Antithesis: Totally Real (War of the Worlds 2×17, Part 1)

It is April 23, 1990. Namibia, recently independent from South Africa, joins the UN. Paulette Goddard dies at 79. The golden-age actress had appeared alongside Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times and The Great Dictator. Dev Patel is born. Robert Polhill is released from captivity in Lebanon, the first hostage to be released since 1986. The New England Journal of Medicine recommends that men avoid sunbathing in the nude due to the risk of genital cancer and also because no one wants to see that. Tomorrow, East and West Germany will agree to merge their currencies, with the West German Deutsche Mark becoming the official currency of both nations in July. Space Shuttle Discovery will launch tomorrow, carrying the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. Later this week, in Nicaragua, Violeta Chamorro will become the first woman elected to the presidency in the Americas (Previous female heads of state in the Americas had been appointed to their respective offices). Michael Milken will plead guilty to six felonies in the junk bond scandal, and will face punishment so severe that to this day, he is only the 606th richest person in the world.

Janet Jackson receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Jimi Hendrix’s Stratocaster brings in close to three hundred thousand dollars at auction. Sinead O’Connor spends a second week at the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Nothing Compares 2U”.

Among this week’s movie releases is Spaced Invaders, which … (looks at capsule summary) … Well shit. I guess I’m going to have to watch it, aren’t I? Fine. This past Saturday gave us a multi-network simulcast of the infamously bizarre multi-franchise crossover PSA Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue, in which the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Smurfs, ALF, the Muppet Babies and a half dozen other animated franchises team up to save America’s youth from the dangers of that most deadly of drugs, the demon weed marijuana. This is utterly convincing, and causes young people to forswear the substance, meaning it is never used again and certainly never gets legalized for medicinal or recreational uses.

TV is mostly repeats otherwise, up through the middle of the week. I guess maybe Earth Day threw off everyone’s schedules? Friday will bring us a new episode of Perfect Strangers. I will defer to the expert on this one, but at a guess, I’m going to say “Cousin Larry in ambitious and unscrupulous, while Cousin Balki acts like a mentally handicapped toddler, and ultimately the status quo is preserved. Other members of the regular cast are not given any worthwhile material.” Star Trek The Next Generation gives us “Tin Man“, which I’m told is a very good episode, but I’ve never been able to really get the details to stick in my head much. Friday the 13th the Series gives us “The Elecrocutioner”, in which a cursed electric chair grants electric powers to people in exchange for murders. Sure. Why not.

1990 is right in the middle of the transitional era for the suite of technologies we collectively refer to these days as “Virtual Reality”. This was really when virtual reality was moving from being primarily experimental into the first serious stabs at mainstream commercialization. Too soon, as it turned out; that generation of VR was a bit of a flash in the pan, with no one achieving any real commercial success, and the era best known, perhaps, for its more extravagant failures, like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy.

But even though “real” virtual reality went back to the drawing board for a couple of decades to regroup and figure out a way forward that didn’t induce nausea, it remained in the public consciousness a thing which seemed “up and coming” enough that mass media science fiction pretty much had to address it. It was so obviously going to be a big part of the future that if you were writing a story set in the future, its absence would be as surprising as the absence of flying cars, robots, videophones, or the internet. Just kidding; no one thought the internet was going to be a thing.

And in a way popular science fiction utterly failed to do with computers, it recognized with virtual reality that while, sure, education would be a thing, the “killer app” for VR was definitely going to be recreation. Stories featuring computer-generated realities transitioned away from the fantastical “Magically zapped into a computer-world where actual computer concepts are represented by physical analogies,” (Either in the more fantastic Tron style, or a more “realistic” cyberpunk “Hack the computer by punching it with your computer-fists” sense) and toward a more naturalistic “Computer-generated simulacra to give bored astronauts somewhere to play and/or masturbate.” Star Trek, of course, popularized the holodeck style of “VR is a room you go to which shows you a fake reality and maybe it can hurt you because [tech], but it’s not like we actually beam your brain out of your head and into a computer or anything.”

