Despite my occasional presence in these pages, I like spooky television shows. Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, Forever Knight, heck, even reruns of She-Wolf of London and Friday the Thirteenth—The Series make me cringe with glee and cancel appointments, opting for television instead! (In fact, I truly love the last one, with its bad Canadian actors and an endless array of cursed light bulbs, mankilling toasters, strangling dog-collars, lifeguard-drowning jack-in-the-boxes, Nazi ventriloquist dummies, and even the horrible, dreaded chipper shredder from hell.) Do I lose my skeptics card? Heck no! CSICOP refuses to give me one. But if they did, I could keep it anyway, as something happens to me when these shows claim to be scientific and blow it badly. Pseudoscience in the classrooms is bad enough without pseudoscience in B — Movies!
Which brings me to Prey, a one-hour series that premiered on ABC Thursday, January 15, at 8 PM EST. According to my local TV schedule insert. Prey is an "intelligent" and "literate" thriller. But is it? Prey begins with Sloane Parker, a bioanthropologist, portrayed by Debra Messing, an attractive actress known for the long-missed FOX Ned and Sucey sitcom (another of my favorites, by the way). We soon sec that a bio-anthropologist is a scientist who sits around in a lab on a college campus talking to computers and caged rhesus monkeys. (It's 2012, so the computers talk back. The monkeys don't though—that was another old movie and TV series.) Her mentoanother bio-anthropologist, is an expert who studies DNA evidence to track down serial killers, which must be what bio-anthropologists do when they aren't talking to computers and caged monkeys.
We soon discover, through roundabout means, that there are serial killers with very strange DNA. In fact, they are not human. Their DNA is 1.6 percent different from ours, which the publicist was pleased to tell me is a greater difference than between us and apes. (She meant chimpanzees, I'm sure.) In fact, its this DNA difference that makes these serial killers act like serial killers ("normal" serial killers, being another case). When her mentor is killed, by the nonhuman serial killers, of course, Parker is endangered, as she is one of the few humans to know of the existence of this "new species."
So why write about it here? Because of the following statement: "One thing I really love about our show is that it's not really sci-fi. We call it science fact," Messing publicly stated. Well, its not sci-fi, for sure, but the science was more accurate on Ned and Stacey. (Stacy's creepy husband Ned's hobbies included watching films of autopsies and operations.) Despite Messing's claims to love science and evolutionary theory, the science is generally wrong. About a year and a half ago, I reviewed The Burning Zone in these pages, a show that was so stupid, and yet made such pretentious claims to being science-fact oriented, that it made me want to throw shoes at the television. (For those of you who missed it, it featured snarly, fashionmodel scientists chasing intelligent hivemind vampire zombie viruses with flame throwers.) In its defense. Prey isn't nearly that bad. It's just that it isn't particularly good. And, sadly, it's most certainly not "literate" or "intelligent."
As for science, it is carefully explained that for 300,000 years Neanderthals ruled the Earth. This is illustrated by a painting of austropolithiccnes on the African plains. When Homo sapiens came into existence, they proved superior, competed with the Neanderthals, and drove them into extinction. This is because they competed for the same ecological niche. I count four major mistakes so far. In 2012, it seems, a new species of man (Homo ted bundy!) has been produced by the pressures of global warming. When one character points out that twenty years is not enough time for a new species to evolve, Sloane Parker responds, "Well, maybe global warming has been going on for a hundred years undetected." (!?) [In fact, there are several outdoors scenes, and, so far, 2012 looks pretty much like 1998, global warming or no.]
But forgetting the past, do the creators understand evolution? (And what about internal series logic?) First, nobody knows the other race exists, until Parker discovers them through blood testing. Yet the new species seems to be organized enough to have developed a cohesive philosophy based on the idea that they must wipe out the human race and take our place. The entire notion, I'm afraid, of a new species springing into place, achieving adulthood, and developing a group identity overnight without being noticed, even in Southern California, is very illogical. The time frame, be it twenty or a hundred years, is completely wrong for evolutionary theory to be relevant. Does the species share a common ancestor? Do they live together in their own place? If these arc our descendants and relatives, didn't they go to our schools and have to take physicals and such? If not, where did they learn English? Besides, if this species is so different from us, why do they look exactly like us to the point of all (so far) being Caucasian?
Perhaps, things will improve and clear up in future episodes if the show lasts, but it seems unlikely. There's probably as much chance of this show surviving as of my ever seeing a return of Ned and Stacey to prime-time TV.
So when all's said and done, does it matter that a bad TV show was put on TV? Probably not. Yet it's curious to think, as spooky entertainment. Prey would have been much more internally logical and entertaining if it had contained a supernatural race, vampires perhaps, living in the shadows, stalking mankind instead of a poorly thought out "new species." Yet, like the Burning Zone, somebody felt the public wanted a contemporary, intelligent, science-oriented action scries and advertised this as such. And that's good. Perhaps someday we'll see such a series. Yet, somehow, in both cases, the production crew found actual science to be beyond their grasp, and that's a bit disturbing.
—Peter Huston
Peter Huston is an author and freelance writer living in Schenectady, N. Y