Thesis: So Shall Ye Reap (War of the Worlds 1×21, Part 1)

I’ll do anything you want, just give me more!

It is the first of May, 1989. Much of this week’s news is a continuation of last week’s, but it was about a year ago in our time that we visited last week, so here’s a recap: Disney-MGM Studios, now Disney’s Hollywood Studios, opens in Orlando. Donald Trump takes out full-page ads in four major New York newspapers demanding the railroading of the Central Park Five. Andrés Rodríguez, who had taken over Paraguay in a coup back in February, was elected to the presidency of that country in what is widely considered both to be marked by fraud, and also the closest thing to a free and fair election Paraguay had ever had up to that point. He would leave office at the end of his term in 1993, the first Paraguayan head of state to leave office voluntarily at the end of his constitutional term since 1948, 1932 if you don’t count interim presidents appointed after coups. Oliver North is convicted for his role in Iran-Contra this week. In Cold War news, work begins on the first McDonald’s in Moscow and Hungary dismantles part of the Iron Curtain with Austria. Space Shuttle Atlantis will launch this week. Its primary mission is to deploy the satellite Magellan, bound for Venus. Mission Specialist Mary L. Cleave is the first female astronaut to fly on a shuttle mission since the Challenger disaster. Singer, songwriter, and domestic abuser Chris Brown will be born Friday. Margaret Thatcher celebrates ten years in office as Prime Minister of the UK, showing a level of commitment to a serious misjudgment the British government would not repeat until Brexit.

Barry Mantilow will release the album “Barry Mantilow” this week. It’s the last of his five self-titled albums, and the second one to be named “Barry Mantilow” (The others are “Barry Mantilow II”, “Barry”, and “Mantilow”). A California jewelry store will call the cops on a “suspicious person” skulking around who later turns out to be Michael Jackson in disguise, which is almost but not quite funny enough to make the obvious jokes in spite of the problematic racial angle. Madonna maintains the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for a second week. New in the top ten are Jody Watley, Cher and Peter Cetera, and Paula Abdul, with REM, the Bangles, and Milli Vanilli all getting booted clean into the 20s.

Nothing much in theaters this week, aside from K-9, which you may remember as “The Buddy Cop Movie With a Dog From 1989 That Isn’t Turner and Hooch.” It’s a week of new shows on TV, though. May Sweeps I guess. Tonight alone brings us a new MacGyver that I don’t really remember, a made-for-TV movie called Dark Holiday which is Lee Remmick’s last role, the season finale of Columbo, and a new episode of ALF. The rest of the week will give us an Oliver North biopic (I wonder if they filmed two endings…), another “Sam Solves Racism” episode of Quantum Leap(Quantum Leap is utterly fantastic, so don’t let my habit of complaining about the “Sam Solves Racism” episodes sour you on it), Perfect Strangers gives us “Wedding Belle Blues“, a delightful arranged marriage episode that I’m sure is great because I’m too tired to read Casey’s review right now myself. This Sunday will give us The Trial of the Incredible Hulk, the second of three TV Movies continuing the adventures of the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno version of the character. It features the unbelievably perfect casting of John Rhys-Davies as Kingpin, and, like the previous TV movie, was a failed backdoor pilot for another attempt at doing a low-budget Marvel TV adaptation, this time with Rex Smith as Daredevil. It also features the most wonderfully ho-yay scene in Live Action Marvel History Excluding Loki, as Matt Murdock lovingly cradles a traumatized, shirtless David Banner upon learning his dark secret.

Star Trek The Next Generation is “Pen Pals”, the shitty “The Prime Directive compels us to let the adorable rubber forehead child die,” episode. I could go off on a tangent here about how fucking amazing Star Trek Discovery is compared to any other Trek series when it comes to the Prime Directive, but we don’t have all day I guess. (Short version: whenever it comes up, it is pretty much immediately dismissed as, “We can be a little flexible when it comes to General Order One under the circumstances. Just don’t go playing God.”). Last time we did this, I got my Friday the 13th the Series episodes mixed up and told you about this week’s episode. So to close the loop, last week‘s episode was “The Butcher”, in which Jack has to re-kill a Nazi he’d fought back in the war, now resurrected by a cursed amulet.

