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

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

The body of the latest victim is found pretty much immediately, though lacking a police escort, Harrison and the gang don’t get to the scene until after the local cops have pretty much finished up. Lieutenant Novak is kind of smug and smarmy about it, which is in keeping with her character so far, but you’d think she’d tone it down in light of the fact that she clearly does want their help. Sorta. The writing is a little confused on this point. OBSTRUCTIVE COP ARCHETYPE, everyone.

Suzanne confirms radiation on the body, which Novak apparently knew about, but she recognizes that it’s relevant to Harrison’s team and demands to know what’s up. Ironhorse gets all awkward and fumbly and defers to Harrison, but Harrison doesn’t make it into his explanation before Novak is called away for an important call.

Said call is the DEA, failing to confirm the team’s backstory. So the idea here is that to go undercover as DEA agents, the team made up fake computer records, but did not actually tell the DEA or get someone there who would vouch for them. Strike one. When Novak goes over to confront them about it, they clearly don’t recognize the name of the head of DEA field operations, strike two. And despite the fact that it’s really clear what’s going on, they still just try to bluff and deflect. That’s a sufficient strike to get them read their Miranda rights for impersonating federal agents.

Alas, poor Jack’s number is up, as he’s the next experimental subject under the guidance of the new head scientist, played by Angelo Rizacos. He… Also looks familiar. What is it with me and deja vu this week? New Scientist seems to have gotten the formula right this time, because Jack mugs around the cell for a few minutes doing “crazy” shtick before the aliens declare it time for the “final test”.

They bring in the blonde from earlier, who struggles as she’s forced down the stairs in order to pull off a gratuitous panty shot. Maybe it’s just my sour mood, but this episode’s use of cheap thrills feels like it completely misses “edgy” and lands squarely in exploitative. War of the Worlds is part of a wave of first-run-syndicated shows from this time period that traded heavily on the recent loosening of broadcast standards to offer something a little more graphic than standard network fare. That’s why you see a lot of anthology horror cropping up around this time period. This particular show is of course drawn from the tradition of pre-Alien Sci-Fi Horror, so even as it’s imported a lot from the gorier tropes of ’80s horror, it’s been fairly light on the sexualized aspects that grew to dominance in the horror genre through the ’70s and into the ’80s. When they do go that route, they usually play it for laughs. Here, it’s just a frame of nipple in a blipvert and an occasional panty shot and women in hospital gowns being menaced. The lack of levity (there’s an attempt, I guess, in the form of Sherry the Alien Prostitute complaining about how she has to do all the work despite her state of decomposition, but it’s… not actually funny) makes everything harsher and it just feels cheap.

She’s placed in the cell with Jack, and he just stares at her dully for a few seconds. We’re spared a scene of her desperately trying to appeal to his better nature, since she only has time to say, “What did they do to you?” before he breaks her neck. And by “breaks her neck”, I mean, “Twists a head and shoulder prosthetic around a hundred and eighty degrees.” The practical effect shot is bloodless and short enough that you might potentially miss it, but it’s gruesome in its bizarreness, a full 180 head-twist. She dies as she lived: with her underwear gratuitously visible.

At the risk of harping on it, I’m still having a hard time sorting out exactly what the aliens want this drug to do. They’ve said about a half a dozen things and shown about a half a dozen things, and they’re all in sort of the same general area, but they don’t quite line up, and they don’t add up to a plan that benefits the aliens in an obvious way. At a basic level, “Make humans kill each other,” is the bones of a decent plan. But the exact implementation? We start out with this blipvert thing and the claim that they’re breaking down the distinction between erotic and violent stimulation. That would suggest that the drug causes people to experience some sort of parasexual stimulation from killing. But that doesn’t track at all with what we see from Jack, who seems to have been rendered into a murder-automaton. To the point that after he kills the nameless woman, he just walks around his cell, bouncing off the walls like a roomba. But this isn’t going to be the behavior we see out of him or others affected by the drug later. And besides, a drug that renders humans into impassive automatic killers a few seconds after dosage might be useful for a battlefield situation maybe, but how does it work to sow chaos and disrupt human society through the street drug distribution network? People aren’t going to be lining up to buy drugs that instantly make you robotic and murderous. Drug cartels aren’t going to be pushing drugs like that. For the kind of usage the aliens have lined up, you’d want something that behaved like a normal street drug at first. Something where murderousness was either triggered later or was a symptom of withdrawal. “It’s a drug so addictive that addicts will murder in exchange for more,” or “It’s a drug so addictive that addicts will fly into a murderous rage if they can’t get more,” are both perfectly reasonable ways for this plot to go, but neither one is the actual alien plan here. Except… Both are kinda involved in what ends up happening also? And maybe it gives him superhuman strength? I don’t know. It’s clumsy is what it is.

