Author’s note: Due to the exceptional length of the angry tirade I go on, this episode’s treatment will be split into three parts. Thank you for your patience.
And what would your name be?
Woodward and Bernstein didn’t need a name.
You’re Deep Throat?
It is April 24, 1989, or as they call it in Massachusetts, “New Kids on the Block Day”. The District of Columbia has, for the second time, been blocked from enforcing a new law that would forbid minors from being out on the streets of the nation’s capital after 11 PM. Deposed Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda lost a SCOTUS appeal on the freezing of their assets. In China… My website is definitely getting blocked for saying that stuff is happening in Tiananmen Square. Noboru Takeshita will resign as the Prime Minister of Japan tomorrow, in the wake of the Recruit scandal, which we’ve mentioned before. Motorola will release the MicroTAC cell phone this week, the world’s smallest cell phone, which is pretty much the size of a modern cell phone, once you remove its camel-hump-like six-hundred pound battery pack, which can provide the phone with enough power to work for possibly as much as thirty seconds. Dad had one. To check the battery, you dialed *4 (From the mnemonic 4=GHI=”Gas”). He got an adapter kit for it that let you run it off of a dozen double-A batteries.
In the past week, a gun turret exploded on the USS Iowa, killing 47. In New York, Trisha Meili was assaulted while jogging in central park. She was given last rites due to the severity of her injuries, but emerged from her coma twelve days later and largely recovered. Because of media policies about not identifying victims of sex crimes, she would largely be known to the public simply as “The Central Park Jogger” until publication of her memoir in 2003. The case provoked huge amounts of public outrage, feeding into a culture of paranoia about urban violence, which has since been partially explained as the result of systemic lead poisoning from pollution, but, between genuine ignorance of how to deal with a then-growing violent crime problem and the political expedience of playing upon America’s history of racism, the attack was one more incident that served to help justify escalation of police militarization and mass incarceration, mostly of people of color over the next thirty years. Five young men were quickly apprehended, coerced into confessing, and were convicted the following year.
The actual assailant, Matias Reyes would confess to the crime in 2002 while already serving a life sentence. His confession was validated by physical and DNA evidence. Reyes would claim to have acted alone, though some connected with the case maintain that some or all of the “Central Park Five” likely acted as accomplices. All five convictions were vacated in 2002. Strictly speaking, this next bit goes next week, but let’s get it out of the way now: On May 1, real estate mogul Donald John Trump will take out a full-page ad in New York’s four biggest newspapers calling for the execution of the five suspects. The state of New York did not have the death penalty at the time. Trump’s advertisements are thought to have swayed public opinion in the rush to convict. As of October, 2016, Trump maintains that the Central Park Five were guilty of the crime and should have been executed for it.
Okay. Deep, cleansing breath, and try to pivot back to pop culture. Nintendo releases Super Mario Land for the Game Boy. Tom Petty releases his first solo album, Full Moon Fever. Madonna unseats Fine Young Cannibals for the top spot on the Billboard charts with “Like a Prayer”. Bon Jovi has a new song in the top ten, though I imagine he’s got other things on his mind, since he’s marrying his high school sweetheart this week.
Child’s Play is released on home video. Pet Semetary and Teen Witch open in theaters, but the real big news on the silver screen is Field of Dreams. Lucille Ball will die Wednesday. TV is generally new this week. Perfect Strangers, for example, gives us “Teacher’s Pest”. Here is a link to a Perfect Strangers review blog I really rather like, because I am sharing the love, and I imagine he would be happy if some of my many “one or two visitors a week” would swing by there. MacGyver gives us “Brainwashed”, where Mac has to stop a brainwashed assassin from killing a diplomat. BBC1 will air a documentary on spontaneous human combustion. Dragon Ball Z premiers in Japan Wednesday, while today, The Disney Channel will debut the third incarnation of The Mickey Mouse Club. It’ll air at 5:30, right after Kids Incorporated. Well, right after the ten minutes of music videos and time fillers they have to add to make up for the fact that The Disney Channel doesn’t show commercials yet, so the Hal Roach-produced Kids Incorporated, like all of their programming that was created for syndication, is ten minutes too short. This is the incarnation of the show which will introduce the world to Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, Kerri Russel and Ryan Gosling. Sunday, The Wonderful World of Disney will show a special introducing the world to Disney-MGM Studios (Now “Disney’s Hollywood Studios“), which opens the next day. Here is a link to the History Honeys podcast about Disney’s Hollywood Studios, because I am in sharing mood and also because Grant and Alaina are fantastic. Bionic Showdown, the second of three TV films reuniting The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, airs afterward. I am not currently following any Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman review blogs.
