Few…(Movements? Obsessions? Paranoid meme repositories? Phenomena? Let’s go with phenomena.) Few, uh, phenomena have better captured the tenor of the last few years of American politics than the rise of QAnon, the latest incarnation of the country’s ongoing and unshakeable belief that someone, somewhere, is responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened to them, and posting on poorly moderated message boards is the key to sussing them out. Giving the ties between the “group,” its “the government is run by Deep State operatives who want to steal the gold buried underneath your bunker to pay for their pedophile pizza crimes” ideology, and the armed invasion of the United Stated Capitol Building on January 6, though, it’s hard not to argue that the mysterious Q and their various advocates haven’t had a major effect on American politics over the last few months. That’s at least some of what HBO’s new 6-part docuseries, Into The Storm, hopes to explore, charting the group’s rise from the lurking cesspool of 8chan to the talking points of CNN.
Directed by Cullen Hoback (Monster Camp) and produced by Adam McKay, the docuseries charts the rise of the nascent movement, while also trying to figure out who the hell the enigmatic Q might actually be. (If they work it out, though, the trailer for the series released today doesn’t give away the game.) And, again, given how much impact the loose collection of beliefs grouped under the QAnon umbrella have ended up having on the tone of politics in our increasingly unhinged world, it’s hard to argue that a clearer understanding of the phenomena’s origins won’t be useful, even if we’re just clinging to the memory of it while being sacrificed to the dark gods of the letter-worshiping mobs.
Q: Into The Storm debuts on HBO on March 21.