Television Review: Deadliest Warrior

Since so far I've only interviewed movies, and things I liked I decided to almost go with the opposite here (although I guess that would really mean a book review, but I have a whole plate full of those to work on over the weekend). So we're going to go with what has turned out to be one of the most popular series of last season, and I'm going to ask why, point out some horrible flaws (as well as some good points), and give my overall impression.

Deadliest Warrior is a show where a small team of specialists take two opposing warriors from history that never had a chance to fight one another and compare them, supposedly deciding who would win in a real battle. The fact that the specialists are a medical doctor with experience in trauma service (i.e. he was an ER doctor), a martial arts specialist and biometric technician, and least, but not least, a computer programmer lend some credibility to the task at hand. Each episode also has two specialists representing each side, normally termed a "weapons specialist" and a "combat specialist" respectively.

Last weekend, due to the series premier this last Tuesday, I was afforded the opportunity to watch a great many hours of this show in a row, and I did see some progression (which I'll talk about later) but overall the theme seemed the same. The show does not, in fact, match warrior, but instead their weapons and armor. This creates an artificial result and unfortunately due to the current faith in the media I fear that a great majority of viewers consider these results not only to be accurate but encompassing.

Of course my first complaint is that the fights are one on one, this simply happens to rarely in the real world for me to believe an accurate measure of a warrior can be made individually, after all one of the first principles we learn in the military is that team work is what completes a mission, not individual skills. This is remedied in later episodes, although their reasoning is the use of firearms and the negation of kills due to "lucky shots", but we still see groups fighting one another which is more in conjunction with the warrior ethos.

Next we'll focus on the aforementioned focus on equipment. While definitely assisting in the killing power of a warrior it is not definitive of it. Unfortunately this show relies completely on the effects of certain weapons on mostly unarmored bodies (although to their credit, the use of ballistics gel and pig carcases gives accurate depictions). Even when armor comes into play it is only used for demonstration against one of the weapons leaving a completely unbalanced representation of combat even if weapons and armor were to solely be considered. That and watching the computer programmer say how amazed he is every episode due to the damage caused by a weapon is awfully repetitious and annoying.

My biggest complaint, though, is the complete lack of consideration for the things that have effected warriors throughout history. Physiology, psychology, and availability. Although occasionally these things are mentioned it is specifically left out of the computer program they utilize to determine the victor in these various combats. I will reference one particular episode that I know the results would have been heavily different would they even be considered as determining factors.

The Pirate versus Knight episode, while I am not completely anti-pirate, does accurate display the lack of realism from the show. Considering Physiology knights were not just soldiers, but nobility, or at the very least freemen, thus had access to better food and lodgings, rarely suffering from disease while pirates were simple seamen turned bad, and like all seamen had a tendency to live off of restricted rations and often were sick due to their food or environment, even when not sick the effects of a previous illness could be measured. Psychology, knights already thought themselves superior by virtue of breeding, and that actually is measurable on the field of battle (I could site the example of the Marines versus soldiers, but that would incite a whole other argument), as well as specific training and conditioning with their weapons, while oppositely pirates were simply recruited from sailors, being common men, most times with no military training, and they utilized their weapons only skills learned from their own survival, the argument being that a truly successful army advances through the use of its veterans teaching its recruits, this did not happen on pirate vessels where new recruits were immediately put to use working the ship and whose first training session was the next boarding of a ship. Last, but not least, is availability. While every European nation had some form of Knight and Privateer (or pirate) knights were actually much more common in number, and thus more likely to have superior numerical forces in battle.

Thus I have to argue that in true combat, whether individual or group, if measured properly would result in the knight's victory, not the pirates. This is not always the case, in some instances I believe that the victory would still be as represented by weapon effects alone, but should still be considered inaccurate due to these factors. I only hope this new second season begins to focus less on weaponry and more on the weaponry, or otherwise becomes renamed "Deadliest Weapons" or even Deadliest Warrior's Weapons" but I doubt it.

I do not believe it to be a bad show, simply inaccurate. And if we boycotted inaccurate shows, well heck, I wouldn't even be able to watch my beloved NCIS. I simply become frustrated when accuracy is so easy to achieve and simply ignored for speed or simplicity, and I believe that is the case with the Deadliest Warrior.