Antithesis: Max (War of the Worlds 2×18, Part 1)

Okay. We can do this. Home stretch. Deep breath.

It is April 30, 1990. In Los Angeles, Alex Trebek marries Jean Currivan, a real estate broker. Space shuttle Discovery returns from space after deploying the Hubble Space Telescope. The coming week will see talks between the government of South Africa and the African National Congress and Latvia’s independence from the Soviet Union as part of the “Singing Revolution”, of which we have not heard the last. Frank Reed, another of the hostages in the Lebanon crisis, is released.

This is not an overly dense month in pop culture, so I’ve already covered the fact that Spaced Invaders is in theaters. British Satellite Broadcasting began transmitting satellite TV yesterday. They’d merge with Sky Television by the end of the year. Sinead O’Connor still tops the Billboard charts with that song by Prince. Madonna has Vogued her way into the top ten.

ITV will start broadcasting The Upper Hand tomorrow, which is apparently a British adaptation of Who’s the Boss?. CBS airs the recently-rediscovered pilot episode of I Love Lucy in a primetime special. TV is generally new again. MacGyver‘s season ends with “Passages”, another head-trauma-induced fantasy episode. This time, comatose and near death, Mac experiences a fusion of Egyptian afterlife mythology and a cruise ship, and gets to see his parents and grandfather. I was surprised how foppish his dad comes off. This is also the reveal that Mac’s grandfather has died. My Two Dads is new. China Beach is new. There’s a TV movie called Child in the Night which is Elijah Wood’s first role as a named character. Roseanne is new, so is Matlock and In the Heat of the Night. Quantum Leap, Cheers, Twin Peaks, Full House, Dallas, Just the Ten of Us, all new. Due to the amount of time since I did this last, Casey has finished up his review blog by now, but I can still point you at it for Friday’s Perfect Strangers, which is a Rashomon riff of sorts. I’m starting to recognize pretty much everything in the TV listings by now. “The Spirit of Television” is Friday the 13th the Series‘s offering this week. Antique TV summons vengeful ghosts. You know the basic idea by now. Star Trek the Next Generation gives us “Hollow Pursuits“, an episode which is bad on many levels, is mean-spirited, treats addiction as a joke, treats sexual harassment as a joke, and has the crew acting profoundly unprofessional for the sake of making a butt-monkey out of Barclay. I’m angry just thinking about it. Never mind. Moving on.

So… There is perhaps a bit more to me dragging my feet on this one than my usual tendency to drag my feat. See, I watched War of the Worlds as a kid. Back in 1990. I watched it again in the mid-90s when it reaired as part of the Sci-Fi Channel’s “Sci-Fi Series Collection”. They aired the whole thing like three or four times. But through a strange series of coincidences, I have never actually seen this episode. I didn’t get out much in High School, but somehow I had a conflict at least one time it aired. And another time the cable was out. One time the power was out altogether. A decade or so later, I bought a set of bootlegs off the internet, and through what feels like malicious conspiracy, that one was damaged and I couldn’t get the DVR to play. So it wasn’t until the second season finally got an official DVD release that I had the ability to actually see this one.

After all this time, there’s a certain weight to it. This is basically it for me: the last “new” piece of War of the Worlds the Series I am ever going to consume, at least from an official standpoint. So I’ve been kind of hoarding it. And I guess it’s time to finally dive on in. This is “Max”.

And it’s The Terminator. It’s just straight-up War of the Worlds doing a knock-off of The Terminator. Maybe I should not have waited thirty years to watch this.

We open “ONE YEAR AGO”, a flashback which is, per their custom, in black-and-white. We are introduced to the titular Max as he discovers a charred corpse with an assault rifle outside a generic snow-covered abandoned warehouse in the generic snow-covered abandoned warehouse district of Toronto the unnamed east coast city where the show takes place. Somehow I had internalized the notion that Max’s final mission had taken place out of the country. I checked the subtitles for episode 1, but I guess I imagined it?

