College student Devon Taylor is listening to space. He thinks he can detect a pattern coming from Sirius. [1] His professor finally tells him to go home, but he grabs the tape to listen to later. When his younger sister Joyce overhears the tape, she is able to clearly hear the pattern. In fact, she puts on a set of head-phones and snoozes all night with it playing.
Her father finds her in the morning. He immediately assumes she is on the drugs. To be fair, her pulse is racing and she is acting weird. And he should know the symptoms because is has two doctorates — the one of his character, and being played by Dr. Johnny Fever. Before he can tell her to just say no, she grabs the tape and runs out the door to school.
Joyce gets everyone at school listening to the groovy space music. Devon insists that there is a message embedded in it, which is likely since it sounds suspiciously like the transmission sent in Contact. He goes looking for Joyce at a rave where the music makes everyone look like they’re playing that game Riker brought onto the Enterprise; you remember, the one that induced orgasms . . . c’mon, you know you want to click it.
Devon sees that the euphoric teens are addicted to the music like crack. He is a little over the demographic so is able to resist its charms. It also has the side-effect of causing metallic scales on the kids’ skin. He goes to the booth where the DJ has the easiest job in the world — one tape, on a loop. When Devon grabs the tape, the people stop their orgasmic, slack-jawed moaning and scream in pain like when I accidentally hit the Firefox back-button to my sister’s Facebook page at an inopportune time.
Joyce and the other teenagers are taken to the hospital. All of them are getting the same metallic plating on their skin even though soap and water would take care of most of it. Devon looks in Joyce’s eye with one of those lighted doctor doohickeys and says, “Her iris is changing.” No, Mr. Know-It-All, her pupil is changing, not her iris. Seriously, does anyone in TV finish the sixth grade?
After Devon sends the tape to a friend in Japan, he is responsible for a global outbreak. The Feds show up and confiscate his stereo, oscilloscope and nudie magazines. The enigmatically-named Dr. Riddle is called from the CDC, but she is no match for the 20 year old Devon. She confirms that the disease is spread by a signal that is like music to teenagers and random noise to adults . . . just like _____________ . [2] It also instills an intense desire to share with others, thus explaining Bernie Sanders’ success. Oh, and it comes from space.
The CDC decides the best course of action is to play the signal in reverse. In addition to confirming Paul is dead, this also kills Joyce. Thank God Devon is there to turn the original tape up to eleven and revive her.
Devon further concludes that the changes are a gift from aliens. Our sun is about to shift to a blue dwarf. Only those who have evolved the metallic skin will survive. 
The CDC agrees and the government starts broadcasting the signal, finally using that goofy Emergency Broadcast System, and on PBS, although they wisely schedule it during Downton Abbey so someone will actually be watching.
All the kids on Earth are soon covered with a gold shell making them look like small Oscar statues, which will drive Roman Polanski crazy. Adults are able to get a treatment which will give them the same metallic shell. For reasons not well explained, Joyce & Devon’s father opts out.
I always like a mystery that has to be solved. And the magnitude of the story — human evolution & sun shift — certainly lend gravitas to the story. Add in a little star-power (no pun intended), and a few minutes of padding don’t seem too big a price to pay.
Post-Post:
- [1] The pattern is to cancel every 3 months before the welcome-back offer expires. I ain’t paying full price for radio, man! Actually, I saw later that they were saying Certus, not Sirius. That isn’t a thing, so I have no idea what they were going for.
- [2] Mad-Libs time. [Name some dreadful young people’s music].
- Devon is played by Joshua Jackson who would go on to
play a similar brainiac on Fringe. Surprisingly, he is great here as a 20-year old know-it-all and less annoying than the know-it-all he played as an adult. - Joyce is played by Kirsten Dunst, three years after Interview with the Vampire and three years before the greatest movie in the history of cinema.
- Title Analysis: About as perfect as you can get.
- Music of the Spears.
- Music of the Sneers.
- Music of the Shears.
Wise Man and Fool follow Rat to her, by definition, Rat-infested home. They peek in the window and see that within seconds she has already thinned the herd by overdosing on the coke.
Wise Man goes to see The Chemist (played perfectly by Joe Flaherty). Whether it was intentional or not, his ditsy blonde assistant Orchid gets a laugh from me by calling him Wiseman [2] as if it were his name. While Chemist and Wise Man are weighing the cocaine, Orchid pours some champagne — hey, there’s a brick of coke right there! [3] We are tipped off that Orchid has slipped poison into one of the glasses. Son-of-a-bitch if I wasn’t fooled again! She killed The Chemist and she and Wise Man end up in the sack.
A reel-to-reel tape tells us, “The following is a true and full account and hereby sworn by me, Paul Brett, Attorney at Law.” Dang, you had me right up til that last part. The tape continues on, leading into a flashback . . .
Once back from the honeymoon, she feels Mr. Hughes has become “distant, hard to reach”, perhaps fearing another room needs painting. He refuses to let her see her old friends.
One night after they are married, his wife is having a nightmare. She says, “Drink this, Mrs. Hughes. Have another dose. Mrs. Hughes, I know you took some earlier, but you have to have another dose. Drink it.”
This segment begins by setting up a story that never arrives. Norma Lewis (Mare Winningham) is such an insufferable shrew that you have to think that characteristic must be of some great importance to the plot.
The next night, Mr. Stewart comes to the apartment and explains to Norma how the device works. If the button is pushed, someone she does not know will die, and she will receive $200,000. When Arthur gets home from work, she gives him the 4-1-1 through a constant sneer and cigarette smoke.
Of course Norma is going to push the button. She is low-life trash and her husband is too whipped to stop her. They take a long time to get there, but there is never any doubt. Imagine if this had been a classy couple; maybe moderately well off but just suffered some big financial loss. Or a preacher who sees only the immediate good the money could do for people around him. Or a parolee who is struggling to be a better person. Or a dying man who wants to provide for his family. There would have been some tension then.
Professor Joseph Fitzgerald wraps up his Wednesday Harvard Economics lecture by saying. “We’ll pick this up on Monday.” So the Harvard Economics class-week is only 3 days? That would explain a lot. I know the day of the week because it is 
Fitzgerald transports 3,000 miles to Dealy Plaza just as Kennedy’s motorcade makes the turn. I guess he transported ahead a day to the 22nd also, but that isn’t mentioned. He raises a camera that puts Abraham Zapruder’s to shame and films the cars. He pans up the schoolbook 