‘Alaskan Bush People’ Season Premiere: ‘King of the Mountain’ (RECAP)
In the Alaskan Bush People Season 10-ish premiere episode “King of the Mountain” (August 4), the Wolfpack races to build their homes before the ground begins to freeze. Later, a snowstorm threatens progress as they haul Bear’s new house — a shipping container — up to the highest peak on the mountain.
No show this bad should last 10-ish seasons.
So, Billy, what do you think about this episode?
I could end the recap there, but then I’d be depriving you of all my thoughts about goat urine, and I just couldn’t live with myself.
Bear and Gabe are chopping wood. Gabe weaves a hula skirt, dances poorly and then calls himself a “hooligan.” Someone actually had sex with this guy? You mean we have 59 more minutes of this crap left to go?
WINTER IS RIGHT … WAIT FOR IT … THERE! Most of this season, which was supposed to be the second half of Season 9-ish until Discovery failed at math, was filmed in the fall of 2018. The remaining Brown kids who weren’t fortunate enough to escape to California must build their shoddy homes before winter comes and kills them all. Tell me if you’ve heard that one before.
Billy has apportioned his land among his children (screw you, Matt!) as depicted in this crude topographical map. Keep this map handy for reference. You’ll need it when the Great Brown Family Civil War erupts in 2027.
Bear’s project gets priority, even though his home requires the least amount of construction and he’s the most likely to survive the winter sleeping in a hole somewhere. Bear says the trees on Brown Star Ranch are too scrawny to support his original Ewok village idea, so he’s instead going to use a shipping container (they’re calling it a “conex”).
Typically when you purchase something, you want to kick the hell out of it before you even let the owner know that you’re interested in buying.
Bear swings a barter deal with Conex Guy: one shipping container and a two-day bulldozer rental in exchange for a bunch of firewood and labor in the summer picking pears or whatever. Once again, the Browns come out way ahead on a barter. I can’t wait to watch the fruit-picking scenes in Season 11-ish.
Noah’s child isn’t even born yet, and he’s already thinking of ways to expose it to harm. He starts by constructing a baby bath made from a goat-feeding tub and an aquarium water pump/heater.
The concept involves recirculating warm water under the baby for some reason. This is totally impractical. The tub is way too big and the little guy is just going to slide to the bottom. No child should be left unattended in the bath, so it’s not like Noah can let his baby sit there alone while Noah goes out to do tai chi. Fortunately, this thing will never get used, as Noah, wife She Who Will Not Be Named and baby Elijah live in a house in Colorado that Billy bought.
Noah want to be just like his dad, except 100% more. [shudders in horror] Good Lord, could you imagine there being someone twice as awful as Billy?
Birdy and Rainy tend to their goats. Last season, the pair couldn’t determine if they were looking at male or female goat hindquarters.
It dawns on them that they may have a billy goat in the herd, as one of the females appears to be pregnant. They determine that the goat Birdy has named Bambi is indeed a billy goat, and that’s bad news because Billy hates billy goats.
Billy goats are annoying and they spray pee all over themselves and then wipe it on you. You’d think Billy would be used to that stuff from his family by now.
After collecting fresh urine from the goat they call Ma’am, they do a pregnancy test and determine that there’s definitely going to be another kid on the way.
Birdy’s reluctant to tell Billy, since he’s going to want to get rid of Bambi or slaughter him. Birdy proposes that she keeps Bambi as her own, and she’ll separate him from the females and eventually keep him on her parcel of land. Birdy is cool with the pee, and though Billy says she’ll regret this decision, he agrees to let her keep Bambi.
Bear gathers his siblings around the fire to tell them about the barter he roped them all into. He explains that as part of the deal, they have to help chop wood and pick pears. Bear offers each of them a window of time in which they can borrow the bulldozer to clear their individual pieces of land. Gabe pretends to be surprised.
Everyone gets to choppin’ wood. Bear and Bam have an argument about the proper way to toss split wood to the person who’s stacking it. Bear likes to put some spin on the wood, while Bam just wants a simple underhand lob. That there is knowledge gathered from 30 years of living in the Bush, y’all.
