Category: TV

Don’t you see? It’s not just our problem. If we lose this war, we lose the entire planet.

It is January 9, 1989. In Japan, Emperor Akhito has just ascended to the throne. Wednesday, President Reagan will deliver his farewell address to the nation before ascending directly into the heavens on a rising tide, leaving golden showers trickling down in his wake. I assume. In a weird bit of synchronicity, there was a peace summit between the US and the USSR since last we met, the outcome of which was an agreement by the Soviets to destroy their chemical weapons. The big news this week, of course, is the crash of British Midlands Flight 92 near Kegworth in England. The crash, the result of the pilots shutting down the wrong engine (The relevant indicators had recently undergone a design change) when one of them failed due to metal fatigue, killed 47.

Over the weekend, 42nd Street and Starlight Express closed on Broadway. The Lost Lennon Tapes are released on vinyl. The Billboard Hot 100 continues to stagnate, though there’s just a hit of movement at the bottom of the top 10 with the arrival of Def Leppard’s “Armageddon It” and Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal”. MacGyver, Alf, and Newheart are new. Star Trek the Next Generation returns from Christmas break with “Loud as a Whisper”, which is the one about the mute telepathic negotiator who speaks via three interpreters until they get offed. I’m told it’s really really good, but honestly I remember almost nothing about it. Friday the 13th gives us “Night Hunger”, in which a cursed car key, when bathed in the blood of a murder victim, upgrades your car to win illegal drag races. It’s sorta like Christine got crossed with Knight Rider and also that episode of Futurama where Bender gets turned into a were-car. Also, The Pat Sajack Show premieres.

It’s time for a little blast from the future. “Among the Philistines” was the eleventh episode of War of the Worlds to air, but the sixteenth produced. We’ve seen episodes out-of-order before without it being an issue; this isn’t really the sort of show with an episode-to-episode story arc. But this episode is actually going to reference things that haven’t happened yet. These won’t be spoilers for us, thanks to the order in which I’ve done things, but Harrison’s going to mention the name of the alien homeworld and the time-table for the invasion, which he’s not going to learn until February, in “The Prodigal Son”. He also places the events of the “The Resurrection” about a year earlier.

The lab set’s also been redressed a little, though looking back, the refurbished set actually debuted back in “The Second Seal” (Notably, after two episodes that didn’t have any footage set there), and I just didn’t notice because it switches back for a couple of episodes. I only noticed it this time because there’s a few shots where you can see the supercomputer, which actually looks like an honest-to-goodness Cray-1 now, the height of 1970s computing technology, all decked out in red leatherette.

There’s also one particular scene early on which seems very strange in context, but will make a lot of sense to you if I tell you now that this episode was probably supposed to fall immediately after “He Feedeth Among the Lilies” (Which will ultimately air before “The Prodigal Son”, but was produced after).

We open with Ironhorse’s squaddies — Ironhorse has squaddies now, another thing that won’t be introduced until later, though I do find myself thinking that it actually makes sense that it be this week’s events that prompts him to get some — setting up a fake car accident to serve as a road block. Stopping for the road block, three aliens driving a truck under the marque of the “Source Chemical Company” are captured alive. Harrison repeatedly stresses how important it is that they be taken alive for interrogation. Inexplicably, Harrison repeatedly saying this out loud right in front of them somehow alerts the aliens to the fact that the humans want to take them alive and interrogate them, so, exchanging a meaningful glance at each other, they each in turn punch themselves in the chest causing them to die in a spray of alien goo out their backs.

[br]I tried making an animated gif out of this, but it’s like half a second long and would give you motion sickness.

Harrison completely flips his shit over this. They’d set up the roadblock due to a tipoff from an unknown source, and Harrison is convinced that the fact that the aliens were able to commit suicide apparently by force of will when captured after he’s told them that he wants to interrogate them about the invasion means that the aliens must have been warned about the ambush. Maybe we missed a scene or something.

For reasons that will become clearer when we view this episode in its proper context, this latest setback pushes Harrison into a dark place. He sits in his office brooding angrily until Ironhorse shows up to ruin my policy of only shipping Ironhorse with Norton. He actually gives Harrison a heartfelt shoulder-massage and talks about the stress of fighting an unseen enemy, leading into another of Ironhorse’s famous tonal whiplash military anecdotes.

