Deep Ice: More Men Were Back at Work (Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II, Episode 3, Part 2)

Guys, I can’t believe I’m saying this. I’m shook. I’m confused. The world no longer makes sense. You might want to sit down.

War of the Worlds II: The New Batch actually said something relevant and important and made a relevant political observation. I know, right? Now don’t get too confused; it still sucks ass. But there’s actually a hint of a political idea in there which resonates with the world we live in.

I’m pretty sure it was an accident.

The first ten minutes – ten minutes – of side two covers exactly this ground: Tosh Rimbaugh is off the air, and the station isn’t going to reinstate him until and unless DeWitt recovers. Tosh is upset about the damage to his brand, of course, and not even slightly cowed by his role in an attempted murder, repeatedly blaming the victim and rolling out his, “De-Witless!” catchphrase. He still sounds more like Oliver Hardy than Rush Limbaugh as he splits his fury between the radio station management and Jefferson Davis Clark. He makes plans with his long-suffering PA, Seth, to appeal directly to the affiliate stations, planning for the contingency where he starts producing the show itself and directly marketing it. This is long and logistical and boring, but by War of the Worlds II standards, largely inoffensive. But then they get to the real meat of it: Seth brings up the fact that a JD Clark has got himself a Legal Defense Fund which – in a stunning example of a thing that they set up in this series actually paying off somewhere down the line – argues that Clark wasn’t culpable for his actions because they were induced, like a fit of temporary insanity, by-

Wait for it.

Wait for it.

I promise it will be good.

ECONOMIC ANXIETY

I. Am. Dead. Fucking. Serious. Way back at the beginning of Episode One, they introduced the then-irrelevant tidbit that the courts had recently ruled that certain kinds of government dereliction imputed a legal right to commit otherwise legal acts to make up for the difference: a kind of Gotta eat to live, gotta steal to eat precedent. And that comes full circle here with the idea that Clark should not be held responsible for trying to kill DeWitt because of the government’s failure to protect his job. That no, he wasn’t motivated by sexism, stoked by a loudmouthed mysogynistic blowhard with, just for the sake of argument, a comb-over and inability to tell when he’s used too much bronzer. No, no, they say, it was ECONOMIC ANXIETY.

I’m dying. I mean more than the usual amount caused by the soul-crushing reality of life in 2019. Somehow, despite their scattershot, unengaged, underinformed, ultimately directionless political meandering that never amounts to more than “Get off my lawn you kids!”, the Phelans managed to happen into the idea that in the face of female president being shot by a blue-collar yokel literally named after the president of the Confederacy, people would rush to the idea that it was totally “economic anxiety” that put him up to it.

This happy thought is going to carry me almost all the way to the next scene (which sucks). The remainder of Rimbaugh’s scene is, in all honesty, kinda okay. It’s almost a nice touch listening to him line-by-line absorb and internalize this new narrative: he will, in fact, usurp the leadership of Clark’s defense fund, use his access to manipulate Clark into publicly exonerating him of any involvement in the shooting, and at the same time push the “economic anxiety” issue as a new cudgel against the DeWitt administration.

Wow. A scene I… Kinda don’t hate. The whole character of Rimbaugh is misguided and too cartoonish, but there is a sort of stylized realism in how he fails to move an inch even in light of the assassination attempt – the sociopathy of his complete lack of sympathy isn’t coupled with him adopting the mannerisms of a comic book villain the way everyone else in this thing does. And the process whereby he rewrites his own attitude toward Clark in order to assimilate the ECONOMIC ANXIETY argument into his worldview is… Truer to life than I wish it were.

And then the following scene was so bad that it took me basically all the rest of the time between my previous post and this one to force myself to listen to it.

Are you pretty much up to speed on the subplot about Nancy getting kidnapped by Ratkin, then escaping with Ratkin’s son? Well too bad, because it’s time to recap it in excruciating detail. Nancy and Ethan show up at the home of Tom and Jennifer Connors. You might remember them as Nancy’s friends from the boring dinner party in episode 1, or possibly from the fact that in episode 4, they turn out to be the leaders of the underground resistance. Though in this episode, they’re so thoroughly clueless that I think it goes without saying that particular twist hadn’t been thought up yet. Tom is in local government, if you’ll recall, and his wife is a scientist of some sort, and they’re Nancy’s neighbors, which implies that they live somewhere near either Houston or Washington (those being the places it’s convenient to drive to from Nancy’s house. Incidentally, the implication here is that Ratkin’s palatial high-security secret compound is in walking distance), though they’ve both got old-money New England accents. Jennifer in particular does not sound like a “Jennifer”. She sounds like any minute now, she’s about to declare, “I’m Marion Coatesworth-Haye.”