Here we are, then. The home stretch. The antepenultimate episode. Yes, I am taking my time. I still need to work out what I’m going to do with my life after I finish this. (There is a certain irony in the fact that I’ve been doing as close as possible to nothing in order that I don’t reach the end when I have nothing planned for what to do after. I coulda just finished up two years ago and done all the nothing I liked ever since). But I guess we may as well get on with it, or else I’ll still be doing this when the new TV series drops, and then I’ll pretty much have to.

According to The Forrester Papers, “So Shall Ye Reap” was the last episode to be filmed. I assume the reasons for this are logistical; I can’t imagine it was intended to be the last to air- the actual finale is coded very strongly as a season-ender. But it also feels like something from earlier in the season. The plot is broadly similar to a handful of other episodes: the aliens are pursuing a comically overblown mass-murder plot, the Blackwood team kind of slowly follows the trail toward them, the aliens plot ends up collapsing more from bad luck and their own incompetence than anything else, and the good guys show up too late to really have much impact beyond cleanup, because they spent the bulk of the episode doing some mild black comedy with colorful guest stars. There’s not really anything new in this episode or any sense of growth or forward progress. This episode could be dropped anywhere in the series and it would fit just about exactly as well. I guess I’m a little disappointed after we got strong episodes for Suzanne and Ironhorse recently, with so few episodes left, it felt like the show had actually decided to pick a direction, but now it’s backing down and just giving us a fairly generic “Mass Murder Plot of the Week” story. To make matters worse, while I know the remaining two episodes are going to be fairly strong plotwise, they’re not especially character-driven the way the preceding few have been.

One television sci-fi cliche War of the Worlds hasn’t really engaged with much is the mining of pop-consciousness moral panics for plots. They haven’t been shy about leaning on cold war fears – assimilation by a foreign collectivist horde or the looming threat of nuclear annihilation – but those were a little dated by this end of the ’80s. Science fiction has a long history of attaching a speculative angle to whatever moral fear is bothering the public at the time, comforting an audience who feels threatened by modernity with the promise that, yes, you’re right to be worried, and those kids with their video games and their loud music and their test tube babies and their self-help books and their interracial relationships really are destroying America, but they’ll get theirs in the end. Anyone have a weird feeling of deja vu? Anyway, the only time War of the Worlds has really dipped into this was “Goliath is My Name“‘s invocation of the Dungeons and Dragons Satanic Panic.

But I think the lack of such plots is more a matter of War of the Worlds having a lot of different things it wanted to try out rather than a deliberate avoidance. Had the show gone on, I assume we’d have seen more of these. The latest thing in the aliens’ succession of ill-considered plans to kill humans involves the moral panic that may well be the most eighties of all moral panics, the War on Drugs. Yes, the aliens have, “at great risk”, infiltrated the country’s drug syndicates. So take that, hippie scum, those jazz cigarettes you think are just a harmless good time are actually being sold by Middle Eastern terrorists… I mean godless commies… I mean ALIENS! Why? Well, I suppose it could be a way for them to raise human money to fund their other ventures. Or maybe they could be pushing drugs that render humans docile so that they won’t resist…. Why does this all sound familiar? Anyway, it’s none of those things, because the aliens aren’t really into subtlety; they’re into body horror and body count. No, it’s because the aliens have developed a designer drug that will turn humans into psychotic killers. There’s a hint of The Screwfly Solution in the details, as the alien scientist explains that the drug causes its victims to respond the same way to violent imagery as to sexual imagery.

At least, that’s the theory. They’re still working the kinks out. They’ve got a test subject strapped into a Clockwork Orange rig forcing him to watch blipverts of violent and sexual imagery. Seriously, why does this all seem so familiar? I am not clear on how this experiment works. It feels like they just liked the Clockwork Orange imagery and shoved it in, since it seems like that would be more in the vein of some kind of psychological conditioning similar to what we saw in “Choirs of Angels“. In any case, this version of the drug is a little off, because instead of just turning the victim murderous, it makes his brain leak out his ears.

