I’ve seen some reality shows, and I’ve done some production work. I am fully aware of the choices editors sometimes make (the “If it bleeds, it leads!” philosophy) to produce a show that will draw and hold an audience. In reality shows the situations and the dangers are contrived. Real, yes, but artificially imposed upon the actors/participants.
In Whale Wars all of the situations are contrived, in that all dangers could be avoided if everybody just went home. In that sense it is indeed just another reality show. But given the fact of an active campaign against whalers, the actual day to day dangers, like attempting to recover small boats while underway in a heavy sea, or allowing those small boats to become nearly lost to contact in an ice field at sunset, are not contrivances. They are actions directly attributable to the mission (that *save the whales *thingy) and the battle plan chosen by the officers and the Captain.
I submit that the battle plan, at least the parts of it I have seen carried out on the occasions I’ve watched the show, is amateurish at best and woefully inadequate at worst. Capricious actions seem to be the order of the day, and usually take precedence over careful planning.
Further, this haphazard (and I use the term deliberately) approach to their “campaign” is underscored and worsened by the abysmal level of skills development and training provided for both the crew and the officers. There is really an undeniable Keystone Cops flavor to the whole program. Having an officer in charge of the helm who could not use and did not believe the instruments before him does nothing to inspire confidence either up or down the chain of command.
So no, I do not excuse these stupidities as merely artifacts of the movie making process or of the editor’s knife. And I do not excuse them as somehow necessary to the mission. There are only two possibilities:
One, the top levels of management of Sea Shepherds are oblivious to the large and unnecessary dangers their cavalier approach to safety imposes upon their volunteer crews. I find such a level of abject stupidity difficult to imagine in people who appear otherwise competent, but I cannot deny the possibility. There is though another alternative, to wit:
Two, the top levels of management of Sea Shepherds are completely aware of the dangers, but they care less about the peril in which they place their ideologically passionate volunteers than they do about raising funds and keeping themselves and their mission firmly in the public eye. And so they actively accept and encourage potential dangers knowing full well the relationship between disaster and media attention. They court disaster in daily operations for its media value, and withholding or ignoring reasonable safety and competence training is a conscious choice made as a means toward that end. The volunteer crew are merely expendable dupes and pawns in a much bigger game with very high stakes.
If in fact, as in One above, the principals are merely ideologically driven idiots, that would be bad enough. It might even justify the entertainment value of the show in a point-and-laugh kind of way.
If instead the principals are ideologically driven cold and calculating people who deliberately place others in peril to further their own agenda, then they are simply craven bastards and we should stop watching their show, stop sending them money, and suggest that they should be the targets of legal action for depraved indifference (or something—IANAL).
