It’s time. Let’s get this over with.
I could lie and tell you that it’s bittersweet, here at the end, to finally be done with Thomas and Yvonne Phelan’s Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II. It’s not bittersweet. It’s pretty great, actually. That I still have any fondness left for any form of War of the Worlds after this is kind of amazing. It’s pretty much been one shitshow after another. There are three small mercies here in the final act of this nightmare play:
- Side four runs a few minutes short to accommodate the credits and copyright notice
- The whole act is set on Mars, so we won’t be seeing any more of the Earth case
- Just as the first tape led off with a full recap of the last ten minutes of episode 2, episode 4 leads off by replaying the entirety of the last scene of episode 3, so we technically already covered the last ten minutes way back in 2017.
We left off with the Orion crew, Jessica Storm, and her hired gun Walsh (the narrator implies that the rest of Storm’s crew is there too, but no one ever refers to them and episode four will have them back on Artemis) bitching at each other in a cave on Mars. They keep that up for bit, with Nikki needling Jessica for being passed over by NASA. Previously, they’d always asserted that it was Jessica’s lack of experience that gave Ferris the edge despite her superior test scores. Here, Nikki asserts that it’s Jessica’s complete inability to work with others or, y’know, lead in any sort of meaningful way. Jessica for her own part insists that it was simply sexism that led the “old boy scouts” at NASA to pick Jonathan over her.
After a bit more arguing, Townsend declares that the smoothness of the tunnel implies it was constructed with machinery, which adds credence to the possibility of a concealed exit.
They argue for a few more minutes about forming a search party before working out that there are nine of them. Walsh doesn’t want to go, and takes Jessica aside to reveal that he’s smuggled a gun down with him in spite of the Martians’ instructions. The gun is never mentioned in episode four. He tries to threaten Jessica out of sending him on a search party, but she convinces him that she’d detonate Orion-1 with her dying breath if he tried anything. As a consolation, she orders him to kill the Orion crew once they’ve found an exit.
The Orion crew notices them sharing a hearty villain laugh, but this has no impact on their behavior because why would it. The gang splits up, with Talbert, Townsend and Pirelli taking one tunnel, Morgan, Ferris and Walsh a second, and Jessica, Nikki and Rutherford the third, which I’m sure won’t end badly. As they disappear into a tunnel, Mark Rutherford, still thinking he’s a character from a ’50s sitcom, grouses to himself about it in a way that completely ignores the fact that he is a prisoner on Mars with a woman who has been hired to murder him.
Hey, wait up! Wait for me! I can’t believe those two. They’ll kill each other before the day’s over. How did I get stuck in the middle again? This is the last time I ever allow myself to come between those two…
Actually, in what is either a clever subversion or just the writers getting bored, team three doesn’t descend into any sort of love triangle antics. The reason that’s weird is that the next ten minutes is basically the same scene playing out twice. Because the adverse influence in these caves — episode four reveals this all to be an elaborate Tor simulation — teams one and two quickly devolve into deadly love triangles.
What?
The narrator informs us that the space explorers do not notice the faint, distant sound of machinery that is rhythmic and hypnotic. It kinda sounds like an old printing press. It is never explained nor does anyone ever mention it again. Presumably it is meant to be the mechanism that compels everyone to fight, “hypnotic” being the key term here. But I’ll note that they never actually explain it. They also don’t ever come right out and say that these scenes are some kind of simulation or illusion. Possibly they’re not; it could well be that these events really do play out physically, and are somehow undone later using Martian powers. If these events are a simulation, then the narrator’s description of a mechanical device nearby casting some sort of hypnotic spell is misleading at the least.
Talbert laments that they don’t have Mark’s phosphorescent subterranean lamp, which prompts Pirelli to get annoyed at his complaining. Talbert gets angry at being berated in front of Townsend. Pirelli doesn’t understand his complaint at first, but then comes around, as if his own mind is filling in a backstory to match his current state of mind.
Though that’s smart enough that I find it hard to believe that it’s what this story would be going with, especially as they leave the details unsaid rather than having different groupings of characters explain it in painful detail three times. Talbert confesses that he’s “sweet” on Townsend, and when she defends him to Pirelli, Pirelli becomes suddenly jealous, accusing her of two-timing him. Pirelli insists that the two have been in a relationship for some time, which makes Talbert fly off the handle, but only confuses Townsend.
Talbert and Pirelli come to blows, and the narrator tells us that “for the first time in her life”, Townsend finds herself unable to decide whether to intercede and who to help. It seems possible that they’re trying to make a point here about Gloria being unaffected by whatever’s happening to the others. That fits well with the hints in episode four that I took as suggesting she might be an alien changeling. But again, that’s far cleverer than I’ve come to expect from this, and again, you wouldn’t think the writers would have nearly enough chill to let it go without copious exposition.
In another tunnel, pretty much the same scene plays out with Ferris, Walsh, and Morgan. How “pretty much”? It starts out with them lamenting that they don’t have Mark’s phosphorescent subterranean lamp.
