So TV2’s new show The Cult is about a cult (just a guess) and being the director of Cultwatch I had the brainwave that if I did a blog comparing week by week, episode by episode, this fictional cult with the psychology of the real thing, then people would find that pretty interesting.

The inner circle is made up of the cult leader’s lieutenants, these are the cult’s hard men and women. The Gestapo. The lieutenant’s prestige is linked to their standing with the cult leader, and so they will do anything to ingratiate themselves with their power source – like sorting out trouble or fleecing money from the cult members to buy the leader expensive presents.

A cult’s lieutenants are perpetually in a power struggle with each other, in fact a clever cult leader will exasperate this by giving the lieutenants similar goals and overlapping spheres of authority. It’s likely The Cult drama will feature some spectacular inter-factional fighting.

The biggest problem with being a lieutenant is that if something major goes wrong, then they risk being the fall guy – the cult leader is incapable of error, therefore one of the lieutenants must take the bullet. A lieutenant’s greatest fear is being cast out, into the outer circle.

The outer circle are the ordinary cult members. The true believers. These are the cult’s worker bees who provide the money and labour. They provide the leader with the worship he needs, and they’ll do anything for him: from baby sitting to selling their homes, to stealing, to sex, and in some real life cults even to murder.

They are also the ones trapped in the web that the narcissistic leader has spun. The web consists of isolated compounds to keep the members physically trapped, and the demonising of former friends and family to keep the cult members mentally isolated. The cult is their new family.

Over all the cult should be like a big dysfunctional family, and most of its members will have stepped sideways into the cult from a dysfunctional upbringing.

As the cult members cut themselves off from their friends and family, this will, just as in real life, cause a reaction by those who love them. In The Cult drama the “Liberators” represent those disenfranchised from their loved ones. The Liberators come together to fight Momentum and rescue the cult’s members.

I’ll talk a lot more about the Liberators as this blog rolls on. But I’ll mention one of the Liberators now, Hugo (played by Will Wallace) is an ex-SAS (special forces) man that works as the Liberators’ bodyguard.

Of course CULTWATCH is a charitable trust, and so we have a mountain of spare cash :), that pays for our amazing NORAD like underground HQ, and not just one but a gaggle of ex-SAS bodyguards to protect us from all those foaming-mouth cult lieutenants.

But honestly the reality isn’t that glamorous, ex-SAS guys are great in a scrap, but most of the time they sit round our underground HQ drinking lager and discussing amongst themselves why none of them can score a women. I haven’t had the heart to point out that women look sideways at men who go out into the wild and spend days under a bush together while wearing makeup. But despite that, let us hope that Hugo has better luck.

This blog entry has talked a lot about what we might see. Next entry I’ll discuss The Cult‘s first episode. Let’s discover how it turns out…

Sanctioned relationships is also a classic cult trait. Here not only is the leader controlling who you can see, he is also turning your desire for a loving relationship into a carrot. If you do what he says, then you will be rewarded with an intimate relationship with the cult member you happen to be infatuated with.

In male dominated cults often the most desirable female members are treated less harshly, while unknowingly being dangled in front of the noses of a number of big-eyed male followers.

In this first installment we saw other cult techniques employed, but I’ll comment on those in future blog posts. For now, just remember Physical Isolation and Relationship Control.

In this episode things have not being going well for Michael, near the end he crashes his car. It lays upside down on its roof playing some sort of rap music, or it could be the horn stuck on, hard to tell. And after he crawls out someone hits him on the head several times.

So, what will happen next? Has the cult enticed the Liberators to New Zealand so they can perform medical experiments on them? Who is the traitor in the Liberator’s camp (there has to be at least one)? When will we hear about the cult’s Armageddon scenario, and wouldn’t it be a funny twist if they actually turned out to be right? Will there be aliens? Is Michael actually an ex-cult member with his memory wiped? Was Michael actually a secret agent sent by the CIA to infiltrate the cult and they wiped his memory, and if so, what if the cult then wiped his memory too? If you have your memory wiped twice is it a good idea to have your brain defragged? Perhaps the aliens will have some intergalactic open-source software up to the task? We can only wait and see!