Meanwhile, having set up this human plot that’s come to a head with the team being arrested by the Chicago PD for impersonating federal agents, you’re probably expecting some dark humor and intricate plot developments. Maybe the gang has to escape and is on the run from the cops, but at the last minute the aliens release the drug and there’s a tense moment where Novak has to choose between believing Harrison or the drug-crazed Jack, and…

Yeah, no. Harrison and the others spend a few minutes grousing about the indignity of being locked up (At this stage of production, they no longer, it seems, had access to the jail set from “Thy Kingdom Come“, so they’re just cuffed to chairs in a conference room. Not even a very secure-looking one, though it does have “INTERROGATION ROOM 1” stenciled on the door. I need not remind you that they have a “warehouse full of cages” set, so why not at least roll in one of those to make it look a little like the team is actually secured here?), then Novak comes in and lets them go. She’s spoken to General Wilson, who identified them as a counterterrorism group fighting a jihadi plot to flood Chicago with exotic designer drugs. Helpfully, she parrots back what he told her about them so that Harrison knows their new cover story is. Novak admits their DEA cover might be reasonable since the “real” story sounds a little crazy, though Ironhorse counters by comparing it to the Halabja chemical attack. Nice try, War of the Worlds, but you’re no Hideo Kojima. Metal Gear Solid can have a go at showing me an epic storyline about walking tanks and Russian cowboys and vocal cord parasites and then be like, “Yeah, but is this really any crazier than Mutually Assured Destruction?” War of the Worlds is not going to get away with that sort of crap. So. What Ironhorse actually says is, “Iraqi soldiers bombing their own people with poison gas.” I had to look it up to figure out what he was talking about. I mean, I’d heard references to Hussein using chemical weapons on his own people before, but I was too young in 1988 to know the specific details. And because I mostly heard it in the context of George W. Bush justifying the second Iraq war, I’d kinda assumed it referred to events from the ’90s. But what Ironhorse is referring to is an event from March 16, 1988, in which the Iraqi army declared the Kurdish population of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan to be collaborators with the attacking Iranian army, and bombed the town first with rockets and napalm, then with a combination of mustard gas, Serin, VS and Tabun. In 2010, the attack was officially recognized as a genocide by the Iraqi High Criminal Court and was declared a crime against humanity by the government of Canada. It is among the crimes for which Ali Hassan al-Majid was executed in 2010. So…. OBSTRUCTIVE COP ARCHETYPE? Done with that now. Novak gives the team carte blanche. The thing they set up with Norton hacking the police database? Nevermind. We are basically hitting the reset button on the human side of the plot at this point. Everything that’s happened so far? Padding.

Mass production of the drug begins, but before they can release it, the aliens want to do a field-test to see how Jack performs outside their direct control. They give him a shot, order him to kill humans, and drop him off outside…

A strip club.

Guys, I don’t think I want to do this any more.

I’m not a prude. I don’t object to prurient elements in my sci-fi horror. Or in most genres, really. Like Rick Blaine, I don’t mind to a parasite, but I object to a cut-rate one. And this is cut-rate titillation.

I have almost nothing to say about the scene that follows. For the sake of completeness, Jack beats the crap out of several people while the camera keeps cutting away to an exotic dancer who doesn’t react to what’s going on. I guess I can point out that the crowd is quiet and polite and shows only modest interest in what’s going on on-stage. It’s also a diverse crowd, with at least two people of color and at least two women and people in different styles of dress from yuppie to lumberjack.

The cops show up after a commercial break to be amazed that one man could have caused so much destruction. The scope of the destruction isn’t honestly clear from the shot. There’s several bodies on the floor but two of them are moving and none of them have visibly mortal injuries. It was pretty clear the woman in the cell was all-the-way dead, but it’s less obvious here how many are just injured. There’s a splatter under the bouncer’s dropped baseball bat that’s probably blood, but a larger possibly-blood pool on the floor is ambiguous: it’s next to a tipped-over glass, and in this light, at this resolution, with this deinterlace filter, I’m not even a hundred percent sure it’s liquid. Looks like it might have a fold in it.

