Death to 2021

Death to 2020 <<

Director: Tennyson, how do you want us to refer to you in the captions?
Tennyson Foss OBE: I expect you want to know my preferred pronouns. Well, I don't have any. I don't have any. I do not dance the wokey-cokey. So you can call me whatever you like.
Director: Oh, I was just checking whether we should put OBE after your name.
Tennyson Foss OBE: No, you should. You must, in fact.

Pyrex Flask: Just a little bit of Pfizer before we start...

Narrator: Constitutional order is restored when, in a reverse exorcism ceremony, the ghost of Joe Biden is installed in the White House.
Joe Biden: Democracy has prevailed.
Narrator: Biden promised an intensive program for his first 100 days in office, just in case he didn't make it beyond that.

Gemma Nerrick: First I thought the new brand names were terrible and that they could've come up with something catchier than Delta. But they said they'd looked, and there isn't anything catchier than Delta.

Narrator: This new wave of virus variants leads to a new wave of lockdown variants and a new wave of depressing news reports. People are forced once again to adapt their lives to save lives.

Narrator: As the lockdowns continue to bite, many turned to television for escape, as you are doing now. The first TV hit of the year is Bridgerton, a gritty exposé of how wealthy and good-looking people had sex in the past...

Madison Madison: So diverse, yet so boring. You know, I would have called it "The First Woke Oscars," but most viewers slept through the whole thing.
Narrator: The new look ceremony features many innovations, including, for the first time in Oscar history, a moment of reflection for those who have been canceled this year... Matt Damon... Justin Timberlake... JK Rowling... Chrissy Teigen... Dr. Seuss... Armie Hammer... Dumbo... Gina Carano... Mr Potato Head... Sia... Pepé le Pew...

Penn Parker: As part of his sentence, Chauvin was banned from owning firearms. But he didn't shoot George Floyd. If the court really wanted justice, they should have chopped off his fucking knees.

Narrator: With life on Earth looking increasingly precarious, thoughts turned to how to protect our most beautiful and precious resource... Billionaires, the mega-rich star in self-funded, self-promoting, self-indulgent space extravaganzas, shooting themselves as far from the dying planet as coins will allow.

Narrator: Days later, more astonishing scenes. As the gentrification of space continues, another rich kid's dream is live-streamed as ultra-billionaire and world's most eligible skull Jeff Bezos blasts off inside a rocket-powered Freudian metaphor, every suggestive moment captured for a smirking public.

Penn Parker: Trump never seems to have properly gone away. If there is a deep state, they're not doing a very good job.

Penn Parker: I enjoyed watching it on the big screen. And as a thriller, it was genuinely tense because a dry cough kept echoing around the movie theater.

Director: Would you consider playing the role?
Tennyson Foss OBE: Well, there is not much point in me even applying, is there? Because they do not want people like me anymore. Now it is James Bond double-woke-seven. The name is Bond, James Bond. He/him.

Tennyson Foss OBE: Well, I haven't seen it, and I don't intend to. It is ridiculous, this liberal Taliban tearing down great men like Bond as if they were mere statues. And, of course, you can't even call them great men anymore. No, no, they are women without cervices. They are destroying everything, and I mean everything.
Director: Who do you mean by "they"?
Tennyson Foss OBE: They, them.
Director: And are those their pronouns?
Tennyson Foss OBE: Oh, do fuck off.

Tennyson Foss OBE: Here we go again. Another TV drama with an absurdly diverse cast. All Asian? Really? When does that happen in real life? It's simply not believable. And yet, of course, the baddies are privileged white men. How does that reflect society?

Snook Austin: For a few hours, with nobody validating their existence, many users assumed they had died.
Penn Parker: None of us could use social media. It was like being Donald Trump for an afternoon.
Gemma Nerrick: It was a horrible few hours. I kept staring at my phone, wondering if any messages would come through. None did. So it was like a normal night, actually.

Narrator: Social networks come under heavy media scrutiny, in particular, their ability to ruthlessly monetize anger and despair even more efficiently than Adele.

