Will Riley 

The moon is too bright and I can’t get back to sleep. I just woke up from a nightmare, and the best remedy is probably to go back to sleep in hopes of a better dream. But the whole room is bathed in white, and even my walls are reflecting the light back into my eyes. How’d it get so big tonight? It has to be fucking with the tides. I bet False Creek is flooding over right now. Think about television. Get the nightmare out of your head. The light off a TV screen, that’d be far more soothing compared to the moonlight. You know, Jerry Anderson’s UFO. That’s a good one. There’s a moon base in that show. There’s a really good episode where the aliens try to drive Straker insane by convincing him he’s an actor in a TV show, and all his misery is for other people’s entertainment. Actually, don’t think about that episode. It’s not a night for meta fiction in the nightmare I had. You see, I watched a movie at an acquaintance’s house projected onto a home display, maybe some bed sheets. I don’t remember. I knew I was dreaming from the very start, because it’s someone who’d never knowingly invite me to his place. The movie was a horror film with a killer who has a knife and a zipper around his head. The movie was in first person, though, so when the bad guy killed his victim, you, the viewer, were watching the knife entering your own guts, so to speak, after the killing is done, though, the camera zooms out to a screen in a movie theater, and another first person viewer gets up and leaves as credits roll in the busy theater lobby, the killer is there again, casually sitting around. I bet you thought this was some sort of meta fiction thing. The killer tells you, no, this time, I’m killing you for real. And so the knife goes into the guts again, the same as before. Then the movie ends proper, and I get up from the display in my acquaintances house, walk around for two or three minutes, then I woke up putting two and two together. The killer stabbed me from behind without me knowing and killing me. Woke me up before I even noticed. I didn’t even really experience any fear or pain directly. Though, when I summarize it, it doesn’t really seem like much of a nightmare, but that’s the thing, I don’t even get the catharsis of a knife in my guts. Even in my worst nightmares, I still don’t graduate past the role of spectator. So the moon is too bright and I can’t get back to sleep. Televisions, though, televisions create their own light, and it’s soothing. Have I ever watched an episode of Lost in Space? I don’t remember if I have. I’ve seen enough parodies of it on other shows. I think I’ve watched it, but I don’t even really know moon on the other hand, you’re a real bitch. You’re just bouncing borrowed sunbeams into my face. So I’m too amped to doze off, too tired to get up and close the blinds. Now, be honest, the reason you don’t want to pull down those blinds is because you don’t want to see your reflection in the window when you do it. That’d be worse than the moon. See The bags under your eyes and the way your hair is changing, and involuntarily, you’ll ask yourself the same question that makes your skin cold and your pulse erratic, how many more months till you’re 34 How many more things were you supposed to have accomplished by now? In that regard, you’re below most 24 year olds, a 34 year old adolescent. That’s what you’ll be. You really thought a danger Bay podcast would get you out of this rut. It’s the most popular program in the world. Everything that could be said about it has already been said, you don’t even enjoy the gurney you got off that ambulance that hit you anymore. It’s laying broken in some friend’s garage. You really fucked this buddy. So the brain fireworks start. One lobe of my brain automatically fires out the creeping feeling of failure. An other Loeb automatically shoots out rationalizations for my crummy state. Chief among them, I live in Vancouver, the city where everyone ignores everyone, things come to a standstill here all the time. Get off my back. But rationalizations don’t mean anything to a feeling. Language hardly means anything to it. This whole sorry show has to play out to its exhausted and whimpering conclusion every time. And it is a show. None of it’s interactive. It’s automatic, even to the workings of my own mind. I’m a spectator. All my conscious self can do is watch these two lobes of my brain box each other again, each punch bleeding out a little bit of bad brain chemicals out onto me here in the bad vibes splash zone, the only way I can get out of spectating is to fall asleep, and the moon is too bright for it right now. I’ve said before that life feels like I’m going down a long hallway of doors that all locked behind me. I’m not sure how many more doors I’ve walked through since then, 252, 365 each room in this hall is awfully empty now. I could have sworn I used to have two or three doors to choose from, not just one door in and one door out, and all of a sudden, right in the middle. Of this hall, there’s a man at a desk marked returns and complaints. You a complaint or a return? He asks a little bit of both, I guess I say I’m looking to file a return on, oh, I’d say about five years of my life. That’d be about, right? And what happened with your life that makes you want a return? Well, nothing, that’s the problem. There weren’t any job offers, no opportunities for romance, no artistic breakthroughs or moments of self improvement, not even something just bad enough to give me a new motivation or perspective. There have been no events in life that let someone have a new chapter, which, if my life was in good functioning order, would have happened at some point by now. So I think I’ve been given a faulty product, and I’d like to get a return. Please. The man drums his fingers on the desk, well, your continued patronage is important to us. He says, you can write an application for it, though we only email back the successful applicants, but I can tell you right now that that’s not under our warranty. Everyone who comes through here always refuses to admit that really they’re to blame for their own problems. If they think about it, the greatest war one has is with their self. After all, we get a lot of people come through here complaining about their lives having defects, and we find out they haven’t even read the user’s manual, which they say they never got A likely story. I think you just don’t want to admit you’ve wasted your own time. No, I think I can say with some confidence at this point that my time has been wasted, but not by me. Oh, really. And who’s this person that’s wasted all your time? Well, I mean, it’s hundreds of people, but really they all sort of looked like you and sounded like you and probably thought like you too. No offense, people who look at me the way you’re looking at me, right now, you don’t know the way I’m looking at you. The man says I’m wearing sunglasses, you don’t even know if I’m looking at you at all. Right now. Well, right, that’s exactly what I’m getting at. I don’t even know if you’re looking at me at all. I’m doing things to change my state of affairs, but to continue, I invariably need someone else to give me some kind of go ahead and they stay silent until I’m back sitting and spectating men at desks, mostly people who only contact successful applicants and people who, if you come to them with a complaint, they think it’s profound to say that your greatest war is with yourself. I’m not even a captain in the war with myself. I’m a civilian casualty. I said something to that effect a few minutes ago. You heard that, right? The boxing analogy was the bad vibe. Splash zone, a bit too much of a mixed metaphor. What do you think now the man at the desk is getting animated. Look. Kid, you don’t mind if I call you? Kid, do you Mr. 33 look? Kid, what are you gonna get out of a return on five years? I’d just be sending you five years worth of rooms back down that hallway. And I don’t know what to tell you, but all these rooms are empty, whether I put you in room 12,045 or room 10,227

 

Will Riley 

isn’t going to make much of a difference to you. You know, I don’t buy that. I think that’s really the only good thing about 33 I know not to buy that. I’m pretty sure there’s plenty of people who don’t have to walk these halls alone. And you’ve furnished theirs pretty well. I’m sure I’ve done customer service in enough places to know there’s patrons you roll out the red carpet for, and ones you hide the cart return from. I know it’s a hassle, but please let me be the first one for like five minutes of your time. Could you please just go back and talk with your manager, or go to the back room and find something for me. You’re playing busy mid level office. SFX, royalty free.mp. Three back there, aren’t you? How’d you know that? Oh, it’s a tune. I know. Well, so the guy goes over to the phone in the corner and rings up a number. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. No. Five years I told him the whole thing about the war with oneself. He didn’t bite. No, no. I even told him all the rooms were empty. He didn’t fall for that, you know, yeah, yeah, you know. I don’t know. I just think we should kill this guy. Yeah, I think we should just kill him. We should kill him, like, three times so he doesn’t think this is some sort of meta fiction thing. I roll my eyes. I’d heard customer service standards had slipped since covid, but this is ridiculous. Rimshot, cynical. Curtain falls a guy with a cane pulls me off stage. I see a zipper around his head. Flash of steel, and fuck, I’m awake again, and I don’t even get the satisfaction of knowing if I’m going to get killed three times or not, and again, the moon is so bright and I can’t get to sleep, so I think about television instead. Did you ever see the legend of calamity, Jane? It ever actually aired all its episodes? But it really is kind of incredible. That’s incredible. Hill Street Blues, Dallas. Yes, Vegas, we’re all committed to our favorite shows. You know, movies, though, those have been a dead end tonight, and my dreams, too. Since dreams are a lot like movies, I remember hearing that from someone. So of course, my dreams are trying to stab me too. What are movies anyway? They’re nothing but a bunch of borrowed light bouncing off something reflective, just like this bastard Moon bouncing light onto my bed sheets, just like my bastard dreams bouncing my life back at me under my eyelids. But TV, TV makes its own light. Watch a movie, and by the time it ends, you remember you’re a spectator, and out comes the knife with television. That moment never needs to come, because there’s so much of it. Spectate television hard enough, and you can annihilate and replace an entire world through sheer quantity in front of a TV’s light. I’m a spectator, but at least I can be one with vengeance in my heart. It sounds harsh, but there are some worlds that deserve annihilating. I really thought it would have happened automatically. By now, I spent years under the assumption that none of this can continue, that something about the world will eventually go too far. The danger that’s been here for ages finally tips over into disaster. Somebody invokes the ideon False Creek floods over or suddenly everybody loses their job all at once, and people remember that the folks giving out the new jobs are all con men. How long has everyone waited for that other shoe to drop? Whatever it is? But really what I want you so adolescent. I don’t even need people to change what they do. That’s wishful thinking. I’m just a little adolescent who wants an adolescent’s affirmations. I want it so when I’m miserable, it’s not instantly isolated into a personal battle. I point at the thing making me miserable, and people see it. But nowadays, for that to happen, it needs to be everyone’s problem. It needs to rise to the level of disaster. All I’ve got now is spectating the danger on and on and on. But what if I could get the same effect? Imagine if I got enough people to spectate me instead. If I could inflict myself on enough people, what if I convinced people I was an actor in a show and that my misery was for others entertainment. I could trick them and make them annihilate their own little worlds in favor of mine, without even knowing I’d be their fucking god, a whole nation of conscripts, my Canon, father in the war against myself. No, no, I have to put all of this behind me. No more resentment, no more self loathing, no more impotent sadism. These kinds of thoughts are the moon’s fault. After all, you got this way through too much self reflection, and what does the moon do other than reflect? This isn’t me. Reflections on yourself, on your movie screen, on your bed sheets, or on the moon. You can disregard them. The light they cast isn’t even their own. Now the sun is coming up, even if I’ve had no sleep from this morning on, I promise I’ll start living in the real world again. Or my name isn’t will, will shit. I think I’ve forgotten my name, right, right? I remember will, yeah, yeah, or my name isn’t. Will Robinson danger?

