Month: August 2018

I think, when you get down to it, most of these long-term projects I try to throw myself into tend to come off the rails because I hit something that is a breaking point for me. I tried to do a Michael Moriarty Movie Marathon years ago, and it fell apart four movies in because I watched Hitler Meets Christ.

It isn’t always because I encounter something bad even. Just something that fills me with an ineffable desire not to go on. And obviously, living in a slow-motion action replay of the worst sins of the 1980s has not really helped fill me with desire to finish off the TV series. But what has actually broken me and made me stall out is something more inexplicable. So consider this my surrender: I am giving up on trying to be an absolute completist about this whole War of the Worlds thing, and I’m going to just move on and knock out the things that are actually left in my queue — one movie, I think three comic books, and seven TV episodes — and address anything else that pops up purely on the “if it tickles my fancy” basis.

I got through the Pendragon movie. I had no trouble with the two grammatically whimsical DG Leigh novellas. But for some reason, Stephen Baxter’s authorized sequel to the original novel has just brought me to a crashing halt.

Through some weird twist of irony, I first became aware of Stephen Baxter about twenty years ago, when I read The Time Ships, which is another sequel to a Wells novel. I liked it. I found it a pretty quick read, and I liked the way it fused a fidelity to Wells’s style with more plot-driven storytelling, and the way it confronted a lot of Wells’s conventions head on, such as having the Time Traveler learn a bit of Freud and realize that his visceral revulsion toward the Morlocks wasn’t purely rational, but might have had something to do with getting briefly locked in the root cellar as a small child.

One cool thing about The Time Ships that I learned years later is that Baxter had originally pitched it as a Doctor Who novel, but it was rejected. The basic plot of The Time Ships is that the Time Traveler, attempting to return to help the Eloi against the Morlocks, arrives in a completely different future, where a race of intelligent, nonviolent Morlocks have enclosed the sun in a Dyson sphere. The Time Traveler and his Morlock companion attempt to return to his native time, but only make it as far as a version of the 1940s where World War I never ended and London is covered by a concrete dome to protect from aerial bombardment. The changes in the timeline are suggested to be the result of the Traveler’s own story having inspired the H. G. Wells surrogate. The Traveler ends up going back millions of years, then forward to a version of 19th century Earth whose ecosystem has collapsed, where post-human creatures build the titular Time Ships, which they use to travel back to the Big Bang in order to find a universe with the optimal initial conditions before going back to his own “historical axis” to bootstrap his own story by giving his younger self the initial sample of the radioactive isotope used to build the time machine. Which, yeah, sounds like possibly a bit too weird even for Doctor Who… But… Weird esoteric beings seeding the moment of creation to force creation along the path they want is the plot of the eventual Doctor Who eighth Doctor novel Timeless, and that plot arc ends with the Doctor’s origin story being rewritten into a time loop in Sometime Never, plus, Baxter’s basic original idea of a first Doctor adventure based around history being repeatedly changed by the travelers’ presence shows up in Simon Guerrier’s The Time Travellers. Baxter himself would end up writing a Doctor Who novel in 2005, The Wheel of Ice. But this time, I don’t know. All the idea in here that I got to, I rather liked… But I found that no matter how long I spent reading it, I never seemed to make any forward headway. I’d look at the number of pages behind me and the number ahead, and I’d just be overcome with despair at the thought of going on for the length of time it would take me to finish the book.

How far did I make it? I made it to the end of chapter 14. Does that sound like a lot? Most of my reading these days has been to Dylan and Evie, so it sounds like a lot to me.

Chapter 14 is about the midpoint of Book I.

There are four books. I made it 70 pages, about a sixth of the way through the book. I stopped just after the Martians put in their first appearance. Seventy pages is kind of a long time to take to get to the actual warring of the worldsing. It’s not like I didn’t enjoy what I read, it just left me with no sense that the story was going to go anywhere in a timely manner.