If War of the Worlds had ever had time to settle down and develop a house style, it seems like a likely candidate for a “standard” episode-of-the-week plot would be “Morthren take something mundane which is currently big in the pop-science consciousness, and turn it into a murder machine.” There’s a basic similarity between that kind of plot and what Mancuso was doing over on Friday the 13th all this time. It opens up a broad range of possibilities, and gives an easy, repeatable framework that you can use as the backbone for a lot of episodes, and then sort of fill in around the edges with things like ongoing story arcs and character growth.

None of this actually happened, of course, because, near as I can tell, no one was actually at the wheel of this show. And I know that TV of this era didn’t really have the modern “showrunner” concept, where a single creator’s creative vision was the dominant driving force behind the show. That’s a much more modern concept. But there’s not even a sense here of a single coherent vision within individual episodes a lot of the time, let alone across the series. Historically, we know that the show lost its script supervisor early on. And over the course of 20 episodes, we have at least 16 writers. Which means that the closest thing we have to a consistent narrative voice is Jared Martin and Adrian Paul scribbling notes on the scripts between takes in a desperate attempt to maintain some vague consistency.

At least we get a returning writer for “Totally Real” this week. Unfortunately, it’s Jim Trombetta, who previously gave us “Time to Reap“, an episode which I believe I described as “incoherent garbage” due to it taking an interesting concept and implementing it as… well, incoherent garbage, I guess.

But maybe I can be optimistic. “Time to Reap” had an interesting premise, but it failed mostly because it used that concept poorly, hitting some time travel cliches as a sort of paint-by-numbers exercise, getting absolutely nothing out of the choice to revisit the context of the movie, magically transferring knowledge to the protagonists as convenient, and completely ignoring causality after making a big deal out of it. VR bloodsport is maybe a less interesting concept, but it’s okay. And there’s not nearly so many places for it to go wrong. I mean, we kinda know where this is going to go, right? The Morthren invent some kind of VR esports thingy which kills the loser, and Kincaid’s going to have to risk his life in the arena to save the day. VR’s probably going to pretty much look like a Laser Tag arena, except there will probably be a segment that gets slightly surreal and has a lot of filters.

That’s basically all you have to do in order to meet the absolute minimum requirements for this episode being basically functional. So let’s see if they fuck it up…

We still have the dateline of “Almost Tomorrow”, in case you’ve forgotten. Seeing it now made me wonder, so I looked back. The dateline is absent from “No Direction Home” through “Night Moves”, and the episode after this one replaces it with something else on account of opening in a flashback. Is it just an oversight that it’s missing for seven episodes? Yeah, probably. I also notice that “Almost Tomorrow” (and next week’s alternative) is rendered in a different font from the rest of the titles.

The first thing we see, after an establishing shot of a contextless building at night, is a pair of men in combat. You could describe what they’re wearing as cheap samurai costumes, but it’s be more fair to say that they look like samurai-themed uniforms, sort of akin to fencing gear, one all-black, the other all-white.

Their arena for this battle is a featureless black void partially filled with low-hanging smoke — it’s the laser tag arena we were promised! To further highlight that we are watching a video game, it’s presented in the the frame of a projection within a pyramidal display. That’s kind of neat. I assume the use of a pyramidal display here is meant to evoke the Pepper’s Ghost illusion. That’s a nineteenth century illusion where reflecting images off angled glass creates the illusion of depth. By arranging four of them into a pyramid, you can approximate a 360° view. It doesn’t actually produce a volumetric image, at least not on its own, but it’s been the basis for lots of “3D” gimmicks, and it’s also been the basis of some legitimate (or, at least, “legitimate”) attempts at doing proper autostereoscopic displays. We’re still a year out from Sega’s seminal Time Traveler game, which used a similar kind of illusion (using a parabolic mirror rather than Pepper’s Ghost. Devices to produce both types of illusion are now popping up in my targeted ads just for talking about it.) to simulate a volumetric display, but I think the transparent pyramid display still would’ve been something the audience would instinctively understand that they were seeing some sort of futuristic 3-D display. Never mind that it’s not actually a Pepper’s Ghost illusion — the pyramid itself is also part of the projection, and vanishes when the game ends. The visual shorthand of “A hologram is a three-dimensional projection which appears inside some kind of enclosure. Let’s say a pyramidal one,” is powerful enough that it justifies not just having the image appear unbounded in the air above them, even though obviously that would be more impressive for the spectators.

