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Sydney Morning Herald

Monday March 7, 2011

Tim Elliott

How Earth Made Us Wonders of the Solar System Nurse Jackie Hot Docs: Pray the Devil Back to HellHow Earth Made UsABC1, 8.30pmWe tend to think of human history as being forged primarily by humans. But as this ingenious new series shows, human civilisation has been shaped by awesome natural forces linked to geology, geography and climate. Travelling to Mexico's astonishing Cave of Crystals and the deserts of Israel, host Professor Iain Stewart explores the unlikely attraction that humans have for fault lines, those geologically fragile zones where tectonic plates grind and collide. Fault lines are like vents for the Earth's deep interior, bringing minerals, ore and water to the surface, enabling and shaping the human lives above.Wonders of the Solar SystemSBS One, 8.30pmThe second episode of this dauntingly ambitious five-part series explains how everything - the sun, the rotating planets, you, me - all started out as a giant cosmic cloud, a chaotic mass of gas and dust that coalesced over millions of years into our perfectly ordered solar system.To understand the forces responsible for this, host Brian Cox gets up close to tornadoes in Oklahoma and plumbs the rings of Saturn, which are thought to reflect the nature of the solar system in its juvenile stages.Cox is an excellent host, his explanations clear but not simplistic, his tone a mix of explication and boyish wonder. His real triumph, however, is to demystify the solar system without killing the mystery, which is harder than it sounds. Just ask Richard Dawkins.Nurse JackieEleven, 9.30pmWith her tired eyes and crumpled sandshoe of a face, Edie Falco is perfect as Jackie Peyton, an overworked emergency-room nurse at New York City's All Saints Hospital.Jackie's plate is overflowing, with two young kids, a general shortage of disposable income and a penchant for prescription painkillers.Tonight, in order to hide the extent of her habit from her husband, Jackie sets up a separate post office box for the pharmacy bills. She also accepts an offer of funds from friend and colleague Dr O'Hara - against her husband's wishes.This series' focus on nurses is admirable and the cast is certainly capable. And yet the writers just couldn't resist inserting stock characters, from the sweet-hearted gay male nurse to the no-nonsense black admin woman.Hot Docs: Pray the Devil Back to HellSBS One, 10.05pmIt takes a rare kind of dementedness to hack off a baby's arm, decapitate a man with a carving knife or rape a 12-year-old in front of her parents. Yet these were just some of the depths to which combatants sunk in an effort to win Liberia's two civil wars, which raged from 1989 to 2003.But, as they say, it takes a woman to clean up a man's mess and in early 2003, Liberia's women, both Muslim and Christian, called time on the violence.Determined, fed up and crazily brave, the women's first act was to demonstrate in Monrovia's fish market in 2003, demanding then president Charles Taylor enter peace talks. They then recruited their husbands by declaring a sex strike. "In the end, their husbands were equally praying with them," activist Leymah Gbowee says, "because the end of the war meant the beginning of enjoyment."This sad, gruesome and at times affecting documentary doesn't purport to tell the whole story of Liberia's struggle; instead it sheds light on a little-known chapter of history, showing what can be done when otherwise powerless people put their bodies on the line for a dream.

© 2011 Sydney Morning Herald

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