A Final Adventure for the Consummate Animal Hunter

Probably no creature in the history of the animal kingdom ever needed the image-enhancing public relations services of, say, a Hill & Knowlton, as much as the stingray that attacked and killed Steve Irwin off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia in September. Of all the naturalists to choose to make a victim! Mr. Irwin, of course, had gained celebrity engaging with unwieldy and lethal reptiles as if they were, on a scale of fearsomeness, roughly equivalent to a table of society matrons at tea.

Skip to next paragraph

Animal Planet
Steve Irwin, holding a stonefish, in his last show, “Ocean’s Deadliest.”

Readers’ Opinions
Forum: Television
For the 10 years before he died, he was the host of “The Crocodile Hunter” on Animal Planet and various other television specials. When Mr. Irwin was killed, the world mourned him — children, conservationists, Russell Crowe — in an outpouring that gave him the posthumous stature of a great revolutionary or a member of the House of Windsor.

Mr. Irwin’s appeal — his goofy, uncontained alacrity, the aperçus delivered in commoner’s twang — is nowhere obscured on “Ocean’s Deadliest,” to be shown tomorrow evening on Animal Planet, his last television project, and one for which he was gathering film in Queensland when he lost his life.

What could have wound up an entirely macabre enterprise amounts to another chapter of extravagant tribute instead. The special has as its host Philippe Cousteau, grandson of Jacques Cousteau, whose narration reminds the viewer over and over how “honored” he is to be watching Mr. Irwin at work.

“I’ve been around marine scientists my entire life,” Mr. Cousteau says, presumably endangering any inheritance yet to come to him, “but I’ve never seen such rapport between a human and a creature of the sea.”

Mr. Cousteau follows Mr. Irwin about as he takes his dive boat, the Croc I, to go searching for great white sharks, stonefish (apparently responsible for more than 50,000 injuries to humans annually), saltwater crocodile (able to hold hostage animals the size of wild boars) and other pernicious inhabitants of the sea. Nowhere is Mr. Irwin shown imperiled beyond the point of his usual routine.

The mission is noble in purpose too, as Mr. Cousteau informs, because along the way Mr. Irwin is joined by scientists who will collect venom from the sea snakes he and his team catch and will use it to make “antivenom.” The hazards involved in all this are apparently considerable.

“This is very dangerous business,” Mr. Cousteau says gravely, “but so vital it’s worth the risk.” (Though not a scourge of the Northeastern beach holiday, sea-snake bites are often fatal and plague much of the world.)

Mr. Irwin was not one to intone or take such matters so seriously himself. Here he is, in fact, on the subject of the sea snake: “We are so lucky, we are so honored to have the king of all sea snakes cruising around right next to our boat so as we can get a good look at him,” he says from the Croc I in his trademark safari shorts.

“Sea snakes are a beautiful animal,” he goes on, lingering over the adjective as if he were using it in regard to a pretty 20-year-old. “Lots of people think they’re evil, ugly serpents living down in the water wanting to kill people. That’s not true at all.”

Mr. Irwin remained, above all, a populist, a promoter of animals that were as graceless and inelegant in appearance as they were terrifying in their intentions. He liked the mess and disorder of the natural world, making the business of the adventurer, still stuck in connotations of a benighted aristocracy, seem a workingman’s game. There was nothing hush or highborn in his observations. The standard nature documentary, reliant as it often was on a disembodied voice offered at the volume of someone speaking in a reading room at Oxford, seemed even fustier and more exclusionary through Mr. Irwin’s reimagining.

If the old-school style, a staple of the era that preceded cheap travel, reminded viewers that the world beyond their middle class living rooms was vast but largely inaccessible to them, Mr. Irwin understood that the new age demanded a more intimate and inherently less condescending posture. The world of the box jellyfish is a pretty frightening one, but in many cases, it’s just a plane ride away.

OCEAN’S DEADLIEST

Animal Planet, tomorrow night at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.

Jason Carey and John Stainton, executive producers. A production of Best Picture Show for Discovery Communications.