The BBC is well regarded for its wildlife documentaries. The filmmakers they employ at their Natural History Unit are known for both their creative talent and the careful consideration they bring to the field while shooting. With men like David Attenborough on staff, it’s no wonder that they manage to continually produce jaw-dropping, conscientious television like Blue Planet, Planet Earth, Life, and the recent Frozen Planet.
So, someone answer me this for me: Why does the BBC send Nigel Marven back in time to film wildlife documentaries when he is apparently an utter idiot? Why do they keep in their employ a man whose repeated failure to follow time travel etiquette endangers not his self, but the very structure of time? He’s unconscionable.
It’s really not hard to not damage time. As far as I am aware, I have never in my own scientific pursuits generated ANY time paradoxes. The vast majority of people on this Earth manage to be born, grow up, have children, and go back to dust without introducing even the slightest of knots in causality.
Even if you or I did find ourselves back in time, where such paradoxes are much easier to create, there are only three simple rules we’d have to bear in mind:
1. Don’t fuck with shit. That frog you antagonize could end up being your dad, and you’ll just be adding emotional baggage to your own subconscious.
2. Don’t leave shit behind. You’re just going to confuse future historians and scientists. Causality loops resulting in self-genesis make taxonomy impossible, and taxonomists inconsolable.
3. Don’t be an idiot and/or asshole. What are you doing? Put that down.
Simple. You don’t need to be a temporal engineer or some kind of high-falutin’ theoretical chronologist; BBC’s other filmmakers manage to do all this even when filming in the present, when you don’t have to worry about accidentally inventing frogs. But no, not Nigel Marven, he’s too busy getting chased by velociraptors to care about ethics.
This man has not even the slightest of respect towards either nature or our universe’s temporal mechanics. Let me share with you one of his outings I caught on television recently.
The program opened with Nigel spreading open his “time map” and telling the camera about his audacious plan to go back in time and film history’s “Seven Most Dangerous Seas.” An interesting idea, though its melodrama begs question: How exactly does one construct a list of “most dangerous seas” in the first place? Can one quantify danger? Perhaps there is a database somewhere with time-traveler death statistics. Maybe Mr. Marven’s producer took the time to calculate a specific lethality ratio for every time period and this is just the result. I sincerely doubt it.
However they bothered to decide upon it, Nigel and his crew used their “time map” to jump to the Ordovician period, 450 million years ago. This was before there was any life on land, and the only plant life at all was algae. As a result, the oxygen content of the atmosphere was low compared to modern times, requiring Mr. Marven to use an external air tank. Fair enough. But here’s the thing:
They apparently only brought that single air tank. Just that one. He and his entire crew shared it, passing it around like this was just another day at the oxygen bar Chez La Ordovician.
I don’t even want to think how they pulled this off over several days of filming, especially since it included an overnight stay in tents. One would think they’d be using some sort of face-mask while sleeping, which begs the question of why Nigel didn’t just wear one while filming so he wasn’t fishing for the mouth piece between every single fucking line of exposition.
It didn’t take long before Nigel got tired of filming the dead rocks, and went searching for some of the abundant marine life. Rather than taking careful precautions so as to film the wildlife candid in their natural habitat, Nigel instead waded barefoot into the water with a fish on a stick, waving it about wildly in an attempt to draw in something ‘cool’. Who has the time to wait on danger? Nature exists for terrible television presenters to mangle themselves some excitement!
Nigel’s ruse attracted a sea scorpion, which he immediately yanked out of the water. “You gotta be careful about those formidable pincers at the front,” Nigel murmured sagely as the eurypterid flailed frantically in his death grip. This kind of thing is apparently part of his time traveling routine. I’m not sure what he was trying to accomplish by this, or who would find this advice ever useful. He eventually let the poor sea scorpion and, to no one but Nigel’s surprise, it went immediately for his leg.
Was the sea scorpion seeking retribution, or was it just taking advantage of Nigel’s enticingly exposed extremities? Either way, I can’t feel anything but congratulatory for the triumphant arthropod. Yes, it did get exposed to foreign matter from hundreds of millions of years in the future, and it did release thousands of alien bacterium into the still young ocean; on the other hand: it struck a great blow for karmic balance. It did a good thing.
