Lentorama 2009: Great(?) Moments in Catholics on Television

April 13, 2005: It may be the end of the world as we know it, and I feel like I wasted six hours

A TV show based on the End of Days doesn't seem like a winner, which may be why Revelations turned into a six-episode miniseries. It probably does not explain why it was such an incoherent mess.

Your basic plot: scientist Richard Massey (Bill Pullman) is a skeptic of the highest order, and when his daughter is killed by a Satanist, he is integral in his capture and return to the US, where he is imprisoned awaiting trial. Massey is not a man of faith, which makes his later pairing with Sister Josepha Montafiore (Natascha McElhone) a bit of a chore.

Montafiore spends her time criss-crossing the globe looking for signs of the Second Coming, at the behest of a private, and very conservative, organization. Her work, often at the fringe of organized religion, puts her at odds with mainstream religious folks.

So what you wind up having is The X Testament, with Massey as Scully and Montafiore as Mulder. They get mixed up in some sort of plot launched by the Satanist character to either prevent the second birth of Jesus or hasten the rebirth of Satan. I don't quite recall from memory, and I don't think it was particularly clear at the time, either. All I do know is that it involved the kidnapping of Massey's son so he could spend a lot of time with a character played by Fred Durst. There was also some subplot involving astronomy that required the involvement of a professor played by Jonathan Rhys-Davies, who spent most of his time "lecturing" Harvard students in the most grandiose way possible, spouting generalities and nonsense.

(If that reminds you of Mohinder Suresh and his pointless narration on Heroes, it's not an accident, as the shows share at least some DNA thanks to producer James Chory.)

So to sum up, the plot was confusing, the characters often ludicrous and in the end it wasn't really clear what had happened. To some extent that's a decent metaphor for the book of the Bible after which the miniseries was named. Just one that isn't particularly fun to watch.