There is no question the photography here is excellent and the dedication to the making of this documentary to be admired but for my wife and myself there were two aspects of this that just grated and really spoiled it.
Firstly, in the 1st and 4th episodes filmed in the Antarctic and showing the teamwork involved in "wave washing" penguins and seals that were seeking refuge on iceflows, Sir David repeatedly and consistently referred to the animals as "killer whales".
They are NOT killer whales. That is an unfortunate nickname that went out of use so many years ago that this is the first time I've heard anybody refer to them as such in at least a decade if not longer. They are Orca.
Killer whales would be fine as an alternative if for one fact: they are NOT members of the whale family fore crying out loud and it is just wrong to refer to them that way.
Orcas are members of the oceanic dolphin family. Yes, the name is arrived from the latin for "whale" but that was an error in naming them dating back to the 19th century. It's unfortunate, but it was forgivable back then for thinking they are whales. We know better now and should correct the mistake by not referring to them as whales as an English name for them.
I read recently that the nickname originally given to them was not even "killer whales"; it was "whale killers" because Orca has been observed to kill whales. Somehow the name got reversed and it stuck.
"Orca" is the correct and widely accepted name so use it.
Unfathomable that Sir David has agreed to use the term "killer whale" in his narration because he was must surely know it is wrong. In fact, by coincidence I happened to see another Attenborough documentary this week in which he actually did refer to them several times as "Orca". So why "killer whale" here which only serves to perpetuate the error that these are whales?
Second mistake came in the fourth episode and was more of a misleading statement. In the section on the Antarctic interior he was talking about the active volcanos in the interior mountain ranges. He then showed video of Mt. Erebus and the Erebus lava lake in the crater and used it as an example. Erebus is NOT on the mainland of Antarctica but on an offshore Island near the mainland but in the Ross Sea. Again, the information was just wrong. Why suggest that Erebus is an interior volcano when it isn't?
Problem is that when one catches out narration having two errors like the above, you start to wonder what else they have got wrong. What other factual errors were there that we didn't catch?
I'd love to have given this series a 10 for the visuals alone but two points docked for the two script errors that I caught.
