“I refuse to be a victim.” – Tim
After taking the first few episodes of Doomsday Preppers far too seriously, I was able to keep my anger in check and even found myself enjoying parts of “Back to the Stone Age.”
If you can look past the inherent nuttiness in the whole prepping thing generally, a lot aspects of the show are pretty damned funny.
Case in point: Tim Ralston. Tim is a father of two from suburban Phoenix who believes the end of the world will be ushered in by an Electric Magnetic Pulse (EMP), which will render all computers and electronic equipment useless.
Tim takes his sons out into the desert for weapons training and winds up shooting his thumb off with an assault rifle. Hilarious, right? It gets better. Tim passes out from the pain or shock or both, and the producers have to call in paramedics to rush him to emergency surgery.
Come on Tim! A real prepper knows there are no ambulances or emergency rooms in Armageddon. If he really wanted to prepare his sons for the end of the world, he would have sewed his thumb back on with a spool of thread and a rusty fishhook.
The next prepper profiled is Jason Charles, a firefighter from New York City. Jason claims to be preparing for an eruption of the Yellowstone Super Volcano, which he fears will spew deadly ash as far away as the Eastern Seaboard. It’s a ludicrous fear, and one that I don’t actually think Jason believes.
A source close to Doomsday Preppers told me that the show’s subjects are given a list of possible doomsday scenarios and asked to choose one. If the scenario you believe has already been chosen, you have to pick a different one. I imagine that Jason’s real reason for prepping is the fear of another terrorist attack on New York City, which is certainly more understandable than concern over a volcano thousands of miles away.
After Jason is Jules Gervaes, who isn’t really a prepper at all. Jules is simply a guy who has taken the local, organic food craze to the extreme. He has built a miniature farm in the backyard of his Pasadena home in an effort to ween his family off of its dependence on the supermarket. Of all of the preppers, Jules appears the least crazy and the most admirable.
The last subject on last night’s episode is Pat Brabble, “a churchgoing southern gentleman,” from North Carolina. Pat claims to be preparing for the downfall of society due to currency hyperinflation. Pat’s preparation techniques are funny as hell. First off, instead of stocking up on staples like water, canned vegetables and grains, Pat has a secret passageway in his garage that leads to a stockpile of junk food and Domino Sugar bags. God forbid he runs out of sugar for his sweet tea during Armageddon.
Best of all, Pat spends several hundred dollars a month buying bottles of liquor, which he thinks he will use as currency when society breaks down. To be honest, that actually sounds pretty cool. Never mind the Gold Standard, I’m all for Goldschlager Standard.
Some stats and info about Doomsday Preppers, “Back to the Stone Age”
TV SHOW – Doomsday Preppers
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 1, Episode 3
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – National Geographic
CAST – Michael Izquierdo, Stephen Mangan, Tim Ralston
GENRE – Reality TV, Docuseries, Trashtastic TV
This review was originally published on TV Geek Army.