Spectators? Yeah, we’re in a room full of men and women shouting out bets on the competitors. The men are all in tuxedoes, the women mostly dressed in 1920s-style eveningwear. Quite a few of them are fairly old. We’re shown pretty straightforwardly that this is an underground gambling ring, but a high-class one. There’s a sort of speakeasy atmosphere about it, which might be a little hard to justify. I’m sure we’ll be told that such things are highly illegal, and it at times seems like this show is set in a police state. But on the other hand, we know that narcotics are legal in this world, and that the government is in a state of collapse and life is cheap. Frankly, it would come as a surprise at this point if bloodsports were illegal in this world.

The black-clad samurai dominates the fight. We’re told by a bettor that he’s the house champion. There’s one brief moment of reversal when the samurai in white breaks his opponent’s sword, but this doesn’t faze the pit boss, who calls for final bets before the champ impales his opponent. The physical bodies of the competitors, also color coded, sit wearing adorable simulacra of VR headsets at opposite ends of the pyramid table. The man in white falls to the floor and is confirmed dead by the pit boss, who assures the audience that the game is, as they had been promised, “Totally Real”. I sort of like the way they title drop the concept of “Totally real” before ever uttering the phrase “virtual reality”.

One does wonder why they’re all so excited about a video game that kills people when they lose a swordfight when, like, they could just have the competitors actually swordfight. But now I’m just being a downer. We’ll let that slide.

Your guess that this “totally real” video game is a Morthren invention is quickly confirmed as the pit boss hands off a stack of cash to a tuxedoed Ardix. The house champ, a Morthren named Sendac, grants that his opponent was good, and looks forward to the next challenger. This is immediately contradicted by a fade to the Morthren lair, where Malzor insists that the guy wasn’t a challenge. We’ve seen the Morthren engage in moneymaking schemes before in order to finance their operations, but, as before, there’s another angle in it for them as well. The real purpose behind their deal with Nikita is research: the Morthren aren’t doing too well at this whole “conquer the Earth” thing, and they’re hoping they can pick up some tips about human combat strategy from playing video games. Like a reverse Last Starfighter. While Nikita presents exciting VR bloodsport for his audience, the Morthren computer is learning human tactics and shaping the virtual scenario to try out different things against human ingenuity.

At least, that’s the claim. It’s really more of an informed trait than something we will see. And so far, as Malzor points out, it’s not really working. Mana looks up from her work at a pickled brain on a pedestal to suggest that maybe the problem is that they’ve been experimenting on “warriors”, whereas the reason they keep getting defeated is because they’re facing humans who don’t follow good solid logical strategy.

Malzor agrees, and interprets this to mean that what they ought to do is involve children in their bloodsports, because they, “​have not yet fallen into ingrained patterns of behavior.”

Two things occur to me immediately because of this. The first is that this is a trope I’ve seen before, but used in a slightly different way. The more common form of the trope is that a military conscripts children to do their strategy because of something nebulous about creativity. Both the Daleks and the Cybermen did it in Doctor Who, for example. But here, the Morthren are using the children for training, rather than forcing them to serve as strategists, and I think that’s an interesting choice, given that we’ve seen the Morthren try to subvert other races by bringing them around to Morthren philosophy — by comparison, it’s weird that the Daleks, even knowing that it’s necessary, would condescend to placing a filthy alien in a position of power.

The second thing that occurs to me is that this definitely means we are going to get a Debi-centric episode. Woohoo. I love Debi episodes.

Meanwhile, in the sewer, John Kincaid is hung over. Blackwood notices that Kincaid looks unwell, but it never becomes relevant to the plot, nor is it explained any further.

Now, are you ready to have your mind blown? Because for what I think is the first damn time all season, we are going to have a thread of specific continuity that connects the previous episode to this one. They’re going to take one specific thing that happened last time, and expand upon it this time, in a way that reflects that the specific events of this series are not forgotten from week to week, and that more than just the broad strokes of the overall premise remain in canon from episode to episode. The closest thing like this we’ve seen so far is Adam being born in “Breeding Ground” then reappearing as a six-year-old in “The Pied Piper“.