Right from the get-go, Baxter makes cool and interesting choices in its characters. The narrator for our sequel is Julie Elphinstone, the ex-wife of the original narrator’s brother. That original narrator? He’s even got a name and for once, it’s not some play on Wells’s. Walter Jenkins gained world fame for his history of the war, but then went on to a certain amount of infamy for his unpopular persistence in reminding people that the Martians were still out there and might come back some day.

Reprising one of the things I enjoyed in The Time Ships, Walter’s therapist calls out a lot of issues from the original novel. Walter is suggested to be suffering from PTSD, which, given the circumstances of its discovery, they call by the adorable name “heat-stroke”. More than that, there are some hints that Walter might be on the spectrum, with his therapist, lacking modern terminology to describe it, suggests that the “heat-stroke” exacerbated an already-existing condition involving an unnatural detachment and difficulty connecting with other people. As an example, he cites the way he borrows his neighbor’s horse to help evacuate his own family without warning the neighbor about the imminent danger. Or that he never bothered to learn the name of the curate. It’s Nathaniel.

Continue reading Shallow Ice: A Couple of Chapters of Stephen Baxter’s The Massacre of Mankind

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

Suzanne had a bad date.

While this is going on, Ironhorse and Harrison dress as hoboes and break into the alien facility via the sewers. “Are we insured for this?” Harrison asks. “Yeah, by Uncle Sam,” Ironhorse responds. Maybe the script editor was sick? I think I remember reading in one of these articles that they had a lot of trouble with the scripts, logistically. Despite the music telling us this scene is tense, their search goes off without a hitch. They stay out of view of the only aliens on duty, and no one’s watching the eggs themselves. Harrison decides to steal one for study. Ironhorse is not cool with this, wanting to leave basically the second they see the pods. This is yet another thing that feels like a throwback to earlier in the season: Ironhorse having a somewhat unjustified instinctual response to back away rather than confront when face-to-face with the aliens.

This was something we saw in the first few episodes, and at the time, I mused on the possibility that it was related to the “alien amnesia” angle. That Ironhorse, despite his bravery and professionalism, is just more affected than the others by whatever it is that makes people want to reject the reality of alien life. But, of course, that’s been pretty much ignored for like 17 episodes now, so is it coming back now intentionally, or just by coincidence, or because Jon Kubichan was working from nothing more than a couple of early-season scripts to get his sense of the characters?

What with his date ending early, Cash is able to follow Suzanne home and snap a picture of Ironhorse’s car as he and Harrison return from their raid. “Piece of cake,” he says, having trivially gotten the evidence he needs that… Um… That… A thing is happening at this government facility. A thing involving people entering it. I don’t know. I think the script has too much faith in us being impressed by them just saying Cash is a journalist. We see him do exactly two pieces of investigation in this entire episode, and one of them is “Takes a picture in the dark of a car entering a gated property.” At no point do they indicate Cash has learned a single thing other than what Quinn told him. Couldn’t we at least have gotten a montage of him bribing guards and looking through ledger books and scanning microfiche about, oh, I don’t know, all those military operations Ironhorse has been running across the country? This would be a perfect time to reference past episodes. Just dummy up a few newspaper pages with headlines about people disappearing and various things being locked down for counter-terrorism exercises.

Instead, Cash McCullough, who will stop at nothing to get a story, does, near as I can tell, no legwork whatsoever. The next time we see him, he’s returned to the Korean Bathhouse to do a vaguely racist impression of the proprietor’s accent and meet with Quinn again to ask for help getting hard evidence. Quinn can’t get him inside the Cottage, but he agrees to give him a time and location for the Blackwood project’s next operation. He also claims that his reason for doing this is that he’s got a mistress in common with General Wilson. Once Cash is gone, Quinn pulls back the hood on his robe to laugh hammily at the camera.

We have to bid John Colicos goodbye now. I hear they’d wanted to bring him back as the primary antagonist had there been a second season, but we won’t be seeing him again. His character is terrible and doesn’t make much sense, but come on. He doesn’t have to, does he? He’s John Colicos. He’s hammy and ridiculous and I love him. We are never going to get an explanation for why he’s doing all this, and really, what explanation could possibly help here? Is he trying to expose the aliens? Is he trying to shut down the Blackwood project? Is he trying to get Suzanne back together with her ex? Who can tell?

