Last Thursday, ABC premiered the first episode of a quirky, moralising legal drama that is arguably the bastard child of Ally Mcbeal, Boston Legal, and a bunch of new age hippies. Such a deformed monstrosity of a show could only be the mutated amalgam of three parents, eschewing the normal process of sexual intercourse to create new life by simply chopping off the worst aspects of each (not that new age hippies have any good aspects, mind) and haphazardly throwing these chunks together in a semi-coherent form.

I don’t hate the show just because I abhor the show’s blatant moralising in favor of idiotic new age bunk and “alternative” medicine, though. No, even in spite of these faults, the show is just plain bad, even absent these affronts to my sensibilities. The dialogue tries entirely too hard to be snappy and witty, coming across like that ass at your job who is always trying to make jokes and usually failing. And its quirks are hardly endearing or entertaining. Weird, unnecessary musical moments pop up for no apparent reason, often featuring washed-up, homosexual pop stars from the ’80s. It’s like Ally Mcbeal’s infamous dancing baby, except somehow more irrelevant and hardly as memorable. And don’t even get me started on the plot; it’s formulaic, predictable, and incredibly cheesy. If the first episode is a sign of things to come, then viewers have good reason to tune out, and I suspect the large majority of viewers, like me, were only the residuals of Lost’s season priemer, which Eli Stone had the luck of following. I’m saddened that I did not immediately change the channel.

Naturally, the show’s transparent new-age agenda is the one thing that really stirred up my gastric juices. I can pardon a bad show, but I cannot and will not forgive a bad show that pushes insane bullshit as somehow factual. Indeed, the first episode did not merely make one or two awkward endorsements of pseudoscience; instead the whole show is founded upon pseudoscience. The premise of the show, for instance, revolves around the main character’s attempts to change the world as a “prophet” of God. Apparently, having visions of George Michael makes one a prophet, now. There is even a character on the show whose sole purpose is to dispense worthless new-age platitudes. And, get this, the character is a practitioner of “alternative” chinese medicine. That’s right, the show features the unholy trinity of woo: faith, antivaccination nonsense, and alternative medicine. (I can already sense Orac’s head exploding in rage.) The first episode appeals endlessly to the power of faith with the help of George Michael singing the song of the same name, foolishly advertises the long falsified claims of hysterical mothers that ingredients found in vaccines cause autism, and features the quack alternative medicine practitioner dispensing sage spiritual advice while poking him endlessly with needles. Although, if I had to choose between being stabbed with needles and watching this tripe, I’d go with the needles, hands down.

The first episode is saturated with nonsense like this. Ultimately, it relies less on substance and more on appeals to emotion (and blatant lies) to get its point across. How can anyone root against Eli Stone when he helps the mother of an autistic boy to prevail against a towering legal firm and monolithic vaccine maker? It doesn’t matter that Eli suffers from delusional hallucinations; that the mother doesn’t understand causality, medicine, or science; or that the cause they’ve decided to champion is ridiculous and unsupported by any evidence. What matters is that the little guy won. The delusional, idiotic, little guy.

At heart, the show is simply trying to convey that faith can prevail over science and “facts”, and so can alternative medicine. Of course, no facts of any sort support the claims of alternative medicine practitioners or new-age gurus. Alternative medicinal practices are just a method for impatient pseudo-doctors to pretend to be practicing medicine without the effort or accountability, and new age spirituality just takes all the worst reasoning of established religions and removes it from ritual. Of course, Eli Stone ultimately fails to show that faith can transcend science. By siding with the antivaccination crowd, the show has opened itself up for criticism based on the implications of this unthinking support, and Eli Stone unwittingly refutes its new-age, feel-good ideology by advocating such nonsense. Authoritative and legitimate medical institutions like the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention universally recognize that vaccines are safe and effective. What we find in Eli Stone is that faith does not trump reason. Instead, faith leads to horrible injustices and the endorsement of idiotic, unproven claims that ultimately cause more harm than good. Now we must fear for the mothers or potential mothers who watch this show and try to prevent their children from being vaccinated. We must fear for those who will refuse modern medical treatment in favor of worthless and futile reliance on alternative medicine, medicine that doesn’t have to live up to reasonable safety standards, whose efficacy is unsupported by evidence, and whose side effects can be dangerous and deadly, particularly in relation to other drugs or overuse. Eli Stone means well, but its faith causes more harm than good. To paraphrase Steven Weinberg, Eli Stone proves once and for all that though good people do good things and bad people do evil things, it takes faith for good people to do evil things.