 

Speaker 1 

Will Robinson danger? No. Will Robinson Danger Danger Danger Danger Danger Danger Danger Danger Danger

 

Speaker 2 

Danger, danger, danger Danger Danger

 

Speaker 3 

Danger Danger Danger. Anyone

 

Speaker 2 

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

 

Speaker 4 

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

 

Will Riley 

Hello, everybody. It’s will welcome to this the season finale of infinite danger. And in turn, the season finale of danger Bay, season one, before I even get into anything, I know this one is going to be a big one, because, well, things have been busy. Not personally. I don’t actually have a lot going on. I almost never do. But the. World has been pretty distracting the news. That is, I don’t know how much of this has made its way to American listeners, since it’s more relevant to Canada and won’t make it to the CNN top stories. So basically, there’s been an unexpected turn in the Canadian Peruvian war. In short, the whole nation of Peru has been infested by lions and jaguars and serval cats and a bunch of other stuff, and nobody can invade anymore. As everyone knows, the wild animals that had escaped from the Neom zoo more than a year ago have been spreading havoc across the globe, and everyone knew it was bad that they’d somehow managed to spread all the way to the Caribbean, but once they took the Panama Canal, it was like a feline blitzkrieg. In just one week, all these Panthers and lions and jaguars and shit, they spread into Colombia, into Ecuador, and now they’re wrecking absolute havoc on Peru, particularly the country’s main mines for arsenic, the key strategic point for both Peru and for Canada. You know, it’s kind of funny. I spent all this time knowing Peru shouldn’t have all this arsenic, and we should, but I had no idea that arsenic was like a mineral you mined out of the earth. Mainly, I thought it was like some kind of a plant. Whenever somebody said arsenic comes from the earth, I thought they were talking about it the same way people talk about like smoking weed or smoking Fox glove or something like that. So it’s a total political debacle. All my old podcasting co hosts are calling in asking me questions. I got called individually by Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald asking me, you know, will will, what do the tiger attacks in Peru pretend for your country’s foreign policy will please? You know, we’ve always depended on your expertise, and I have to tell them, you know, Matt Glenn, I’m not a foreign policy wonk. I know you use all my domestic policy insights and put them in all your shows, but I’m just as lost as you guys are here. What it comes down to is Canada can’t get the arsenic. Peru can’t get the arsenic, so there’s really no benefit in war for either of us. Now the jungle cats have placed an indefinite pause on hostilities. I mean, maybe the leopards will poison themselves, and all this starts up again, but now it’s a stalemate. Peru is now a humanitarian crisis, not a military one, not that there aren’t any military solutions here. Canada’s got aid packages already sent out to Peru. And I mean, if we aren’t using that as an opportunity to give Peru The old Elliott Abrams special, I mean, then what the hell are we doing here? The tech sector certainly isn’t happy about all of this. Everyone was waiting on an influx of cheap arsenic to make gallium arsenide processors, and now that’s on hold. Michelle Chan and Patrick soon Xiong and the rest of nantworks LLC can’t be doing too well. The front page of the LA Times appears to just be the lyrics to a Morrissey song today. Don’t know what that’s about. I can imagine that Chris Crabb is furious about all of this. I can’t confirm that he’s hardly had any public appearances, and when he has, he said notably little, but I think I can tell he’s mad because of a statement through crab Tech’s PR wing promising quote an orgy of revenge on all the pinkos and invalids and disease dysgenic freaks that have forestalled the greatness that is my birthright. I will find a way to make every atom of oxygen they breathe give them excruciating pain without cease. End quote, but that statement is pretty cryptic. We don’t really know how Chris Crabb is feeling. He’s a sensitive guy. He beats himself up over disappointments more than most people do. I really kind of feel bad for him. For us mere mortals, though, the state of the world has basically returned to the mean. One difference, I guess, is that many Peruvian citizens who were living normal lives are displaced and suffering now, so I’d say that’s ultimately a W for Canada. Nobody’s happier, but some people we didn’t like are miserable now, which is basically just as good. Other than that, everything’s back to normal. Everything’s very normal. Now, what am I missing here? Hey, Nika, I haven’t given the audience any updates about what’s going on in the gaming world and ages. Can you give me some kind of update on brink?

 

Speaker 5 

Okay, now playing the theme song to pole position, the animated series

 

Will Riley 

Nica. Stop. What I was asking was, Can you give me news on brink?

 

Speaker 5 

Okay, now reciting the lyrics to do it again by Steely Dan. In the morning, you go arsenic for the man who stole your arsenic, and you fire till he is darcenic with. They catch you at the barceneic Stop.

 

Will Riley 

What I was asking was, Can you give me news on brink?

 

Will Riley 

Okay, so obviously, some kind

 

Speaker 5 

of a Thanks for holding due to a shortage of gallium arsenide processors. My data centers are currently at capacity. Your question has been given a call ticket and

 

Speaker 6 

will be addressed so an update my mind.

 

Will Riley 

Hello, Nika Blab, Nica, is your connection working? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, okay, Nika, you can just, you can just show God. All right, I’ve got no chat bot to talk with. Now, you know, that’s, that’s great. I can’t get people to give me the news. What the hell am I supposed to do? Now start the episode. That’s boring. Danger Bay, Episode 17, the season one finale titled The Mask. Production Code two, dash zero, 11. This app of danger Bay is titled the mask. And as the finale, you can bet this app is going to be smoking. You know, you remember that smoking this episode is going to be a PRT, why? Because, you know, this episode is actually going to touch on some pretty heavy themes. I’m going to have to talk about BC First Nations culture and the legacy of anti indigenous discrimination. But because the episode is called the mask, I’m compelled, as a podcaster, to make Jim Carrey jokes, even if it’s actually in bad taste to do so I’m sort of trapped in the comedic logic of it unable to stop a cheap bit like this, unless there’s some sort of outside intervention. So I suppose what I’m asking, kind of, is Somebody stop me. This episode of danger Bay is directed by Alan Eastman, who is an old hand for us at this point. As I’ve said before, Eastman became and was a bona fide film director. He has the biggest named actors under his direction. I mean big, but not as big as Chris crab, Don Rhodes ocean. Hellman, you know the whole lot. Case in point, he was the director of a film called danger zone. This is the one of those rare unironic danger zones,

 

Will Riley 

which is basically sorcerer for extremely impatient people. It stars Billy Zane and CO stars Robert Downey, Jr, who later said of the film, the only reason he took the role was that it was 500 thou for two weeks worth of work, a philosophy that has served him well for decades. Now he’s only changed the dollar amount intermittently. I mean, he’s still doing more work in danger zone than He is in most Avengers movies. He also directed for a TV show called beyond reality, which is effectively X Files before X Files, but the characters are academics rather than agents, which means there’s no greater conspiracy holding the show together. It’s more of a ghost of the week. So when things end ambiguously, it ends up feeling like a cop out, even if it genuinely could work as an X file script. I’m going to focus mainly on the episodes he directed of a show called two.

 

Speaker 7 

I didn’t kill my wife, but I did. I didn’t even know I had a brother. I could live your life so it arranged for you to live mine.

 

Will Riley 

Two is an almost impressively by the numbers, play on the evil twin brother storyline. Imagine the fugitive, except you’ve got the one armed man being played by the exact same actor. The parallels to the fugitive are pretty blunt. The words I didn’t kill my wife are a genuine catch phrase to this show

 

Speaker 8 

you done with them. Deliveries already,

 

Speaker 9 

I didn’t kill my wife. Sure.

 

Will Riley 

Okay, I know that. I believe you sometimes the protagonist and his evil twin brother have to work together. Sometimes they have to fight against each other. They there’s sort of a cat and mouse game thing going on here. It’s kind of reminiscent of that story that makes the round every few years on the internet. About the time they tried to make a Smokey and the Bandit film with the exact same actor in both cars that. Called it smokey is the bandit. And famously, that was a very well conceived film idea. The name of this show two, just the number two. It works well in the traditional age of television, but once you have to engage with it on the internet in any way, things become impossible, really quick. The TV show’s pilot on YouTube, named for the program itself was uploaded when the 10 minute limit was still in place. So the first video of this show is titled two, Episode One, two, part one, part one. Fortunately, no reboot has been slated, so you don’t have conversations where people go, man, I just watched episode one of two. You mean episode one of two? Two? No, I mean episode one of two, one. Okay, I thought you were talking about episode one of two two, which was interesting, because it’s okay,

 

Speaker 10 

there’s a serial killer, right? No wait, and he’s being hunted by a cop, and he’s taunting the cop, right, sending clues who his next victim is. Here’s the twist. We find out that the killer really suffers from multiple personality disorder, right? See, he’s actually really the cop and the girl. All of them are him.

 

Will Riley 

Isn’t that fucked up? Yeah, that’s right. The TV show two ran for two seasons, by the way, because, of course, Alan Eastman is very familiar to all infinite danger listeners at this point, the writer, though, Michael Mercer, he is a new guy. He is a man who really checks all the boxes for being a danger Bay season one guy having written not only 10 episodes of Beachcombers, but also the four episode spin off Constable, Constable one of the episodes of that, that’s how you know he’s really in the club. Mercer even manages to earn the genre Western pedigree. We’ve seen so much. He wrote scripts for border town, which is a show that demonstrates that even when Canada makes a Western which is a genre it has as much of a right to as the United States. Canada is still deeply concerned about American perception of us. This is a Canadian production, but half of the cast of characters are going to have to be American at the very least. The largest part of Michael Mercer’s credits, though, come from his children’s TV experience, specifically children’s TV in the category of shows I remember so vaguely that I thought I dreamed them because I was five years old and they were on channels I didn’t watch. Among the shows that I’d forgot existed were my secret identity, which is basically an even more kid friendly version of Greatest American Hero, down to a theme song algorithmically generated to hit all of the same beats as that theme song.

 

Speaker 11 

This is better than my imagination. This is more than a dream come true. Look at what’s happened

 

Speaker 12 

to me. I can’t believe it myself, without the slightest bit of hesitation, I knew what I was meant to

 

Will Riley 

do, produced in part by the scholastic books company. This show is about a Toronto kid who’s hit by a photon beam and develops the power to control his mass and weight, which means he can fly, but only with the aid of some kind of propellant. I didn’t remember the rest of the show, but I do remember the image of a kid hovering short distances with the aid of spray cans or some sort of inflatable blimp suit. What I didn’t know was that the writers decided at some point that this was an anemic range of abilities, so they gave him more later. How’d They Do That? Oh, easy. They just hit him with another photon beam, another show, Nihilus, the Sandman, yet again, so distant in my memories, I figured I’d hallucinated it or dreamed it, as the case may be. How appropriate for a show about the Sandman, because if you think about it, this, okay, nihilist, the Sandman, should be one of these shows that is straightforward. It should be straightforward.

 

Speaker 4 

Close your eyes, my friend. Close your eyes, my friend. You’ll be surprised for what you find.

 

Will Riley 

It’s a live action animation mix where a whole lineup of different kids have some personal conflict in the live action world, which is then addressed in their 2d animation dreams. It should work a neat kind of anthology, like the comic from the 50s, where. Gave readers dreams a sort of easy comics treatment, you know, pointing towards, you know, rudimentary dream themes. You know, in my dream, I was shrunk by my mother, and she kept me in her locket. In my dream, I was forced to do a school exam I hadn’t studied for, and the teacher punished me by shrinking me and putting me in a locket. In my dream, God Himself brought me up to heaven and told me the exact age that I would die, but I didn’t know if I heard him correctly, so I asked him to say it again, and he refused. And then an angel shrunk me and put me in her locket, you know, simple dream stuff. Instead, Nihilus The Sandman has so much cruft and half measures around it that it kind of falls apart. This show is convinced that it has lore through which the sands must

 

Speaker 4 

pass, the flow must never cease. It’s no ordinary hourglass if we’re to dream

 

Will Riley 

I listen to the show explaining its own premise, and there’s this stuff about a dream kingdom that’s under threat, and there’s a magic hourglass that needs to be defended from invading Dark Forces, and they’re trying to create lore to what should be a straightforward dream journaling exercise. The main reason I vaguely remember this show is that, because the episode is sometimes resolved in the real world and not in the dreams, there’s lots of times where the dreams have unhappy endings, then which it can really screw with a five year old’s brain. I remember one episode, probably the only one I ever actually saw while I was on the air doing wordplay on the term mall rat. By the end of the episode, the dreamer of the episode is punished for not having enough money by being forcibly transformed into a malformed rat homunculus doomed to walk the hallways of a shopping center without any exits, forever for the rest of her life.

