This. Is. It. At 9 PM tonight on Spike, Deadliest Warrior's final episode of the season airs, and we're getting our hands dirty when the IRA and Taliban go head to head in the ultimate showdown between modern terrorists.
Well gents, here we are. This is our final episode of the season, and it has been one hell of a ride. Geoff, Dr. D, and myself had no idea what we were signing up for when we started this gig, except that it was probably going to be pretty cool. After a lot of long hours on the range and in the lab, we had a feeling we were on to something, but your reactions have exceeded our wildest expectations.
On behalf of those two, as well as everyone involved in making the show, I just want to say thanks for making this such an incredible experience. Every comment has mattered to us. The positive feedback has been overwhelming, and we've taken your critical comments to heart: it's been an absolute thrill to keep the conversation going with The Aftermath (I'm sure Kieron would agree), and hopefully, we'll get to keep this discussion going in the future. Again, thank you all.
But on to tonight's episode.
This is about to get a bit ranty-and if you want to get to the point, I invite you to skip on towards the end.
Let me be frank: this was a hard episode to do. It's a hell of a matchup. We knew that from the first moment it was suggested that it was going to be hard as hell to do, but also, that we had to do it. We also knew that the distance of time and history usually give us a shield that protects us from offending anyone's sensibilities, but that in dealing with modern terrorists, we'd be stepping out from behind the shield of history. Because of that, we owe it to you to explain some of our reasoning behind this one, since it has already been suggested that we "could be seen as glorifying terrorism."
"Could be seen," by the by, is a hell of a way to couch the issue in a f#%*ing qualifier.
We decided to run IRA vs. Taliban as a matchup because we wanted to understand how terrorists function in combat. We live in an age where terrorism dominates the news-guerillas, asymmetric warfare, insurgents, sleeper-cells, terrorists, IEDs, hijackings, kidnappings, suicide bombings, ransoms, extremism-every day, we are confronted with a cocktail of these volatile terms. Perhaps these words were once used to inform, but now they've merged and bled into a constant drone of fear mongering.
