Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…
We cross-fade to an idealized version of the team’s underground lair, with a formally set dining table under a crystal chandelier. Suzanne is done up like a ’50s housewife archetype, with Blackwood beside her, smoking a pipe, wearing a sweater, and doing a damned fine job of playing the sitcom dad. Kincaid is in a smoking jacket. They very gently strongarm her into sitting down for a nice pleasant dinner together.
The reason I question the editing is that we see all of this before Blackwood and Suzanne announce their intention to impose on the game as well. Had we reversed the order of the scenes, we could’ve had a moment where it wasn’t clear whether the versions of Blackwood and Suzanne in the game actually were manifestations of their real-world counterparts. Instead, it’s pretty obvious that they’re essentially puppets created from Debi’s memories, but controlled by Sendac.
Oh, and that thing about Suzanne talking to Debi from the control room? I think a few pages of the script must’ve gotten mangled here, because that side of the plot immediately backpedals. Suzanne has no idea how to interact with the Morthren computer. Fortunately, Blackwood shows up and shoves her to the side, declaring his intent to use the tracker cells to interface with the computer, linking himself both to the game and to the Morthren at the same time.
This bit is hard to follow, and it really didn’t have to be. I think the reason for it is some late changes to the script. The way the scenes in the control room are filmed, it feels very much like we are supposed to perceive Blackwood as actively doing something to resolve the story. All he actually does is gurn a bit from the strain of being connected to… Whatever he’s connected to. We never actually see what he’s seeing from his link with Sendac and with the game, and the only information he communicates about it is at the end, when he announces that the alien computer is dying.
I think we’re meant to understand that Blackwood interfacing with the game is what allows Suzanne to get through to Debi, appearing on the videophone to remind her that she’s still in the game and none of this is real. Game-Suzanne turns the phone off, as it’s dinner time, and guides her back to the table. Suzanne’s contribution here doesn’t seem like it adds anything. We haven’t seen any indication that Debi actually believes that she’s out of the game and back in reality. That would be a valid idea if they’d established that the nature of the game made that kind of messing with her mind a possibility, like in the Captain Power episode when Lord Dread suggests that maybe he’s already won the war and has messed with a defeated John’s memories to torture him. They could’ve established the game as having a dream-like quality. But they haven’t. On the contrary, the phrase they keep hammering home is that the game is “totally real”. This is the only point in the game where we switch to being totally surreal, and they haven’t done anything to suggest that the game is trying to trick Debi in that way.
On the contrary, Kincaid offers Debi the ray gun from the previous scene, and the others announce that they’ve caught the champion for her. A second Adrian Paul stumbles in, still wearing the tuxedo, but this time in zombie makeup. Between puffs of his pipe, Game-Blackwood explains that she can end the game by shooting him.
Ardix makes it back to the Morthren base in time for Mana to fret that Blackwood interfacing with the game has caused them to lose control. This is not reflected in any obvious way within the game, but again points to the idea that some of these scenes were written with the expectation that it was Blackwood who was going to save the day here. Malzor, in a complete reversal from before, orders the game shut down, even though this would kill Sendac and for some reason lose all the combat data they’ve acquired.
Yes, this makes no sense from the standpoint of how computers work. But this sort of, “Oh computers are magical and data can’t be copied or backed up,” thing is incredibly common even unto the modern era in television shows, and at least War of the Worlds has the justification that Morthren computers are biological in nature so we can guess their basic principles might be very different from real computers.
Malzor’s reversal, though surprising, is justified. When it was just Sendac’s life on the line, he was willing to take a risk to finish the experiment. But the humans being able to interface with their technology wasn’t part of the plan, and opens up the possibility that they’re dealing with an actual threat to them. Before this point, the Morthren had no reason to think that their involvement in the game was known to or even relevant to the attackers: Nikita screwed up and kidnapped someone with a family. What were the odds that he’d have grabbed the daughter of a professional alien-fighter?
