The End is Nye premieres Aug. 25 on Peacock.
For 29 years, Bill Nye has been banging his enthusiastic drum for all things science. He’s been one of the most recognizable faces of “cool” science advocacy starting with his series Bill Nye the Science Guy (1993) which enlivened science programming with its zippy editing, fast-moving graphics, and engaging experiments. Nye’s latest, The End is Nye, is less frenetic in pace but just as engaging and watchable as he presents realistic natural disaster scenarios and how they pose huge threats to our planet. Within Disaster Simulator sequences, Nye is our guide in playing out how scientists, governments, and individual citizens would be impacted, and respond, in these worst case scenarios. While the overall content is frankly terrifying, Nye’s dry wit and genuine optimism about how science remains the key to our global salvation is actually a hopeful blueprint to fix our overwhelming environmental problems.
Each of the six The End is Nye episodes tackles a singular natural disaster like super volcano eruptions, a global Hydra storm, sun flares, and even the eruption of the Pacific Ring of Fire. From their standing set, the Disaster Institute, Nye walks us through the basics of the problem and the scope of the potential outcome so we have competency going into the Disaster Simulator sequence. Nye is essentially our ground level narrator for that as he joins a recurring troupe of actors who roleplay very relatable real-world scenarios. They act out the human mistakes made along the way — including cameos of executive producer Seth MacFarlane consistently playing the a-hole contrarian in every sketch — so the natural disasters unfold in the worst possible ways.
With the escalating seriousness of global warming and the subsequent impact of mass droughts, floods, and outsized weather events, Nye and writer/director Brannon Braga (Cosmos: Possible Worlds) make sure to ground all of the natural disaster scenarios with contemporary obstructions including politicization, mandate rejections, nationalism, and normalcy biases that might thwart reasonable decisions, reactions, or problem solving. In doing so, they make clear that while our planet and environment is constantly threatening our safety, we’re also helping it along with increasingly poor decisions. Nye then goes to the lab to use science to unpack how we can avoid succumbing to potentially planet-killing events.
If you love disaster movies, the series will most definitely be your jam because Nye, Braga, and their visual effects team stitch together real footage with high-quality green screen to approximate a Roland Emmerich level of devastation every hour. There’s everything from weddings buried in ash to subsumed towns and a coffee shop owner drowning in Houston to scratch that apocalyptic itch. If The End is Nye wanted to just shock and scare, there’s plenty in every episode to nudge you towards going fetal in a corner somewhere. It’s not a binge watch, for sure. But thankfully, Nye comes out of every Disaster Simulator sequence with a breakdown of what we can feasibly do now to reverse course, or at least diminish it significantly, with current science. There are demonstrable scientific paths laid out that Nye illuminates in their various stages of development, so there’s something tangible to support and advocate around by each episode’s end.
In tandem with the varied cinematic techniques and fun writing, Nye is very much the star of the show. Even in the bleak Disaster Simulator scenes, he’s very funny with his well placed acerbic comments and reactions to what’s going on around him. There are recurring segments like the Act of Cow which points to a moment in the past where humanity screwed up something major to serve as cautionary tales, and carefully constructed jokes that build to entertaining payoffs. Plus, it’s refreshing to see Nye’s personal frustrations get softly vented with regards to poor government responses and our inane citizen reactions to reasonable science suggestions. Listen, we all need a boot to the ass about our lazy behaviors every now and then and Nye is a reasonable messenger. He’s had a courtside view of what we have and haven’t done about climate change, sustainable building, and growing renewable energy. As such, the episodes clearly portray how humanity continues to prefer the paths of least resistance, or to lean into normalcy bias when it’s antithetical to our safety. Not to mention, we “love to burn things” on a level that’s killing us all, which should just doom us and our behaviors. But Nye keeps nudging science right back at us in new endeavors like The End is Nye so we can finally hear what we need to hear, and teach the next generation what steps to take next. Thank goodness Nye hasn’t given up on us.
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