The scientist assures an envoy that this is only a temporary setback and it’ll only take them a week or so to- Wait. Wait, wait. That scientist looks familiar…

Holy crap, it’s Hawk! Since we last saw Peter MacNeill, he’s had a small part in a Burt Reynolds movie, guest roles in Alfred Hitchcock Presents and T and T, and now, this.

…

Yeah, there’s not really any good way to spin this as Peter MacNeill moving up in the world. But he’s getting consistent work, and will continue to do so straight through to the present day, winning a Genie and two Geminis, and – this somehow did not come up in my series of articles about the show – a guest bit on Star Trek Discovery where he plays – I can hardly believe I am typing these words – Harry Mudd’s father-in-law.

The stylish be-shoulder-padded envoy gives Scientist Hawk the usual speech about how the Advocacy won’t tolerate failure and completely ignores his educated estimate of how long it will take to finish up the work in favor of ordering him sort it out in a day. I think technically we have only seen this one or two times before, but it sure does feel like about a million by now. Or maybe I’m just getting old. That the leadership caste neither trusts nor respects the scientific caste is old news by now, and it would be cool if this had a specific justification (Oh, I don’t know, say their failure to notice that the planet they were about to invade was deadly to them?), but they’re not going to get around to making any more progress on this theme before the season runs out, and besides, I already live in a world where the leadership caste neither trusts nor respects scientists and constantly undermines and ignores them to promote their own ill-advised agendas with catastrophic consequences, so I am a little less receptive to the dark humor of the situation.

Maybe if the human race is still around in five to ten years, we can look back with some distance on War of the Worlds the Series and reflect on how it anticipated certain social and political trends of the future and how they could derive as extensions of the collective cold war neurosis. Hell, that is actually where I started out when I began this project. Not that specifically, but more with the notion that one of the major reasons this show failed commercially was not simply that there are serious misjudgments in how it was made, but that such misjudgments were inevitable because the show required a media and sociopolitical backdrop which did not yet exist – that what the show wanted to do was enough ahead of its time that TV like that was neither a thing audiences were ready for nor a thing that show-makers had worked out how to do (On a technical, rather than sociopolitical, level, the show straddles an uncomfortable place between the ’80s model of disconnected adventure-of-the-week shows and the emerging ’90s model of story-arc-driven adventure shows, having a plot that calls out for material forward progress, but lacking a cohesive narrative voice to actually move things along).

The blipvert serves as a segue to an exceptionally ’80s nightclub. Another fashionably be-shoulder-padded young woman named Sherry is drawn to a lonely businessman with thinning hair, who introduces himself as Jack Sawyer from the less-famous Kansas City.

After some smalltalk, they head for an elevator where he reveals himself as a vice cop, and she reveals herself as an alien. Some grumpy bickering ensues among the alien and her companions as they toss Jack into a van full of their other victims and drive him off for fun human experimentation. Got to be honest here, randomly picking up lonely businessmen in night clubs seems like an inefficient way of getting test subjects who won’t be missed, especially given that the aliens discovered homeless people half a season ago.

There’s an attempt I guess to keep us in suspense about who’s stalking who, with the sex worker alien’s partner menacingly watching them from a distance, but the reveal of Sherry’s radiation sores isn’t given much weight. Jack doesn’t seem even slightly fazed when a nail sloughs off her purple, blistery hand. Also, the partner disables Jack with a Vulcan neck pinch. Is that a thing we knew they could do?