It’s EXXXXTREMELY important to the success of Billy’s months-long dream of a sustainable ranch that each of his kids (except Matt) gets a good start on their home construction because WINTER IS RIGHT THERE and they can’t wait until spring because…
Dear Lord, no! SPRING IS RIGHT THERE!! There’s always work to be done. The Browns are always on the precipice of doom. There’s always Fake Urgency. “The boat’s always sinking,” Billy says. He must be talking about the first 8-ish seasons of this show.
So of course there’s a snowstorm, just to complicate matters.
Bear takes delivery of his conex, which arrives on a flatbed truck. Bear should have to pick 100 tons of pears over the next 20 summers just to cover the transportation cost alone. Bear asks the driver how he should get his container up to the top of the hill, since it involves moving a heavy object up a steep incline and Bear has “a little bit of that concerny kind of stuff” about these properties of physics. The driver suggests a helicopter or Manitowoc crane. Noah is working on inventing both of those things.
Bam gets the bulldozer first and starts plowing away. He needs to rip out a tree stump, but the snow is providing poor traction and the frozen ground is keeping the stump firmly in place. I honestly can’t remember (nor do I care to find out) if Bam eventually pulled the stump out. Meh.
It’s Noah’s turn to bulldoze a road to “Castle Ridge,” but his self-centered, thoughtless brother Bam didn’t leave the keys in the machine. Clearly Bam was respecting the danger, because thieves have been known to exist within and around the Brown family.
Noah is not only a self-aggrandizing fop, but he’s also a whiny little poser. I enjoyed watching him fall on his ass.
Noah gets the keys and fires up the bulldozer. He talks about how great it would be to someday have his son riding on the back of one.
I think about how great it would be for Noah to be arrested for child endangerment. Noah doesn’t seem very confident operating this rig. Maybe he should stick to things that don’t actually work.
Bear finally gets his turn with the bulldozer. First, he uses it to tear his dad off the couch. (This scene will be future Lost Footage.) Billy, who has experience driving bulldozers into fishing boats for more than 30 years, will be at the controls to tug Bear’s 5,000 pound conex 200 yards up the hill.
That’s probably the most truthful thing Billy’s ever said, though the statement has not been validated by the Bureau of Bush Weights and Measures.
With the snow already melted — I’m thinking Park Slope rented this bulldozer for a lot longer than two days — Billy starts pushin’, pullin’ and draggin’ the conex up the hill. There’s some unnecessary drama as Billy is in danger of flipping the bulldozer ass over teakettle, and the conex gets snagged on a rock.
Eventually, Billy sets the conex on an uneven, precarious piece of ground and calls it a day by quoting Ghostbusters.
Look at this thing. There’s no way someone, even Bear, could live in it like this. I’m guessing that Park Slope is going to use this conex on the hill for exterior shots only. The conex that Bear furnishes and pretends to live in is probably parked somewhere down in Loomis.
Birdy is summoned to Noah’s tent, and after some uncomfortable small talk about how Birdy really dislikes She Who Will Not Be Named, they ask Birdy if she will be the baby’s godmother. They think that Birdy would be the best caregiver for their child should Noah and She Who Will Not Be Named perish in a circular-saw accident.
They also think Birdy would be the best person to teach their kid how to shoot stuff and pretend to live off the land. Birdy agrees. Maybe this is the end of the awkwardness between Birdy and She Who Will Not Be Named, but I’m hoping it isn’t.
Bear grills up some of that bison meat that has been rotting for weeks in Noah’s meat locker. He must be careful not to injure himself and contaminate the food with his own blood.
Dude, have you not heard of vampires or mosquitoes?
Finally, Billy delivers his usual spiel about how the Browns can accomplish anything as long as they stick together as a family (except Matt) and so on and so forth and whatnot. This whole season is going to be a big, putrid pile of whatnot.
“The work will never be done [by me],” Billy says. I am just assuming he meant to say that last part.
It’s time now for the Season 10-ish premiere edition of “That’s Matt!,” in which we take a social media look at Matt’s sober offscreen adventures:
Reports are that Matt is in Washington and visiting his family, and there’s talk that he may film again.
This is a bad move for Matt. Escaping his father’s grip and getting off this freak show was probably the best thing for him. Maybe Matt will take part in a reunion episode that will be the series finale, and they can end this crapfest and destroy all evidence that it ever existed.
Alaskan Bush People where to stream
