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Wednesday, Jan 7, 2009
Aimed at the Bible Belt and piggybacking on Schiavo and the pope, NBC's creepy, pandering "Revelations" miniseries paints nuns as heroes and rationalists as the bad guys.
Apr 13, 2005 | In a scene from the first episode of the six-part miniseries "Revelations," which airs Wednesday at 9 p.m. on NBC, several doctors are sitting around in an eerie hospital room, one that's even darker than those autopsy rooms on "CSI." Their faces lit from below like demons, the doctors confer about a comatose teenage girl who was struck by lightning, presumably for wearing low-cut pants. The assembled are anxious to "harvest" the girl's organs -- not to save lives, of course, but to make the hospital some cold, hard cash. The girl has been spewing lines of Scripture in Latin and drawing odd little maps whenever there's a thunderstorm, but the doctors aren't even curious about that. They just want her kidneys!
Doctor No. 1: So she is literally brain-dead?
Doctor No. 2: It's called a persistent vegetative state ...
Doctor No. 3: Which falls into an unfortunate area of debate. Right-to-lifers would claim consciousness in brain waves on a night crawler!
If this little snippet reminds you of any recent public debates, not to mention that scene from "Jesus Christ Superstar" where Caiaphas and the priests are plotting against Jesus, that's because doctors, scientists and realists -- or "devil's advocates" as our heroine, Sister Josepha, calls them -- are the clear enemies in "Revelations." While screenwriter David Seltzer claims to be a "science buff" and the teasers for the next episodes say that the endgame phenomena unfold "in a mystery that combines both Science and Scripture," it's clear who's on the side of the righteous here: The bright-eyed nuns and believers mounting a global search for Jesus not only speak in sweetly poetic verses, but have a hazy glow about them. Their scenes are warm and yellow and bright, while the hospitals and prisons and airports are cold and blue-green and populated by creepy strangers.
Welcome to the latest nugget in a hailstorm of fundamentalist invective, from "The Passion of the Christ," to Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' bestselling "Left Behind" series, in which skeptics and agnostics are left to fight for their lives against the forces of the Antichrist (centered in Baghdad, led by the head of U.N.), while true believers are whisked away to the comfort and safety of heaven like the lucky winners on "The Apprentice," whisked off to shop for $600 Jimmy Choo sandals at Bergdorf Goodman. All of the divine signs point to the same conclusion: The rest of us, it seems, are headed to the boardroom.
But what better way for NBC to round up a full month of hand-wringing and candlelight vigils for Terri Schiavo and the pope, than by ushering in a miniseries sure to capitalize on the fear whipped up by these two deaths, not to mention more terrorist arrests, the tsunami disaster, the war in Iraq, you name it? "All the signs and symbols set forth in the Bible are currently in place for the end of days," breathes Sister Josepha, and we believe her, because she looks like the Virgin Mary, except with cheekbones like Isabella Rossellini's. But is she talking about the latest tragedy in Baghdad, or the upcoming made-for-TV movie "Locusts"?
Like "Locusts," which airs Sunday, April 24, at 9 p.m. on CBS, surely "Revelations" is just another bit of crassly commercial entertainment to flesh out May sweeps, custom-fit though it may be for mass Bible Belt consumption. After all, Seltzer has been importing creepy Bible verse into the horror genre since he wrote the hit movie "The Omen" in 1976. As dark and foreboding as his series might be, Seltzer must have a sense of humor about it all.
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