Bear Grylls chills down in a snowy mountains edition of Man vs. Wild.
There have been well over 50 episodes in the Discovery Channel’s Man Vs. Wild series to date, but really there are only three.
There is the “jungle episode,” the “desert episode,” and the “snowy mountains episode.” Every episode is a slight variation on these three themes. “Land of Fire and Ice” finds our hero, Bear Grylls, stranded in the Icelandic wilderness. As you may have already guessed, this is a “snowy mountains episode’”
If you recall, a couple years ago Grylls and the show caught a lot of flack for being “fake.” Several years ago, reports surfaced that indicated that Bear wasn’t exactly roughing it in the wild. Instead he was staying in motels and arriving for pre-set-up “survival scenes.” Discovery Channel even admitted that “isolated elements” of the show were “not natural to the environment.” Many viewers were turned off because of these revelations. But not me.
I don’t watch Man Vs. Wild because I care about survivalism or learning to build a lean-to out of bamboo and banana leaves. I watch for two reasons and two reasons only: to see Bear Grylls eat gross shit and to hear him pronounce words in a hilarious accent. “Fire and Ice” was, unfortunately, pretty light on the nasty food element, but boy, oh boy, did it make up for it in the funny pronunciation department.
Some of the most memorable MvW scenes are like the best scenes from Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, only less pretentious and more disgusting. Here are some of the show’s culinary highlights: Bear eats a Zebra, raw. He simply uses his knife to peel back a flap of the animal’s skin and proceeds to gnaw on the rotting flesh. Bear munches on raw goat testicles. Enough said. Bear sucks on camel fat cut directly from the dead animal’s hump.
“Experience has taught me to be a little bit weary of Burbar delicacies,” Bear said of this tasty treat. Bear makes an elephant dung smoothie. He grabs a heaping helping, squishes it together, holds the glob above his heads and squeezes the juice into his mouth. Bear drinks his own urine. Not one of the better drinks I’ve ever had. No s—, Bear.
Like I stated, last night’s episode didn’t have any classic gross-out moments, but we were treated to a scene of Bear roasting earth worms over a fire and then chewing them up by the mouthful. “They’re warm and nutritious, but they suck when it comes to taste.” On a grossness scale of one to ten (one being the least gross and ten being Bear’s own urine), I would give the earthworms about a two.
At one point, I was convinced we were about to witness an “all-timer.” After Bear makes it out of the mountains and circumnavigates a winding river, he finds himself on an Icelandic beach. He conveniently stumbles across a beached whale which had clearly been dead quite a while. Bear couldn’t be more excited. “A huge, rotting carcass of a whale… it’s starting to putrefy!” It’s like Christmas morning in the Grylls’ household. I thought for sure he was going to chow down on a hunk of the smelly, discolored flesh. But, alas, he just walked right past it.
For those of you that aren’t familiar with the show, Bear Grylls is British, and therefore everything he says sounds funnier than it would if your typical American said it. The “snowy mountain episodes” are always the best for funny pronunciation bits due to the constant presence of glaciers and crevices. In the Bear Grylls lexicon, both words take on a hilariously French lilt. “Glacier” becomes “glassier” (as in, glassier), while “crevice” morphs into “crev-ass” (as in “crev” plus “ass”). I don’t know why this kills me every time, but it just does. And when it comes to reality television, you gotta find the positives wherever you can.
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.