At the point, the prime discussion is the mission. Fighting an enemy you couldn’t see. It takes everything you have just to hold it together. I’ve been there. We fought all night at Khe Sanh. Pinned down. The screams, the dying that night. We all knew we’d be overrun. We’d be dead by the end of the night. In the morning, the mist cleared in the valley and they were gone. We’d done it. We’d held our position: we’d won. But that night was a million nights long.[br]You’re going through a night like that, Harrison. But the mist will clear. And we will have won.

I love it when Ironhorse goes into Dark Vietnam Anecdote mode. The music goes all grim and brooding and the lights dim, and I’m pretty sure they mixed in some jungle ambient sounds, and I just keep thinking of the scene in Gremlins where Phoebe Cates tells the story about how her father died (Or better, the scene in Gremlins II about why she hates Lincoln’s Birthday). While those two are exchanging meaningful looks, the aliens back in the Land of the Lost cave are having a Mua-ha-ha moment over how the death of the three aliens from the truck means that everything is going exactly according to their plans. So no suspense about that then.

Here, then, we introduce this week’s guest star, Doctor Adrian Bouchard, played by Cedric Smith. Smith is a prolific actor, known for his roles in Anne of Green Gables and Avonlea, as well as for voicing Professor Xavier in the ’90s X-Men cartoon, opposite Captain Power alum David Hemblen’s Magneto. Also, minor fact, at the time, he was married to actress Catherine Disher, who was, I’ve mentioned, their first choice for the role of Suzanne. Pity they couldn’t get her to do the show.

Adrian is a researcher who’s spent the last decade doing language research with a couple of dolphins names Mona and Mabel. His work will eventually lead to seaQuest DSV. The gang has brought him to a cool old mansion that’s being used as a government safe-house so they can talk to him about aliens. During the copious down-time involved in studying dolphins, he listens to the radio a lot, and had noticed a correlation between an “odd percussive transmission” he’d picked up and news reports of terrorist attacks. Applying his dolphin research to the transmissions had yielded the tip we saw the team respond to earlier. Adrian had done work with the Navy in the past, training dolphins to lay mines or something (They don’t go into detail, but I just keep thinking of the “dipshit stuff” Gillian had suspected Kirk of being up to in Star Trek IV), and had some military contacts who’d hooked him up with Harrison and company.

Adrian seems to have no awareness of the 1953 invasion, though he looks to be older than Harrison and therefore would have lived through it, probably as a teenager. And yet his response to the news that Earth is being invaded by aliens is not fear or panic, but simple scientific curiosity, asking about the aliens’ origin and technology. When asked, Harrison volunteers the name of their planet, that a colonization force of millions is four years away, and that they’ve tried without success to make peace with the aliens. Adrian agrees to help them decipher alien transmissions.

At their next coffee break, Harrison leaves Adrian alone with Suzanne so they can flirt a bit in the hopes it will make his sudden but inevitable betrayal a little less obvious. I mean, come on. Having an alien in human form casually flirt with Suzanne, feigning total sincerity? If we hadn’t seen the new alien commander last week humoring the little girl over the parking meter, I wouldn’t have imagined them capable of it.

What? You hadn’t worked out Adrian is an alien? I’m sure writer Patrick Barry will be happy to hear it. Yeah, it’s him again, back again after “The Second Seal”, an episode, you’ll recall, that I’d really liked in my youth but had serious misgivings about this time through. Anyway, it’s hard to avoid realizing that Adrian and his game-beaking ability to decipher alien transmissions is actually a trap when they keep cutting back to the Advocacy in the cave talking about how well their plan is going, which they do again now.

Adrian and Norton try running the algorithm against an incoming alien transmission on the safe-house’s mainframe, and there’s lots of computer-sounding gibberish about opening new windows and bitmapping the X-axis or whatever, but the signal is too big or something and the computer overloads, causing all the text windows to fade out and the whole system to go down. And the computer scientist person who has ever used a computer in me wants to call bullshit on that, but for all I know, ’80s mainframes did work like that. When Ironhorse comes in to see what’s wrong, he name-drops their supercomputer, and Adrian storms off in a huff, angry that they were screwing around with a Commodore 64 when they had a supercomputer.

