Rip It & Run! River Monsters...

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!