'The Capture's' Second Season Seizes on Big Tech's Political Manipulations

Halloween may make October officially "Spooky Season," but the scariest release this fall isn't a horror film with serial murderers or a ghost story. Instead, it's the latest season of The Capture, which arrives with all episodes on Peacock on November 3. It's a story with plenty of CGI, but not in the service of making you believe fantastical creatures are real. Instead, it focuses on the horror of CGI's ability to do just that, making the average viewer believe whatever their lying eyes perceive to be reality.

When our whole lives depend on believing what is shown to us on the screen, what happens when those images are manipulated to show us things that aren't real?

The first season of The Capture, which premiered in the U.K. in the fall of 2019, and followed on Peacock in the summer of 2020 as part of the streamer's initial launch offerings, posited a near future scenario where computer-generated imagery had gone from a few deep fake funnies on TikTok to an entire secret government program. Referred to euphemistically as "Correction," this technology was posited as used by the U.K. government to land convictions when the evidence wasn't quite up to snuff, creating visual proof of a crime to secure a conviction of the party everyone assumes is guilty.