Master of science
Freeman and ‘Wormhole’ will tackle tough questions
FEW PEOPLE on the planet speak about a potential real-life zombie apocalypse with the relish that Morgan Freeman does.
But the Oscar-winning actor isn’t plugging a horror movie. He’s talking excitedly about an upcoming episode of the Science Channel show he produces and narrates, “Through the Wormhole,” which kicks off its fifth season Wednesday at 10 p.m.
“Zombies do exist,” Freeman tells The News of that June 25th episode. “Start off with the lowly ant. There is a virus that can attack and drive an ant to the highest levels of a tree, where the ant will clamp onto a leaf and die. It will hang there as a fungus grows right off the ant’s brain and then rains spores on its fellow ants.
“That ant is a zombie and all the other ants are going to be zombies.”
Freeman helpfully adds that humans need not worry about that Ophiocordyceps fungus.
If and when a zombie infestation infects mankind, it will likely come from a new pathogen, like a mix of rabies and Ebola.
“It could spread across the globe in a heartbeat,” he says. “It would be the planet’s way of diminishing runaway population.”
Wednesday’s “Wormhole” focuses on a scary premise of a different kind: Is poverty genetic?
“I understand how it could be thought this is a very tricky subject,” says Freeman, who grew up poor in Tennessee. “But because I know my own relationship to it, I said, ‘Let’s do it, because I’m living proof it isn’t always the case.’ ”
If that isn’t provocative enough, later this season “Wormhole” will ask, “Will We Become God?”
“A few years ago, we did an episode called ‘Is There a Superior Race?’ ” notes executive producer James Younger. “We didn’t walk in thinking there is a superior race and we’re going to find it.”
Five seasons into the science show, Freeman and the writers haven’t run out of questions.
Even if some of them, concedes Younger, “are rather scary to say out loud.”