Warning: Images of poorly simulated eyeball trauma below the cut.
Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…
In a twist that is completely shocking to anyone who has not seen television before, John Kincaid’s presumed-dead brother, Max, is not actually dead, but has been turned into a cyborg by the Morthren and sent out to kill his brother for reasons which are never made clear. So far he has murdered several people who are not his brother, most recently Scoggs, the stripper-slash-hacker who has appeared several times as a trusted ally of the team.
I liked Scoggs, and if there were more than two episodes left to this series, I would be upset with this send-off. Shellshocked, Kincaid escapes back to the Awesome Van while Max is randomly shooting the bartender. He tries to call home, but Debi had been warned not to answer the phone in case Bradley were setting them up. Or because she’s got headphones on and doesn’t hear it. This seems like overkill.
It’s only Suzanne who meets with Bradley, and he promptly arrests her when she gives him the run-around. But like I said, Bradley seems like a decent sort. He reckons that Max was captured and brainwashed, and is now after his old unit. Suzanne has a hard time believing this, which is real weird given that she knows about the Morthren cloning process. But it occurs to her that Max would know where Kincaid lives, and that spooks her into being helpful, what with her daughter being there. This is an interesting thread of plot, because according to the setup, Max shouldn’t know about the shelter, since his personal memories have all been erased. But it would make sense for Suzanne to assume that Max is a clone, not a cyborg, in which case she’d wrongly assume he’s got Max’s memories.
Except that no one mentions cloning at all in this episode – no one is surprised that Max is a cyborg rather than a clone, no one suggests he might be one, and Kincaid just inherently knows that it’s his real brother and not a forgery, and thus can’t bring himself to shoot him. And what’s more… It turns out Max does know where the shelter is, as he goes there, but, miraculously, they choose not to make Debi a peril monkey with a hostage-taking scene; she’s able to stay out of his way as he searches the place, but being in his old home triggers something, as Max starts having visions of his brother. Mana and Malzor recognize this as a fault in the program, having not previously questioned how Max knew where to go. They also will make no use of the fact that they now know where the shelter is. Y’know, a thing that could be really huge, like in Captain Power. I realize that was something like ten million years ago that I reviewed Captain Power, so I won’t be hurt if you don’t remember.
Blackwood hooks up with Kincaid, and has a momentary pained expression when he learns Scoggs’s fate – the only reaction we are going to get to her death. Kincaid is coy about who his attacker is, but insists on returning to the shelter, having determined by magic that Max will go there next rather than, like, walking out to the parking lot of the strip club where Kincaid is currently sitting. The plot, such as it is, starts falling apart at this point, really. They’ve run out of patience for having things happen for a reason. Everyone shows up outside the entrance to the shelter. Max is distracted enough to hesitate instead of shooting at Kincaid immediately, but does blow up Bradley’s car, leading to a “thrown by the fireball” action sequence for him and Suzanne. Kincaid magically knows that he’s the only one Max is interested in, and hops back into the Awesome Van to draw him away. Suzanne explains about Max to Blackwood, who somehow instantly knows Max must be a cyborg. Bradley’s reaction is, “But we don’t have that technology,” which is a very weird thing to be your objection.
Max chases John for a while, but then crashes for no clear reason, and John pulls over and goes back to check on him. He’s not there, and we cut back to Blackwood, who magically intuits that Max would be compelled to return to the place where he “died”. Bradley randomly decides that he thinks John is conspiring with Max… to… something… I guess… So Blackwood cold-cocks him, and act which will have no repercussions later. Bye Bradley. You woulda made an adequate recurring character I guess.
Sure enough, Max has indeed returned to the generic snow-cover abandoned warehouse district (See, this is why it has to happen on the anniversary of his death; otherwise there would be no explanation for why the snow is all in the same place as in the flashback. Also it’s daytime now. John and Max confront each other, and Max starts glitching out so bad that his flashbacks are in color now. Also, his flashbacks are from a third-person POV, being the same shots they used in the opening scene, even though they have Max’s Terminator-Vision HUD over them. Malzor and Mana start to worry about Max’s lack of commitment to this whole fratricide project, even after Mana “increases the power to the program,” and Malzor orders her to kill him.
