Tales from the Loop

"You will see here sights that, well, you'd say were impossible, and, yet, there they are." Tales from the Loop is a modern, profound warning when people romanticize technology for instantaneous gratification. The show is based on a book of artwork by Simon Stålenhag. Our wants and desires are usually not what's best for us: visiting a forbidden island, swapping bodies, living longer, lusting for someone, or reversing someone else's mistake. Technology, when exalted as a panacea, begins to view humanity through a lens of perpetual illness instead of perpetual improvement. Each episode zooms in on the hamartia of individual characters with The Loop as the background elephant in the room. (It is almost as if Prometheus is gifting the person in the episode with a new kind of fire.) But The Loop never becomes front and center; rather, it serves as the canvas for each episode. The catharsis viewed via each character in each episode drives home the message about something that is universal -- we are all curious. Whether young or old, that naïveté is there to drive our curiosities. Some make profound decisions with life-altering consequences when a child or teen and some as a parent or grandparent -- all in "the blink of an eye". And the unforeseen profound consequences that result are sometimes passed onto the next generation of our own lives or the lives of others. Each episode finds a niche and shows us that Mercer, Ohio is already here on Earth: our own creations of these tools can either help or harm us if one is not educated.