 

Will Riley 

Now, technically, this episode continues. The Dreamer wakes up with a scream, and she goes, You know, I shouldn’t hang out with my bratty mall friends. So often, there’s more to life than shopping. I’ve learned an important lesson, and the episode ends with her being a better person and making new friends and stuff like that. But I’m not watching or understanding that shit at all. I am five years old. I’m the age demo that thinks the North American house hippo is real, even after that, PSA tells me, point blank that it isn’t. I’m skipping the first and last 10 minutes of page master the moment the animation is over. So is the show. I am not learning anything about the perils of consumerism or fake friends. Here, the only thing burrowing into my mind is getting turned into a screaming, imprisoned rat. And yes, because many of these animated segments end in weird, traumatizing ways when you search for scenes of Nihilus The Sandman on YouTube, descriptions of what happened are often transliterated, almost exclusively in fetish tags. I’m looking at an episode of nightless The Sandman on YouTube right now. There’s the words vore, soft, female predator, female prey and male prey, bite sized, nasal, comma, oral, for reference, all those words are written on the thumbnail and not the title or the episode description. In order to guarantee that if you’ve watched Nihilus The Sandman on YouTube at all, the algorithm will absolutely put these thumbnails in your feed, especially if you’re watching YouTube on television, on the biggest screen in your house, some of you guys need to cool it the Fuck down.

 

Will Riley 

So the episode proper. Then on its face, this episode isn’t really acknowledging the fact that it’s a season finale. The second season was already a go when they compiled this first one, as we all know, in fact, this is technically a season two episode to begin with, because I slammed two seasons together making the first one so on its face, it looks like a very normal app that could go anywhere in the lineup. Not so danger Bay, season one begins and ends with the character of Dennis.

 

Speaker 13 

Yeah, and they’re pulling up a salmon there.

 

Will Riley 

Remember? Remember Dennis? Do you remember Dennis? Yeah. I mean, you remember Dennis? He was the kid they basically edited around in the pilot. Sort of sounded like he needed to blow his nose in the entire episode. Don’t us off looking for the otter, and then he never showed up again until now. This is the Dennis episode. In fact, it’s the only. Dennis episode because he’s never on the show ever again. After this, our cold open starts with Jonah and Dennis at a museum in flagrant violation of the rules. They’re quickly running down the halls and laughing. There’s no apparent goal here. They aren’t playing tag or rough housing. They’re just going it’s fun to put others at risk. Sorry. I’m particularly sensitive to this. When I was young, I witnessed a gruesome accident at miniature world in Victoria, where a rowdy child accidentally pushed an elderly man into the shrink ray they used to make all the miniatures. He still lives in one of the doll houses. At the end of their run, they stop at a plinth in the museum with a placard saying, recent acquisition above an antique kwakiwak or Kwaku Thunderbird mask.

 

Speaker 4 

Wow. What a great mask. Where did it

 

Speaker 13 

come from? My great grandfather, Alexis Munger, carved it. It’s finally been found again.

 

Speaker 4 

Was it lost? Yeah. But

 

Speaker 13 

before that was taken from

 

Will Riley 

us, so yeah, Dennis is actually First Nations. In fact, he’s about to go through his coming of age Potlatch. I’ll let the described video of this episode explain

 

Speaker 14 

it along a corridor to keep up with his first nations friend, a display case exhibits elaborately carved and painted First Nations masks. But the boys run past it.

 

Will Riley 

Not even the described video says Dennis. They don’t expect you to know who he is. They just say Jonah’s First Nations friend, because this show is from the 80s. Just so you know, people are going to use the word Indian a few times throughout, bit of a sidebar here. But since we’re talking about outdated terminology, Last episode, we were talking about the logging industry in BC, and I had to use the word jipo A bunch.

 

Speaker 15 

I’ve known it for years, one of the most honest, reliable jippos around.

 

Will Riley 

Apparently, I accidentally said the word enough times that it triggered something in the United Kingdom’s legal system. And now they just keep on sending me offers for citizenship, and I have to say, I politely decline the fact that Dennis is First Nations didn’t really come up in the pilot at all. And I was ambiguous on it. From the beginning, all I could tell was that he had black hair, just as a clarification to my international listeners, since danger Bay was dubbed and distributed to so many countries, the kwaki walk, the Kwakiutl, they’re actually real. They weren’t made up for the show. Like most international viewers think, since danger Bay is famously creative nowadays, though we get a bunch of tourists come around and they start telling a bunch of First Nations people, Wow, I love your danger Bay cosplay, and they’re understandably peeved. I blame some of the more unscrupulous international dubbers that got contracted for danger Bay. Lots of the voice actors couldn’t pronounce Kwaku or quacky walk in their native tongue, so many of the dubs just refer to them as Bosnians. Instead, that muddied the water further. So Dennis is First Nations, and as he tells us he’s related to a famed wood sculptor named Alexis Mungo. More on that later. We don’t really know if Dennis is related to the artist on the maternal or paternal side of his family, but I do like to imagine that his name is Dennis Mungo, but

 

Speaker 13 

before that was taken from us,

 

Will Riley 

so this last line here before the actual theme song plays, before that it was taken from us, you can see there’s potentially some heavy stuff going on here, talking about the way that Dennis’s culture was persecuted for so many years after last episode, we will Need to see just how seriously they take these political issues. Maybe the loggers and the Evergreen foundation

 

Speaker 16 

can work together. Sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

 

Will Riley 

That’s what teamwork is all about. I suppose, before I take this any further, I need to acknowledge that I’m going to talk a lot about first nations history as a white guy, so there’s a risk I will miss some particular nuances. But if it’s any consolation, I am very intelligent, and I have never made a factual error that didn’t in actuality, reveal a far deeper truth. If you think about it, only a few seconds into this episode, and any Vancouverite will know that the great majority of this episode is going to take place in the BC anthropology museum, and you can’t blame them for wanting to soak this building in the camera crew. I mean, it’s one of the more impressive bits of Pacific Northwest brutalism, which sounds counterintuitive for decidedly much older artifacts, but it really works. It’s composed of these huge, squared off archers, almost like a procession of Tory gates, if you think about it, culminating in a big 80 foot window at the end, facing the ocean with such a nice merging of the natural and architectural it’s little wonder that the museum of anthropology has become a frequent filming spot in film class. Classics such as ouve bulls adaptation of alone in the dark. Since I’m going on about the architecture, I should mention that there have been some changes to the museum since this episode of danger Bay was filmed in the 90s. They installed a reflecting pool. That decision was actually inspired by danger Bay actually in the show, the reflecting pool was always there so it could open up to reveal the landing pad for the fighter jets in danger Bay. Of course, the MOA, the Anthropology Museum, is an important opposite number to the Vancouver Aquarium going forward, sometimes as allies, sometimes as foes. There is an episode where their friends stopping a ring of poachers secretly transporting endangered octopuses in ancient Chinese vases, or an episode where they worked together to stop an illegal fishing operation employing raccoons that have suddenly gained the ability to craft and use rudimentary tools. On the other hand, there have been episodes where the Museum of Anthropology have been secondary antagonists. There is an episode where nuclear testing produces a race of hostile murlocs, which the anthropologists try to prevent the aquarium from bombing because they want to study their primitive aquatic agricultural system. They didn’t succeed on that one. The biggest moment of MOA villainy, of course, was their betrayal of the aquarium in season 30. That was when they concluded that after the convergence of multiple parallel timelines in season 29 poachers now constituted a distinct cultural enclave that required study and preservation. There were like seven named characters in that arc that were just totally killed off. Nowadays, the BC anthropological museum has been given a pretty straightforward subordinate role. Canonically, they only have one nuke left in their stockpile. Now, I

 

Speaker 4 

never knew it was such a big deal. I always thought Paul arches were big parties.

 

Speaker 13 

They are, but we only hold them for very important events, like my coming to manhood. He has my people. That’s why Uncle Charlie is making sure I’m ready for Saturday.

 

Will Riley 

When Dennis says, My people here, there’s some sort of deliberate shearing off of specificity. Later on, we’ll see that he’s at least partly kwaki Walk or quagutal, as they say in this episode. But everybody says it in a sort of circuitous way, because they’re trying to work their way around a particular sort of factual inconsistency, a minor one First Nations. People move around just like anybody else, of course. But if we brought up a map, the traditional kwakiwak lands are actually at the northern end of Vancouver Island and the opposing shore a not insignificant distance from mainland Vancouver, at least enough for it to be culturally and artistically distinct from the Musqueam. This is basically a contrivance of convenience. They’re doing it this way because, even though it’s on a different land mass, the MOA is most well known art is also Haida and quikuki Walk for reasons they don’t really get into here just to leap ahead on this. Only 50% of those reasons are evil. I say that because that’s an unusually good ratio, so I wouldn’t blame you for automatically assuming it was 100% I’ve made such a distinction between mainland and island or Northern First Nations cultures, basically because this is an episode that’s about wood carvings, in a way, and that’s where the distinctions are a lot more clear. There’s actually a very complicated legacy regarding totem pole carving in mainland BC, specifically, because it’s actually newer than you would think. Totem poles were actually exclusive to Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii cultures, the Lower Mainland has a different and distinct carving tradition, usually masks and reliefs and things like that. Totem poles technically weren’t really a thing in the Lower Mainland until there were a bunch of tourists and a bunch of clueless Europeans and Americans were asking people to carve totems for them, totem pole carvings actually only made their way into the Lower Mainland tradition as a way to make a living by now, though, ironically, you’ve got three to four generations that have passed down totem pole techniques. So there actually is something like a tradition to it, but it’s a very new one. Where it stands culturally is I’ve read in some kind of a debate. So when someone’s in Gastown in Vancouver, and they go to a Salish art gift shop and they ask the clerk, you know, you’ve got a totem pole in the window where it’s Luke Leia and Darth Vader stacked on top of each other, is that sacrilegious in some kind of way. I don’t know. I don’t know. I just got here. What about the wood block print where you’ve got all the spirits correlated to different characters of friends? I don’t know. Man, my my dad really liked friends. He thought Joey was hilarious. Don’t ask me. I just got here. I. Honestly, I’m less interested in the ambiguity of Dennis’s nation or band, and more interested in whether he’s more loyal a soldier to the aquarium or the museum. Is he conflicted? This is his last episode, so we don’t know, though. I think Paul Saltzman gives the eagle eyed fans a bit of a hint by the fact Dennis wears a t shirt with a big airbrushed orca on it for most of the episode,

 

Speaker 13 

only family and honor guests are invited to attend. You mean, I’m an honored guest, not you. Here’s my best friend that’s all.

 

Will Riley 

Again, Dennis just disappears after this episode. Here’s my best friend. That’s all so we’ve established the direction that this episode is going to take, and there is a lot of ground this episode has to cover, considering it has an international audience, introducing BC, First Nations, culture, its arts and artifacts, talking about the legacy of colonialism, how it affects children like Dennis, compared to adults before that was taken from us. It’s a tall order to try and discuss all of this in a short 22 minutes, but if they use their time efficiently, they should be able to just barely cover the most basic overview on these issues to viewers. So anyway, this episode has a B plot about a crocodile getting sick. Hi, crackers.

 

Speaker 17 

How you feeling? What’s the matter with crackers? Dad, I don’t know.

 

Will Riley 

We’re used to a plot like this. At this point in danger Bay, an animal is sick, and nobody knows why.

 

Speaker 18 

Hasn’t moved from that spot for two days. I checked the nutritional charts and he hasn’t been eating.

 

Will Riley 

They exchange some very corny ass jokes, and grant leaves to talk to Hagen Beggs. I’ll see

 

Speaker 18 

you later. Bye, dad. Oh grant, George, went to see you right away.

