For
those who thought that this post was about something else, I apologise up
front. In fact, it is a review of
this television show (in that I pick it to pieces) but I’m not going to focus
on any particular season or episode; rather, I want to demonstrate how this
show is a great and handy springboard into writing your own scenarios for “Call of Cthulhu” (or any other
horror-based roleplaying game).
For
those who’ve never seen this show, it’s about a fellow named Jeremy Wade (an
aptonym if ever there was one) who travels the world trying to find the
biggest, rowliest river-dwelling critters and catch them. Then put them back.
By training, Wade is a zoologist, specialising in fish, and by inclination he
is a fisherman of over 40 years experience. His hobby has taken him around the
world and back again in search of fishing thrills.
Some
of the earlier episodes of this program involve Wade heading out into the
wilderness in search of certain fish of wide renown, those game fish which
anglers from all over the world are keen to stuff and mount upon the walls of
their dens. These early shows set the tone of Wade’s approach but they are nowhere
near as interesting as the later episodes, which unroll more like mysteries
than bold adventures.
A
feature of every program is Jeremy Wade chatting with the local people,
especially the fisher-folk. Wade himself is a tall Briton, with rather scowly good
looks, somewhere in his late 50s or early 60s. Everywhere he goes he looks like
a finny specimen out of its element, chatting with villagers along the Amazon,
talking with farmers in Suriname, even sauntering along a canal in Miami. He
always looks like he doesn’t belong but this never sets him apart from those
with whom he consorts. A fluent speaker of Spanish, and with a genuine liking
for others who fish to survive or for sport, he always makes a connexion with
those he encounters.
To
be frank, the show strives for drama, and if you’ve ever been fishing, you’ll
know that it’s a lot of sitting around with very little happening. To keep the
viewers’ attention, the show heavily features reconstructions of fish-related human
deaths and woundings, and Wade talks up the horrible realities of being eaten
alive, or crushed, or drowned, with ponderously ominous tones. It’s all a
little arch and overly-cooked, but it doesn’t fail to deliver on the monsters.
By
the end of every episode, Wade has hooked and netted, weighed and measured, and
then released some evil-looking critter that’s as often amazing for its sheer
size as it is for its arsenal of teeth, jaws, spikes, thrashing tail, or scaly
armour. And it goes back into the river. There is one episode where this doesn’t happen: after catching the
Congolese Goliath Tiger Fish, Wade makes a present of the overly-toothy beastie
to the local tribe. There is an unsettling sense, as the credits roll, that if
he hadn’t handed over the fish, he
and his film crew would have seen the business end of several machetes. The
Congo has its own rules about these things...
Every
so often, Wade encounters the local superstitions and beliefs concerning these
monsters, generated by the people who have to live alongside them. To his
credit, he never pooh-poohs these spiritual concerns, slapping on the holy oil
given to him by the woman whose son was eaten by a huge catfish, or watching
intently as the sadhu prays to Kali
to beg her to make the enormous child-eating fish go away. Of course, these
overtones of the supernatural certainly help the writers and producers to beef
up the levels of drama.
Sometimes
the histrionics get a little extreme. The episode where Jeremy steps into a
pool of piranhas, after throwing in a bucket of blood, is somewhat alarming. So
too, is the one where he goes diving in the Amazon to find a 27-foot long
anaconda to play with. He doesn’t seem to have a death wish, but occasionally
he does do something incredibly risky to prove a point.
So,
why is this a good show for “Call of
Cthulhu” players to watch? Well, for starters, it’s worthwhile watching how
each episode is structured, especially the ones where Jeremy is researching a
mysterious death and doesn’t really know who the culprit is (the anaconda
episode is an especially good one to look at). The start of the episode is all
about research: Wade hits the books and finds documentary evidence of the
critters in action – eyewitness accounts, newspaper articles, wildlife census
data. Then he heads out to the area in question and starts talking to the
locals: in almost every show, he goes to the local fish market and talks to the
workers there about their catches, their views on local matters and whether
they’ve ever heard of a local something big enough take a man off a boat, or a jetty,
or a riverbank. Then, loaded with gossip, he finds a local guide willing to
carry him out day-after-day in their motor-boat while he dangles nasty gobbets
of dead fish in the water on the end of a string. It’s all a twisty
investigation with a monster at the end of it. Sound familiar?
Investigators
in “Call of Cthulhu” don’t spend time
in fish markets, dragging fish fillets out of buckets of ice; but they do trawl the locales where the
information pertinent to their investigation is most likely to be found: bars,
hotels, government offices. Also, they hit the library - although rarely to
flip through books on fish biology. One of the really difficult things about
writing a horror scenario is constructing a line of investigation, points of
information leading to other points: in this show, you can see it happen and
also see how it happens. It’s a
revelation.
This
is not to say, of course, that this is a horror show, or any kind of fiction.
It’s a reality program all about a guy who travels the world fishing for very
large freshwater creatures with a rod and reel. For me, I enjoy the big fish at
the end of the hunt (especially the bit when the beastie goes back into the
water) although the striving for drama and excitement do tend to make me roll
my eyes occasionally. There are some very strange monsters out there in the
world and, to be honest, I’ve already written one or two scenarios from the
material that this show presents: giving your players a break from tracking
Cthulhu by going on the trail of a missing friend taken by a huge catfish in
Spain, or a saltwater shark that somehow seems able to swim in freshwater
rivers, might be a nice holiday for them!
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