasure Island, it’s called post industrial sheet, a lot of corrugated sheet metal painted in pastels, I beams as design accents. You know. However, at the far corner of Granville Island, facing away from everything else, there’s a steep grassy mound. It’s probably the tallest thing on the island, but if you actually make your way up its inhospitably steep inclined the trees that encircle the mound block out any sort of view, you’re isolated from the rest of the island, and the island is isolated from the mound. The mound is made this way people tell you, because it’s an amphitheater. See this little stage at the far end of the mound? Don’t these trees make a nice natural bit of sound insulation for the mound? But this is a half truth. It only became an amphitheater after the fact the mound was already here and already this shape. The name of this mound is Ron Basford Park. Ron Basford was a minister in Pierre Trudeau S Government, the longest serving one. In fact, his bald head was perfectly round and shiny and he was wide, or at least, he always wore suits that made him look wide. He looked like a more put together version of the kingpin, or maybe the British comedian Matt Lucas. He was an MP for the riding of Vancouver center before the 1980s Granville Island had been an industrial zone. It had actually been named industrial island for a time. It was the place you made things that would then make other things, ship parts, steel, ropes, logging and fishing supplies, things of that nature. But then the 60s happened. Then the 70s made things even harder, and then the 80s really wiped everything out. It was a skeleton of a place, a landscape of empty factories, the kind of place multiple Batman villains would be hanging out. And Ron Basford made Granville Island his mission. He lobbied his offices, he lobbied the parliament. He lobbied Pierre Trudeau himself. He got the name Mr. Granville Island. This industrial husk was his pet project, but it wasn’t a re industrialization project. The phrase urban revitalization was not exactly as huge as it became in the 90s. Tony Blair in the UK hadn’t cottoned onto it yet, but that’s what it was. It was easier to do than all that as well, because it wasn’t actually a residential area. Eventually, Ron Basford got what he wanted. He walked down the island with his people, and he told them, you see that lead paint factory over there? That the lead paint factory where we make lead paint for boats, sir, yes, I’d like you to make that into a children’s market, put in toy stores and a little arcade, maybe one of those VR setups with small footprints. What does VR stand for? Ron? Never mind that. Boys. So Basford boys emptied out the lead paint factory. They took out the machinery, they knocked down walls, they pulled out concrete and painted the facade to look like a giant clown face. They hauled out the refuse, and they moved on. Next they came to the shared workplaces of Gordon machinery and German logging Gordon was spelled with an A, somehow, and German was spelled with a Y, somehow. People all misspelled their names back then. Now, Basford said, I want you to build a brewery over here. But, sir, this place is too tiny for a brewery. Have you ever heard of a microbrewery? Son? I mean, well, no, but well good, because that’s not what this is going to be. The folks here will make all their beer in the same places they make Budweiser, and it’ll taste the same as that, but when you drink it here in a cozy environment with 200 other people, it’ll be an artisanal experience. When you buy a 24 pack at a price that can only be just. Described as suspicious. So basford’s Boys emptied out the machinists. They disassembled the work benches, pulled out leftover saws and drills. They took out a floor so the ceiling would be higher. They hauled out the refuse, and they moved on. And next was the biggest demolition of all the remnants of Wright’s Canadian rope company, where they had built steel ropes that not only got sent to the forests of British Columbia, but from the island’s shores. They went all the way to Europe and Japan in World War Two, and all the way to Australia. When they were building the Sydney Harbor Bridge, Basford looked at this grand old building of Canadian accomplishment, and said, Boys, you ever been to a food court? Basford’s Boys hauled out the refuse and they moved on. This demolition was not total, however, an extra part of basford’s plan was to be selective about what parts of the island to keep, what wouldn’t be emptied out. Basford decided he wouldn’t get rid of where people made concrete. He wouldn’t empty out the little workshop where they made precision drill bits. He did this because he knew that once everything else was hauled away to make room for tourism, these spots would become quaint antiquities. The fact they made things with utility made them tourist attractions in and of themselves. Oh, you actually make things here that tourists would say between bites, things that people use to make other things fascinating. Tell me more. And once those ground rules were established, Basford boys truly went to work. They gutted a warehouse and turned it into a restaurant by painting it yellow. They hollowed out a steel product shop, put in stationery stores, and named it the net loft. They emptied out the actual net loft and named it something else. They hauled out the refuse, and they moved on until there was no place to move on to, and the refuse was all that was there in the southeast corner of Granville Island. Everything they had hauled away had accumulated into a massive pile, a mound of broken concrete, cracked plaster and frayed steel rope, unusable spare parts for things that made other things all turned into garbage, and because there was nowhere to haul this garbage off to baz for his boys put dirt over the scrap heap and then grass seed after the grass had grown, they hoisted a Canadian flag, and they named it Ron Basford Park. Now I want to be clear here, elsewhere in life, Ron Basford actually worked to prevent various neighborhoods from being demolished. Both Gastown and Chinatown wouldn’t have existed if he hadn’t successfully scuttled expressway plans. But this is a world of demolitions, so they cast his memory onto where they got to empty everything out. They didn’t memorialize him in the neighborhoods he saved. They don’t even memorialize him in the house he lived in because it was demolished and redeveloped. Instead, they put his name on the mound, a pile of refuse buried beneath the grass, a cemetery for a world that no longer exists. But I mean, I guess it’s not all bad. I’ve spent a good deal of time on Granville Island myself. There’s a nice cafe there with a quiet, cozy lounge that I found was a good place to get some riding in, but they cleared that room out to make space for a custom 3d cotton candy vending machine. If you’re curious what green cotton candy shaped like a cube tastes like. You know, go ahead check it out. Anyone

 

Speaker 1  08:42

danger? In Danger,

 

08:48

danger, danger, danger. Danger hasn’t come home yet. I’m

 

Speaker 2  09:01

so afraid of just never gonna see danger. She could be a danger to herself, Dad, be a danger to us. Danger. Danger. I

 

Will Riley  09:26

I want Bob blue. Bob. I want by him. Fish. Hey everybody. It’s infinite danger again. Will here apologies for another extended gap between Episodes. Here I I did it again. There was an episode that I was working on but unfortunately, it got lost. It was my first interview for infinite danger. I had his holiness Leo, the 14th on the show. He was going to talk about how danger Bay had influenced his understanding of faith and the Lord and family and all of these things. But unfortunately he forgot. To hit record in Audacity on his end. So it was just an episode that sounded like me talking to myself. So, so that’s gone, although, frankly, I may have dodged a little bit of a political bullet. In this instance, right after I discovered that this episode wasn’t usable, it turned out that the Archbishop of Penticton had made a pronouncement that the Antichrist is, in fact, canonically Peruvian, so at least I don’t have any Catholic Action leagues or religious Splinter sects breathing down my neck. I’ve been dealing with some technical stuff as well. You might hear that my voice sounds a little bit different in this audio file. There may be a few more plosive pops and hisses every once in a while, but on the whole I think that my voice is going to be a little richer in this a little less distant I had been recording inside a professional audio podcasting mini booth, at least that’s how it was advertised to me on Facebook marketplace. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that it was actually an oil drum filled with egg cartons. So I’m doing something different. Now, parenthetically, if anybody has $1,500 to spare, I would really appreciate it. I have some recoups to make danger Bay, Episode 14, Mad Hatter bears. Production Code, one, dash, 004, now you can probably tell that’s a pretty early production code, and they’re really creating a true vertical slice of danger Bay’s early premise here. I sort of like this episode quite a bit. I like how it’s structured, though it is maybe a little bare bones. We’ve had a lot of episodes that were getting off track. You know, they expanded the danger Bay universe in ways that laid critical foundation for the future of the series. You know, who are the poachers working forward? Well, the Soviets for now, but now we’re back to the stuff that really gave danger. Bay its purpose, water crimes. I won’t give everything away yet. The difficulty, as always, of course, is that TV episodes with just plain solid construction are not quite as much grist for the content mill. That’s fine for me, of course, as all my episodes are a tight 45 minutes. Gilbert Chilton directs and writes this episode, one of the main times in his career we get to see true shiltonian auteurism. That’s sort of a joke, but for so many TV directors, things rarely go beyond work for hire. Directing in service of someone else’s creative vision can be a thankless task. It’s common to get lost in the shuffle, and as far as I can see, that happened to Gilbert Chilton here too. We are all familiar with old Gil and his various danger Bay episodes by now. His final directorial output consisted of one short a year produced for film acting courses. So even at the end of his career, he really wasn’t ever the star of the show. So I figured as we reach a pronounced gap in his danger Bay tenure, it’s only fair to Shilton that the first of the programs I talk about is his very own show, the one he created. The sole time we get to truly see Shilton as the total artist, something that can only be described as truly shiltonesque. Gilbert Chilton was the director of the Secret Service a crime reenactment program hosted by Gerald Ford’s son, Steve. I’m Steve Ford. Welcome to Secret Service. Well,

 

Will Riley  13:25

not to be confused with the maligned Gerry Anderson puppet program about a vicar who can shrink Gilbert Chilton. Secret Service was familiar territory for it, despite being esthetically a very American show with a very American premise. It’s about the Secret Service. The Canadian fingerprints are all over this show, especially when you hear any of the actors speak.

