Do the Alaskan Bush People get paid? We asked! Read our interview with the Brown family.
On Discovery Channel’s Alaskan Bush People Season 2, Episode 3, “Welcome to Browntown” (Jan. 16), the Browns set up their home site. A mishap at sea has a search and rescue team out to find two of the boys.
ALSO SEE: Episode recaps, news and more from Discovery Channel’s Alaskan Bush People
Greetings, friends! I’m currently in Los Angeles covering really important stuff at the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour, so I’m a little behind on my coverage of the Bush People this week. I was eating and drinking (mostly drinking) at NBC’s party, and got back to my hotel room 15 minutes late for the episode. Since I’m without a DVR (I am totally living off the grid!) I couldn’t record it or comb through all the details of the episode. But I swear I’ll watch it again in its entirety and update this recap for you good people who’ve been so kind as to come here.
Alaskan Bush People Season 1 Recaps: Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4 | The Wild Life
Season 2 Recaps: Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4 | Episode 5 | Episode 6 | Episode 7 | Episode 8 | Wild Times | Episode 9 | Episode 10 | Episode 11 | Episode 12 | Episode 13 | Episode 14 | SHARK WEEK! | Episode 15 | Episode 16 | Lost Footage | The Wild Year
So I join the episode when the boys have to swim out to retrieve the skiff, which, once again, someone failed to properly secure with rope. It would’ve been awesome if Matt was the perpetrator again, but the blame falls on Gabe this time. This skiff is more trouble than it’s worth. At least they didn’t pay Used Boat Guy anything extra for it.
The family is building a temporary trapper shack on their land, a small log structure with moss stuck in between the logs for insulation (see all of Season 1, Episode 1). They’re under the clock to get this shack done, but yet it seems like their priority is to instead build an elaborate outhouse so the womenfolk can pee in private. Then men discuss their own process of marking their territories. Does Bear shit in the woods? Indeed he does.
Family MacGyver Noah takes on the superfluous task of building a shower out of logs, some scrap PVC pipe and an elevated plastic storage tub full of water. Noah says that adding the lid to the container creates water pressure. He has no understanding of air or fluid dynamics, since putting the lid on the container actually prevents the water from flowing. Maybe there are holes in the lid, but we can’t see them. A very light trickle of water comes out of four holes in the pipes, barely enough to moisten an envelope much less cleanse a human body. Suffice it to say, faucet manufacturer Moen won’t be calling Noah for an engineering internship anytime soon.
Ma Brown “washes” dishes with collected rain water, and rain water collected from the evergreen trees gives her dishes an extra fresh pine smell. I’d like to see this method vs. Palmolive in a side-by-side comparison.
Birdy and Rainy play together with dolls, pretending that they are their brothers. Birdy’s impression of Matt is awesome: “This sucks! This sucks! This sucks! [Falls asleep]”
Gabe busts the chainsaw, making everybody go to the axes and hatchets and slowing everything way down. Gabe is so far leading the race for this episode’s Brown Family Dumbass title. Billy fixes it, marking the first time in this entire series he has actually done something productive.
Gabe and Matt take the skiff out to sea to drop crab pots. They go back to retrieve the pots later, and they don’t come back for hours. The Browns freak out, and they have the show’s producers radio for a search and rescue team to find them. Now, the “bush” thing to do would be to let them drift helplessly out to sea, where they would be intercepted by a Russian fishing vessel and be forced to labor on it for the rest of their lives. That’s Bush Justice for being stupid at sea. But the search team (maybe it was a real search team, maybe it wasn’t) finds Gabe and Matt and delivers them safely to shore, clinching Gabe’s Brown Family Dumbass of the Week championship. They were careless and the tide took them out. The only logical reason for this is …
THE SKIFF IS CURSED! That’s why Used Boat Guy wanted to get rid of it! BURN IT! TAKE THE CHAINSAW TO IT! USE IT AS A TOILET! Never set sail in it again! Fairly warned be thee says I.
At this point, I’m so completely bored with this episode, because the only drama onscreen lasted all of two minutes. I can only truly be entertained by this show when bad things are happening to this family, or when they’re interacting with local weirdos who may or may not be actors. It makes me a horrible human being* but a fairly passable TV critic.
Which is why the producers of this show — none of whom are idiots — will keep devising new and interesting ways for the Browns to be in constant peril or making asses of themselves for our entertainment.
*Theoretically