Major metropolitan areas are completely wiped out, while remote rural locales remain untouched, since apocalypse reception is so unreliable once you’re out of the city.
As thousands gather on a mountainside to watch in horror as a rogue asteroid hurtles toward the earth, a sage old man philosophizes that “the apocalypse is in each of us.” Another man, pointing upward at the ever-growing fireball, shouts hysterically, “Oh, yeah? Then what the fuck is that?!,” to which the old man replies, “Look, I’m not a scientist, okay?”
It turns out that the apocalypse was all the dream of an innocent young child. That young child? Jayden Scovill of Prescott, Arizona, who grows up to be the prick of a boss who fires your ass.
The apocalypse decides to postpone because it wants to find out what happens next on Mad Men, especially whether Don Draper has really turned over a new leaf and remains faithful to his new wife, or lapses into his old habits and sleeps with that woman in the bar in the last episode of Season Five. Also: Will the firm change its name following Lane Pryce’s suicide? Are we ever going to see Peggy again? Will budding teenagers Sally and Glen ever “do it?” And is Betty fated to remain a cold, brittle, emotionally distant bitch for the rest of her life? Once these questions are answered, all life suddenly blinks out of existence.
People cower in terror as the apocalypse begins, only to discover that it can be staved off, like a cat, with a spray bottle.
The unimaginably massive global tidal waves that threaten to submerge every land mass on earth abruptly recede. We later learn that the apocalypse is six months behind on payments to the moon, and that, as a result, its gravitational pull has been disconnected.
What is thought to be the apocalypse is actually an M. Night Shyamalan movie about the making of a movie about the apocalypse directed by a man with a remarkable gift of prophecy (played by Shyamalan himself) who knows the exact moment at which the actual apocalypse is to occur, and thus organizes the movie’s shooting schedule so that the the filming of the fictional apocalypse coincides with the exact instant of the actual apocalypse, mainly to avoid paying overtime to his cast and crew. In a twist ending, however, it turns out that the movie, and the movie-within-a-movie, are part of an elaborate ruse, and that the real-life Shyamalan is in fact the infinite, omnipotent Universal Supreme Being who has completely masterminded and executed the actual apocalypse, mainly to “show” the kids who picked on him in high school. Universal Supreme Being Shyamalan is bitterly disappointed when unenthusiastic critics, blogging from deep subterranean bunkers, describe the apocalypse as “tepid,” “utterly predictable,” and “his worst effort yet, by far.”
The apocalypse actually occurred thousands of years ago, and, unbeknownst to us, modern history has represented the slow, gradual rebuilding of a post-apocalyptic world. While we have been led to believe that our civilization represents the pinnacle of human achievement, newly discovered clay tablets finally reveal that in the pre-apocalyptic era, cable TV was free and Baskin-Robbins had 96 flavors.
The apocalypse fails to materialize. Scholars eventually realize that the circular stone “Mayan calendar” used in their calculations is actually just an ancient sewer cover.
The meek inherit the earth, but are too shy to do anything except kind of shuffle uncomfortably as they look down at their feet.
Want to see more on how it all goes down? Try this. Or this.
