Deep Ice: Children should be cared for. They need love (Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II, Episode 3, Part 3)

We can do this. We’re gonna make it. One more cassette to go. Two more posts and we’re free.

So, did you reckon that the segue last time heralded a return to Mars and the actual plot? Have you learned nothing at all from our time together, dear reader? Well, good news: we will return to Mars this time. At the 30 minute mark. Out of thirty-five.

No, first it’s time for more adventures of Ethan Allen Ratkin. Young Ethan wanders into a “bad part of town,” we are told. This “bad part of town” comes off as pretty much being Sesame Street back in the ’70s before it got gentrified and working class monsters like Franklin and Forgetful Jones were priced out of the place. (Seriously, I recently watched some old Sesame Street from the ’70s and was really struck by how much shabbier it looked, but also how much more it looked like a real place that just happened to be a mixed community of puppets and humans. There’s people all over the place just going about their daily lives in the background and the whole street looks lived-in, unlike the contemporary street which is very clean and sterile and rarely has anyone visible on the street other than the characters actively participating in the scene.)

Ethan stops outside a pawn shop to be confused by the concept. This is, apparently, the first business he has passed whose purpose confuses him. Pawnbroking is a pretty old profession, and it’s maybe just a little weird that it hasn’t fallen into the scope of Ethan’s theoretical knowledge. The clearly want to make a point here about the schism between Ethan’s book-learning and his street-naivety, but they don’t really know how, so this scene is a lot of Ethan not understanding simple concepts until they are explained to them, then instantly grasping their underpinnings in theoretical economics, then completely failing to make even the smallest logical extrapolation from that.

The shopkeeper comes out to shoo Ethan away from loitering. Like everyone else, he’s a broad, overplayed stereotype, this time a dated archetype of a Brooklyn shopkeeper, with a heavy New York accent. We should probably be grateful he’s not coded strongly as Jewish given War of the Worlds II‘s hamfistedness about such things. I imagine him somewhere between Walter Matthau and Mr. Hooper. Again, the writing clearly wants him to come off as parasitic, but can’t pull it off, leaving us with a real weird (honestly, weird to the point of being kind of enjoyable) sense of him being some sort of kids’s show character. He doesn’t understand Ethan’s big fancy-school words like “mirth” or “collateralized loan”, but gives Ethan a detailed and extremely forthright explanation of his business – he literally says that he profits by human misery.

He explains that people who are down-on-their-luck take out loans from him, backed by something of value. Ethan understands the concept of an interest-bearing loan backed by collateral, but somehow doesn’t realize that the pawnbroker is talking about interest-bearing loans until he explains it. He goes on to assert that most customers can’t repay the loans, so he keeps the collateral, which Ethan doesn’t understand to be a good thing until he is told that the claimed collateral is sold at a profit. Whereupon Ethan instantly understands the economics of the situation and can’t understand why his father doesn’t go into the business.

But the irony doesn’t really land because there’s too much going on in the joke. Pawn shops thrive on human misery, thus it would be an appropriate line of work for Ronald Ratkin, the world’s most cartoonishly evil man. But Ethan doesn’t know and doesn’t believe that his dad is evil. He muses on it anyway, though, because despite being literally told by a pawnbroker that pawn shops work by exploiting people in trouble, he still doesn’t actually see anything evil about it. Just like they do with everything else, the writers rely too much on the audience to just take for granted that pawnbrokers are parasitic to make up for their failure to actually convey anything (An even bigger ask in 2019, given how much the public image of pawn shops has been rehabilitated). Even with the pawnbroker outright calling his business exploitative, the description he gives…. Just doesn’t really convey that. When people are in trouble, he offers them help. That he does it at a profit doesn’t actually make him any worse than any other participant in capitalism. And as he dispels Ethan’s misconceptions, he honestly doesn’t come off as doing anything but what is completely reasonable – recouping his investments and minimizing his risk. There’s no real addressing of the actually unsavory bits of the business – the usury and handling stolen goods – so he comes off as not really significantly different from anyone else who makes secured loans. The only real difference is that reselling forfeited collateral is a major part of his business model.