Since Adrian’s background check had just come through before the computer crashed, Harrison is now at liberty to invite him to come back to the Cottage and work with them. Adrian claims that he wants to go back to his dolphins, but Harrison makes an impassioned plea about the fate of the world, and he agrees to be blindfolded and driven to their place.

There’s another new arrival at the cottage: Debi just got a new evil-detecting dog, Chekhov Guido, from Anton Chekhov’s Evil-Detecting Dog Emporium. Adrian and Guido, predictably, do not hit it off, with Debi barely able to restrain Guido from attacking, because Patrick Barry does not know the meaning of the word “subtlty”.

The supercomputer solves their overload problem, and begins producing translations of the alien recordings, which everyone assumes will be the key to swift victory. Norton cautions them that Adrian’s algorithm doesn’t work on older recordings for some reason, so there might be more to the cipher than they’ve figured out. The team wants to bring Adrian on permanently, and both Suzanne and Harrison make pitches to him, but he plays hard-to-get.

During a break, they realize that they meant to establish Norton’s action skills at some point and haven’t gotten around to it, so Norton and Ironhorse spar at bojutsu. At first, they seem to be evenly matched, but Norton finally opens a can of whup-ass so big that he breaks Ironhorse’s staff.

It turns out Norton was cheating: his staff has a metal core. Seriously, I hope Anton Chekhov got royalties for this episode. But I kid. I think it’s actually a good thing. This episode much more than any episode so far has made a point to set things up ahead of time. The climax of this episode is going to play out as a series of callbacks invoking things we learned in the first half. It’s a big departure from the, “Heroes just kind of stumble onto the alien plot by dumb luck and a series of coincidences put people in the right place at the right time to foil them.” It’s not as funny as “Alien plot to nuke a peace summit foiled because they only put an hour on the meter,” but it’s more dramatically satisfying.

It’s right around here that Debi announces that Guido has disappeared, maintaining her perfect track-record with pets. Suzanne isn’t going to let her have so much as a goldfish after this. In the words of Oscar Wilde, “To lose one pet due to the machinations of a malevolent alien race bent on world domination may be regarded a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness.” While everyone’s discussing their intent to hire Adrian on permanently (And give him Ironhorse’s parking space, according to Norton), Adrian decrypts another transmission, and announces that the aliens are up to some vaguely outlined plot involving nerve gas, and gives them the exact time and place where it’s all going down complete with a note to make sure to show up exactly on time and for the love of God, don’t come three hours early and scope the place out for an ambush ahead of time.

Continue reading Thesis: Among the Philistines (War of the Worlds 1×11)

On the twelfth day of Christmas, A Mind Occasionally Voyaging gave to me…

We must plan for the future.[br]A future without humans.

It is January 2, 1989. Happy new year. We have, of course, been to the beginning of 1989 before, so you know the broad strokes of it. Leonard Nemoy is enjoying his first full day of marriage to Susan Bay. Notre Dame beats West Virginia at the Fiesta Bowl, Miami beats Nebraska at the Orange Bowl, Florida State beats Auburn at the Sugar Bowl, and Michigan beats Southern California at the Rose Bowl. By week’s end, Comet Tempel 1 will reach perihelion (It would later be visited by NASA space probes Deep Impact and Stardust, the only comet we’ve visited twice. The former would carry a detachable baby space probe with which it would ram Tempel 1 as part of NASA’s “Let’s see what happens if you crash a space ship into a comet” program. Answer: SCIENCE^TM), a pair of French newsmen will test security at JFK by trying to plant fake bombs, Hirohito will die, and, in news that kinda prefigures the way this year is going for communism, Russian newspaper Izvestia will start running commercial advertisements.

