'Painkiller': Obfuscation, or Cleverly Coded Message?

Netflix’s portrayal of the opioid crisis, Purdue Pharma, and the Sackler family has an eerie parallel with the COVID vaccine saga

It is not often that a TV series really grabs me these days. I have found myself avoiding contemporary film and TV more and more for a variety of reasons, the obvious one being the wokefication that is so ubiquitous now, but also because so many shows – including the non-woke ones – just totally miss the point.

I wrote recently about Covid vaccine harms as the paramount issue of our time and one which any given person’s willingness to openly discuss is a good indicator of their fundamental credibility. I drew a line in the sand and declared that so-called truth seekers like Tim Pool, and apparent populists like Donald Trump should not be trusted until such time as they unreservedly acknowledge the colossal crime against humanity that was the Covid vaccine scam. I proposed that this is a case of ‘with us, or against us’ and I stand firm in this belief.

In much the same way as many luminaries within the truth and freedom Movement refuse to name the elephant in the room, so too do TV shows and movies completely ignore not only the vaccine issue, but most of the fundamental questions that surround our rights and dignity as humans in the paradigm of neoliberal globalism.

To take the most common example: I can no longer watch movies or shows that portray the government and its myriad agents as ‘the good guys’ – I just can’t do it. It sticks in my craw and sometimes makes me feel physically ill. Moreover, because of the glaring fraudulence of the premise, it becomes functionally impossible to get engrossed in the plot, as the brain is constantly screaming ‘YOU’RE BEING LIED TO!’

Such are the trials of the red-pilled, and I’ve endured my fair share of pop culture disillusionment – for instance, there are bands I used to love, that I cannot listen to anymore. It is tragic to lose such iconic pleasures from one’s life, but it’s the price we pay for knowledge.

Even my enjoyment of history – particularly that of the Second World War – has been threatened by my new understanding of the forces that shape our world and it does not really matter how far back you go, virtually every piece of entertainment, art, or non-fiction ever produced has a hidden story behind it that calls into question its popular framing – even Shakespeare.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised by Netflix’s new series, Painkiller.

SPOILER ALERT

Despite the insertion of a strong empowered black woman, Edie Flowers (who has distinctly lesbian undertones as well) and whose ‘composite character’ served as an amalgamation of various players in the true story of the opioid epidemic, there was nothing woke about the series. This type of blackwashing is so common now that it cannot be avoided, and indeed we get off lightly if it is done as relatively innocuously as it was in Painkiller.

Uzo Aduba as Edie Flowers.

There is nothing objectionable about Uzo Aduba's portrayal of the fictional Edi Flowers, an investigator from the US Department of Justice who takes on the infamous Sackler family over Purdue Pharma’s malfeasance in marketing Oxycontin (oxycodone), generally accepted as the catalyst that spawned the US opioid crisis which killed over 300,000 people. And in a dramatisation of this sort, composite characters are necessary, indeed, the other two protagonists, Glen Kryger (played by Taylor Kitsch) and Shannon Schaeffer (played by West Duchovny) were also composites – it is just somewhat eye-rolling at this point that for the hero of the story, who takes on the system, they selected a woman of colour.

So while Painkiller gives a big nod to wokeness, it is not fundamentally woke.

First box ticked.

Where things get interesting is in Painkiller’s treatment of the Big Pharma issue.

To say that Netflix cast the Sacklers as the villains in this story would be the understatement of the year – the writers and producers go after them with a fiery zeal that feels almost personal in its merciless condemnation. This is no great leap to take though; the Sacklers have been taking a beating in the square of public opinion for years and have somewhat conveniently become the whipping boy for Big Pharma skulduggery in general.

West Duchovny plays Shannon Schaeffer, a naïve all-American girl recruited to work as a sales rep for Purdue Pharma fresh out of college.

It is therefore incumbent on me, both as a cynic to ask: is Painkiller simply a way of obfuscating the public conversation away from Pfizer and Moderna and toward the safe and established boogieman of the Sackler family? And on the other hand, as a cautious optimist, to wonder whether someone up at Netflix has stopped drinking the Kool-Aid, and used the analogy of the opioid epidemic and the gross crimes of Purdue Pharma to construct a cleverly coded message to the viewing public?

To assume the best about anything that Netflix does at this point perhaps goes beyond optimism and enters the realm of pure fantasy. This company has been at the forefront of ESG-driven woke capitalism since the beginning, and its demerits in this regard are numerous, the most egregious being its production of the paedophile-adjacent movie Cuties in 2020. But as the recent public pillorying of Bud Light and Target has shown, corporations are not immune from consumer pushback, and more to the point – as people continue to drop dead from vaccine-induced myocarditis and the story becomes too big to deny, woke doesn’t necessarily mean 100% compliant with the globalist program.

Could it be possible that a renegade element of senior executives at Netflix have themselves been impacted by the vaccine harms – the loss of a loved one, or a child with a permanent disability – and thus greenlighted the production of a shrewdly-veiled indictment of the corrupt political and regulatory system that facilitated not just the opioid epidemic, but the Covid vaccine crime as well?

If I had to bet, my money would still be on the most likely explanation – that Netflix has a vested interest, on behalf its owners (the usual lineup of WEF-affiliated asset managers including BlackRock and Vanguard), in obfuscating the issue of Big Pharma criminality. After all, the same funds own Pfizer and Moderna. The mutual interest here is not merely suggested, it is an undeniable financial fact.