But before all that, Suzanne got a crack at studying the egg. She’s interrupted when Ironhorse demands to know how her date went. She explains about Cash’s investigation, with the possibly good news that the presumed leaker must not know the actual details of their mission. “That’s terrific,” Harrison says, and I’m going to blame the director for the fact that I can’t tell from Jared Martin’s delivery whether he means it or not. He’s exactly in the middle between exasperated facetiousness and being genuinely happy that Cash is so radically misinformed and thus their cover isn’t blown.

Suzanne barely has time to get angry at Ironhorse for bugging her table when Norton summons them over to see the supercomputer’s reconstruction of the inside of the egg. It does not look like anything in particular to me, but Suzanne quickly identifies it as an alien fetus. Harrison claims there were thousands of eggs in that icehouse, even though it seemed like no more than a couple of dozen at best to me.

While Harrison and Ironhorse are making plans to storm the place, Suzanne notices the egg move in response to alien transmissions Norton’s playing. I think. She says as much, but then Norton says, “Maybe it got too hot,” and the rest of the scene proceeds from that, with Suzanne working out that the eggs have to stay cold to avoid hatching prematurely. In what totally ought to have been the epigram over the title sequence instead of the Deep Throat thing, Suzanne tells Norton to summon the others because, “I could be midwife to a monster.”

The egg does hatch, and let me tell you, they do an admirable job on the alien baby. It’s this utterly uncanny fusion of the look for the adult aliens and… Cute baby animal. In the close-ups, I think they’re just using their regular alien animatronic, but there’s two longer shots where it’s a very tiny model with little spindly hands. The baby is premature and dying. Ironhorse wants to speed it along with a couple of bullets, but Suzanne stops him in the name of Science(!). A second later, she sticks her hands into the glove box to examine it, and it grabs her hard enough that she’s got bruises on her arms afterward. Ironhorse immolates it with a bunsen burner.

In the aftermath, Ironhorse is utterly deadpan and emotionless when he goes on to let everyone know that, “My plan is ready. We’ll attack tonight.” William Fruet directed four episodes of War of the Worlds, and the other three are pretty solid. Yet Harrison and Ironhorse both seem off this week, and Michael Parks is wildly inconsistent. It’s hard to blame anyone other than the director for this, but why is it only this episode that feels that way, when “Among the Philistines“, “To Heal the Leper” and “The Meek Shall Inherit” didn’t suffer from these problems.

The entire rest of the episode is an extended action sequence. I guess we should be used to that by now. I guess it hasn’t really occurred to me to bring this up. War of the Worlds has kinda fallen into a pattern. Since “The Meek Shall Inherit“, pretty much every episode has pushed its big action sequence all the way to the end and has usually run out the clock on it. More, I think, than they really ought to. Quite a few episodes, particularly in the last third of the series, haven’t had a proper coda. And it’s weakened some of them. My feeling is that there was a sense behind the scenes that the action scenes were their strength. And I won’t argue that. When I compare this to other military-style action-adventure, the action scenes do hold up pretty well. But by pushing it all the way to the end, they give up the chance to really resolve the narrative in any meaningful way.

For instance, the last we see of the Advocacy comes between Harrison and Ironhorse’s nighttime raid and the pod hatching in the Cottage, and it just consists of them ranting a bit about the humans having stolen one of their babies. They don’t even force the alien who dropped the ball on guard duty to commit ritual suicide. They just make the usual noises about how important this job is and how the troops on-site have to protect the eggs with their lives. They don’t send reinforcements or anything. I mean, given how important this whole “produce a viable next generation for our species” thing is, you’d think they’d send literally every alien they have.

