Last night’s episode of Deadliest Catch was the first of four to deal with the illness and eventual death of captain Phil Harris, but it was melancholy in all other sorts of ways as well. One crabber, Keith, called his young daughter to talk him out of chewing tobacco, because otherwise he “wouldn’t be around” anymore; the senior crew had to figure out how to tell Jake, one of its junior members that his father, on shore, had gone missing and was likely dead; 54-year old JJ fell, and was ribbed for being too old for the job; Harris and his younger son had an emotional talk about the latter’s ongoing addiction problems. After all of this father/child/mortality footage, there was still more, and it was worse: Harris was found, off-camera, collapsed from a stroke. Barely speaking and having troubling moving his left side, his sons, the crew, and emergency medical personnel put him on a stretcher, lifted him via crane off the boat, and put him in an ambulance. Watch the matter-of-fact footage for yourself.