Don’t get me wrong – the story of Purdue and the Sacklers and the diabolical role they played in the opioid crisis is a compelling tale that needs to be told (and indeed has been, both in Netflix’s documentary series The Pharmacist, 2020; and the Hulu drama Dopesick, 2021), and to give Netflix their due, I believe the series is a masterful piece of television. Annoying woke tokenism aside, I was gripped from start to finish; horrified and repulsed by the evil and abject greed of Richard Sackler; and deeply moved by what is now an all too common, and for many, close-to-home story of addiction, suffering, and tragic loss. I myself have taken oxycodone in the past and know only too well the dangerous power of this drug. I have also lost a friend to opioid overdose.

Taylor Kitsch plays Glen Kryger, a working-class guy whose back injury leads him down the path of opioid addiction.

But the timing of Painkiller’s release is suspicious. The Sackler story has been well known for years. Why did they do this now? Is it because the heat is being turned up on Pfizer, Moderna? And on the governments and other big backers who enabled the boondoggle though their manifest corruption and manipulation of the situation?

In many ways, Painkiller benefits Pfizer, Moderna, and their owners at BlackRock and Vanguard – it neatly ringfences the Big Pharma boogieman, and confines discussion of the topic to the now discredited Purdue Pharma – the sacrificial lamb.

It’s the old magician’s trick – distract the viewer while your hand is in his pocket (or plunging a needle into his deltoid, as the case may be).

But Painkiller also takes some feisty jabs at the establishment which, if I didn’t know better, I would swear are coded missives of condemnation for our current paradigm.

Knowing only the most general details of the Purdue story, I went into Painkiller largely blind, and as it unravelled, I began to suspect that the series would conclude with Edie Flowers and her boss at the Justice Department, John Brownlee (played by Tyler Ritter), emerging victorious – that they would defeat the Sacklers and take the win for democracy! That Richard Sackler and his clan of glorified heroin dealers would be imprisoned and have their fortune stripped away. This is how it was shaping up around about episode 4 of six, and I said to myself: “Here we go, I see what’s happening here. The message is going to be: Yes, Big Pharma does get up to some dodgy stuff, and things have gone wrong in the past, but thanks to the dedication of fearless public servants like Edie Flowers, the bad guys were caught, the system prevailed, and everyone can breathe easy – because we’ve got this.”

They could easily have ended the series this way, but they chose not to. While indeed maintaining that there are fearless public servants like Edie Flowers who are fighting for truth and justice (a notion I have absolutely no problem with), Painkiller stops short at the rank and file and essentially declares that everyone from middle-management on up, and all the way to the White House, are completely corrupt.

As this plot direction became apparent, my cynicism evaporated and I started to get excited. After taking some scathing shots at the FDA and aptly illustrating the revolving door of employment that connects this agency to the pharmaceutical industry, the creators of Painkiller went on to finish on a pointedly ironic note.

There was none of the hokey God bless America rubbish I had creepingly come to anticipate, but rather a stark admission of the shameful realities of the issue: that at this level of big business and politics, there is no justice, only greed and ass-covering.

While Purdue Pharma has been forced into bankruptcy, the Scaklers themselves have largely escaped culpability and their net worth remains at around $11 billion. Painkiller bitterly laments this fact in the closing sequence, which follows Richard Sackler (played by a super creepy Matthew Broderick) around his gaudy, cavernous mansion to Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence – an understated but deeply appalling viewing experience that I reckon rates among the best TV show endings in recent times, and left me with chills and moist eyes.

Matthew Broderick’s unsettling portrayal of Richard Sackler may be Painkiller’s crowning glory.

Edie Flowers even ruefully states at the end of her monolog, which runs intermittently through the whole series as both an in-person and voiceover narration, that her boss John Brownlee was “part of the system” clearly implying that there could be no justice for victims of Big Pharma, for the establishment is stacked with pawns who may put on a good show for the cameras, but in the final analysis will cut a cushy deal and be done with it.

The clear message of Painkiller is not that some bad actors did a very bad thing but the system caught up with them in the end and justice was done… But that the system remains very broken – corrupt beyond belief, perhaps even beyond redemption; and it ends with Edie wishing the current batch of prosecutors a sceptical “good luck” in their ongoing efforts to nail Richard Sackler.

The message is not what I would automatically expect of an establishment organ attempting to massage the narrative in a direction favourable to its own interests, but one of deep cynicism, stunned disbelief, and most tellingly – righteous anger.

Painkiller loudly proclaims that Big Pharma has committed monstrous crimes in the past, and that these crimes were aided and abetted by all branches of the government and the regulatory agencies, but what’s remarkable is the not-quite-so-loud yet unmistakable message that nothing has changed.

Again, we come to the point about the Purdue Pharma story being old news. Why make this series now? For when we hold up the core message of Painkiller against our current paradigm, anyone with a triple digit IQ would be hard-pressed not to draw an eerie parallel with the Covid vaccine saga. One could in fact change out every element of Painkiller with pertinent ingredients from the Covid story and the series would remain entirely coherent.

Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but I wonder if Netflix, in this case, is taking a break from saying the quiet part out loud, and instead, whispering the loud part in clever code.

It only remains for me to invite your thoughts, and, if you’ve not yet seen Painkiller but read my spoilers anyway, encourage you nonetheless to watch it. If nothing else, it is a quality piece of television.

4.5 stars