Salvation Will Have You Hoping for the World's End
CBS show is disposable summer television at its worst.
Salvation. CBS. Wednesday, July 12, 9 p.m.
In one of the first scenes of Salvation, an astrophysicist whose giant hydrocephalic brain is second only to that of Neil deGrasse Tyson is trying to explain to a bunch of dumb-cluck MIT students and professors that a meteor could hit the earth like at any second because even a cyclopean intelligence like his own doesn't know where every single meteor is all the time. "There have been at least five mass-extinction events in the last few hundred million years, people!" he shouts into the glassy-eyed faces of the bovine MIT fools. "Five!"
What's interesting about this—and, honestly, just about the only thing interesting about Salvation—is the show's conceit that Americans would be dumbfounded at the suggestion of a meteor striking the Earth. Tales of planetary fender-benders have been sci-fi bestsellers since a couple of rogue planets came our way in 1933's When Worlds Collide. (Spoiler alert: there was a sequel called After Worlds Collide.)
Hollywood alone has generated at least a dozen pictures in which inauspicious encounters with random space crap have variously left Earth battered by quakes and tidal waves (1998's Deep Impact), under attack by homicidal vending machines (1986's Maximum Overdrive), being devoured by hungry plants (1963's Day Of The Triffids), or besieged by zombies who can be vanquished only by locked-and-loaded Valley Girls (1984's Night Of The Comet). In the most terrifying of all, 1958's The Blob, a puddle of meteorite gloop threatened to destroy Burt Bacharach's career before it even began.
That gloop would be a towering dramatic presence if it came crashing into Salvation, the latest and least summer popcorn series from CBS. Insufficiently inane to be funny, way too sloppy and foolish to qualify as tense, it's a grimmest foretelling ever of the way the world ends: not with a bang or a whimper, just a strangling snore.
As usual in big-bang apocalypse tales, a lone scientist—in this case a nerdy MIT grad student named Liam Cole who's mapping the entire universe so people will stop running out of gas on their way to Ursa Minor—blunders onto the track of a meteor hot-rodding its way in from Jupiter, six months off.
Cole is reluctant to get involved with a lot of save-the-world-and-whatnot because he doesn't want to be distracted from porking this smoking little sci-fi writer chick he recently picked up (Jacqueline Byers, Roadie). Nerdporn, by the way, is quite common in Salvation, with hot girls constantly flopping down to be ravished, their heads spinning—whether in lustful ardor or despair that the human race is worth saving, I could never quite tell—at pickup lines like, "When two celestial bodies cross paths, it can change their trajectories forever."
Eventually, though, Cole teams with astrophysicist-tech zillionaire Darius Tanz (Santiago Cabrera, Big Little Lies), a Randian madman who believes the entire human race can be reconstituted from 160 survivors of the impending collision. They, naturally, will escape in rockets manufactured by one of his companies at a very reasonable price.
Their chief adversary is slithery Department of Defense official Harris Edwards (Ian Anthony Dale, Hawaii Five-O), whose bearing suggests a credibility unseen in military affairs since Saddam Hussein's spokesman Comical Ali was doing daily briefings in Baghdad. Wavering someplace between the two sides is Grace Barrows, a Pentagon press spokesman who would really love to help keep the Earth from being blasted into space confetti, you know, but it's just so exhausting being a single mom and all.
It seems the Defense Department has known all along about the meteor. And even though all its rockets keep blowing up on their launching pads, the Pentagon won't be deterred from its plan of shooting a transmogrifier—I mean, gravity tractor—at the asteroid to modify its path and send it into Zsa Zsa Gabor's orbit.
Counters Tanz: "We're not going to wait for the government to save us! We're going to save ourselves!" Well, at least 160 of ourselves.
In short, Salvation strongly resembles recent congressional budget debates, punctuated by occasional kidnappings, car chases and gunplay by an unidentified gang of thugs that apparently wants the world to end. Finally, the Nihilism Lobby gets its own show.
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Maximum Overdrive was spectacular and terrible.
“When two celestial bodies cross paths, it can change their trajectories forever.”
Can? It kind of has to, doesn’t it?
as long as no other forces act upon it.
New trajectories only last until the next celestial-bodies encounter. I learned this painful lesson observing my high school love life.
whose giant hydrocephalic brain is second only to that of Neil deGrasse Tyson
So, somewhere south of Carrot Top.
Change that to ANcephalic brain, and I might agree.
at least the Blob had Steve McQueen in it. the coolist 30 year old teen ever
“or besieged by zombies who can be vanquished only by locked-and-loaded Valley Girls (1984’s Night Of The Comet).”
Now that was a classic 80’s sci-fi parody movie. Valley girls ‘shopping’ at the post apocalypse Mall with Uzi’s.
And having a debate over which gun is better.
Night of the Comet is one of my favorites. The “smart people” shut themselves up in their super-bunker, and forget to close the vents.
How can you say The Blob threatened to destroy Burt Bacharach’s career? That was an awesome song. And I’d always heard it was responsible for launching his career. It gave him his second top-forty hit– and nobody remembers his first.
Lucifer’s Hammer is a superior look at something big hitting the Earth. Better than all the Hollywood shit shows.
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Eh, it’s Hollywood, and the viewing public is used to greater & greater thrills. That said, just a few years ago there was a meteor big enough to have an impact fo 20 Hiroshimas barely miss a similar-sized city (Chelyabinsk, Russia), and the last big one before that also hit Russia (Tunguska) in 1908, so it’s not an abstract threat. NASA is good enough to track anything big enough to cause an extinction event well in advance, but there is still work to be done in guarding against the ones that could level a city.
I’m from Buenos Aires, and I say kill ’em all!