The dancer, for what it’s worth, is unharmed. She’s stopped dancing at least, and is sitting amidst the destruction kind of impassively. Jack had been very obviously leering at her, which does go back to that whole “breaking down the difference between sex and violence” thing, but then he left her unharmed so I don’t know. Jack escapes back to the waiting aliens, but the cops are close enough to give pursuit. The resulting chase scene is… Sloppy. Jack is jonesing for another fix, but his thrashing causes the alien to break her syringe before she can give it to him. He keeps shouting and thrashing, and there’s a bit where it looks like he’s speaking alienese, though I think that’s just clumsy scene composition. Then they drive off a dock or something and crash into the water.

I don’t know why. It would make sense if they’d decided to sacrifice themselves rather than lead the cops back to their base – that would fit with the call they make to the Envoy where she basically tells them to do just that. But the driving alien seems surprised when he suddenly drives off into the water. The way it’s composed is like he was distracted by Jack and couldn’t turn in time, but… he isn’t. He’s got plenty of time and Jack is only being very modestly disruptive. They may have cut something from this scene, because one of the aliens disappears. Maybe she’s just out of the frame, but I think Jack is meant to have killed her.

Being rather better at this than the aliens, Norton and Suzanne extrapolate from the drug variants they’ve already seen and work out what the final form of the drug will do: instant addiction plus fits of violence. Okay. That’s a clear at least. Also, you can’t quite make out what the computer calls the drug, but it looks like it says “Progaine”, which is a volumizing shampoo from the makers of (but not containing the active ingredient from) the hair-regrowth product Rogaine.

Once Novak learns about Jack’s death at the hands of the “terrorists”, she prepares to call every cop in the city in to shut them down. In order to stop her, Harrison is forced to spill the beans about the aliens.

Her reaction is mildly bemused skepticism. The scene is weird. The scene pretty much has to be weird. I wish they’d played up the early sense of, “Everyone does know about aliens but they find it hard to actively think about it,” because without that, you get these scenes that are weird but not really funny. Novak is all like, “That’s ridiculous! But also I am going to believe you! But also I will make wild threats about the consequences if you are lying! But still, aliens, you say. Okay. I accept that.” Maybe this would’ve been a better place for Ironhorse to make a comparison to Iraqi war crimes. If you’re going to go for the, “But is this outlandish sci-fi plot really any more absurd than war?” moral, go big.

We glaze over the exact details of Harrison explaining show’s premise by cutting back to the aliens, who have decided to leg it after losing contact with the field team. Like the car chase, everything seems a little bit at cross-purposes, since the envoy is surprised they haven’t returned despite the way her orders to them sounded a lot like she was telling them not to come back. The envoy also makes a snide comment about the scientists being “relegated to a lower class”. The political class disrespecting and scapgoating the scientists in the wake of them overlooking the whole, “This planet we decided to invade is made of poison” thing is another one of those elements of the series which we’ve seen before but was a lot more abstractly clever and less uncomfortably close to home back when I started this project than it is now.

There’s a clip of Ironhorse (in uniform, his third costume this episode) and Omega squadron hustling out of police HQ to hop in an armored truck (two extras in police uniforms do not react to this), which seems premature given that they don’t know where they’re going yet. To find that out, Novak’s called in a favor from the rich and interesting backstory that she’s got but which hasn’t really come up in this show. We rejoin her and Harrison in an unmarked car, waiting for her contact while Harrison finishes up with the details about the aliens from the fifties having returned. As before, there is neither hint that Novak knew about the ’53 invasion, nor that she is surprised to learn that there was an apocalyptic global war thirty-five years ago that she knows nothing about, and she has, again, only a very mildly bemused level of skepticism about the whole thing. She doesn’t act as though she knew about the original invasion, but also does not question why she’s never heard of it. She does, however, notice when Harrison explains how radiation brought the dormant aliens out of hibernation, and connects it to the radioactive traces found on the drug test victims. I like that, at least. I think I generally like scenes where they show us characters figuring things out.

Harrison has to wait in Novak’s car while she meets with Don Giuseppe, local crime boss and old family friend. I like the idea here, as it adds a lot of richness to the guest character story, but the decision to play the scene so straight, without highlighting the incongruity of a high-ranking police administrator being close friends with a mob boss doesn’t seem right for War of the Worlds. The scene wouldn’t be out of place in a regular cop show, and maybe that’s the point, to try to convey the alien war as intruding on an otherwise normal sort of cop drama, but I just feel like it needs to bring the weird a little bit harder to actually work.

