Speaking about Rescues

The storyline of H2O is fantastically well connected. In this article, we discuss marine rescues performed by the mermaids.

As we discussed in the previous post, the three present-day mermaids parallel the 1950's mermaids as well-defined counterparts.

So we'll start with Louise and Emma.

Of the 1950's mermaids, Louise is the only one known to have performed a rescue. This was an off-shore rescue of a man who would otherwise have drowned. When interviewed, Louise denied having performed the rescue so far off shore, but acknowledged only having pulled him up on the beach. She denied having seen anything else that could have been involved.

Our first modern rescue was performed by Rikki, in which she rescued Elliot Gilbert from heavy surf, and we'll come back to this incident in a bit.

The first deep water off-shore rescue was performed by Louise's counterpart Emma. Zane was trapped in, oddly enough, Louise's sinking houseboat. He sunk with the boat and drowned. Emma arrived as the boat hit the bottom and had to break the door open with her tail, of which Zane caught a glimpse before passing out. Emma brought an unconscious Zane to the surface and brought him to the beach with this own boat, which Emma presumably untied from the sunken Lorelei. On reviving, Zane remembered drowning in the boat, but Emma insisted that she found him on the surface, and denied knowing how Zane escaped from the boat.

Side note here: Zane later tried to do a scuba dive on the wreck to try to investigate the mystery. While his buddy Nate had surfaced, Zane saw Emma swimming out of the wreck, and thus saw a mermaid in full torso. But this was the time Emma had coloured her hair scarlet red. So while Zane only saw her backside, what Zane actually saw was not much unlike Disney's Little Mermaid! So this only swirled the mystery further.

Now it is very interesting that Emma would rescue Zane, as this is also a repeat of history, for about thirty years earlier, Emma's mother Lisa, who was then twelve, performed a shore rescue of Zane's father Harrison, who was also twelve years old. So history repeated itself in that Lisa's daughter rescued Harrison's son.

But let us take a moment to recall that Harrison Bennett was a champion windsurfer in his teen years. He held an unbroken time record for windsurfing around Mako Island. So while the circumstances of his accident at age twelve are not given, a reasonable guess was that he had a surfing accident.

This then brings us to Lisa's son Elliot. At about age twelve, he was learning to surf. Byron was giving Elliot some basic lessons on dry sand. Byron was distracted for a few minutes with Emma, who begged Rikki to sit and watch Elliot. It is self-evident that Elliot fancied Rikki, who sat up against the rocks in her pretty pink bikini. Elliot was determined to show off, hoping to impress Rikki, and he ran into the heavy surf with this surfboard. But Elliot was not trained to penetrate the surf zone properly, hence why he was told to stay on the dry sand. A heavy wave flipped him and he was caught fighting for air in the heavy surf. Rikki had to risk mermaid exposure on a public beach to rescue Elliot. She was successful and discrete, and managed to motor Elliot back to shore on his own surfboard without her tail being seen. Elliot was smitten with Rikki and boasted that Rikki was the fastest swimmer ever, that she could even outswim a dolphin!

And we are reminded that Lisa rather fancied Harrison, but nothing ever came of it. Still, the Gilberts and Bennetts were long-term family friends, and Lisa always liked Zane, perhaps hoping that Emma would connect with Zane, even though they never did.

Another little incident before the houseboat sinking was when Zane tried to recreate his father's record setting windsurf around Mako Island, using the actual sailboard his father had used. But the reef on the far side of the island had since become shark infested. He had Lewis along for filming and surface support, but on the far side he capsized in the water with sharks around. Unknown to him, Rikki was in the immediate area shooting some underwater video of sharks. Seeing the situation on the surface, Rikki boiled water in a circle around Zane, keeping the sharks away while Lewis completed the surface rescue.

Season two would present an interesting turn as we follow Zane and Rikki. Here we have a situation where Rikki is doing some search and recovery for a ten thousand dollar reward for a sunken gold statue. Zane is doing surface support. On finding the crate, Zane provided Rikki with a scuba tank and the right lift bags to raise the crate. After inflating the bags and starting the lift, the harness assembly broke apart and the crate fell on Rikki. She took a nasty bang on the head and was knocked out cold underwater. As the lift bags surfaced with no load, Zane knew something was wrong and dove in after her. This interesting scene marks the only time any of the mermaids were ever injured in mermaid form, and the only time any of them was actually rescued. (In this context, we're not counting Lewis going after Cleo in "Sea Change". Cleo was in emotional distress, but not immediate physical distress.) So here, Zane rescued Rikki underwater, off-shore.

Now we come to Rikki's crowning rescue in Season 3. Will is a competitive deep free diver. Zane's ego has him jealous of Will's ability, and he tries to show off by getting Nate and another friend to help him fake a moderately deep free dive by scuba gear. Will is then determined to show off what he can do by trying to dive to seventy meters. His sister Sophie begs him not to try, as he is not adequately prepared for such a dive. But he tries anyway and blacks out in the deep water. Zane telephones Rikki on-shore, who is able to race to the scene in a couple of minutes. This implies that in an emergency, Rikki is able to swim at extreme speed, perhaps in excess of one hundred knots. She arrives at the scene and finds Will unconscious by the seventy meter marker. Here she successfully revives Will underwater with A/R and brings him up ten meters from the surface, from where he is able to surface on his own. Sitting on the boat, a bit dazed, Sophie asked him what happened and Will answered with a glowing smile, "An angel... an angel rescued me." Zane quickly covered for him before he said too much, but Will would later say to Rikki, "I remember you like an angel." Will would always have a certain fondness for Rikki from then on.