Monday's Best Bets on TV
“Locked Up Abroad” (9 p.m., National Geographic Channel): Tourists who are kidnapped or imprisoned away from home get to tell their side.
“The History Detectives” (9 p.m., PBS): “The History Detectives” are back for their sixth season of sniffing out clues and delving into the past. The intriguing artifacts in tonight’s opener include the moving diary of a pilot who died in World War II and an 1853 coin thought to have been shot up by Annie Oakley during one of her “Wild West” shows.
“Ganja Queen” (9 p.m., HBO): The documentary “Ganja Queen” serves as a harrowing reminder for tourists that laws can be ultra harsh in other countries. It tells the story of a woman who traveled to Indonesia, where 10 pounds of marijuana was discovered in her luggage. Terror strikes when she learns that, in Indonesia, drug trafficking is a capital offense.
“The War of the World” (10 p.m., PBS): The conventional view of the 20th century traces a terrible trail of wars involving the United States. Historian Niall Ferguson sees this stretch of recurring violence as a single, unrelenting “war of the world” that began with Japan’s invasion of Russia in 1904, continuing through World War II and the Korean War all the way to what he dubs an ongoing “Third World’s War.” Ferguson is the host of the three-part PBS series “The War of the World,” which explores the notion that such a new broad-based conflict could replay itself in the 21st century. Episode one, “The Clash of Empires,” proposes that economic volatility, ethnic conflict and empires in crisis combined to spawn the bloody conflicts of the past century, leading to the rise of the brutal regimes of Germany, Japan and Russia. The second episode cites the horrors of World War II to show how, in order to win, the Allies acted with the same savagery as their enemies, thus attaining “a tainted victory.” Part three describes the Cold War as a continuation of the “war of the world,” while the end of the Cold War led to new dangers and challenges — and an eastward shift in the balance of power that may start the whole process over again.