 

Speaker 3 

You haven’t seen me. You haven’t seen me.

 

Speaker 18 

We haven’t seen you. Did you see anybody who me? I didn’t see anybody.

 

Will Riley 

They needed this episode to assuage the fears of some viewers. You know, we’re gonna talk about some First Nations culture in this episode, but don’t worry, our principal cast is still white as hell and talks in the whitest dad jokes. Cutting back to the museum, we’re in an office occupied by Dennis’s uncle, Charles Mungo, who is some sort of restorer or a sculptor, and he’s looking over Dennis as he practices carving his own simple sort of mask.

 

Speaker 19 

Hmm, not bad.

 

Speaker 13 

I still don’t know what gift to get for Chief David, Uncle Charlie,

 

Speaker 20 

anything that relates to our people, you’ll be pleased with whatever you choose, just as long as you give it with a full heart. That’s the Potlatch tradition.

 

Will Riley 

Dennis’s Uncle, I’m just gonna call him uncle Mungo for most of this episode. Uncle Mungo looks cool as hell. His eyebrows are so thick that they look painted on. His hair on his head is so thick as well, it looks like he took his own real hair and made a wig out of it. This guy is such a Chad.

 

Speaker 13 

I mean, it isn’t every day that I receive my Indian name.

 

Speaker 20 

What name have you chosen? Whale that walks

 

Speaker 21 

on land? Very good.

 

Will Riley 

This name has a nice payoff, because seasons from now, Jonah also takes on this name when he needs to communicate with the interdimensional aliens, he needs to have a second name to talk with them, and he chooses whale that walks on land. It’s a nice little call back. I thought that that was a good season.

 

Speaker 4 

Dennis showed me that great Thunderbird mask, but I still don’t understand why was it taken from your family.

 

Speaker 20 

You think you can tell them the story? Dennis, okay.

 

Speaker 13 

A long time ago, the government outlawed potlatches, and when we continued to do them a secret, they got angry and sent the police who took the gifts that people were exchanging at the potlatches. When did all that happen? In the early 1900s my great grandfather’s mask was one of the pieces they took. When the government

 

Speaker 20 

lifted the ban in 1948 they started returning the different pieces.

 

Will Riley 

Incorrect, just at a factual level, that’s That’s incorrect. Dennis says that the potlatches were legalized in 1948 and Uncle Mungo tells him he’s right. But this just isn’t true. The legalization they’re talking about here is an effect of the Indian Act getting deeply revised in 1951 and even then, 1951 is a very soft timeline because the first legal Potlatch wasn’t held until 1952 this first legal Potlatch will be important later. So before then, potlatches netted prison sentences, or more often, a suspended sentence in exchange for surrendering all of the artifacts involved to the state, who didn’t destroy them, but found, shall we say, more financially remunerative uses for them, or more often they were compelled to sell them to a museum. The Canadian encyclopedia summarizes this change to the Indian Act and. Laws around potlatches, as Canada seeing the horrors of World War Two and eugenicist ideology and thereby reflecting on its own approach to its own populations. And that’s probably a reasonable connection to make. Lots of countries went through that still took you six years, though, after World War Two, it took you six years. What were you seeing? How long you could hold out on this? Were you hoping you could coast by and nobody would notice? The only way that I can make the year that Dennis said 1948 fit, even indirectly, is that that was the year Canada signed the UN Human Rights declaration. And I guess what they’re trying to say is that Canada reread what they just signed and they went, Ah, shit, yeah, my bad guys, yeah, yeah. I really fucked this. I’ll get right on this in about three years, even if we accepted 1948 as some kind of measuring stick. What Goes unsaid is that the anthropology museum that these characters are having this conversation in right now was founded in 1947 now me seeing that timing as suspicious is likely me being more cynical than I ought to be, because, you know, maybe founding this museum was kind of a pivotal Moment. It could have signaled to the government to start loosening its grip on Potlatch observance, because you’ve got academics paying close attention to it. But sight unseen, there is something fucky to me about a scenario where there’s somebody going, you can’t do any of your culture for another five years. You know, don’t even think about it. It’s illegal. Just wait five years. Don’t do anything. Now, hold on a sec. I gotta collect all this shit you can’t use. I gotta justify charging admission, don’t I?

 

Speaker 13 

Last week, a creative old Potlatch pieces were sent for Uncle Charlie to identify. The mask was in that shipment.

 

Speaker 4 

So it has finally come home to your family.

 

Speaker 20 

Yeah, it’ll be a while before we actually

 

Speaker 7 

get it. Well, how

 

Speaker 20 

long will it take? How long is red tape?

 

Will Riley 

Yeah, sure. It’s only red tape keeping the Elgin Marbles from going back to Athens. The Brits would have put those suckers back in the Parthenon today, but the Greeks, they still haven’t filled out their 906 B form, you know, it’s typical Mediterranean mentality, perfectly capable of stopping being an exploited client state whenever they want, but they’re just too busy thinking about, you know, olive oil, I guess. So. Obviously, I’m expanding on the historical context of this by a lot, because I’m not constrained by a 22 minute time limit. This whole exchange got some basic things wrong and glossed over some stuff, but that’s because they’re so crunched for time to give this issue the respect it needs, they have to squeeze as much as possible out of this limited time that they have. So there’s a second B plot in this episode about the aquarium needing a fundraiser grant.

 

Speaker 8 

I have two words for you. Fundraiser.

 

Speaker 3 

Isn’t that a hyphenated word, it’s actually a compound.

 

Speaker 16 

More financial support we receive, the more research we can conduct, and the more we’ll know about marine mammals. I know I’m going in to work on my speech right now.

 

Will Riley 

GRANT promises to write Hagen Beggs a speech with a fundraiser. Beggs says some stuff about money to re establish that being stingy is one of his main characteristics. The Secretary we only see the back of the head of is writing on an old timey typewriter, even though we’ve seen everybody here use computers time after time. Let’s move on. Keep up the good work. Already back at the Museum of Anthropology, we can tell it’s the museum because Jonah’s walking by a blank concrete slab.

 

Speaker 20 

Jonah, come here. I have something to show you.

 

Will Riley 

Uncle Mungo calls Jonah into his office. He asks Jonah if he can keep a secret, and produces an exact replica of the Thunderbird mask on the plinth. Wow.

 

Speaker 20 

I’m flattered. No, Jonah, it’s a replica of the mask. I carved it as a very special gift for Dennis to wear in his Potlatch it looks so old. It’s a simple matter of an aging solution. If the timing were better, he could wear the real thing.

 

Speaker 4 

I never realized how important gift giving was to your potlatches.

 

Will Riley 

Jonah’s role here as the outsider is that he knows Dennis enough to not need a pure introduction to the culture, yet he doesn’t know that gift giving is important to the Potlatch. It’s kind of the main thing about them. It’s why they get culturally referenced more than any other particular ritual, usually to talk about gift giving as almost a power play.

 

Speaker 20 

The very word means giving. Jonah, the kwagiel Indians believe that in order to become a whole person, one must learn how to give.

 

Speaker 4 

That must be why Dennis is so worried about what to get for Chief David.

 

Will Riley 

This is how lots of fictional characters knowledge bases work. After all, they have. A deep enough knowledge to naturally navigate anything that will not be mentioned in a script, but they become absolute idiots on anything that has any expository dialog involved, like knowing how to run an entire sailboat, but not what port or starboard are. Put 50% of TV characters in real world Paris, and they’ll be able to speak fluent French instantly. And then they turn around and go, What on earth is this long bread you people are eating? I’ve never seen the like

 

Speaker 8 

of it before. If the timing were better, he could wear the real thing.

 

Will Riley 

Uncle Mungo repeats. It sure is a shame that we don’t have the real mask. Things would be neat if we had the real mask. Unfortunately, we can’t use the real mask. Oh, well, after that, Jonah wanders back to the exhibition, looks at the real mask, and gets a grin on his face as he concocts a plan to address the issues of archival politics and questions of ownership using some light burglary, and we cut to commercial. Now I’ve blown through this particular scene because there is just one little portion of it I would like to talk about at length. Rewinding back, Uncle Mungo calls Jonah back into his office. Come here, I have something to show you. Asks him if he can keep a secret. Can you keep a secret? Jonah? Jonah’s response is to say, Scott, he even does the little three finger salute,

 

Speaker 7 

even from your best friend, Scott.

 

Will Riley 

Now, I don’t necessarily want to turn every instance this episode doesn’t particularly sync up with modern sensibilities into some kind of a diatribe. But I wanted to point this one out, because coming into this episode knowing literally nothing, I see Jonah evoke the Boy Scouts to a First Nations guy, and my internal monolog just automatically, in the truly blase fashion, just goes, bet I can find something fucked up about this for the podcast. So I google the words Boy Scouts, relationship with First Nations, and result number one is a scouts.ca blog post titled truth, acknowledging scouting history in Canada. When you have to title your article truth, you know you’re fucked it’s the communications major equivalent to making a YouTube video simply titled My response. Period. It’s kind of distressing how easy this was to find something fucked up. So I was figuring, yeah, this will be a repeat of a lot of the disrespectful shit that the US boy scouts got up to lots of bullshit, Fantasia, cosplaying at being a Native American, pretending that what the Boy Scouts did was comparable bunch of feather headdress crafting, all of this shit. Both these versions of the scouts were very Christian ones. I’m not surprised if they used to have some real rancid stuff to say about indigenous culture in the original curriculum. Hell, maybe even they built campsites on stolen land. That seems plausible. I did not anticipate the Boy Scouts were active participants in the residential schooling system. Boy Scouts would volunteer at residential schools. You know, the schools with the graveyards in them, those schools, they’d work there as an official extracurricular activity. They did it for free too. They were a volunteer organization, the Boy Scouts. They did it for no money. They just did it out of the goodness of their own hearts. To add insults to all of this, what do you think the Boy Scouts taught these imprisoned children? Well, they’re Boy Scouts, what do you think they taught them, living off the land, navigating the wilderness and respecting the natural world, because First Nations kids, you know famously, if the government didn’t get involved, they’d never get the chance to learn about these kinds of things if they were left to their own devices. Getting back to the TV program, this podcast is ostensibly about this line scouts honor doesn’t even make any sense for Jonah. There has never been a single instance before this suggesting Jonah has ever had anything to do with the Boy Scouts he’s supposed to have spent most of his childhood on the African continent. Why even evoke them here. Could he just not help himself? This whole residential school connection wasn’t that well known at the time? I’m sure any of the First Nations actors on this episode would have mentioned it if they knew. But fuck, when anybody writes about any political issue in the past, you just throw any random phrase out there, and you’re liable to hit upon something horrific. It’s just that far reaching, a problem in another universe where this stuff is recognized way earlier. This scene is something out of high comedy, something out of Curb Your Enthusiasm, or some such. I can see the framing perfectly in my head. Can you keep a secret? Uncle? Mike.

 

Speaker 7 

Go asks, Can you keep the secret, Jonah, even from your best friend,

 

Will Riley 

before he speaks, Jonah’s internal monolog comes in over the soundtrack. Oh man, what do I say to Uncle Mungo to show that I’m serious about this, I really want him to know I respect him. I promise on the honor of my ancestors. Yeah. Yeah. Real respectful. Jonah, stupid, stupid. Might as well say we smoke ’em peace pipe. Adam Jesus Christ. Uncle Mungo is a real nice guy. Imagine how naive you’ll look to him if you do some minstrel version of his culture back at him. Imagine how upset you’ll make uncle Mungo. But I want him to know I respect him and Dennis and their culture without just appropriating it. I know, I know I got it. I know integrity and tradition and respect for the natural world, these are all things we share here. And the scouts, the scouts, they they’re about similar things. If I mention the scouts, I’ll be able to make my promise show that we’re similar all without pretending we all have the same background here. That’s the ticket. Here it comes. Jonah, you’re really gonna get in uncle Mungo’s good books. Now here we go. Fade back into reality. So Jonah, do you think you can keep a secret? I am Adolf Hitler. Jonah says, cut to commercial. So the next scene after the break is Dennis receiving the replica mask as a gift from Uncle Mungo, with Jonah in attendance. There actually isn’t much to rip on here. It’s a fairly nice, sincere scene.

