Antithesis: Video Messiah (War of the Worlds 2×16, Part 2)

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

The Morthren have cloned motivational speaker Dr. Van Order to control the rich and powerful. Specifically, to control advertising executive Hardy Galt. Specifically, to get him to embed subliminal messages in commercials to make people more flexible on the matter of evil. To this end, he’s having his seniors all sent off to a corporate retreat and brainwashing, including Kincaid’s girlfriend, Mindy Cooper.

Kincaid returns to the base disappointed after being turned away by the receptionist with the news that Mindy had been unexpectedly sent on an overnight seminar. He pushes aside his disappointment to watch the results when Blackwood, Suzanne and Debi hook the watcher up to an image converter (You know what would’ve been nice? Some kind of allusion to the similar scene in the 1953 movie, to which this show is technically a sequel. There will be, if I recall correctly, only one more reference to that connection in the series), in the hopes that the watcher has a recording buffer, “like one of our own satellites.” They’re all surprised to find that the watcher they caught hovering outside Hardy Galt Industries has been watching Hardy Galt Industries, and when they zoom in on the image, they’re even more surprised to see that it is watching Hardy Galt himself.

The fact that they see Galt with Van Order is a legitimate thing for them to find interesting. No one goes as far as to suggest that Van Order is a clone, and the fact that the watcher was surveilling them is the only thing the Blackwood team ever sees to indicate that there’s a Morthren angle here. I’m not saying its a big leap. But Kincaid seems to just intuitively conclude a lot more than he really ought. He doesn’t know what the Morthren plot is, or how far along it is, or even which direction it’s flowing. He and Blackwood assume Van Order is up to no good in an alien sort of way for really no better reason than a personal distaste.

Blackwood describes executive retreats of the sort Van Order runs as, “Replacing your entire personality.” He joins Kincaid when he leaves to rescue Mindy from the Van Order institute because he, “hates mind control.” It’s not at all surprising to see Blackwood siding with Kincaid here; I can’t imagine him as the sort of guy who’s have a lot of tolerance for new-age crap like self-help gurus. Still, there’s an odd absence in that they don’t address the alien angle at all; the watcher (which helpfully burns out seconds after showing them Van Order and Galt) establishes that a connection of some sort exists, but no one ever discusses or speculates on the nature of that connection. Blackwood and Kincaid seem to be motivated primarily by a more generalized suspicion of Van Order, and the aliens figure in mostly in terms of, “Van Order is bad, and the fact that aliens are involved somehow makes this technically fall under our remit.” There’s no consideration of the possibility that Van Order is a target rather than a conspirator, or, hey, that maybe this is a trap, what with the staggering coincidence of Blackwood and Suzanne trying out their watcher-stunning gizmo in front of Kincaid’s girlfriend’s office and having it lead them to the retreat Kincaid’s girlfriend is currently going on.

Anyway, Hardy Galt’s best and brightest are taken to the Van Order institute. Here’s a picture of Bob checking out a Louis XVI chair while Clark apparently checks out Bob’s ass. Bob is played by Keith Knight, who was mostly a voice actor. Clark is Alex Carter, who I remember best as Detective Vartann on CSI. Something seems familiar about him. While we’re on the subject, that unnamed Van Order employee is played by Suzanne Coy, who seems familiar too. Can’t think why. Off-screen to the left are our additional cannon fodder, Kurt (Michael Caruana) and Jane (Angela Dohrmann).

Kurt and Bob are basically the “weak” ones who aren’t fully sold on having their personalities rewritten, while Jane and Clark are the ambitious, cuthroat ones we’re supposed to hate, with Clark sniping at Kurt and Jane at Mindy. They’d been selected earlier in a little slideshow on the Morthren viewing membrane that was organized to make Mindy’s selection a shocking reveal to lead into a commercial break. Once everyone’s changed into hip ’80s fascist uniforms — basically coveralls with shoulder pads and big brass snaps at the collars — Van Order appears via video screen to tell them how at this weekend’s seminar, their, “Weaknesses will be exposed and then irradicated.” Or as Malzor put it they’ll be pushed, “Beyond their natural abhorrence of human suffering until their perception of what is right is flexible.” Even though I’m not fully convinced it’s intentional, I really dig the follow-through here; unlike previous episodes where the Morthren were trying to convert humans to a more Morthren worldview, Malzor is forthright that he’s trying to break these humans and make them worse, rather than “perfecting” them.

