TV REVIEW : Encountering Blue Whales Underwater

As the new installment of “ABC’s World of Discovery” shows, TV nature documentaries can be a dangerous thing. After many thousands of miles and countless hours trying, undersea filmmaker Al Giddings finally captures on film that most elusive creature of the deep, the blue whale--only to have his precious footage marred by the drippy narration of James Brolin.

It’s like having Luke Perry narrate the Apollo 13 landing.

Fortunately, the world’s largest animal is simply too awesome for Brolin to do permanent damage. The blue whale’s comeback from near-extinction is another example of how the global environmental movement has actually won battles and made a profound difference.

Although there are only about 2,000 known “blues” in the northern Pacific climes where they breed, their numbers are growing, partly due to cleaner California offshore waters, where their main food source, krill, thrive.

Blue whale watching has become a favorite California sport, but the 80-ton mammals spend only 5% of their time at the surface where the tourists see them. Giddings is eager to film them underwater, while whale researcher Bruce Mate is intent on tracing the blue’s entire migratory pattern.

Mate’s project is unprecedented; like an enlightened Ahab, he is shown tagging individual blues with an electronic sensor read by space satellite and then beamed back to his lab.

Another high-tech tracking of whales has been going on for years, in secret by the U.S. Navy. In a curious byproduct of the Cold War, American subs recorded the sounds of Soviet subs--and singing whales. Oceanographer Chris Clark’s encounter with these secret tapes is like a kid stumbling on the world’s greatest toy store. Call it the Joy of Science.

But Giddings’ footage of the blues is the reason to hang on through this hour show, despite Brolin’s voice. His final underwater encounter with the giant is one of those rare sequences on TV that wraps the viewer in silent awe. The sense of something larger than us and still fairly unknown powerfully reinforces the epic images Giddings is lucky enough to record.

* “ABC’s World of Discovery” airs at 8 tonight on ABC (Channels 7 and 3).