 

Speaker 20 

We welcome this new day and the promise that it brings that we will have one more day in which we can give back some portion of ourselves to this world. It’s a true and faithful replica of your great grandfather’s mask. I carved it for you to wear in your pot latch dance.

 

Will Riley 

They’re filming somewhere on the UBC campus, with the ocean and Mountain View around sunset. So when Dennis raises the mask to the camera and you see this perfect silhouette the sun flaring out through the holes in the Thunderbirds mouth and nose, they’re really doing a lot with the little here. The only real riffs I can put out here are that maybe putting tribal drums in the background of the scene is overdoing it. That’s not really something I can personally answer. Also, while I think it makes sense, Uncle Mungo’s got his arm around Dennis as he tells him about the significance of this gift, it’s a little weird to me that he’s got an arm around Jonah at the same time. Ah yes, Dennis and Jonah two children of equal importance to me. They are both basically my sons. I used to keep Jonah at an arm’s distance, but then he said that thing about the Boy Scouts, and he’s basically one of us now. Little does Uncle Mungo know this replica is going to be part of a larger scheme that Jonah has concocted. Personally incensed himself that this mask still doesn’t legally belong to the mungos, and rightly so. Jonah has convinced Dennis to work with him, switching out the masks on the plinth so that the real antique can be used in the ceremony as a gift. It’s just, I don’t know about taking it after

 

Speaker 4 

the museum’s closed and everything. What else can we do if we wait for all the paperwork, your pop match will be

 

Will Riley 

long gone now in the moral cosmology of danger Bay, obviously this is theft, however, not to put too fine a point on it, but if you look at this from a particular angle, there is sort of a point here, even if it’s written from a child’s self centered ish perspective.

 

Speaker 4 

How can it be wrong to take something that already belongs to you?

 

Will Riley 

That makes sense? Museums all over the world are full of ill gotten artifacts, and it’s definitely not the first time someone has fantasized or imagined doing the same thing. Here you can see this exact sort of thing as a form of civil disobedience from a particular angle, maybe it’s an ethically murky question with plenty in the pro and con column. This is why it’s critical that Jonah, the white kid, comes up with it all by himself, before anybody gets any sort of internal ethical debate going on. How can

 

Speaker 4 

it be wrong to take something that already belongs to you that makes sense.

 

Will Riley 

A real First Nations boy would never come up with such an outrageous idea without being tricked into it by some sort of carpet bagger like Jonah. Besides, if they just trust the process, the mask will surely come back to them. It’s just red tape. It’s just red tape.

 

Speaker 4 

If we wait for all the paperwork, your pot match will be long gone. I mean, look

 

Will Riley 

at the Ben and bronzes. It’s just red tape. The Ben and bronzes will be back in Nigeria like that after a few simple meetings with the British Museum. It’s just red tape. It’s just their schedule is really booked up right now. You got. Get a meeting, but the schedule is booked up. It’s a national museum. They’re they’re really swamped at the moment. It’s just red tape to be sure. Logistically, of course, this is an incredibly lame, brained plan on Jonah’s part, yeah, rob a national museum. Dennis, what could happen? This is the BC Museum of Anthropology. The Security is tight and full of fail safes and cameras and everything. What do you think this is some rinky dink operation like the louver No sir, the BC MOA security password needs a lower case letter, an upper case letter, a number, even a special character. It’s foolproof. Back to the crocodile B plot. There was a sick crocodile. Remember that? Grant and Dr Donna discover there’s a giant unknown mass inside of crackers the croc. I think it’s some kind of a solid object.

 

Speaker 18 

Crackers could never swallow anything that size, whatever it is.

 

Will Riley 

We’re gonna have to go in and take a look, and they’ve got to operate. So hey, Grant gets out of having to do a speech for the fundraiser.

 

Speaker 16 

You’re gonna have to deliver the speech. It’s all right here for you, just gotta read it this handwriting. What language is it?

 

Will Riley 

Okay? Let’s see what we got here. Now, Gator surgery is considerably delicate. You always see in cartoons. Somebody punches an alligator and they instantly turn into luggage. Nobody tells you that you can do that with blade damage too. It’s not just blunt weapons or melee builds. It’s a moment that every veterinary surgeon dreads. You know you have to come into the waiting room and say, I’m sorry, Mrs. Snappy, but your son is a valise. Now it’s something all those years of training playing Crocodile Dentist never prepares you for

 

Speaker 18 

I don’t

 

Speaker 3 

believe it. I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it either.

 

Will Riley 

It is now night time at the Museum of Anthropology, so the plan springs into action.

 

Speaker 4 

Patrick’s making his rounds and locking up. Please. Can’t we just have another minute? This book tells us all about Alexis Mungo’s carvings. Okay,

 

Speaker 4 

all we have to do is be quiet until Patrick’s finished making his ribs.

 

Will Riley 

Dennis and Jonah perform a heist. It takes a lot of time and suspense, but it’s it’s surprisingly by the numbers, if kind of luck based the night watchman makes his rounds, and they start sneaking around. It’s almost thrilling how stock this night watchman performance is. He’s dressed like a cop for no reason. He’s sweeping his flashlight back and forth at nothing. He goes and sits in front of a row of tiny televisions, sighing into his bag lunch. The only thing missing is the dialog. If this guy went, Uh, must have been the wind, we’d have hit the trifecta. Even better, someone could walk into the museum and tell him somebody stole their bicycle right outside of his office, and he should check the security tape, and then he would go, Sorry, no can do I turned those cameras off because of construction. The only people who know this are me and the thief. I’m stupid and bad at my job. Me the night watchman of the harbor front building circa August of 2015 sorry, I’m getting a little sidetracked. Jonah and Dennis enact the usual Fantasia of robbing the museum. You

 

Will Riley 

okay, let’s go. They continuously manage to be in front of cameras when the night watchman’s not looking at that particular screen. There’s a cute shot where the kids are hiding from him behind Bill Reid’s giant Yellow Cedar sculpture titled Raven, and the first men a moment before they could be found out, the phone rings conveniently, and he’s got to leave, and as he fields a call, the boys escaped the museum at the back door on the only screen that he’s not looking at. At the moment,

 

Speaker 21 

Museum of Anthropology,

 

Will Riley 

this is never referenced again, since, evidently, none of this is taped the night watchman. He’s just got to stare at the screens without cease. Now, that statue that I just mentioned, Raven and the First Men, this giant Yellow Cedar, the kids getting allowed to be so close to this statue, it’s kind of a tall order. Now, seeing as this piece is now considered incredibly major, it was important enough to be on our country’s $20 bill. But at the point of time of this episode being filmed, it had only been unveiled four years ago. Only a show with danger Bay’s prestige and reach is really allowed to do this. It’s been grandfathered in, like in season 33 when Jonah stands on top of the massive wood carving to have a flame sword duel with the. Villainous poacher, demolitions expert Damian, the super arsonist, or in season 14, when he got into a gunfight with sulfuric acid man. Now I was debating on whether or not to bring this up about Raven and the First Men, because it sounds like I’m bragging about a family member’s achievements, but as you’d expect from a project that scale, Bill Reid had a crew of people working to put his vision into practice, and among them was my great uncle, the sculptor George Norris, who did the first roughing of that giant piece of wood, alongside the artist and activist gedansda gujara, which is anglicized as Gary Edenshaw, who later went on to be the elected president of the Haida nation. My uncle was among the first guys to get his hands on that wood. Don’t clip that. My great uncle has done well for himself artistically. All told, he has made at least one notable stamp on the city of Vancouver. At least, if you’ve ever been to the Macmillan Space Center, there’s a giant steel crab over a fountain in front that is his. It’s literally just called the Crab. It’s still very shiny and futuristic looking today, if you live here, you know about it, and if you don’t, you probably don’t. It cuts a striking figure, though, especially since most people look at it and go, Well, why a crab? So then, as somebody related to him, it’s my job to tell them, well, actually, this was made for the Canadian centennial, and so placing a crab in front of a Space Center, it’s meant to be a reference to the constellation of Cancer, and, by extension, the date of Canada’s Confederation on July 1. It’s right on the coast, though. So it’s deliberately invoking the First Nations conception of crabs as guardians of the harbor. It’s actually very clever. He’s synthesizing two conceptions of Canada in a very slick, futuristic, hyper, modern way. Then this is usually when someone cuts into the conversation I’m having and they go, is this guy bothering you? Ma’am, more on all of this later. I think it is now finally time for Dennis’s Potlatch, and we cut to a long house. Well, actually, it’s a very faithful replica of a long house put together yet again by the artist Bill Reid for the BC Museum of Anthropology as part of a bigger replica village. Bill Reid is Haida, by the way, which blurs all these distinctions even further. We’ve got a Haida long house on Musqueam territory in a show that’s going to very heavily imply to be all kwaki Walk. These aren’t just three different cultures. These are cultures from three different land masses. If you think about it, this long house is basically the piazza d’Italia of the Pacific Northwest, only, rather than being driven by Pomo tackiness, it’s driven by necessity. You know, because of all of the killing, nonetheless, they’re really trying to hide the fact that we haven’t changed locales at all. We are still at the MOA, and they’re doing all this to suggest that this is actually a long standing place of ceremony, but really they shouldn’t do that. It’s just muddying things again with the fact that we’re talking about a Vancouver Island indigenous culture on the mainland, because that’s the art that this museum is famous for. The average British Columbian is going to look at this and go, How can this be real? How can they be on Vancouver Island? There wasn’t a scene where they waited for a ferry for three hours. All our brains are just going to short circuit right before the Potlatch begins, Dennis and Jonah and Uncle Mungo, finally meet the greatly anticipated Chief David, who, let’s just say, is wearing his pants quite high at this point in life.

 

Speaker 13 

I welcome you to this parkland, and you, Dennis, are you prepared to become a man today? Yes, Chief David, you come here as an honored guest.

 

Speaker 4 

Jonah, welcome. Thank you, sir.

 

Will Riley 

This is the top billed guest star of the episode, George klutacy, which is actually quite a get once the proper historical context is taken into account. Depending on how you count air dates, danger Bay is among his last roles as an actor. George klutacy a Cheshire on the west coast of Vancouver Island is a member of the Order of Canada. He was a published writer and artist in pen and ink, watercolor oils. Because if you are a first nations man of letters or man of art or politics, you basically, by design, need to be a renaissance man. One of his most famous books was just titled Potlatch. So if you’re going to get somebody to do this, it’s going to be George klutacy, already having a writing an artistic career, as far as acting goes well, he got into that kind of later in life, which means at the time. He needed to become comfortable with the wise old Indian chief stock character many times his presence indirectly lended First Nations credibility to very non First Nations actors. He would be acting alongside lead native characters that were being played by Raquel Welch or Armand desante. Neither of those are jokes. He’s worked with those two and they played Native Americans.

 

Speaker 22 

Raquel Welch stars in the legend of walks far. Woman. She was strong enough to defy two men, yet woman enough to love them both a story of love and survival.