Step one of this weakness-exposing involves making them… Well, pretty much do their jobs. They stay up all night watching a new Hardy Galt commercial — one with the embedded images — on an loop, alternating with clips of Van Order’s platitudes, ostensibly so they can take notes on it. The ad is not much different in concept to the one we’d seen Galt show them earlier and decry as a failure. I couldn’t get an animated gif to be a reasonable size of it, but it’s just two naked people lubricating each other on the set of a Meatloaf video. We see a montage of Mindy and the others taking turns going stir crazy, negging each other, eventually breaking out in a fist fight, which the clone Van Order watches via a monitor in his office with a creepy gentle smile. A cutaway to Blackwood and Kincaid gives John a chance to tell us that Mindy has “really changed” since she fell under Van Order’s spell. Since we’ve never seen Mindy before, nor do we know anything at all about her, this is not exactly a convincing claim. We also haven’t exactly seen anything about Mindy’s Van Order-induced behavior that seems out of line, except maybe that she’s really enthusiastic about it. It’s a bad case of “tell, don’t show” all around. See, with Clark and Jane, we can see that they’re cruel and ambitious, and it would be easy to convince me that Van Order’s “It’s your world; take what’s due you,” teachings had made them into assholes. But Mindy isn’t like that; she seems to still be a pretty decent person. Her biggest flaw seems to be a lack of self-confidence, and maybe that’s meant to be something Van Order engendered in her, but it’s not a consuming flaw, certainly not profound enough to stick out, and, unlike Hardy Galt, we don’t have contrasting scenes of him being a pushover with Van Order while still playing the strong leader for his employees. We know nothing about Mindy, so there’s no context from which we can see Van Order as having an effect on her, and what little we do see of her under Van Order’s influence isn’t especially bad.

Fortunately for the A-plot, it will take until morning for Kincaid and Blackwood to reach the Van Order institute. I’m not sure how to make this timeline work out. They left some time during business hours, and are already there. Kincaid and Blackwood left a couple of minutes after Kincaid got back from his failed attempt to take Mindy out on a date, and it’s going to take them what, ten to twelve hours to get there? Blackwood looks super pissed when he finds out how long it’s going to take. Like he totally had something else to do tonight and only came because he thought this would be a short trip.

Dawn finds that the fighting at the executive retreat has died down. The unnamed employee informs them that they’ll be interviewed one-on-one by Van Order in person.  And while it might have been interesting to see some of what he tells the others, I don’t think we should be at all surprised that it’s only Mindy’s interview that we see. Van Order cautions her that she’s not nearly sociopathic enough, and that she should be more overtly evil like her colleagues. I notice, though, that when he tells her she’s not doing as well as some of her colleagues, he names Kurt, Jane and Clark. Bob is so fucked. In order to remove hew “flaws”, Van Order does this sort of cross between the Pain Box scene in Dune and the Room 101 scene in 1984: Mindy has her hand strapped to a metal cage which suddenly contains an angry rattlesnake. Van Order insists that the snake isn’t real, that, “Fear has tricked you into seeing something that isn’t there.” After a few seconds of him telling her to look at him and trust him and ignore the snake, she looks down to see the cage empty.

The scene’s emotional beats are strong, but, once again, the job they do of communicating what’s going on here isn’t great. Was this some bit of alien trickery? Or is it a more mundane trick, part of the real Van Order’s program of psychological manipulation. Remember, all the complaints we’ve heard about the morality of Van Order’s “messiah”-hood are just as applicable to the original; it’s not at all clear whether or how much Van Order’s process has been altered now that he’s an alien-controlled duplicate. The goal of the exercise, in retrospect, seems to be to convince Mindy to trust Van Order over the evidence of her own senses. But this is a little murky since there’s enough going on that it’s hard to say where to focus. The Morthren want Hardy Galt to take on a partner who they can trust to do their bidding, and in light of that, it makes sense that this “training” would be designed to ensure the new partner would trust and obey their proxy, Van Order, above their own senses and judgment. But there’s also this whole thing with the subliminals making them violent, and the message about ruthlessly pursuing their own goals at any cost.

