Webseries: After Judgment

By Lisa Fary

After Judgment doesn’t think I’m a moron.

There’s no build up, no explanation – After Judgment just starts in the middle and then doesn’t go from point to point in a straight line. It’s jumps forward, backward, to the side, throwing everything it has at you to piece together yourself.

We know almost immediately that an apocalypse of some sort has occurred – the streets are vacant, save a few people aimlessly wandering or sitting on the sidewalks. Everyone is starting to lose it: a woman talks to her hand as if it’s a cell phone, a cop stands guard at an empty street corner, and most people seem to have taken to speaking in cryptic riddles.  After a couple of episodes, it’s apparent that this world operates under a very different set of rules.

I watched all of the available content on Sunday morning and it stayed with me all day. My mind kept drifting back to it, rolling it around.  And not because I knew I’d be writing a review of it later – I’m genuinely trying to fill in the blank spaces and figure out what’s happening to the characters.

The series has a professional look and doesn’t suffer from what ails many web shows: bad acting.  Most of the characters, well on their way to wacko, are appropriately detached and off-kilter after spending an inhuman amount of time in this upside down world. Main characters Steven and Michelle, played by Joel Bryant and Taryn O’Neill appear to be the only remotely well adjusted people, playing their roles with an apathetic acceptance of the circumstances.

After Judgment is not for passive viewing. It’s a puzzle for the viewer to piece together – the difficulty is that there’s no picture, no guide to how all the pieces are going to come together except what the viewer’s brain has pre-loaded. It’s very easy to read the story as a Rapture scenario, particularly after watching the companion series, Before Judgment, but I get the feeling that it’s a red herring for a couple of reasons.

First, there are elements in After Judgment that distinctly point away from Biblical judgment scenarios despite the similarities.  Second, the series isn’t preachy about sin and scripture and all of that (if it were, this would be a significantly different review).

The series is experimental in its format, and I appreciate that. With traditional television, we’re spoon fed everything we need to know in a linear fashion, for the most part. Flashbacks and flashforwards have been in vogue for the past few years, but After Judgment pushes that sensibility to the limit and moves forward without assuming that the viewer is a numbskull.

It was refreshing to watch a sci-fi show and not holler, “Are you freaking kidding me?” like I’ve been doing so often with television lately (I’m looking at you, Heroes; you, too, Caprica preview footage). I did enjoy After Judgment and will continue following it when new episodes premiere this Tuesday.

New episodes of After Judgment premiere January 13th at AfterJudgment.com and Koldcast.tv.

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.