Fortunately for Ethan, Steinmetz (It is literally always referred to by its full name, “Steinmets Psychiatric Hospital”. It’s just me shortening it) is well enough known that a random pawnbroker in the bad part of town knows where it is. It’s in Connecticut. Now, we have absolutely no idea where this is taking place, so it might as well be on the moon. But the Pawnbroker suggests that it would cost Ethan about $500 to take a cab there. I have no idea how inflation has affected cab fare over the last 20 years, but given current rates, a five hundred dollar cab ride to Connecticut would suggest we’re somewhere in the DC Metro area. Which I guess is plausible. It doesn’t really track with the idea of Nancy imagining they’d send a limo to drive her to Mission Control. But a cab to Connecticut from the general neighborhood of either Johnson Space Center or Kennedy Space Center would be an order of magnitude higher. Of course, it’s plausible that the pawnbroker is simply being facetious, since “Take a cab clear up the Atlantic seaboard,” is not really a serious suggestion, but… It really doesn’t come off that way.

The pawnbroker offers Ethan a dollar an hour doing odd jobs around the shop, to which Ethan responds by misquoting Benjamin Franklin and attributing it to his father. This provides the opening for the pawnbroker to go on a tirade about how evil Ratkin pere is, that he’s responsible for the water shortage and also somehow responsible for the poverty of this particular neighborhood. This continues the pattern of Ethan being told by strangers what a piece of shit his father is which will culminate in Ethan’s decision to turn against the old man in the final episode. Of course, as usual, everyone hates Ratkin and knows the details of Ratkin’s evil machinations despite his complete control over the media and the fact that everyone also thinks that Ratkin is a paragon of industry and it would be political suicide for the government to act against him.

Also, given that the pawnbroker has just explained in excruciating detail how his business is built around human suffering and preserving the cycle of poverty, it’s weird that he’d hold such animus toward the guy who’s almost certainly driven a lot of people to the pawn shop to trade grandma’s wedding band for a half-gallon of water.

Ethan turns the job offer down, but instead pawns his gold watch. Thanks to his shrewd negotiating skills, he’s able to argue the pawnbroker up to seven hundred dollars. Still a far cry from the watch’s true value, but what can you expect. He’s clever enough to reject the pawnbroker’s usual “It’s probably fake,” and “It’s probably gold-plate,” and “Watches aren’t worth much,” but possibly accepts that the engraving (“To ER From RR”) will make it impossible to sell. It feels like a missed opportunity that the pawnbroker doesn’t bring up the possibility that the watch is stolen. I mean, a three thousand dollar gold Rolex is not something a child would normally have, so he could easily have justified underbidding Ethan on the grounds that he needed to protect against the potential for loss if the watch turned out to be stolen. We do get to actually hear the negotiation, though the transaction itself is handled by the narrator, who also foreshadows that Ethan sees a flash of movement through the window of the pawn shop as he leaves.

The narrator tells us that Ethan intuits that taxicabs are rare in the bad part of town, so he sets out in search of a better neighborhood, when he is confronted by the character we know will later become Ethan’s sidekick, Kyle Jordan.

Kyle tries to mug Ethan, pulling a knife on him. Then a bit of foley happens that sounds like a slap fight, but apparently is Ethan owning the shit out of this street tough because, ahem, Ethan has had extensive private tutoring in Taekwondo.

Sure. Why not. Roll with it. It’ll go faster if we don’t question these things. Actually, as I think on it, Ethan seems like he might be an example of a variant on the sheltered prince archetype I think I’ve seen before, but not in a long time: the prince who, despite his sheltered upbringing, instantly becomes a hypercompetent ass-kicker the instant the scales fall from his eyes. I think this might be an older archetype from the days when “nobility confers virtue” was still something you could play straight, and the more common, “The prince is actually useless for a long time until he is tutored by the old master and/or rebellious action girl,” version originated as a deconstruction of it. Here, of course, it’s mostly just an artifact of the gears grinding.

Ethan poor-shames Kyle a bit until he has it explained to him that the reason Kyle is unwashed is that water costs twenty-five dollars a gallon and he’s poorly dressed because he has no income and he can’t get a job because there aren’t any jobs and also he is filthy and dressed in rags. Ethan is touched by Kyle’s plight and would totally buy him a steak and fries (The narrative does not seem to consider that the price of water would have a knock-on effect on the price and availability of livestock) except that he needs cab fare. Whereupon Kyle explains that a train is a lot more cost-effective than a cab, which means that Ethan could buy him dinner and tickets for both of them. Convenient!