Meanwhile, our heroes. I’m trying to be fair, I really am. This is an episode where the alien plot is on the heavy side and the human plot is on the light side. We get moments of levity out of the human side of the plot in most episodes, but it’s rare to have an episode where the alien side of the story is so consistently dark, particularly coupled with the humans… Honestly not contributing all that much. More often, we get to watch the humans fret over the emerging alien plan intercut with the delightful adventures of Little Billy Who’s Family Has Been Possessed or The One Alien Who Goes All Dark Dungeons or the militiamen who can’t resist the urge to slip off and eat the flowers. A big part of what makes this show interesting is the contrast between the silent, implacable, indestructible invaders of the first movie and the slightly goofy cartoon supervillains of the series. This week the aliens are dumb and their plan is terrible, but not really in a funny way. The closest we get to a lighter side of the aliens this week is an alien sex worker complaining about the hours. Usually, what makes this show appeal to me personally is the way it’s multiple things at the same time, often in the form of the juxtaposition between the Blackwood Project being this very traditional, very serious “Science the shit out of it,” sci-fi-horror hero team, fighting aliens who might suddenly decide to cut a prog rock album. Reversing the balance, as they do here, isn’t as enjoyable to watch.

It’s not unusual in this show for the heroes to just sort of luck into finding the aliens at the key moment so that Ironhorse can resolve the problem of the week by shooting it. Those plots aren’t generally as satisfying as the ones where we actually do have the team closely engaged with the unfolding of the alien plot, but they work okay and generally have enough else going on to keep the story feeling cohesive. But this week, the gang remains firmly several steps behind the whole way. They’re not even really “chasing” the aliens; they basically just sit around waiting for clues to show up, then have a tense reveal of something the audience already knows and the alien plan falls apart all on its own before Omega Squad even shows up.

The basic plot of the human side of the story this week is that the bodies of the aliens’ test subjects have been turning up, and the team is posing as DEA agents to investigate, and most of what they will do this week is clash with the Chicago police because it turns out that The Feds was a bad thing to pose as (Harrison mentions “The old federal cop-local cop rivalry,” but my recollection of cop show tropes is that DEA agents are especially awful for local cops to work with. Something to do with cutting sweetheart deals with the local criminals in pursuit of out-of-state kingpins). It is essentially an idiot plot which could be resolved with a single phone call, as evidenced when it gets resolved with a single phone call at the top of act three.

Harrison and the gang have been given a closet to use as an office, piles of unsorted boxes of paperwork, and no access to the department’s computer records. Also, they tried to refuse entry to Gertrude, because it’s 1989 and mockingly refusing to accommodate a disabled man’s wheelchair is hilarious rather than a straightforward violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I will give it to Jared Martin for being really on his game in this scene as he pleads his case with Lieutenant Novak, staying plaintive and professional while expressing his frustration in a polite way. The same can’t be said for Dixie Seatle as Teri Novak, whose dialogue and performance for the first half of this episode could just be replaced by her shouting “I AM AN OBSTRUCTIVE COP ARCHETYPE!” over and over. I think maybe it’s a failed attempt to portray her as too concerned over Jack Saywer’s disappearance to put up with Harrison – the only time her performance feels legit is when she’s talking to her secretary about him.

Dixie Seatle has a long resume that’s mostly one-off guest and minor roles, with two interesting things in it. First, she played the Moneypenny-analogue in a 1986 Canadian series Adderly, about a James Bond-inspired spy who’s relegated to permanent desk duty after losing a hand on a mission, which sounds kind of interesting. Her other big role was in the Canadian soap opera Paradise Falls, where she played a transwoman. Is casting a cis woman as a transwoman less bad than casting a cis man in drag? There’s plenty of awful to go around, I guess. She won a Gemini for both roles, so there’s that at least.

Novak is so An Obstructive Cop Archetype that she’s had her secretary contact Washington to verify Harrison’s identity, and when the secretary admits to having used the computer to do so, Novak rejects that answer and demands that she get confirmation from an actual human being.

Is this crossing a line? I feel like it’s crossing a line. Kind of a nonsense line. Like, the whole idea here is that Novak hates and distrusts the Feds. So she’s defaulting to the assumption that Harrison and his team might be impostors. She’s assuming it so hard that her assumption is that computer records are “too easy to fake.” She’s assuming that Harrison and the others are impostors who hacked a government database to establish false credentials in order to come to Chicago and mildly inconvenience the local cops in order to… Investigate a series of suspicious drug deaths. I AM AN OBSTRUCTIVE COP ARCHETYPE. I WOULD LIKE TO OBSTRUCT YOU IN COP ARCHETYPE WAYS.

