By Stephanie Krikorian
- Animal Planet
- Scene from “Whale Wars.”
If you define reality television by Snooki, Boston Rob and overweight people shedding half their weight, be clear: you have other options for real life TV. There is some seriously high drama, on the high seas, with human and whale lives at stake. You just need to know where to find it.
Animal Planet’s “Whale Wars” started season 4 tonight. The show is part documentary, part reality, and one giant part social activism vehicle. It’s based on the organization, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and its quest to save whales in the Antarctic waters.
At the helm of the project: a founding member of Greenpeace, Paul Watson. He was asked at the start of the show, as the fleet was getting under way to leave Hobart, Australia to stop the whale fisherman, “You can’t stop whaling, right?” His response: “You can’t stop slavery, that’s what they said once.”
This season is “Operation No Compromise.” The star of the show unveils the newest member of the three ship fleet, the Gojira, a state-of-the-art stealth machine that replaces the Ady Gil, which sunk after colliding with a whaling ship last season. It’s captained by Lockhart Maclean.
The older members of the fleet are ships called the Steve Irwin and the Bob Barker (yes, named after that Bob Barker, an animal activist, who is said to have donated money to the Sea Shepherd’s campaign.)
Bob Barker is an older ship — and the early show drama tonight surrounds it losing it’s umph. Captain Alex Cornelissen fights to keep it going during the journey. There’s a fuel leak, and the when the ship’s engineer goes to investigate in the bowels of the vessel, he gets a bump on the head, leaving him with a stream of blood dripping across his balding head. The ship is fine, and the blood is cleaned up.
Navigating icebergs of tremendous beauty, the Sea Shepherd team on the three ships, after 6 days of travel, reaches the Antarctic Ocean. They start searching for the few whaling trips they expect to be trolling those waters. There’s urgency because everyday they wait and look, they say whales are taken from the waters.
But it’s a needle in a haystack – the Sea Shepherd know the whalers are in the water somewhere, but they have no idea where exactly to find them. They focus on an area in which whales feed on shrimp. And they find one ship. After a week at sea, there’s a harpoon ship in their sites. And then the entire fleet, a finding that usually takes weeks to discover.
There are three types of ships in the fleet, which is apparently Japanese. There are security ships to guard the fleet and harpoon ships to kill the whales. There are also factory ships which process the catch and the key target for Sea Shepherd. If they can cut the factory ships off, the meat can’t be processed.
A helicopter is dispatched once they find the fleet to do some recon and the Sea Shepherd fleets get ready to approach in the water, but snow keeps the chopper grounded on the ship, leaving just eyeballs to catch the whaling ships.
The Bob Barker starts after a harpoon ship in the meantime, but the ship faces a major ice field, an area which caused the death of 22 people a few weeks earlier. There are bleeps to cover the cursing and stress as the ship cracks through the plates of ice. They want the harpoon ship to be on the move, and incapable of fishing for whales, but reaching it through a minefield of ice is a challenge.
Meanwhile, the Steve Irwin is searching for the big fish, the factory ship. No ice, but rough seas.
In addition to the new ship, there’s a projectile device that shoots onto the decks of the whaling ships. They call it the spud-gun and it shoots 200 meters. The crew gets it ready as the team closes in.
And so they leave us this episode with three whaling ships in site. A cliffhanger of sorts.
This is the team’s third campaign to stop whaling. The whalers have said they whale for science, though have not agreed to be taped for the show in past seasons, according to releases from the network.
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