A sequence of fish leaping from the Indian Ocean to snatch fledgling terns from the air is edited with ideal savagery, a thrilling lack of sentimentality: a splashy half-dozen feather-crushing strikes. The reefs host some of the best battles, and the audience comes here, in part, looking for action. Less dramatic than the “Blue Planet” series, it is analytic and threaded with interviews with submersible pilots, research scientists, and the like.) What does he see in reefs? “The density of the animals on tropical reefs makes competition inevitable and extreme,” he says. Attenborough loves a good reef, marvelling at them as “marine cities.” (In fact, a miniseries called “David Attenborough’s Great Barrier Reef” arrives on the Smithsonian Channel this week. The second vignette visits the Great Barrier Reef. It is a sound like the screech of nails on a blackboard as if released with a whistling wet flatulence. But, because the show’s sound is as impressive as all the other technical aspects, we hear the dolphins’ vocalization with a horrifying new clarity. We descend alongside a dolphin family to a coral reef in the Red Sea to “properly appreciate their true character,” as Attenborough puts it, by watching a calf learn to brush against fronds that secrete an antibacterial mucus. The first vignette develops from crowd-pleasing footage of bottlenose dolphins surfing gnarly South African waves, the slick cinematography pumped up by deft editing. I counted ten vignettes in the first hour of the series, and a roughly equivalent number of Land Rover ad plugs, followed by a brisk behind-the-scenes coda and a tease of a coming installment. In the form of the show, classical values prevail throughout, so that it seems worth the time to scan the metre when Attenborough says something like, “As they travel across the sea, storm-driven winds create huge swells.” Segments begin in the tropical waters and travel to seasonal seas, and venture up toward the poles. The narrative line of the episode flows with the Gulf Stream. “The ocean, seemingly limitless, invokes in us a sense of awe and wonder and also sometimes fear,” he begins. We see Attenborough from above, on the deck, hale in his blue linen shirt. The boat shoots through waves graced by dolphins. “One Ocean” begins with an image of the sun’s reflection streaked across water cut by the purposeful prow of a ship BBC nature shows have a way of ritually orienting the viewer to bow to the sun. You can feast your eyes on a sperm whale, the great leviathan itself, as cow sharks gnash at its carcass.
The moments are psychedelic and spiritual, and “Blue Planet II” collects them into a saga pulsing with sea serpents, multi-armed beasts, protean freaks, photogenic anemones, legends of kelp forests, and cnidarians named for Gorgons. Creatures beyond imagining, such as these, enrich the imagination when encountered. When the cuttlefish needs to subdue a crab to eat, its pigment flickers hypnotically, to stupefy its prey. Attenborough promises introductions to “creatures beyond our imagination.” Behold, for instance, the broadclub cuttlefish. “Blue Planet II” sincerely spins itself as not just family friendly, not simply educational, but even uplifting. viewers were encouraged to social-mediate their viewing experience by typing #GatherTogether, a hashtag too earnest to mock. population will never watch the same nature documentary at the same time unless PBS hacks a network feed to replace a Super Bowl postgame show. That’s pretty good, considering the local lack of a sense of event and the relative unpopularity of popular science. In January, when “One Ocean” came to these shores-via BBC America, with a simulcast extending to its corporate-sibling cable channels-about three million Americans watched.