Heaven's Gate

Frank and Sawyer are both captivating as the two most covered interviewees throughout this mini series. The growth of Applewhite's cult from humble beginnings to a mass suicide that took the lives of 39 people is expertly covered here. Animation department did some great work with some of these sequences. It's heartbreaking. There are no easy answers, sadly. But at the end of this you'll see the late members of Heaven's Gate not as deluded freaks but as what they really are. Human.

I thoroughly enjoyed this podcast. So I was thinking how could this be better ? Well, the images and interviews for one. What is remarkable about some of the reviews is that there are people who rate this low because they immediately claim that they could never fall for something like this , well anyone can tell you that these reviewers are actually the most vulnerable since certainty breeds deception. The timing of this amidst the NXIVM drama unfolding may take away from the fact that these very real and profound events took place years before and have little to nothing to do with the type of bs peddled in NXIVM. Now It's helpful that more of these stories are coming to light now and while we can hope that time and education will help us or our loved ones from making the same mistakes some things can not be avoided as we quest for righteousness acceptance and love in this life. Those of us who remember the events leading up to this as it unfolded finally get an in-depth retelling of events.

Heavens Gate has been a subject i've always been extremely interested in. I've even written school papers on them. That being said, there are major misconceptions about this "cult", and this documentary series is one of the best things to watch to get information about Heavens Gate that doesn't come off too one-sided or misconstrued. So little is known about this cult, its origin, its teachings, it's difficult and confusing innards, and it's oddballed participants and leaders, but this documentary series does a really good job explaining all of its extremely interesting inner workings, how the cult changes over time, and how it ultimately ended. Heavens Gate is a really sad, mysterious, odd and even charming story as a whole, and this series really bundles it up nicely.

Definitely recommend this to anybody who's interested in cults, religion, or even aliens / ufos.

One of many "mini-series" that makes one ask: "uh, why is this padded, stretched, and larded with repetition to get to four episodes?!" I found this added little to what I learned about this group from reading major newspapers at the time. It relied too much on interviews with people who say banal or predictable things; far too much time is taken by uninteresting, shaky home video shot by the group in the 90s. If you know little about this group going in, the story may have a macabre fascination, but otherwise this documentary will likely register as a missed opportunity to better explain, with more wit and insight, the original motives for and influences on the group, apart from the psychology of the ex-music teacher at its center. Why did this cult emerge in the early 70s ( a low point for Hollywood and TV sci-fi) and extinguish itself in the mid 90s? The sentimental, indicative music and clunky editing adds to its tedium and the sense the film-makers are masking a lack of analysis. This film would have been better if the more historical approach of the first episode were extended, smartly edited, and left at 120 minutes (ep. one is by far the best of the four--as it reflects, yet still doesn't detail, that the group was analyzed and widely reported on in the mid 1970s, including a cover feature in Psychology Today: what did that author argue? Despite having the author on camera, this film doesn't specify).

I really wanted to like this. I really did. Unfortunately, it was a boring and tedious 4 hours of attempting to make associations between Christianity, science fiction and cultism to explain this mass suicide. This series would have been greatly improved by delving into the mental illness aspect of the two leaders as well as the members. The series gave this group of lost souls a flowery lens, instead of really looking into the grifting, child abandonment and other reprhensible behavior this group of folks participated in. This would have been an amazing opportunity to shed light on the the types of personalities that are at risk to be swallowed up by psycopathic charismatic leaders. This series almost felt like it was making an excuse for the outcome, when it could have really used the platform to shed light on the ugly truth of the matter mental illness and at-risk populations.