In 2007, amateur adventurer Tim Akrin attempted to film the pilot for his show, Stranded, in the Australian Daintree Rainforest. Unfortunately, he ended up disturbing a creature lost to time.
This episode contains examples of:
- Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: If what little we do see of the Megalania is to be believed, it's black with yellow spots. Not an impossible color pattern for it, as many venomous lizards in real life have similar patterns.
- Artistic License – Paleontology: The bite that Tim sustains is entirely too small to be from a Megalania. These animals were the size of small cars, meaning it likely would've taken Tim's entire arm off.
- Reptiles Are Abhorrent: The focus creature of the episode is the supposedly extinct monitor lizard Megalania, and while it isn't one of the genuinely malevolent monsters to appear on the show, it still proves to be terrifying in its own right.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: As is revealed at the end of the episode, Tim was caught and eaten just a quarter of a mile away from Aboriginal tour guides who could have saved him.
- Super-Persistent Predator: The Megalania chases Tim for the better part of a day before it finally gets him. This is how it would have hunted in real life with animals too fast or too big to tear apart - bite them and wait for the poison to weaken them.
- Too Dumb to Live: Tim tries to show off an Aborigine method for finding out what kind of animal lives in a den without considering a rather obvious issue - whatever lives in the den might still be in the den. He gets bitten, becomes infected with blood poisoning, and is eventually caught and eaten by the Megalania,
- Uniformity Exception: While the show has suggested that the various cryptids and mythological beasts that it focuses on may be survivors of extinct genera, this is the only episode that explicitly uses a real but extinct creature as the focus - the extinct varanid Megalania (
now known as Varanus priscus).