If I trusted this show more, I might claim that it’s actually being clever, leaving some things unsaid and trusting the audience to work it out. But after sixteen episodes, I have little enough cause to believe they’re being clever. Last week, I suggested that we needed someone to explicitly tell us that Van Order’s message isn’t the problem. Even more now, if I am to believe they know what they’re doing, we really need a scene where, say, Malzor explains that Van Order’s disciples believe they are being taught to think for themselves and prioritize their own goals, but really they’re being taught to defer to Van Order and to want what he tells them to want. We also need for that contradiction to be something more than an informed disconnect: very little of what we actually see does anything to convey why or how Van Order teaches the opposite of his textual message. These complaints are mostly variations on a theme, I know. The underlying issue here is the extent to which War of the Worlds expects us to just take it on faith that “He’s a new-age self-help guru” is sufficient all by itself to communicate to us that Van Order is bad news, that his message isn’t sincere, and that he brainwashes his students into dependency. This isn’t the first time War of the Worlds has gone here, just taking for granted that the audience will instinctively accept certain things as surprisingly specific kinds of “bad”. “Synthetic Love” took for granted that we’d all accept without evidence that narcotics legalization was “bad”, “The Pied Piper” took for granted that we’d all accept without evidence that test tube babies were “bad”. There’s an ongoing assumption that it just goes without saying that the government is corrupt and self-serving. It’s easy enough to blame sloppy writing for this — and I do — but since part of my goal here is to look at how this show is part of the story of the world in which it existed, there’s an informative element here. That in this specific time and place — American TV culture of the early months of 1990 — these were things you could take for granted: drugs are bad (mmkay?); test tube babies are bad; self-help gurus are bad. And it’s somewhat curious to consider what they don’t assume they can take for granted. “Terminal Rock” takes the time to show us that the Scavengers are bad news when they easily could have just taken for granted that punk rock was “bad”. And Hollywood is fairly notorious for reductivist approaches to major societal issues. Despite how “liberal” Hollywood is supposed to be, they almost inevitably portray things like corporate malfeasance as the result of greedy bosses, racism as being entirely about individual bigots with personal racial animus, and institutional violence as purely a matter of a few “bad apples”. Yet War of the Worlds takes the surprising tack of doing several episodes which embrace the idea of humanity’s failings being on a systemic level — in “Synthetic Love”, “Path of Lies” and “The Deadliest Disease“, they don’t simply take for granted that the individuals running with the drug companies, the media and even the smuggling rings are simply evil, but rather they make the effort (with varying levels of success) to show how the systems themselves force people to behave worse. Remember, this is just part of the technique used by the original Van Order; the subliminal messaging isn’t connected. Though it’s close enough to muddy the waters, because we’ve got, essentially, two different forms of brainwashing going on at the same time, with different proximate goals. We don’t ever really get any sense of why Van Order telling people over and over to take responsibility for their lives, to listen to their reason and ignore fear, or to pursue their own goals leads to people handing over responsibility for their lives, ignoring their own reason and senses in deference to an authority, and doing what they’re told by Van Order. This scene with the snake is the closest we get.

Meanwhile, back in the city, Suzanne has been tasked with investigating Hardy Galt himself. Using the false identity of “Miss Hope”, a silk and cotton clothing manufacturer, she’s set up an appointment with Galt. They meet just after Galt finishes a brief meeting with Mana, inexplicably dressed as a sexy widow, to receive a tape of the new subliminally-embedded commercials. At first blush, this scene strikes me as superfluous. But since we saw Malzor and Van Order assembling the commercials, and we’ve only seen them shown at Van Order’s institute so far, the small detail of establishing that the embedded commercials have been given to Galt, but only just now (I guess this means I was wrong before when I assumed they were already on the air),  is an unusual example of War of the Worlds dotting its i’s and crossing its t’s that on the one hand, raises my trust that the writers have thought this all the way through, but on the other, makes me wonder why they’d take the time to show us this detail when they didn’t feel the need to establish, say, what Mindy was like before she started following Van Order.

Another small detail I like is that Suzanne claims Galt was recommended to her by Van Order, which seems to help her gain his trust. Most of the meeting takes place conveniently off-screen. The major thrust of it is that he shows her the video tape of his new commercial, in order to give her a sense of what sort of work HGI does. See how convenient that was? And there’s a hint here of the effect it’s having on Galt, even with such limited exposure: when Suzanne claims that one commercial doesn’t paint a complete picture, he snaps at her that it should, before regaining his composure. This was actually a rouse to get him to step out for a minute, in order to grab some more tapes, giving Suzanne a moment to steal the tape from the VCR. She bails while Galt is out of the room, which is a big no-no when you’re performing a social engineering hack. You’ve got to finish the interview so that when they find the tape missing, no one remembers you as the person who disappeared right in the middle of a meeting right after the last time anyone saw our only copy of this super important new tape.

