Parallel Madness!

This episode of The Indicator informed me of an Amazon Prime show called Counterpart in which there's a world parallel to ours in which life is lived in the shadow of a deadly flu outbreak. Apparently, the post-pandemic world in the show looks "disturbingly similar" to the world many of us are living in now.

The show stars the inimitable J.K. Simmons, so I might check it out.

Then there's there are the murder hornets. An invasive bug from China that manifests itself in Washington State and starts to move across the United States, wreaking havoc on the European honey bees that have not evolved evolutionary immunity to the creatures.

Parallel madness.

Years ago, I pitched a show to Netflix set in an alternate reality. 

Donald Trump runs for President and Russian hackers employ social media algorithms to make it so. Then "President Trump" has to deal with a deadly zoonotic virus that invades our great nation. It comes from the far reaches of China-- from a bat or pangolin-- and Trump and his incompetent federal government have to deal with the medical and financial crisis. 

Chaos ensues!

It's a satire, of course, but Netflix didn't get it. They said it was absurd, and not in a hip, surreal way. More in a sad and stupid way. 

3 comments:

zman said...

Perhaps the most Dave post yet in this new multi-sentence format.

zman said...

Parenthetically, here is Justin Schmidt's take on the murder hornet:

https://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/slim-chance-of-so-called-murder-hornets-becoming-established-in-canada-experts-1.24131477

I read his book "The Sting of the Wild" and I thought I reviewed it on G:TB but I can't find it. You (Dave) would like it, despite some bad sentence structure, but most people would find it dull.

Dave said...

you definitely told me about that book . . . maybe it's in a comment here.

A New Sentence Every Day, Hand Crafted from the Finest Corinthian Leather.