Dynasties, episode 4, review: Not merely about charismatic animals but their whole civilisations and ecosystems

Lions, tigers, penguins and chimpanzees are the other subjects of Sir David Attenborough’s five Dynasties . Ruthless killers, all of them, some even of man and their own, yet still in the popular imagination considered the good guy.

In such company, the painted wolf stands out. Traditionally, when the narrow eyes and cut teeth of the wild dog appear in the BBC primetime schedule, it is to eat our hero’s baby.

So life from the wolf’s perspective is particularly illuminating. Indeed, you do not have to experience it for long, it turns out, to start forming radical opinions on all sorts of things, even Little Red Riding Hood.

More to the point, these unloved beasts are facing struggles familiar to us all. On the banks of the Zambezi in Zimbabwe there is a refugee crisis and an immigration crisis. There is even a map, with graphics, to explain whose lands are where, divvied up between rival wolf packs, lions and humans, which feels like it could have been lifted straight from the 10 O’clock news.

We join our painted wolves on a tense morning. Pressure on the land of two rival packs – led, it turns out, by a mother, Tait, and her daughter Blacktip – forces the daughter to launch a raid on her mother’s territory. They strike in the dawn hush like Cherokee on horseback in some wild western, and drive Tait and co from their home and into lion territory.

Refugee life is not easy. Opportunities are scarce, and the native population, being lions, are somewhat hostile.

At one point the meticulously planned and successful hunt of a deer ends with the lazy lions sweeping in to steal the meal, and the wolves go hungry. This is not, at least according to the Attenborough canon to this point, how things are meant to work.

In this fraught world, babies are born who will, we assume, know of the motherland only through folklore, while they do their best to make a life for themselves – a wolf in lion country.

Eventually, Blacktip comes to pursue her mother yet further – but as with all empires, from Athens to Jamie’s Italian, initial success begets overconfidence begets downfall. In the episode’s climactic moment, Blacktip’s babies are spared from the lions by what can only be described as a kamikaze water buffalo, who offers up his life to save the young of another species for reasons never made clear. Even Attenborough doesn’t seem to have a clue what’s going on.

There are only so many stories out there in the natural world. Real Attenborough anoraks have, to a certain extent, seen them all. In the last few years, the evolution of nature documentaries have been the story of technological change, altering the ways in which the old stories can be told, not to mention documenting the threat we pose to it all.

That is what makes Dynasties such a major breakthrough. Not merely charismatic animals but their whole civilisations and ecosystems. Not just hand to mouth, and the daily struggle for a meal, but their way of life – from generation to generation.

In the end, of course, pups are born and the sun sets with the threat of morning still to come.

The wolf pack legacy is secured. If only the same could be said for Attenborough, who still has none to follow him.