The CBS crime drama Eleventh Hour, based on a rather smug, scientistic, and politically left BBC series of recent vintage, is a rather interesting program from the standpoint of the ideas it presents, which I will analyze in some detail in a future article.

The show manages to avoid the temptation to adopt facile attitudes that make for easy answers to complex problems, and its producers also refuse to indulge in the too-easy presentation of science as good and religion as a dangerous force impeding the unalloyed benefits of science. They recognize that science doesn’t have all the answers and that religion has a valid place in human life. In that regard the show is far superior to its BBC predecessor.

Also appealing is the program’s willingness to be realistic about which people, institutions, and motivations tend to cause problems in this world. Businesses are sometimes the source of the problems in the show, as is true in real life, but typically the problems are mainly caused by people’s desires for more than what nature and common sense allow.

For example, the pursuit of youth and beauty led to a horrific disease outbreak in a recent episode set among upper-upper-middle-class suburbanites, and sexual desires led directly to an outbreak of a different disease condition in an ep involving college students a few weeks earlier. This approach goes strongly against the assumption that efforts toward personal fulfillment are always laudable, which dominated the American culture since the end of World War II.

Also somewhat unusual is the fact that government is not always the solution and is sometimes the problem in Eleventh Hour even though the protagonists work for a government agency, the FBI.

A recent episode, "Minamata," went against the grain in another way: the villain in the episode—a man who has caused the deaths of several people—is a radical environmentalist in the department of fish and wildlife, who has dumped mercury into a lake in hope of having businesses blamed for and force political action that would put strong regulations on them to prevent further such outbreaks. Of course such regulation is entirely unnecessary but is in fact the product of the radical’s puritanical and impossible desire for humans to have no impact on the environment.

In essence he is an environmental terrorist.

What’s quite impressive about the episode is the observation that the presumed purity of the man’s motive does not in any way justify his actions, and the producers’ willingness to recognize that even the best-intended of actions can have horrible unintended consequences. In addition, the episode shows a woman who risks her life in order not to jeopardize that of her unborn child—and presents her choice as quite laudable.

In showing a left-wing environmental activist as a villain and presenting a mother who believes in the sanctity of an unborn child’s life as a heroine, the "Minimata" episode of Eleventh Hour was fresh, realistic, and insightful.

Eleventh Hour, "Minamata": Recommended

—S. T. Karnick