 

Speaker 3  13:49

Doesn’t it matter to you that you probably set up your own brother in Provo for a double cross? How the hell would I have

 

Will Riley  13:54

known about that? Chilton had already directed crime reenactments for Top Cops. I’ve referenced that show before, and I figure he was observing the whole process of filming reenactments, and he went, you know what’s even better than the police? President police. But sadly, that’s not even really true. There’s not many President police stories one can relate. It’s in the name the Secret Service, all the Presidential detail. Stories that could actually be publicized are overexposed or too politically fraught to adapt. This means that almost every episode is reenacting counterfeiting cases, because that’s the secondary duty the Secret Service has. So imagine this. You’re watching the show opening and it’s covered with Yankee Doodle imagery showing all the presidents from Lincoln on superimposed on the Stars and Stripes, you know, open on an office with the Capitol Rotunda in the window. The president’s son shows up to be the Rod Serling of all the proceedings. He sits down and begins to explain to the average 1993 TV viewer how. How banking computers work. His

 

Speaker 4  15:02

dissatisfaction led him to use his computer skills to hack into the database of a major bank. The files in Charlie’s personal computer provided clues to his elaborate earlier escape scrutiny because he had worked for the telephone company and not directly for the

 

Speaker 5  15:15

bank. This represents the names of the Tex pan bank employees who have direct access to the ATM cards.

 

Speaker 4  15:20

Ryan, that’s the file I want we print this. Charlie Provost worked outside the bank, but had inside knowledge of the system calls

 

Speaker 5  15:27

are first safeguarded by the telephone company, then the bank’s own security system kicks in. Ryan, that’s the file I want we print this. A hacker would have to go through the specialized computers that the telephone company uses for calls coming into the bank anyway, assuming that someone did make it through the telephone company. Then there’s the series of passwords and codes that the bank itself has instituted, even if a cleared person mistypes a password, even once access is denied and internal security investigates

 

Will Riley  15:58

the second Chilton show I’m Bringing up because, well, this is my last chance, really. He directed for diamonds, a TV program that teaches America the critical social lesson that even if you and your partner get divorced, you should not let that stop the both of you from starting a private detective agency together. Now that’s a straightforward, if silly premise, a sequel, if you will, to Kramer vs Kramer, titled Kramer and Kramer pi. But that’s not all. The premise of diamonds is actually complex and convoluted enough so that the opening credits is a series of newspaper headlines desperately trying to explain it as quickly as possible, the events that happened before the start of diamonds is the protagonists, Mike and Christina were actors in a TV show where they played PIs who were married, then they got married for Real. The show got canceled, and then they got divorced. Then after the divorce, both of them independently get the idea to become real. Pis. The thing is that this fake TV show that both of them acted in was also named diamonds, the same name as the real TV show you the viewer is watching right now. Hey, that’s the name of the show. This Ouroboros of fiction becoming reality, with actors playing actors who are real private eyes who once played fictional private eyes. This is what’s going on in diamonds before Episode One even starts, and it usually doesn’t even factor into the episodes at all. I wonder why it didn’t catch on with the general public, but this is where the weirdness starts. I didn’t tell you that the male lead of diamonds is Nicholas Campbell, who we’ve heard about several times now. He is the titular Da Vinci of the Da Vinci’s inquest cop show spread

 

Speaker 6  17:51

all the junkies and the hookers and that don’t pay a lot of taxes. So

 

17:54

don’t insult me with this. Dominic, I don’t deserve it.

 

Will Riley  17:59

A well respected elder statesman of Canadian TV, just don’t look at the controversy section of his Wikipedia page. Do you remember what I said about the history of Da Vinci’s inquest? Dominic Da Vinci was inspired by a real coroner who was working in Vancouver at the time. The real coroner then rode that publicity into becoming the mayor of Vancouver. Then the last season of Da Vinci’s inquest is about the fictional coroner becoming the fictional mayor, just like the real one before him, the story of life imitating art, imitating life. So what this means, though, is that diamonds, a TV program about life imitating art, is retroactively itself, a real example of life imitating art. I feel like I need to draw some kind of diagram with three different layers of reality here. But to recap, look, look. Nicholas Campbell is an actor. He then portrays an actor playing a sleuth, who then becomes a real sleuth, the real Nick Campbell then moves on to portray a fictional sleuth based on a real sleuth, who then becomes a real mayor, which makes Campbell play a fictional mayor. I suppose I should mention that this real mayor was named Larry Campbell, no relation to Nick Campbell at all. They just happened to be named the same thing, like it was just meant to be at this point, I can only assume that diamonds and Da Vinci’s inquest form some sort of Grant Morrison hyper sigil, or that this is just our universe’s version of Alan Moore’s providence. Take your pick based on which side of that particular war you’re on. And you know, just a word to the wise, if you walk into that online war and go, well, actually, I like Peter Milligan more than either of them. I get it. I love his work. It’s pretty brilliant. But if you’re trying to insert how different you are into this fight, I’m sorry someone’s throwing you down a well, I’m sorry. It might even be me. Don’t worry about it. You’ll be just like your good pal, Enigma. You’ll come out. Of it with psychic powers, you’ll get to be able to turn people gay, if you like, if that’s what you’re that’s what you’re into. You

 

Will Riley  20:23

our episode of danger Bay opens on a nearly comical distillation of BC pastoralism. We see a man camping by the lake in a tent with nobody but his dog the mountains and the trees for company. He’s got steak and eggs on a skillet over the fire with a big old slice of rye bread and an old dependable pickup in the background, truly an idealized version of province stills of a scene like this hang on the wall of every FinTech office in the city. You know, you’ll look at this image of rugged naturalism, and you go, man, he’s just like me. I’ll now emulate that mountain man by hitting my KPIs a day ahead of schedule. But this placidity is quickly interrupted, of course, as the music spikes and what else but a huge ass bear walks on screen, ready to strike and start the episode off with a bang. Now, a lot of times in danger Bay, there’s been some reused documentary footage, especially in the more harrowing scenes we’ve seen a poacher attacked by hawks, and it’s just her emoting as they cut to something recorded like five years ago. No this time, all the footage is brand new. They rented a whole ass bear from a company called Olympic Game farms. He’s walking around the same set as the actors. Sourcing a bear actually is a different job from handling and training it, which means the jobs that are listed in the credit this episode go kind of like this, script supervisor, boat coordinator, boat operator, pilots, bear creative consultant, not credited as bear sourcing or wild animal procurement, just Bear. They really capitalize on having this on set bear footage. It dashes through the camp. The dog is barking, absolute chaos. The Bear lifts up its arms and slash right as we cut to the theme song, all edited frenetically enough to disguise that the split second the bear’s claws make contact with the victim. It’s actually a man in a bear suit. Now that’s not a jab at the production of this episode. It’s actually really well concealed. The editing really makes you swear the bear and the camper were actually in the same shot at some point. This is a tasteful bear suit usage. It’s professional. That’s why the Canadian bear suit union makes the big bucks you gotta pay respects to sag Ursa. They spend 75% of their career relegated to stage productions of the Winter’s Tale. So you’d think once they get to branch out, they’d start showboating. But no, they are real pros. That’s the discipline. A Shakespearean background gives you other side of the theme song, we get some traditional Roberts Island banter. Jonah is cooking weird food for the family, and Nicole is grossed out.

 

23:12

Hey, it smells good.