While Blackwood and Kincaid apparently spend all morning sneaking into the Van Order institute, it’s time to winnow down some of our guest cast. Everyone’s put on treadmills to prove they are physically as well as mentally competent to be Hardy Galt’s new partner. I would say this whole plot has shades of The Apprentice, but I don’t want to think about that. The smiling face of Van Order pushes them on from a video screen. Eventually, the treadmill electrocutes Kurt. Only Mindy is fazed by this. Everyone else has a good laugh at how Kurt’s dead now, because they are not meant to be sympathetic characters. They even mock Mindy for caring about the “born loser” when “only the strong survive”. They don’t think it’s at all odd that Van Order’s staff simply carries Kurt’s body off and the police aren’t called. I guess given the world this show has portrayed, it’s not too weird, but, like, most sociopaths know you have to at least fake humanity. There is no point here where anyone considers that callous disregard for human lives might be bad for busin— eh, y’know what? I’ll allow it.

But I do wonder: there’s no indication that the rest of Van Order’s staff are clones or Morthren or anything. As far as I know, they’re just ordinary people who worked for the real Van Order before he got cloned. So… is covering up the death of the occasional corporate executive on retreat part of their normal duties? We only need one line of dialogue here; have the clone tell Malzor that he’s replaced the usual staff with mercenaries or something because they need people who, “Won’t ask questions about the new itinerary.”

Mindy is so broken up that she can’t even enjoy the delicious buffet. Bob, of course, loads up his plate because he’s the fat guy. I will credit them for the fact that this is the only thing in the entire episode that seems to have been written with conscious awareness of Bob being “the fat guy”. I mean, they just did a scene of everyone being forced to do strenuous exercise and they didn’t make a fat guy joke. Maybe they got it out of their system last week. Jane has disappeared, and Mindy goes off to find her, despite Clark’s warning that this “might be a test”. Once she’s out of the room, Clark offers Bob a slice of cake. By which I mean that he turns toward him holding the cake knife with serial killer eyes. And asks him if he wants a slice of cake.

Suzanne watches her stolen tape back at the base with Debi, discovering the embedded images. This scene is the One Big Disappointment I referred to last week: Debi is in the scene purely to play the Doctor Who companion and ask, “What is it, Doctor?” so Suzanne can explain. In the first place, we don’t actually need a detailed explanation here, with Suzanne telling Debi how subliminal messages work and explaining exactly what they’re supposed to do. We already know that part, so most of this could be handled off-screen. A thing I find slightly unrealistic is how quickly and accurately Suzanne works. From what we see, it comes off as though she sees one frame of civilians getting shot when she turns on the slow-mo, and instantly understands not only that there is a subliminal message inserted, but that it’s “designed to induce violence”. I don’t think we’ve been told exactly what Suzanne’s field is. I assumed chemist early on, but “The Pied Piper” suggests she might be a psychologist. That would justify her being the right person to identify this, but I feel like the scene is too quick and we see too much to accept her working the details out like this. If there’d been a montage, or if we’d joined the scene with signs that she’d been studying the tape for hours already, it would sell me a lot more. Or if there’d been some sign of something overtly alien about the embedded messages. As with Mana’s earlier appearance, it’s a nice bit of fleshing out, giving us an extra scene with Lynda Mason Green and Rachel Blanchard when they could’ve just cut straight to Blackwood being told about their findings over the phone (Which is, in fact, the next scene) that is strange in that they chose to spend the time here and not somewhere else. And I really like that they’re consistently including Debi in the nuts and bolts of their work against the aliens. It’s as if they’re actually trying to build her up as a character and it’s leading toward something. Which is amazing because it actually is trying to build her up as a character and it’s leading toward something (I mean, sure, she’ll disappear for a couple of episodes soon, but still).

But you know what I’m upset about, right? I know it was a long time ago, but early on in the season, the Morthren tried using embedded signals to make people violent and Debi was affected by it. There should be a reference to that. More than that: Debi should have a reaction to it. You know how Blackwood mentions hating mind control? There’s a scene back in “Terminal Rock” where he seems to recognize that he’s being manipulated by the music for no clear reason. Put them together, and you get an implication that Blackwood has been a victim of some kind of brainwashing in the past, and now he’s hypersensitive about it. That’s the kind of reaction we should be seeing from Debi here. But nope, that was six months ago; might as well have happened in a different series.