The fact that Mana is suddenly the one against shutting the experiment down and losing the data is a reversal less easy to justify. She’d been the one before who had wanted to end the game early when things started to go south. There’s been some inconsistency on this front about Mana all season, really. She’s butted heads with Malzor when he’s jeopardized her scientific research for his more militaristic goals, but at other times, they’ve come into conflict because she views his plans as too risky. I think this episode can actually serve as a bridge on this front, since it shows us both sides. We saw Mana getting hot and bothered over the latest game update earlier, then she’s reluctant and wants to pull the plug when things don’t go to plan, but she gets excited again as Sendac adapts to fighting both Debi and Kincaid. You can read this as Mana being not inconsistent so much as conflicted: she’s a pragmatist, but she’s also a scientist. Her instinct to shut down the game happened before the game “got good”.
But Mana concedes and starts shutting the game down remotely. Not that this is reflected in the game world. The only person we see it affect is Blackwood. We don’t see the game glitching out, or really anything to give a sense of urgency to Debi’s final showdown.
Instead, we get a cliche so obvious that you have certainly already guessed how things play out in the game world. It’s competently executed, but it’s also played painfully straight. Can we all say it together? Everyone entreats Debi to shoot Zombie-Kincaid to win the game, then Zombie-Kincaid tells Debi that she should shoot both of them, so Debi shoots the Kincaid in the dressing gown. Sendac falls off his chair and dies conveniently off-screen so that we don’t need to pay for the complicated Morthren decomposition effect. Debi and Kincaid are released from the game, and Kincaid runs off to help Blackwood, who was knocked out when Sendac died.
We return to the sewer for a coda, which finds Blackwood with a severe headache from the tracker cells.I wonder if this scene is meant to mirror Kincaid’s hangover at the beginning of the episode? Good thing they never bother with those again if it leaves him this messed up. Before refilling his ice bag, Suzanne gives him a little kiss on the cheek, and he watches her leave with an expression that hints at something I’ll get to in my own coda.
Debi wakes Kincaid to apologize for not believing he was real when he first appeared in the game. Kincaid is kind of bummed about having completely failed to have been of any help and having needed to be rescued by a child. Debi gives us the thing they probably started out intending to be the theme of the episode over all: “We helped each other. All of us.” When Kincaid struggles mannishly with expressing his feelings, Debi lets him off the hook by skipping to, “We love you too.”
It’s a definite improvement over Trombetta’s previous offering. Where “Time to Reap” wasted the promise of its premise and ended up pretty incoherent, “Totally Real” has a pretty solid plot, and does a good job of setting up its twists ahead of time. It’s far more coherent on the knowledge transfer front, making sure that the characters only act on information they actually have justification for knowing. Even more, it’s actually relevant to the plot what various characters don’t know at certain points: Debi doesn’t know Kincaid has entered the game when he turns up, so she assumes he’s part of the game. The Morthren don’t know that the attackers at the casino are people they’ve dealt with before, so they underestimate the seriousness of the threat.
But there are similarities to “Time to Reap” as well. Namely, evidence that the script had some substantial eleventh hour rewrites. They’re handled much better here. In “Time to Reap”, a lot of them took the form of Kincaid and Blackwood seeming to magically intuit things they have no reason to know. Here, it seems more like they filmed half the scenes with one plot in mind, then made a big change to the whole arc of the story, which is conveyed through a second set of scenes filmed later. And the two halves aren’t entirely disparate, but there’s friction where they interface.
If you ignore all the scenes at the Morthren base, the episode’s reveals work a lot better. We see Ardix at the beginning, sure, but we don’t know the details of what the Morthren plan is or what their interest is in a snuff game. The unnamed Champion (He’s only named in the base scenes) is easily defeating all challenges, so Nikita comes up with the idea of kidnapping a teenager all on his own. It’s only when Blackwood witnesses Nikita’s death that we realize that the Morthren actually created the game. The angle of Mana remotely shutting the game down is completely absent; the game, we assume, dies because of Blackwood’s interference.