 

Speaker 7  23:13

I call it Jonah’s omelet, supreme

 

23:17

bananas, peanut butter

 

Speaker 8  23:19

and what’s his icky purple stuff, grape jewelry. I can’t eat this dad. She’s feeding my

 

Will Riley  23:27

arm was in danger. This sort of writing demonstrates there’s nothing new under the sun, really. I’ve already shown how danger Bay is doing the Bart Simpson, Lisa Simpson, dichotomy years early, but this precise food gag is something I closely associate with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You know, try this Chow, Bane and salami Cal zone, dude, outrageous. You know, that kind of thing. You check it out. I’m in the 12 to 17 male demographic, and I eat garbage, you know, something like that. But this is, like, four years before the first TMNT episode even airs, it really is an eternal trend, you know, creating a more visceral version of the way people like to demonstrate online that they’re zany for minor culinary quirks. Yeah, I dip my Wendy’s fries and my Frosty Ooh, you gotta lock me up. I ate my apple pie with a slice of cheese. Doctor, I need ECT, stat. I like donair sauce, Somebody, please. Well, you know, honestly, that one’s true. I’m no draconian about this, but if you do like donair sauce, you shouldn’t go to an asylum, and you probably shouldn’t get electroconvulsive therapy, but you really should have a long conversation with a professional about how your life has ended up here.

 

Speaker 8  24:43

Try it. You’ll be surprised. I don’t want to be surprised. I want a normal person’s breakfast.

 

Will Riley  24:48

It’s not bad this scene, of course, quite a departure from the Chris crab of Today, no doubt, no peanut butter omelets now, obviously his breakfast now consists of saltines spread with algae based. Nutrient slurry, 15 almonds sanitized with infrared light to cleanse them of any potential parasites, and 250 milliliters of distilled water with three drops of methylene blue. Now we all know the Chris crab breakfast up here in Canada. It was a Tim Hortons promo meal. You know how Tim Hortons right now has a Ryan Reynolds scrambled eggs promo meal this, this is Chris crabs version of that harbor air calling whiskey the family breakfast, however, is interrupted by a warning call from the Roberts Island. Distant early warning system, the Thunderbirds radio system that they’ve got a man camping near Brennan lake was attacked by a grizzly, airlifted to physicians hospital right

 

Speaker 9  25:42

away. Breaker. Breaker. This is Grant Roberts, where are you? Joyce, Can you pick me up? I’m right on

 

25:46

your way. Don’t have time. The guy is seriously hurt.

 

Speaker 9  25:49

Well, he’s gonna need medical attention fast. Then, besides, this is the fourth attack in that area this month. And I’d like to find

 

Will Riley  25:54

out what’s happening. They say that this is the fourth bear attack in one month in just this area alone. Outsiders may think that that’s a TV exaggeration, or that it indicates the city is perhaps being a little less a fair about animal attacks. But you know, it’s the Pacific Northwest. This just comes with the territory. It can happen anywhere. Bear attacks happen at camps, of course, but also in suburbia. It can happen in office parks if they’re too close to a forest. It can even happen in an urban space. There was a story about a guy who got injured by a wild grizzly while he was in the revolving restaurant on the 35th floor of the harbor center. They still don’t know how that happened. Grant inserts himself into this bear attack right away. He can do human as well as veterinary medicine, it turns out, because, you know, of course, he can, if you look at the lists of everything else he can do, this is one of the least surprising things grant can do here. Aquarium people, just happening to have plot critical skills, will be a recurring theme in this episode.

 

26:54

I’ll be there. Grant whiskey, Papa Fox.

 

Will Riley  27:01

We get some great pontoon plane footage here, just flying past trees and rocky cliffs while grant and Joyce riff about possibilities for why Grizzlies are showing up, not just less aggressive black bears. There was

 

Speaker 10  27:15

a food shortage up there. We did have a bad winter. Yeah, that’s a possibility. Well, our bears a little out of your domain. Any

 

27:24

patient that doesn’t talk back is a part of my domain. I guess

 

Will Riley  27:28

that counts me out. Any patient that doesn’t talk back is a part of my domain. What’s left unmentioned here is that he’s including the assumedly comatose human victim in this. In turn, this finally explains why we had a whole episode where grant Roberts was taking care of a mute girl, you know, she can’t talk back, so it’s part of his domain. This is why a lot of doctors in British Columbia have veterinary degrees, not human medicine, the legal definitions of humans and animals involved capability of language. And they never really close the loophole, because it just takes less time to get a vet degree, so long as the patient is sedated on a medical slab at the time and they can’t talk back. You know, it’s fair game. A dog’s heart and a human heart are roughly equivalent. Why let some fancy human PhD get in the way of surgery? I mean, my doctor has a veterinary background himself. It’s Vancouver. You take what you can get. He’s nice enough. But whenever he prescribes me medicine, he keeps trying to feed me the pills wrapped in a little bit of cheese. The pontoon plane lands at the site and grant quickly has an entire diagnosis like he does it so fast that they just do it off camera. He’s got

 

Speaker 9  28:39

two broken ribs and a possible leg fracture. I don’t like his color either. Think he may have a ruptured spleen, so try not to move him as much as possible. Will do I’ll

 

28:47

take good care of

 

Will Riley  28:55

him. Joyce leaves almost as quick as she arrives, but you know, hey, more pontoon playing footage. One of the perks of being an aquarium curator, as I’ve said before, is that you know everyone, and everyone knows you, including any random victim of a bear

 

Speaker 9  29:09

attack. How well do you know him? Grant, well enough to know Cliff Harwood wouldn’t get mauled by

 

Will Riley  29:13

accident. There’s not even a customary scene of grant seeing this guy and going, oh my god, this is Cliff Harwood. I know this man, it’s just taken as a given that he knows Cliff Harwood and knows his personality intimately well enough to know Cliff Harwood wouldn’t get mauled by accident. Aquarium curators need to know hand to hand combat, how to ride a horse, the history of Spanish colonial gold management. Why wouldn’t they also memorize the city’s Civil Registry? Another perk of being a curator at an aquarium, you get to pull rank and basically tell the entire Forestry Service what to do. Grant just becomes the lead investigator of this animal crime scene. The park rangers, who all already know who he is, of course, obediently fall in line and give him a sit rap. Well, maybe

 

Speaker 9  29:59

I can hear. Out. I’d like to take a look at one of those beers before you airlift them out of here. I

 

Speaker 11  30:03

got three, two man teams up here. The district supervisors just instructed me to shoot any grizzly found near a campsite. This whole area is nothing but campsites. It’s a pretty

 

30:13

drastic solution, isn’t it?

 

Will Riley  30:16

Yeah, it is. Now this scene is basically designed to drive me insane as a podcaster and an auto didactic scholar of danger based studies. That’s because all the actors here have incredibly long careers. I could speak about at length, but they all have two or three lines a piece, and it may be a waste of time. There’s this horrible temptation running this podcast where you look at a cast member, and you just click on the guy playing park ranger number three, and you see His credits, and you just start scrolling. And you keep scrolling. Hey, this guy was in my little pony. That’s kind of funny. Still scrolling. I’m still scrolling. Oh man, this guy was in the Robocop TV series too. I’m continuing to scroll. He was in Kung Fu. The Legend Continues. I’m only halfway through scrolling through his career. I haven’t even got to his danger Bay credit yet. I’m gonna try to keep this down to two actors. First is this permanently scowling head ranger who seems quite gung ho about the prospect of being able to shoot and kill a grizzly.

 

Speaker 11  31:21

If we can tranquilize him, I’m still gonna ship him out. We can’t spend the whole summer airlifting Grizzlies and apologizing to injured tourists.

 

Will Riley  31:30

He is played by David Peterson, who I’m putting a pin in here because he actually plays the lead in a Canadian cult film called skip tracer, which unfortunately is a story for another time. He’s had a whole long career, almost exclusively playing stiff and stern authority figures. He’s got exactly the right face and head shape for it. It’s impressive to be an actor for 30 to 40 years and have a hairline that is permanently receding but never fully receded. He’s also the second person we’ve seen on danger Bay who’s played one of the cops Rambo attacks in first blood, which is not a category of actor you expect you ever need to create. This is in no way the same caliber as being in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, but hey, being in First Blood creates one of those extra skills you can put on an actor’s resume, you know, musical training, capable skier, good at walking around forests, looking worried, and that’s exactly what they needed for this role. I can sort of yada yada my way through David Peterson’s career, because we will see him again. This next guy, though, is non negotiable. He needs to be mentioned, and it sucks that I have to try and probably fail to keep this as brief as I can.