The only new movie releases this week that I’m familiar with are American Ninja 3 and Communion, a Christopher Walken flop based on Whitley Strieber’s 1987 book about alien abduction. The networks start back up with new programming this week, though even the shows I’m familiar with aren’t doing episodes I remember particularly. Nothing has moved in the top ten since last week. Star Trek the Next Generation returns next week. Friday the 13th the Series gives us “13 O’Clock”, which is pretty much the Twilight Zone episode “A Kind of Stopwatch” but meaner. We once again run into one of our old friends, Gwynyth Walsh, who acquires a magic pocket watch that stops time for an hour at one in the morning. Only since this is Friday the 13th, it only does that as payment for murdering someone, and she gets it by murdering her husband, the previous owner. I think the major part of the plot is her trying to track down and murder a couple of orphans who witnessed the murder, and naturally, it ends with her frozen in time. I’m kinda fuzzy on the middle part, because I remember it mostly as being one of those episodes that did a much better job of selling how completely screwed the good guys were and how the villain was basically invincible and they had no chance whatever of stopping her, and a worse job of making it believable when they go ahead and win anyway. Also, the visual effects for both the stopped time and the watch itself (which magically manifests a “XIII” where the “I” should be when stopping time) were really impressive by the standards of the day, and got them an Emmy nomination. If I recall correctly, stopped time, like time travel in this show, was represented by a switch to black-and-white with a fuzzy ghost-trail motion blur effect.

War of the Worlds this week is about as close as a show like this can get to a Christmas episode. By which I mean it’s called “Epiphany”, which is also the fancy name for the religious observance that happens after the twelfth day of Christmas (That is, on January 6, because the “Christmas Season” begins with Christmas and ends on Twelfth Night, rather than the modern American tradition of it beginning on All Saint’s Day, climaxing the day after Thanksgiving, and finally ending on Boxing Day when the radio stations stop playing Christmas music and all the Christmas stuff is marked down 50%). It also happens to be today, which is why I extended my originally planned four weeks of padding for the mid-season break out so long, the same way I padded out Captain Power to make the finale fall on April Fool’s Day.

What does this episode have to do with the childhood of Jesus (Epiphany traditionally commemorates the events from Jesus’s birth through the wedding at Cana, with the western church’s celebration centering around the Adoration of the Magi, and the eastern church around the Baptism of Jesus)? Very little, as close as I can tell. The secular meaning of the term (The feeling of a sudden, profound realization) doesn’t seem to fit especially either. There’s a few minor points that, at a stretch, could be made to fit, and we’ll talk about them later.

So if not a straightforward epiphany, what are we in store for this episode? A mixed bag, as this show tends to be. First thing I’ll say is that the pacing is fantastic. After a few missteps early in the season, the pacing has generally been very good in War of the Worlds, but this one especially. This episode was filmed between “The Good Samaritan” and “Goliath is My Name”. It’s not quite as good as “Goliath”, but there’s absolutely signs of progress. Another “as always” is that the character roles are fantastic, with some particularly good moments from both the guest cast and the regulars. Also, they managed to land legendary actor and “enthusiastic” nudist Patrick Macnee.

On the other hand, though this show is really always about the Cold War, this is the first one to address it directly, and it’s a little over-the-top. This episode is pretty much all about the actual Cold War, and the role of the aliens in the plot is curiously bracketed: they basically stop being active participants by the midpoint. The story works just fine, but in all honesty, 99% of it would work just as well if they weren’t in it at all. The dialogue is curiously clunky — probably related to this being another script attributed to an obviously fake writer, this time “Sylvia Van Buren”. The overall gist of what’s going on is fine, but the actual specific words coming out of people’s mouths seem ill-chosen. Suzanne is woefully underused, having only really the one worthwhile scene and getting more than her share of the dialogue clunkers. Worst of all, this episode sees the return of Sex God Harrison.

The story opens up with three creepy, alien-possessed nuns taking a tour of some kind of crime-infested dystopian urban sprawl (That is, San Francisco), like we’ve suddenly turned into a show set in a post-apocalyptic societal collapse grimdark future or something. They watch two men come to blows over a parking spot, watch the world’s worst David Spade impersonator steal a purse, and watch some bullies rough a kid up for his lunch money (When he asks why they didn’t do anything to help, they remind him that, “God works in mysterious ways.”). All this street crime in a one-block radius proves the research the aliens need for the military commander to conclude that humanity is absolutely going to wipe itself out via “tribal” warfare in a couple of decades anyway.

