Deadliest Warrior

Apart from the odd episode in passing, I’ve never really watched the American channel Spike TV’s show Deadliest Warrior, but having recently finished watching the first season of Game of Thrones, I was in search of something new to sate my bloodlust.

Now this programme is a good watch simply in terms of its sheer ridiculousness. For those of you who don't already know - the basic premise is this: each episode compares two types of warrior plucked from somewhere throughout history and pits them against each other in a hypothetical fight to the death.

Throughout the episode, the various weapons for each side are compared in categories such as long, medium and close range and then the effectiveness of killing and/or maiming of these is measured using “modern scientific techniques”, which more often than not is using the weapon on a dead animal carcass or a ‘gel torso’ standing in for a human body.

So far, so gory – most guys have some kind of morbid curiosity about what type of damage these things really could do. Where the show really becomes ridiculous though, is the sheer amount of bravura macho posturing that goes on during it.

You see, instead of particularly boffin-y scientists or fusty old historians approaching things from a calm and intellectual point of view, each warrior’s side is represented by a modern day fight expert (or at times an actual descendent) or two, who fiercely believe that their warrior is greater than the other and stubbornly do their best try and prove so.

Each episode therefore often descends into a dick-swinging slanging match of the juvenile ‘my sword is bigger than your sword’ type nonsense or, ‘see that? That's your guy’s head’, before smashing a skull with a hammer or something.

At the end of it, when all the data is collected on a laptop and plugged into a specially made computer program made by ‘Slytherin Studios’ (hellooooooo nerds!) the simulation is run to see which of the two competing warriors would win in a one-on-one fight repeated a thousand times.
We all know that staring at the resultant bunch of numbers would make for a dull finale and so instead, they show a reconstruction of such a fight for our viewing pleasure. For example, we see a Samurai strolling through the countryside when ‘bam!’ – he randomly runs into Viking.

Immediately they fight in the most dramatic and drawn out way possible making sure that they utilise the COMPLETE RANGE OF WEAPONS that were studied at during the show.

Laughable though this series is – it cant be denied that its fun to watch. I mean who wouldn't want to see ‘Spartan vs Ninja’, ‘Pirate vs Knight’ or more shockingly, ‘IRA vs Taliban’?
For further enjoyment, place bets at the beginning of the show to see if you can guess the outcome!

25 July 2011