Contrariwise, Norton feels the need to sweep their closet-slash-office for listening devices before they can talk about aliens. Which, admittedly, might be justified given that Novak is willing to go above and beyond to be obstructive. Doing exactly what they’d normally do at the Cottage, everyone gathers around the computer to look at Norton’s molecular analysis of the drugs found in the aliens’ dead victims. Norton and Suzanne claim they haven’t been able to analyze the drug’s molecular structure yet… Then show us a computer graphic of the drug’s molecular structure. Comparing the results from the victims, it’s clear that the victims all died from different variants of the same basic drug. Suzanne helpfully explains what “designer drugs” are, small alterations to the molecular structure of a street drug to make it technically distinct from the illegal substance. The details of her argument are a little ahistorical, since the 1986 Federal Analogue Act would cover the specific kinds of designer drugs she’s talking about, and also, she uses cocaine as her example, while in the real world, that sort of drug twiddling was mostly about hallucinogens and opioids (To give you a sense of history here, there’s an episode of Dragnet about this).

Without saying it outright, the narrative kind of just allows us to slide into the conclusion that the aliens are in fact creating a modified version of cocaine specifically, which is again weird because, like, I mean, you can inject cocaine, but it’s not really the primary method you think of unless you’re into Sherlock Holmes roleplay. Norton and Suzanne theorize that the aliens are trying to induce one very specific side effect with their tampering, but don’t know what it is yet, because Suzanne isn’t allowed to study the tissue samples until she gets the proper forms filled out, and the forms clerk is on maternity leave. Because OBSTRUCTIVE COP ARCHETYPE. Everyone has a good chuckle as they decide it’s time to just have Norton hack into the police computer to get the information they want. Why did they drive all the way out to Chicago again? I mean seriously, why are they even here, going through with this charade? Even if the cops hadn’t been OBSTRUCTIVE COP ARCHETYPEs, what did they intend to do here that wouldn’t be just as easily – or more easily – done at the Cottage with their own resources and equipment? Eventually there will come a point in the story where it makes sense for Harrison to call on the Chicago police’s knowledge of the city and its criminal networks and what’s out on the streets. But why are they here now, when all they know is that some people have died from alien-modified drugs?

Jack, for his part, is being kind of uncomfortably intimate with another prisoner as he tries to comfort her, insisting that, as a cop, he’s got friends who will definitely keep looking until they find him. IMDB tells me that Jack is played by Jonathan Welsh, and his best-known role was in the Canadian newsroom drama E.N.G., but it turns out that he was in Adderly too, playing the M-equivalent. The casting here is a bit of an easter egg for the Canadian audience. Of course, in the 1980s, the number of American viewers who would’ve seen a random Canadian series from a few years earlier is approximately zero, so it’s an easter egg not entirely dissimilar to the time Power Rangers reunited Bray and Amber from The Tribe. Only I assume War of the Worlds did air in Canada, so maybe not so bad (Despite being filmed in New Zealand, for most of its history, regulations about violence in kids’ shows prevented Power Rangers from airing there). I checked just in case, but no one else from Adderly appears in War of the Worlds, though I do see the name Ken Pogue, which is somehow familiar… Eh. Maybe it’s because Pogue played Moriarty in one of the surprisingly large number of “Sherlock Holmes was in suspended animation and gets woken up in modern times” TV movies. Also, unfun fact: Jonathan Welsh died on my birthday about fifteen years ago.

As is tradition, neither Jack nor the blonde woman he’s comforting is next to die; they pick the black guy instead. Peter MacNeill shows the envoy the next round of testing, and it almost works this time, but the subject’s violent phase lasts only a few seconds before he progresses to paranoia. The envoy deems this a failure and is very smug and self-satisfied about ordering Peter MacNeill back to the Land of the Lost cave, where, if he’s very lucky, he will be permitted to commit suicide rather than be executed. Shucks. I was enjoying his haughty tone and character tic of constantly wiping his eyes. Oh well. Bye Peter MacNeill.

To Be Continued…