Oh, one last thing before I go (as I write this one of our ex-SAS men is prodding me in the back with his copy of “The Game”). My comment last week about the makeup and not being able to score a woman got all our ex-SAS bodyguards rather miffed. They spent half-an hour in conference and then declared that one of their number “Killer” (they all have nicknames like this) dated a woman back in 2002. They insist I tell you that Killer’s romance lasted three whole weeks, and would have lasted longer if he hadn’t given this widowed mum’s six year old son a box of flash-bangs (a fire-cracker of some sort) to use for Guy Fawkes. Apparently what really ended the relationship, was his mistake in mentioning to the child that the SAS normally use these fire-crackers inside.

There, that’s made them happy. Chuffed even. Until next week!

The Children of God cult, also known as The Family of Love, introduced in 1974 a technique called “flirty fishing” where their female members would offer sex to recruit new members. This policy ended in 1987 – just so you know. The cult’s founder David Berg certainly understood the power of relationships as a tool to draw people into his cult.

The name us counter-cult types use for recruitment through manufactured relationships is “Love Bombing”. Love Bombing is one of the most powerful proselytizing techniques in a cult’s arsenal. So be aware. Watch out for instant friendships. Remembering that real friendships take time. If you planted an acorn, and the next day a hundred foot oak tree was there, you’d be suspicious wouldn’t you? It’s the same with friendships: if you planted an acorn and the next day a new friend was growing out of the ground… oh wait, I’m messing up my metaphors. I mean, if you plant the seed of friendship then that friendship should grow normally, if it springs up with unnatural speed then you know something is wrong.

I’ll talk more about Love Bombing in a later post because this is not the whole story, Love Bombing has another sinister side.

Now back to the actual story. Michael has had a better episode this time, since no one hit him on the head. But as a whole things are going badly for the Liberators during the flashnows (if scenes set in the past are called flashbacks, then surely scenes set in the present are called flashnows).

There is a mysterious man working against them who seems to be controlled by the cult’s leader Edward North. This man collects bodies, ties people to beds, and likes to listen intently to the sound of small bugs – the electronic kind that is. I’ll call him The Man until we find out more about him. The liberator’s first plan to get everyone out of the cult compound is foiled by The Man.

And the police have been added into the mix. They are suspicious about the “goings on”, but then that is their job. It must be annoying being married to a policeman, I imagine the conversations go like this:

Policeman’s Wife: “Welcome home dear, I’ve cooked halibut.”
Policeman: “Likely story my love, can I see the receipt for the fish? And where were you at two thirty this afternoon, the time of the Lynnfield bank job?”

Let’s see if the Liberators have more success next week. Until then.

These moments, depending on the significance of the realization, can produce powerful feelings. Feelings of clarity. Feelings of pride as you look down on those still stuck in their wrong thinking. Feelings of release, especially if the realization sets you free from a long carried burden, such as the burden of keeping up appearances.

So where’s the danger in this? Surely these epiphanies are a good thing? Well often they are, but here’s the rub, you can stretch the feelings epiphanies produce into emotional proofs to validate teachings and practices that are not right or good.

Think about this. You probably have fallen in love at some point in your life. Do you remember that feeling? The emotional surge as the epiphany – of what that person is to you – exploded in your heart? The way they looked when you first saw him or her? (Or if you’re an accountant, how your first big-buttoned calculator glistened as it emerged from its bubble wrap. How you stroked it, as you whispered, “My one. My own. My precious.”)

Can you remember how your beloved could do no wrong? How actions that would drive you crazy if performed by anyone else, became sources of endearment? How you believed that you had found perfection in a person?

Of course, logically you knew he or she wasn’t perfect. But reasoning had long been washed out your ears by that rogue wave of love. And it is during this crazy time, that cult leaders can make you sell your house and give them the money, or convince you to disown your biological family, or even take your own life.

If they have succeeded in giving you a deep epiphany then you will attribute that amazing feeling to them, in the same way you attributed the feelings of love to your beloved. And so you will think your leader infallible, just as you could see no imperfection in your beloved.

