So I caught this last night after mistakenly thinking that it was Tuesday and Scrubs would be on. Being bored and a little curious, I watched the whole hour.
First, some questions:
I thought Catholic belief was that Revelation (no s!) was supposed to be like a coded message of encouragement to other early Christians in the face of persecution. So why was a Catholic nun, or at least I think she was Catholic, trying to find proof of the end of the world?
What in the world kind of scientist is Dr. Massey? I thought physics, but then he’s giving a lecture regarding the plagues of ancient Egypt. Then he’s writing a paper involving sub-atomic something with something something.
Why did they say the girl who got hit by lightning was brain dead? She seemed to be doing just fine. Also, why did the hospital staff have video footage of the nun helping the girl write, but not of the girl writing on her own?
Why do I think this show will be insanely popular, sparking huge DVD sales and possible spin-offs (think Mole 666: Which one is the Antichrist?)
Because the writers are not Catholic nor do they know any way to research Catholic beliefs. That said, an individual member of the church has as much right to be a crackpot as any other individual, regardless of their job.
He’s a TV Scientist. Duh.
Because she was brain dead but a miracle occurred. There is no tape because the nun is faking the whole thing.
The show will be seen as an exploitative rip-off of **Left Behind ** and The DaVinci Code and fail miserably, leaving the field open for non-exploitative news-driven programming such as last night’s Dateline.
No, I haven’t seen the show and have no desire to do so. Life is too short to waste it on uninspired malarky.
Actually, I enjoyed it in a Stigmata, strange Catholic Mysticism kind of way.
Though this ep was very expositional, it did it in an engaging way – well filmed if not well written. Interesting characters. It of course is as doomed as science fiction on Friday night Fox so, go figure.
It’s made clear in the scene where Massey looks her up on the internet that she is considered a bit of a nutcase and even perhaps a heretic by some in the church for her beliefs. She is not mainstream.
I THOUGHT I saw that the paper he was writing involved subatomic something-or-other in neural synapses, so I would say that he is most likely in some field involving human physiology.
If that’s true, then why is he lecturing on ancient Egypt?
I also just noticed that there is another thread on this show from before it aired. Oh, well.
The show itself isn’t bad so much as just not very good. I’ll probably watch it again if I have time next week, but I always hate missing one episode and seeing the next and having no idea as to what is going on. Apparently the writer is the same guy who did Omen.
i asked my husband (who takes the paper when he leaves in the mornings) what the regular TV reviewer had to say about it. normally the reviewer can go into justifiable high flights of snark-dom which are things of beauty to behold. my husband said the article was basically “meh” – not great, not bad enough to be sure to miss. so i decided to watch it, simply because i occasionally find pseudo-religious stuff interesting. (if you haven’t seen Dogma, run get a copy now. as Catholics, it had us in stitches. and that’s in a good way.)
as for Revelations?
meh.
i found the whole arguing-about-who-gets-rights-over-the-braindead-girl’s-body portion to be distasteful in the extreme. (particularly in the wake of the whole Schiavo circus.) but what had me scratching my head while simultaneously putting a hate on the TV screen was, what bloody business did a couple of clergy members have in interfering with the decision to harvest her body organs??? none of them were even REMOTELY related to the girl or her father. just how did they get off on trying to countermand the hospital staff, particularly since it sounded like Dad had given them the go-ahead? that strained my credulity to far beyond the bounds of probability.
on top of that, i didn’t find any of the characters to be particularly likeable or sympathetic. the whole thing left me decidedly unengaged. i’ll give it a miss without a second thought from here on.
I don’t believe you can buy an organ. You can’t offer someone money for it. I think there are Federal and State laws prohibiting it. I’m sure that someone has done it, but a hospital likely couldn’t get away with it for any length of time.
The nun wore a habit that didn’t match any particular religious order I’ve seen. Then again, most nuns don’t wear habits all that often. A lot of them are like the characters in “Dead Man Walking”.
I’m recording it for a friend, but she has to give me the blank tapes. I think I will watch one more, but it may annoy me too much.
Oh yeah, I wanted to mention this. Who reads “Don Quixote” to a young girl? Did he have a children’s version or did he just want to read one enormously long bedtime story that would take him a year to finish reading aloud?
Or maybe he read it in Spanish? Or maybe they just watched a video of “Man of La Mancha”?
I kind of got the impression that the supposedly brain dead girl was in a Catholic hospital and that the nun had clout (think of the guy in DeadWood representing Randolp Hurst). If Bill Gates put a few billion behind me to indulge his obsession in whatever I could probably get my own forum on Straight Dope and all of you guys would be scracting your head saying WTF, that’s not supposed to happen. Money talks even at the end of days.
I was saddened to see John Rhys-Davies in a wheelchair. He’s been such a hearty bluff man (I remember him in Shogun) and it was a shame to see him thinner and and in a wheelchair.*
(I heard somewhere that he had become very ill after LOTR, so I don’t think the wheelchair was just an affectation for the character. I think they had to make a concession for him due to his illness.)
the wheelchair thing somehow reeks of “plot device” to me. YMMV. maybe i’ll even check out this thread, assuming it (or the show) continues, to eventually find out if i was right.
i certainly won’t be spending any TV time to do it.
I’d forgotten about that one. I kept thinking, “Don Quixote? Really? Don Quixote?” It’s a rather difficult story to read to a young girl.
The whole hospital scene made me angry. First off, what if the girl really were brain dead and not “killed” by God? Then when she dies completely and your strong-armed priest like people are blocking the doctors from harvesting her organs thus preventing other people from using them, who’s the crappy person then?
So, do you all think the baby Christ or the Antichrist?
Gimli was lecturing in the beginning, but at a book signing Dr. Scientist gave a brief talk on the ancient plagues of Egypt and how they could all be explained by a volcanic eruption.