But there’s, like, a dozen at most. If there is meant to be a large army off-screen, then the climactic battle suddenly comes off a lot worse, since, really, no, it’s a pitched fight between Ironhorse’s small, elite taskforce, and the aliens’ roughly similar numbers, but it’s not a massively imbalanced fight. (I am similarly hard-pressed to believe Harrison’s claim that there are thousands, or even hundreds of eggs; we see a few dozen at best and the layout and arrangement of them doesn’t indicate that there’s an order of magnitiude more offscreen somewhere.

The humans win. Ironhorse does lose a couple of men, and once again, we get some of Richard Chaves’s fantastic physical acting in the way he refuses to yield his professionalism with an outsize reaction, but he still makes it very clear that it hurts him to see his men sacrifice their lives. You can feel that he’s going to need to go have a talk with Bernard Behrens to talk about this tomorrow. But it’s a complete rout for the aliens.

That’s been happening a lot recently. Not every time, to be sure, but more often than not. I have feels about this. On the one hand, I am kinda bored with the tradition in this kind of show where basically, the heroes lose every single time up until the grand finale, or where the heroes are allowed “small” victories but never make any progress in the overall war. What we have here is actual, tangible escalation. Back at the beginning of the series, it felt like they were establishing a pattern: the team would uncover the alien plot, go in, kill some aliens, stop the plan, but it would turn out that the aliens had already accomplished enough of what they wanted that they made significant forward progress. “Thy Kingdom Come” ends with Harrison frustrated that they’re losing the war due to so many resurrected aliens escaping. The aliens evacuate their town in “A Multitude of Idols” before Ironhorse can bring in the cavalry. The aliens at Fort Streetor are defeated in “The Second Seal“, but the list of alien dump sites is lost. But when you get to the middle of the season, the team starts actually winning outright, not just stopping the immediate scheme of the week, but preventing the aliens from achieving their larger goals.

Continue reading Thesis: My Soul to Keep, Concluded (War of the Worlds 1×20, Part 3)

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

Ahem:

Quinn tells Cash that the Blackwood Project is a covert ops group tasked with the mass murder of illegal immigrants on American soil.

It’s moments like this that feed into why it’s taking me roughly ten times longer to write about this show than it took them to make it. It’s not like we haven’t seen this sort of thing before; the repeated times Ironhorse has called in military strikes on small midwestern universities or declared martial law over hospitals, and everyone just rolls with it? This show has repeatedly proceeded from the supposition that it is entirely reasonable and believable for the military to be engaged in combat operations on US soil apparently against US citizens, and even if they do have to cover it up, it’s still not enough of a big deal that anyone reacts to an army Colonel marching into a small-town morgue and demanding access to an active crime scene with anything other than mild frustration. This was emphatically not the way the world actually worked back then. But on some level, I think we sorta felt like it could be.

And yet…

It ought to completely derail the believably of the show that any reporter whose credentials extend beyond the check-out at the supermarket would fall for this. Because it ought to be too obviously false. I mean, cui bono? The penalty for getting caught is tremendous, and what’s the reward for doing it? The main benefit you get out of a hardline stance against immigration is that you get the votes of people who don’t like immigrants. Which means that anything you do to hurt immigrants has to be public. You can’t run for reelection on a platform of, “Immigrants are mysteriously disappearing and we swear we have nothing at all to do with it. Wink.”

If I’d stayed on the ball and this article had come out two years ago, we could go back to my plot exposition now. But we can’t. Because it’s 2018, and the United States of America rounds up the children of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers and places them in concentration camps. And it turns out that the actual thing that is unbelievable in this story is that the government is trying to cover it up. The current administration has proposed using the army for immigration enforcement. If news broke tomorrow that the Trump administration was sending out the army to perform mass executions of undocumented immigrants, it would be a surprise, but can you honestly tell me you’d find it unbelievable? Within a week, Stephen Miller would be bragging that the whole “Final Solution” thing was his idea, Sarah Huckabee-Sanders would be calling journalists unprofessional for using the term “death-squad”, and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions would be citing 1 Samuel 15:2 to explain how genocide is sometimes okay.