In case you’ve forgotten – it’s been a while – Max here is Max Kincaid, brother of our designated hero. He’s the straight-laced… Guerilla soldier of fortune who runs black ops missions from his secret sewer lair… This episode is going to be mostly about characterization; the plot is pretty thin. After ten weeks of Star Trek: Picard, I am used to it. But it’s kind of asking a lot of me to accept for the sake of this episode that Kincaid is a complete fuckup who constantly needs his brother to bail his ass out, when he’s been an omnicompetent polygenius for the rest of the season. It’s also a bit of a stretch to buy this uncharismatic beef slab with a vaguely-defined probably-generic-Eastern-European accent as Kincaid’s beloved brother, but I can cope.

Once he’s inside the warehouse, he’s surprised by his own brother, who I guess wasn’t supposed to be there but came anyway to back his brother up. Max gives him some stern words about doing as he’s told and following proper procedure and sticking together. Kincaid then immediately runs off ahead, leaving his brother without backup. Kincaid is barely out of the frame before Max gets shot a whole bunch of times by Mana with a phaser set to gurn. Once he’s on the ground, she shoots him a few more times for good measure. Malzor is there too, because he is a hands-on kind of manager.

I do like that Max is taken down in a scene that is very similar in composition to when Colonel Ironhorse was captured back in “The Second Wave“. But even if I ignore the fact that John runs off for absolutely no reason despite having directly said that the reason he came was to have Max’s back, I still find this scene questionable. This would be set some time before “The Second Wave”. But I’m pretty sure that the aliens have to move shortly after that story and Mana mentions being annoyed that she has to leave all her captured human test subjects behind. Also, what’s with the charred remains at the beginning? We’ve never seen the Morthren do that to anyone before or after. It appears that Malzor and Mana are the only ones there; Max doesn’t take out any soldiers, and we don’t see any indication of John doing so either. Which conflicts with Kincaid’s report of having seen how Morthren die during this fight. I don’t think the scene as shown here contradicts the strict letter of how Kincaid described it before, but it sure does violate the spirit, since it seemed heavily implied that Kincaid saw Max die, and that he died in a fire-fight. In the flashback version, it’s not at all clear why John thought Max was dead. If he saw him get shot, sure, he might not realize that he was only stunned. But he’s nowhere around when Max is taken. Particularly after what happened with Ironhorse, you’d assume Kincaid would be open to the possibility that his brother was captured rather than killed.

In color, and thus the present day, Mana is giving Max’s body the Six Million Dollar Man treatment. Okay, there’s some attempt to leave suspense as to the identity of the cyborg they are building, but come on; you don’t show us Max in an episode titled “Max” then cut to the creation of a cyborg they tell us is being made from a captured soldier and really expect it to be a surprise when it turns out to be Max. It’s hard to express just how much Max looks like an anatomical model in these shots. We first see him with his chest open, and not in a surgical sort of way, but like he’s just had a panel removed to show his bloodless internal organs and perfectly white rib cage, all very clean and dry aside from the coating of K-Y Jelly that everything Morthren has to it. We get a look at a piston in his right arm to demonstrate how robot he is. Mana installs his eyes – the left one has been given a zoom lens, while the right one is actually a miniaturized version of the little flying tracker drones they have and fetches his face out of a container and attaches it.

For vague reasons, they reckon that he’s the perfect subject for their new plan to turn humans into cyborg soldiers, on account of he was a member of an elite military unit that had caused them trouble in the past. Though he won’t remember any of that and as a cyborg, his effectiveness as a soldier will be based more on the fact that he is bullet proof and good at tossing people through things than on military training. Possibly they just like the irony.

Another irony they possibly like is that it has been exactly one calendar year since they captured him, as we cut to Kincaid moping over a box containing Max’s things, including blank dogtags and a ring made from a gold coin that prompts another black-and-white flashback in which Kincaid tells his brother and some friends a story about finding treasure in a shipwreck. The ring had been made from one of the coins for a birthday present, though the main thrust of the flashback is that John is a fuck-up who constantly needs Max to bail his ass out. There’s another similar flashback set in the shelter, with Max beating John into submission after he goes AWOL from the army. They’re going for a theme here that Max keeps insisting that John follow his rules and do things his way, while John seems to have a specific trigger about being ordered around. And to be honest, it comes off more that Max is controlling than that John is unreasonable.