So Ethan and Nancy show up at their door looking for help, and Nancy fills them in, and my God is it painful. They do this protracted shtick where Nancy will say something, then Tom and Jennifer will repeat it back to her in a shocked, questioning tone like they’re on the phone in a ’50s screwball comedy, except that we get to hear both sides. “I was kidnapped.” “Kidnapped?” “By Ronald Ratkin.” “Ronald Ratkin?” “I escaped.” “Escaped?” “This is Ratkin’s son.” “Ratkin’s son?” And Nancy goes over everything. The phony general and his subsequent execution, her imprisonment, discovering the check stubs, meeting Ethan, the dismissal of Ethan’s nanny. There’s no incidental sound effects or indication of movement during this scene either, so I get the very strong impression that the entire seven minutes of this scene takes place with Ethan and Nancy standing just inside the front door. Ask them in, offer them a drink at least. Tom keeps breaking for asides where he badmouths Ratkin, unable to account for the fact that he’s telling a small child that his dad’s a monster, yet never really going into the kind of specifics that would actually justify this position – he never explains how the entire world is literally dying of thirst while Ratkin foils any attempt to increase the supply of potable water, he just deals in platitudes about how many people would like to see Ratkin dead. And as usual, there’s the inherently contradictory stance that apparently the public all knows what Ratkin is up to yet everyone’s also completely in the dark about his machinations because of his control over the media.

Also, Tom knows that NASA has lost contact with Orion, but doesn’t know about the Artemis mission and is shocked to learn that Ratkin has his own private expedition to Mars. He has to have it explained to him why Ratkin would be interested in Mars or in foiling the Orion mission. Keep in mind that the Artemis mission is public knowledge now and is all over the media, though allegedly everyone believes it is simply a “friendly competition”, despite the fact that allegedly everyone also knows it is secretly Ratkin’s plan to murder a NASA crew and literally conquer space to gain absolute control over all known water in the universe. He also crosses a line when he describes Ratkin as a “madman”, which angers Ethan enough that he has to go lie down in the spare bedroom for a bit. The others discuss Nancy’s plans over dinner, and since this is new material rather than a recap, the narrator takes over to give us a precis. Nancy is intent on fulfilling her promise to Ethan by finding his mother, but she’s worried that he might get caught in the cross-fire if Ratkin’s goons catch her, so they decide to leave him with the Connors’ while she goes to Steinmetz alone. Then everyone goes to bed and Ethan has a dream about his mother while Nancy has a sex dream about her husband. So I guess switching to the narrator was for the best.

Ethan sneaks out through the window before the others wake up. Tom wants to call the police, but Nancy warns him that Ratkin surely has the police in whatever random town this is in his pocket. Tom assures her that he’s got one or two men in the department that he can trust. No one discusses the fact that Nancy has abducted Ethan, and even a policeman who wasn’t in Ratkin’s pocket would be kinda duty-bound to return him to his legal guardian.

Leaving those wheels to spin for a bit, we return to stately Ratkin Manor, where Dr. Evans has been summoned. I think Evans has either been recast or is just doing a new shtick. He’s full of vocal fry and comes off as a flamboyant aging cad from a ’40s movie. You can practically hear the pencil-mustache and fedora as he flirts with the secretary (herself strongly coded as a movie character of the same period). He’s got it turned up so high that I imagine him as a sort of fusion between William Powell and John Waters.

Ratkin orders Evans to head over to Steinmetz and kill his wife. He starts out doing the movie mobster thing – all, “I need you to take care of a little problem,” because someone went through his desk drawer and, “Saw something unfortunate.” But it takes approximately no prodding at all for Ratkin to confess basically everything to Evans, possibly because we hadn’t already heard this once and had it recapped to us three times. Ratkin explains everything: that he’d kidnapped Nancy Ferris, the wife of Commander Jonathan Ferris, to blackmail the astronaut into surrendering Mars to Ratkin, but Nancy escaped, taking Ethan hostage and seeing the check stubs from Steinmetz. Now Ratkin has correctly surmised that Nancy might take Ethan to find his mother.

This is ridiculous on at least two levels. I mean, why is Ratkin telling Evans all this? We’ve established that Evans hates Ratkin and is only motivated by the money he needs to sustain his opulent lifestyle (Evans is on a million-dollar-a-year retainer, which, is a lot, yes, but even that isn’t exactly the kind of uber-wealthy levels you’d expect given the number of felonies Evans has been ordered to commit). Evans has already threatened Ratkin with blackmail before. Which is itself kinda weird under the general auspices of the story’s commitment to the contradictory claims that Ratkin keeps his nefarious activities a perfect secret such that no one can ever call him to account, and also that he is so powerful that he can commit his crimes openly without any risk of being called to account.