But it doesn’t follow that because someone induces feelings in you that they are somehow perfect. Adolf Hitler was very good at inducing feelings both in crowds and one on one, but his teachings were poison.

So you need to be aware of this dynamic. You need to keep in mind the danger of the epiphany. Great feelings do not validate everything someone teaches, you need to keep your brain engaged.

Back to The Cult. I’m looking forward to the next episode, since I want to find out more about The Man. Is The Man conducting an experiment on both the cult and the Liberators? Is The Man a metaphor for the script writers? Or are the aliens finally going to turn up? Until next week.

The big question is, of course, what are they going to do now they have run out of Solar Panel Installers?

Is a deprogrammer an evil software developer who deletes other peoples code? Not in this context. In regard to the cults a deprogrammer is an expert able to undo the mind control that is influencing a cult member’s mind.

Before we go on it is important that I define terms. First notice I said “mind control”, and not “brain washing”. Brain washing is indoctrination by torture, and as a rule is not something established cults do. However the cults do perform mind control, because mind control is more legal and much more effective than brain washing. Mind control is not the literal ability to take over someones mind, like a Jedi master in Star Wars is able to control the minds of the weak. Rather mind control is a series of techniques working together to manipulate a person. In some ways it is more like having a gun pointed at your head. Like a gun, mind control is a threat. Obey me or you will lose your family, your friends, your salvation, and God will hate you. It is manipulation based on fear.

Mind control is a world that the cult leader builds in the cult member’s mind. It is a perception of reality which skews the cult member’s thoughts towards utter obedience. However, and here is an important point. The cult member is complicit in allowing this to happen. In other words a measure of responsibility lies with the cult member. Certainly the cult leader and the cult system is mostly to blame, but ex-cult members need to understand that they allowed this to happen to them. Only through understanding their part in the game, will ex-cult members realize that they can resist these tactics and ultimately purge the effects of mind control from their daily thinking.

Now mind control is what you are learning about as you read these blog posts. My hope is that after we have finished enjoying The Cult together, that you will also be inoculated against mind control. And don’t think that mind control is only employed by the cults. Mind control can be found in the small, in unhealthy marriage relationships, boyfriend girlfriend relationships, and in your working environment. It also can be found in the large, in countries and movements, like Nazi Germany and Communist Russia.

Next episode I’m hoping we will be seeing Sophie the deprogrammer in action. So we can talk more about what deprogrammers do.

Talking about relationships, my ex-SAS guys can’t figure why Hugo the on screen ex-SAS guy just doesn’t call in an air strike on the cult’s compound. I tried to explain that the Liberators have relationships with people in the compound and so don’t want them blown up, but it was pointless. The conversation went like this:

Killer: “Re-lation? Relation ships? You guys have any idea what the civy is talking about?”
DOC: “Maybe Relation is a country?”
Limb-Shredder: “So the Liberators co-own ships, registered in Relation, with the people in the compound. Surely it’s to their advantage if those people are dead. Then they can have the ships all to themselves.”
Me: “No. Relationship is one word. Relationships are what women want.”
All of them: “Women!”
DOC: “So if we went shares in our own container ship, then we could each get a woman?”
Limb-Shredder: “But Gaz at the parachuting club has a woman, and I’m sure he doesn’t own a ship.”
Me: “Nargh! This is hurting my head. Don’t you guys need to go and practice underwater knife fighting, or something?”
Killer: “So have you ever kissed a woman?”
Me: “What? Yes, of course.”
Killer: “What’s it like?”

And thankfully I wasn’t disappointed, because Saul didn’t start either singing or dancing. What’s more there was no background music for him to lip-sync, or dancing girls, or men hopping around with trashcan lids on their feet. I feel the show’s director brought the series to the brink of a musical, and then he wisely chose another path.

This episode things are starting to heat up. The calm before the storm. Hugo the ex-SAS bodyguard wheeled out a much bigger gun, a scoped rifle (no doubt there is a gun-nut out there who will email me its type). And we learned that the cult has its own collection of guns too.