 

Speaker 12  32:44

We’re getting a lot of flack. We know this is the peak tourist season. We’ll do all we can to keep those bears alive and airlift them out of the campsite area. I’m gonna pair you up

 

Will Riley  32:53

with Ranger hanver here. He has the genuinely wonderful name of Blue Man Kuma, who we’ve indirectly encountered with the German produced Huckleberry Finn show I’ve previously mentioned. He played the role of Jim, just Jim, just plain old Jim. There’s no other modifiers here. Now, I know it’s pretty common knowledge that lots of actors are fairly short people, but some of the copy about Blue Man Kuma really lays it bare. Man kumas, commanding presence dominates the screen, a gentle giant, towering at six foot and that’s the end of the sentence. He’s just six foot zero, and you watch the show, and it’s absolutely true, he is so much bigger than everyone else on the screen with a name as cool as Blue Man Kuma. You may have already guessed that this wasn’t his original one, and sure enough, he changed it just before his arts career started in Vancouver, which coincided with him leaving the US openly to dodge the draft in the 60s. So you know, props for that. You’d think that with that background, there may be a political reason for the name change, but that’s only half true. Actually, he’d taken on an African origin name, but then at some point, he was in a band of which no record seems to exist beyond the amazing name of King Blue Lady rose and the exotics he was the titular King blue, and he went, Man, I gotta consolidate my brand. And he changed his first name to blue for that. So with all of that, with blue man kumas vivacious history and identity, you know, this sort of political background that we might be able to glean from his life choices, it’s very funny to see that the largest chunk of his career is filled with just playing cops. He plays cops in dramas. He plays cops in children’s shows. He’ll even do voice acting work in video games if he gets to be a police officer, and then he doesn’t even get to take advantage of his imposing six foot zero. Frame then, I mean really, even in this scene, he’s a park ranger, he’s a tree cop, and he’s talking to a fish cop.

 

Speaker 12  35:07

We’ll do all we can to keep those bears alive and air lift them out of the campsite area.

 

Will Riley  35:11

So moving forward here, we cut to grant and Blue Man Kuma wandering through the woods for a while, just enough time to build up tension before they find the bear wandering erratically through the woods. Spotted

 

35:27

the bear. We’re

 

Will Riley  35:29

on our way. So what’s the plan here? Well, sometime off screen, somebody gave grant a gun. I mean, it’s a tranq rifle, so you know, okay, but it’s Grant’s job to take the shot, which he knows how to do, because, you know, of course, he does get him.

 

Will Riley  35:58

From here. Grant’s marksmanship goes unremarked here, of course, but it is important setup for his arc in the abalone wars storyline, where he is conscripted as a sniper. His most impressive kill in that arc, I think, is it was when he assassinates a corporal with an inverted shot ricocheting the bullet off a visiting ambassador’s lapel pin. People would say that that scene was far fetched at the time, but really it’s taken out of context. Grant had to craft a specially shaped bullet to make it work. That was like half of the episode. Like, have you ever read the Golgo 13 manga? There’s a chapter where Golgo 13 has to make his sniper rounds flat so they can skip off the surface of a lake to hit his target. It’s like that, unlike Golgo 13, however, Grant does not have to FOIL the plans of a Gulf War era Saddam. All he has to do is tranq a bear.

 

Will Riley  37:00

And since grant is so moral and cares about animals, he apparently shoots it someplace where the tranquilizer will take too long to work, too squeamish for a head shot. What a fool. The bear starts angrily trudging towards them. GRANT struggles with blue band Kuma, who’s got live rounds in his gun.

 

37:19

Don’t kill him. No. Us.

 

Will Riley  37:22

No, he’s scared the bear will reach them before it falls asleep, but grant is totally willing to risk getting mauled if it means not shooting the bear. Of course, what Blue Man Kuma doesn’t realize is that if it comes to that, Grant is more than capable of wrestling that grizzly into submission, but it’s all for naught before grant can apply an ER sign. Lebel lock another Ranger dashes in to take a precise, lethal shot. There’s a dramatic beat here, and it’s sort of interesting. Gil Shilton makes a really smart directorial move, and he cuts to the faces of every Ranger, and it’s clear this is a huge failure in all of their eyes. If you have to fire a gun at an animal at all, you’ve already lost everyone’s face is one of just pure shame. Each actor has basically been told you have just killed an animal. Emote not you have just killed an animal in self defense. Emote, you know you’ve killed something. Feel bad about it. Grant is squinting his eyes like he’s gonna tear up at any second. The whole crew looks totally crest fallen as briefly we see a shot of a man in a bear suit tumbling down under the camera. It’s a tragic scene. I’m not lying when I say this is a tasteful bear suit. The next scene shows danger Bay getting back to basics, the things that matter. GRANT Roberts doing surgery on a land mammal getting chewed out by his boss, because he’s only cleared for aquatic

 

Speaker 9  39:02

life. I’m worried about those animals out there. Whatever it is could be affecting that whole area. What’s a bear doing in an aquarium? I’m sorry. I thought he already knew. Oh, come on, Grant, that’s a forestry problem. It’s not

 

Will Riley  39:13

ours. God damn it. Roberts, this is a step too far. You’re a loose cannon, hand in your gun, your badge, your scalpel, your tranq darts, your complimentary splash zone rain ponchos, your historical essays on the storage of Spanish gold. Joyce randomly interrupts the scene just to tell grant that when he made that guess that the camper had a ruptured spleen, he was totally accurate. How’s

 

Speaker 10  39:37

Jeff hardwood doing? Well, he did have a ruptured spleen, but he’s gonna be all right. No

 

Will Riley  39:41

real point for this scene to be in this exchange. It’s just another reiteration of the fact that grant can do no wrong. And now the plot really finally starts to thicken.

 

Speaker 9  39:53

This is our problem, too. This bear has been eating contaminated fish. His whole system is contaminated with

 

Speaker 7  39:58

what mercury. Yeah, the nasal tissues contain very high levels of mercury. That bear has been poisoned,

 

40:04

red Hatter bears.

 

Will Riley  40:06

Hey, that’s the name of the show, which makes this the second time in a season the gang has to contend with some sort of induced animal madness, basically metallic rabies.

 

Speaker 9  40:16

Something is making them aggressive. George, they are leaving their turf and coming down to the campsites.

 

Speaker 7  40:21

If the rest of the tests are consistent with these results, that bear will have ingested enough mercury to make him more than a little nutty.

 

Will Riley  40:28

It’s also the second time Michelle Chan has talked about madness in the least tactful way possible. He was loaded

 

40:38

with rabies. Grand, don’t let this make you

 

Will Riley  40:40

crazy. So this turn, this turn right here, this is what makes this episode so great.

 

Speaker 9  40:47

Something has been poisoning those animals. No, it’s up to us to do something about it.

 

Will Riley  40:50

You thought this episode was about bears? Well, guess what? It’s fish. Crimes. Again, it was poachers all along. It was never not fish. Crimes, bear has been eating contaminated fish. All social ills are downstream from fish crimes. In this case, literally, these are the bits of danger Bay I tend to like the most the way characters keep working their way backwards from a disruption in the balance of nature until they can make fish crimes stick yet again. So far, the only time this formula hasn’t hit is when they were doing it with files in an office cabinet. That’s the motto to follow here, less paper trails, more dead fish on a dirt road. This scene, finally, is where they overuse the bear suit. They liked using this bear suit so much in this episode that in this scene, Grant’s got to do autopsy on the bear, and they’ve just put the empty bear suit up on the slab. They didn’t even stuff it with like cotton or anything. Now that there’s no sag Ursa professional inhabiting the suit, this is where things start to get unconvincing. Grant’s got his scrubs on, got his surgical gloves, and everyone is reciting informative, medical, procedural dialog, but they’re all just standing around what looks like a fancy throw blanket. There really isn’t even anything bear shaped in this scene. This is just a fluffy mass. I can’t tell where the head is. I can’t tell where the feet are. Boy, he’s

 

42:20

huge. Poor

 

42:22

thing. Can you get the chopper this afternoon? Joyce,

 

Speaker 13  42:25

oh, sure. Get two. They’re very small, little red, one, a little green one. Who’s paying for this?

 

Speaker 9  42:31

Well, you are, of course. George, no way. Now hold on a minute, George, hang on. Listen, something has been poisoning those animals. Now it’s up to us to do something about it

 

Will Riley  42:44

in a rather knowing way, rather than having Hagen Beggs actually openly agree to hiring a helicopter. He says no grant. Says two words to him, hard cut to them in a helicopter. This is probably one of the reasons this episode is filmed early but released late. By this point, everybody knows that all Hagen Beggs protests will immediately be unheeded. I mean, by season seven, they’re interrupting Hagen Beggs mid sentence, George, we’re gonna need a Scud missile. I’m not cut to a Scud missile firing.

 

43:18

Okay, let’s check all six rivers in this area.