Director: On your social network, YipYakker, users are just repeatedly expressing rage and misery.
Zero Fournine: And it's essential to let them do that. It's optimized to keep them in that state. We found maintaining a sense of limitless fury keeps our users engaged, and if they're engaged, they must be enjoying themselves, even if they're desperately unhappy. In fact, especially then, because desperate unhappiness also equals greater engagement.

Mark Zuckerberg: Our company is now Meta.

Narrator: Human impersonator Mark Zuckerberg excitedly reveals diverting plans to spend billions on a virtual reality space he calls the metaverse.
Mark Zuckerberg: I'm proud of what we've built so far, and excited about what comes next.
Snook Austin: You can see it's a fantasy world because it's full of cool, arty types. Not like the real Facebook full of sex pests and perverts. That's who's actually going to be in the metaverse. They should really call it "the Me Too Verse."
Penn Parker: I was impressed. Zuckerberg's avatar actually looks like a more lifelike version of him than he is.

Narrator: A virtual reality world looks increasingly appealing since, in actual reality, the world is still trying to kill us.

Narrator: The much-anticipated COP 26 Climate Conference opens in Glasgow, London. Mankind's last chance to negotiate peace terms with the Earth, according to doom-laden coverage.

Narrator: While the world waits nervously for whatever the conference will finally fail to announce, Glasgow becomes a focus for climate activists.
Duke Goolies: Now that the whole BLM thing's been fixed, I had the bandwidth to get involved in climate change. I want to be, like, the Greta Thunberg of environmentalism, you know. Like, a lot of people, they stay at home, and because they don't see the reality of climate change up close, they don't even think about it. And so, what I wanted to do is flip the script on that. So, I actually went to Greenland to see the melting icebergs for myself, and then to a wildfire in California and a beach party in Cancún...
Director: Was that a climate emergency?
Duke Goolies: No, but you got to relax sometimes. Avoid burnout, especially with all the burnout going on.
Director: How did you get to these places?
Duke Goolies: Uh, private jet, obviously. I know what you're going to say, it's bad for the environment, but… Because the purpose of the trip was to persuade others not to use fossil fuels, technically, I mean, it's carbon neutral.

Narrator: A climate deal is finally brokered, but it is not as promised. Mankind has moved from ignoring the climate to gaslighting it, which is even worse for the environment.

Narrator: So, the conference fizzles out, and humanity is once again left to burn, drown, or virus to death.

Narrator: So, the conference fizzles out, and humanity is once again left to burn, drown, or virus to death. COVID is showing signs of a revival, aided by the vaccine's potency fading significantly after six months. Like true love, booster shots are required.
TV Anchor: Biden had a booster shot on TV.
Gemma Nerrick: I didn't know you could inject ghosts without the vaccine solution dripping straight through onto the floor, but then, I didn't know that ghosts had veins, so…

Snook Austin: The bizarre beliefs of hard-core anti-vaxxers means a significant number still insist on their right not to get the shot. Unfortunately, COVID still insists on its right to infect and kill them.

Penn Parker: Here are the two Americas again, each side believing the other side is trying to kill it or enslave it, whether it's masks, or vaccines, or votes. They constantly yell at each other, amplified through social media and TV. But I wonder, if these two sides actually sat down with each other as human beings in real life and took time to listen to each other, then maybe, just maybe, that could spark a fucking furious fistfight. Bam, bam, bam. Wouldn't that be a spectacle?

Narrator: We end the year as we began it, polarized and divided, progressives versus conservatives, vaxxed versus unvaxxed. Science versus whatever the fucking mental opposite of fucking science is. Some would say that we're in the storm of a culture war, others violently disagree. But there is some hope. While they may not have made everything normal again, vaccines have given us the normalest of the new normals so far. A chance to live, learn, and even love again.

Narrator: And what did you learn in 2021, Zero?
Zero Fournine: Well, I learned Mark Zuckerberg is unaware that I actually already built the metaverse five years ago. We've all been in it since 2016.

Narrator: What have you learned in 2021?
Snook Austin: I learned that when I say the phrase, "I was in the room when…" People tend to leave the room.

Penn Parker: What did I learn in 2021? I learned that nobody learned anything in 2020.

Narrator: What is it you're working on?
Pyrex Flask: It's a concerning new variant that I just discovered… Oh, no! Shit! Run away!

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