The first season of Wild Ground went down the wrong way with Caroline van der Plas. At the beginning of this year, the BBB leader announced parliamentary questions about the “Farmer’s Earth Movement” in the soap, which was compared to the NSB. Broadcaster AvroTros explained to the MP that Woeste Grond is a drama series, a made-up story. The parliamentary questions were never asked. The politician can be satisfied with the current storyline. The farmers take the law into their own hands to shoot a problem wolf.
With series like Stranger Things you have to wait years for new episodes, but Wild Ground (NPO 1) will be in its third season within one year. The previous season ended this summer with a hell of a cliffhanger. Grandpa Bats targeted an attacking wolf but also shot the ranger. His own son-in-law, after all.
How does that continue? As usual in soaps, showrunner Johan Nijenhuis raises major problems that he then quickly unravels. It starts ominously: the farmers are ready to go back into the dark forest with guns in hand. There is a second problem wolf around.
But that expedition is apparently canceled. The ranger is soon released from the hospital. He goes back to work with a large plaster on his neck. Despite the dramatic incident, no one is angry with anyone. The shooting did give him a fear of the forest. He is frightened by a small barking dog.
Meanwhile, his wife immediately leaves the hospital with her father (that’s the perpetrator, Grandpa Bats, but no hard feelings) into the forest and immediately runs into the second wolf, which she also shoots dead. Away problem wolf! Shame. So what should they talk about for the rest of the season? The forest ranger is still conducting an investigation into the unlawful killing of a protected animal species, but we already know how that will end. You also have a pregnancy, a fertility problem and a man with a fear of chickens, but that doesn’t seem like enough for twenty episodes. Hopefully they will find another litter of orphaned wolf cubs.
Tommy Wieringa in Ukraine
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, writers Jaap Scholten and Tommy Wieringa have been organizing convoys to supply the army with equipment. In the two-part documentary Convoy we follow their eighth journey. Among other things, they bring body bags to a team that transports fallen soldiers. Or in Wieringa’s voice-over: “Deceased soldiers are now being brought home in the freezer trucks of Dutch fishmongers.”
Also impressive is a visit to a psychiatric institution where traumatized soldiers are treated. Wieringa and Scholten will bring EMDR sets. In the clinic, Wieringa speaks with a soldier who portrays the trauma. He makes portraits of the crazy supervillains The Joker and Harley Quinn. The man spent two hundred days at the front in a self-dug cave. In photos you see him as a ‘caveman’, with a wild beard. He sustained himself by reading Machiavelli: “Every day I thought: I can’t die today because I have to read more pages.” To Wieringa’s astonishment, the man is about to return to hell.
The series is about war misery in Ukraine, but also gives a warm Christmas feeling because the Dutch convoy brings joy and relief everywhere. Wieringa’s literary voice-over, with his deep baritone and clear diction, give the documentary extra cachet. When they visit a rapidly expanding soldier cemetery, Wieringa barks: “The hill is far from saturated.” Wieringa also emphasizes the greater purpose of the Ukrainian mission. Here the freedom and democracy of the whole of Europe is defended. “Our guileless innocence lasted for eighty years. Now everything is at stake again.”
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