Eli Stone

I taped Eli Stone after watching the season premiere of LOST, not only to see the Oceanic Airline commercial that was promised to feature in it. The series is about a lawyer who begins having ‘visions’ or ‘hallucinations’. It is discovered that he has a brain aneurism – as his father presumably had, but it went undiagnosed and everyone assumed that he was simply a drunk.

The pilot episode was not particularly gloomy, given that the main character is disgnosed with an inoperable condition that could result in his death at any moment. It is moving, but also lighthearted at times. Particularly amusing is the acupuncturist Eli visits, who turns out to be a well-educated individual who found that his degree in philosophy didn’t lead naturally to employment, and thus he put on a Chinese accent and put on a good show while also giving people genuine counselling and advice.

Eli’s initial assessment of his situation is what might be expected. The things he has seen and heard (like George Michael singing in his living room) are “just my defective brain playing tricks on me”. The “acupuncturist” gives a helpful reply. There are two explanations to everything, he says. Science may diagnose Eli as having a brain aneurism, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that his experiences, including but not limited to his visions, are also something more than that.

This is precisely the sort of question we must ask about religious experience in our time. Let’s say it turned out that Paul, the apostle, had an aneurism or epilepsy or anything else of that sort. Would that make his life and his writings any less significant? What if something similar turned out to be true of Moses, and Jesus, and Mohammad, and other prophets and visionaries of various sorts down the ages?

Eli replies once more that, unlike other prophetic figures, he doesn’t even believe in God. Yet again there is a sage reply: “Sure you do. You believe in right and wrong, in goodness, in love…”

The show promises to be thought-provoking. Perhaps its most controversial element was the focus on a case involving a link between a mercury-based preservative and autism. The trial in question, however, merely suggests that it would make sense to err on the side of caution if there is even the possibility that there is a link in even some cases. Just to be safe, though, at the end they added a disclaimer that the events depicted are fictional, and viewers were directed to the web site of the Center for Disease Control for more information about autism.