Bear Grylls Says This Episode Of Man Vs. Wild Is His All-Time Favorite

Bear Grylls has seen it all. From jumping into boa constrictor-infested waters to surviving off some questionable forms of sustenance, Edward Michael "Bear" Grylls had a lot of memorable moments while filming "Man vs. Wild." The show was all about surviving different harrowing wilderness situations, so you might be surprised to find out that his favorite episode didn't deal with the wilderness at all.

That's right. Gryll's favorite episode focused on a much more harrowing enemy: man. Across seven seasons and 73 episodes of terrifying moments in Bear Gryll's career, Season 4, Episode 12, "Urban Survivor," is the former British Special Forces soldier's most beloved memory. We didn't even have to ask him. Grylls answered the burning question for us in his new book, "Never Give Up," in which he wrote, "If you were to ask me to choose one episode I loved doing more than any other, it would be the urban one."

Throughout the episode, which Grylls called a "blast" to shoot, he can be seen performing a tyrolean traverse and detonating warehouse doors. Instead of swinging across vines and crossing rivers, Grylls scaled cargo nets and swung across guidewires to safety in an entirely new approach to "Man vs. Wild." In his own words, this episode "broke the mould."

Bear Grylls relished taking the show's traditional natural survival setting and applying the rules to an urban environment. He sets the scene well early on in the episode, explaining that while he's definitely in an urban environment, the rules of survival are the same. It's still all about protection, rescue, water, and food. The episode's objective was to simulate a survivor of a harrowing world event who needed to navigate empty buildings and survive for days before rescue. As Grylls makes the most of a sticky situation, he drops several memorable quotes and some cheeky rhymes, like this one: "Cargo nets like this are made, of course, twisted twine. They're super strong, but they're hard to climb." 

The episode is also full of classic "Man vs. Wild" mayhem. Grylls reveals in his book that the whole thing "felt like a movie," the plot of which would be non-stop action. After he navigates to a rooftop and scales down an elevator shaft, he makes a bomb out of oxygen and acetylene bottles to access a locked building. Grylls then leaps through the flaming residue and parkours his way up to the building's rafters to eat a raw pigeon egg — shell and all — before hopping down into the sewer and crawling his way to safety. Grylls wrote that it took him a week to feel normal after shooting an episode "full of dust, grease, pigeon crap, and a sense of history."

If you liked learning about Bear Gryll's favorite episode of "Man vs. Wild" to film, you'll love learning about Gryll's favorite ways to kill snakes. Grylls came face-to-face with a lot of dangerous wildlife over the course of "Man vs. Wild." While his favorite episode featured Grylls surviving an urban jungle instead of in the backcountry, in the very next section of his novel, Grylls gets back to his roots, describing in gruesome detail his encounters with wildlife in its "grimmest" form. Right after the chapter on filming urban survival, Grylls detailed his experience capturing a snake in the swamps of Australia. 

Grylls would eventually repent and reveal he regrets killing so many snakes in the show, but one might argue that if you kill a snake with the methods he outlined here, it's fair game. During this particular brush with the bush, Grylls learned about an Aboriginal folklore method of killing snakes that involves sticking the live snake's head directly into his mouth and biting it off. Lest we forget, Grylls is learning all this while the angry snake is hissing in his grasp. After "some smart alec" on the crew basically told Grylls to do it because it would be "pretty awesome," he opened wide and bit down on a live snake.