© Discovery Communications Credit: Tina RowdenDiscovery Channel joins the scripted true-crime craze with the two-hour premiere of its anthology series Manhunt: Unabomber (Tuesday, Aug. 1, at 9pm ET/PT). This eight-episode limited series retraces the desperate hunt to identify and catch the individual profiled in the most famous police sketch in the world — the serial killer dubbed the Unabomber.
During the Unabomber’s reign of terror, which stretched from 1978-96, he mailed or hand-delivered package bombs to a seemingly random collection of universities, airlines, technology stores, lobbyists and others, killing three people and injuring dozens more. And when he released his 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” he bemoaned humanity’s loss of autonomy, urged nature-based anarchism and rationalized his use of bombings as calling attention to man’s dependence on technology.
Sam Worthington (Avatar) stars as FBI profiler Jim Fitzgerald, who joined the UNABOM task force in 1995. Handed a wildly inaccurate profile of the suspect, Fitzgerald used pioneering and highly controversial forensic linguistics to create an uncanny profile of the Unabomber, later identified as Ted Kaczynski (played by Paul Bettany, Transcendence), a Harvard-educated former math professor turned survivalist, who was arrested at his rural Montana cabin.
For much of the series’ first episode, Kaczynski is only seen in bits and pieces: a shot of hands here, a face in profile there. When we finally see the insane genius full in the face, he and Fitzgerald are meeting for the first time. The men contemplate each other less as adversaries and more as kindred spirits who share an unlikely understanding. It’s a mesmerizing moment, and Bettany as Kaczynski makes as chilling a murderer as Anthony Hopkins did as Hannibal Lecter.
Manhunt: Unabomber — which also stars Chris Noth, Keisha Castle-Hughes, Jane Lynch, Mark Duplass, Michael Nouri, Brian d’Arcy James and Elizabeth Reaser — isn’t trying to paint a compassionate picture of Kaczynski. He is clearly portrayed as a murderer and a terrorist. What it does delve into is the effect of his words and how they affected Fitzgerald, who seemingly suffered a mental breakdown as a result of uncovering the clues to Kaczynski’s psyche that were found within his manifesto and other letters he sent. Interestingly, Fitzgerald serves as a consulting producer on the series, which weighs the insanity vs. intellect of one of America’s most notorious criminals.
You can stream the entire first hour of the series here:
It is impossible to overstate the infernal and eternal evil represented in the Unabomber case. It shaped the attitudes toward environmental issues for decades adding ridicule and derision of the most powerful sort. Backed by the CIA and its linked Petro powers, it provided the margin of difference and then some to elect greenhouse gas promoting George W Bush 4 years later, not environmentalist Al Gore. It went on to provide the basis for much of the anti-environmentalist propaganda and attitudes which have both dominated and debilitated ecological debates since,… Eco-Nut, Eco-Terrorist, Tree Hugger, Enviro Wacho etc etc. It molded the debate, and reinforced and enabled environmental degradation at every level, including those to limit greenhouse gas output. The perpetrators of this penultimate crime against humanity bear much of the responsibility for the murder of not just one human or a few or six million, but of all life, and most likely forever. They are central figures in the silencing of the songbirds of earth,… forever. As heat waves rapidly enter the 120, 130’s and 140’s, and we have our first mass death of thousands in a major city somewhere in the world,… only then will the world stop laughing, and examine this case with the detail, and the horror it so richly deserves.
If YOU want the details,…and the proof,… Google Unabomber Morph and you will see that the first of the Unabomber wanted sketch’s was computer morphed from Ted Kaczynski’s Berkley Photograph, the sketch it produced was hosted on the NAIC NASA server that created the morph process in the 80’s, and the FBI Agents got their emails on the same server. When NASA scientists saw this ten years later they were afraid of becoming targets, and panicked and complained and the Washington Post printed the story. The sketch, its photo source, and the post article all reside at your local library for easy confirmation. When you look at the sketch and the photo side by side the relationship is undeniable. You can’t create the wanted poster from the suspects photo seven years before the arrest and then claim you did not know who he was !!! Will we see justice for the billions about to die, and the trillions who will never be born? or are we going to go along and get along for the few years we have left. God is watching.