2 out of 5

Swing and a miss – lame baseball metaphor brought to you by me.  I shan’t use it again?  Am I lying?  MR. BROWN?

At some point Derren seemed to mostly abandon the up close magic and mentalism shtick and his frequency of shows related to this shtick was dialed back, and it’s all very understandable as you can only vary upon this theme so much before either he gets tired of it or we as an audience call foul (which sorta happened when I watched his last “show” Svengali, so, yeah)… and thus we’ve gotten these Derren Brown ‘specials’ which sorta’ springboards from his interest in directing people’s motivations and combines it with his oft-repeated belief in believing in yourself and what you can see and know, and that goals are achievable with focus…  I find these specials most rewarding when he takes a sort of cynical approach to it.  I mean, it still ends up being touching in its own way – even something as outright finger-pointing as ‘the experiments’ is curtailed by Derren’s sense of responsibility and awareness that just crushing someone’s belief does nothing, so he either makes peace or tries to be sensible with his explanation of logical factors… very satisfying stuff.

But then you get the sappier stuff, the “overcome yourself” Derren Brown version of ‘the Secret’ in the form of Hero at 10,000 feet and Apocalypse.  Are the concepts interesting?  Absolutely.  In Apocalypse, Derren wanted to take a lazy s.o.b. and make him appreciate life.  So he finds a super unmotivated average dude who lives at home and tweetle-deets on his phone all day and uses the massive amount of resources he must have to stage… the apocalypse.  A zombie apocalypse, the stuff of much popular interest nowadays, and this is probably the most interesting aspect of the show from afar – how Brown can effectively stage something that should be worldwide.  I mean, yes, it takes a huge cast of zombies (we’re going with the ‘meteor strikes and causes an infection’ zombie route, which Derren introduces into his marks life by hacking his phone with news feeds and getting his friends and family in on the gig, of course, seeding talks on the concept and then putting our dude to sleep at a key moment, only for him to wake up in a hospital all alone and I’m still talking in parenthesis, aren’t I), and some well chosen, large sets, but this is still a really skillful application of space and resources.  A large budget could’ve been squandered, but they pull it off, and that’s pretty cool.

It’s also interesting to watch someone legitimately responding to this stuff… and just like in a horror movie, you’re stuck wondering, “Wouldn’t I stop and ask this?  Would I do that?” and etc.  So who knows.  The lead guy is sorta’ doofy, and Derren does play at narrowing down one candidate from a bamillion, so he suspects – or so we audience who believe in his ‘abilities’ – he suspects how someone will or won’t respond to stimuli…

Anyhow, this special is just a lot of bluster for nothing.  It’s way leading, and unlike 10,000 feet, where there’s a key moment where the primary has to stand up and take charge, this scenario doesn’t really rely on that.  There’s a couple of ‘save this person or run’ moments, but the choice seems pretty led… so while 10,000 was overly “humanity is amazing,” the payoff was stupid effective, whereas ‘Apocalypse’ feels like it would’ve ended in the same way regardless of what our lead guy said or did.  Too much money at stake to leave it too far open, perhaps.  An interesting experiment, but more TV-ish than anything else Brown has done, and probably the least experimental as well.