David Attenborough's new series will haunt your dreams
In Namibia, an African social spider shares a nest with her 50 sisters. They hunt in perfect unison, advancing and pausing like an arachnid version of granny's footsteps. That is skin-crawling enough, but much worse is to come.
This is a series about parenthood, you see, and the mother spider who has raised her 30 spiderlings makes the ultimate sacrifice to help them grow: exhausted from the strain of feeding her young, she mimics the vibrations of a distressed prey insect. They descend en masse and eat her. Her cousins do the same – that's 1,000 spiderlings turning on their mothers and aunts, and devouring them. These scenes come with crunchy sound effects and horror film music.
There's probably a lesson in here somewhere about Gen Z destroying the generation that gave them everything, but let's move on. The rest of the episode is cuter. A Western lowland gorilla cradling an adorable newborn baby. Lion cubs in the Kalahari Desert. Some fluffy owl chicks do their best to fend off a roadrunner (as a child raised on Looney Tunes, I'm not sure I ever gave thought to the fact that roadrunners are real birds, so it was interesting to see one).
Attenborough even throws in some poo jokes as the camera focuses on a hippo's behind in a river in Tanzania. Kids will love this bit. If you've not seen it yet, perhaps switch off the programme after this point, before you get to the spider matricide. Don't want to give the children ideas.
Those scenes aside, there is nothing here we haven't seen before – or that's how it feels, anyway. We've been spoilt over the years by top-quality nature programming. It has the obligatory 'how we made it' section at the end, once a novelty but now standard.
And something else we've experienced before: while the programme tells us that footage of a female boxer crab is shot on an Indonesian reef, a tiny note online reveals that it was partly shot in a 'specialist filming tank', as were other underwater scenes from later episodes. The BBC says there are good reasons for this – the fragility of the reef, and the challenges of filming such tiny creatures – but it's still not giving viewers the full picture.
The series is mostly family fare, and more anthropomorphised than the landmark shows that remain Attenborough's high-water mark. Scenes of an owl inspecting a burrow are set to jaunty music and likened to humans checking out a new property. A female boxer crab is referred to as 'a supermum'.
At 99, Attenborough's work is in providing narration rather than trekking around the world to see the animals in the wild. But there is no edge of frailty to his voice. In fact, he sounds decades younger than his age. Now that AI can clone and mimic how a person sounds, it wouldn't surprise me if someone does that with Attenborough after he's gone; generating his tones to give future wildlife documentaries a touch of class.
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