Dead at 21: MTV Drama Is Worth Revisiting 30 Years Later By As a kid, one of my doctors was attempting to explain something about my albinism, and I misunderstood him horribly, thinking he meant that all albinos die at the age of 25, so I was extremely depressed for a couple of days before my mother figured out what happened and straightened me out. For Ed Bellamy, however, this is a much more real and immediate scenario, as just when the young man is celebrating his 20 birthday, thinking his whole life is ahead, he’s confronted with the terrible news that he’ll be, Dead at 21. Now that’s a solid stinger.
“Don’t trust anyone” was starting to become the motto of a generation, and Ed was constantly being told to his brain or lose it. The show’s intro does a decent job of sharing the premise. Ed Bellamy (Jack Noseworthy) has always been a smart kid, but he’s about to find out that he was adopted, a part of a government project to make children smarter in hopes of forcing evolution, and probably going to die because of the microchip in his brain by his 21 birthday.
This is one of those situations where they say we only use so much of our actual brain power, but this little processor lets people like Ed – called Neuro CyberNauts, ‘sibs’ or ‘cybs’ for short – do so much more. It gives them these intense dreams, which can be helpful or harmful, and I like that not everyone who has been given one of these goes through it the same way, their abilities manif.