This is not without precedent. David Koresh’s followers at Waco were festooned with guns, they even had a .50 caliber sniper’s rifle. The Jonestown boys had guns too, which they used to mow down people, including a US senator. The Orange People under Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had an armed security force (which thankfully didn’t result in any bloodshed). And even in New Zealand there have been cults caught arming themselves and making bombs.

Why? Why do some cults spout peace and love, while at the same time crawling through the undergrowth into Rambo land? Well it relates to another important part of mind control known as an “Us verses Them” environment.

In this episode of The Cult when the Liberator’s Hugo produces his rifle, Nathan who has come out of the cult says, “They’ve got guns too. For protection from the outsiders.”

For a mind control environment to function properly the cult leader needs to create a war like environment. A cauldron that the cult members are trapped in along with their enemy, as the cauldron heats up. The cult members are the “Us”, the insiders. Everyone else is “Them”, the outsiders.

Think of it this way. Imagine a football coach giving his team this pep talk, “We’re going to stand in a large field for an hour holding this egg shaped inflatable leather ball. So let’s train really hard to prepare.” After a talk like that I’d bet that his players wouldn’t be inspired to train hard at all. Heck, I could be a football player if it just means standing in a field. No, the coach is more likely to say something like, “This Saturday we’re playing the Dakota University Maulers. They have won this championship five times in a row, their players are all seven feet tall, and when the TV cameras aren’t watching they have been known to resort to cannibalism. So if we want to win, we have to train harder than we have ever trained before…” The coach knows he has to introduce an enemy so his players has a “Them” to focus on, a Them to resist. A reason to fight.

An enemy helps define what your group is, what they stand for, and goes a long way to building the group’s esprit de corps. With an enemy it means you are at war, and war is justification for throwing out the normal rules of living. In war it is normal for the leader to have absolute power. In war you are meant to sacrifice yourself for the greater good of the group. In war deception is justified since the enemy has no right to know the truth.

Creating and feeding an “Us verses Them” environment gives a cult leader heightened powers. Often one group of the outsiders are focused on as the cult’s primary enemy. For David Koresh’s followers in Waco it was the US Government, for the International Church of Christ it was all the supposedly worldly Christian churches, and in Nazi Germany (remember last week I talked about mind control being used “in the large”, in this case at the national level) their primary created enemy were the Jewish people.

This “Us verses Them” dynamic is important to remember when dealing with real cults, and important to remember when watching The Cult. I predict that because of this dynamic, The Cultwill soon be heating up. Expect gun battles and more murders. And hopefully, even though we’ve been talking about war this post, Elvis will not turn up and start singing.

One last thing. Did you notice that the Alien Flower made another appearance in this episode? Jenni’s Mum Frances is captivated by it for a moment. Although I think the writers have made a mistake: the flower is too small, it’s not even a baby Triffid – the most it could do is sting their toes. Well I guess you can’t get everything right. Until the next episode.

In a cult it’s like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, except the cameras are not physical cameras but the eyes of the people around you. Along with providing a “feedback loop” for the cult’s leadership, the cult’s Reporting Structure allows another cult phenomenon called “Mystical Manipulation” (a term I believe was coined by cult exit-counselor Steven Hassan).

Mystical manipulation is a way for cult leadership to make themselves seem more god like. Here’s how it works. Imagine you’re a new member of a religious group. The people are very warm and friendly (see my post on episode two about “Love Bombing”), and you develop one or two seemingly close friendships. One day you confess one of your deepest secrets to your trusted new friend – perhaps you stole some money, or have a problem with drugs, or like listening to Elvis.

So unknown to you, your new “friend” reports this secret to leadership (gaining themselves brownie points with the leaders). Then the next time the group has a meeting, during the leader’s talk you hear him say, “…and God told me that one of you here is struggling with drugs and burdened by the guilt of theft, but God wants you to know that you are now in the right place with us…”

Not suspecting for a moment that your new friend broke your trust, you hear the leader’s words and are convinced God has spoken to you through the leader.

So if God has just spoken to you through the leader, then the leader must be OK, and the group must be OK too. You are filled with wonder and your resistance to joining the group is seriously decreased. That’s Mystical Manipulation, the creation of a fabricated epiphany within you to convince you the group is right.

