I finally just watched this. Yeah, I know, I'm late to the party again. Sue me, I sold my TV. I found it on Veoh under the name of "Last Prophecy of Nostradamus" -- apparently illiteracy on the internet is not limited to message boards -- and broken into 10 parts of random lengths. Note: if you go looking for it on Veoh ignore parts 3, 7 and 9. 3 is one second of nothing. 7 is a trailer and 9 simply doesn't exist. Yes in the new world Nostradamus predicted we will go straight from 8 to 10!
Anyway, on to what I thought of the show.
First of all, as someone mentioned, it is only lost to the enormous amount of illiterate and un-curious who get ALL their information from a television. I was reading about the Vaticini Nostradami years ago. In fact, I remember posting a question on UM asking if anyone had anymore information on it and I think I received 1 or 2 replies.
I watched the show after finding out it was on the VM, as idea of images of prophecy fascinates me. I don't care if Nostradamus wrote it. For the record, I think it likely it was a collaborative effort between N. and his young son for two reasons.
1) The MS we have is a copy. Therefore, we can't Nostradamus wrote but we also can't say he didn't. He did have a son who grew to be a noted painter.
2) It apparently was in the Vatican Library at one point. How weird is it that is somehow made an escape from there, by the way? And if the Vatican thought it was written by Nostradamus, I'll take their word for it. They seriously suck at defining a religion, but are unbelievable archivists.
But authorship really is not important. Sure, if Nostradamus did write it, the prophecy believing community could believe is more easily, but he wasn't the only one that managed to predict the future -- sometimes -- with eerie clarity. St. Malachy is the first that comes to find. Only a few more popes left! Woohoo! Hope for the world!
The next question I had was, is it prophetic and the answer, just taking the information in the program is, of course: inconclusive. Some of the images are so extremely vague that nothing can be drawn from them.
Others made me raise my eyebrows: such as the one where it appears a pope is looking at a book with a picture of a mushroom cloud on the left hand page. Granted it might be another Tree of Life, but I have never encountered one done in ruddy tones before.
But most of the pictures were zipped bast so you can barely see them. Irritating. I agree with what someone said earlier, that it was a director pushing an "Let's scare some people with 2012!" agenda.
The fallacy in that line of thought, that no one on the show mentioned, and in omitting this revealed the slant, is that assuming Nostradamus was a prophet, just for the sake of argument, his writings don't come to a conclusive 'end of the world' terminus. They emphatically say, and this is the beauty in them regardless of whether or not they are prophecy, is that things are gonna really suck before they get better. It is kind of ironic that whoever made the program seems to have a real desire for Armageddon, since Nostradamus never appeared to believe in such a thing.
All in all, I thought it a program typical of the kind produced in the last 8 years or so. I think Beavis paraphrased it best: "We're all gonna diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I think I will celebrate New Year's Day 2013 by reading some of my by then and probably now, actually, out of date books on Nostradamus.