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

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

While Debi is busy getting kidnapped by an unscrupulous underground casino manager, Blackwood and Suzanne are doing some unethical human experimentation with their new toy. They swab their respective wrists with q-tips after poking the two cultured samples made from the Morthren drone. A few seconds later, Suzanne starts having a bad trip, pressing the heels of her hands to her temples and shuddering with pain, but she urges Blackwood to go on, and her pain turns to what starts to look maybe just a hair more orgasmic than you’d really want as she gets a blurry glimpse of what Blackwood is looking at. They’re both delighted when it comes into focus enough for her to watch Blackwood type out “Eureka” at the computer keyboard. Suzanne having a strange and disproportionate emotional reaction when influenced by alien technology seems somehow familiar to me, despite the fact that it’s not something we’ve seen in this season…

Back at the Morthren base, Mana is working on an update to the game which, “Links together the senses of human and Morthren alike in an extraordinary universe!” I wonder if there’s some intentional parallelism here, because, like Suzanne, Mana’s tone as she explains this conveys a kind of excitement that feels disproportionate and has maybe just a hint of a sexual charge to it. I’m not upset or anything, but it’s odd, especially because it’s not something I really recall us seeing much of before.

In fact, everyone seems to be hamming it up this week, well beyond what the plot requires, and in some cases beyond what the plot justifies. Honestly, if they’d been acting like this all season, maybe it would’ve been a more fun show. Take Sendac for example. It’s pretty clear to me that Michael Woods is modeling his performance on Dolph Lundgren as Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, playing Sendac with a kind of abstract, detached “I must break you,” arrogance. Enough so that there’s a moment where Malzor shoots a concerned look over his shoulder to Mana, hinting that he’s worried Sendac might be getting carried away. He reminds him that the only reason for his involvement is to study human creativity. Sendac shrugs it off, insisting that creativity won’t help humanity.

I really like that Malzor shows concern over this. There’s been a handful of little hints across the season that the Morthren are becoming “tainted” by humanity, and the idea of Sendac putting personal glory ahead of the mission could very well tie into that. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s probably intentional, though it’s not fully-formed, likely due to the bounty of issues the production of this series had with consistency. Like I said last week, so many things in this episode are interesting on their own and work well, but they fail to slot together into a unified whole.

They never spell out Malzor’s concern, for example. That would be okay if it played into a larger series-long arc, but of course they don’t have the time or the focus for that sort of thing, so as it is, we’re left with an incomplete sketch of Malzor possibly under-reacting to what sure looks like a breakdown of the Morthren philosophy.

Speaking of Morthren philosophy, we’ve seen both Malzor and Sendac (though he reverses on the point) express respect for human ingenuity in this episode. Again, if it were part of a pattern, that would be really interesting. As a one-off, though, it doesn’t match up with the Morthren arrogance in their superiority we’ve seen elsewhere. It’s a nice change to switch from, “Humans are so stupid and useless and weak. Huh, they somehow keep beating us anyway. Let’s double down on the same failed strategies because the problem can’t be us,” to, “These humans seem to have something going for them. We should really look into that.” But it’s a blip here, not the promise of interesting future developments.

From Kincaid’s failure to subdue a henchman without killing him, we cut immediately to Debi being introduced to Nikita’s gambling pit, Hannibal Lecter-style, tied to a chair with a leather gag over her mouth. Which makes me uncomfortable right in the moment, but not as uncomfortable as the Fridge Logic when I realize that in the space of the cut, she’s also been re-dressed in white fencing gear. We were clearly not meant to think about it, but in addition to kidnapping her and restraining her and gagging her, Nikita’s goons stripped and re-clothed a fourteen year old girl.

What the fuck, War of the Worlds?

At least Sendac has the decency to be shocked by this, complaining at being asked to fight a child. Of course, he was right there when Malzor made these plans, and it doesn’t really make any sense for him to be acting like this for show. Again with the disjointed bits of the story not seeming like they were really meant to go together.