Mindy finds Jane’s bedroom filled with steam, and discovers Jane’s body, hanged in the shower. I won’t show a picture here, but I’m actually only guessing that it’s the shower; we’re shown a real close shot, and it does kinda look like the thing she’s strung up with is the shower curtain. The background… Looks like a birdcage? I don’t know. She’s certainly near the shower, given the sound of the shower and the steam. Mindy runs downstairs just in time to find out what’s going down between Clark and Bob.

I don’t talk enough about the use of lighting and composition in this show. Few things in War of the Worlds do more to establish that we’re out of the ’80s than the lighting; your basic 80s adventure show usually had very simple, high-key lighting. But this show is full of low-key lighting, backlighting, under-lighting, or, as in so many scenes out of this episode, lit by a floodlight through a window. I guess that was a thing in the ’90s. But despite my mocking, so much of the tone of War of the Worlds is conveyed through lighting, and it really is a hallmark of this being conceptually more modern. We’re closer to The X-Files than MacGyver in visual texture.

Seeing Clark over Bob’s dead body, Mindy declares, “You killed them! You killed them all!” Wait, what? I assumed that Van Order rigged the treadmill to kill one of them as part of the whole “desensitize them to murder” thing, and Jane hanged herself…

Except no, Clark cops to it, spouting Van Order’s platitudes as justification. Okay, we see him kill Bob. I see absolutely no way to put Kurt’s death on Clark, but okay. Jane… Well, I went back and took a closer look at the shot when Mindy found her body. Maybe that bit of plastic wrap at the corner of the screen is meant to be something restraining her hands? I guess it’s possible. There’s no place in the narrative where Clark should’ve had time to kill Jane, but there’s also no place where he should’ve had time to rig the treadmill to electrocute Kurt. So I don’t know.

Despite having been subjected to the same murder-inducing brainwashing as everyone else, Mindy mostly just screams and panics like a slasher movie victim, but fortunately, after spending, apparently, hours skulking around the place in secrecy, Kincaid shows up just in time to shoot Clark before he can kill her.

Rather than fleeing to safety, Kincaid makes his way to the control room, where Van Order is holding Blackwood at gunpoint. “I’m a survivor. That too is part of my philosophy,” the clone explains, ordering Kincaid to disarm. Mindy enters, and is, in spite of everything, still fully under Van Order’s spell. He declares her the “winner”, Galt’s new partner. She does not question this, does not suggest that possibly her boss might call the whole thing off after the brutal murder of half of his senior staff. I’ll buy that, because brainwashing. But if the brainwashing has worked so well on her, why does she seem to be the only person who wasn’t driven to psychopathy? Why isn’t she willing to fight back against Clark? Why is she the only one who cared about the deaths of the others? I pointed out last time that it seems like there’s a conflict between “We need someone we can control” and “We need someone who’s been turned into a sociopath who only cares about their own advancement.” And like with all this episodes weaknesses, it’d be fine if the show displayed some consciousness of that conflict. The others all seem to have internalized Van Order’s message of looking out for yourself and doing “whatever it takes” to achieve their goals, while Mindy (like Galt, for that matter) has become entirely dependent on Van Order.

Van Order pistol-whips Blackwood when he tries to talk Mindy out of obeying him, which is convenient because it makes the climax a lot simpler, a verbal duel between Kincaid and Van Order for Mandy’s loyalty. But this is where things get awkward due to that unacknowledged conflict in Van Order’s teachings: they’re basically both saying the same thing. They both ask Mindy to think for herself, to follow her own goals. Van Order seems to get the upper hand, convincing Mindy to take Kincaid’s gun, but she hesitates when he orders her to shoot Kincaid. Kincaid tells her to, “Remember how you wanted to save the world?” and reminds her that she wants, “To be free,” which would’ve been a nice motivation to introduce before this exact moment. Van Order tells her, “You decide your future,” but follows it up with an order to kill. As she struggles, Kincaid pulls out the big guns and says, “I love you, Coop,” (Out of habit, I’ve called them “Kincaid” and “Mindy”, but they consistently call each other “John” and “Coop”). With a sob, she turns about thirty degrees to the left and fires. Somehow, this leads to Van Order being shot, despite the fact that he’s directly to her side. His falling body switches on a bank of screens playing a loop of his aphorisms as Kincaid rushes in to catch the sobbing Mindy.

We fade to the street outside the recently re-named Hardy Galt Worldwide. Kincaid is a bit reluctant about Mindy taking the job as Galt’s partner, but she insists that she can do good, protecting people from the dangerous commercials. He assures her she can succeed, and they share a kiss before she leaves. The camera lingers on Kincaid for like five seconds too long so he can look wistfully off into the distance.