If I were writing it, I’d probably only show Malzor and Mana at the end, to explain what the point of the experiment was while they disposed of the Champion’s original – as I said before, I think it’s likely that Sendac was originally intended to be a clone. I’d also clarify how Blackwood involves himself with the game a bit. Specifically, I’m thinking that Blackwood actually uses the tracker on the game in reverse: using the scanner cells on himself and the receiver cells on the game. And this would be how Suzanne is able to communicate with Debi inside the game: the game itself is now seeing through Blackwood’s eyes. It could be the feedback loop created by the game seeing through Blackwood while Blackwood is seeing through Sendac, while Sendac is himself in the game that causes the game to break down and die. I wouldn’t want this to be how they get out of the game all on its own, as that would rob us of Debi’s agency in the climax. But having the breakdown of the game manifest in the game world would give some urgency to that last scene in the fantasy version of the sewer base: the game is falling apart, and if Debi doesn’t escape now, she’ll die along with it.
And the climax does need a bit of work. As it stands, there’s nothing to really justify Debi shooting the fake Kincaid. Sure, the shameless ripoff of that old Star Trek episode tells her which one is real, but Debi’s already refused to kill multiple times in this game. She could’ve just run for it. As it plays out, the game constructs just tell her she’s got to shoot Zombie-Kincaid and Zombie-Kincaid tells her she’s got to shoot Construct-Kincaid (and then that she’s got to shoot both of them), so she picks one and shoots him. If Debi had shown a willingness to kill earlier, this would be fair, but she’s shown the opposite, and moreover, the narrative has been unsubtle in telling us that killing is the wrong move, punishing Kincaid every time he tries to defeat Sendac by a direct attack. “Pick the right person to shoot” is not the right moral for the story to go with. Why does Sendac bother with this gambit to get Debi to shoot Kincaid anyway? Why didn’t he just kill Kincaid himself? Why does he give Debi a gun? He could’ve just shot her himself while she was disoriented by the weird family dinner. I can see two ways that the story could’ve justified this. On the one hand, this could just be a manifestation of Sendac’s arrogance: he’s no longer content just to win on his own, but needs to outsmart Debi as well. It would pay off Sendac’s odd characterization. But we don’t have any evidence for this. That’s definitely the sort of thing Malzor and Mana should’ve exposition dropped, with one of them being excited about him taking initiative and learning to respond to Debi’s creativity and the other one worried that his showboating was risking the experiment. Alternatively, it would also work to propose that Sendac can’t attack Debi directly. It could tie back to the otherwise unexplained lightning bolt that disappears Kincaid when he nearly killed Sendac in the graveyard level. Or this could be the effect of Blackwood’s interference. Have Blackwood able to hold Sendac in check so that he can’t use force.
For that matter, why is shooting the fake Kincaid equivalent to shooting Sendac? Sendac is clearly controlling the false Blackwood and Suzanne as well. Would shooting them have also won the game? What does it mean that Sendac is controlling multiple avatars? Could Debi have won the game by killing any of the zombies? Or is there always one “real” Sendac and other characters he controls don’t count? If so, why would he risk himself by shapeshifting into a false Kincaid rather than just generating a “puppet” Kincaid for the scene? This isn’t a plot hole per se, but the rules of this game are frustratingly vague.
Everything else is mostly okay in the setup: the fake-people should tell Debi to shoot Kincaid, Kincaid should tell Debi to shoot them both, but everything leading up to this point tells us that the right answer is for her not to shoot either of them. “Which of you do I shoot?” should be a false dichotomy. It should play out more like the climax of the Doctor Who story “The End of Time”, with the Doctor seeming forced to choose between shooting the Master or shooting Rassilon, before he remembers that’s not how Doctor Who works, and shoots the diamond instead. There ought to have been a third option, that’s the whole point.
