The consequences for everything are both intense and meaningless. He probably would’ve died from hypothermia after falling through the ice the first time around, but this is underpants-torch-mine land, not reality. But what do I know? She was very cute, and Bear Grylls saved her eventually. Grylls made it across the lake, and then rappelled down an icy cliff, and was finally greeted by a giant, cheerful, whuffing dog who, to my eye, did not look like she’d been abandoned in a frosty wilderness for 36 hours. I replayed (rewatched?) it again, and this time I selected the army-crawl option. A “replay episode” option popped onto the screen. “You’ve learned a valuable lesson, but we can never give up,” he said. Then the episode ended, and Grylls’s strangely upbeat voice-over arrived. Grylls called for a helicopter to lift him out. He did not complete his mission, which was to rescue an adorable Saint Bernard named Dana who’d gotten lost in the midst of a search-and-rescue effort. “Now I’m in danger of total body shutdown,” he said, matter-of-factly, after hauling his sopping, steaming body out of the icy abyss. When I chose incorrectly, he fell through the ice and then lay there, partly draped over the frozen lip of the ice sheet, explaining how bad this was. When faced with an expanse of ice over a frozen lake, Grylls asked me (the viewer/mouse-clicker) whether he should walk across it or army-crawl the whole way.
In some moments things do look quite dire. The sense of strangeness, the weird discombobulation of somehow finding yourself in a pitch-black mine carrying a badly designed underwear torch, comes from the slippery, shifting relationship between Grylls’s predicaments and watching someone in actual peril. You select grappling hook or slingshot, saw grass or mangrove patch, and Grylls proceeds as directed, often accompanied by a resigned, “Ouf, this will be tough going,” or, “I don’t know, those rocks look pretty slick.” And then, obligingly, he does whatever it is. “ You decide,” he says, over and over, while asking viewers (participants?) to select between options like scaling a cliff or scrambling along the coastline, crossing a gorge on a log or swinging across on a vine, building an igloo or sleeping under a rock overhang, eating bugs or eating a mushroom.
#Best man vs wild episode series
Grylls spends most of the series speaking directly to the camera. On the heels of the Black Mirror installment Bandersnatch, it is the next major release in Netflix’s branch of programming that asks viewers (players?) to participate in the story. The other, more important twist is that You vs. One is that in several of the episodes, Grylls is tasked with some mission, some additional framework to keep him bushwhacking and vine-swinging moving toward an ostensible goal. Wild guy, the adventure survivalist, the drinker of his own piss - has once again been dropped in unpleasant wildernesses and left to survive for some period of time. If no sensible cause got you here, who’s to say what the effect of your actions might be now? How much of this could possibly be real? How much of it is a fantasy? What happens when your underwear torch goes out?! That dizzying surreality makes you feel disconnected from the usual order of cause and effect.
Do you make your next decision based on common sense? Do you chuck it all, lean into the absurdity, and just do whatever seems silliest? It’s unlikely that real life could ever have put you in this situation, trapped as you are in the ever-darkening mine, the guttering light from your cotton underpants torch slowly dimming, the distant sound of wind howling past the mine’s entrance. It’s such a bafflingly absurd place to find oneself. It’s hard to say how you came to be in this position, and it’s even harder to know what the consequences might be now. Wild feels a little like being stuck in an abandoned mine with a poorly lit torch made from your own underwear.
Watching the new Netflix interactive reality show You vs.
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