Nigel hobbled back to shore to brag about “adding another scar to the collection,” all smiles and laughs. Yeah, giggle about all that blood you’re spraying about like an incontinent dracula. Watch you be the point of origination for malaria. It wouldn’t be hard for a protist to eventually evolve into itself in a time paradox. One million people dying annually here in the present, all because you’re too busy getting your kicks fondling sea scorpions in the past to be careful. Laugh it up, time-Hitler.
The clown zoologist was undaunted by this disaster in the making, and soon had a new plan to attract even bigger and more dangerous sea-life. Oh fucking boy. He took a dead trilobite, placed it in a pointless bin, and then replaced one of its eyes with a camera to create a new observation tool. With this he’d be able to bait something bigger and then film it eating his camera! Can you figure out what is horribly wrong with this idea?
Nigel sadly kept on with his plan, and concluded that he’d inevitably have to go into the water with his camera. He armored himself to avoid getting torn apart by the sea scorpions, which had united into a mighty eurypterid swarm with the singular goal of Nigel’s death. Hatred brings us all together.
And so he pushed off in his rubber boat to molest more dangerous animals, the sea scorpion from earlier lurching after him. Nigel drove his boat out to open water, and dropped his trilobite in. After spending hours protecting his bait by beating sea scorpions with a stick, the bait and camera were suddenly eaten whole as planned. However: Nigel wasn’t paying attention, and missed the entire thing. Nigel dove in to see what took his camera. Risk be damned, along with literally everything else that will ever exist.
It was none other than an orthocone, a colossal shelled cephalopod. And you know what? Someone is going to find said orthocone’s shell encased in rock some day, and be very fucking confused when they discover the digital camera fossilized within. Paleontologists won’t know what the fuck. People are going to think there was some kind of ancient squid society or something, it’ll be just awful. We’ll all spend YEARS trying to figure out where the hell it came from. Thanks, Nigel Marvin. Thanks a lot.
The orthocone, like the gathering sea scorpions, saw Nigel as a threatening piece of mystery food. But Nigel put his experience at flailing shit about to good use, and used his flashlight to scare off the cephalopod. He learned that trick from Jurassic Park, you see.
Mr. Marven, with his characteristic respect towards nature, saw this as his chance to grab onto the fleeing orthocone’s shell and take it for a ride. Which he then did. Yee. Haw.
I mean, that’s what David Attenborough does when he’s waltzing about in Africa, right? “That endangered Rhino looks like it’d be awfully fun to have a go on, someone rope it up so we can see how fast it can get.” It’s certainly not unscientific and completely absurd, especially when the animal in question could murder the shit out of you.
Indeed, for Nigel Marvin, this was apparently a fine day’s work, and he returned to shore after his ride. There, the sea scorpions were amassing to lay their eggs. An evocative sight. These, after all, were some of life’s first steps on land, and though transient ones, still were momentous in the grand course of history. Nigel responded to the sight with as much tact as one would expect.
Ok, really: How can you be this awful at time traveling? Is he cocking about as much as possible deliberately? The whole “anything you do in the past can’t change the future, since it already happened” thing isn’t a challenge to attempt to prove otherwise.
It was at this point that the horrible realization hit me: we were only fifteen minutes into the program, and Nigel had already conceivably created DOZENS of temporal paradoxes. And there were still six more seas to visit.
Nigel left his boat behind as he “time map” jumped into the future, because fucking whatever. There are too many animals to antagonize for him to worry about leaving a boat in the past. The eurypterids could have it.
The next “Most Dangerous Sea” was 230 million years before the present, in the Triassic period. Reptiles abound, and primitive dinosaurs were mucking about. Nigel’s interest however was in marine reptiles, and as you can see, he took more of a detached approach towards locating them. He’s also apparently changed watches; maybe he left it in his boat back in the Ordovician. Just another anachronism that’ll be dug up eventually, I’m sure.
Through his ‘nocs, Nigel spotted a nothosaurus coming up for air. Take a large monitor lizard and have it pretend it’s a seal: that’s a nothosaurus. Nigel dived in, and immediately began menacing them with a cattle prod. Classy. The nothosaurus were more curious than threatening however, so he put the prod away in order to do some up-close investigation of the animals, all scientific-like.