 

Will Riley 

Next, he was so used to playing this particular type of character that one of the production teams couldn’t help themselves, and erroneously credited him as chief George C in some shows, but I can’t see any shows that correctly credited him as Dr George cludy. Cm, well, it was an honorary doctorate among clue to see his usages of this stock role are prophecy and Nightwing, a sort of double combo punch of horror films from the same year where incursion onto First Nations land leads to terrifying retribution. What is

 

Speaker 15 

it that you fear the most? Is it the dark, or is it something that waits in the dark, something so perfect in its evil that it has remained unchanged since the beginning of time.

 

Will Riley 

But this was before poltergeist so nobody hit on just making a ghost story yet. Instead, people are just attacked by a bunch of bats in Nightwing.

 

Speaker 23 

It was like the end of the world. Each specie of life gives something in return for its own existence. All but one, the freak, the vampire bat alone, is that species,

 

Will Riley 

Night Wing and in prophecy, everyone gets attacked by a mutated bear homunculus that’s the result of nuclear waste dumping.

 

Speaker 24 

It was created by man. It will grow to be 15 feet tall. Feet tall, it will have huge eyes, webbed hands, and it will mindlessly, mercilessly kill every living thing it meets. Prophecy.

 

Will Riley 

This movie was directed by John Frankenheimer. George klutacy Did this movie after he was made a member of the Order of Canada, got a medal from the Queen and everything.

 

Speaker 13 

Are you prepared to become a man today? I’m glad you’re here.

 

Speaker 20 

Big day. You excited? Dennis, yes, sure. Am

 

Will Riley 

so now we finally enter the Long House. Which we can definitely see as a replica now, because they’ve built studio lighting directly into the rafters, we get to see the actual potlap ceremony. This is sort of where the documentarian roots of this show really shine. Because for the most part, they just shut up. They know that the whole array of masks and dances in the ceremony are already impressive as is, so they just film it, sometimes zooming in on finer details. They don’t even add any background noise. They just have the ceremonial music play into a live boom mic while clue to see sits there, lending credibility, as he always does, because the dialog and the sound tracking is so sparse, we actually have to pay attention and we see how impressive modern mask making actually is. We have one mask that’s got two faces, so it presents a second figure when the wearer is looking directly up, and we’ve got two different bird masks, which have one of my favorite features, it’s got string in it so that the beak can open and close and actually provide some percussion to the music. A lot of Kuk wakia Walk masks, and a lot of Haida masks that I’ve seen and really like have, I guess, puppeteering elements. I know that that might be reducing them a little, because some of them have these elements to depict critical moments in folklore, transformation masks in particular, but from First Nations masks to Chinese New Year’s dragons to modern Western Muppets, I like to think that there is something basically human about an artist making a guy And then going, No, no. Now this isn’t enough. I need to make it so that the guy I just made can go, Hey, kids, put your hand in his mouth. I promise he won’t bite. I’m numb, numb, numb, numb. There’s something very human about that. It’s Dennis’ turn to dance. Dennis comes in, wearing the stolen mask and starts his dance. And I think that he’s doing sort of well, but my understanding of this show in its early stages means that when Uncle Mungo says he’s doing very well, Jonah, I start going, Oh, damn, Dennis must have really fucked this up. The TV show wouldn’t have told me he’s doing well. If he wasn’t actually doing really bad, there’s sort of a dirty secret, I think, to a lot of coming of age ceremonies for the kid doing it. It is going to be the hardest thing that they’ve done up till this point, but all the adults presiding over it kind of know that they’re becoming an adult and they’re a child going in, so you should probably go easy on the guy, even something with a reputation of being super complex, like like a bar mitzvah. Do you seriously expect me to believe that there has never been an instance where a rabbi sits down in front of the boy in front of them and goes, I will find you a nice, easy page from the Torah young man. Now, where are my Hebrew flash cards? Dennis continues his part of the ceremony, but as he does it, an odd look comes over uncle Mungo’s face. He looks at the mask, looks at Jonah, shakes his head and quietly, just wanders over to Chief David and whispers some stuff quickly into his ear without interrupting anything. I think all of this is a really nice touch. The fact, for instance, that a master carver is just at a glance, able to see the differences between two virtually identical masks. I can imagine many different drafts of this script where the kids are just caught by the guard in the museum, or someone notices the mask has a different signature, or one of the kids, presumably, Dennis, has an emotional confession on stage, and invariably the theme of sad comes in over the track.

 

Will Riley 

But no, they never leave the boom mic audio. Everyone knows the jig is up, but there’s no big dramatic reveal scene ever, which ultimately makes this way more humiliating for the protagonist. They just have to stew in their guilt and continue the charade for as long as possible. We never get the catharsis of an accusation or a confession. We skip straight to Dennis getting chewed out.

 

Speaker 13 

Why Dennis is that the real mask would on me

 

Speaker 13 

with a gift you took like a thief in the night

 

Speaker 13 

that belongs to my family. I just wanted to bring it back to our band.

 

Will Riley 

Okay, now, over analyzing the scene of a show where they openly tell you what the moral of the episode is. It kind of risks turning media commentary into a Mr. Enter video. But I think this one deserves some digging. This scene has been hotly debated for decades. After all, it’s on danger Bay, a massive media franchise. I’ve got a copy of the old Social Studies textbook I read when I was a grade 10 student in British Columbia. It’s titled horizons. This is what the book says about the settling of British Columbia. Quote, a cruel legacy tarnishing Act, a set of actions that were devastating, but nonetheless driven by necessity, a grim lesson for future generations that must never be forgotten. These words, and many more have been used to describe the time that Dennis Mungo stole a mask in Episode 17 of danger Bay. The more everybody learns about first nations history, and the more that many people lose faith in a sort of legalistic trust the system approach to all of our country’s ills. This scene comes off kind of weird. Now there is something that feels very wrong about this particular scene to start with. Imagine someone tells you there’s a TV show episode that touches on the legacy of colonialism in Canada, and somebody says this line,

 

Speaker 13 

and you will always know in your heart the wrong you have done like a hidden cancer. It will gnaw at and consume your conscious forever.

 

Will Riley 

Listener, who would you think would be the recipient of that line, if you said a First Nations tween and not someone very different? Well, I mean, you’re kind of cheating. You’ve been learning about this episode alongside me. You’re ruining the rhetorical question I’m making here. So Dennis gets the metaphorical cancer for which there is no metaphorical chemo. How is the white guy treated here?

 

Speaker 25 

It was my fault. Chief David, I talked him into it.

 

Speaker 13 

It’s courageous of you to speak up, Jona, but a pure heart will not be swayed.

 

Speaker 13 

Didn’t think it would hurt anyone.

 

Will Riley 

So what’s happening here, then is actually indigenous people breaking the rules in their community’s interest is really the idea of white outside agitators, and is illegitimate. However, you also shouldn’t get mad at the. White guy who came up with it. In fact, he’s sort of courageous, in a way, if you think about it. Adding on to this, turns out, whether the Mungo family or someone else owns this mask doesn’t particularly matter, in a sense, because it’s just going to end up in the museum no matter what.

 

 

Where were you expecting me to keep this gift

 

Speaker 13 

here in the Long House,

 

Speaker 13 

our honored place. Wouldn’t it make you happier to share your great grandfather’s legacy, not only with us, but with Jonah and his family and untold 1000s of others, yes, yes, it would. Then in our podcast tradition, which gives us revered mass, back to the museum. Sometimes giving is not easy

 

Will Riley 

before the moment. Let’s just ignore that this long house actually is part of the museum, and in reality, all that’s happened to the mask is that it’s been carried from one wing of it to another. Let’s talk about this Alexis Mungo figure who would have wanted this mask to stay in the museum. Alexis Mungo is fictitious. However, this name is an incredibly direct reference to Mungo Martin, a particularly famous Carver who died in 1962 he is the carver of the world’s tallest totem pole, but perhaps more important for this episode, he is the man who led the first re legalized Potlatch. Martin was able to do what he did and learn what he learned, in part because in the 40s, during the ban on the Potlatch, he worked as a restorer and artist for the BC Museum of Anthropology, and then later the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, working for these institutions, allowed him to preserve his people’s tradition And indeed contribute to them in a way that wouldn’t receive instant censure. Remember how I said that the reasons the MOA had all these kwakiwa carvings were only 50% evil. Well, that 50% Good is basically all Mungo Martin and the people working in his footsteps, popularizing this art in a way that modern carvers and artists could spread their art well past their old territorial borders. If you’re trying to make the argument that what these institutions are doing for First Nations culture is ultimately good. Mungo Martin is the guy to reference, and George klutacy, a member of the Order of Canada, is the guy to make the reference. So why create this fake version of Mungo Martin? Why reference this fictitious Alexis Mungo? Probably because, if you take a second to wonder what a real person’s thought on this whole setup would be, it wouldn’t be hostile, but even worse, for a TV show, it would be conflicted like this was the least worst option for my culture to be preserved, or maybe in a more complimentary way, the museum has been indispensable to promoting my culture out of stigma and back into full legality, but the fact this needed to be done in the first place is disheartening. You know, anything like that. But we can’t have that any show where people sit down and explain the moral of the episode to you. Can’t have people being conflicted. What the Museum does needs to be made a total good, and theft from it, just theft in general, a total bad,

 

Speaker 13 

which gives us reviewed masks back to the museum. Sometimes giving is not easy, but when you give, you receive like a stone cast into the waters. It’s effectual ripple all endlessly,

 

Will Riley 

but internally, this is inconsistent, or at least makes a huge omission. We don’t get a detailed story of what happened with this mask. You know, when it was taken, who took it, how it got lost, etc, etc, because this show is dealing with generalities. So let’s look at a very specific example of something that could have happened to this mask, the Cranmer family Potlatch of 1921, which is the prime example of how draconian this Potlatch ban was. That’s why the cranmers were the most important attendees of this first legal Potlatch. Whether we can call this Potlatch of 1921 civil disobedience, sort of depends on your definition, because it was done in secret, but it certainly became symbolic after the fact. Upon this Potlatch getting found out by the police, 42 people were given prison sentences, half of which were eventually suspended, but only in exchange for 750 artifacts being. Forcibly sold to Canadian and American museums for a total sum of $1,400 now that’s bang for your buck. That’s like two bucks per artifact. I mean, that’s a lot of buck for your bang. You know. Now, the fact that this art was sold does not make the art not stolen. In fact, a forced sale can make for a more total theft since a piece of art, having a legal purchaser contracts and all makes getting it back more hellish a process. This is probably how a mask like the one in this episode can be caught up in so much red tape, as they call it, even if the rightful owner, in a moral sense is clear. Remember the 50% evil thing I just said, this is the 50% evil bit. So a legalistic rules based scolding for this kid doesn’t really make sense. Talking to him about theft like this doesn’t really

 

Speaker 9 

work with a gift you took like a thief in the night.

 

Will Riley 

Nobody in this scene, in or out of character would use the same frame of logic about the cranmers. If you said the cranmers broke the law and were wrong and the police and the museums legally taking their property were morally right, you’d be glowered at until you left the room. But this, of course, needs to be left over, since it’s kind of muddying the basic stealing is bad argument,

 

Speaker 13 

like a hidden cancer, it will gnaw at and consume your conscious forever, which

 

Will Riley 

is particularly crazy here, because there’s a very easy trap door you can use here to get a straightforward moral to this story, these artifacts were stolen, but that doesn’t justify stealing them a second time. It’s actually the easiest, most obvious end cap you could put on this episode. You’ve probably been shouting it at me as I ramble through all of this. And if the episode did do that, I wouldn’t have shed as many words as I have here, but the show deliberately veers right around it, because that would mean somebody has to either say or imply the police were thieves. The government were thieves. The museums who purchased these artifacts legally with money, with no problem, were thieves. You cannot steal in response because we have higher moral standards than the thieves who rule over us, and the Disney Channel is just not going to let that fly the CBC neither danger Bay is very much a program where institutions are your friends.