After a bunch more flashbacks while John begs Max to remember his true self, Max pulls out a knife and plunges it into his an unconvincing dummy face’s left eye, destroying the watcher and cutting off the video feed to the Morthren. I’ll wait if you want to go back and reread the paragraph at the beginning where I said which eye was which.
To make matters more complicated, whenever we see Max’s POV, he’s got the Terminator HUD over it, even if it is a flashback or hallucination or he’s seeing a projection of Mana. When they show Mana and Malzor looking through his eye, on their viewing membrane back at base, it does not. We’re told that his human eye has a telephoto lens, and we do see that feature in use, with the HUD overlay. And the dialogue makes it clear that Mana and Malzor can’t see the hallucinations Max has in the shelter. So okay, the HUD-view is Max’s enhanced-but-human eye. And they’re pretty clear which eye is which; Mana puts his left eye in, then installs his face, then picks up the other eye from a worktable where it is next to a partially disassembled watcher, and sticks it in his socket while saying, “This will let us see what he sees.”
Okay, fine, so they fucked up the shot and switched eyes at some point. Minor problem. Except that right before he sticks the knife in, we cut to Max’s POV again, and we see the knife coming right for us. I don’t expect much in the way of continuity out of this show, but we’re pushing the edges of basic storytelling coherence at this point.
And afterward, we keep getting POV shots from Max, still showing the HUD. Just in case you had any doubt. Well, I say “POV shot”, but really, it’s just camera three – it’s exactly the same shot when it’s Max’s POV as when it’s a non-POV close angle on Adrian Paul; the only difference is that sometimes it has a reticle and a slight red filter.
Max eventually falls to his knees, grabbing his temples and reciting some of Max’s complaining-about-his-asshole-brother dialogue from the flashbacks interspersed with some “I MUST BUT I CAN NOT” Ro-man stuff as he fights off his conditioning. The robot seems to win for a moment and John is forced to flee, but then he gives up, crying and giving a speech about what a fuck-up he is, and offering up his life as repayment for his failure to have Max’s back a year ago.
Adrian Paul is an actor of several talents, but sad scenes where a man’s resolve breaks and he is brought to tears is not among them. He looks goofy and I don’t really buy any of this. I think I’ve said a few times: Adrian Paul’s performance is at its best when Kincaid is putting on an affectation; it is at its worst when he is being sincere. He is being very, very sincere in this scene.
Fortunately for the brief future of this show, Max sorta-recovers himself, and tackles his brother instead of shooting him, now reliving his last mission. When it becomes clear that he isn’t getting through, John decides to play along, promising to, “Do it right this time.”
And then a bunch of Morthren show up and there’s a shootout. All the soldiers are killed, but Mana and Malzor take out Max by concentrating their shots on his remaining eye. After multiple episodes where they make a big deal out of keeping their technology out of human hands, they do not use the vaporize setting on their weapons and make no attempt to recover Max’s body, instead legging it when Blackwood shows up and starts shooting at them.
We end on a wordless scene of Max receiving military honors at his funeral, complete with 21-gun salute and the sloppiest Flag Presentation I’ve ever seen. In their defense, I’m sure all of these actors are Canadian, but, like, they fold that flag so poorly that it really bugs me. So I guess the whole thing where Max murdered a fuckton of MPs and his brother was suspected of conspiring with him and Blackwood decked Colonel was quietly forgiven off-screen? Also, they appear to be burying Max in a quarry.
Sigh.
Well okay, as the final piece of War of the Worlds the Series for me to experience-for-the-first-time, this was…
Look, it was shit. I’m not actively angry at it or anything, but there’s nothing at all in this episode that… Anything, really. I know there’s no verb in that clause, and that’s kind of how this episode feels. It’s just a complete nothing of an episode. We just went through ten weeks of Picard, so I have spent time thinking a lot about how a show can become infuriating when its structure hangs entirely on emotive logic to the exclusion of plot logic, in spite of absolutely stellar craftsmanship in every other respect.
