Aspasia Karras: Whether it's news or noir, there are too many zombies on TV

My avowed approach to television is: “Whatever you do, don’t switch it on.” I have a small, bobble-head Nancy Reagan sitting on my shoulder. She's armed to withstand temptation with her red ’80s power suit and enough hairspray to set a long-haired  dachshund. She  whispers fiercely “Just say 'No!'.” Because, to succumb is to find yourself drooling into your couch at 12.30am on a weeknight, eyes vacant, brain draining slowly from your left ear as you gather enough energy to answer the prompt on the screen: “Are you still watching?” Yes, you infernal monster. Yes, I am still watching. Play on. 

Although, am I really? There's nothing active about this verb. I'm now reduced to a passive content receptacle, an empty vessel into which episode after draining episode of so-called entertainment is poured. I think they make it all in a jungle in Columbia. I'm now just a puddle of a human being whose spine melted back in the ice age when we used to sit around the campfire on dark nights waiting for the punch line in the epic poem some bard was spinning. In other words, I'm biologically hard-wired for a good storyline. Ashoka, Odysseus, Thor — those chaps have been keeping us up past our bedtimes forever. 

But there is something truly rotten in the state of Denmark, my friends. My capacity for choice in the matter of my entertainment disappeared the moment I was peer pressured into thinking I was picking my own poison.  The algorithm knows me better than I know myself. And now one cliffhanger melds into the next as all semblance of time and space disappears. The highs and lows blend into a slough of despond as you mainline storylines with a dark desperation to return to those halcyon days of peak TV, when the narrative arc played out over weeks, maybe even years, instead of these long dark nights of the binge watch. 

I speak from recent, gruesome experience — my brush with the consequences of saying yes to the streaming Satan. It was last night, to be precise. By the time I came screeching in to the finale of some Icelandic horror show involving a volcano it was too goddamn late — quite literally — to claw back my self-respect. I'd hit rock bottom.

Let me tell you about that volcano, Katla, named for a homicidal 12th century milkmaid who did away with a shepherd (who'd stolen her magical breeches) in a great vat of whey. She then jumped into a crevice to escape detection and set off the violent cycle of volcanic eruptions that have plagued the village at its foot for centuries. True story. In the vat of Netflix heroin in which I've been drowning, the volcano has been exploding for a year. This isn't entirely unusual in Iceland. Anyway, the frontier town at the infernal foot of Katla has been abandoned by almost all its inhabitants, who cannot realistically continue to live in the constant ash storms and the horrific post-apocalyptic landscape where the shells of their former lives are now covered in a grey pall of  shattered dreams and hopes. Nature! Not to be underestimated. She'll bitchslap the best of us. So far, so properly expressing the existential angst of the present, global warming age with its constant unravelling of climate certainties. 

But then, in the manner of the noirish Scandi’s, who know their way around addiction in serial formats, the volcanic version of swamp thing emerges from the bowels of hell and on her heels emerge other shadow things — ghosts and embodied versions of the dead and the living walking this scorched Earth — not quite human but human enough to pass. The sound effects of these spontaneous zombie births from the depths of the volcano and the collective unconscious are spectacularly chilling — at once alien and eerily familiar. I was hooked. 

Historically speaking, Katla, the volcano, did this:  in 1625 another maid of  the area had a brush with just such a changeling zombie baby. The evil fairy folk living under the volcano like to play with the wounded psyches of townsfolk foolish enough to continue living in the shadow of an exploding volcano. After the maid exposed her out-of-wedlock baby in the hopes that her premarital activities would not burden her for the rest of her days she regretted her infanticidal impulse and went to collect the baby, which was still alive. Sadly, it's not the baby she'd left behind. It was a changeling that later extracted its revenge as a teenager, not by staying out all night and sowing its own wild seeds, but by matricide. 

Don’t worry, I'm not going to spoil the plot in case you're also inclined to mainline some crack tonight. But I am struck by my algorithm. I don’t know what's happening in yours but mine is on sci-fi overdrive. Everywhere I look superheroes are getting jiggy with the supernatural. UFOs are with us, the planet has been destroyed countless times (mostly by our own hand), there's an endless supply of time travel, time loops, parallel universes, mythical creatures and worlds unfolding at one infinitesimal remove from our present reality. New moons, old moons, the other side of the moon and witches to build a huge pyre of paranormal dreams on. Plus, documentaries purporting to give A-grade evidence for all the above mentioned mysteries, fables and visitations presenting science-adjacent, subatomic, quantum leaps of faith as fact.

What"s going on? Perhaps the actual world as we know it is too bloody much. The news sucks, and the people running the place give serious changeling energy as it is. I mean, are Donald, Elon, Putin and Kim even real or did they emerge from the gloop under the volcano to march implacably across the ashy plains, replicants one and all. Are they just a manifestation of our darkest impulses and worst nightmares? Are the sad little rocket men  the unspoken id of our time, driving our unconscious, grim impulses out into the open? I think I'm onto something here. I've clearly got to get a grip and embrace the “no” in November. Watch me do it! This is me stepping away from the TV remote. 

This article originally appeared in Sunday Times Lifestyle.