Supporting characters may materialize and dematerialize, Kincaid might pledge his eternal love to someone we’ll never see again. But by God, do you remember how “Video Messiah” had a B-plot about Blackwood and Suzanne capturing a Morthren probe? Heck, I barely remember it, but the writers came right back with it. Because Blackwood and Suzanne are busy doing experiments on it, and have extracted and cultured samples of the scanner and receiver “elements”. They’re hoping that they can refine them to the point that they can be used as a topical surveillance device. The cloned elements can be applied topically, granting one person the ability to see through another’s eyes.

Two notes on this:

1. Several more minutes of this episode will be spent on them being annoyed at their lack of the equipment and resources to do proper scientific investigation to work out what the probe cells do and how they work and how to use them, despite the fact that in this scene, Blackwood basically says exactly what they do, and all the magic there seems to be to it is “rub some on your wrist.” I mean, sure, there’s a lot of details to work out like the effective range and dosage and side effects, but they don’t really talk about it. It comes off more like a bit of wheel-spinning to keep Blackwood and Suzanne from getting out in front of the plot by giving them a couple of scenes to just say, “We really need to science this shit some more.”
2. I am so very happy that they are making the probe they caught last week relevant to this episode’s storyline. I am also pretty sure that this new alien technology they’ve captured and adapted to their own arsenal will not be seen or mentioned in any of the show’s remaining episodes. Of course, there are only three remaining episodes, so maybe this is not a big deal.

“We captured some enemy technology and now we can use it to our own advantage,” is a pretty cool idea which is rare to see in shows of this period. Far more common is, “We really want to capture some enemy technology so we can use it to our own advantage, but we will constantly be denied that in order to preserve the status quo.” Even Stargate SG-1 ran with that up through nearly the midpoint of the series — kinda hard to believe SG-1 ends with contemporary humans being able to build intergalactic starships when up through the fourth season, it was practically a running gag that every time the SGC finally managed to get its hands on a spaceship, they immediately had to sacrifice it. Even if you look at something where humanity’s already technologically advanced like Star Trek Voyager, it’s absolutely lousy with, “We discovered cool new alien technology that could help us and whoops it broke during the final commercial break so next week we’ll be back to exactly the same familiar Star Trek technology we’ve had for seven years.”

Kincaid is not impressed by the fancy alien doodads, but Debi thinks it’s “cool”. She’s looking super 1990-chic in a shiny vest and gold pants because it’s “career testing day.” We hear the phrase “career testing” repeated later, but the thing she’s going to seems to be more of a job fair, or even a tech expo. Kincaid abandons his raw egg and orange juice cocktail to volunteer a little bit forcefully to give Debi a ride so Suzanne can continue her work. Do we ever find out why he’s so interested? No. We’ve previously established that Kincaid is uncomfortable with Blackwood experimenting on Morthren technology, so that’s a possibility, I guess. He also mentions breakfast, so it could just be that he’s the type who finds bacon a good hangover cure.

He drops her off at the “Simulator Expo”, where she meets up with her friend David, who is apparently a close enough friend that she greets him with a kiss on the cheek, despite him not having been mentioned before or after, or having been invited to her birthday party. He also uses motorized wheelchair which looks homemade and quite possibly diesel-powered.

Hey, that could be an angle, right? I bet David is ripe for being tempted into dangerous VR bloodsports because virtual reality offers him an escape from the difficulties his disability imposes in a world that I can’t imagine is very accommodating. Hey, didn’t General Wilson’s team back in the pilot have a computer programmer in a wheelchair? Man, this plot totally woulda worked for him. Anyway, maybe he could get involved in Nikita deathsport ring and Debi has to talk him out of it, maybe evoking the memory of her heroic lost friend.

You know the punch-line by now, right? Yeah, David gets like one more scene and then is completely forgotten.