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The hook for Cash is that the Blackwood Project is under General Wilson, his ex-wife’s uncle. And Quinn reveals that Suzanne is involved, which reels Cash in rather than making the whole thing sound incredibly fishy given that he has, in fact, met Suzanne, and ought to know that she is:

• Morally opposed to mass murder, to the point that she quit her previous job when she found out her research was being used to develop bioweapons.
• A microbiologist. A quick perusal of ICE’s careers page shows openings for jackboots, thugs, fascists, and administrative assistants, but not currently any for microbiologists.
• A civilian.

Instead, Cash falls for it, hook, line and sinker. Still not sure what Quinn expects to happen. Maybe Cash is able to ply his sources to follow the money and verify the existence of the project. Possibly he’s able to get access to some redacted reports which reveal things like Ironhorse taking over a hospital or driving tanks into Beeton. Is Quinn is banking on Cash being exactly tenacious enough to get that far, but not enough to find out what’s really going on? Or does he actually want Cash to find the truth and is providing a cover story because “The aliens which everyone knows exist because of the 1953 invasion are back,” somehow isn’t as believable as secret government death squads? (Spoiler: It’s probably that one).

Meanwhile, back at the, ir, cottage, Norton goes to see Harrison, because he’s wound up about alien transmissions. “Norton, it’s three AM. How come you’re always showing up at meal time?”

What’s bothering Norton is that, while he still can’t decipher the alien language, he has enough experience now to gauge the tone of the transmissions. I like the way this acknowledges some growth for Norton: he’s getting better at understanding the aliens, even if he can’t understand their language. We already saw Norton being the one to recognize the alien transmissions becoming chaotic when the Advocate was sick back in “To Heal the Leper“, and how he’s gotten even better at interpreting the patterns in the messages.

The thing he’s interpreted at three in the morning today is that it sounds like baby talk.

Dammit, War of the Worlds. I give you a compliment, and you pull this shit? The aliens are trying to hatch their babies, so the alien transmissions are in baby-talk. Makes sense. Sure. Okay. To be clear, there’s no scene later where they indicate the aliens are, like, doing some kind of prenatal education thing where they transmit messages to the eggs to help with their development. The eggs aren’t even in place yet. No, the assumption here is that because the aliens have babies on the mind, their normal radio chatter is being conducted in baby talk.

It’s like they looked back at “To Heal the Leper” and thought, “Okay, so when the aliens are sick, their transmissions become chaotic and random, I guess because the transmissions are feverish?” instead of the much more straightforward, “The transmissions become chaotic because the aliens are confused without their leadership.”

Harrison has no wisdom for Norton, but slaps him away from his crudites. Harrison’s a vegetarian, you’ll recall, which is why all he ever eats are salads and platters of raw vegetables. It’s almost as though no one involved in dressing the set actually knew what vegetarian cuisine was like.

I assume we skip forward a few hours, because the next scene has Ironhorse delivering the mail to Suzanne, and she, quite bizarrely, makes a flirty joke based on substituting “male” for “mail” and saying, “I’ll take one.” Plus five points for foreshadowing, but minus a hundred for what they’re foreshadowing. In case it’s not obvious, this is going to be a plot about Suzanne seeing her ex-husband for the first time in years, and it’s an ’80s TV show, so yes, of course the thrust of the episode is going to be how Cash is a shitty human being, but damn if Suzanne doesn’t still have unresolved affection for him and damn if they’re not going to tease the possibility of eventual reconciliation between them because after all, they’ve got a kid together and the laws of TV morality means that you always have to give the deadbeat dad at least one on-screen try.

And to “justify” all of this, we lead off by reminding us that Suzanne is an adult human woman, and that many such people sometimes have needs and desires for which they might desire the companionship of a man, other than the three she spends ninety percent of her life with because of her job. And that’s fine. That’s great. Except that it’s not really all that great because it’s here entirely as an excuse for Suzanne’s judgment to be compromised when it comes to her shifty asshole ex-husband on account of she hasn’t been gettin’ it regular and is feeling all tingly in her nethers.

