Alone Season 2

[Elle]

After a long dry spell wherein there was no television program whatsoever that I cared to watch, one of my favorite shows is finally back. Alone is on the History Channel but if you don't have the History Channel under normal circumstances and you do have a Roku box you can pay to order the entire season. This is not something I would normally ever do but that is how much I like this show. The show would be a lot better to me if they would focus Less on making it supposedly good television or entertainment and more on giving us instructions about exactly what the people are doing in their process of establishing a life on the island. However there is no denying that when they do try for entertainment they occasionally have some truly hilarious moments. I have a few favorites from among the ones who are left so I probably shouldn't talk about that. If you have never watched this show you should consider watching it because it is completely awesome. They dropped 10 different people down in different parts of Vancouver Island all by themselves and whoever can stay there the longest without deciding to leave wins half a million dollars. I find that the monetary prize doesn't necessarily determine much about who stays and who goes. The people who engage in this experiment are unique enough that I'm not sure the money motivates them all in the same way that it would motivate most people. On the other hand some of them are clearly quite motivated by it and so that makes for an interesting Dimension too. The best part of the show involves figuring out the unique techniques that they used to stay alive and provide shelter and food for themselves. And it's fascinating just see the unique choices that each person makes. Something about the human personality comes out in a vivid and enlightening form when these people film themselves all by themselves under this condition of trying to survive. This time we're letting our kids watch some of it though there are a lot of bleeped out moments and some pretty intense scenes that can be scary. For instance many of the residents encounter Bears or other dangerous wildlife. Others become injured in ways that can be a little scary for the novice viewer. And in general you will sometimes witness people having intense emotional experiences as they spend time alone in their own minds. One of my favorite contestants on this year show left due to such an experience. Basically this person had an encounter which prompted a negative psychological experience and that is what caused the contestant to go home. During the first season my husband and I had two favorite contestants from the get-go. One was our favorite just because he was so freaking awesome and hilarious and he was from our hometown in Nebraska. The other was our favorite because it was obvious from the get-go he was going to win and he was almost as hilarious as the other guy. This season I have another favorite I would give a great chance of winning but I guess I shouldn't say who it is since we haven't gotten very far into the season and some of you might start watching. This time there are three or four people I would expect to last a really long time. They seem to have gotten off to a really good start with nice weather in a way that the earlier contestants did not enjoy. But the bad wind storms and rain storms are on the way soon and it will be interesting to see how some of the folks who have fared well so far will endure if anything goes wrong with their systems of fishing or shelter under the worst weather conditions.

I find the survival aspect of the show fascinating because these are skills that I lack and would probably only understand a part of how to accomplish. So in that way I feel like I learned a lot just from watching the show. And it tells me what things I would like to learn that I don't presently know. However the emotional aspect of the show is far more fascinating to me because I find it mysterious to watch the various current surface in these folks and make it impossible for them to endure the challenges they're facing and the solitude. At one point when I was about 19 i spent 2 weeks with almost no contact with other humans whatsoever and no way of gaining such contact without taking a very long walk. I found this experience extremely instructive because you really do get to know yourself in a way that you have never been able to before. There were other periods when I spent a longer time mostly alone but it was punctuated by sporadic contact with other humans and it would have been extremely easy for me to hang out with people if I had wanted to, so that was a rather different sort of experience. A number of religious traditions make some provision for the deeper kind of solitude experience and I think there's a good reason for that. It's something that everyone should be able to do at least for a short period. The idea of combining this experience with the tremendous stress the person is placed under while trying to survive on their own in an extremely challenging environment is especially interesting.

[Elle]

Yep. They're down to the last five and this show is great. Pleased to see my favorites are still there. Every one of these people is amazing, though some more than others.

[Elle]

Just realized there are people making winner predictions about the show. Wow are they all wrong. Personally I suspect Ron and I did this in season 1 and now season 2 so successfully just because we get how the show telegraphs things. Like if we are spending many minutes with someone early on, and we know they encounter a bad animal at night, you can kiss them goodbye. People we get to know gradually, people who have lots of food sources - they last.

[Elle]

Seriously people, I have no idea why you aren't all watching this show and absolutely SEIZING over it. I am just blown away by what happened with the food situations today. The food - like, was this NEW? Could they have been doing this all along?

[mimekiller]

My mom is always going on about this show and for the life of me I just don't get it.

[Elle]

It's so good. I grant that it could be a lot better - they film things I wouldn't waste the footage on and don't film things I would want to see or know. Or I should say, the things I want to see often don't make it into the final cut. I also have infinite unanswered questions about it. But, still, it's so good.

[Elle]

Tonight is the season finale and I don't have cable TV and don't know how quickly it will appear on my service. I'm so curious what happens!!!! I was so sad last episode when one of my favorites left. Spoilers: she has MS that apparently was in remission, if that's a thing, and yet she managed to tackle this challenge anyway and lasted for SO long!!! I really thought if she had no bear attacks she might stick it out the whole time, wow. She was terrific and I realized I live surrounded by edible plants not of my own garden. We have really puzzled over how they could manage to contain fish for a period of days without simply making a lure for bears, since that would have helped her enormously. Anyway, so excited to see what happens in two hour episode!!!