You know what I’m thinking now? A lot of the inconsistencies in this episode stem from scenes at the Morthren base. If you drop those, you get a more consistent Sendac, and you don’t get mixed messages. It would be too much to imagine them doing an episode without the aliens showing up, but it’s just about possible to think that this script was originally written with the Morthren involvement being a surprise. Maybe in an earlier draft, there were no scenes with Malzor and Mana, and it wasn’t until the very end that we would learn that the game was alien in origin. Forget Malzor coming up with the plan to use children – maybe recruiter for a VR company is actually Nikita’s day job, and kidnapping Debi to play in the death-game isn’t something he was doing on orders from the Morthren, but on his own initiative.

Heck, maybe the game wasn’t Morthren in the early drafts. Aside from his last exchange with Malzor, Sendac’s general behavior would make a bit more sense if he’d originally been conceived not as a Morthren, but as a clone. In this hypothetical “first draft” version, perhaps it really was just a money-making scheme for the Morthren, and Sendac was a human VR gladiator who the Morthren had cloned to win them some cold, hard cash. In that case, it’d be entirely consistent with what we’ve seen of clones that he’d behave basically like a stone-cold prizefighter in the employ of evil totalitarians, justifying the whole Canadian Ivan Drago thing he’s doing.

It would also resolve a moderately serious plot hole in the fact that without commenting on it at all, the Morthren are taking a tremendous risk here: what the hell happens if Sendac loses, and proceeds to bleed green glowstick fluid before melting and vaporizing the way the Morthren do when they die, before a live studio audience? Sendac you could justify being too proud to consider the possibility, but that’s the sort of thing that ought to prompt a complaint from Mana at least.

​At this point, it would maybe feel like showing off for Nikita to describe the game as “totally real” again, so instead he tells Debi that it has a, “Higher reality quotient than any other.” The phrase “reality quotient” is nonsense, of course, but it has a lovely cyberpunk feel to it. Nikita assures her that it’s her choice whether or not to play, but it’d be a real shame if she didn’t, as, y’know, she’s getting plugged in to the murder machine in either case. The assembled spectators are, of course, shocked and scandalized because they assume the fight will probably be lame since the big burly guy is probably going to murder the teenage girl pretty quick. No, none of them are concerned that this is pretty damn evil and the teenage girl clearly didn’t volunteer for this. What kind of dystopia do you take this for?

Debi finds herself in a virtual simulation of shogunate Japan so realistic that it consists of a couple of paper screens and a gong in a black void with some low-hanging carbon dioxide fog. Virtual reality has equipped her with an ill-fitting samurai costume, because I guess this being a totally real simulation, the costumes are all off-the-rack. Sendac approaches through the fog, hamming it up for the audience by doing his best Russel Crowe “Are you not entertained?” shtick. Debi remains fearful, but manages to regain her composure when a samurai sword appears in her hand.

Meanwhile, Blackwood, Kincaid and Suzanne take a teenage boy to a strip club.

They do not call attention to this or anything, but we’ve been here before. Kincaid needs information about something that went down at the simulator expo, so he goes to his hacker contact, and that’s Scoggs, and her day job is exotic dancer. David recaps the previous scene for Scoggs’s benefit, and she helpfully reveals that there’s been rumors of mercenaries being kidnapped to play murdergames that are (Sunglasses) totally real (Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhh!).

We will pause here very briefly for me to be surprised that Nikita was kidnapping mercenaries for his murdergame. I mean, okay, I can believe you might need to engage in a little bit of friendly gunpoint abduction to conscript children into playing deadly video games. Actually, I don’t really think that; I’m pretty sure Nikita could easily get volunteers. But I’ll allow it. Mercenaries, though? First, you’ve got a significantly higher labor cost here in using force to compel an adult combat-trained person to play video games. We just demonstrated that Nikita’s goons are, to put it simply, pretty easy to kill in a crowded tech expo with their own knives without raising so much commotion that you can’t discretely leave afterward via the handicap-accessible exit. And, like, they’re mercenaries. You can just hire them. You give them money, they give you fighting. That’s basically the business model.