Suzanne’s mail includes a note from the main switchboard informing her that her ex-husband called. Ironhorse tries to seem all casual and just showing a friendly interest, but since he’s facing the camera, we can see that this is a cunning subterfuge, and he is in fact subtly trying to grill her for information, since Cash McCullough is, of course, a journalist, and journalists are enemies of the state, fake news, what about Crooked Hillary’s emails?

Because Ironhorse has approximately zero chill, when Suzanne muses to herself that she wonders what her deadbeat ex could possibly want to be calling her for the first time since the divorce, he immediately wheels around and asks what Cash wants in an accusatory tone. We’ve established pretty solid by now that this sort of thing is part of his job, so why does he need to be a dick about it? He literally could have just come down and said, “Your ex-husband called the switchboard. He’s a scumbag reporter, so I’m extra concerned about this. Let’s coordinate on this so that I can ensure the security of the project.” But instead he plays all coy and then suddenly wheels on her like a hardass for the fact that her scumbag ex called her unbidden.

Other than that bit of subterfuge, Ironhorse is entirely reasonable about the whole thing. He knows that Suzanne wouldn’t tell him anything about the project, and just needs a report from her afterward. What he’s really concerned about is Debi. Not sure why, given that it’s been nine episodes since we’ve seen her. Suzanne promises to “have a word with her,” which is good enough I guess? I mean, seriously, he goes to all the trouble of being a dick to Suzanne about her daughter possibly seeing her dad for the first time in two years and then he’s like, “Oh, yeah, just make sure you tell her not to say anything.” I’m not even clear whether Debi knows what they do at the Cottage. We saw her down in the lab once, but we’ve also heard her talk about alien life as something speculative.

Anyway, Ironhorse thanks Suzanne for her cooperation and we cut back to Suzanne to see her have absolutely no reaction whatsoever. Not even one of her bizarrely-timed smiles. Just nothing. And then we cut to an outdoor ice rink, because this show is just galloping forward through its plot, unlike me, with my constant asides and shameless digressions into more exciting subjects like the Trump administration’s miscarriages of justice or ’70s porn movies.

Debi sees her dad across the plaza, but has to ask for confirmation that it’s him, because that is how shitty a father Cash McCullough is. That talk Ironhorse wanted Suzanne to have with Debi? Addressed in its entirety by the line, “Do you remember what we talked about?”

Upon seeing her father for the first time in years, Debi’s first reaction is to want to go off and ice skate so he can watch her. This is a touching bit of realism, as Debi, who’s very young now and was even younger the last time she saw Cash, clearly is desperate to impress her father, out of an internalized, probably pre-conscious notion that she needs to win his affection. Nah. I’m just foolin’. The writers barely comprehend Debi on a level beyond that of a prop, and they’re getting her out of the way so that the “real” characters can talk. Cash portrays himself as wanting to reconcile, apologizing for his past and claiming that he’s grown weary of the way the life of the globetrotting journalist has left him bereft of interpersonal connections deeper than the random women he bangs. He apologizes for that too. As long as we have the actors on-screen, the writers reckon they should stick to shallow platitudes; the actual meat of their conversation is handled in the recap Suzanne gives Ironhorse back at the Cottage later.

Cash claims to have been covering the Armenian earthquake when the human suffering prompted him to reevaluate his life and the fact that no one would know or care if he died. Pretty pat story, easy enough to believe, and one thing I want to note about it is that the Armenian earthquake of December, 1988 is a real thing. I mentioned it back when we crossed through December, 1988 a couple of years ago for “The Good Samaritan“. That’s a bit remarkable, because it’s a real event, contemporary to the making of the show that dates the setting of this episode within a pretty narrow window — it’s still winter for them (Though a perusal of historical data suggests that it was a very mild winter in the Bay area, and hardly the Toronto-esque conditions we see on the show). In the past, references to major events in the outside world have been both fictionalized and sensationalized: a nuclear summit a few months earlier, a reference to a catastrophe involving biological weapons, and what might have been some stock footage of the Bhopal Disaster passed off as current events.

