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

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.

If an episode like this had happened earlier in the season, you’d expect it to end with Omega Squadron attacking the factory to discover they’re too late and the baby aliens had already been spirited away to safety. Instead, let’s not undersell this: Stavrakos uses a flamethrower to dispatch an entire generation of aliens (Stavrakos does not have a speaking part in this episode, but it is still the same Off-Brand Deluise brother they introduced back in “The Meek Shall Inherit”). The Circle of Life has been broken. This is the sort of thing that seems like it would prompt a big emotional scene of the Advocacy flipping out and promising bloody vengeance against the baby-murdering humans.

But nope. We do not return to the Land of the Lost cave for a coda. There’s no closure on this. The clock just kinda runs out.

Or maybe we could go back to Quinn to get some sense of his reaction. Did he mean for that to happen? Did he deliberately sabotage the Circle of Life in order to make the aliens more desperate, perhaps more willing to accept his help? Or did he involve Cash hoping that he’d distract the Blackwood team long enough for the little ‘uns to hatch? If so, it didn’t pan out. But again, no, we don’t come back to Quinn.

No, Quinn’s meddling comes into play at the climax, but not in a way that has any effect on the outcome. Cash shows up after Omega Squadron has gone in with a cameraman and a boom operator, ready to catch them in the act. The first bodies he comes across are human, but when he encounters dissolved alien remains, his reaction is disgust divorced from understanding: he concludes that Ironhorse is using chemical weapons. Given this, it seems very strange that he is willing to walk up pretty much right behind Omega Squadron as they prepare for the final push, making no attempt to hide from the soldiers. What makes him think they won’t just shoot him?

No one really reacts appropriately to Cash being here; he mostly just gets an angry eye roll and fist-shaking out of Ironhorse. Why isn’t Cash’s first order of business to let someone know that he’s left all his notes with a lawyer who’ll release them if he fails to check in later? And, I mean, he sees pretty quickly that the “illegal aliens” are fighting back, so shouldn’t he at least be trying to avoid getting caught in the crossfire?

Suzanne, who the others had left behind in the car (Why even bring her, anyway?), sees Cash and follows him in, trying to warn him away, but she gets caught by an unhosted, unsuited alien. It’s one of the best looks we get at one, even if the lighting is dim. Cash hears her cries and abandons his camera crew to tackle the alien while it’s throttling her. This is, I assume, supposed to demonstrate that he’s not utterly irredeemable since he imperils himself without hesitation instead of waiting to try to snap a photo first.

Momentum means that he’s able to knock the alien away from Suzanne pretty easily, but once it’s mano-a-tentáculo, Cash is seriously outmatched. Given that in the past, we’ve frequently seen that an alien can casually shove its hand through someone’s face in a second, Cash (and Suzanne for that matter) really ought to be dead by now. But this alien’s not interested in showing off (or, for that matter, in acquiring a host body, which is weird. Why isn’t he wearing one anyway? I assume the real-world reason is that they needed Cash to see an alien in its natural form to justify his change of heart, but there’s no good in-story reason for it), so the fight takes long enough for Ironhorse to show up and put a couple of bullets in the alien. It has the decency to fall away from Cash so that its exothermal decomposition doesn’t kill him (This is a thing which never happens once in this show, and I’m disappointed now that I’ve thought of it. Or even better, some kind of gambit where Harrison has to trick an alien into dying in just the right place so that its corpse will, I dunno, melt the wiring to the doomsday device).

On the way back to rejoin the others, Cash and Suzanne find the bodies of the camera crew, who apparently met some aliens that were in a more face-removing sort of mood. Again, makes sense from a real-world perspective, because if they’d just been shot — like the men Ironhorse lost — Cash might convince himself that Omega Squad shot them as part of the cover-up, so the plot needs them to be mutilated. But it doesn’t make a lot of diagetic sense: they were basically right behind Ironhorse and the soldiers. So, what, did the aliens sneak up behind the good guys, murder just those two guys, then just fuck off, leaving the attacking army to kill their babies? In-universe, it would make far more sense for them to have just been shot by the defending aliens in the freezer room. Cash is clearly shaken by the deaths of these two non-speaking characters who have only been in one scene, falling to his knees in despair.

Ironhorse makes it back in time to lead the final charge. They kill the last of the aliens just as the pods start to hatch, and the death-shrieks of the baby mortaxans as Omega Squad hoses them down with fire lures Cash to break cover and take a look for himself. As he stands in the doorway to the freezer room in shock, Ironhorse walks past him, stops for a second, and looks at him, but says nothing.