Star Trek The Next Generation airs “The Icarus Factor”. I should refer you to Josh Marsfelder on this one, because I remember this one as just being boring and about Riker not getting along with his dad while Worf is pissy because he never got to go through Klingon Fraternity Hazing, so his pals set up the holodeck to let John Tesh in Klingon Makeup zap him with a cattle prod. This week’s Friday the 13th The Series has the wonderful title, “The Secret Agenda of Mesmer’s Bauble”. The plot can’t live up to it. Just another “Cursed antique grants wishes in exchange for murder,” leaning heavily on stunt casting: singer Denise Matthews, then performing as Vanity, guest starred.
This episode is a callback to previous episodes in a lot of ways, but it’s strange about it. It’s not really an “arc episode” like you’d see in a post-The X-Files TV show. No, when I say that this episode calls back to previous episodes, it’s more of a feeling that this episode was filled out with trimmings from previous episodes. It’s somewhat adroit that we’ve happened upon this episode right after introducing ourselves to the Eternity Comics story. Much like how issue 3 there had that strange repetition that seemed meaningful but didn’t add up to anything, this episode is full of echoes to the past that are less “callback” and more “My typewriter ran out of ribbon. Just reuse page 24 from last week’s script here.”
Our writer this week is Jon Kubichan. This is his only contribution to the series. I wonder how much background he was working with. Given the production, let’s say, “difficulties”, maybe he simply didn’t know which elements of the series were meant to be recurring character and world tropes. Kubichan is probably best known as a writer and producer for the original Land of the Lost (he actually wrote my favorite episode, “The Repairman”, which guest stars Laurie Main, the voice of the narrator from Winnie-the-Pooh, as an eccentric, mysterious man with a British accent and knowledge of the workings of space, time, and the Land of the Lost, who wears a tweed jacket and a bow tie. Yes. The Winnie-the-Pooh narrator plays the eleventh Doctor in 1976), though this gives me very little enlightenment here. Near as I can tell, this is Kubichan’s last TV work. It’s also the only thing on his resume in the entire decade. Did he come out of retirement to write one middle-of-the-road episode of a failing first-run-syndication science fiction show? Sure, why not.
The aliens are in a pickle when we open, as it turns out that ten gallon food-grade buckets half-full of dry ice fog in their radiation-filled Land of the Lost cave is not actually a suitable environment for gestating the leathery, triangular eggs that the aliens hatch from. The heat is causing them to break open prematurely, and that’s bad news since the aliens can only lay eggs every nine years, which means that if this batch doesn’t make it, the, “Circle of life will be broken,” a sentence that is going to get really funny in a minute.
It’s actually kinda weird that they didn’t see this coming, since the second episode of the series was all about the fact that the radiation also makes it too hot for the adult aliens without those refrigerated suits. War of the Worlds hasn’t been great about following up on things. This is understandable. After all, it’s still the ’80s and any continuity from episode-to-episode beyond broad strokes isn’t really a thing you do in TV of this era. The fact that episodes often aired out of production order meant that trying to reference past details could bite you, and, in fact, we’ve already had them reference events from the future back in “Among the Philistines”. This episode is going to bring back some elements we’ve seen before, though, which makes it all the more surprising that, at least insofar as the “We need to find some refrigeration because it’s too hot in our radioactive cave,” angle, the show seems possibly to not have noticed they were doing it.
In Dillard’s novelization, there’s a reference to a third alien gender which gestates alien embryos, with an explanation that those ones were less hearty than the gamete-providing genders, and none had survived the initial invasion. That could serve as a setup for this episode, with the aliens struggling to find a means of artificial gestation in light of the impossibility of doing it the old fashioned way. I wonder if it was written that way in an earlier draft. Sadly, it doesn’t mesh with the dialogue of the episode as aired; instead, the Ilse von Glatz advocate orders the soldiers to find them somewhere safe and cold to put the eggs, “As on our planet.”
