Engrossing but also utter pants
In full knowledge that this column isn’t called ‘‘What to Watch Only Half Of’’, please indulge me while I try to make the case for a new Netflix show that is precisely and exactly 50 per cent pretty enjoyable and watchable, and 50 per cent complete and utter pants.
Surviving Death lives up to that oxymoronic title. The first episode, on ‘‘near-death experiences’’, is fascinating, revisiting welldocumented cases of people who have, medically, shuffled off this earthly plane and into the great beyond, only to be rudely summoned back – in one case after 37 minutes of ‘‘brain death’’ – and ‘‘resurrected’’ with no apparent symptoms of neurological damage, other than agreeing to appear in a Netflix special.
Near-death experiences are – almost – certainly a neurological and not a ‘‘spiritual’’ experience. That may explain why the shared memories of glowing lights, the collapsing of time and space and a sense of great peace and oneness with all living creatures will sound suspiciously similar to the best moments on the dance floor of Sub Nine, for anyone lucky enough to be young and feckless in mid-1990s Wellington city.
Me, I’m just happy that our brains pump out a chemical cocktail that relaxes us, brings us joy and sends us home in a cloud of glowing pink light at times of great stress and fear.
Any chance we could bottle that in time for my next dentist appointment?
The episode on reincarnation is similarly engrossing, although a lot less immediately explicable. Most moving is the story of the 4-yearold boy who suddenly began to recall the life and times of a fairly obscure 1940s movie actor and agent, Marty Martyn, in such minute detail that even the deepest of Google dives could not possibly have served it up. Now in his teens, the boy visits the elderly daughter of Martyn. What follows is so downbeat and anti-climactic, it plays as the complete opposite of what any charlatan or attention seeker might have planned, and is oddly convincing because of that.
What you should not do, under any circumstances, is waste a minute of your precious time on the ‘‘Mediums’’ episodes, which are just another sad parade of the shameless leading the guileless, as always. By the time the so-called ‘‘psychic’’ asked a bloke in his 70s whether his father had ‘‘passed’’ – and whether Dad had ever smoked tobacco (who didn’t, back then?), I could feel a near-death experience of my own coming on.
Although the ‘‘school’’ in the Netherlands that charges the gullible and the narcissistic thousands of euros to develop their ‘‘psychic gifts’’ is unintentionally hilarious, that none of the students can see it for the naked fraud it is, kind of says everything you need to know about the business.