Why they generalize from street crime to the Cold War is unclear, but they decide that it’ll only take a very little bit of prodding to persuade the major powers of the Earth to nuke each other out of existence. Curiously, no one points out that an added benefit of triggering a shooting war between the US and the Soviet Union is that the radiation will render the planet safer for Mor-Taxan immune systems.

At the cottage, everyone’s watching the Plot Convenience Channel coverage of upcoming nuclear disarmament talks which will be going on nearby the next day. Not unlike last week, there’s some good non-verbal communication when they cut around the room to show Suzanne, Harrison and Norton all looking happy and hopeful at the news, while Ironhorse grimaces and looks pensive. He snaps off the television in frustration, declaring that the plan to simultaneously dismantle an American and Soviet nuclear device is, “The beginning of the end,” because, “Nuclear warheads are the only guarantee of peace we have right now.” Harrison, clearly humoring him, politely asks for an explanation, and Ironhorse launches into a text book defense of mutually assured destruction, insisting that the superior Soviet numbers in conventional weapons make an invasion absolutely, unarguably inevitable absent the threat of nuclear retaliation.

Surprisingly, the writers decided to let Suzanne be the one to challenge him. They cut to her rolling her eyes during Ironhorse’s speech. Once he’s done, she points out that his entire philosophy is predicated on the idea that the “reds” actually want to launch a ground invasion of the United States. He calls her naive for even imagining otherwise, and she pretty much calls him an idiot. Ironhorse insists that the strong dominating the weak is a law of nature, and cites Darwin at her. Norton tries to break the tension by offering up the very obvious joke that, having discussed politics, perhaps they could move the conversation on to religion. This scene is actually really cool in that we see the three scientists sort of instinctively banding together against Ironhorse, but they’re all very different in their approach. Suzanne is the only one who becomes combative. It’s consistent with past episodes where she’s been quick to annoyance and anger forced to suffer fools, but it’s surprising that they’d give this scene to her and not Harrison. There’s a reason for that, though.

Harrison slips out unnoticed during the argument to take a personal call from one of this week’s guest characters, Dr. Katya Rhodan. Since we spent a whole scene establishing that there’s nuclear disarmament talks going on, she’s obviously a Russian nuclear physicist who’s in town to attend the conference (In a minor nice touch, she namechecks Dr. Jacobi, Harrison’s boss from Pacific Tech, who we haven’t heard mention of since halfway through the pilot). She’s also an old flame of Harrison’s having, as we later find out, spent three days hiding from her KGB handlers and boning him at a physics conference in 1980 — which may be the most relevant that Harrison’s astrophysics training will ever be to the plot. She’s cagey on the phone, because we’re doing Cold War Intrigue, but you’ve already figured out the score, haven’t you? I mean, there’s only one way a Cold War intrigue goes from this setup. She sets up a lunch date with Harrison then hangs up just ahead of being accosted by her KGB babysitter, Major Valery Kedrov, played by John Steed himself, Patrick Macnee, in a role which he treats with complete professionalism aside from the fact that he gives not a single fuck about whether or not he sounds even the least little bit Russian. I mean, what, was the director going to order the dude who played Satan himself in Battlestar Galactica to put on a fake Russian accent?

He’s a straight-up stereotype Cold War-era KGB heavy, speaking in veiled threats and exuding that very polite distrust that makes it really clear how numbered the Soviet Union’s days are, and really exposes the fallaciousness of Ironhorse’s worldview: not once does he ever treat any of the Americans with the level of suspicion or suppressed hatred that he treats one of his own. Ironhorse thinks that the Russians are gearing up to invade the US? Judging by Major Kedrov, they’re more likely gearing up to invade Russia. Not that the notion of one’s own government spending as much effort trying to keep its own citizens in line as protecting them from outside attackers is something entirely alien to anyone in our post-9/11 world. What Macnee brings to the character is a sense of gravitas, and the way he sells the urbane front the character puts on. He’s an extremely political character, never making actual threats or even outright stating a position, while still communicating with authority and intimidation.