 

Will Riley  43:22

Turns out Joyce is a multi disciplinary pilot. She can fly helicopters to I mean, a helicopter is basically a more vertical version of a plane, right? I mean, that’s why our mayor Ken sim finally cut through that regulatory red tape. If you can fly a remote control drone, you can fly a chopper in Vancouver. I finished most of the drone races in the judgment video game, so I figure I could make it too. Just gotta fill out some forms. Here we get some really gorgeous shots of some land deeper into the province of British Columbia. I really like all of this beautiful Rocky River footage. Get used to seeing them this app. They really want to have all of this footage in this app, because there is a discussion that doesn’t actually go anywhere, just so that they can show more of this footage over it. Where did

 

Speaker 9  44:19

that man? Victorian England hat factories used to use mercury to soften the film and the fumes attack the central nervous system. So after a while, the workers in those factories go start raving mad, Mad Hatters as an Alice in

 

Speaker 10  44:33

Wonderland. Pretty good for a city slicker. Well, US city slickers know more than you think.

 

Will Riley  44:39

Yeah, not bad for a city slicker. Joyce says, I mean, that is the thing. That is where the rural urban split exists. Most urbanites can’t hang with people of the Heartland because of their citified notions of Victorian literature. I mean, speaking myself, one time, I was visiting Revelstoke, and I got chewed out hard by a local for myself. Nudie Vancouver ways, you city slickers know nothing about Alice in Wonderland. The man said your analysis is shallow and trite and barely engages with the critical discourse. I bet you don’t even have a reading on its relationship to mathematics and the theoretical revolution among 19th century English logicians. You don’t even have a tentative stance on it, you fool you absolute rube, this is only the second unexpected skill that Joyce has in this scene, and now comes the third. City

 

Speaker 10  45:33

Slickers know more than you think. Yeah, like, they also use mercury and gold body. In college, I took as many courses as I could, including one in metallurgy. I’m impressed.

 

Will Riley  45:43

So apparently in university, Joyce took pontoon plane, flying helicopter, flying Victorian literature and history, and apparently metallurgy as well. That’s the power of the mandatory breadth credits in SFU. I wonder if the metallurgy professors get tired of all the students coming in just to get their metallurgy critics, and they never engage with smelting theory at all. But hey, that’s where all this cash is going. That’s where all this corporate donor money goes in all these STEM faculties, science, technology, engineering and metallurgy. After this conversation, the editor sort of realizes they’ve been using a lot of this river footage in one go, but they still have a lot more that they want to use, so they start trying to break it up. We’ve got a quick shot spliced in of grant actually getting some water testing in. He’s wandering through a stream with big old hip waders, putting some stream water in test tubes and looking at them studiously, like he can figure something out right now. How

 

Speaker 10  46:45

many more samples do we need? Two more we’re doing. It’s

 

Will Riley  46:49

sort of ironic that this little filler scene was so crucial to changing the Vancouver fashion world. Everyone was big into hip waders this summer because of this episode, it caused a big rubber shortage. I mean, like, everybody’s got those pictures of their mom in the 80s, you know, got her big hair, lots of mascara, maybe some shoulder pads, hip waders. Then they go straight back into more coptering around like immediately the danger Bay crew shelled out for all this brand new helicopter footage, and by God, they are going to use all of it. Who’s paying for this? They’re going to use every single swooping and swerving shot of these tree lined rivers. Isn’t this beautiful? Wouldn’t you like to see this every day? Don’t you want to speak to a real estate agent right now and get to work in telecom, we have samples

 

47:43

from all the river branches coming from

 

Speaker 10  47:44

up north. You know, there are a lot of abandoned gold mines in this area. I know it’s

 

47:49

like looking for a needle in a haystack.

 

Will Riley  47:50

This scene is really interesting to me as a Vancouverite, in a way that other people might not catch on to here. Joyce, let’s slip that this beautiful river with all these nice trees is actually the site of a gold mine that has already stripped out all of the natural resources from this area. It looks beautiful, but it’s actually been fully exploited. Now you would probably scarcely believe that this was the case from all the nature photography we’ve just seen, but that’s the fundamental truth of things. In Vancouver, maybe all of Canada, the underside of all this nice nature scenery is that, well, it’s only allowed to look as nice as it does, because industry has already stripped it of all its exploitable resources. We get to have our cake and eat it too. Why do you think our country’s coins have bears, loons, deers and beavers on them today, it seems like it’s the result of some sort of cultural connection to nature. But simply stated, there’s only a beaver on our nickel because having the hat we skinned that beaver to make on there would be a little too on the nose. But when we get

 

Speaker 9  49:01

the lab results from these samples, we will narrow down the source of the poison.

 

Will Riley  49:05

It’s part of Vancouver’s cultural landscape, and it’s part of Vancouver’s literal landscape. Decades ago, BC had two massive, I mean, gigantic, oil derricks off our coastline, just pumping away, just sucking up as much black gold as they could. They took up the entire view of the ocean. And finally, when these oil derricks had extracted as much as they possibly could, the province began a giant re greening process. Cover these oil derricks entirely with soil. Cover them in artificial trees, hell, even put buildings on them make the land sort of useful. And once we had built those two gigantic artificial islands, we named them Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii. You’d hardly ever know that they were once part of the petrochemical industry, because now there’s boutique tech companies and the smoothies there cost. Dollars more than anywhere else. So you know that it must be a very green place. Cut to the Vancouver Aquarium labs and grant and Dr Donna are doing a bunch of tests on beakers full of stream water.

 

Speaker 7  50:13

Bingo grant, we struck oil, or should I say, Mercury? Oh,

 

Speaker 9  50:18

terrific. All right, now we know the source of that contamination.

 

Will Riley  50:21

I put myself in the head of Shilton here writing this script. Oh, man, I wanted her to say struck gold, but gold mining is already a key plot point in this story. So should I delete this line? No, that’s too much work. What else do people dig for? Like oil. Okay, Backspace. Backspace. Backpack. Space, oh, I L

 

50:44

What should I say?

 

Will Riley  50:46

All right, moving on. Let’s go to the next page. Grant Roberts aims his rifle at the Mad bear and shoots. Okay, there. So after this 45 second scene at the Vancouver Aquarium, what else? Right back into the helicopter. They are transfixed with this helicopter. Let me tell you, both Paul Saltzman and Don Rhodes have been beguiled by helicopters throughout their careers. Paul Saltzman, as always, had a sort of spiritualist reading of the helicopter. He saw the spinning rotors as something akin to a Buddhist prayer wheel, emerging of the mechanical and the spiritual in a way that literally lifted people up to a higher plane. It was not a coincidence. Saltzman said that the image of Christ was carried into the world via a helicopter in La Dolce Vita, as for Don Lee Rhodes, he was once considered to be the lead in blue thunder. However, every time that he got into the cockpit and the rotors started turning, he would look straight up, look at the rotors and go, spin, spin, spin, spin, louder and louder and louder, and he would never read any of his lines. So they would have to just let him go. One great side effect of all of this new B roll is that the music in the long version of the episode is really great. You can just let the propulsive energy of it soak into your pores. Chuck

 

52:21

Bengio, Chucky,

 

Will Riley  52:40

keep and now at the other end of this musical interlude, the other shoe finally drops, and the gang starts constructing a theoretical culprit.

 

Speaker 9  52:53

Gonna take a long time for that mercury to build up, if it was just contaminated fish the bear was eating.

 

Speaker 10  52:58

Well, didn’t you say that the grizzly nasal passages were in flames. Yes, gold smelter, using the mercury separation process, produces lots of smoke.

 

Will Riley  53:07

They start constructing the workings of an illegal mining operation, scrounging for the leftovers of these depleted gold mines. The only

 

Speaker 9  53:16

question is, why hasn’t the Forestry Service spotted the smoke? Well,

 

53:19

maybe they only run the smelters

 

Will Riley  53:21

at night. The entire Forestry Service is deceived from something as simple as running their smelters at night so people can’t see the smoke. Really. This happens a lot. It’s a real problem. Too many times, logging multinationals start encroaching into old growth forests or start poaching lumber out of treaty lands. I mean, they’re doing this at like six in the morning, and I was laying awake until like 1am last night.

 

53:51

Be so sleepy, you’d have a combined pollution of the food and the air and the

 

Speaker 9  53:54

water, Mad Hatter, bear, ducks and deer and squirrel, fish. Ducks and deer and squirrels of fish and miners.

 

Will Riley  54:05

Now, every single thing Joyce said in that scene was pure speculation, and it’s all 100% correct. Cut immediately to a villainous trio on the ground tending to a smelter fire. You know

 

Speaker 13  54:19

what the old man said about starting a smelter before dark, I am sick of listening to him

 

Will Riley  54:23

now, traditionally in TV, you would foreshadow any of this beforehand. You would cut to footage of one of these crooks by the stream. Maybe you’d shoot them from behind without context, maybe some footage of a fire from someplace. Then, once the operation is uncovered, the viewer goes like, oh, that’s what that was. Instead, we only ever see these people’s faces right after their entire operation is fully summarized, it’s like Joyce isn’t so much making educated guesses as calling these villains. Into being. You

 

Speaker 13  55:01

know what the old man said about starting the smell there before dark?