Nikita kidnapping Debi made sense in the context of her being a rare talent he’d never seen the like of before (Even if the evidence of this was not effectively conveyed to the viewer), and him making a rash, one-off decision. It’s easy for me to accept that this is the first time he’s resorted to kidnapping anyone. Scoggs suggesting that abduction is actually the regular MO doesn’t fit at all. Another example of the sloppiness with which the scenes are connected.

An incredibly clumsy block costs Debi her sword, and house odds favor the champion 78-to-1. But Debi hucks the gong at Sendac like it’s a frisbee while he’s showing off for the audience. And… I don’t know. I mean, actually I do know, but it’s very badly choreographed.

Because I’m sure the script says that she hits him in the gut hard enough to double him over and disorient him long enough for her to slip past him. But what it looks like is that he just catches it in a very normal sort of catch right in front of his chest, then doubles over for no reason, and kinda just stops paying attention and starts looking all around him for a bit to give her time to escape. Throwing a gong is taken by the audience as evidence of Debi’s tactical genius. Nikita claims that the game promises “hours of excitement”, which I guess means it’s a good thing that the champ didn’t just win the thing with his first blow in the opening seconds.

David identifies a grainy dot matrix printout of Nikita, and Scoggs gives them the bad news: he runs a “snuff game” out of an underground casino in quadrant nine with a thousand dollar cover. Everyone emotes quite a lot, then rushes off to the rescue. Except for David, who they don’t wish to further endanger, and so leave behind.

In the strip club. And tell the stripper to make sure he gets home safely. Y’know, the fact that David never once seems, in spite of the circumstances, to acknowledge that he is a teenage boy in a strip club having a conversation about underground bloodsport gambling with a stripper is either a testament to the strength of his character, or a testament to the weakness of his casting.

The kicker? They don’t actually rush straight off to rescue Debi. They go home first, because Kincaid has to roll himself a cigarette-sized tranquilizer dart and blow gun so he can use it at a dramatically convenient moment later, and Suzanne can propose the dangerous idea of taking the experimental alien tracking q-tips with them.

In VR, Sendac walks through the fog doing menacing flourishes with his sword. I don’t know, guys. I’m not sure they’re really committed to this whole “He’s an alien killing machine without human emotion” thing. Debi somehow realizes that she can spin around real fast and create a cyclone of fog. Because this game is… totally real.

This confuses Sendac enough that Debi is able to sneak up on him and knock him unconscious with the hilt of her broken sword. Though the crowd bays for blood, Debi refuses to deliver the killing blow, shouting her refusal to murder for the audience’s amusement before discarding her sword.

Under orders from Ardix in the control room, Nikita uses smelling salts to arouse Sendac, whose body vanishes in the game world. Lucky job smelling salts work on Morthren. It’d be super awkward if it turned out that aliens had a massive allergic reaction to ammonia or something.

Level two of the game is set in a cemetery. Well, set in a black void with dry ice fog and a few polystyrene gravestones. She’s attacked by a decent TV-budget zombie, and at this point, the game has taken enough of a weird direction that we have to cut back to the Morthren base to throw us a bone of exposition. Mana explains that Sendac has, “Become multiple combatants,” but Malzor adds that Debi, “Has already learned that her fears are being used against her.”

I’ll take their word for it. Fortunately, Debi’s in arm’s reach of a halberd when the zombie grabs her, and she managed to bonk him with it, causing him to vanish. Debi is chased through the graveyard by more zombies, eventually stumbling and falling at a gravestone bearing her own name. This video game is getting a lot more interesting than the “It’s just two dudes swordfighting” level we’d seen previously, but honestly, I’m having a hard time understanding how this experiment is giving the Morthren useful information with real-world applicability.

