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Blue Planet II's footage of a shark devouring a whale carcass was the stuff of nightmares - episode 4 review

A blue shark in Blue Planet II - WARNING: Use of this copyright image is subject to the terms of use of BBC Pictures' Digital Picture
A blue shark in Blue Planet II - WARNING: Use of this copyright image is subject to the terms of use of BBC Pictures' Digital Picture

Heresy alert. After another instalment of Blue Planet II (BBC One) one’s jaw has to be surgically removed from the floor. But a little sceptical devil in you, probably dosed up on the desensitizing wonders of CGI, harbours a rebellious niggle: begging your pardon, Sir David, but surely that’s not really real?

Nature’s design solutions are sometimes so freakish as to seem fictitious – the kobudai which changes gender, that Technicolor cuttlefish, the barrel eye which looks upwards through its transparent skull. This week’s come-off-it segment featured myriad beautiful jellyfish dangling in the briny main, as if hanging around in their thousands for James Cameron to copyright their image for the Avatar sequel. 

The fourth episode of Blue Planet II threw up fewer outlandish implausibilities as it scoured the ocean wastes for hardy big-bodied familiars: big and bigger sharks, albatrosses with Stakhanovite parenting skills, a pod of sleeping sperm whales vertically a-dangling like buoyant prehistoric menhirs. 

And yet once more it discovered evidence for behaviour previously known only as a fisherman’s legend (see also episode one’s bird-hunting trevallies). The astonishing boiling-sea sequence starred spinner dolphins, so-called for their 720-degree corkscrew leaps. They bore down on a vast shoal of lantern fish, a group-thinking mass which moved like the sea’s mirror image of a starling murmuration. Despite their exotic plumage, mobula rays and sailfish hastening to the banquet were mere supporting players in this unimaginable drama. 

A plastic duck - Credit: BBC
A plastic duck Credit: BBC

As the how-we-got-these-shots segment explained, the sequence required saint-testing patience: El Niño put the whole showpiece on hold for 18 months. Unless my eyes deceived me, it seemed to have been filmed by deep-diving cameramen using only snorkels. Elsewhere, a camera, possibly not held by a human, got horribly close to a great white shark snacking greedily on a whale carcass, affording an unrivalled view of not just the infamous teeth but a bulging white gullet flush with flesh. You can pop it on the list of Blue Planet images that may trigger nightmares.

The episode’s only misstep was the rubber-duck sequence. It may have been filmed to illustrate the swirl of the oceans’ currents, but looked distractingly like one of those pretentious BBC Two idents. The programme had a much stronger point to make in this week’s wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee moment. A short-finned pilot whale dragged around the carcass of her calf, possibly poisoned by plastic-contaminated milk. “Prove the link!” deniers will doubtless holler. It’s time for the rest of us to quit our nastier plastic habits. The series may be called Blue Planet II, but once ocean populations are devastated by plastic, there will be no second act.