Kevin's Watch

Saw a trailer for this at the movies Life After People--I don't know how many times they'll show this but The History Channel is showing it encore tonight--starts in Chernobyl and goes on from there--looks pretty darn freaky.

I soooo want to watch this program! Unfortunately, it's not listed at all on the website of History Television (the Canadian counterpart to History Channel). Looks like it's only being shown in the US - at least for now. Bummer.

However, a couple of nights ago on the Discovery Channel, I did catch a similarly-themed special called Super Comet: After the Impact. The title pretty much says it all, eh? At first, it looked to be some sort of lame dramatization, and yes, there was some of that, but it ended up being pretty riveting anyway. Basically the "drama" portion showed what might happen in the immediate wake of a giant meteor impact (don't ask me why they didn't just call the show Super Meteor). It focuses on a select cast of survivors who try to stay alive on a drastically altered Earth. This intercuts with the other portion of the show, where a panel of experts from various disciplines explains stage by stage the consequences for the Earth's climate from the massive impact.

The show even had a Deep Impact-style start to the story, with Earth launching a huge nuclear warhead in hopes of stopping the deadly meteor. Of course, it failed utterly. (<-- laughs in face of total annihilation)

I caught the second half - pretty interesting. I just finished reading Dies the Fire, by S. M. Stirling, which is a scifi novel (actually series) about what would happen if all the technology in the world suddenly stopped working. Not complete human extinction, but in some ways very similar - abandoned cities crumbling and becoming overgrown... interesting stuff. Wish I'd caught the whole program.