I’m glad to get one last Debi episode before we finish up with the series. I won’t come right out and say that any of the actors in this show are bad, but of the regular cast, Jared Martin and Rachel Blanchard are the only ones I’d say actually have a significant range. Adrian Paul is a fantastic physical actor, but you give him a dramatic scene and he kinda mumbles and sulks his way through it like a moody teenager. Denis Forest is an excellent weirdo, but he’d be completely lost in any scene that requires he be sympathetic. Catherine Disher and Lynda Mason Green seem to have dramatic ranges which do not actually cover the characters they are playing. But Jared has been convincing as a romantic hero, and as a streetwise action-science type in the mold of, say, Daniel Jackson or the ninth Doctor, and as a straight-up action hero, and he’s remained convincing when he’s been more vulnerable, like when he encounters Mrs. Forrester in the past. And Rachel has similarly shown that while she’s clearly still pretty green, she can handle things like murderous rage, teen angst, burgeoning young love (I thought all of us were burgeons…), and both being afraid for her life, and forcing herself to keep calm despite being afraid for her life. It’s a shame we don’t get more of her, and I’m more convinced than ever that had they continued this series, they probably were planning to ramp her role up over time.
I reckon those earlier drafts also placed more emphasis on the thematic significance of Blackwood, Suzanne, Kincaid and Debi functioning as a family. That’s been minimized in the final product, but the coda with Debi and Kincaid makes it clear that it was deliberate. It’s reinforced by the depiction of the gang in a Norman Rockwell sort of arrangement when Debi’s mind influences the design of the final level. Of course, the demographics of the group make the family structure unusual. It’s interesting that Kincaid and Blackwood are both rendered as patriarchs, representing two kinds of head-of-household-style masculinity. Kincaid’s smoking jacket suggests old-world sophistication, which is an odd choice for him, though I guess it may also evoke notions of the old-school high society playboy. Blackwood, on the other hand, is very clearly cast as “dad”, with the pipe and sweater, but also in the way he’s positioned with respect to Suzanne. They’re almost always in the frame together, while faux-Kincaid is always positioned opposite of them. Debi viewing Blackwood as a surrogate father figure is an obvious thing to happen, but an escalation of what we had previously seen on-screen.
Debi casting Blackwood as a father figure doesn’t necessarily imply a connection between him and Suzanne on its own, but there’s some other little moments in this episode. The way they touch in the base, in their excitement at the successful tracker test, and again later when Blackwood reassures Suzanne in the club suggests a kind of casual intimacy between the two of them. And Blackwood’s reaction when she kisses him is very suggestive. There is really very little in the show to suggest a romantic relationship between Suzanne and Blackwood. But it is such a natural an expected way for a show like this to go that watching this episode as a younger man definitely left me shipping the pair, enough that I’m genuinely surprised this time through how, outside this episode, it’s not really justified.
In terms of big picture, I think this is a decent episode. It doesn’t hang together as well as the previous two episodes as a coherent whole, but its individual pieces have a lot going for them, and it feels “important” in a way those episodes didn’t. We have not just the continuing plot thread of the scanner, but recognition by the Morthren that their tactics so far haven’t been working and that they need to understand humans better. This episode feels very emblematic of the series as a whole: it’s full of good stuff, it’s got interesting science fiction concepts, it has a focus on the emotional bond between its heroes… And it often feels disconnected and like long stretches of the story were an afterthought tossed in at the last minute. What this show lacks is a single coherent narrative voice to unify the various different directions it meanders in. And sadly, it’s too damn late in the day for them to fix that now.
I might have to go back through the old episodes, because I’m suddenly interested in these statistics:
- Morthren killed: 1 (by Debi)
- Humans killed: 5/6
- By Sendac: 1
- By Ardix: 1
- By Kincaid: 1 (maybe 2; it’s not clear if he kills the last guard)
- By Suzanne: 1
- By Blackwood: 1
- Title Drops: 5
- Weird Julian Richings Facial Expressions: 1
- Strippers: 2
- War of the Worlds is available on amazon.