“Max”, on the other hand, shows what happens if you do the same thing but also are not very good at making television to begin with. The nicest thing I can say about it is that there’s a lot of shots that have moderately cool side-lighting. Nothing really feels like it happens for a reason in this episode; it’s all just here because it feels like the sort of thing a show like this ought to do. Nothing comes from anywhere or goes anywhere. Why do they send Max after his brother? Why do they need him to steal Kincaid’s file? Why do they decide to do this on the anniversary of capturing him? What was the mission a year ago about in the first place? Who set them up? What was the deal with the burned corpse? And what about Scarecrow’s brain?
None of the emotion feels properly earned; we’ve never met Max before, and his connection to John is established entirely through flashbacks in which John is acting radically different from the character we know. You could very well do a theme about how it was Max that taught Kincaid responsibility and how to handle himself, or how it wasn’t until Max died that he was forced to grow up and stop being such a fuck-up, but they don’t bother with any of that. We’re meant to be sad because Adrian Paul looks sad. But the character death I actually cared about in this episode was Scoggs, and she gets no reaction other than Blackwood looking pained for a second.
We’ve had far too many character focus episodes on Kincaid, I think, but this one is the big one. And in that respect, Adrian Paul is particularly badly served by it. I try not to be too down on Adrian Paul as an actor, since I assume he’s still got fans who will be angry at me if I say anything too mean. But he’s got a particular set of things he’s good at, and he doesn’t get to do any of them in this episode. He’s a fantastic physical actor, and he’s good at doing these “outsider” sorts of roles where he’s playing someone moving within a society he’s not a part of – an IRA sympathizer in Goliath or an immortal in Highlander, or his various “undercover” personas in this show. But he gets none of that here. In the flashbacks, he’s just an irresponsible jerk with authority issues, and in the main narrative, he’s vulnerable and emotionally compromised, and that is not what Adrian Paul is good at.
No one else is well-served by the plot either. Suzanne and especially Blackwood are reduced to plot token dispensers, appearing to deliver some exposition that they don’t even have any good reason to know. There’s a hint of tension between Mana and Malzor, but there’s no consistency to the tone – Malzor is neutral for most of the episode, then jumps down Mana’s throat the second there’s an issue with the cyborg, and we get no closure on it, as we don’t return to the Morthren for a summary of how their cyborg plan has failed and now will be abandoned and never spoken of again. The character who seems to get the best out of this episode is actually Debi, who’s put in a clear Peril Monkey setup, but rises above it, recognizing the danger before Max finds her, and managing to elude him.
The character of Max Kincaid loomed large in his absence. To blow his appearance on a spiritless zero-budget Terminator knock-off is such a waste. If we weren’t so close to the end, I don’t know that I’d care enough to keep going.
And our statistics:
- Humans killed: 11
- By Max: 10
- By Mana and Malzor: 1
- Morthren killed: 4
- By Max: 1
- By John: 1
- By Blackwood: 2
- Strippers: -1 (Bye Scoggs)
- People dying tragically in Adrian Paul’s Arms: 2
- Goofy Adrian Paul Facial Expressions: I totally lost count
War of the Worlds is available on amazon.
So long and thanks for all the fish
or is this not the end?
There are four more episodes. This is just the last one I hadn’t seen before
I hated this one for pretty much every aspect, except the evidence that there might still be a competent military (and lights that don’t have colored gels on them) not filled with incompetent and corrupt assholes… and then Harrison decks one of them needlessly, when the guy is probably right to draw the conclusions he draws. Harrison in season two isn’t remotely like Harrison in season one, and the destruction of the cottage and death of Paul Ironhorse is not enough to justify it, at least not without some kind of character arc ON SCREEN.
Like you, the only death here that bothered me was Scoggs.
I wonder who was the one sane authorial intent person who managed to avoid making Debi a peril monkey.