The Future is here, but it is not what you think: #ThePath

Reviews

If I could describe this tv-show with one quote, I think the most fitting would be F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s “So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness” from All the Sad Young Men (1926). I am probably biased, as I’m only focusing on one character in particular (Eddie Lane), but I can stretch this a little and make it fit to some other members of this series and the religious movement it portrays. What is this series though? The Path. Yes, I am finally going through my to-do list and this tv-series has been finally ticked as “binge watched”. Moreover, the third season in up on Hulu.com now, so once my binge watching session was over, I continued watching it religiously (duh) every Wednesday, which is the day it airs on the platform. May I also say that, somehow, I felt drawn to it? Yes of course I can, who can stop me? So yeah, I did feel the urge to watch this show although the title was not really convincing. Eventually I fell in love. They got me at “Aaron Paul” and could not stop watching ever since.

thepath

The show is set in Upstate New York, no wonder something told me I had to watch it. I lived in Saratoga, NY and the surroundings you detect through the setting of some of the episodes were strangely familiar and strikingly real. In LA, one of my previous house windows opened above the parking lot of the big blue building belonging to Scientology: I was always curious to know more, just for the sake of it, so I started reading something about this cult. Later, when I read “bla bla bla the Meyerist movement, a sort of Scientology” going through the series synopsis, I couldn’t help but smile, and just yield to the excitement of watching… The Path. I have to be honest (as always after all): watching the first couple of episodes I actually wished this movement were real: the bliss on the serene faces of these Meyerists, these “real believers”, the philosophy they believe in, their lifestyle and their manners are as charming as the devil, but they could also be -unfortunately- a sort of utopia. You see right away that everywhere you go, even among the shiniest commune that may exist in this world, there is always something rotten hiding behind those who are in power. I’ll go straight to the A|R because the whole point of all this is to show you how interesting this TV-series may seem.

CdzZTPyXEAAWa_j

The Path

Genre: they want to call it just “drama” as cult drama would not be appropriate
Created by: Jessica Goldberg
StarringAaron PaulMichelle MonaghanEmma GreenwellRockmond Dunbar, Kyle Allen, Amy Forsyth, Sarah JonesHugh DancyPaul James
Watched on: HULU
Two Seasons, Twenty-three Episodes binge watched in: One week, plus season 3 airing now (13 episodes)

Transparency, honesty, and the research of The Light is the focus of this community, willing to fight negativity in order to receive enlightenment, and to be ready for The Future, which is near and apocalyptic, basically a sort of Judgement Day. In order to climb The Ladder in the sky -that is apparently made of fire and it goes from the Earth to The Garden, i.e. Heaven, the followers of the Meyerist movement have to go through 10 stages, each one represented by a Rung (of the Ladder) while following the Light and The Truth, which is a way to say God, in my humble opinion. Cute is the symbol of the movement: an eye with eyelashes that look like the rays of a shining sun. I mean, wouldn’t you think too that this is kind of cool? I would totally start believing in this Truth and I would totally be an adept of this cult. No wait, “it is not a cult, it’s a movement!” as they repeatedly say whenever someone accuses them of being another among the many religious cults in the world. And then Cal happens. And no, Cal does not stand for California. Cal is R10, the last stage of the climb and he is a charming fellow in disguise. Tormented by a past he cannot (or does not want to) recall, he seems to be acting weird and completely far from the movement’s directions: he drinks, he kills, he lies, he basically does everything wrong, but he preaches correctly. Duh.

the-path

The story takes a wrong turn when Eddie goes to Peru, where the founder of the movement eventually moved to pursue his final passage into the Light (he shouldn’t die as a normal mortal as far as they are concerned) and to look for answers and connections, in order to finish what appears to be a sort of Meyerist bible or book guidebook he personally wrote. In Peru, Eddie goes through a ritual practice which uses ayahuasca, referred to as the juice of “sacred herb,” and starts having visions: there is no Light, Steve is dying, the movement is based on mere lies. When he gets back home to Sarah and the other members, Eddie says nothing and tries to keep his secret, as he starts to not believe in anything, anymore. From now on, what once was a slightly slippery slope kind of situation, turns into a vortex of lies soaking up everybody’s life and basic certainties.

What happens then? Watch it yourself. I promise you though, that after a couple of episodes, you’ll start getting familiar with their verbiage, and I want to help you a little prior to your binge watching session: when they talk about The Ladder they are referring to their foundation. The reason why they want to be part of this movement can be found in the 10 different rungs of this Ladder, each one indicating the “level” of awareness and of “enlightenment” of its members. A Possible is someone who is interested in the Meyerist Movement and cannot be considered an IS -ignorant systemite- anymore. A Denier, as Eddie will be (no spoiler, you’ll see), is someone who decided to leave the movement because he or she does not believe any longer, and to the eyes of a Meyerist, this is really, really bad. To avoid and beat the deniers, basically. Then there’s what confused people at the beginning, making them believe the show was about Scientology: the Meyerists use a machine, similar to the Scientology’s E-meter, which is necessary to re-align the spirit of the believer after a damage (emotional trauma) or a sinful event, which is called Transgression. 