The one thing we see Debi and David do before they split up to take placement tests is try out a VR game presented by none other than Nikita. The game they play is just straight-up VR pong. They bounce up and down in a black room with some prop rocks and the least convincing starfield backdrop since Jason of Star Command, tossing a ball back and forth under heavy motion blur. Debi is apparently really good at VR pong, because Nikita declares her score to be the highest ever recorded. So high, in fact, that he immediately starts scheming to kidnap her to press-gang into gladiatorial VR combat.

I’m going to just say it now: I have a bit of a conflicted relationship with this episode. Lots of the parts are pretty good. It looks great, kinda stylish and cyberpunk in a very ’80s kind of way. Reminds me a lot of the better looking stuff from Captain Power. The Morthren ooze menace in a way they don’t always successfully carry off, the dialogue is pretty snappy, there’s a sense of forward progress on both sides, and the pacing is pretty solid.

But… There’s a lot of bits that just don’t quite hang together properly. I’ve already mentioned the wheel-spinning that Blackwood and Suzanne do over their invention. And there’s a lot of little holes in the whole gaming conceit. Like, at first, Sendac makes a point of acknowledging that his first opponent was really good. But both he and Malzor then reverse into, “We’re not learning anything from fighting these weaklings; we need a real challenge,” mode. But then there’s a bit where Malzor cautions Sendac about overconfidence, saying that, though he compensated for them, Sendac had made several blunders in his last match.

And here, we have a very cool and stylish VR sequence, but they’re just playing catch, really, and nothing we see really indicates that Debi is some kind of prodigy at this game, and especially nothing that suggests skill at VR Pong would translate to the combat simulator. It is clear, without any dialogue, that Debi won the game with David, but, like, it just seems to come down to “She hit the ball and he fumbled the return.” There’s no indication of what qualities Nikita is looking for in a victim, or how Debi demonstrated that. There’s a big gap between, “She narrowly won a single round of a two-player game neither she nor her opponent had ever tried before,” and “She got the highest score of all time which indicates that she has the kind of unpredictable, creative thinking we are looking for in our battle simulation bloodsport.” They haven’t gone far enough to convey, “Debi is actually a prodigy at video games.”

And even if they did, it’s not actually clear why being a prodigy at video games in general is the skillset Nikita is looking for. Like, being good at video games isn’t actually the point of the Morthren experiment: they want to analyze how humans behave in a combat scenario, how they strategize and plan. And sure, video games could work as a proxy for that. But not just any old video game. I could believe that being really good at Fortnite might translate into being good at the kind of tactical thinking the Morthren want to study. But, like, the game they used to pick Starfighter pilots in The Last Starfighter wasn’t Candy Crush.

While David takes an engineering exam, Debi is approached by Nikita, who offers her a chance to, “focus her goals,” and gives her a speech about parents trying to impose their own unfulfilled hopes and dreams on to their children. What he claims to be offering is a spot in some kind of high-tech Montressori school in exchange for her working as a beta tester for industrial simulators which are, “More that virtually real… Totally real.” Two title drops in twelve minutes. Not bad.

(Also, not sure what the big deal about “Totally real” is when apparently fully immersive VR games which put you in a photorealistic environment are already a thing. Is he just promising her the chance to play a game without motion blur?)

When she politely declines his offer, Nikita responds by pulling out a gun and just kidnapping her in broad daylight. He’s fortunate that no one reacts to this in the slightest, except for David, who just happens to return from his placement test at the right moment.

Because that is what David is for. His only purpose in this story is that someone needed to see Debi get kidnapped, but not be able to follow the kidnappers down the fire escape. Kincaid totally could have served the same role in the plot as David (actually, he’d work better, since you could have Debi beat him in the game and insert a line of dialogue explaining how Kincaid’s military background was no match for Debi’s childlike creativity), except that you’d have to justify why he didn’t chase Nikita down the fire escape and beat the shit out of him.

David instead alerts Kincaid, who chases down the goon Nikita sent back specifically to prevent him from alerting anyone, and the resulting fight scene is pretty well choreographed, but ends in Kincaid straight up murdering the dude, which leaves him unable to reveal where Debi’s been taken.

To Be Continued…