NEW YORK — On the laboratory floor, a humanoid figure flickers to life. Her name is Mia, and when her artificial intelligence is fully operational, she will be a supremely realistic sex doll, ready for mass production. To get up to speed, she watches hours upon hours of porn.

Up in the sky, Redtube Flight 728 slips through a wormhole, which the captain explains to the passengers is part of the new normal.

“They’re pretty common now that the patriots at Amazon are using them to bend the fabric of the universe to improve delivery times,” he says.

Soon a vehemently campy flight attendant named George begins to suspect that there’s a sex ghost on board. “What the frick is a sex ghost?” his equally dimwitted colleague Tammy asks, reasonably enough.

But also: What’s all this online hysteria about a virus caused by furries? (That’s the subculture of people who dress in animal costumes.) Can it really be traced to a plane that’s gone missing, and are George and Tammy on that plane?

That’s not even close to all there is to keep track of in Nadja Leonhard-Hooper and Dan Nuxoll’s “Eat the Devil,” the gleefully but fatally overloaded satire from One Year Lease Theater Company at the Tank.

A sci-fi, apocalypse, time-travel, airplane-disaster movie riff, it’s a careening sendup of an out-of-control American culture mesmerized by screens. There are characters based on famous right-wingers (conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, political commentator Tomi Lahren, televangelists Jim and Lori Bakker) piled alongside fictional social outliers: an incel named Ethin Sell and an out-and-proud furry called Goatse — who, for the record, believes he is “the reincarnated soul of a goat from a 13th-century Russian folktale.”

All of them commune with their public through cameras, and Nick Flint’s production makes impressive use of plentiful video. (Some of it is shot live, which occasioned some technical glitches at the performance I saw.) This is the rare stage production that credits not only a video designer (Scott Fetterman) but also cinematographers (Adam Dietrich and Bella Graves).

There’s a drone here, too — its name is Alexa Bezos — and it is maybe not such a great idea to have it fly over the spectators’ heads.

By far the best, most focused parts of the show happen back at the lab, where Kelindah Schuster makes a wondrously sympathetic Mia, and Lexie Braverman lends a vital warmth and ease to her creator, Penny. Rory Spillane is a comic standout as Charles, her awkward young colleague (and is equally fine as Ethin the incel).

But at 100 minutes, this fervent experiment drags — because it’s too convoluted, and because the single philosophical stand it seems to take is for nihilism. It strafes everything in its sights.

As the Bakkers prepare their viewers for the dark times they insist are ahead, they hawk a survival kit stocked with many thousands of calories.

“It’s a 30-day fiesta bucket,” Lori says.

“Eat the Devil” is a kind of fiesta bucket, too — jam-packed to overflowing, but its calories are mostly empty.

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Event information:

‘Eat the Devil’

Through March 9 at the Tank, Manhattan; thetanknyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.