Over the years, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight deep dives have helped to educate us about the everyday horrors of our world, from voter suppression to ransomware and predatory “ministries” taking advantage of the dire state of the U.S. healthcare industry. But somehow, he has judged this “the worst thing [he has] ever seen”.
In a web-only segment, a horrified Oliver introduces his audience to South Texas’ most nightmare-inducing beach trash: the dozens of semi-intact dolls, doll heads, and other doll parts that wash up on the shore with alarming regularity, empty features worn blank by the waves and orifices occupied by malignant colonies of sea life. Featured players include Oliver’s “personal enemy, Barnacle Baby”, one he’s named Anthony, and a doll that he points out is quite clearly a sex doll, judging by its carnival-clown-like mouth opening: “That doll is different than the others in a meaningful, practical way!”
Of course, like any eerie phenomenon in this age of constant information, there’s a helpful scientific explanation for why this keeps happening. And of course, it doesn’t mollify Oliver one bit, and he descends into doll-inspired madness brainstorming how the cursed coastal debris can be removed from this plane of existence.
“Do we need to break some kind of curse? That would make sense,” he rants. “Is there a special volcano we have to throw them into?” There’s also a complex theory about the ghost of a Victorian child with the Devil in her heart, haunting the waters of the Gulf. And frankly, given the inconceivable scope of the many, many problems facing American society right now, exorcising a 400-mile-long swathe of the Gulf Coast of sinister toys sounds perfectly doable at this point.