A cult’s reporting structure also interacts powerfully with another element of mind control called Relationship Control, which I mentioned in the post on episode one. I’ll talk more about this interaction in a later post.

In the meantime I hope this kidnapping epidemic stops in The Cult. Otherwise all the cult members will be trapped in the Liberator’s house, and all the Liberators will be trapped in the cult compound – I’d hate to see what deus-ex-machina the show’s writers would need to create to get them out of that one.

Until the next episode.

So when a cult member is told by a parent that their group is a cult, then their programming triggers: first, confirming the validity of the group since they predicted this would happen, and second, identifying you with the enemy. By calling their group a cult you are confirming the idea that you are part of “them”, you are an agent of the devil!

Second, the most important thing of all is to keep the lines of communication open. A cult will seek to isolate your loved one from you. You must work to appear as non-threatening to the cult leaders as you can, while reinforcing your relationship with your loved one.

You should act preemptively yourself, especially if your loved one is a student away from home. Keep up communication. Share with them about what a mind control cult is like. Get them to agree to discuss any new group or church they are thinking of going along to with you and their friends. These simple steps can prevent years of heartbreak – make the effort.

Third, learn as much as you can about the cult and mind control. Get your loved one’s old friends on your side, and help them understand how mind control works. If you know about the cult, then often you can use the “is that smoke?” technique: instead of saying, “fire fire fire!” or in other-words “It’s a cult! Get out!”, you can say, “is that smoke?”. Show them the smoke by asking questions that direct your loved ones thinking towards the answers – and let them find the fire themselves.

Fourth, if you can, the quickest intervention of all is to get your loved one away from the group. Get them to come home if they are in another city, or take them out of town on an amazing holiday. The longer you can keep them away from the group the more the cult member will gain perspective. Often a holiday from a cult is enough to get them out by itself, especially if you can ask lots of “is that smoke?” questions.

Fifth, if you do decide to employ an exit counselor then make sure they are well known in the field and have a good reputation. Follow their advice, and discuss fees up front. Just so you know, Cultwatch is run by part-time volunteers; so while we do speak with cult members when we can, we do not charge for what we do and we do not provide full on exit-counseling. You are best served by a professional exit-counselor if you can afford one, who can dedicate a good amount of time to your situation.

So, until the next episode!

A mind control cult performs this same sequence, the difference being that their new recruit has no idea what is coming. The new recruit is melted down with the heat of guilt and character assassination. He is made to believe that his former life and belief system contained nothing of value. Next he enters into a period of heavy indoctrination. The liquid metal of his self is poured into the cult shaped mould. Finally the new cult member is pulled smoldering from the mould and accepted into the cult.

A cult leader wants an army of people to do his bidding. He needs everyone to be the same because his narcissistic insecurities demand it. He needs to replace their identity with the cult identity so they feel like the cult is their new family, and because it reinforces the cult’s “Us verses Them” environment.

A common observation made by people who visit cult groups, is that everyone seems the same. They walk, dress, smile, eat, and talk the same. A normal religious or self-help group does not require this outward consistency, but a cult needs it to function.

If you watch The Cult you will see that the cult members all dress the same, this type of uniform is part of identity replacement.

So back to the show. We have discovered that the cult has made coffins for each of the liberators. I think that would be a brilliant candid camera trick. Imagine someone being taken innocently to a stranger’s house, perhaps as a date at a party, then being given wrong directions to the bathroom. They open the door and walk into a room containing a coffin marked with their name. That’s what happened to three members of the Liberators this episode while they were skulking around the cult’s compound. Now that would be a party story worth having.

Until next episode.

Most of the time in real cults, the solution to the problem does not require killing yourself. Instead it demands a radical sacrifice. Perhaps selling your house and giving the money to the cult leadership, so they can further the cult’s cause before the apocalypse. Maybe working eighteen hours a day six days a week for the cult. Maybe committing a crime. The problem is used to compel the cult members to do things that normally they would never do. It is a tool of the cult leader to control.

Edward North is emphasizing that those from the outside are trying to destroy their cult family. He is underlining that something radical needs to be done to solve this problem. Let’s see how far he can get his followers to go. Already cracks are starting to show in some of the cult members, with Hannah saying this episode that she “doesn’t know what to believe any more”.