Consider this a minute. One of the elements of worldbuilding, such as it is, in this series is a faint underlying notion that War of the Worlds is set in a slightly nastier version of 1988 than the one we inhabit. I can’t say whether this is a deliberate departure from the real 1988, or more of an embracing of certain cultural narratives that are strong even today — narratives about society being on the brink of collapse. But if it is deliberate, then isn’t it odd, in a world where nuclear accidents and bioweapon attacks and armies opening fire on their own people and special ops units taking over hospitals and tanks rolling into small towns and all the attendees of a lima bean festival suddenly disappearing and counterterrorism operations on college campuses, the thing that allegedly makes Cash McCullough do some soul-searching is an entirely natural disaster?

Heck, maybe that’s meant to be a clue that he’s not on the level. Not that we need the clue. There’s no ambiguity for the audience in this; we already know the real reason Cash is trying to reconcile with his family. Whatever the case, Cash’s magic is working on his ex-wife. She’s agreed to have dinner with him. “While my mind was saying no, my mouth was saying yes,” she explains. Look, I get that it is reasonable for exes to have some unresolved stuff between them and it’s complicated. But Jesus Christ do I not need to see this story any more ever, and Jesus Christ do I not need another, “Oh, the smart and strong and determined woman is completely powerless before the rougeish bad boy.” Plus, Suzanne was married to this guy. So this whole “He’s got a power over her” thing boils down to “We couldn’t be arsed to think of any reason why someone like Suzanne would pursue a relationship with this jackass at all, let alone one that progressed to the point of marriage,” so let’s just make it “He’s got this magic power over her.”

I’m as angry as Ironhorse is. Sure, he shows some sympathy when Suzanne tells him how Cash has no living family other than them, and accepts that he didn’t ask Suzanne anything about her work, but the moment she leaves his office, he slams his fist on the desk and calls Stavrakos to set up surveillance on Suzanne’s date.

Dick.

Hey, remember when this show used to be about aliens and not Suzanne’s sex life? While I was busy complaining, the aliens took over a refrigerated warehouse and moved their eggs there. Now, they’re only seventy-two hours from hatching. Fortunately for humanity, even though Norton hasn’t been able to convince Harrison of his “baby talk” theory, he has been able to triangulate the source of the transmissions, so Harrison convinces Ironhorse to take some time off of spying on Suzanne’s dates to spy on refrigerated warehouses. In a lucky turn, the aliens have holed up in the industrial district in Eureka (or whatever city the Cottage is supposed to be near. As we’ve previously established, there’s contradictory evidence for that, but when Norton is locating things which are “nearby”, he inevitably pulls up a map showing Humboldt Bay).

Just a reminder here: the aliens are based in the Nevada desert. The closest place they could find to refrigerate their eggs was in northern California. Are there no refrigerated warehouses in Reno? Ironhorse himself points out what a big risk that is. Obviously, he doesn’t know where the aliens are and the aliens don’t know that they’ve moved in a few miles up the street from the enemy, but Ironhorse essentially hangs a lantern on the fact that there’s got to be refrigerated warehouses that aren’t in major metropolitan areas, no? For example, there appears to be one right off of I-80 in Storey County. I don’t know much about dairy logistics but I assume it’s a thing that exists and all.

At this late stage in the series, we forgo the usual back-and-forth where Ironhorse has to be skeptical for a scene or two. In fact, it’s reversed: Harrison doesn’t see anything noteworthy at first glance, but Ironhorse’s trained eye notices the passive security. We see a binocular shot of the cameras on the roof, and Ironhorse mentions electronic locks and sensors. We are not shown these because it beggars the imagination to seriously believe that he’d be able to see those from this distance.