Liminal Twilight

Catholics have confessions, Meyerists have the Unburden: basically the same concept of purging and confess, in order to expiate your sins. You can resist to this practice, or you can offset, doing some good to overcome what you did wrong. Then something really funny (to me) comes up:  the IRP. What and why is so funny? Well, the IRP to me was the Independent Research Project I had to write in Graduate School to get my Master Degree. We “literally” did spit blood, it should have been our calling card to apply for a doctorate, long story short, it was a pain… in this show, IRP is the Infidelity Rehab Program. I don’t know, is it just me laughing? I bet this could be at least as painful as my IRP was. If you cheat, you may be forgiven (I’m sorry, but I’m still laughing…) but you have to go through counseling and purges and some other bla bla bla. I swear, I can’t stop laughing but …whatever. I would rather go through Realignment a thousand times then, at least you’re forced to eat fruits and vegetables (which is something that sounds pretty awesome to me!) and you are not allowed to leave your assigned room in the compound (the area assigned to the movement for its members and families to live in). Basically a vacation to realign with your soul. I’d take it anytime.

The Red WallI will totally skip on the fact that Kyle Allen, who plays Eddie and Sarah’s son, is the spitting image of my beloved Heath Ledger so it is definitely worth watching the show at least for his presence (and beauty), or on the fact that Prison Break‘s C-note, plays the role of an undercover FBI Agent who gets involved in the movement, let’s just say, on several levels… and we’ve already said that it is definitely worth watching because of the themes and the atmosphere in it, so I would only add the soundtrack for now -good old music-, oh and …did I mention Aaron Paul?

 

 

How to survive a plane crash #Travelers

Reviews

No. I do not know how to survive a plane crash, and if I knew, it would make my life so much easier. This is just one of the things I wanted to keep as useful information after my binge watching session of Travelers, on Netflix, this spring.

will and graceJust like everything that happens in my life, one of those weekends throughout the academic year, when I had tons of stuff to do which automatically turn to be NOTHING (only in my head though), I was scrolling down my Netflix account menu to find something cool to watch. Honestly, not the title in itself, but the presence of Eric McCormac as the main actor, just captured my attention, and I clicked on the play button to see if this time, after (NBC) Will and Grace, and another favorite, (ABC)  Perception, he would disappoint me. It did not happen. Obviously.

perception

What the TV-show is about you will see keeping on reading, reaching the “alternative” review, because for now, I just want to underline how, for whatever reason, everything lately seems to throw hints on something wrong with the world we live in and similar truths, ehm I mean, bs. Which are not bs if we believe when they say we are going through a time of change, that the Age of Aquarius is at its dawn of whatsoever. According to Wikipedia (lame, I know) Aquarius “is associated with electricity, computers, flight, democracy, freedom, humanitarianism, idealism, modernization, astrology, nervous disorders, rebellion, nonconformity, philanthropy, veracity, perseverance, humanity, and irresolution”, and what more than myself watching this kind of TV-show fits better to confirm that definition? Just consider this: for any respectable FBI agent on Earth, we know that some of them work under cover, leading a double life: they work to save the future from the mistakes of the past/present, they take care of humans and their families, they interact and they teach something in order to evolve, while using knowledge that they acquired with time and experience. Thanks to social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all, we can portray a scenario of what our lives are right now, sharing anything that is possibly imaginable. But then, we realize that reality is not what it seems. The media world is packed with fake profiles, not fake per se, but because people share parts of their lives that are not real, there are missing information or settings that are created in order to show a more appealing portrait of ourselves.
Doesn’t this lead us to a righteous social judgment? We are allowed to wonder if what is shown via the media can or cannot be reliable. What will the future generations get from all this? Will it be a distorted representation of how our lives are today? We share pictures of our lunches as if we were dining in the most prestigious restaurant on the planet, when we are actually tweeting from a comfortable bed,  filled with bed bugs, in a hot Californian evening in our overpriced AirBnb room. Is there a lesson we have to learn from this? Well, at least we saw that, to survive a plane crash, we have to find the remotest spot in the back of a plane, and this may be a fact. Any volunteer?

Travelers

Genre: they want to call it “science fiction”
Created by: Brad Wright
StarringEric McCormacMacKenzie Porter, Nesta Cooper, Jared Abrahamson, Reilly Dolman, Patrick Gilmore
Watched on: Netflix
One Season, Twelve Episodes binge watched in: one afternoon & one half night.

Travelers1-2Agents from the future are sent back to our present to stop catastrophes and massive accidents. Grant McLaren (Eric McCormack) an FBI agent who tries to track down suspicious criminals, eventually becomes one of the Travelers himself when, right at the moment of his death, falling from an open window, his body gets taken over by the chief of the travelers’ squad. The Travelers have protocols assigned and missions to accomplish, in order to not really care so much for those people who were in their lives before “transforming”, but eventually they do. Apparently empathetically, all Travelers find a connection with those around them from, who do not know they really are. Interesting is the way the Travelers move through time and space, called T.E.L.L. (time, elevation, longitude, latitude) technology. Right a couple of seconds before the earthly death of their host bodies, the agents coming from the future take their place without leaving a dead body behind. They become the person of the present, with their life, family and friends, and only the other travelers know who they are.

eric

The transfer of their consciousness is possible thanks to GPS and the 21st century technology, and social media are used to gather information about their hosts people’s lives. Along with travelers there are messengers; any child can be one, taken over for a few seconds, released right after, thanks to their pre-puberty condition of being malleable and flexible. Season one was over and I am waiting for season two to be released. Is it worth watching? Yes. If not just for the presence of Eric McCormack who excels in every role he plays, it is quite fascinating to wonder why, by the first half of the season, you already start sensing that, no matter when -in terms of centuries- you live, there will always be someone who is more worth saving than someone else. It is always a matter of power and social hierarchy, isn’t it?

Screen Shot 2017-07-29 at 5.00.15 PM