Before they can get on with that, the stillborn egg has to be disposed of. We’ve seen the weird green pit in the cave before, but there’s never been an explanation for what it is. Possibly it was formed by the underground nuclear testing which rendered this place suitable for the aliens. But this time, I notice that there’s something orange-red and quivering slightly at the bottom of the abyss. With the quasi-religious significance the aliens seem to give the pit, I’m curious about it. Did they stick something down there? In any case, one of the advocates says a few words, including the word “thee” to make it sound extra religious, in a scene that humanizes the aliens to an extent that’s largely unique for the show. And then we get another poorly composited shot when he tosses the little egg at the matte painting of a hole.
Meanwhile, at a Korean bathhouse in DC, we meet this episode’s guest star. Michael Parks was a veteran actor with a long resume mostly of things I’m not familiar with. Probably the most interesting thing he’s done is playing Earl McGraw, a minor character who appears in From Dusk Till Dawn, Kill Bill, Planet Terror and Death Proof. Here, he’s playing Cash McCullough. As in Suzanne’s ex-husband. And yes, that is not either of the two names we have already been given for him. Cash is a journalist, and he’s from the TV tradition of journalists being unscrupulous jerks who are always hurting people and burning sources in pursuit of scoops. We have, of course, spoken before about TV fiction and its tradition of journalists sucking. Right now, Cash is the “evil journalist” archetype. Since this is still the ’80s, actually exposing a secret government project is “bad” and not ‘heroic”. If he is to have a redemption arc through this story, we can assume it means he will have to switch over to “journalist who actively suppresses big stories to protect the status quo a world that isn’t ready for the truth or the heroes’ safety or whatever.”
He’s been invited to this bathhouse for a meeting with a shadowy informant, who remains in the shadows, his true identity shrouded in— It’s Quinn. Quinn the renegade alien from “The Prodigal Son“. They try to be all coy about it and refuse to show his face until near the end and have him cough a lot for some reason. But come on. It’s Quinn. John Colicos has an incredibly distinctive voice, and pretty distinctive mannerisms even when he’s got a Christopher Robin robe pulled up to cover his face. Maybe back in 1989, not everyone watching the show would work out who he was instantly, but damn is it obvious. I mean, sure, back in 1989, there wasn’t binge watching and this show wouldn’t be released on home video for another 20 years. But, like, “The Prodigal Son” aired two months ago. The last time I watched it was two years ago, and I could still tell who he was.
Also, he gets a Special Guest Star credit.
But I’m getting off track. Quinn is giving Cash McCullough a lead in the hopes he’ll break the story on the Blackwood Project. As you may deduce from the opening epigram, Quinn identifies himself to Cash by claiming to be Deep Throat.
What a difference thirty years makes. From the 1974 publication of All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein until the 9/11 attacks in 2001, conspiracy theory was defined by the holy trinity of the Roswell UFO incident, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the Watergate informer “Deep Throat”. In 2005, the aging and long-retired former Associate Director of the FBI Mark Felt revealed that in 1972, he had passed information to reporters from The Washington Post about the Nixon Administration’s cover-up of its involvement in a break-in to DNC offices at the Watergate Hotel and Office Building. The resulting scandal led to the resignation of Richard Nixon. Due to the sensitivity of the information and his role within the government, Felt kept his identity secret for the next thirty years, identified only as “Deep Throat”, a name taken from the title of a popular pornographic film of the period about a woman with an unusual birth defect transposing her clitoris and her uvula, who therefore could only orgasm from performing fellatio.
Man, the ’70s were weird.
In the years since Felt’s revelation, speculation has abounded as to his motives. Some view him as acting out of moral and patriotic reasons, while others reckon he was disgruntled over the management of the FBI since the death of J. Edgar Hoover earlier that year. Some view him as a hero, others as a villain. Still others, such as, I assume, one future president facing investigation for election shennanigans, hear “Deep Throat” and can’t stop giggling, because fellatio.
In the years before, speculation was more rampant about the identity of the informant. Theories ranged from the credible — such as White House Associate Council Fred Fielding, or the idea that “Deep Throat” was a fiction invented by Woodward and Bernstein to condense a larger number of informants — to the… less credible. Such as speechwriter, actor, gameshow-host and evolution-denier Ben Stein, war-criminal Henry Kissinger, House Minority Leader and future-Nixon-replacement Gerald Ford, UN Ambassador and future US President George H. W. Bush, and, remarkably, US President Richard Nixon, I assume, having traveled back in time from a dystopian future where he got away with it, but then Ozymandias teleported a dead psychic squid into the middle of New York (The actual theory is that he was pulling a John Barron and trying to lead Woodward and Bernstein on in order to discredit them, but fucked up).