Hi! hope everything going as well as it can be. Thought I’d let you know I finished reading Massacre of Mankind by Baxter. And you were right it is a slog, however I cheated and I thought I’d let you know the secret at some point I stopped reading any chapter not from Julie viewpoint. And it was actual enjoyable at that point and I didn’t feel lost at all even to the end of the book. So if you ever want to take a crack at it again, thought I’d let you know.
That’s helpful. I keep thinking I ought to give it another go, but then it occurs to me that i could do literally anything else instead.
well spoilers for the story then: rot13
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That’s disappointing. I really liked his Time Machine sequel from years back. It spent a lot of time beating around the bush, but it at least had a bunch of interesting and pretty novel ideas
I loved seeing Rachel Blanchard given more to do in this season of the show. It’s one of the season’s redeeming qualities and I would love to know who is responsible for that to give them due credit. I liked her as Debi. Blanchard is my age. While I didn’t necessarily consciously identify with her character (I tended to consciously identify with Blackwood), I think there was something unconscious about my appreciation for seeing her get some importance in this season, because… well… if I were in her place, I’d want to have some more agency, too.
Regarding the inconsistencies between the Morthren base scenes and the others… It sounds, from your analysis, that the story ran short and needed more content, OR, seeing the end coming, and the script not including enough of Catherine Disher and Denis Forest, they added more content for them to be more present in the episode. Nearing the end of a series, there’s less opportunity to feel like “well, we’ll get more to do later”.
I personally didn’t care for the cheesiness of this episode. VR… is a “going nowhere” tech fad to me, but that’s not what bothers me. The cheesy representation of it in fiction bothers me. More importantly, the cliche of “you die in the game, you die in real life”. There’s almost NEVER justification for this, and never sensible justification (not even the “psychosomatic” issue with the one in Captain Power).
Also, at this point in the show, are the Morthren EVER going to actually attack humanity with anything remotely impactful? How many are left? In a few episodes, there’s going to be a statement that there are so few of them left that “Malzor and 20 soldiers” are all that stands between the Blackwood team and defeating the Morthren. At this point, they’re spinning their wheels. They’ve lost already, unless they decide to, I don’t know, poison the entire planet, defeating the reason they came to Earth… which was… what reason again…?
Is there anything that Denis Forest was in where he didn’t play a creep or a loser, or a creepy loser? I’ve always enjoyed watching him, but I would like to see if he’s done something… gentle and pleasant. He was a visual artist and poet(?), and I seem to recall a photo of him with long hair and a dove, which, while cheesy, sounds like the man was actually kinda sentimental, so… where’s the acting work that takes advantage of this? Was he permanently typecast or did he just love doing this kind of role?
With my high hairline and big forehead, I suspect I could have slicked my hair back and been hired as a background or side Morthren in this show…
Rachel blanchard still has a acting career. So is isn’t bad.
Rachel blanchard still has a acting career. So is isn’t bad. This tv show is over 30 years .
@Jace “I loved seeing Rachel Blanchard given more to do in this season of the show. It’s one of the season’s redeeming qualities and I would love to know who is responsible for that to give them due credit.”
IIRC (from a source I can’t remember where), FMJ when killing off Ironhorse and Drake, forgot that Philip Atkin was Canadian and a Canadian show filmed in Canada with tax write offs has to have a certain percentage of cast and crew Canadian. Which is why Herb Wright was not listed as an Executive Producer.
By killing Drake off and bring in Kincaid, he had to get another Canadian actor, hence why Debi was given more to do without bringing on someone else.
I’ve heard different accountings of the details, but it does appear that the casting choices were heavily influenced by the tax write off. The most common versions of the story suggest that Richard Chaves fell victim to it, as replacing the “soldier” character with a commonwealth citizen (Adrian Paul is English, not Canadian, but apparently that’s close enough for tax purposes) offset firing Philip Akin.