THIS IS HOW SCIENCE WORKS!!! The nothosaurus managed to escape after a time, and the two reptiles fled the scene. Fortunately for Nigel Marvin and his film crew, a tanystorpheus accidentally stumbled into view as it made its merry way along the seafloor.
Tanystropheus was a reptile with an extremely long neck and a very short tail by comparison. It’s a bit ridiculous animal, really. Here was a chance for truly candid filming of an animal bizarre even by nature’s standards. No tricks needed, no baiting necessary, all they had to do was follow it around and film it. And what did Nigel Marvin, Time Traveling Zoologist, do?
He ripped its tail off. HE RIPPED ITS TAIL OFF. “This happened to me many times when I was catching lizards as a kid,” Nigel laughed, caring not for the fact that holy fuck you tore that poor reptile’s tail off. The hell is wrong with you!? I don’t care if it’s a defensive measure and that it can grow it back, YOU ARE A NATURALIST! YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO RIP ANIMAL’S BODYPARTS OFF! Especially if you’re in the past and that animal can have some major place in the ecosystem I mean god damn.
The massive cloud of blood that now surrounded Nigel attracted a cymbospondylus, an early ichthyosaur. It took the still wriggling tail, and began eying Nigel himself. The fact that this situation was entirely his fault apparently eluded Mr. Marvin, as he began his anxious attempts at repelling the now blood-crazed predator. It turns out that ancient reptiles have very little experience in being electrocuted though, so after a few jabs Nigel was able to flee back to his boat unharmed.
Now, if I were Nigel Marvin, I think my first thought after all this would be, Wow, I really fucked up back there. What the hell was that? Yes, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by how cool animals are, especially if you’re, say, hundreds of millions of years in the past. But these kinds of actions are not acceptable. It’s just fucking bonkers. And he wasn’t done! No, Nigel Marvin was utterly unfazed by all of this. Instead, he was already thinking about the next animal he planned to film further back in the past, and a conundrum he and his crew aimed to answer.
See, Nigel considers the Devonian period, 360 million years ago, to be the “Fifth Most Dangerous Sea,” largely due to the presence of Dunkleosteus. This is quite understandable: Dunkleosteus is a fish the size of a bus, is covered in thick bony armor, and has bear trap for a face. Nigel’s crew managed to spot one using an incredibly expensive diving camera, which they then played back on a shitty CRT TV in their sail boat.
Here’s the thing: their aim isn’t to film the Dunkleosteus because, hey, it’s a cool as hell predator that’s extinct, with nothing even remotely related to it still alive in the present. No, they filmed there because Nigel had bet his crew that Dunkleosteus could bite through the armored fish they’re using for bait even when it’s wrapped in chainmail. Yes. He’s going to try to get a magnificent piece of evolutionary history to eat a hunk of metal so he can win a fiver from his camera crew.
I kept waiting for Attenborough to walk onto screen and go “Gotcha!” revealing this to be an elaborate Goofus and Gallant skit before caning Marvin to death. But no, it kept happening. Nigel Marvin went into the water with his fish wrapped in chain mail. He used a stick to poke a shark with a cheese grater for a dorsal fin until it went away. And then his Dunkleosteus showed.
The episode ended with the Dunkleosteus charging Nigel’s dive cage, with a cheesy Will He Survive??? fade to black. Given that there are apparently two more episodes of this and four more dangerous seas left to visit, I’d assume so. Nigel Marvin may be an idiotic asshole, but he apparently is quite adept at surviving the ludicrously suicidal situations he gets himself in. Maybe this is where his talent lies.
Hell, maybe this is why they send Nigel Marvin back in time in the first place: because none of their other zoologists and camera-men would survive. Maybe Attenborough’s film crew would have been torn apart by sea scorpions in five seconds or something. I dunno, I suppose it’s possible. I am skeptical though, given that these animals are mostly nonplussed or confused by Nigel’s presence, right up until he starts ripping their limbs off.
You know, I could almost let it slide on the grounds that hey, they’re not looking to film these animals candid, they just want to show a more British and still alive Steve Irwin doing some time-traveling antics. But Steve Irwin, for his very hands-on style, showed endless more tact than this. He never endangered animals and always made sure that everything he did for teaching the audience. He also never went back in time. That’s the key bit, I think.
Nigel Marvin, you are basically Steve Irwin if he was a time-traveling zoosadist. You are the worst time traveler.