There’s obviously a recurring theme here of Debi’s video game gifts manifesting in the form of her refusing to just straightforwardly attack with a weapon, and it comes up again when, instead of attacking the zombies with her halberd, she uses it to pole-vault over them, and is rewarded for her efforts with a bolt of lightning that summons a sword in a stone for her. Which she looks at for a bit, and then leaves alone. Is this more of the, “Debi is creative so she does not default to grabbing obvious weapons and using them as weapons,” thing? Malzor refers to her as having to apply herself in “Two directions at once.” Again, this is a little unclear, because it seems to refer possibly to the fact that she’s confronted by both the sword in the stone and also a locked door. But I wouldn’t call it “two directions at once”, given that, by fairly obvious video game logic, the point here is that the sword unlocks the door. I hope I’m not giving too much away. It takes Debi forever to figure this out, largely because she somehow fails to notice the big sign on the door explaining the puzzle for the length of time it takes for the show to hop over and follow the rest of the cast as they infiltrate the gaming den.

Blackwood and Suzanne are left to discretely find their own way into the casino while Kincaid, sporting a tux, presents himself at the door as a high roller looking to get in on the action. I do love me the scenes of Adrian Paul going undercover. The limitations of Paul’s range work to his advantage here: I would have a hard time buying Adrian Paul as a wealthy upper-class asshole who likes gambling on bloodsports, but I have no trouble buying him as a roughneck pretending to be a wealthy upper-class asshole who likes gambling on bloodsports. He pays the cover charge in cash, then places a bet on Debi in the form of a sack of diamonds.

You know, we’ve seen the heroes beg, barter and steal before, but we’ve never seen them have any source of income that was explained. I guess they’ve never really depicted money as a problem, but it feels weird having Kincaid be able to get his hands on that kind of money in a hurry. A conflict with the overall sense of the team as being resource-poor.

Also, why is Kincaid making a point to call attention to himself? If he were covering Blackwood and Suzanne’s entrance, it would be one thing, but we don’t actually see how or when they get in. Instead, he’s just made a point of making sure that the guy in charge is aware of him. Won’t that make it harder when he decides to start kicking ass? In fact, when Kincaid looks around the room to note the positions of the guards, each of them in turn stops and stares back at him. Way to go, master spy.

The odds for the next round now favor Debi, as she’s reached a level no one’s seen before. But, as Nikita reminds us, this game is still totally real. Kincaid uses his blowdart to take out one of the guards, then grabs Nikita and orders him to cancel the game at gunpoint. Blackwood and Suzanne enter from a back hallway as the audience flees in terror, just in time for them to kill the two remaining guards. It’s possible the one on the balcony that Suzanne shot was only wounded, but when Blackwood shoots the other, we see his back explode open with the exit wound in a scene that surprises me with its gore. Suzanne holds a gun to Nikita and threatens to kill him if he doesn’t disconnect the game, but he explains that ending the game early would kill them both.

Upstairs, Ardix warns Malzor of what’s going on, and Malzor insists that the experiment must not be compromised, overriding Ardix when he says they should abort, and ordering him ensure Nikita’s silence, assuming the attackers don’t know about the Morthren. Ardix doesn’t recognize Blackwood, Suzanne, or Kincaid. I’d have to go back through the episodes to be sure, but I think Ardix has been around them before, probably in “Doomsday” and possibly “Breeding Ground“, and he was there when Kincaid and Blackwood went through the time portal in “Time to Reap“, but I don’t think he’s ever interacted with any of them, and in the last case, he probably didn’t get a good look at them. Malzor absolutely knows what Blackwood looks like in “Terminal Rock“, but there’s no necessary reason to assume he’s shared that with everyone. Whether the Morthren recognize the gang on sight will become a plot point near the end of the season. Predictably, it doesn’t add up exactly right, but I’m willing to give them that they’ve done a mostly good job in arranging which pairs of characters have interacted to support that. Like, I think Bayda is the only recurring named Morthren who has directly interacted with Kincaid or Suzanne.

With zombies approaching, Debi finally reads the sign on the door:

As she struggles to fend off the zombies and pull the sword from the stone, the guard Kincaid tranquilized earlier recovers and tackles him, allowing Nikita to escape. Instead of giving chase, Blackwood shoots him with a dart of his own, this one containing the Morthren scanner cells. He watches through Nikita’s eyes as he runs to the control room, where Ardix kills him. We haven’t seen someone die to a Morthren weapon in a few weeks, and it’s a bit more graphic than we’ve seen before, with the skeleton effect lingering longer than it did the last few times, enough that I finally buy this as technology compatible with the “skeleton beam” from the movie.