The other level that I find ridiculous is more subtle: why does Ratkin think that Nancy will take Ethan to find his mother? He’s right, of course, but why would Ratkin think this? Ethan is supposed to think that his mother is dead. Ratkin is supposed to believe he’s controlled Ethan’s exposure to the world to carefully groom him as a successor and believe whatever he’s told. The idea that Nancy would take Ethan to find his mother is predicated on several assumptions:

• That Ethan would believe his mother was alive despite Ratkin’s claims.
• That Ethan would tell Nancy about his mother.
• That Nancy would draw the connection between the Steinmetz checks and Ethan’s mother.
• That Nancy would want to help Ethan, son of her kidnapper, hostage to ensure her safety during her escape.

Not all of these are big asks, but we’ve established that Ratkin had radically underestimated the control he had over Ethan. We haven’t established why Ratkin would imagine Nancy to feel any compulsion to help Ethan. I mean, we’ve barely established why Nancy does feel any compulsion to help Ethan. All we’ve got is, “He’s an adorably precocious child and she’s a nice person,” which, okay, but under the circumstances? You know, the circumstances where Nancy is in fear for her life and her husband’s life and the safest thing to do is to go to ground and not go to a place she knows Ratkin would look? Where the only thing she’s got stopping Ratkin from having her killed on the spot is Ethan as a hostage. Where she’s already threatened to kill Ethan (as a bluff, admittedly, but Ratkin explicitly was not confident of that). Where Ethan is, after all, the son and heir to the most evil man on the planet (In a story which constantly harps on how petty and self-absorbed people in general are, everyone seems very quick to say, “I know Ethan isn’t responsible for his father’s evil and we should definitely not use him as tool to bring his dad down or just kill him as retribution). And on top of all that, Ratkin doesn’t know that Nancy made a deal with Ethan or that the two have developed an emotional attachment; there’s no reason for him to think she’d stick her neck out for him or do anything other than keep him locked up while she contacts the secret service or whoever she can plausibly believe isn’t in Ratkin’s pocket with evidence of the fact that he’s committed felony kidnapping and conspiracy to commit multiple murder, piracy, wrongful imprisonment, medical malpractice, impersonating a general, and tax fraud.

Evans balks at being asked to commit murder, even if Ratkin (and, strangely, the narrator) tries to frame it as a mercy killing. But threatening his retainer is enough to bring Evans back in line. Side two ends with the narrator reminding us that Ratkin hasn’t heard from Jessica Storm in a while, and he’s not happy about that, since space is, for the moment, outside the scope of his total control of everything. Does this herald a return to Mars for side three? Does anyone care?

Ugh. Just ugh. Maybe all this time away from War of the Worlds II has given my psyche time to recover, but the first and last scenes of this section weren’t all that bad. Well, I mean, they were bad, but they were tolerably bad. Imagining Evans as a cross between William Powell and John Waters made the Ratkin bit amusing enough to get through, and the execrable Rimbaugh scene had that amazing ECONOMIC ANXIETY thing to prop it up. But this section as a whole – this episode as a whole – is basically wall-to-wall wheel spinning and recaps. And my long time to heal notwithstanding, I still remember the events of episode 2 well enough on my own without needing to be told them again at almost exactly the same speed as they told us the first time. It’s not like I don’t already wake up in the middle of the night sometimes, sweat-soaked and screaming incoherently about the disappearance of Nurse Mary and the striking ice sectioners’ union. Ask my wife. The other three episodes were awful and stupid and wasted time on nonsense, but at least things happened from time to time. Almost everything that has happened in this episode has just been a recap of episode 2.

The worst part is the scene with Nancy, Tom and Jennifer. Ugh. I wasn’t lying before. Every morning on my way to work, when I’d heard as much as I could take of NPR trying to be gentle and moderate and reasonable and avoid calling concentration camps “concentration camps” and trying to find a way to parse, “Yes I would definitely accept foreign help to win an election in spite of the laws against doing such,” as treason, I’d switch over to my CD player and listen to War of the Worlds 2: The New Batch. And I would hear exactly one of those, “Ratkin sent a phony general.”/”He sent a phony general?” exchanges, and I’d have to stop and switch back to something less upsetting, like reporters asking whether crimes against humanity were really worth getting upset about when the stock market was up (I like NPR, but at times their compulsive centrism gets to me. I won’t name names, mostly because I can’t remember who it was who did an interview with a guy who wrote a book about how torture is bad and doesn’t work, where every question he asked was some form of, “But come on, torture really does work, doesn’t it?”). I’d listen to music but morning radio is really light on music, much heavier on talk. Also 107.3 changed formats and is a gospel station now. I found a new station to listen to but it’s an oldies station and sometimes they play songs I remember from when they first came out, and then I wither away to dust like the mummified fossil I am.

There’s not much left, though. And I’ll get through this. I’ll get over this. I know I will. I’ll pretend my heart’s still beating, and I’ll tell myself – no, wait. That’s Go West. Excuse me, I have to go return to my coffin now.

End of Side Two