The article in USA Today about a NFL football player dying in a car crash grabbed Travis’s Snider’s attention because it was the fourth death in five months on the same team. The media called it a strange coincidence but Travis, a junior college instructor with a passion for statistics, saw it as something different: a pattern of deaths.
Other patterns soon unfold: five animal park workers are mauled in a week, six New Jersey assembly members die, and four women named Gladys win big lottery prizes in a row; each event having a statistical probability measurable in the billions. Random events were forming into inexplicable patterns. But why was it happening?
Many had theories, and something to gain. Former Congressman Abe Simpson demanded compulsorily gun ownership for every US citizen to counter whatever force was behind the patterns. Preacher Paul held marches to denounce the devil wreaking havoc. Andy Sweeney, the charismatic and ambitious host of a late night talk show Mind Bogglers, smelled opportunity by making Travis into a media star.
‘Patterns’ examines the public’s reaction when a monkey-wrench gets tossed into the normal course of rational thinking. It’s also the story of Travis, an unassuming man who finds himself ill-cast into a world of fame and Hollywood glamor, manipulated by TV-host Andy Sweeney and his seductive assistant-producer Stephanie. All of a sudden Travis is at the epicenter of the decade’s most important news story, in a world where normal reality has been tossed upside down while Travis is being asked to explain to an upset public, “Why?”
