![]() At least it's spirit lives on in the Blue Planet II. The real one, however, now resides broken and sore in a hangar at Wallsend in Newcastle after being trashed by a Hokusai inspired ‘Great Wave off Kanagawa’ earlier this year on its way back to Tokyo from the deepest place in the world. There is a great deal of personal satisfaction seeing something I designed and built myself that I have used so much in recent years being featured in this type of film. Speaking of that lander –the ‘hadal-Lander’ – it also got featured in this episode, or a least a full-size replica of it was seen descending into the Mariana Trench. The Hadal Snailfish going about their daily business at 7200 metres deep. It was also great to hear Attenborough utter the name ‘Ethereal snailfish’ in a landmark documentary as it is a nickname coined by my colleagues after much discussion in the days following the discovery. I took special pleasure in reminiscing about the time I was sitting somewhere over the Mariana Trench in 2014 and the technician behind me was watching back some footage from that mornings lander deployment and tapped me on the shoulder and said “Hey Al, what’s that?” to which I replied “that my friend is now officially the deepest fish ever seen alive” (until we filmed it even deeper two days later). ![]() It was also fantastic to see the hadal zone (depths exceeding 6000m) included alongside the usual mainstream deep-sea topics. High Definition footage of the methane escaping from the seafloor to the unrestrained violence of underwater volcanism is always fascinating, and then tied together with the hydrothermal vents and their endemic fauna is a necessary must in a film like this. The geological aspect of the episode was also very impressive. Although deep-sea biology has progressed massively, even since Blue Planet I, it is still notoriously difficult to really capture the essence of a lot of these animals alive and it takes a landmark documentary like this to make that happen. Watching the Synaphobranchid convulsing with toxic shock having found itself too close to the brine pool was fascinating, and marvelling at the small crustacean ‘born’ into a sponge prison was an incredible piece of filmmaking. The true value of this episode is simply bringing these organisms to life, in particular the myctophids and the cock-eyed squid amongst others. It was also great to see Osedax getting a mention, although admittedly under their pseudonym ‘zombie worms’. The advances made in underwater lowlight filming made the bioluminescence all the more spectacular, and one would have to be numb to not find themselves in awe when watching six-gilled sharks feast on a dead whale carcass. It is a beautiful work of art, visually stunning, and also of course very entertaining which ultimately is what is was made for. The second instalment of the BBCs long-awaited Blue Planet II series, The Deep, is a true spectacle, of course it is, it was always going to be.
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