Emeka,
Thank you for referring me to the The Leftovers. I concluded my first binge watching session of The Leftovers last night with a viewing of the full first season of the show. The Leftovers is entertaining and interesting and I will be watching the second season sometime next week. However, I must admit that so far I have not found the "examples of the human compassion" that I crave. This is a very dark show. The very title of the showThe Leftovers seems to me to be indicative of the tone for the show. As art, it succeeds in disturbing one's thoughts, but it does not provide the moral and spiritual enlightenment that I crave.
I contrast what I have seen while watching the first season of The Leftovers with what I have seen re-watching the first season of Star Trek Voyager. In that first season, there is an episode entitled "Emanations" that left me pondering the meaning of the afterlife and the meaning of the soul. The synopsis of the episode is as follows:
Voyager detects the signature of an as-yet undiscovered heavy element within the ring system of a planet and organises an away team to investigate the cavern systems of one of the rocks. In doing so they discover numerous humanoid bodies, covered in a cobweblike substance and conclude that the cavern system is a burial ground. They discover that the burial ground is still in use when a 'subspace vacuole' opens and deposits a dying body shrouded in the webbing. Another vacuole begins to form and the away team is beamed out for safety reasons, but Ensign Kim disappears into the vacuole and is replaced by a female alien body, also wrapped in the webs.
Kim has been transported to a mortuary on the aliens' homeworld, and finds himself in a pod-shaped device, which the aliens open to release him. They identify themselves as the Vhnori, and believe that Kim has come from the "Next Emanation", their name for the afterlife. The pods, when activated, open a vacuole and transport the dead Vhnori body inside to the emanation. While being confined to the mortuary building for the time being, Kim meets a man named Hatil who has been scheduled by his family to go to the Next Emanation. Hatil does not wish to, however, and the confusion surrounding Kim's arrival to the planet re-inforces his doubts about the nature of the afterlife.
Meanwhile on Voyager, the Doctor revives the body of the woman who replaced Kim. She becomes hysterical when she realises that the afterlife is not as she had believed. Eventually she agrees to be transported into a forming vacuole in an attempt to be returned to her homeworld, but the attempt fails and she dies again. The woman's body rematerializes, swathed in the weblike substance, and collapses.
On the homeworld, Kim and Hatil agree to switch places, so that Kim can be transported back through a vacuole using the burial pod and Hatil can escape and live out his life in a rural village. Hatil wraps Kim in his burial shroud, and Kim is rescued by Voyager and revived after being transported through the pod. Later, he thinks about the accidental damage he may have done to the religious aspects of the Vhnori, but Captain Janeway reassures him that their scans picked up emanations of neural energy coming from the bodies of the deceased Vhnori, and a giant energy field made of thousands of these energy patterns is around the asteroid field and an indication to a possible afterlife.
*****
The thrust of the episode is an affirmation of the possibility that an afterlife does indeed exist and that one's journey in this space, time and dimension, is only part of one's journey.
Emeka, such a positive affirmation is what I yearn for these days. I especially grave such a positive affirmation being expressed in a show that I would not mind viewing with children and teenagers. The first season of The Leftovers did not provide that positive affirmation. Maybe I will find a little more of what I am searching for in the second season.
Peace,
Everett "Skip" Jenkins
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Hello Skip and all,
I would like to highly suggest you consider watching The Leftovers. Now I cannot say that every human encounter in the show will not be reminiscent of what you observed in The Walking Dead, but I am confident you will find many examples of the human compassion (in all its complicated forms) you crave within the show’s two seasons (a third and final season is in the works as we speak).
I’ll leave you with a synopsis of the show to wet your appetite:
Premise
The Leftovers takes place three years after a global event called the "Sudden Departure", the inexplicable, simultaneous disappearance of 140 million people, 2% of the world's population, on October 14, 2011.[7] Following that event, mainstream religions declined, and a number of cults emerged, most notably the Guilty Remnant.[8]
The story focuses primarily on the Garvey family and their acquaintances in the fictional town of Mapleton, New York. Kevin Garvey is the Chief of Police. His wife Laurie has joined the Guilty Remnant. Their son Tommy has left home for college, and their daughter Jill is acting out.[1] The second season moves the main characters to the fictional town of Jarden, Texas.
Source: Wikipedia
Let me know if anyone ends up enjoying the show as much as I did.
Much love
Emeka
I am a big fan of the zombie apocalypse show, The Walking Dead. For six seasons now, I have watched this highly unpredictable show not knowing who the "walkers" might get to next. While it is the most gruesome and violent show on television, for the most part, I found its violence (especially the violence perpetrated by the shows "heroes") to be acceptable within the parameters of what a zombie apocalypse should be. At least that is the way I felt about the show until the last two episodes. In the last two episodes, the "heroes" have engaged in acts of cold blooded murder against fellow human beings ostensibly on the premise that those fellow human beings were "bad" people who deserved to die and also because by killing these "bad" people the heroes would have access to more food and supplies and would therefore be better able to survive. What troubled me, is that the heroes seemed to "cross the line" by conducting a "preemptory strike" against the "bad" people even though those "bad" people had never really done anything to them. What kind of morality or humanity is being conveyed when the heroes kill people without those people having done them any harm?
I suppose that there will be many that "tsk-tsk" this question as pointing out that it is really just a television show. However, I have begun to wonder if television shows do not mirror the moral tenor of the times. Indeed, I have also been in my "Man-Cave" spending a great deal of time with Captain Janeway and the crew of Voyager. Star Trek Voyager left the air some fifteen years ago, but those fifteen years seem to be "light-years" away. To a man or woman, the crew of Voyager would have preferred to starve before killing another people for food. There is a moral tone to the show that is uplifting and is filled with the best expressions of humanity. It seems so sad that within the last fifteen years that the moral tone of our entertainment has gone from that shown in Voyager to that shown in the latest episodes of The Walking Dead.
Am I wrong in my perceptions? Are there shows currently on the air that show the best expression of our humanity? If so, please tell me what they are so that I can attempt to "cleanse" myself from what I have recently seen.
Peace,
Everett "Skip" Jenkins
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Yesterday was International Women's Day, a day for action and reflection.
However, aside from reading about the meaning of the day, I must admit that I did not do too much. You can read about what more notable (and active) others did and said at
As for me, yesterday evening, I confined myself in my evolving "Man-Cave", a space that once was a three car garage and began re-watching one of my favorite television shows ... Star Trek Voyager. Coming on the heals of my binge watching of the first season of Orange is the New Black, watching Star Trek Voyager with Captain Kathryn Janeway and Chief Engineer B'Elanna Torres, seemed to be a couch potato homage to strong women on International Women's Day. And the fact that Kate Mulgrew is one of the leading actors in both series is perhaps a hint that both series are very, very good.
In any event, I hope others may have had a more productive International Women's Day. If so, please do tell us about it . But until then, a belated International Women's Day to everyone ... and may we continue to go where no one has gone before.
Peace,
Everett "Skip" Jenkins
Class of 1975
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