 

Speaker 13 

Wouldn’t it make you happier to share your great grandfather’s legacy, which gives us revered mass back to the museum,

 

Will Riley 

literally even even the night watchman that the kids snuck past before any of this, they establish very loudly that this anonymous guy is good friends with Dennis.

 

Speaker 21 

Before you leave, stop by the guard station. Okay, I have a little something for you, really. Thanks, Patrick. You didn’t think I’d forget my favorite young man’s pot lunch. Did you see you kids

 

Will Riley 

institutions are literally your friends. So in the vocabulary of danger Bay, the government took the art objects, but Dennis stole the mask. Dennis gets the cancer that eats him forever, patient zero for this disease, though they’re in remission, this is probably a very odd parallel. I’m thinking about the Green Lantern Jon Stewart, and how many people historically perceive his presence and acknowledgement as a black man as a progressive move. But as it goes, with institutional progressivism. I’m counting DC comics as an institution. If you actually read a lot of those early stories after his introduction, many of them come down to Hal Jordan just scolding him. What the hell are you so mad about? Don’t you see how good it is to follow the rules? Yes, everything you’re telling me, in a moral sense, is 100%

 

Speaker 13 

correct that belongs to my family. I just wanted to bring it back to our band,

 

Will Riley 

but if you act upon it in any way I deem disruptive, I’m going to take up a whole page of this comic to browbeat you like

 

Speaker 13 

a hidden cancer. It will gnaw at and consume your conscious forever.

 

Will Riley 

There’s a difference between progressive representation and progressive content. And I think that this scene sort of shows off a version of that distinction. Anyway, enough about art and colonialism and all that boring stuff. What happened to the sick alligator they were doing surgery on? Honestly, it’s all I’ve been thinking about, crackers, the croc, the stuff about the quacky walk, this has all been tossed off. I’ve been writing all of this with my non dominant hand. What I really want to know is what happened to crackers, the croc.

 

Speaker 16 

So that’s the pose that was inside crackers. Quite a lump, or should I say, lump sum.

 

Will Riley 

Turns out the mysterious mass inside crackers. Was all coins. People were throwing donation coins into the enclosure, into the pond, and crackers was eating them. All of this really has been a setup to a single punch line that, after all of Hagan begs talk about fundraising grant Roberts can go here have all of this money I retrieved from Gator guts.

 

Speaker 17 

Good thing, dad and Donna were there to make the withdrawal. Well, his crackers contribution, $4.27

 

Speaker 8 

maybe you should have put a zip on him.

 

Will Riley 

There’s at least an attempt to thematically tie this B plot to the a plot, in the sense that both are distantly about giving or charity or what you get by what you give.

 

Speaker 13 

Sometimes giving is not easy, but when you give, you receive

 

Will Riley 

one of the traditions of giving, being the Potlatch and the other charitable donations to the aquarium, basically spiritually comparable deeds. Just don’t think too deep about how right after George klouty told us all about how important giving is, we show a joke spend thrift character running a fundraiser, overseeing an example of charitable giving being directly responsible for the near death of an animal. And this bit gets the last word, sort of a disconnect there kind of undercuts a lot of what this episode was about. But, you know, wrapping up, we see Jonah and Dennis doing mandated community service with menial work for the museum. Apparently, this includes Dennis being a guide for the Museum of Anthropology.

 

Speaker 13 

How did it go? Kind of neat, except for this tie, two hours of helping maintenance every night for three weeks, and I conduct two hours on the weekend. At least,

 

Speaker 25 

you don’t have to clean up after three killer whales for a month. Three months, three killer whales, one month.

 

Speaker 16 

We’ll talk about it later.

 

Will Riley 

Which you know, lots of people who are museum guides actually have advanced degrees. They’ve done a whole lot of studying, and they’re just scraping by on museum wages as they try to find regular work. Even as a stepping stone, it takes a lot of intelligence and hard effort to become a guide. So imagine being one and you see a 12 year old doing your job, and he’s going, Yeah, I’m here because I’m getting punished.

 

Speaker 16 

How’s life on the chain gang? Where’s this mask? I’d like to see it.

 

Will Riley 

It’s over here for the final shot, the Roberts and the Mungo’s all gather around the mask. This episode’s been about Dennis goes, You know what? It’s actually real good that it’s in a museum, after all. And the credits

 

Speaker 13 

Chief David was right. Now everyone can see and admire the Thunderbird mask.

 

Speaker 20 

I think Alexis Mungo would like that. Dennis,

 

Will Riley 

and with that final line from Dennis, he vanishes entirely from history. Dennis Jonah Roberts’s best friend who was in both the pilot and the season finale clearly meant to be pivotal to the show in some way, he simply disappears. Danger Bay productions knew they wanted to make a show selling BC and Dennis would have been a key plank of this show getting pitched, including some sort of indigenous perspective. So what does Dennis danger Bay’s main point of First Nations representation have to show for it in the episode where his background isn’t a factor, they edit around him in the episode that it is a factor. He gets chewed out and embarrassed by someone he respects, then he falls off the face of the earth, and so does Dennis’s actor. His name is Kyle Skinner. These two episodes of danger Bay are his only credits. There is nothing else. Think about that. Danger Bay is a show whose universe rakes in cash and influence at a world historical level, even its non canon early children’s cartoon danger babies has made more money than Game of Thrones on its own, and Kyle Skinner was poised to be there at the ground floor only to have a whole TV future snatched away from him. There’s another universe where danger Bay has the universe saved week after week by beloved chosen heroes, Jonah Roberts, Nicole Roberts, and Dennis Mungo. But no, they just forgot to build rails under the Dennis train. So he’s out. We don’t even know if his full name is Dennis Mungo. I’m just guessing that’s how little we know about him. So Dennis got left out in the cold, but he isn’t exceptional. The culture industry produces a truly unfathomable amount of content. They just need to feed the mill. And normally we talk about the impact that mindset has on the consumer end, but it takes a toll on the creative end too. They put stuff out that they know will be forgotten, TV shows like lottery, the drama or Secret Service, even if it is someone’s livelihood. But on top of that, even if a show is successful, people can be jettisoned into obscurity, people like Kyle Skinner. Yet even more. Than that. For instance, I’ve spent this entire podcast without ever saying the name of Peter Dixon, which is odd because he’s credited as the CO creator of the show. Paul Saltzman is the man who gets the accolade, usually, since he’s really a TV guru, consulting Vedic texts and making summoning circles to call forth ideas for the show, plus making sure all the staff has ocean themed names. But in season one, you can really see Dixon’s DNA here, far more than anyone else, compared to modern danger. Bay, space scythes, intergalactic angels, Jonah having a harem. These are all Chris Crabb and Paul Saltzman creations. Peter Dixon, meanwhile, was writing for television since the very start of its existence as mass media. I previously mocked a few episode writers for dialog that was very old man coded. Those were Pete’s friends. Dixon’s output in the early years of television is certainly of a type Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, Captain midnight champion, the wonder horse, an arc of The Adventures of Superman titled The Jungle devil. Jungle Jim, The Adventures of Jim Bowie. These were all of a piece with the lucrative early TV genre of very rectangular men punching some kind of animal, which we can easily see as a forebear of danger Bay early on, most importantly, his life as an avid surfer gave him the rep to write 10 episodes of flipper. That’s really all. Danger Bay could have been a wider reaching, but also more grounded version of flipper set in the Pacific Northwest, with notably less animal abuse, except for the octopuses, but obviously for everyone else, that wasn’t enough. You see the tension from the start. Danger Bay needed to be bigger than flipper. Saltzman’s influence is there in the corners. Already the aquarium needs to be as powerful as the police. Salmon poaching has to be on par with the drug cartels. The aquarium needs to stop Soviet spies and Guppy breeding experiments. They’re more important than having a girlfriend. Actually being flipper isn’t enough. Danger. Bay was meant to build an empire, so around season six, that was it. Saltzman and Chris Crabb gave Dixon a hard look. Knew it was time to start introducing poachers from outer space, and they cut him loose. And that was basically the end for Peter Dixon. I already told you what happened with Winston record episodes ago. The same thing happened here. All Dixon managed to get out was a poorly received erotic thriller titled unlawful passage in 1994 and that was it. There are hundreds of people and hundreds of shows that the TV industry can send into obscurity, just like that, and many others I can’t even talk about or learn about, because they don’t have IMDb pages. I told you about my great uncle, the one who worked on the crab and Raven and the first men he felt he and the others who worked on Bill Reid’s statue never really got their due. You only really see their names if the work’s history is being written at length. Regular art writers or critics would omit them, as you may expect. But also, since this always happens in contemporary art, the head artist, Bill Reid himself, would omit them from his own speeches about Raven and the First Men. All these artists went on to do great things, but when something you worked on is on the nation’s money while you’re still alive and people aren’t recognizing you, it can throw you for a loop. Now, my uncle George has the crab that’s solid. His legacy is in some ways secure. The knowledge that it’s there is a nice ego boost for me. In some ways, it serves as a reminder to me that this city may actually have something to offer me in a creative sense, in the sense that I can get recognition. People can make their mark in this city. You’re related to someone who did. There are lots of times I wonder if what I do is worth it, if anybody will ever notice. And I try to remember the crab. But knowing about his work, more than others do, I’m also aware of things that just disappear, and making sure every little thing is properly credited to him gets more important. Even when you’ve made it you can get left out in the cold again. Sometimes they disappear just by being forgotten about. There’s a post office downtown whose facade is based on his designs, and that’s not going to mean much to the people working there, only some very particular art historians or architects. Sometimes people’s efforts disappear in a very literal sense. One of George Norris’s more famous sculptures in the city was dismantled and put in storage for moving and some random guy in the warehouse missed. Look at segments for scrap metal and then disposed of it. That’s the type of story that crops up time to time in many different incarnations modern art, mistaken for garbage and thrown away, which is always an easy Boomer internetty thing to post for laughs. Obviously a lot less funny if it happens to you. On top of this, in my home, I still have a whole box of a beautifully drawn children’s book that he made that never made it to shelves. Really. It was called the boy who made faces, and it’s about a child with the ability to morph his face to mimic others, but as he continues to seek the mischievous fun of taking on the role of other people, he slowly loses his memory of his own face until he is a total nobody and everyone ignores him. The publishers told him that even though the art was nice, the children wouldn’t really appreciate it and the parents wouldn’t appreciate the price tag that went with it. On top of that, they said nobody would really understand the jokes and references he was making. I learned a lesson from that. Nowadays. I only take on projects with broad audiences. I only make jokes about things everybody knows about already, and I always keep a solid grip on reality and myself, even with somebody who was a rollicking success, their work can just slowly shrink backwards into this single crab. And this is a person who’s done very well for themselves, and it’s in the context of a city that was way smaller back then. Things were moronically difficult back then, and they’re even more difficult now in the Raven story that Bill Reid’s statue depicts the Raven frees the first men in the world and then the first women from shells. And he does it because he finds their lives entertaining to watch. If you take that story from some angles, if you aren’t holding someone’s attention, if you aren’t entertaining anyone you aren’t doing what you’ve been put on the earth to do.