Every single time the lamp is mentioned, they use that exact phrase in its entirety: “phosphorescent subterranean lamp”. They must be proud of it. Not just here; the phrase is going to come up two more times. Also, I guess this scene isn’t a total waste, because it’s the only scene in the entire series where they mention Doctor Morgan’s first name. It’s Katherine. Ferris and Morgan are, out of nowhere, suddenly very flirty, and their dialogue implies that they’ve been having a clandestine affair. Walsh notices their demeanor and taunts Ferris over his lack of professionalism.
When Ferris and Morgan try to get rid of him so they can be alone, Walsh becomes belligerent and… Yeah, they are blessedly vague about it, but the implication isn’t exactly ambiguous about what Walsh means to do with Morgan once he’s got her alone. Walsh is, I assume, meant to sound like a lecherous thug in this scene, but he just sounds bored. He’s never sounded anything but bored at any point. I think they were going for “Brutish thug of few words”, but even when he’s meant to be threatening, he only ever sounds bored. Since Walsh has a gun and Ferris doesn’t, the resulting fight is a lot shorter than the one between Talbert and Pirelli. Morgan offers to go with Walsh to protect Ferris, but Walsh simply shoots him anyway.
The narrator helpfully reminds us that the third team has the phosphorescent subterranean lamp, and therefore has an easier time of their search, discovering a “strange panel” set into a wall which they’re able to force open to reveal a “strange room” full of swords. Nikki declares it, “One weird room,” and compares it to the equipment room at college. Jessica demands Mark bring her the phosphorescent subterranean lamp so she can take a closer look. In the space of about three minutes with no real prompting, Nikki and Jessica decide to have a swordfight to the death, and Jessica murders Mark when he tries to intercede on account of Nikki’s injury (You’ve probably forgotten, as I had, that Nikki got shot at the end of episode 2). Despite that flashback a century ago where Nikki claimed to have always let Jessica win in college, it takes about ten seconds for Jessica to run Nikki through.
With both Mark and Nikki dead, Ohm suddenly appears to Jessica, insisting she come with him right away, because it’s urgent and he only has time for about five minutes of exposition, starting with him taking thirty seconds to answer the very straightforward question, “Are you a Martian?” Because, y’know, he was born on Mars, but his species is originally from a different star system.
They go on to argue quite a lot over how much Ohm is going to explain before Jessica agrees to go with him. Jessica threatens him with the sword, and despite the fact that it can’t actually hurt him (It is not clear whether this is because of the Martian power to manipulate matter, or if the sword is even real in the first place), he gives her the full backstory about how his people had become “complacent in our peaceful ways” and been conquered by the Tor, even though the Tor were less advanced.
Another one of those telephone scenes ensues, with Ohm’s explanations punctuated by Jessica repeating back the last thing he said as a question. The Tor use the Martians for slave labor. “Slave labor?” In the mines. “Mines?” Where they mine Quorrium. “Quorrium?” It’s the Tor’s primary energy source. “So you mine Quorrium for the Tor?” Yep. For centuries. “Centuries?” He finally gets around to explaining the bit where the Tor will destroy her unless she comes with him, and she follows him through the wall, using dimensional matter bending. “Dimensional matter bending?”
Thankfully, the Tor cut her questions off to introduce themselves. The Tor claim to have been studying the humans to see if they’d be useful as slaves, since their alternate energy source has dried up so they need to increase production on Mars. Humans apparently don’t measure up to their other big slave race, the Caligulans. Caligulans have lots of arms, live for hundreds of years, have a six week gestational cycle, and don’t need sleep. Also, I assume, they give senate seats to horses and abused little people sexually.
Anyway, humans don’t measure up, so the Tor are gonna destroy them. This is where we came in in episode four, with Jessica making her deal with the Tor to enslave humanity in return for putting Ratkin in charge of Earth. I won’t go into the details, but I will point out that there’s no indication in this episode that the Tor are planning a double-cross. And okay, that would make sense as a thing to be held back for a shocking reveal next time, but… The extra context we have on this side of it seems weird. For one thing, the claim that the Tor are investigating the humans for slave labor in the mines comes from Ohm, not from the Tor. The implication, then, is that Ohm, who is a Martian Quisling, believes the Tor’s cover story, while Ari, a fugitive, is privy to the Tor’s actual plan to abduct humanity to go farm fungus on Brick.
Also, the digression about the Caligulans is strange too. The Tor spend several minutes explaining how humans aren’t suitable for mining quorrium, then Jessica makes the counter-offer, “How about I get you human slaves to mine quorrium?” and the Tor respond as though this is a pretty sweet deal. It doesn’t even really make sense if you know the Tor are lying, because why would Jessica think this offer made sense? And besides, I’m fairly sure that they wrote this scene without having decided that the Tor were planning that particular double-cross.