Robomax does his take on the, “I need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle,” scene from The Terminator, though because this is War of the Worlds, it’s just in the form of him wordlessly tossing a couple of dudes to death in the middle of their arms deal and stealing their shitty car. He then checks into a hotel to review the blueprints of an army base.

To commiserate over the anniversary of Max’s death, Kincaid goes out to drink with the same group of buddies from the flashback, in the same strip club from the flashback, where they’re all wearing the same clothes from the flashback and sitting in the same chairs from the flashback. Efficient! They talk briefly about what a great guy Max was, then everyone leaves so that Kincaid can angst to Scoggs about how he never got around to looking into who “set them up” on the mission where Max was taken. We will never learn who set them up or why they were set up or why Kincaid thinks he was set up, and Kincaid will not pursue it again.

Max breaks into an army base and murders the fuck out of everyone, mostly by tossing them through things. He steals his brother’s file, then goes back to the hotel to read and burn it. Maybe it’s because I’ve been Sheltering In Place for three weeks now and my brain is starting to go mushy, but I’m having a hard time processing this plot. I feel like I must be missing something, because in the space where a story should go in this episode, there just doesn’t seem to be much of anything. Max’s one and only mission is to track down and kill his brother, whose murder has not been a priority for the Morthren until right this minute. In fact, it’s not clear they even knew who he was until this episode. Now, in the next episode, it becomes a plot point that the Morthren know his identity, and I guess that’s set up here in that Max steals his brother’s file, so Malzor and Mana get a good look at his photo via Max’s watcher eye. They mention Kincaid as being part of a military unit that has been giving them trouble, and it seems like they’re talking about Max’s old gang, who have not been seen before and won’t be seen again, rather than Blackwood and the group Kincaid is currently hanging out with. We did see them target a (para-?)military group back in “Loving the Alien“, and of course back in “The Second Wave” they were targeting General Wilson’s group, but at other times, they’ve got the military in their pocket. Maybe the idea here is that they’ve recognized Kincaid as a target because of what happened last time with him in the VR game? It seemed like in the past, Kincaid had the advantage that the Morthren didn’t know who he was or that he was associated with Blackwood. Of course, if killing Kincaid was a priority, they could’ve just cloned Max before they melted his brain. If the main goal is just to test their robot soldier, I guess this is okay, but it’s a little convoluted.

I can’t even tell what information Max is meant to have gotten from John’s file, since his next move is to track down the two drinking buddies from the strip club scene and murder them while asking where to find Sarah Connor John Kincaid. How does he track them down? Never mind. He does not get John’s location out of either of them, though with the second guy, that’s mostly because he asks him while crushing his trachea.

The investigation into the attack at the army base is led by a Colonel Bradley and his sidekick, Lieutenant Scott. Bradley seems like a decent enough sort, though he’ll end up being no more than a plot obstruction. Scott seems mostly just annoyed. I wouldn’t mention her at all except that she’s played by Jill Hennessy, who is an actual actor of some repute, best known for Crossing Jordan and Law & Order, and more recently for the Showtime miniseries City on a Hill. And I feel like there’s something else I recognize her from but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

It takes them no time to work out that the only thing that was taken was Kincaid’s file, so Bradley gives him a call. Debi answers the video phone and hands off to Blackwood, who is a little freaked out that an army guy they’ve never heard of has their phone number, but agrees to meet with him after a short lock-and-load sequence where he and Suzanne arm themselves in case this is a trap.

Scoggs and Kincaid share one last flashback, showing how Kincaid had broken his brother’s one cardinal rule by allowing an outsider into their secret sewer lair, though he’s less angry when it turns out to be Scoggs, and they all have a good laugh over the fact that she’s boned both of them. This key bit of backstory is revealed here in order to make the next bit more tragic, as Max, despite having done nothing useful to pursue it, somehow has located his brother. Scoggs sees him first, and very calmly and deliberately puts herself in front of John before he even realizes what’s going on.

To Be Continued…