 

Will Riley  55:05

So with this scene, we are being introduced to one more genre of poacher. We’ve already exhausted all the biomes a poacher could reasonably operate in. We’ve got land, sea and air, but so far, they’ve been limited to poaching living animals, but there’s always gotta be something new to poach. So voila, we’ve got the earth poachers all the exact same poacher coating has been applied to these guys, same voice patterns, particularly the same clothing, all grimy, tooks and overalls and suspenders. Similarly, they’re scripted to be littering the whole time too, because poisoning the river wasn’t enough. They’re just dumping a wheelbarrow of soda cans and burger wrappers into an open field somewhere. You can just transpose everything we’ve seen from the fish poachers onto mining, and it basically makes sense. What is a mountain but an ocean of land? What are gold nuggets but an underground salmon? Inventing new types of poachers is a common feature creep in any long running TV show. No doubt you remember the more recent danger Bay arc where the Roberts butted heads with people who were capable of poaching abstract concepts. Who can forget the chaos that occurred when those men in plaid and flat caps stole the very notion of perspicacity? One of the reasons this earth poaching operation is summarized to us before we even see them, it seems, is that we’re going to be introduced to them right as things are hitting the fan. We see each of these villains for the first time as their outfit is disintegrating. One of the poachers is impatient, and he starts smelting in midday, rather than under the cover of night. And the elderly leader of the gang, literally, an old prospector type, immediately starts trying to leave.

 

57:00

We came here for gold. That’s what I’m doing.

 

Speaker 14  57:03

Shut that thing down. Put it out. He’s stupider than the stupidest new we’re gonna find. Shut

 

Speaker 13  57:12

1. All right. Go ahead, see how far you two can get without me,

 

Will Riley  57:18

he’s gonna say some variant about wanting to go multiple times this episode, I’m

 

Speaker 13  57:23

leaving. I got all I came for I’m leaving. See how far you two can get without me.

 

Will Riley  57:29

So imagine his surprise when this out of line poacher grabs his gun and forces the whole operation to go on. Nobody is going anywhere. And from this point to the end of the episode, this gun is not leaving his hands. Now, everybody’s doing the mining under threat. You

 

57:48

drop that wood. Take that dump it, get back here.

 

Will Riley  57:53

So here’s the twist to this dynamic. We’re not just dealing with some moral degradation, with bad guys causing environmental damage, and, you know, committing crimes. One of them is already a slave to the mercury in his brain.

 

Speaker 14  58:11

You’ve inhaled too many of those fumes red.

 

Will Riley  58:15

It is a scenario akin to Apocalypse Now, as everyone in the camp slowly succumbs to the seductive grip of mercury madness. The Mercury keeps making its host organism do things that will allow the mercury to get an even tighter grip. You know what

 

58:31

the old man said about starting the speller before dark that

 

Speaker 15  58:33

mine has just begun to keep you’ve inhaled too many of those

 

Will Riley  58:38

fumes Earth poaching has expanded beyond being a self interested deed. Poaching has now slipped the bonds of reason itself a mad compulsion. It’s very convenient. Grant and Joyce are trying to stop the flow of mercury. What better villain than someone who is now vessel for Mercury itself?

 

59:01

Too many of those huge

 

Will Riley  59:02

now, all we need is for him to force his partners to take their masks off, let the fumes run wild through you, brother, soon, all the world will be Mercury’s domain, looking to

 

Speaker 5  59:20

can you breathe deeply?

 

Will Riley  59:29

This poacher with a condition once reserved for Chinese emperors, that being mercury poisoning, is named red, and he’s portrayed by an actor who’s another Zack Snyder’s watchman alum. His name is Jerry Wasserman. He is still going strong, yet another man with a resume that just keeps on scrolling. I don’t know how to describe how he looks in this episode, other than wet, he’s just drenched in sweat the whole app, I’d say he’s got longish hair and a. Mustache, but here they really only exist as a delivery system for even more sweat. Jerry Wasserman follows the tested Vancouver actor career path of doing multiple Hallmark Christmas movies in a single year, and speaking of zombification, he was just in an episode of The Last of Us as well. This danger Bay role, though, is very early in his career. So just to give you a frame of reference, he’ll be in three episodes of danger Bay before he starts that tenure. He’s trapped in cut rate TV movies like spot marks the x a film so disregarded that its own plot synopsis is riddled with grammatical errors. The story about a boy who discovered that his dog knows where the blood money were buried after his last danger Bay role in 1989 Wasserman had been skyrocketed to real theatrical releases, playing with the big boys he was in, look, who’s talking, playing the small but pivotal role of Mr. Anal. Most of the inter poacher. Debating is between red and the old Prospector, of course, but every group of poachers, really, any business operation, needs a pliant and gentle oaf to work

 

1:01:14

with me. Pete,

 

Will Riley  1:01:15

this really is a critical role. It’s counterintuitive. Most entrepreneurs don’t see the value in hiring people that run straight through walls when you call for them and leave behind a hole in the shape of their exact outline. However, once you scale up, you really do need a pure hearted simpleton who goes die, Okay, boss, whenever you give them commands, chop that wood, take that dump it, get back here. Professional oaf is a generalist trade. It’s not really enough to make a living on, but in theory, ofery is usually a good resume builder. I did some opening for KPMG for a time myself. I was tending to their chicken coops because they wouldn’t let me near any of the rabbits my size helped. I won’t go on about it, but I am 105% of one blue man, Kuma standard measurement unit. The oafs role is important in this outfit, because his job is the one that’s most directly poisoning these bears. After he gets the rifle pointed in his face, he gets back to his duties, dumping a wheelbarrow of ashes from the smelter into the river for emphasis, the camera pans to the opposite bank, and there’s already a bear wandering around looking for fish, just as the old man had claimed, burning the smelter in the daytime attracts attention, and here comes grant and Joyce to investigate right away. Somebody’s coming.

 

1:02:36

Sounds like a chopper. You get rid of them, or I will

 

Will Riley  1:02:42

not to worry, though, the old prospector has already prepared for this contingency. He will disguise this mining camp as just some folks on a fishing weekend. How well he’ll hold the fishing rod also, he’ll have a baseball cap on, not his took which would have just been a dead poacher giveaway.

 

Speaker 9  1:03:00

How are you doing? Fine. Thanks. Fish bite. Oh yeah,

 

Will Riley  1:03:04

pretty good. This is a disguise that could have worked on just about anybody. But there’s one thing he didn’t count on he’d be talking to the number one fish, expert, interesting

 

Speaker 9  1:03:14

looking rod you got there. How so well I think a fly fishing rod would be better than a bait casting outfit for the kind of fish you get up

 

1:03:21

here, matter choice,

 

Will Riley  1:03:23

what did I tell you? What did I just say a few minutes ago? It always comes back to fish no matter what. After that, both characters know what the other is thinking, but neither will cop to it. It’s another version of the exchange that happens in every Columbo episode The hypothetically, let’s say that I did kill him. Conversation,

 

Speaker 9  1:03:44

well, I hate to tell you this, but the river’s poison with mercury. The fish here are no good to eat. You

 

Speaker 14  1:03:49

don’t say mercury. Hey, how do you happen to know that

 

Speaker 9  1:03:52

I tested the water? Oh, yeah. How come you haven’t seen any miners around here? Miners,

 

Speaker 14  1:04:01

no, can’t say, as I have no gold in these parts for

 

Speaker 12  1:04:06

years, that’s provided. Of course, all these speculations are valid.

 

Speaker 8  1:04:11

You know, I got a feeling that when we find our friend, it’s going to turn out that he has a terrible temper.

 

Will Riley  1:04:18

Maybe you’re right, except this guy has all the opposite class signifiers of a Columbo villain. He’s literally an old timey Prospector. And of course, this is fish crimes, which puts all of this in this weird conceptual cul de sac, separate from Columbo.

 

Speaker 9  1:04:36

Did you tell him about the mercury? Yeah, but I think he already knew,

 

Will Riley  1:04:39

in a moment of true foolishness, these miners assume grant is everything other than an aquarium employee.

