Deep Ice: Why do I enjoy these images? (“Howard Koch’s” War of the Worlds 2, Episode 3, Part 1)

Previously…

Hey, guess who’s exactly stupid enough to have set up an alert to let him know when a copy of the episode of War of the Worlds II he couldn’t find before turned up on Amazon.

That’s right, I am masochistic enough to have spent additional money for the chance to listen to a twenty-year-old audio drama I hate. So here we are, folks, the missing chapter in the long-lost saga of Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II, episode 3: “The Tor”.

If you’re just joining us, two years ago, this rabbit hole in which we find ourselves brought us to an audio play by Thomas and Yvonne Phelan, nominally a sequel to the 1938 Mercury Theater version of War of the Worlds. In fact, the audio play has had approximately sweet fuck all to do with the famous Orson Welles broadcast, instead being a political soap opera and soap box for the authors to make snide comments about things they don’t really understand but certainly don’t approve of about how the world is going these days. The overarching premise is that pollution and inept leadership and a fickle populace have caused a global potable water crisis, or possibly the water crisis was manufactured by the world’s richest asshole, and in order to save the world, a space expedition was sent to Mars to look for water. The bare-bones connection between this and the 1938 radio play is that their shuttle was able to make the trip thanks to retrofitting with reverse-engineered Martian technology.

It is bad, folks. Just awful. The writing is stilted and weird, the characters who have any personality at all are playing weird, over-the-top shticks that seem to have been chosen at random, it’s full of lengthy, irrelevant asides, subplots that go nowhere, and there’s just too many damn things going on for any part of the story to ever get anywhere.

I hate it. If you’ve been wondering why my throughput dropped off so significantly in the middle of 2017, well, okay, it’s mostly because my kids are now both of an age where they requires a lot more of my higher brain functions, but also it’s because reviewing the other three episodes of this shit burned me the hell out.

But I will not let this thing beat me. Come along therefore, and let us slay this dragon together. This is “The Tor”.

The good news up front is that fully half of side 1 is dedicated to the narrator’s boring recap of the story so far and a replay of episode 2’s cliffhanger. In case you missed it, the away team, minus Mark Rutherford, just returned to Orion I, and did a painfully painfully protracted scene where everyone took turns saying “Jessica Storm!” in an alarmed tone while Nikki Jackson assumed they were just musing on how unpleasant it would be had her old college roommate and soap opera villainess been part of the crew rather than realizing that they were trying to tell her that Jessica Storm was, in fact, right behind her with a gun, having commandeered the ship.

Storm is just about to complete her mission by murdering the Orion crew when Mark Rutherford beams himself aboard. Why? Fucked if I know. When they left Mars, he slipped away for reasons that weren’t explained at the time and never will be, but apparently all he did while he was gone was to make arrangements to beam back up for reasons aren’t explained at the time and never will be.

Jessica demands he tell her about the Martians. The Orion crew begs him not to, since she’s planning to kill them all either way, but Mark gives in when Jessica shoots Nikki in the arm. “My arm. You shot me right in the arm,” she says in what I am pretty sure predates the same bit from Austin Powers, and also is not funny. Jessica keeps using the word “ventilate” to describe what she’s doing, like a ’30s gangster moll. Her hired gun Walsh is super pissy the whole time because he assumes Storm is going all soft and womanly by wanting to interrogate the prisoners rather than simply murder them immediately. This is part of the whole “Walsh thinks Jessica is going soft and is getting ready to turn on her,” thing that came up elsewhere, a contrivance that serves no purpose whatsoever.

Everyone sounds real, real bored during this entire exchange. Art imitates life. Anyway, Mark tells her that the Martians will beam them all down at four in the afternoon if they stand in a circle and think happy thoughts and do not carry any weapons.

Neither Jessica nor Walsh are cool with leaving their weapons – Walsh isn’t cool with any of this and still wants to just murder everyone and go home – but Jessica quietly plots for him to rig Orion 1 to explode and take the remote detonator with them instead of their guns. The narrator wastes another two minutes going into excruciating yet boring detail as Walsh hides plastic explosive around the ship. Details include the fact that plastic explosive looks like gray putty, but is, in fact, plastic explosive (the narrator uses the obsolete term “plastique”, which I haven’t heard in years, but I kinda remember still being in fairly common usage, despite being outdated, back in the ’80s. Not sure about the ’90s).

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Nancy Ferris was, if you can remember that far back, was threatening the son of World’s Richest Man and Bond Villain Ronald Ratkin in an attempt to escape captivity. His son being the only thing Ratkin treasures more than world domination, the thugs are forced to hold back while she makes an escape in a scene that is so exciting that of course they do not actually perform it but just have the narrator tell us is very tense. When we actually do drop into performance mode, it’s a boring cliche talky scene of Nancy and young Ethan Allen Ratkin bonding over his loneliness and her maternal instinct and her confessing that she’s probably not going to murder a child and him admitting that his dad is kind of a dick, and him finally agreeing to show her a safe way out of the complex, in exchange for helping him find his mother. In this action-unpacked escape sequence, they burn a few more minutes with Nancy pussyfooting around explaining what a sanatorium is, and piecing together the link to those cancelled checks she’d seen in Ratkin’s office.

In his office, Ratkin cackles maniacally at the thought of how he can just have his guards kill Nancy since Ferris wouldn’t have any way to know. Which really just calls attention to the fact that Ferris would have no way of knowing if Ratkin hadn’t even bothered kidnapping Nancy in the first place; he could’ve just lied, since Artemis jammed communications with NASA. We don’t even get to actually hear the cackle, as this is yet another scene delivered to us via narrator.

Thus we end side one, with approximately sweet fuck all having been accomplished. I should be upset, but mostly I’m happy to have gotten through it so quickly. I fear the remaining parts won’t be nearly so quick, which is compounded by the fact that if you’ve read by treatment of episode 4, you should know that none of the many, many, many, many pieces on the board are going to move more than a couple of squares over the course of this episode.

This article has been brief because I really hate this series with a consuming passion by now. Nothing happened in this part, and I feel absolutely no impetus to stretch it out any longer than I have to.

This is the end of side one. Please flip the cassette over to continue on the next side.