The don gives Novak a single rose (“For Saint Teresa of the Roses”) and an of-screen infodump. She returns to Harrison with the news that the don had been approached by the aliens to handle distributing the drug, and thus he knows where they’re working from. Harrison calls Ironhorse with the information, and he turns out to have, I guess, just been randomly driving around Chicago and happens to be near the abandoned prison where the aliens are.

As part of their escape, the aliens plan to inject the rest of their prisoners with the drug in order to cause enough chaos to provide cover. And again, the details get all fuzzy. Because apparently the humans in the cells are already addicted to the drug. But they aren’t behaving violently; the cells are packed, but everyone inside is just reaching through the bars begging for another fix rather than killing each other. And other than the fact that they really want some drugs, they seem pretty lucid. Because the aliens are idiots, the alien orderly getting the drugs ready leaves the cell keys too close to a cell and one of the prisoners snags them and opens his cell.

All of this would work fine, I think; if these are normal humans they grabbed off the street and imprisoned to run experiments on them, sure, they’d be looking for a way to escape. But the second thing the guy does after unlocking the cell is to prepare a syringe and shoot up with the murder drug from the orderly’s cart. So okay, he’s already addicted. Jack’s behavior contrasts with the complexity and self-control this guy showed, but it’s still only a minor variation. However, shooting up is the second thing he does. The first thing is to hand off the keys and send one of his cellmates to go open another cell. That’s prosocial behavior. In fact, we only see addicted humans fight each other in one very brief cut for the rest of the episode, and it’s contextualized as them fighting over a bottle of the drug. These are very chill and organized rage-zombies.

When the orderly returns and the humans won’t follow orders, he gets attacked. What’s well-done about this is that the alien is more than a match for a single human, effortlessly picking him up and slamming him into a wall. But he’s equaled by several humans working together with no regard for their own safety, finally taking him out by smashing his head in with a toilet. And again, prosocial behavior. Working together against a common enemy; self-sacrifice for the good of the group. These do not seem like the actions of people who have been turned into rage-zombies by a murder-drug.

The scientist arrives to release the humans, but finds the cells empty. He finds the decomposing body of the orderly stuffed in a cell, whereupon the escaped prisoners surprise and mob him. They hid. They laid in wait. They set a trap. What does this drug do again?

The envoy is cornered by a mob of prisoners while on the phone with her bosses, and just has time to warn them that the drug turns humans against them. Despite her ordering them to stop, they throw her to her death. We saw the aliens order Jack around before, but it’s never really mentioned in discussions of how the drug works that it should render humans obedient, yet both the envoy and the orderly seemed to think they could just order the humans around and are surprised when it doesn’t work.

If they’d set this up properly, with the idea that the drug made humans do as ordered, then this could work out and make sense; the aliens had mistaken a failed formula for a working one, and injected everyone with a drug that only seemed to make its victims obedient, or one where the obedience was short-lived. That could tie back to Jack losing control in the car during the chase. But they never actually talk about obedience as an effect of the drug; the drug is just supposed to induce indiscriminate violence. Yet here, the humans seem to be only very discriminately violent; attacking their captors in service of getting to the drug. Once the envoy is dead, the humans don’t fight among themselves or even try to escape. Instead, they find the large jugs of the drug, smash them on the floor, and roll around in it licking it up. If anything, they seem pacified and content.

It’s this scene that Harrison, Novak, Ironhorse and Omega Squad find when they enter the building. A bunch of people in hospital gowns lounging around, some of them licking the floor. The repeated cuts to the shocked, disgusted expressions of Harrison and Novak seem maybe a little out of proportion; you’d think they were watching a scene of bloody carnage, but really, other than the pinkish tint to the viscous fluid everywhere, you’d think they’d just walked into the aftermath of a particularly exhausing orgy with a weird prison-hospital theme. I don’t know; after some of the scenes of carnage this series has given us, this one just seems kind of tame.

We end back at the Land of the Lost cave, where the advocacy grouses about the need to scrap the project in the face of it turning out that rendering humans into unthinking murder machines is actually kind of counterproductive. They declare it, “A mystery beyond our understanding,” how primitive humans could keep foiling their brilliant plans.

Um.

That line would work a lot better in an episode where humans had actually foiled their plans, rather than one where it was the aliens’ own stupidity that caused their plan to fail, and also it wasn’t a very good plan in the first place.

