Episode 15: The Omega Effect

Details, credits, errata: Episode 15: The Omega Effect is written by Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson. Our special guest is the wonderful Sarah Jones, politics writer for New York magazine and all-around solid citizen. Sarah wrote a fantastic piece for New York about Donald Trump’s tendency to bait evangelicals and that one time it seemed like he’d accidentally declared himself the Antichrist in the process. Here’s a profile of her in the New York Times.

Sarah suggested we watch The Omega Code, a 1999 thriller directed, if that’s the word I want, by Rob Marcarelli, and produced, financed, and distributed (to a solid profit and an eventual sequel!) by the Trinity Broadcasting Network, which is the channel with the preaching and the lady with the pink hair that you get over the rabbit ears. (Sam said it was a cable channel; he was wrong.) It stars—again, just doesn’t feel like the word I’m reaching for—Casper Van Dien, Michael York, and Michael Ironside, and man. It is an experience. You can have this experience for yourself free on the TBN website, if you so choose.

Our episode art on the website is Hieronymous Bosch’s John on Patmos (1490-95), as blessedly weird an image as any detail in the great Dutch master’s Garden of Earthly Delights, with an eagle in the bottom left, Mary and Jesus in the top left, and what appears to be a caricature of the artist as the Devil in the bottom right. That painting, oil on oak, resides at the Gemäldegalerie, Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin (which is to say, the paintings gallery of the National Museum in Berlin).

Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Omega Code is copyright 1999 TBN, whose website is arcane enough that I could not snag any audio excerpts, so all content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.

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