Written by Katy Scoggin

Recipient of a Sundance/Sloan Commissioning Grant

Synopsis

Miriam, a public radio intern, works hard for everyone but herself. Things turn around when she gets a job producing a story about her dad Gordon, a fossil hunter in rural Kansas.

But there's a catch: Gordon is an alcoholic. Miriam hasn’t seen him in seven years. And the last time they spoke, he told her he'd converted to Christianity.

Miriam's job prospect trumps her inhibition, and she goes out to investigate. What she finds is a changed man. Her dad is on top of the world: dry, happily engaged to a woman from his church, and in the middle of digging up an amazing fish fossil buried deep in the Kansas planes.

Miriam learns that when her father converted, he discarded his staunch support of evolution for the belief in creationism. Once on track to get a PhD in paleontology, he's now teaching home school groups that the earth is 6,000 years old and that the fossil record is a product of Noah's flood.

Miriam finds herself in a conundrum: on one hand, she's enthralled to have intimate access to a killer story. Gordon's evangelical friends are excited to interview with her and share their young-earth beliefs with the public radio-listening world.

But on the other hand, Miriam resents the fact that her dad has dropped his science for a belief system she considers radical and wrong-headed. It feels like her real dad has been whisked away and replaced with a freshly-scrubbed double.

And yet...Gordon is happier than Miriam has ever seen him. He seems to have found a peace that he never had when he was raising her as a single, drinking dad.

At the deepest level, Miriam thinks of painful questions that aren’t about God or science or public radio; they’re about her: How could God could save her dad when she couldn't? Why wasn't she enough of a reason for him to change?