Then he mentions that the guards are all covered in radiation sores. Way to bury the lede. They make plans to have Omega Squad secure the perimeter on the DL and return for a look around. In the mean time, they return to the Cottage so that Harrison and Ironhorse can muse at each other about why the aliens would take such a big risk. The scene reminds me a little of the scenes in both “The Resurrection” and “The Walls at Jericho” of Harrison guiding Ironhorse to use his military expertise to guess at alien strategy. But like before, this just makes it all the stranger that neither of them draws a comparison to that time the aliens took over a liquid nitrogen factory. Harrison gets as far as theorizing that the aliens need to recreate the colder climate of Mortax, but he can’t come up with a reason. Come on, Harry. You already know that the aliens are susceptible to heat, and you know that there’s been times in the past where the aliens have taken big risks like this. Even if he can’t work out that it’s a delivery ward, the comparison to Jericho and to “To Heal the Leper” should at least get him as far as guessing at it being something healthcare-related.

They get interrupted when Suzanne stops in to tell them she’s off on her date with the ex. This leads, as it must I guess, to a scene where the two men and the incidental music are all left helpless for a few seconds because Suzanne did her hair and now looks ’80s hot. This is supposed to be cute, and it is not, first because I do not live in 1989, and second because it is literally the exact same scene they did the last time Suzanne had a date back in “The Good Samaritan“, and I do not even wish to dignify it with any more commentary.

We leave Harrison and Ironhorse to their failure at working out the alien plot and follow Suzanne on her date. As we’ve only got like three minutes for this scene, Cash cuts to the chase and asks if Suzanne would consider taking him back, on account of he’s lonely, she’s horny, and Debi is desperate for her father’s love. Suzanne, thankfully, rejects him on account of he’s an asshole. She accuses him of having a habit of disappearing when husbandry and fathering are needed, which gives Cash a perfect opening for a fantastically forced segue:

“Disappear? You mean like illegal aliens?” He assumes Suzanne is playing coy, but lays his cards on the table, accusing her, though he is stunned to imagine it, of working with a government project that lures undocumented immigrants out of hiding with false promises of amnesty, then shoots them. He alternates between suggesting Suzanne has been an unwitting pawn in all this and softly threatening her, since he plans to do “the same thing” as “they” did with ABSCAM.

This forced me to look up what ABSCAM was. And it makes no sense at all as a point of comparison here. ABSCAM was an FBI sting in the early ’80s that caught about a dozen public officials taking bribes. Is Cash supposed to be the FBI in this analogy? That might make sense if he were setting up some kind of “sting” with fake immigrants for them to try to shoot. But still, he’s a reporter investigating a secret death squad, not law enforcement investigating corruption. When ABSCAM became public, there was some controversy over the possibility that the FBI’s tactics bordered on entrapment, but all of the convictions were ultimately upheld. Does he just mean that “When it came out that a bunch of members of Congress were on the take, it was a big scandal”? Had you heard of ABSCAM? Far as I can tell, there’s no “intrepid reporter who broke the story and forced the powerful to their knees,” element to the ABSCAM story like there is in Watergate. It seems pretty clear that the point of comparison Cash wants here is to Iran-Contra, but it doesn’t work out because Reagan essentially got away with it and by the time this episode was written, most of the related trials either hadn’t started yet or were still ongoing. Was it just a last-minute, “Watergate is too on-the-nose, swap that out for some other scandal”? Or maybe an ’80s audience would be carrying a different understanding of ABSCAM than I’ve picked up from googling it thirty years later.

Cash promises to keep Suzanne and Debi out of it in exchange for her help. She tells him to go to hell, realizing that the only reason he’s come back into their lives is for his story. “You’re the kind of bastard who makes the case for divorce not enough,” she says. I can’t even fully parse that sentence. It only really makes sense to me if I assume that “The Case For Divorce” is the title of some seminal women’s studies essay. But the only one I’m familiar with is from 2009, so probably not. He cements his asshole status with an ominous warning that he always gets his story at any cost. She throws her drink in his face.

I hope his redemption arc involves him dying. The incidental music agrees with me, going full-on Lifetime Movie as Suzanne storms out, leaving Cash to glower after her with a total, “The climax of this show is going to be me trying to murder you,” expression.

Gee, I bet that won’t be totally undermined in the name of a last-minute heel-face-turn to make Cash a sympathetic character and thus leave open the possibility of eventual reconciliation with Suzanne…

To Be Concluded…

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• War of the Worlds is available from amazon.