The shock incapacitates Blackwood briefly, which keeps him helpfully out of the way when Suzanne decides that since she can’t safely disconnect Debi from the game, she’ll put on a spare VR rig and join them. Kincaid talks her out of it, volunteering to go instead, as he’s been trained in VR combat. We don’t really need any follow-up to that, but it’s an interesting tidbit about this world, that they’ve apparently had virtual reality technology recognizably similar to the Morthren game for long enough that Kincaid has professional experience with it.

Since the zombies inexplicably just sort of stand around laughing, Debi has time to pull the sword from the stone just before Kincaid appears in the game world. Debi assumes he’s not real, though, and returns to the door, placing the sword with the shield beside it to advance to the next level. Kincaid starts to follow her, but when Sendac shows up, he instead draws the sword to fight him. Okay. I’m really digging the thematic angles here. It’s very clear that Kincaid is making a mistake by engaging Sendac directly, using the sword as a weapon where Debi used it as a tool.

Also, Adrian Paul can swordfight. Who knew? It’s a pretty solid fight, and they seem pretty much equally matched, with each of them getting in some good blows. Kincaid eventually brings Sendac to his knees, but when he raises the sword to deliver a killing blow, a bolt of lightning strikes it and they both vanish.

This is all intercut with a scene back at the Morthren base where Mana says that they need to pull the plug once a second player enters the game, but Malzor insists on continuing as, “Sendac is part of the experiment.” We return to them once Sendac and Kincaid vanish, where they basically spoil the climax of the episode by having Mana declare that this is a positive development as Sendac has, “Captured the king.” Malzor adds, “And now, the queen.”

Yeah, I’m more convinced than ever that the Morthren base scenes were added afterward. First of all, that’s not how chess works. But more importantly, the climax of this episode kinda hinges on the ambiguity of what just happened. Kincaid was about to defeat Sendac, then they both vanish. We’re clearly not supposed to know what happened to them, but here’s Malzor and Mana pretty much straight-up telling us that Sendac just captured Kincaid.

Also, how? I get that Sendac can manifest as multiple combatants, and if he’d summoned a zombie to help him fight, that would be one thing. But if Sendac can actually control the physics in the game world, then… What’s the point? How does this experiment help the Morthren learn to defeat humans if Sendac wins by turning on the cheat codes? You could have a perfectly fine plot here where Sendac is actually ruining the experiment by changing the parameters out of his own selfish need to win at all costs. But of course they’re not going there. They never follow up on the hinting earlier that Sendac was a glory hound.

Blackwood recovers and retraces Nikita’s steps to the control room. Jared Martin does a really good job here as he looks around as he staggers down the hall at wordlessly conveying the uncanniness of seeing with his own eyes the place he just saw through Nikita’s. He’s a little thrown by the physical reality of it and keeps touching the walls like he’s disoriented from seeing them at this angle. After finding the Morthren device, he returns to Suzanne and warns her of the alien involvement. He uses the scanner on Sendac to experience the game from his perspective, hoping he can give Debi and Kincaid some advantage. He sends Suzanne up to the control room, where he thinks she might be able to communicate with Debi.

The editing of this bit is kinda questionable to me, though, because between Blackwood reaching the control room and him returning to Suzanne, there’s a game scene inserted which I think would work better if they pushed it forward a bit. The next level of the game is a bit more traditionally space-invadery. Debi is armed with a ray gun and fired on by lasers from a pixelated blur above. Sendac and Kincaid reappear and head-butt each other a few times. Debi concludes that if the game is being generated from her thoughts and fears, she might be able to shape the game consciously, and chants, “The game is over” to herself repeatedly.

And since the show does a fade here and I just realized how damn long this article is running, so shall we…

To Be Continued…