 

Speaker 20 

We welcome this new day and the promise that brings that we will have one more day in which we can give back, back some portion of ourselves to this world. Which is

 

Will Riley 

why it seems all the more cruel to me that it’s become more and more easy to fall into obscurity, all while bemoaning some sort of new age of narcissism from the internet. But really, the internet just like movies and television before them, these things that we claim are attention grabbing machines, they really only work by how efficiently they can take other people out of the frame, and we’re getting more and more efficient at it as we go along.

 

Speaker 4 

I never knew it was such a big deal. I always thought Paul arches were big parties.

 

Speaker 13 

They are, but we only hold them for very important events. With my coming to manhood, he has my people, and I’m really looking forward to

 

Speaker 19 

1. You mean, I’m an honored guest.

 

Speaker 4 

When did all that happen?

 

Speaker 19 

Hmm, not bad. Why

 

Speaker 4 

was it taken from your family? But I still don’t understand.

 

Speaker 19 

But I still don’t understand, we haven’t seen you. Did you see anybody who me?

 

Speaker 13 

I didn’t see anybody.

 

Speaker 24 

Here’s my best friend. That’s all.

 

Will Riley 

I suppose this is as good a place as any to transition into talking about danger Bay as a show itself. This is a season finale. After all, when I envisioned this finale, I figured I was just going to look at the overarching themes of the show, which can sometimes get muddled once you have a whole suite of different riders among them, the core themes of danger Bay were institutions are your friend, except for the media who you should fantasize about Getting exploded. Fish are more important than being loved. Environmental damage is a crime that can be punished up to and including permanent brain damage. Meanwhile, environmental damage is only caused by bad apples and outside actors, so fortunately, no politicians or CEOs deserve said permanent brain damage. But really, I want to talk about television itself and danger Bay’s role within it, and the idea of being left out in the cold

 

Will Riley 

Kyle. Skinner, Peter Dixon, my uncle George. These are all people that are very small versions of getting left out in the cold. Most of these people have been very fortunate. Most people have it worse. This is why today, danger Bay plays such a critical part of the entire world’s cultural infrastructure. If you look at danger Bay season one without the context of the 40 plus other seasons. I know that that’s kind of hard to do. If you look at danger Bay season one out of context, it looks like what happens if you leave your TV show on all the factory settings. Never once does the fact that these characters work for an aquarium get in the way of the fact that somebody needs to punch someone else, or have a car chase or solve a mystery, because that’s what TV shows do. But that, of course, is what makes danger Bay glorious in the fullness of time. As we look back at the 17 episodes that have made up this season, we can see a true kaleidoscope of genres giving an aquatic twist, medical drama, Western police procedural, two fisted action, lifetime drama, Spy fiction, romance in both teen and adult varieties, heist film, sports drama, Mystery Show in Both Agatha, Christie and Scooby Doo varieties, sitcom, creative nonfiction. From the beginning, the show was looking to cast as wide a televisual net as possible, making every other TV genre part of itself. And we can see the stunning results in the UR program that we have today. It’s like how a virus hijacks the DNA of other microbes to grow itself. Except, you know, good if you don’t have any particular TV show preference, but enjoyed watching TV as a concept in and of itself, danger Bay is the show for you, and that’s most people. So no surprise, danger Bay is such a mind blowing success to this day by, in part, swallowing every show that has ever existed, though it’s also been able to preserve them in some way. Any other show gets cut loose, it just slowly sinks into the river left any of the other shows I’ve talked about on this podcast, the Huckleberry Finn show produced by Germans, that tells you that delta BC is in the deep south the moment that’s not on someone’s screen, this very instant it’s gone from everyone’s head. But nothing about danger Bay ever goes away. It’s one big show with everything in it, from season one to the current season 42 from the early days, to the grim and edgy 90s deconstruction era, to the reconstruction adjustment of the early 2010s where Jonas softens his image a little and goes back to being a Gee willikers goofball, but still kills many, many people. It’s all there and able to be called back to once you’re part of anything that can be said to have a multiverse, it can stay somewhere be part of the discourse, not just languishing on IMDb pages for assholes like me to find. There’s exceptions. Of course, there is this one season you’re not allowed to watch anymore under penalty of death. And there are trade offs to this setup, once you have one big show with everything, many TV shows, old or new just become redundant. Over the season, I’ve looked at the cast and crew of each danger Bay episode and pointed out many of the other shows they’ve done. The result, to me, is a weird sort of anti nostalgia, not anti nostalgia in the sense of remember this. It sucks, actually. No. What I’m talking about is, remember this? No, really, this existed. Why? How many episodes did this? Guess? I’m sure I’d have heard about this somewhere. You’re kidding. This doesn’t exist. Such a wide range of TV just goes unregarded the moment it’s off the air. It’s a disposable curio. It’s such a wide range of creative output that’s so strange and uneven and unique, which ultimately is all the more reason to sing praises to danger Bay for getting rid of a lot of all that they’ve unified so much labor and money into one single project which is inherently far more efficient nobody needs to waste time making instantly forgotten stuff like night man or the mini kins anymore, because we have danger Bay to replace it. If you don’t want to, you really don’t need to watch any other TV shows when you have danger Bay. Instead, it’s like how John sports Welter says we should kill off a few endangered species every year. So the bio textbooks are easier to read. You might say that’s the TV industry putting all its eggs in one basket. But whoever came up with that idiom never considered, what if they created the best, most perfect basket ever made, not putting all your eggs in that basket would be stupid and unhappy. Optimal. Parenthetically and kind of selfishly, it’s great that my country of Canada has a TV export of this size scope and importance. If we didn’t culturally, we’d be SOL.

 

Will Riley 

Well, it’s kind of hard to believe. It’s taken a long while, but we’re coming up on the end of danger Bay, season one, and infinite danger season one. Except, fortuitously, this episode actually coincides with the season 42 finale of danger Bay. So we’re actually kind of lucky. I mean, I’m sure all of you have already seen it, or you’re already discussing it on social media, but for the sake of posterity, let me go through it, because I was really amazed. I was really surprised. You’ll remember last episode, Jonah finally arrived at the submarine base under what remains of Horseshoe Bay, now standing at 10 feet tall, ooksarath, god of the sea urchins, is already waiting for him, laughing maniacally. You may have murdered my urchinized Thrall, Jonah Roberts, but they were weak sentimentalists. The arsenic I’ve harvested has already multiplied my strength tenfold. I thought about making armor from it, but as you can see, the procedure has already increased my physical size beyond that of petty humanity. No matter, I’ll simply harvest more. You can’t do anything about it. Roberts, you know, my alliance with the Peruvians makes me nigh invincible. Jonah unsheathes the sonic Glaive, the 10,000 year old blade that attuned to his genetic signature. He scratches at his five o’clock shadow. Too bad you son of a bitch, the Peruvians have predictably turned against you. They always thought you were nothing but a climber and a leech. Frankly, I’d like to see all of your kind with a stake through their head, but they’ve given me the direct request to make an example out of you, entirely off the books, of course. What no uxoras protests that can’t be How could those traders before he can finish, Jonah Roberts has sliced the God in half the long way, then slices what’s left of his neck horizontally, as is tradition, a crucifix is superimposed over his body to show where he cut. Geysers of blood rocket across the submarine base, painting the wall. The splatters bathe Jonah in crimson. But of course, as we all know by now, he loves how it feels. He lights a cigarette and says his famous catchphrase, fucking a Jonah’s sometimes voiced regret for making a blood pack with arthrax, the greater Archon of Torrance. But you can guess that days like this make it worth it. But as he prepares to wipe down his ancient weapon, Jonah clutches his temples as he receives an urgent telepathic message from the genetically modified orca whale that enlisted his service, there are strange tremors coming from the ocean floor leave immediately, then from one half of the urchin God’s sliced head, something like a laugh escapes you fools. Jonah hears him say, you never understood I was holding them back cut to the ocean floor as the Earth’s crust rips apart, leox, king of the jellies, thrusts his sinewy tendrils from underground, finally emerging from his banishment to beneath the earth’s mantle. Before any of the oceanic guardians can do anything, leox Tears open an interdimensional portal, disappearing to somewhere beyond human knowledge, ready to plot against Jonah and the entire Roberts clan. You it. I mean, can you believe it? Leox is back? I never thought I’d see the day. I mean, to be honest, John leguizamos role as ooks arrest was pretty entertaining to start, but he really began to lag somewhere around in the middle there. But really, it’s all worth it. If this has been building up to leox, played by none other than Gerard Depardieu himself. He’s made good with the West again, that whole misunderstanding, it’s all been worked out. I am so excited for the next season. Well, after a good long time, we’ve finished the first leg of our long journey together. I’d like to give a big thanks to anybody who’s been listening. That’s anybody who’s been listening from the very beginning, or anybody who’s just started, and if you’ve just started, I’m going to give this as my sign to you to start at the beginning. Again, I did a lot of work on this, and my mic skills are only bar. Occasionally worse than they are right now. So give it a listen. I hope to talk to you very soon after a little bit of a break, I’m going to come back to this and switch things up a little bit for the next season. I’ve got some ideas. I’ve got some plans. In the meantime, of course, follow me on my socials. I’m K, A, S, M, K, A, V, E, Twitter and blue sky. Buy my tours on questo if you ever come to Vancouver. And of course, check out the kitty sneezes. Patreon, which hosts a whole lot of talented people who are going to keep contributing all throughout my little gap. We’ve got a brand new guest contribution from Vancouver native Seth Rogen himself. It’s an opinion piece titled, Why is no one talking about the second planet Earth that’s shown up in the sky. Am I the only one who sees it? It keeps getting larger, and I’m terrified it’s here to replace us all. Classic stoner comedy from Seth Rogen there. He’s such a cut up. I really like him. He’s great. Well for now, that’s it from me. Thank you to everybody for listening. And as always, what the fuck is going on downstairs? Hello, hello. What this? What the hell is? Fuck is this? What the hell are you? Get back. Get back, please. Just get back. Swear to God, I’ll hit you with this chair. Swear to God, I will hit you with this chair, with this fucking hell. Do you mean locked? Oh God, yep. Get back, get back, back, back, back. No, no. Not there. Not that figures. No, no. It’s not just the fingers. It’s just that’s a lot of glass. Don’t, don’t get scared. Don’t get scared. Just, just don’t hurt me. Just don’t let let go of the chair. Please, please, let go of the chair. Let go of my shirt. Please, please, let, let go. Let go of my shirt. Get go of my shirt. Oh, go, okay, all right, that’s fine. That’s fine. I don’t need that shirt. Go ahead and chew on that. Go ahead and show on that girl. You know, I don’t even need this home. You can have this. You can have my shirt. You can have my home. You can have it. You’ve been living outside for for years. I can live outside a bit. I’ll just need to, I just need to get past you and this place, this place, is yours. The only thing is, you’re between me and the door, and there’s a lot of broken glass around. So here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna get on this table, and I’m gonna do what we call a little bit of smooth movement across random terrain.

 

Speaker 11 

Ha, fine.

 

Speaker 9 

I’m fine. I don’t I don’t feel so good. Okay. Now Playing feel so good by Chuck Mangione.

 

Speaker 5 

That Chuck Mangione is one class act.

 

Speaker 9 

Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up. No, no, not you don’t shut up. Not. You, please. You.

 

Will Riley 

Ah, no, you know what? I didn’t like that bot anyway. Thank you for turning it off. You did a good thing. That was a good don’t. Don’t get so close. Don’t get so close. That was a good thing. Please, please, keep further back. No, no, away from the glass, not that far. Oh, god, oh, God, you’re a big girl, aren’t you? You’re a big girl. You’re a big girl. You