Foreign Correspondent: Season 17
Season 17 Lore Primer
Key plot threads, lore context, and character stakes you need to remember before diving into this season.
- Directly follows the overarching narrative developments of Foreign Correspondent Season 16.
- Faction dynamics and core character alliances shift under escalating external stakes.
- Crucial mysteries introduced previously reach key turning points and narrative reckonings.
- Sets up serialized story arcs that build directly toward the climactic season finale.
Episode Guide
Season 17 Progress Shield
Ramadan In Space
Feb 17, 2009 · 30 min
Which way is Mecca in space? Helen Vatsikopoulos ponders this and other imponderables when she meets Malaysia’s “it” man, the hunky former male model Dr Sheik Muszaphar Shukor, who
The World According to Frost
Feb 17, 2009 · 30 min
For 50 years David Frost has shared the world’s stage with the powerful, rich and famous – and this week he shares it with Foreign Correspondent’s Mark Corcoran.
Stolen and Sold
Feb 24, 2009 · 30 min
What would you do if you discovered your adopted children were stolen and trafficked, and not willingly given up by their parents, as you’d believed? South Asia correspondent Sally
What Lies Beneath?
Mar 3, 2009 · 30 min
In Antarctica the race is on for scientific supremacy and to find an ice-scientist’s Holy Grail … a 1,000,000-year-old ice core. It’s thought that’s where the secrets to understa
Young Lions of Lahore
Mar 11, 2009 · 30 min
South Asia correspondent Sally Sara with the cricket tragics of Lahore, as Pakistan is wiped from world cricket's tour map.
American Emergency
Mar 11, 2009 · 30 min
Washington correspondent Tracy Bowden uncovers one of the biggest killers in America - the US health system. Lack of insurance is now the third leading cause of death in the US, af
Is Aid Killing Africa?
Mar 17, 2009 · 30 min
Dambisa Moyo is a Zambian-born economist who says aid is killing Africa. In her new book, Dead Aid, she argues that official aid is easy money that fosters corruption and distort
Left To Die
Mar 17, 2009 · 30 min
Cholera is a preventable disease, yet there’s an epidemic raging in Zimbabwe. At least 4,000 are dead, and some 90,000 infected. Filming secretly and posing as tourists, reporter
The Big Smoke
Mar 24, 2009 · 30 min
China’s exponential growth took Australia along for the white-knuckled ride. It fuelled our resources boom and had economic optimists forecasting decades of good times. How things
The Farmer Wants a Country
Mar 31, 2009 · 30 min
He’ll have you believe he’s a quiet goat farmer and a keen horseman who just happens to think he might make an ideal Indonesian President one day. But looks can be deceiving and t
Children of Zanskar
Apr 7, 2009 · 30 min
When people in remote villages in Zanskar get sick, chances are they’ll turn to the “Oracle”. The Oracle is a faith healer who goes into a trance so a Tibetan spirit can take over
Jacob Zuma
Apr 7, 2009 · 30 min
He's in the fast lane to the top in South Africa but there’s powerful evidence the man following the trail blazed by Mandela has been on the take. Reporter Andrew Fowler investiga
Trapped in Terror
Apr 15, 2009 · 30 min
They were hiding for their lives, hunted by gunmen who’d brought India’s biggest city to a standstill. In this chilling ‘insider's’ account of a terrorist siege, two Australian bu
The Young Guns
Apr 21, 2009 · 30 min
It’s turned out some fearsome warriors in the past but can America’s prestigious military academy West Point manufacture the brass that will ultimately prevail in what’s now being
Pirateland
Apr 28, 2009 · 30 min
How and why did a bunch of illiterate, dirt poor Africans transform themselves from simple cray-fishermen into the fearsome, gun-toting gangs mugging giant, sophisticated shipping
Cats in the Clouds
May 6, 2009 · 30 min
Very few have seen it in the wild but those who have say it’s the most beautiful of the big cats. The Snow Leopard prowls the roof of the world in dwindling numbers. Can it be sav
The Third Amigo
May 19, 2009 · 30 min
For more than four decades, tens of thousands of Colombians have been kidnapped or killed in South America’s longest-running civil war. Now Colombia’s hard-line president Alvaro Ur
Detroit: Ain't Too Proud To Beg
May 26, 2009 · 30 min
It was big, it was shiny and it was brassy. Few things symbolised the wealth and optimism of a post-war America more than the big car and the Motown sound. And perhaps few things
One Night in Sofia
Jun 2, 2009 · 30 min
Every year thousands of young Australians pack their backpacks, book their EuRail passes and make for Europe, leaving their parents to worry and fret about their wellbeing and thei
Sumo Confidential
Jun 9, 2009 · 30 min
They're big men with even bigger secrets. The cloistered world of Sumo hides myriad rituals and traditions, bone-jarring training schedules even humiliating and painful punishment.
