Change Your Image
nelladarren
Reviews
The Outer Limits: Dark Rain (1997)
very flawed implementation of an interesting scenario
What if humankind goes sterile - that's an interesting premise to base a story on. But I have some serious issues with this one.
The beef I have with it is the way they see the mutant babies.
Very few people are still fertile and (so they say) all of the babies carried to term in the last 10 years have had mutations. The prospect of having a handicapped child is so gross to the main character that she recoils at the news of her pregnancy and wants to terminate even when she's told she's "the one" and the child will be fine.
Knowing your child will be handicapped is seriously sad for a parent, I'm not trying to make light of this, I'm not even on the side of those who condemn abortions in cases you learn prenatally of a serious birth defect that will give the child a short life of pain and suffering.
But seriously, in a world (IN A WORLD...) gone sterile, who wouldn't at least try - and the mutation-babies we get to see are just not overly pretty, they have skin problems and well, maybe they are mentally handicapped, maybe not, but they surely are no monsters. Because, newsflash: people with disabilities ARE NOT MONSTERS. People who aren't just PERFECT are not monsters. If you think like that it's a very good thing if you die out.
They wouldn't even have had to change the story so much - they could have mixed in that the evil government doesn't want non-perfect babies and that they'd kill them - that would give a mother a good reason to dread her pregnancy and evil governments tend to be *very* horrible.
That's actually another, minor point, I cringed at. For a world gone sterile they don't seem do be doing very much about it and you'd expect a much *greater* infringement on citizens' privacy and self-determination such as mass invitro fertilizations, treating people like cattle, etc - if they had focused on that (they grazed it a bit) it would have made a better basis for the issue of how women's bodies tend to be taken away from us, treated as the property of men.
Body of Proof: Lost Souls (2013)
a Halloween episode in March
The daughter of a creepy religious Zelot ends up dead after what looks like a fit of demonic possession or possibly drugs.
We get a spooky ancestor who killed his family in a house that looks like that one from American Horror Story and an angsty family who has Jesus and old teeth in their basement.
There's lot of atmosphere and for me this was a bit of fun I don't take seriously and didn't get the feeling the makers of this series did, either. I agree that it's annoying if TV tries to force-feed you "faith" - but that wasn't what I saw here. The "woohoo, or WAS it the devil after all" part felt just like good old ghost story fun.
I really like what they did with this series. It used to be embarrassingly lame in parts - now after they revamped it we didn't only get better characters but apparently also "weird" episodes. Bravo! Now sing, people. Have a musical episode. And then do a Film Noir time travelling thing.