Part of the reason cult leaders like their followers to make huge sacrifices is because it ties followers who are cracking, like Hannah, to the cult. Imagine that you have sold your house and given the money to a group. In that case, if you start having doubts then you are likely to push those out of your mind. Why? Because your personal commitment to the group being right has been deepened by your vast sacrifice. If the group’s wrong, then you gave up your house for no reason. So the group can’t be wrong, it must be right. It has to be!

The same applies to those who have given their lives to working for the group. Imagine you have worked for the past ten years. If you discover the group is wrong then you have wasted those years. In fact it is worse than that, because your effort went to propping up an evil cause – it didn’t have a neutral result but a negative one. So the group must be right, because if it isn’t then the reality is too dreadful to contemplate.

Let me tell you a secret. There are many high up members in various cults around the world who no longer believe in their heart that their group is what it claims to be. But they can’t leave, because it is their life, it is all they have. To face reality would be too painful, and they would be too ashamed, since everyone knows they have always promoted this group. And so they stay, wasting what life they have left – their own fears keeping them in a bondage of despair until the days of their lives are completely spent.

But I don’t think that is going to happen to Edward North. He hasn’t got that many episodes left. Also one common theme, as yet unexplored, is that everyone involved in the cult and the Liberators seem to have had a near death experience.

I had a near death experience once. I cooked up a good feed of steak and chips on the BBQ, complete with fried onions. Then I walked to the fridge and discovered I was out of tomato sauce. The bottle was completely empty. Honestly, even just writing about that trauma from all those years ago still makes me shake to this day.

Until next episode.

Information is what we use to make our decisions. You voted the way you did in the last election because your information told you which party or presidential candidate best matched your political preferences. You drove a certain route because the information on your map indicated that was the way to get there. You decided to buy that new shiny thing because your bank balance told you that you could afford the expenditure.

If I could have controlled the information you had about the party or presidential candidate, then it would have been me, not you, deciding how you should vote. If I had drawn the map you used, then I could have had you taking a crazy path all over the city. If I controlled the information about your current bank balance, then I could have embarrassed you at the checkout.

Information is power. The cults know they must control the information their members receive. They must massage the information so it best fits the party line. They must stop information that would make their members question. They must invent information to reinforce their teachings.

The problem is that most cult members do not live in compounds where information can be completely filtered. The bulk of the world’s cult members can listen to the radio, watch the telly, read the paper, and surf the net. So how is a cult leader meant to cope these days? It sounds a bit unfair doesn’t it for our poor megalomaniacs. Well, there are two primary strategies employed by the cults to get around these problems:

First, the leaders ban their followers from using the media. Cult members are told not to listen to the radio, or read newspapers, or go online. For example one major church in Auckland told their people not to look up tithing on the Internet, just after we released our web site www.TithingDebate.com. But as a rule this is not an effective strategy, since the cult members will secretly access the media: those told not to have a TV in their home will hide the receiver in a cupboard, those told not to have a radio will listen to them under the sheets at night, and those banned from the Internet will surf at work where their leaders can’t see.

But the second strategy is much more effective. The cult leaders indoctrinate their members with a thought process called “Auto Tainting”. The idea is simple, any information from cult leadership is automatically good, any information from outside is very suspect, and any information from the cult’s critics comes straight out of the devil’s mouth. Cult members are taught to automatically classify information based on its source, rather than classify the information with rational thought.

For recovering ex-cult members it is very important to eliminate the Auto Tainting thought processes, and relearn how to look at information objectively. Remember, falsehood runs from the truth, but truth doesn’t run from falsehood. If what your group believes is true, then there is nothing to fear from examining those beliefs in the full light of day.

Back to the show. In this episode of The Cult we got our biggest clue yet that the commencement is going to result in a lot of dead bodies. Edward North has told his followers that the path to enlightenment is through death. Spooky stuff.

Until next episode.

The people who sold him this dream are actually very rich. They will tell him that they became rich by following the dream. They didn’t. They got rich by selling their products promoting the dream. They sell their books, tapes, DVDs, seminars, t-shirts, retreats, and anything else they can think of to their captive market of dream believers.

