Synthesis 9: One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small

Or maybe I’m just grumpy because it reminds me so much of the other “Drugs are bad, mmkay?” episode.

We haven’t done one of these in a while, because we pretty much burned through all the episodes that pair up well. There’s a handful of episodes that have close similarities in their sci-fi plots, but neither season really uses the “big sci-fi concept” as the primary focus of its stories very often, and the actual centers of the respective stories don’t tend to have a lot to do with each other. They’re both built around the sci-fi concept of mind control via signals embedded in music, for example, but “Choirs of Angels” is centered around the big set piece of Ironhorse comforting Harrison as he comes down from a bad trip, while “Terminal Rock” is primarily about Kincaid trying to rescue the flame-of-the-week’s brother from a life of delinquency. And “Breeding Ground” is (to my consternation) mostly about the tragedy of Doctor Gestaine, while “Unto Us a Child is Born” is a straight-up creature feature heavily inspired by It’s Alive.

In the case of comparing “So Shall Ye Reap” to “Synthetic Love”, though, it’s time to do some introspection. Because in this case, it’s not just the sci-fi kernel of the stories that are similar, the plots at large are broadly similar in interesting ways, and also they display similar flaws. More importantly for our purposes, they differ from each other in ways that I think are really representative of the shift from season one to season two.

Speaking purely on the technical merits, I am hard pressed to call one or the other “better”. Certainly “Synthetic Love” made me angrier, while “So Shall Ye Reap” just kinda left me cold. The first season’s complete failure to make any sort of proper statement is disappointing, but I guess that’s better than the outright moral repugnance of the second season’s implication that ending the war on drugs was a major contributor (indeed, possibly the main contributor, since it’s the only one that is explicitly called out) to the collapse of society. On the other hand, though, “Synthetic Love” at least tries to contextualize drug abuse – the junkies it shows us are sympathetic, many of them clearly suffering from mental illness and explicitly using narcotics to self-medicate. The overwhelming presentation of addicts is as victims with a disease in need of medical help, rather than as a dangerous “criminal element” to be corralled in the name of “law and order”, with even the junkies who resort to violence in order to fund their addiction depicted primarily as pathetic rather than as dangerous thugs. Remember, this was at a time when the prevailing view of “the drug epidemic” among white America was heavily centered around visions of gang violence at the hands of dark-skinned, drug-fueled “super-predators” (Admittedly, one wonders how much the presentation was skewed by the racial demographics of the Toronto acting scene of 1989).

The season one episode doesn’t lean into the racially-charged gang violence motif either, of course, but it’s thoroughly divorced from any sort of cultural context. Involvement with the actual drug trade is entirely off-screen; we don’t see any “regular” addicts, just kidnapping victims who have been forcibly addicted to the alien drug as part of the experiment. What it does do is show us a drug which does what unhip white people have always kinda imagined vaguely-defined “drugs” did anyway: turn people into super-powered, unthinking, unstoppable murder machines. It’s practically Reefer Madness. And while it’s clear in text that it’s special alien tinkering that has made the drug do this, the way people react to it, and the ease with which Suzanne and Norton work out the details conveys a potent subtext: sure, this is a specially modified drug, but turning anyone who so much as looks at it instantly into an unstoppable super-powered killing machine is a normal sort of thing for drugs to do. Note that they’re willing to share that with Novak before they reveal the truth about the aliens; there’s nothing explicitly alien about the drug modifications themselves.

When you couple the lack of any sort of social context with the mindless murder machine aspect, “So Shall Ye Reap” ends up leveraging the same, “Drugs are bad, mmkay? Because they’re bad. They’re really bad. For reasons. Reasons of them being bad,” thing that I disliked so much about “Synthetic Love”. Both stories rely heavily on the presumption that the audience will do the heavy lifting for them, so they don’t actually need to do the work of convincing you that drugs represent an existential threat to the audience’s white middle-class heteronormative American way of life. In “Synthetic Love” this manifests throughout the story largely as a kind of overall laziness – a laziness that crops up over and over again in the second season, really (Remember the completely unsold and offhanded assumption that the audience would go along with Suzanne in being horrified by the concept of test tube babies? Not that season one was entirely free of it; remember when Suzanne conveyed the apocalyptic horror of Y-fever by describing it as, “The same thing that killed all those people,” with no further explanation of who “all those people” were). Season one isn’t nearly as big on “moral panic” episodes, so the impact isn’t as manifest. But that final scene is one place where it really sticks out. Harrison and Novak look positively repulsed by the test subjects licking up the alien drug from the floor. Harrison looks like he’s going to be sick. Ironhorse has this stoic, thousand-mile stare that seems like it wants to say something like, “I’ve seen this before, once, long ago, in Mai Lai. I tried to forget it. I tried so hard…” This is a show where we’ve seen people get their faces casually ripped off, and people melted, and people get an alien fist shoved through their face. Earlier in this episode, we saw a woman’s head get turned around a full 180. But it’s people in hospital gowns licking Pepto Bismol off the floor that prompts the big reaction shot. That’s almost a punch-line: hero stoically ignores scene after scene of bloody gore, but someone eats something off the floor and it freaks them out.

This presumption that the audience would go along willingly may also be why no one in the production phase did anything about the extent to which the aliens’ plot makes no sense. The second season is messier, more slipshod, and generally lacks the sparkle of the first, but at least the Morthren tend to be working from plans that make a basic kind of sense and are oriented toward a reasonable goal. Humans are dangerous and the Morthren don’t have the resources to attack directly, so they set up a plan to pacify humans, particularly the unruly street-mob sort of humans (who we’d established back in “Terminal Rock” were a direct, persistent threat in a way that the dysfunctional power structures of the dystopian setting really failed to be). Almost every second season episode shows the Morthren working toward a specific goal of either acquiring something they need or mitigating a specific threat. Almost every first season episode shows the Mor-taxans pretty much going, “Let’s kill a bunch of humans by….” then throwing a dart at a copy of Newsweek. There are exceptions of course, and it’s noteworthy that in the first season, the exceptions are the really good episodes, while in the second season, not so much. This week, the thing the dart hit was “designer drugs”. It’s not a good plan, to the point that the script itself doesn’t seem to have a solid handle on the details. Again, it feels almost like a Matt Groening joke being set up. Can’t you imagine a scene in Futurama that arrives at the punchline, “Oh no; your plan to make them uncontrollably violent has made them violent. And uncontrollable!” (shades of The Simpsons‘s “That throwing stick trick of yours has boomeranged on us!”).

And yet, the detachment from social context ends up being the saving grace of “So Shall Ye Reap” in some ways. It kept the episode down to a level of merely disappointing, rather than being actively upsetting like “Synthetic Love”. “Synthetic Love” is at its heart a pretty disgustingly reactionary story. Pretty much all of society’s ills are blamed on narcotics, and the narrative frame feels like a “Take that!” to anyone who favors decriminalization. More than that, even, the depiction of rehab centers as something sinister – not just because they were involved in the Morthren plot, but even before that, tainted by their association with the pharmaceutical industry – seems to be selling a message that not only is decriminalization wrong, so is treating drug abuse as a medical rather than criminal problem. It may not come right out and say it, but process of elimination leaves you with the sense that the message here is, “Addicts don’t need treatment; they need punishment.”

On the other hand, though, at least the second season episode made me feel something.