We switch to a voice-over as we close on a slow pan across the burning alien pods. “Now you know,” Suzanne says. “I don’t know anything anymore.” “You realize that if you ever try to tell this story—” He cuts her off: “What story? Something about aliens invading Earth from another planet? Who’d believe me. Hell, I don’t even believe me.”

I mean yeah, who’s ever heard of aliens invading Earth from another planet. It’s not like that’s a thing that happened thirty-five years earlier. So I guess they’ve just full-on gone with “No, seriously, no one remembers the aliens at all and there is no mainstream belief that alien life exists or has ever invaded Earth.” This week, at least. Certainly didn’t feel like that when they were having that international conference a couple of weeks ago. Hell.

For the first time, I find myself making mental connections to Power Rangers Megaforce. That’s the twentieth anniversary season of the Power Rangers franchise. Like many seasons, it’s set during an alien invasion. And like many seasons, it’s set in a world where the invasion is oddly bracketed off, so that you can see people running in terror from a giant monster in one scene, but in the next, casually saying something like, “Don’t be ridiculous; there’s no such thing as monsters.” But the reason I think of that one in particular is that its most egregious flaw, even by Power Rangers standards, was that it was focused on action to the exclusion of all else. And I mean all else.

Early seasons of Power Rangers often did a fairly standard A-plot B-plot structure, where the, ahem, Karate Show For Babies, was intercut with scenes depicting the characters trying to live their normal civilian lives as well, often facing some challenge that was thematically related to the action plot. But by the time of Power Rangers Megaforce, your typical episode consisted of a 2-minute intro scene of the characters at school, then basically twenty solid minutes of fighting, and maybe ten seconds of summation at the end, mostly consisting of them congratulating each other. The show gave so few fucks about anything other than fight scenes that it undermined any actual enjoyment of the fight scenes, since people we didn’t know or care about were fighting monsters we didn’t know or care about using techniques that we didn’t know or care about. In past seasons, new powers were unlocked through spiritual development or dangerous quests. In Megaforce, it was literally, “Okay, now it’s time for me to unlock your next upgrade. Here,” like they’d reached the XP requirement for the next level.

“My Soul to Keep” throws in all these interesting concepts. Suzanne’s reporter ex; Debi’s desire to know her father; the aliens’ desperation to produce a new generation on this planet; Quinn’s machinations. We see this vague outline of Cash going through some personal growth, but there’s no time given to it. There’s no time given to anything. We don’t even have a hint what Quinn’s trying to accomplish. They rely so much on the audience just innately understanding “Scumbag Journalist” as an archetype that they don’t bother to actually show Cash doing any journalism until the very end. I think in the end we’re supposed to be forgiving toward him because he saves Suzanne, but it has no greater weight to me in performance than the equal-and-opposite weight of his behavior toward her at dinner. In what world is it supposed to make any sense that this guy who we’ve established is an unscrupulous and tenacious reporter who “never” gives up on a story would, upon finding out that Earth is being invaded by extraterrestrials just shrug and say, “Eh. This one I’d better just keep under wraps.” The first forty minutes presume that Cash McCullough isn’t the sort to ever say something like that.

There’s so many nice pieces here. But they’re just kind of randomly thrown together and any sort of glue to hold them into a thematically cohesive narrative was forsaken in lieu of a big action set-piece.

Oh, and Debi? Her coming home with Suzanne after ice skating and asking if she can see her dad again the next day is the last we will ever see of her. Rachel Blanchard is out. How does it affect her to have her dad suddenly back in her life, then, presumably, disappear again? Fuck it, we will never find out. You know what could’ve been an interesting angle? Debi’s a child. Y’know, the next generation? There could’ve been some parallels there. Maybe Suzanne being conflicted about Debi growing up fatherless could be thematically linked to the aliens similarly trying to provide a safe and nurturing environment for their offspring. But then we might’ve had to actually follow through on something instead of tossing ideas at the wall.

Debi is more of a prop than a character, really. There’s no place for her in the narrative; they just really want “is a mom” as part of Suzanne’s character backstory. A show like this just doesn’t have a place for a child character. Pity. I wonder what a show would look like built on the same basic premise, but where a character like Debi was a fully integrated part of their world…

Anyway, I’ve ranted for far too long about this episode. If they can just cut the episode off after the climax without bothering to tie up their various plotlines in a satisfactory way, so can I.

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• War of the Worlds is available from amazon.