This model has even been seen in some Christian Churches, where the leaders sell their books and DVDs and hyped seminars to their congregation. The congregation are sold a distorted version of Christianity (the dream) which is all about obeying the leader and giving money to their church organization, because then God will supposedly give you even more money back. Sort of like a spiritual alchemy, donate your block of lead and get a block of gold back. I really feel for these leaders, they must struggle when saying “Amen” at the end of their prayers, when every bone in their body wants them to say, “Ca-ching!”.

The other money making tactic the cults use is “bait and wait”. You attend a free seminar, or retreat, or IQ test, and the result is always the same. You have some real mental or spiritual problems. But don’t worry since we have a seminar that will fix that. It costs a hundred dollars, but really that isn’t much to pay to sort your life out is it? However at the end of that seminar it’s revealed that you still have problems, but don’t worry because we have a course for that too. That next course costs a thousand dollars. But guess what, at the end of that course you still have problems, so you better do the ten thousand dollar course. What you don’t have the money? Well you can still do the course, if you work for us selling our courses. That’s Bait and Wait.

These are scams of course. But that’s the cults for you, they exist in the grey area between what is illegal and what is ethical.

Edward North however is definitely planning something illegal, murder it would seem. Unless he can convince all the Liberators to kill themselves – which I doubt.

What will really be interesting to see is, if Edward succeeds in his plans then what will happen to him? In the show’s version of the afterlife Edward first appeared lying in the mud, and a hand comes up from the mud trying to grab him. But he manages to get up and see the Alien Flower and get the golden wiggly string. But if Edward murders these people, then perhaps the hands from the mud will drag him down?

That is unless he just plans to wipe their memories with his mad scientist’s drug, and have himself a pack of zombie actors for his mates. We shall see.

Onwards to the finale!

It was the indifferent of times, it was the middling of times; it was the age of being kidnapped, it was the age of escaping; it was the epoch of suspended disbelief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of light clothes, it was the season of dark clothes; it was the spring of plot-lines, it was the winter of plot-lines; we had every character before us, we had no one to love before us; we were all going into the cult compound, we were all going the other way. (Sorry Mr Dickens.)

These sort of unrealistic incidents are driven by the corners the writers have written themselves into. They are not the logical actions of a determined character pushing his cause the best he can. These unrealistic incidents not only prevent us identifying with the character, they also break our suspension of disbelief because we sense the wires and rigging holding up the plot.

Regarding the ending, there is no clever twist or surprise or glowing reward for all our hours watching. Instead of a Waco style show down (bad in the real world, but good entertainment in the fictional) nothing spectacular happens.

All Edward’s followers decide to leave him (that actually has happened before with cult leaders). So Edward after shooting his former girlfriend and pointing a gun at the police, goes and has a pity party on a hospital bed; until the Russian accent and her troops comes to claim him. Meanwhile The Man runs off, and mad scientist Cynthia (a psychopath for the entire series) suddenly starts caring about zombie Hannah and rescues her by driving her out of the cult compound. Then at the very end when everyone is leaving Michael sees his dead wife, but she disappears.

Finally, comes the very last shot. Which is, you guessed it, the Alien Flower. Michael’s hand reaches down to pick the Alien Flower and the credits roll, because obviously the Alien Flower would have vaporized Michael for trying to kill it and the budget had run out for that last effect shot.

So the series is over. But don’t get me wrong, The Cult isn’t terrible, however more attention to the fundamentals of story telling could have made it great.

From the perspective of counter-cult work, the series didn’t really focus on the true dynamics of a cult. But that is OK, since a TV drama’s goal is entertainment not education. But, as you can see from my Blog posts, The Cult did contain moments where the practices and techniques of real cults came through.

So that was The Cult. Will the Alien Flower be back in a sequel? I imagine so.

I hope that by reading this Blog you have gained a good idea about how real cults will try to recruit you and keep you trapped in their twisted system.

To find out more about cults read our other articles at Cultwatch.com

Thank you for reading, and I wish you a nice day, especially one where no one performs medical experiments on your loved ones.