It’s also odd that Jessica, despite questioning everything else, doesn’t need to be told that the Orion crew is still alive. She never expresses any surprise or confusion that Nikki and Mark are still alive after she murdered them. She doesn’t even comment on it. She does ask the Tor what they plan to do with them, which suggests that she already knows they’re alive, knowledge which comes out of nowhere as the Tor themselves refer to her as having killed her “friends” for no good reason. We are several years past me having the sort of good will necessary to believe Jessica just quietly worked this out without telling us.
It is not in general wrong to just skip over explaining things which should just follow logically. But this isn’t really a series where “logic” enters into things. So I don’t have a sense of “Well it just follows logically from the other things we’ve learned that the Orion crew aren’t really dead.” What follows more logically is that the writers thought “Well it just follows logically from the fact that they’re the main characters that we wouldn’t have just unceremoniously killed them all off in an offhand way in one scene,” and thus they didn’t really feel the need to bother with actually going through the motions of advancing the plot.
So we end with Jessica mua-ha-haing over the Tor’s promise that the Orion crew will spend the rest of their lives slaving in Martian quorrium mines, without her ever noticing that the double murder she committed a couple of minutes ago has been erased from the narrative. That is where we end, with a musical sting and credits promising “Episode 4: The Escape” coming soon.
Episode four would in fact be titled “Eye of the Storm”, which I will grant is a better sounding title, though it has nothing at all to do with the events of that episode. “The Escape” is at least accurate to the fact that a substantial bit of the narrative arc is indeed about people escaping from things. “Eye of the Storm” would be a clever title for an episode that dove more deeply into Jessica’s motivations, except that she doesn’t really have any so it wouldn’t be a good episode. Not that the episode we got was any better. Anyway. That’s the very end of me listening to all that exists of War of the Worlds II.
Good fucking riddance.
I will admit that there is a sick part of me that is annoyed that I will never get to know where these plots are going – how will the forces of Earth unite to meet the threat of the Tor? Will the Martians prove friends or foes? Will Gloria turn out to be a changeling? Does Jessica Storm have a chance for redemption? Will Mark and Nikki end up together? How will Ronald Ratkin’s evil machinations to become the master of all known water in the universe be undone?
No. Wait. I don’t care about any of those things, except maybe a little bit about the first one. The actual War of the Worlds plot. But here’s the thing: this annoyance doesn’t really have anything to do with the fact that Episode 5 never came to pass (As far as I know. If I’m wrong, if someone is sitting on a copy – or heck, an unproduced script – go ahead and let me know. I am apparently a masochist). Because the existence of an episode 5 wouldn’t do anything about it.
Last time we went through this, I identified that in narrative style, War of the Worlds II is patterned not on a Science Fiction Epic, but on a Soap Opera. But even in a soap opera, things get resolved some times. Nothing, not one damn thing, in this entire series has ever, ever gotten resolved. It just goes on and on, adding more and more subplots, without ever transitioning characters from one subplot to the next. The narrative progression has never been, “And then they moved on to this,” but rather, “And meanwhile, this was also happening.” This is true in terms of plot progression and also in terms of actual linear time, hence the narrator stressing that events which took radically different amounts of time – DeWitt recovering from the assassination attempt, Rimbaugh assembling a network of radio stations to air his new show, Nancy and Ethan walking home from Ratkin’s mansion – all happen simultaneously.
There is one and really only one aspect in which this series bears any real resemblance to the source material, and it’s this: at no point in the story does the plot advance due to the actions of our protagonists. Things happen to our characters, rather than them at any point exercising any meaningful agency. Hell, the Orion crew spends most of the story sealed in rooms without any doors. Even when characters try to exercise agency, any plot advancement is largely coincidental. Ethan sets out on a quest to find his mother, and technically he does find her, but all that really means is that he happens to coincidentally show up during the scene where the actual advancement of that story thread has already been triggered by Evans trying to kill her. Ethan is only there to witness, not to act. Most of the Mars story is about the Orion crew standing around waiting for someone to appear and dump exposition on them. And whenever someone actually is going to take action – searching the maze, or making their way to the Martian warship, or Ethan’s trek to Connecticut – that’s when they cut away from the story and have the narrator glaze over it. People do not, for the most part, do things, but have things done to them.
Even then, none of the things that happen to people really drive the plot in any particular direction. There’s no sense of progress or forward motion, at least on the part of the heroic characters. The bad guys are the ones driving the plot, and they’re not really even driving it forward so much as driving it sideways to pick up a new subplot every few minutes.
If you were hoping that my foolish decision to go back and visit the episode I missed back in 2017 would lead us to some new understanding, some new exegesis… I do not believe you exist because you really could not have seen that coming from the other three episodes. I’d like to say I at least have some feeling of satisfaction from having finally finished the whole thing.
But I don’t, really. Maybe a bit of relief that I won’t have to do it any more, but no real satisfaction. Mostly just annoyance that I’m going to have to watch something quick in order to get out an article for next week because I used up my Star Trek buffer fighting my way though side 2. I smell a filler article in the near future…
End of Side Four. For More Information, Please Re-Listen.
Woohoo! You did it.
[insert NGE Congratulations gif]