Back at the Morthren base, Malzor tries to spin it that it’s no big deal that they lost the watcher at Hardy Galt and that the clone is dead. They’ve got plenty of Van Order archive footage, so really, it’s “more convenient this way.” But they’ll hold on to the original Van Order for a while, just in case.

Mindy meets with her new partner, who is up in arms about not being able to reach Van Order. He does not ask her about the fact that four of his high-level employees died over the weekend. Instead, he tells her that he’s always admired her tenacity and creativity. Which is weird, since tenacity and creativity are not traits she has ever displayed. Her first order of business is to ask him to have a look at a commercial that, “Seems to promote psychopathic behavior, even murder.” Galt is alarmed just in time for what would be a great Twilight Zone-style twist ending when she says “It’s ours,” except that we already knew that. “One more thing,” she says. “Thanks for the seminar. I learned a lot.”

Huh. I think Galt is supposed to be horrified at the end by the implication that his company is putting out a harmful product. It is no real stretch to say that unless murder is the actual product you are trying to sell, commercials promoting murder might be counterproductive. But this scene is tonally weird. Between the incidental music, the lighting, and the delivery, I can’t quite tell whether Galt’s supposed to be genuinely troubled at the danger of the commercials, or if he’s troubled by the possibility of a competitor having this technology. And the ominous tones of Mindy’s final lines make me wonder if we’re supposed to take away that she’s still brainwashed. It doesn’t really fit into the plot, but it feels like what the tone is trying to tell me.

We will never see Mindy Cooper again, of course. Which makes John’s profession of love seem a little cheap. After everything I said about things that make War of the Worlds seem modern, taking a female character we’ve never met before and will never see again, and telling us she’s the love of the hero’s life is a very ’80s thing. I think it happens about sixteen times on Knight Rider (MacGyver, for what it’s worth, brings back all the one-off-love-of-his-life girls for a late-season episode where Mac has an episode-long dream sequence in the wild west to help his subconscious decide which one of them he wants to be exclusive with).

Despite my complaints, this episode is pretty solid. The pacing is good, and they give everyone a little bit to do. Admittedly, it’s not much for most of them. Suzanne and Debi vanish from the story in act 3, and Blackwood serves no clear purpose at the Institute other than to get captured. Still, the fact that most of the story sticks close to Mindy stops it from just being another Kincaid-centric episode. They burn through an awful lot of concept in this episode, which makes it a shame that it’s not followed up on. But on the other hand, it’s nice to know that the writers were capable of having these big, intricate ideas. I’m reminded a lot of the sense I got from our recent check-in with Doctor Who, of several stories worth of plot getting slammed into one story: the Morthren pursue Van Order and Hardy Galt largely independently for their role as major influencers, they pursue Van Order’s therapy and subliminal messages independently as vehicles for controlling humans, they brainwash Galt’s executives to make them uncontrollable killing machines and also to make them easily controlled and submissive. But unlike “Invaders From Mars”, they stick with it, carrying basically two episodes worth of concept all the way to the end.

And Van Order is kind of an interesting antagonist. The Morthren themselves play an unusually small role. In fact, this may be the only episode of War of the Worlds that would probably work in any other ’80s action-adventure series. I know I said before that this episode reminded me a bit of Max Headroom with the corporate corruption escapades and the vidboxes, but the vidboxes disappear after act 1 (which, in retrospect, is a shame, but I’m just not that upset about it). The main thrust of it I could imagine turning up on The A-Team or Airwolf or MacGyver or Knight Rider. Sure, Van Order is a clone… But how much does that affect the plot? Maybe the details of his motives are influenced by that, but he’s still mostly acting the way that it’s apparently in his nature to act. There’s no indication that the embedded messages in the commercials are alien in nature, just “ordinary” subliminal brainwashing of the sort Zach Morris could pull off. It could’ve been corrupt corporations or Nazis or a Voodoo cult behind it just as easily as aliens. The semi-apocalyptic setting maybe does a little to help us buy no one seeming to care about all the murders, but only at the fridge-logic level; powerful individual covering up really wanton murder isn’t that big a plot hole for an ’80s action-adventure.

Ironic that the least War of the Worlds episode of War of the Worlds would turn out to be one of the better ones. It doesn’t bode well, I suppose. But maybe it’s just that after four episodes of Mark Gatiss, I’m just glad that it didn’t turn out to be another shaggy dog story.

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• War of the Worlds is available from amazon.