The Bulldozer
Jun 16, 2009 · 30 min
Foreign Correspondent presenter and reporter Mark Corcoran, who has spent a decade observing the dangerous world of South Asian narco-politics, takes us on a journey through Afghan
A Greek Tragedy
Jun 23, 2009 · 30 min
How did a 15 year old boy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, shot by a policeman in Athens six months ago become a cause celebre? Why was his name and the manner of his death invoked by st
Bravo! Encore!
Jun 30, 2009 · 30 min
In a Venezuelan slum a young girl practices on her clarinet and dreams a big musical dream. On a stage in New York City an 80 year old clarinettist takes his final bow to rapturous
The Rebellion Network
Jul 7, 2009 · 30 min
It’s raw, it’s instant and it’s rocked authoritarian Iran and riveted world attention. It’s the phenomenal new-media broadcast by Iran’s angry, dissenting young that’s capturing a
Orphans of the Storm
Jul 14, 2009 · 30 min
A perilous year undercover - ducking the authorities and informers and risking decades in jail – has resulted in an unforgettable Foreign Correspondent with a team of Burmese camer
Us and Them
Jul 21, 2009 · 30 min
Kilometres of high concrete walls snake through Belfast in Northern Ireland - graffiti daubed and grim. They divide Catholic neighbourhoods from Protestant. They’re called the Pea
The Uighur Dilemma
Jul 28, 2009 · 30 min
The Uighurs. Who are they and why is the Chinese government flattening vast tracts of their magnificent cultural capital, Kashgar? Is it for safety or to secure against separatis
Rocket Island
Aug 4, 2009 · 30 min
It's an idyllic tropical atoll, but amid the coconut groves are billions of dollars of high-tech surveillance equipment. Mark Corcoran reveals a hitherto top-secret, Club Med style
Total Control
Aug 11, 2009 · 30 min
When Venezuela’s socialist firebrand Hugo Chavez lost his best enemy and saw global capitalism teeter you might think he’d be jumping for joy. Not so.
Return to the Fatal Sky
Aug 18, 2009 · 30 min
A year ago Foreign Correspondent flew into the scandalously unsafe skies over PNG to examine why the nation’s aviation industry sustains so many fatal accidents and dangerous incid
A Brave Face
Aug 25, 2009 · 30 min
They’ve been scarred so deeply they’re shockingly disfigured and yet they’ve refused to bow their heads or withdraw from the world. They’re the remarkable women who’ve survived aci
80 Million a Day
Sep 1, 2009 · 30 min
It’s a staggering national habit and it’s grown into a juggernaut of a killing machine claiming an annual toll eclipsing the Aceh tsunami. Welcome to the warning-free, smoking free
The Congo Connection
Sep 8, 2009 · 30 min
Are mobile phones the new blood diamond? Is our insatiable appetite for the latest electronic gadgets actually fuelling despair, deprivation and oppression in another part of the w
Fly Away Children
Sep 15, 2009 · 30 min
Most African adoptions don’t have a Hollywood ending. A Foreign Correspondent investigation in Ethiopia exposes a booming international adoption trade out of control – mothers dupe
Hook, Line and Sunk!
Sep 22, 2009 · 30 min
In Iceland, the financial crisis is called the kreppa and a year after it hit, the whole country is still well and truly in it. Thousands are losing their homes, unemployment is te
Berlusconi and the Beautiful
Sep 29, 2009 · 30 min
He’s got money to burn, enormous political and personal power, and well, a problem. Beautiful women. Why can’t Silvio Berlusconi behave himself and why do Italians shrug off his se
Europe or Die Trying
Oct 6, 2009 · 30 min
Paul Kenyon travels three thousand miles along the most dangerous illegal immigration route out of Africa. Many die crossing the Sahara, or at sea on the way to a better future in
California Burning
Oct 13, 2009 · 30 min
In California massive wildfires are met with massive force – but it comes with a multimillion dollar price tag. With fires on the increase around the world, is money and manpower t
Without Honour and Humanity
Oct 20, 2009 · 30 min
It’s claimed Japan’s ferocious and feared Yakuza murder, extort and intimidate according to an honour code. But where is the honour in the squalid new enterprise now adding to thei
Flight AF 447
Oct 27, 2009 · 30 min
What brought down Air France flight 447? The families, friends and fellow workers of the 228 people who perished when the Rio-Paris flight ditched in the Atlantic mid-year are all
Winds of Change
Nov 3, 2009 · 30 min
With its giant wind farms and pedal-pushing population, Denmark looks like a model global citizen setting a shining green example for all comers to the Copenhagen Climate Summit. L
Thanks for Watching
Nov 10, 2009 · 30 min
Foreign Correspondent’s 2009 spins to a close with an inside look at the stories, characters and issues that moved, provoked and enthralled our audience. It’s a fascinating, behind