Fiction too has taken cracks at Deep Throat. One of the most fanciful versions was the 1999 film Dick which “revealed” the Watergate informant as two teenage girls Nixon had hired to walk his dog. More relevant for our wandering through conspiracy theory and alien invasion at the cusp of the ’90s, Jerry Hardin played a version of Deep Throat in the early seasons of The X-Files, as a sympathetic member of the cabal secretly ruling the world to serve the ends of an invading alien race.
So Quinn says he’s Deep Throat. Fair question: why would Quinn want to bring down Nixon? Why would Quinn have the necessary information to bring down Nixon? I mean, okay, I’ll allow “aliens can do basically anything” as an explanation for how he could do it, but why should Quinn care who the US President is? And why would Quinn choose a pseudonym from a dirty movie about blowjobs? (Actually, that could’ve made an interesting character point, since when Quinn isn’t trying to take over the world, he’s an artist, and the movie in question is synecdoche for the “porno chic” trend of the ’70s which briefly made hardcore pornography trendy and even “artsy” in a subversive way. No, they don’t bother going there) The only explanation we’re going to get is that Quinn just didn’t like Tricky Dick. Since this is Quinn we’re talking about, I guess that’s a reasonable answer. Though perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility that Quinn is just lying.
Since Woodward and Bernstein had proven “ungrateful bastards,” Quinn’s latest attempt to undo a president is being passed to Cash. He assures the reporter that while the president may have survived “Contragate”, this scandal will certainly be his undoing.
You know what’s odd, other than the fact that “Contragate” never really caught on as a nickname for the Iran-Contra Affair? It’s April, 1989. “The President” is George Herbert Walker Bush. Reagan is the president most often associated with the Iran-Contra Affair, not Bush. I guess that makes a kind of sense; Bush was successfully able to distance himself from the affair in order to win the election. So it makes a kind of sense that Quinn might be offended by Bush getting off scot-free, I guess. But this feels like a very “We wrote this still thinking of Reagan as the president,” setup. It just kinda feels right to imagine Quinn as being a Reagan-hater. Not just because of Reagan’s beef with the NEA (I have to be honest, the fact that he’s an artist is far and away the most interesting thing about Quinn, and I am angry that there is no real follow-up on that). It still makes sense even in the context of ’80s mainstream culture: Reagan, despite his obvious faults, had a significant cachet as the Tough, Manly President Who Had Fended Off The Evil Soviet Empire. So of course Quinn, who represents a subversive anti-American element, would hate him.
And besides, this episode is still set in the winter. There’s a good chance it’s meant to be set before Reagan left office. But this doesn’t really make that much more sense: why would Quinn bother taking down Reagan when the man’s at most a few weeks away from leaving office? As a practical matter, it’s probably not possible for Reagan to be impeached in the amount of time he could potentially have left in office.
We never do find out Quinn’s reasons. I mean, he does give a reason, but it’s very obviously false. Does he actually even want to expose the Blackwood Project? What would be his angle on that? And how would it work? The story he feeds Cash is that the project is a secret operation to— Actually, this needs more fanfare:
Quinn tells Cash that the Blackwood Project is a covert ops group tasked with the mass murder of illegal immigrants on American soil.
This is, of course an idea so insane and ridiculous that no one could possibly believe the US government would— No, let me try again.
This is an act so utterly immoral that were reports of it to leak, they would lead almost instantly to impeachment proceedings in the biggest scandal— No, let me try again.
This would really give Carson and Letterman something to crack wise about as Congress wrung its hands and did nothing and the President’s spokespeople called for reporters to be gunned down in the streets by vigilantes for daring to report such brazen lies which are not true and also which they are totally doing and it is good that they are doing and also that they hate that they are doing but are forced, forced to do because of Democrat Laws, which they can totally reverse through executive action except that their hands are tied unless the minority party changes the law and oh look, there’s the First Lady wearing a jacket that says “I like the mass murder of immigrants, do u?”
To Be Continued…
- War of the Worlds is available from amazon.