 

Speaker 14  1:04:46

They know there’s a mine around here, some sort of inspector, Ranger, lady,

 

Will Riley  1:04:53

pilot, police, park rangers, maybe these rubes figured because their poaching wasn’t related to fish, to. Correctly, they’d be safe from the aquarium. The idiots didn’t realize, no matter the crime, if you do it near a river, there is no escaping from the long arm of the ling cod. In the meantime,

 

Speaker 9  1:05:10

I’m going to take a look around. If I’m not back in five minutes, radio the police. Okay,

 

1:05:17

Grant be careful

 

Will Riley  1:05:22

the first time in danger Bay history that the stakes are derived from Grant putting himself in danger, rather than, you know, his kids. GRANT wanders around the site, you know, looking at tents and like a campfire and at a broken down outhouse and all this stuff that isn’t really related. And funnily enough, he never actually sees the evidence of mercury getting dumped in the river. He discovers that these guys are littering as he stumbles upon a pile of cocony cans and receipts for London Drugs. This is what merits getting a gun pointed in his face by red stick your nose in where it don’t belong. You could get it shot off. That’s sort of an unspoken irony of this episode. Grant never actually witnesses Mercury getting dumped in the river. This escalates into a hostage situation, just from these guys ignoring what recycling number was on the bottom of their fruitopia bottles, understandable, I suppose. I once discovered that my neighbor had been putting his Tetra packs in his yellow recycling bag when clearly they belonged in the blue recycling box. It resulted in a six hour police standoff situation. It was only six hours, though pretty short in the greater scope of things, nothing to write home about. Grant is now a hostage. Red and the prospector have him tied up. He’s got his arms behind his back sit. They’ve sat him down on a stump somewhere, and they’re pointing a gun in his face. But they still can’t stop arguing.

 

Speaker 15  1:06:57

We’re leaving here in style like rich men. We don’t need a truck. We’re taking the helicopter, not me.

 

1:07:09

I’m driving out to do what I say.

 

Will Riley  1:07:12

Red wants to steal a helicopter. Objectively, this is a poor idea, grounds for instant identification and capture, but this is the point the mercury is, speaking, the mercury yearns for the sky to be reunited with its brethren within the burning fumes.

 

Will Riley  1:07:35

The critical flaw in this plan, however, is that red has sent the oaf after Joyce to take her in as well. And of course, he’s fully oath the whole thing up.

 

1:07:48

Your friend wants you.

 

1:07:50

Oh, yeah. Where is he?

 

Speaker 14  1:07:53

Yeah, he’s in our camp. One of my buddies took sick

 

Speaker 10  1:07:56

calling beef detail mobile offering I need an emergency call.

 

Will Riley  1:07:59

Joyce immediately flees to the chopper and manages to dispatch him with a single kick to the chest. He falls over on his back and immediately knocks his head on a rock and is unconscious. Just stick some Tweety birds over the soundtrack for full effect, Joyce gets away in her chopper effortlessly. This may seem like the designated oaf is particularly incompetent, or that it’s maybe contrived that he immediately hits his head in exactly the right place. I’m here to tell you, as a man who is still oaf adjacent, I can say this is commonplace once you are six one and above. That’s an inch above one standard blue man Kuma unit. That’s when everything starts getting constructed specifically to hit you in the head, banisters, tents, door frames, the occasional ceilings of basements and attics, the works of man already conspire against me. Why shouldn’t nature herself she took off,

 

1:08:58

you idiot.

 

Will Riley  1:09:01

Down comes Joyce and the chopper. And this is the first time all this aerial photography is used to actually convey action in this episode, rather than, you know, providing B roll to sell real estate in Burnaby. There’s a really great aerial shot of this whole camp getting blown to pieces by the wind. You can do with him.

 

1:09:21

I’ll take your hand.

 

Will Riley  1:09:22

Grant, speedily kicks the gun out of red’s hand and dashes away with his hands still tied behind his back. This continues the episode’s theme of conflicts being resolved with one stubby little kick. Both him and Joyce resolve their conflicts with single kicks. If you’ve played SNK versus danger Bay, you know this runs true. Joyce’s crouching, light kick. In that game has only two frames of startup seven active frames. It’s really oppressive. It’s the first time in fighting game history that a jab has also counted as a meaty Eat your heart out. Chun Li’s crouching, light punch. Does anybody know what I’m talking about? Out here, generally speaking, ending conflict with a single blow. Happens in most episodes of early danger Bay, there will be a lengthy chase scene, sure, but all fights end with like one tackle, one punch, one nut shot with a car door. So far, there’s only been one fight with more than one strike in it, and it had to end with a suplex into a lake. One which you remember, has a statue dedicated to it on Parliament Hill. But for now, Grant needs just to run. The camera follows him overhead as he dashes through the forest with his arm still tied behind his back. At one point, he literally trips over his own legs and rolls around in the dirt for a second. Red and the oaf are still right behind him. GRANT finally gets to the river, gets into the chopper, and right as the Earth poachers line up a shot at him, the copter lifts off. Grant has literally vested the poachers with his hands tied behind his back.

 

Will Riley  1:11:10

The Earth poachers don’t even pull the trigger this whole episode, three different people have had guns this app, and the only guys that didn’t get to shoot are the people you could actually depict using their guns in a negative light like they’ve totally inverted how this is supposed to go. This is the rule for every one laser GI Joe fires off, Cobra has to shoot three. Not that every episode of good television has to follow this exact rule of antagonist bullet metrics. I’m reminded of a season 32 episode of danger Bay in which Nicole unloaded clip after clip into a single corpse over the course of an hour, as is the apparent tradition for danger Bay at this point. Once the climax is over, the denouement resolves at breakneck speed. The moment that grant and Joyce’s chopper disappears, it turns out that the old prospector has stolen all of the gold in the commotion and driven off.

 

Will Riley  1:12:09

Red is at the height of his madness. He just grabs his gun by the barrel and smacks it up against the tree, and apparently it wasn’t loaded because nothing fires, and then a police chopper just conveniently hovers in. This is the police You’re under arrest. Red hangs his head glumly. Joyce and grant share ball mows.

 

Speaker 10  1:12:36

You’re gonna make me old before my time, Doctor, I wasn’t exactly having a good time down there myself,

 

1:12:45

so we stopped them from doing any long term damage to the animals.

 

Will Riley  1:12:48

Cut to the family having more gross food arguments, just to bookend the episode very quickly, roll credits. It’s a new

 

Speaker 8  1:12:55

recipe, all locale ingredients. Well, that’s good to know. I don’t like it. I’m gonna feed her to danger. Jonah,

 

Speaker 9  1:13:01

Oh, hey. All right, you guys, let’s not get into that again. Okay, what’s the father to do? What’s wrong with

 

Will Riley  1:13:11

that? And I’m just here wondering, is there going to be any resolution over the fact red probably has your brain damage. He’s inhaled Mercury fumes over the course of days, maybe months, like his brain may be permanently altered with all the mercury between his ears. I think that when Shilton was writing this script, he really did forget, or he just didn’t care, which actually works in this episode’s favor by being uncannily brutal. I’ve made the point that danger Bay has literally zero love for poachers, like even the most sympathetically depicted poachers in danger Bay get the book thrown at them, but this guy takes the cake as the villains come up, and this is in many ways more gruesome than death at the very least, it’s worse than the traditional PG movie death they would have to give him, you know, you know, red stumbles off a cliff into some kind of Lake cut to grant grimacing as a splash sound effect plays neat and tidy. Instead, this show just kind of tosses out, oh yeah, he’s gonna have metallic rabies for the rest of his life, maybe he needs a live in carer now, it’s the sort of thing you contemplate happening to you, and you just sort of curl up inside yourself and for danger Bay. It’s just an afterthought the fact that this harsh, long term fate is just casually treated as a basic, ironic comeuppance. It cuts at one of the core themes that has been repeating itself in all of these episodes, you know, pointing towards environmental problems that have big time perpetrators, but only depicting small time crooks. We already know there are disused mines all along this area, and it’s land owned by huge companies the environment. Mental damage abandoned industrial mines can cause, especially to wildlife, is well known. The water inside them is chock full of acid, not to mention metallic residue. And if there’s seepage flooding or some massive earthquake, all that crap could get into the river and poison bears and a whole lot more statistically, which is more likely to make all these bears insane, Rio Tinto gold Corp, or three bright young entrepreneurs providing artisan mining solutions

 

1:15:31

I’m leaving.

 

1:15:32

Put that gold down. It’s mine. Put it down.

