When did Left Behind "jump the shark"?
Inspired by the Jump the Shark website, I'm going to invite everyone to post their comments about when did the Left Behind series, which started out so awesome, start to rapidly deteriorate.
Here's the thing that came to my mind as I thought about the books and perused back through them...
- Never JumpedThere's probably more: after all, this was sixteen books, not counting the kids series and the two "political" and "military" series (meaning that Left Behind has something like fifty books total). I'm sure there's some other good ones there somewhere. Feel free to discuss and add to the list!- First Chapter of First Book
- The Movie
- Chloe wants to murder her baby
- Guns, guns, guns
- Jesus shows up looking like a professional wrestler
- The "Tribulation Force"
- Carpathia kills the pig and bathes in its blood
- Birth (Kenny Bruce)
- They Did It (Carpathia and Hattie)
- The "Loyalty Enforcement Facilitator"
- Chang gets the Mark of the Beast against his will
- Too much "copy and pasting" straight from the Bible
- Tsion's life is saved because he has to go "do number-one"
- Viv Ivins
- "World War III"
- The hokey "radiation/electromagnetism" theory about the Rapture
- Chaim's whining
- Hattie's whining
- Too many "6"s
- Leon Fortunato
- The "frogs"
- A website without any traceable IP address gets over a billion hits a day
- Too many flat pronouns (Tsion Ben-Judah, Annie Christopher, "The Place", "The Truth" etc.)
- The Remnant... 'nuff said
- Pontifex Maximus Peter Matthews and his ridiculous costume
- The Prequels
- Buck and Chloe's "cookie" thing
- Too much discussing the geography of Chicago and Colorado Springs
- The Video Game
2 comments:
Out of your list, I feel the most likely candidates for Jumping the Shark moments are:
- Chang gets mark of beast against his will
- Viv Ivins
- Pont. Max. and his ridiculous costume
- The Prequels
Here are a few new possibilities:
- The sudden and senseless death of Ken Ritz, who was just becoming the series' coolest and most resourceful character right before he was killed
- Believers running, en masse at superhuman speeds, in Glorious Appearing
- Can't remember his name, but one minor character believed to be long dead, all of a sudden, re-appearing alive and with only half a face
- The stubbornness of Chaim and/or Hattie, as opposed to their whining
- Too many odd or uncreative names for things (solar cellular, United North American States, United South American States, United Great Britain States, United Indian States, United _____ States for every other region, I can't remember what it was but there was a name of something with two words that rhymed in a cheesy way, etc.)
You're thinking of Steve Plank: Buck's former boss who everyone thought died in the earthquake. Yeah it was a pretty hideous description of what he looked like afterward.
The scene in, I think it was Nicolae, where Tsion and Buck are fleeing Israel and Tsion eludes capture because he had to step away and urinate on the side of the road was the biggest "early warning" in my mind that things were not all well with this series. That was soooo... odd.
The real JTS moment for me, though, was either Chang getting the marke while pinned down, or Chloe asking for a lethal injection to give her baby, which made NO sense whatsoever (and that plotline lasted less than an entire book, even). The Chloe one especially really "jerked me out" of taking Left Behind seriously anymore.
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