Or maybe it’s meant to be funny? You know, the aliens being completely bumfuzzled at how they could’ve been outwitted when it turns out that it was just dumb luck? I don’t know. A big part of what made War of the Worlds special as a TV series was its blend of sci-fi, horror, and black comedy, and to be honest, none of them are really clicking this week. We don’t even get a big action set-piece at the end like we have been for the past several weeks. I know I wasn’t entirely on board with the way the big action sequence at the end of the previous episode left us without time for proper closure, but at least it got the adrenaline pumping. This episode is oddly sedate. There’s clear spots where horror and humor and action are supposed to be in there… But they’re muted. Understated.

I should like this episode on paper. Maybe if it’d come earlier in the season. In one sense, it’s almost like a Greatest Hits of the first half of the season. The complexity of the setting, for example, is something we saw numerous times early in the season, as though there was some other, more mundane Chicago cop show going on and the Blackwood team just sort of accidentally stumbled across and threw everyone’s life into disarray with an injection of Sci-Fi Horror into something more along the lines of Barney Miller. But at this late stage in the series, it’s less of a refreshingly oddball stylistic choice and more of a regression. The feeling that the show isn’t actually going anywhere is very strong in this episode. The regulars, as has been the case too many times, don’t really end up mattering to the outcome. The aliens are undone by their own stupidity; Harrison and the others spend most of the episode just bickering with local law enforcement. There’s no real reason to have Suzanne and Norton out in the field; their roles are exactly what you’d expect them to have done back at the Cottage (one suspects, as this was the last episode filmed, they’re here because they’d already struck the set).

There’s a good solid attempt here to Bring The Weird and imply a much fuller world around the plot-of-the-week events. It’s nicely weird to do this little scene where Novak has a friendly conversation with the mob boss who is an old family friend. But this time the attempt just doesn’t pay off. It’s not funny enough to work as incongruous comedy, and the pattern of the Blackwood team just sort of bumbling about in a B-plot while the aliens stupid themselves into self-defeat hasn’t been established strongly enough to drop it here, where we really want the show to get where it’s going. Or anywhere.

I think what I’m getting at here is that this episode doesn’t fit. What’s it doing here? Actually, I have a guess. There are twenty-three episodes of War of the Worlds. That’s odd. I mean, it is literally odd in that it is not divisible by two, and it is also odd in that twenty-three is a strange number of episodes. I’m guessing that they’d only planned to make twenty-two episodes, and this was a late addition, maybe in anticipation of “The Resurrection” being split up for reruns. Maybe they had a spare draft laying around that hadn’t made the first cut. The end result is something that’s not bad by any means, but lacks any real hook.

We’ve got the alien field team, consisting of two sex workers and Uncle Fester, and they seem like that should be funny… But it’s not really. We’ve got Peter MacNeill playing this very serious scientist with a weird physical tic and a haughty tone who feels like he should be a threatening villain… But he’s not really. You’ve got this antagonism between the Blackwood team and the Chicago PD that feels like it should be building to a climactic “Which side are you on” scene… But it doesn’t really. You’ve got a drug that turns people into unstoppable killing machines… But it doesn’t really. You’ve even got Clockwork Orange headgear and ear-bleeds… But they’re just kind of there. The plot would’ve played out exactly the same had the heroes not shown up, and honestly, I just kept asking myself all episode if things were meant to be funny. Not too long ago, they gave us the joy of John Colicos hamming it up. Now, this episode decided to hold back and not go over-the-top at all, but what’s left in the absence of that is… A pretty mundane story that just doesn’t have a hook for me. We are twenty-one episodes in. War of the Worlds needs to be making the argument for why we should bring it back next year.

“Because we can do a basically competent sort of filler story,” really just is not it.

The numbers:

• Aliens killed: 6 (+1 if Peter MacNeill is executed as expected)
• Aliens killed by Ironhorse and Omega Squad: 0
• Humans killed: 8 (Using the most liberal counting of Jack’s victims)
• Actual Chicago Police Cars: 0
  • Fun fact: though the cop cars in this episode are obvious fakes, they aren’t just completely generic; the color scheme, fonts, and even the exact phrasing of the motto are all accurate to the styling of Chicago cop cars, it’s just that the real things say “Chicago” instead of “City”. (Chicago cop cars also usually have a seal on the side, but it looks like possibly the ones from the late ’80s did not).
• Strippers: 1