Also, Ethan makes up the false name “Edmund Roberts” to conceal his true identity, but this doesn’t really matter as he never uses it again; Kyle just calls him “PC”, short for “Privileged Class”, cementing my conviction that no one involved in the writing of this has ever actually met a street tough. For the sake of convenience, I am imagining Kyle as basically the midpoint between Corey Feldman in The Goonies and Dante Basco in Hook.

Meanwhile, at Steinmetz, “Mrs. Rochester” is considerably more lucid since hunky young Doctor Bryant has been secretly reducing her medication. She can now speak isolated phrases in a pained trill that forces me to imagine her as a Kristen Wiig character. Somewhere between Mindy Elise Grayson and Judy Grimes. She begs to be taken off the sedatives and mentions Ethan, and honestly sounds entirely coherent, just with some sort of speech impairment, though Bryant acts as though she’s producing word salad. Bryant also comes off even creepier than he does elsewhere. I mean, there were hints of it in his other appearances, but here, it’s very clear that he’s warm for her form in a way wholly inappropriate for a doctor treating a patient for a severe psychiatric problem. He promises to continue weening her off her medication before he’s called away.

If you can bear to recall episode four, we later find out that the call was fake, staged to get him out of the room so that Evans could make his move. Gone is the reluctance he showed when discussing the murder with Ratkin; he’s transitioned into some kind of Columbo villain, effete, prissy, and murderous. He taunts her about what a shame it is that the handsome young doctor won’t be getting to know her better, and he does the wannabe gangster thing, telling her that he’s been instructed to give her something to make her, “Sleep more peacefully. Sleep, shall we say, for eternity.” Ugh. They couldn’t have at least written him as nervous and uncomfortable about it?

Let us turn now to Tosh Rimbaugh. I don’t want to either, but we’re never going to get out of this thing otherwise. Since we last dropped in on him, Rimbaugh, he’s successfully gotten together a consortium of independent stations to buy his new show directly, cutting his old station out. The few who won’t sign on, he promises, will come crawling back and pay a premium. He conveniently introduces us to, “Mister Christopher MacMillan, radio syndicator extraordinaire,” who cautions him that without the cover of WXXY producing the show, the independent stations are still nervous that Rimbaugh will cross one line too many and they’ll face blowback. There’s a particular danger that this whole thing where he’s paying for the legal defense of the dude who shot DeWitt might have some consequence of some sort.

But Rimbaugh has a big scoop for his new show: he plans to depose DeWitt. He has inside information that she’s not actually on the brink of death, nor in a coma. That, he says, is just what the news media is reporting because they’re useless pawns who only report what the government wants them to. This would be the same media that is all run by Ronald Ratkin. Never mind that. Rimbaugh has somehow learned that DeWitt has survived and recovered, but was left permanently disabled, unable to walk and with a severe speech problem.

By Rimbaugh’s reckoning, this means that she’s constitutionally duty-bound to resign, and if she doesn’t, congress must remove her. Now, as it turns out, everything he’s said about DeWitt is in fact true, and I’m disappointed that this is how they chose to reveal it to us. In episode four, we have a “big reveal” scene where we find out that DeWitt is indeed mostly paralyzed and speaks publicly using a computer-enhanced voice. Having Rimbaugh telegraph the reveal here undermines that.

Also, DeWitt’s condition seems to be news to Rimbaugh when Seth gives him evidence of it in the next epsiode.

Here, too, we get an actual piece of useful information for understanding what will happen later. According to MacMillan, the vice president has already publicly stated that he will not succeed DeWitt. He’s an old man who only accepted the nomination reluctantly, and thus, if DeWitt leaves office before her term is up, the presidency would fall to the Speaker of the House. But the Speaker is apparently expected to lose an upcoming primary challenge, which means (At this point, everything he is saying actually makes sense, but has gotten so protracted that I am starting to hallucinate) that the House of Representatives will soon be choosing a new Speaker, and that means that they will pretty much be picking the next President all by themselves. And in a moment of bizarre lucidity out of this narrative, Rimbaugh recognizes that this is the sort of thing that would be incredibly newsworthy and worthy of being the major topic of a political talk show, and would be heated and partisan and controversial, but where he, as the guy reporting on it, wouldn’t actually be subject to popular outrage.

