Last night, I got to ... well, enjoy may not be the right word ... the first of six one-hour episodes of what we might call a "limited series" on NBC: Revelations. The premise seems to be that the Bible is 100% true, that we are living in the End Times, and that all the awful things described in the Book of Revelations are almost upon us.
Maybe I'll review the series later in my reviews blog. Maybe not. Frankly, it does not look either especially interesting or especially well-done. In particular, the female lead character engages in some incredibly obnoxious behavior. Do all nuns act like this? I doubt it. If they did, the Catholic Church would have withered and died before the end of the Middle Ages. (1)
I would like the opportunity to suggest that this preoccupation with "end times" has been a fundamental sickness in some branches of Christianity ever since the religion got its start qua religion. Saul of Tarsus (St. Paul), who wrote a large part of the New Testament, himself believed that he and his followers were living in those end times, and that before they died they would see the return of the Messiah, the stern divine punishment of evildoers (the Romans), and the ascension of the elect to the right hand of God. During the almost two millenia following that time, the end times foretold in Revelations have invariably been "right around the corner". I presume that is where they will remain for the foreseeable future. (2)
I do want to address one major subplot. There's this teen-age girl who wanders out onto a golf course in the middle of a storm, where she waits around to get hit by lightning ― twice! The first time she's zapped, she gets thrown into a tree; then a second bolt of lightning hits the tree limb over which she's sprawled, and down she comes with a crash. Ouch!
(Also ― and this apparently has something to do with the plot ― two of her fillings get blasted out of her teeth and up into her brain. The physical explanation for this is not apparent; we may assume that it is miraculous. As well as painful.)
This doesn't immediately kill her, but does burn out her cerebral cortex, leaving her in a "persistent vegetative state." Remind you of anybody recently in the news? Naturally, when she reaches the hospital all the administrators want to convince her father to immediately take her off life support so that they can harvest her organs and reap a nice profit. A Catholic priest shows up to administer extreme unction, but then he hears her talking in Latin (I think she also talks in Hebrew later, though the subtitles continue to have her "[speaking in Latin]"). She also draws a pretty children's picture on a pad that our nunnish heroine holds under her hand. The hospital administrators refuse to recognize this, or her mumbling (in tongues) as more than reflex actions.
Sound at all familiar? Now I won't accuse NBC of attempting to take advantage of the Terri Schiavo controversy here ― no doubt they will assure you (perhaps truthfully) that it's all coincidence. Nonetheless, it leaves me with a few questions:
(1) How long does it take a doctor, or set of doctors, to diagnose a persistent vegetative state? (Emphasis on persistent is intentional.) Frankly, I'd suspect that it takes more than the few hours it did in this episode. This seems very unrealistic to me.
(2) Again, the hospital here is trying to persuade the girl's father to take the girl off life support; there's an implication that they will succeed (he needs his cut of the organ profits to pay for his booze). Did any hospital, at any time, try to convince Michael Schiavo to take his wife off life support so that they could sell her kidneys on the open market? I don't believe so.
(3) This kid whispers in Latin (and, again, Hebrew). What does this mean? In fifteen years, the only time Terri Schiavo was reported to have said anything was shortly before her death, when a family sympathizer claimed that, when urged to say "I want to live," she managed to mouth "AH WAH". This was not recorded, nor witnessed by more than one person. The girl in the TV series spoke, of course, to a few million people ...
(4) Finally, we have this girl facing programmed termination one day after being struck by lightning. In Terri Schiavo's case, it was almost half a decade of unending and fruitless attempts at therapy on the part of everyone concerned before Michael Schiavo made the hard decision to terminate (and another decade before he managed to get that decision implemented).
What it comes down to is that I am not quite ready to believe that the resemblance between the girl in Revelations and Terri Schiavo is purely coincidental. But I'm quite willing to accept that it is extraordinarily exaggerated.
Well. Can I say anything good about this first episode? Of course. It includes John Rhys-Davies (in what, so far, is a very minor role). This is obviously a Good Thing. Rhys-Davies, you will remember, was the Egyptian foreman Salah in Raiders of the Lost Ark (another religious film, but one much more enjoyable) a few years back.
(He was also one of the main actors in Sci-Fi Channel's execrable Sabertooth. But about that horrible misstep, let us be charitably silent.)
(Final note, added later: Do I myself believe that the End Times are upon us? Of course! Republicans control the U.S. government, Osama bin Laden wanders at large, the Walden Books shop at Hilltop Mall has been closed, and I am afflicted with gas. Can anyone doubt the approach of Judgment Day, given such signs and portents???)
(1) It may be argued that I am excoriating a woman for behavior I would treat differently in a man. This is correct. If I saw a man behaving this way on TV, I'd probably throw a shoe through the screen.
(2) I've been told that one fairly well-known Christian sect had to update its prediction about the date of judgment four times in the twentieth century because of God's failure to arrange for Judgment Day to arrive on schedule.