It’s been a while since I’ve watched a show and participated in the online community that follows it. This one seems to bring the most naysayer’s, conspiracy theorists, and others that decry it is highly scripted / thoroughly planned to the table to speak their minds. You watch the show and see the colonist reactions, their despair and desperation, then you turn to VH1 and see a bunch of d-bags on a ‘reality show’ and wonder why the Colonist look like they actually (mostly?) believe that the world has truly ended, this is their reality.
What comes to my mind is watching in college a movie about a ‘Social Experiment’ conducted in what I think was the late 70’s, you’ve probably heard of it. Students at a college were given two jobs in a basement at a school one group were prison guards, the others prisoners. After a couple of months, the experiment had to be shut down because the subjects were seriously believing that this was their new role in life, either in a jail cell on full lockdown, or a prison guard given near absolute freedom to exert their authority. I think The Colony touched on that vein in a sense, and cranked it up a thousand notches. The human mind is a wondrous tool but, it can shut out your rational thoughts when given the right opportunity.
The Colonist looked like they were not only food, water, and sleep deprived from searching for resources in their surrounding areas, but you could tell by looking at them they weren’t themselves we saw in the beginning of the show. I think things took a slight turn downhill on remembering that this was only a show, and they had to know they would never die, or get harmed without a large lawsuit was when they lost the doctor George Fallieras. He was taken off the show by the producers when he was wandering the basement of a hospital, they did this to really mess with the Colonists heads and see how they would react to suddenly losing on of their friends. I think that was the tipping point where the emotional toll finally gave out, and they seemed to accept their gigantic warehouse as their temporary living space until their evacuation truck could be used to get the hell out of dodge. Their last morning, when the marauders were given the green light by show producers to make a full engagement to take over their Sanctuary, as the show called it, I actually found myself silently rooting for them to kick some butt. I would have said it louder, if my wife wasn’t sitting next to me on the couch, and I didn’t mind the rolling of her eyes and deep sigh that she does when she remembers how much of a geek she married. Come on, who wouldn’t have wanted to be the one that was firing the home made flame thrower from the second story of the warehouse and blowing up the marauders’ car? Or throwing Molotov Cocktails off the roof? I would have been the first to sign up. I think the final morning, where they had to defend with weaponry, traps (the guy getting shocked on the electric fence was hilarious), and oil slicked doors was what all the naysayer’s wanted…every episode.
Defending yourself violence, so as to show what you think may be the most realistic interpretation of what would happen after a huge disaster was not the focal point of this show. This was a show about learning, which I think a lot of was going on by viewers like myself who always smirked that they could know how to survive, but don’t even have something basic like a knife and flint at home to start a fire. Yes, the odds were slightly stacked in their favor with three engineers, a doctor and nurse, a machinist, personal trainer, marine biologist, and two exceptional handymen/contractors. The addition of John C.’s wife toward the end seemed to help bring the colonist back together. Though they had the odds in brain power and know-how, I’m willing to bet a few hundred million Americans don’t, not in this digital day of age and highly introverted ‘me first’ society that lives off of McDonalds, and spends the rest of their time watching bad TV or on the internet looking for porn before their wife catches them.
I learned a lot from watching this show, which is one of the intentions that I think the brilliant creators, were trying to do. I may never need the knowledge in my life time, we may all end up being McDonald fed and online porn sedated until the day we die without a major catastrophe that ends the world. But, I am sure as hell glad that I now have some basic components that might extend my life span just long enough to find what is truly important in life after a world shattering epidemic that leaves humanity crawling back to the Dark Ages. That’s Shelter, Basic survival know-how, Companionship, Determination, and Accepting that you can do a lot with very, very little, if you put your mind to it.
How cool is that?