 

1:15:36

It’s my share. Put it down. But because

 

Will Riley  1:15:39

this is danger Bay. All environmental damage must come from external sources, and not mining multinationals, which are famously law abiding. Other than all that, though pretty solid episode, there may not be a ton of character development, but these procedural fish mysteries, where they work their way backwards to the culprit, are always the best. They always provide a chain of events that only danger Bay can provide you. No other program can give 22 minutes that start with a guy slashed by a bear and end with somebody getting hella lifted out of a gold mining hostage situation, a gold mining hostage situation in which the ringleader has been ensorcelled by the seduction of mercury, and a break in the case comes from knowing what fishing rods to use in which rivers. The main bit of praise I’m gonna give this episode does basically ask you, the listener, to imagine a different program, but to give writer and director Gilbert Schilt and his due here, I want to zoom in on this gold mining operation. Imagine this premise was given a 40 minute show instead. Everything about these miners really is a story that could work in and of itself. It already likely is a premise for a Western that just got repurposed. I’d argue that despite how short it is, this mining story actually evokes plenty of themes that would make a very good revisionist Western. After I watched this episode and put my laptop down, I kept ruminating on them. It’s a tale of unscrupulous men at the very end of the frontier, trying to grab the last bit of gold out of the land. And the very nature of this extractive work induces madness. What is the nature of the madness and even more irrational and violent lust

 

Speaker 15  1:17:36

for gold? That mine is just a gun, gun, gun, which ironically

 

Will Riley  1:17:40

sets up the conditions to induce even more insanity.

 

Will Riley  1:17:50

This madness is so all consuming that even the madman’s compatriots, who were originally just as self serving as him, even they must eventually become hostages to his irrationality, trapped in by a person who they must know deep in their heart is simply a version of themselves that has been amplified this episode of danger Bay is Canada’s version of a field in England, is what I’m saying. If Shilton gave this narrative a full script treatment and put it in theaters in five years. I’d say he’d have college professors giving lectures, going, I say that the mercury poisoning is an analogy for westward expansion setting up the stage for European fascism. And he’d look back and go, damn, I didn’t realize it. I really was spitting facts the

 

Will Riley  1:18:45

so there you have it. Danger Bay’s warning to the youth of the world of the dangers of mercury madness. I mean, it was a big thing in this decade. You know, there were all the cheesy film strips about the dangers of mercury consumption. They were really just sort of fighting against. I mean, you know, all of those rappers in the music videos huffing Mercury fumes to look cool, and all the children were following suit. I mean, all these guys in the music videos looked very well off and wealthy because, you know, there was all the gold that they were wearing, you know, from the mercury that they were using. But at the end of the day, mercury poisoning is only a temporary high. Most kids today don’t even remember that there was a Mercury equivalent of the DARE program school information on mercury poisoning. I mean, it was a really sort of a disaster, if you ask me, most kids ended up taking more mercury if they did take the simp classes. But you know what is an addictive substance that has no negative side effects and leaves you feeling high forever? It’s another modern episode of danger bank. Nicole Roberts is sent to infiltrate a poacher code breaking operation under the sway of dark magic belonging to uxaras, the sea urchin God. God, Nicole crawls through the vents of a secret compound using a welding flame built into her robot hand to melt through a grate, working off intel from poacher informants from the anti urchin faction, Nicole expects a big server bank, maybe some beluga based cloud computing, but what she sees shocks her to her the core, but what she sees shocks her to the core. 10 urchinized poachers sit in a circle equipped with neural helmets, pooling their brain’s power into a single supercomputer. My God, Nicole whispers to herself, first packs with dark gods, and now this these poachers will truly go to any length to locate even more salmon to steel. But as she says this, it becomes clear this is no ordinary code breaking operation. A large nozzle descends into the center of the poacher circle, spraying some kind of a vapor they all breathe deeply, chanting UX eras name faster and faster, the supercomputer’s processing speed is amplified 100 times over which the viewer knows, because now it’s glowing dream. This is bigger than Nicole could have possibly imagined. The poachers are all strengthening their mental faculties with aerosolized arsenic, which they’re able to prevent from killing them by only having a little bit of it. Everyone knows arsenic makes mental processes work better. Nicole explains, that’s why it gets used to make some computer chips. I have to stop this before their plans, whatever they are, come to fruition. Nicole drops down from the vent and starts blasting but the poachers mental acuity has already been enhanced too greatly by the poison of kings. They dodge Nicole’s every bullet with pure mathematical precision, advancing towards her effortlessly until it becomes a CQC scenario. Nicole and the poachers are caught in a stream of endlessly shifting kung fu stances and enhanced cerebral combat, angry day stance, Otter, fist, anemone, leg block. This could be an endless stalemate if nothing changes. And so Nicole makes a daring move, using her cybernetically enhanced calves, she leaps towards the ceiling, kicking the arsenic nozzle clean off, filling her lungs with shields green, her eyes roll back as her brain is supercharged with complex mathematics, beautiful symphonies and a brief ecstatic vision of a kind, loving God, smiling only for Nicole. How can this be? The poachers exclaim, we’ve been able to enhance our cognition with arsenic through having only a little bit of it, but you consume 10 men’s worth. What is the source of this power, you fucking idiots? Nicole advises sagely, my cyborg circuits are already gallium arsenide. The arsenic is already a part of me, you have only had a passing fling with the old inheritance powder, as we call it, arsenic, is my lover, my mother, my father and whore, my master of ceremonies. Nicole’s fists are a blur, out thinking out maneuvering easily, besting all 10 poachers until her true master stroke is revealed. The camera shakes as the ceiling of the poacher complex is removed completely. A whole fleet of unmanned helicopters steered by Nicole’s enhanced cyborg brain pulls off the entire roof of the building with a sophisticated weave of steel rope and hooks into this exposed zone of conflict. The choppers strike the final blow, dropping dozens of gas grenades filled with vaporized Mercury, the natural enemy of poachers and the enlightenment of arsenic. The poachers roll on the floor coughing as their nervous system loses all conscious control. Nicole, Nicole, however, was able to anticipate the mercury bombing and keep herself safe from poisoning because she only breathed in a little bit of it. She leaps into a chopper with a single bound watching the poisoned urchin poachers living their last brief moments in pained confusion. She takes a moment to reflect arsenic, a truly miraculous chemical, a murderer, but also a mentor, a killer, but also a computer. Just think of the potential this simple element could have if it was harnessed by trustworthy and moral people. Think of its educational potential. What if there were arsenic in the classrooms, either in a computer or through some other means. Think of how much more the children could learn how our nation’s future generations could prosper. The children need arsenic. They call out for it from the depths of their soul. What kind of depraved people would keep such a crucial chemical from. The rest of the world, as Nicole is hella lifted out of the combat zone. A dam upstream from the poacher compound is remotely detonated, the resulting flood demolishes the entire complex as the mercury and arsenic residue flows away harmlessly into the river. The arsenic crisis is continuing to worsen, and I am glad that danger Bay is actually taking a stance on it. I would say the severity of this issue does actually go beyond the mental and educational aspect of this. I did just see some arsenic based nootropics on sale at the health food store the other day, the recommended dosage on the bottle just said, Only take a little bit of it. I’m not sure what that actually entails. I’d say an unspoken facet of this crisis is the escaped lions and tigers and other predators from the Neom Zoo. They’ve made their way all the way up to Calais in France. And I’d say the only way to really guarantee that they don’t cross the channel and get into England is to use some arsenic and poison the channel. That’s, you know, quick and easy done. Anyway, we’re coming up on the end of another episode of infinite danger. Thanks for listening. As always, be sure to follow me on the usual social media channels and be sure to check out my tours on questo you know the deal bye now, and of course, always, always check out the kiddiesnes Patreon. We’ve got a whole lot of new, interesting shows for you. We are starting a brand new science series. Matt has got access to a bear now, and he’s going to be giving it a different hallucinogenic substance every episode, just to see how it reacts. Thanks again to Olympic Game farms for hooking him up anyway. Thanks for listening again. See you next time danger comes from below.

 

Matthew Keeley  1:26:56

Infinite danger was written, recorded and produced by will Riley, in association with ks media LLC, the theme is derived from amore Grande, Amore profondo by il guardiano dalfaro. We can be contacted through Twitter or blue sky at K, A, S, M, K, A, V, E, or through kittiesneses.com danger Bay was produced by danger Bay productions, incorporated in association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Telefilm Canada and the Disney Channel support infinite danger and other fine projects@patreon.kittiesneezes.com this has been a kitty sneezes. Production, danger, danger,

 

Speaker 9  1:27:37

danger. Danger. Hasn’t come home yet. You Danger.

 

Speaker 2  1:27:50

Danger. I’m so afraid of just never gonna see danger. She could be a danger to herself and Dad, be a danger to us. You. Danger