[Elle]

Season 3 starts in about a month.

I just wait here patiently. Someday.

[Phoebe]

I prayed fervently that a certain person be in the cast, but it didn't happen. There's a Season four though...

The scenery is outstanding and i have two favorites, M and F. Two of the guys are super annoying though!

[Phoebe]

Season 3 is great because they're in a new place and it's clearly easier to get by there, so more people are lasting longer and different kinds of challenges are sending people home (or threatening to). I won't tell you where I am in the season so as to prevent spoilers, but all of the women are still here and I honestly cannot tell you which one of them I love more. The weird hippie one says all kinds of weird hippie things but she is amazing and badass, and her weird hippie things are actually extremely helpful to her success. If other people had been doing some of the things she's doing with her awesome little house and creature comforts and medicines, they'd probably be faring much better psychologically and physically. We haven't seen quite as much of the other two women, and I don't know if that's because they're quieter and less dramatic on camera or because they're around for the long haul and we're going to see more of them later (which is often how it works, in terms of showing us what people are up to).

Anyway, I love this show so much and the people on it are all unique characters. I expect that's what makes them interested in and good at doing this, because they're unique sorts of people with different ways of thinking. It's fascinating to watch how they face their particular challenges, or how they go about doing things that all of them are doing (like fishing, building a shelter, etc.). One person might be successful while another one is not due to very subtle differences in how they go about it.

This season we also finally see people smoking fish, which is something I kind of expected from day one on season one, as soon as someone caught a fish, but I think those people in the first two seasons caught few enough fish that they just had to eat them whenever they had them. In season 2 the woman who had a surplus of fish also had a surplus of bears, so it probably wasn't feasible for her to set up a fish-smoking shop anywhere. In Season 3 they have pumas, in theory, but we're not seeing much of that, so the fish smoking can proceed.

[Phoebe]

There is a new episode and there are five people left and I honestly could not tell you which one of them I like more. I want them all to win. They are all so incredibly awesome. That is really the best thing about this show - most of the people are really, really awesome and you wish you could hang out with them for an hour and just pick their brains about any topic. You think it's a show about survival skills or whatever but really it turns out to be about human psychology and values and life itself. I cannot say enough good about this crazy show.

[Phoebe]

I really love this show, seriously y'all, I cannot believe nobody else watches it. You can watch it via Amazon Prime if you have that and don't have cable with History channel. They are down to three people and the three are absolutely my favorites, so that is great. They should just have a show with these three people not when they're trying to survive in a competition but just living out in the wilderness somewhere and discussing what they do and how they do it. I get annoyed trying to read discussion of the show online because it's very focused on who's going to win and body fat and things like that. I really do not see the show as being about the competition to win, but as being about how people exist self-sufficiently, what they value in life, and how they deal with adversity. It's about human psychology and a certain kind of really unique, really amazing and interesting person. The contest part of it is really not the interesting part. Anyway... all of us love it here and every person piles into the bed in darkness as soon as the new episode comes out each week and we watch it together and discuss. We like being outdoors and hiking and our awareness and ability compared to these people is so low as to be in the negative numbers.

[Phoebe]

OK, watched the end and it was amazing. Absolutely love the person who won and the ones who didn't - such amazing people. These people! The set-up making the show happen is a contest, but ultimately that is not what the show is about. Rather, it's a means of taking a close look at truly unique, self-reliant, powerful individuals, who have in common that they like being out on their own in the wild. You could have some other show, some other mechanism for putting them in this situation and observing it closely, but the difficulties created by this particular set-up reveal fascinating things. You could give them other kinds of difficulties, maybe - I would like that better, if they weren't having to compete for a particular prize. My frustration with the show is that I want THEM (the contestants) to show me the parts THEY want to show about how they manage to live. It should be something like: go out here and survive on your own for 50 days, film your story, and if you make it that long you get some reward at the end. No contest with the others. And then instead of presenting drama related to "who stays longer" they could simply show us HOW each person comes up with unique solutions and goes about the daily task of living. This person is fishing with this kind of bait; this person makes a urinal, this one makes a sauna, this one is hunting berries, this one is carving spoons. That's the part I want to see.

[Phoebe]

So we are all sitting here watching Alone Season 4. Chloe has some very matter of fact observations about, in her phrase, the "Weak Links", lol! I liked the abstract concept of having pairs of people finding each other in the wilderness but I don't like most of the actual people this season or the things they're showing. Hrmm. There's one old dude I like, Pete, but his kid annoys us so much. The woman is a bad ass for reasons I won't spoil here; I wouldn't be sleeping much after that. But what can ya do? Still not really feeling it though - I don't know why. This season is the worst so far.

We also cannot understand why the base camp people aren't all making the largest bonfires they can to send, like, smoke signals to partner. I know it's hard to find wood that burns, but come on. Am I missing something?

I just want to see a bunch of interesting people go out and do their wilderness things and narrate as they go, like an educational video. Dang it perhaps this exists on YouTube somewhere and I only need to look harder.