Meanwhile, the crew of Orion-1 finishes beaming down to Mars.

Ahem. Meanwhile.

I know that I have said that nothing much happens in this episode. But I just mean in terms of moving the narrative forward. For the sake of remembering how time and space work, here’s what’s happened since we left Orion-1 on side A:

• Nancy Ferris and Ethan Ratkin escaped from the Ratkin compound.
• Tosh Rimbaugh decided to split with WXXY and sell his show directly to affiliates. He then proceeded to do this and sign on many radio stations.
• Nancy and Ethan walked to Tom and Jennifer’s house, had dinner, went to bed.
• Ethan walked to the Bad Part of Town and pawned his watch.
• Sandra DeWitt recovered from her coma and was determined to be paralyzed. A computer speech program was set up for her to fake being able to speak normally.
• A source gave Tosh inside information about DeWitt’s condition.

A whole day has passed for Nancy and Ethan. A whole week has passed for Rimbaugh. Possibly weeks have passed for DeWitt. On Mars, a few seconds have passed.

There is some wiggle room here, but not much. The narrator stresses that the events on Mars are simultaneous with Rimbaugh’s conversation with MacMillan. And Nancy didn’t escape from Ratkin until after Jessica Storm took over Orion-1.

Space is warped and time is flexible.

We’ve only got five minutes left in this part, so you’ll be unsurprised to learn that nothing much happens. Ferris shows more emotion than we have otherwise seen at the experience of teleportation. They arrive in a labyrinth of caves which everyone insists on describing as being “like” a labyrinth or “almost like a kind of” maze rather than just saying that it is – one chamber with a myriad of tunnels which twist around and reconverge back in the chamber with no way out. Everyone seems to treat this as an impossibility. Also, Townsend goes on a long and pointless tangent about King Minos and the Minotaur. When they discover that the maze has no exist and Townsend dares suggest that it “really is” a labyrinth, Jessica Storm reacts as though labyrinths are fantasy structures that can’t possibly exist and therefore Townsend is being silly. Jessica’s goon Walsh doesn’t know the word “labyrinth” and everyone has a good laugh at his expense, outraging him. “No one calls me stupid!” he shouts. “We didn’t call you stupid. We implied it,” Townsend retorts. Everyone has another good laugh.

Being in the cave is, for no good reason, making everyone edgy and belligerent. It later turns out that this is deliberate and there’s a reason for it, but no one finds it odd at all and just assumes it is a natural consequence of being in a cave. Ferris and most of the Orion crew want to explore the caves, in case there’s an exit hidden from Talbert’s scan (I guess he’s got a tricorder?). Jessica considers this too to be fantasy talk, and instead wants to just sit down and wait for the Martians to show up, on the assumption that, hey, they’re the ones who invited them.

Rutherford mocks her, suggesting that she must have precognitive powers to come to such a conclusion, which is where this side, thankfully, ends.

Ugh. This side was a slog, folks. The highlight is definitely the banter with the pawnbroker, which is almost worthwhile just for how odd it is tonally. Even so, it’s still far too long and the interest is less about it being “good” and more about it just being weird. The other scenes are pretty meh. Rimbaugh does give us some important background, but you have to sit through the pain of a Tosh Rimbaugh scene for it, and the scene with Evans at Steinmetz is just uncomfortable.

It’s par for the course by now that we spend half of the episode away from Mars, but with how dull the Mars scenes have been in this episode, I’m not especially bothered by it. The Mars scene in this section is weird and pointless, but it’s not even an interesting kind of weird and pointless. None of the interactions among the characters seem to reflect the fact that Jessica and Walsh are holding the Orion crew prisoner with plans to murder them all. Everyone just acts catty for no real reason. And Jessica’s bizarre skepticism is more confusing than anything else.

I hold zero hope of anything getting better, but if we’ve only got one more tape to go, at least I can hope it will soon be over.

End of Side Three