He politely accuses Katya of “frivolity” for using the pay phone rather than the one in her room. She counters, with undisguised distaste, that it would be inappropriate for her to make a personal call on the government’s dime, spitting the word “Comrade” at him. There’s just the tiniest flash of anger from Kedrov when, unable to challenge her logic, he simply tells her that he’s going to note it on his report.

The aliens snatch three Nuclear Power Plant employees right as they’re going off shift, and return the next morning to steal some fissile material so the aliens can make an atomic bomb. Now, there’s an obvious problem with this: the kind of material used in nuclear power plants isn’t suitable for making a bomb, the plutonium isn’t enriched nearly enough to cause a chain reaction (Also, I don’t think you use plutonium in power plants). You might counter this by supposing that the aliens are going to make a dirty bomb — a conventional explosive that uses low-grade material not to cause a nuclear explosion, but rather to contaminate the area with radioactive pollution. Or perhaps it’s just a matter of the aliens using their alien science to somehow convert the low-enriched material into weapons-grade material with the meager resources they have on-hand. But by the time word of the theft gets back to the Blackwood team, it will be on the news that, no, the stuff they stole was high-enriched weapons-grade stuff. Because shut up.

Harrison slips out for his lunch date all dappered up, making a big point of being evasive and dismissive when Ironhorse demands on knowing his plans so that Ironhorse being suspicious of him can be a thing later. When he arrives at the restaurant, despite not having seen her for eight years, he recognizes Katya from behind, across the patio. When he greets her, she pulls him into an embrace that knocks her ridiculous broad-brimmed ’80s hat off. And let me tell you, this scene really reaffirms my impressions last week: the affection between Harrison and Katya is clear and intense here, and you can’t compare his behavior in this scene to the scenes where he’s meant to be “jealous” about Suzanne and believe that Jared Martin is trying to convey the same class of emotion in both scenes.

We aren’t privy to the content of their conversation yet, though, because the camera pulls back to reveal that they’re being watched from a distance by Ironhorse, who’s secretly photographing them with a discreet SLR camera with one of those totally discreet ginormous telephoto lenses. He looks to his right, though, and notices that he’s not the only one spying on the romantic reunion: Major Kedrov is also photographing them. Ironhorse brings up his camera and snaps off a few shots before Kedrov too senses that he’s not alone, turns, and gets a few snaps of Ironhorse before retreating. I can not stress this enough: the scene is played completely straight, and is possibly the funniest thing I have seen so far in this series.

Ironhorse immediately assumes the worst, that Harrison’s gone and gotten himself smitten with a godless Red and now plans to defect so he can run off to Moscow and make the beast with two спинка with her, if you know what I mean (I don’t even know what I mean. I’m not even sure that’s the right sense of the word “back” in Russian). He’s so wound up in his worries about Harrison going pink that he’s barely interested when Norton and Suzanne intercept news about the theft at the nuclear plant. You know. This is the second episode in a row where Ironhorse has shrugged off events that could lead directly to the extermination of mankind with an, “Eh. Not my department.” I know that Ironhorse’s whole character is based around this Brigadier/Agent Scully-style, “Skeptical past the point of reasonability,” thing, but who exactly does he think is poisoning the world’s food supply and stealing nuclear materials? Let’s go back to the pilot for a minute. The very first scene of the very first episode depicts domestic terrorists (In the novel, at least. Since we never get any details on-screen, you’re welcome to assume they’re foreign in the aired version, what with their random generically-foreign accents) attacking and capturing a US Military installation and plotting to, in essence, set off a massive dirty bomb. That much actually happens — it’s not just a fake-out to hide the aliens. And Ironhorse spends the first hour of the series convinced that terrorists are now schlepping around the pacific northwest with a truckload of radioactive waste in order to do bad stuff and hurt Americans. As the series progresses, Ironhorse proceeds to be skeptical about lethal levels of radiation at a liquid nitrogen plant, the theft of trucks carrying radioactive waste, the theft of an incredibly lethal bioweapon, a spate of murders involving bizarre mutilations, and a deliberate attempt to taint the world’s food supply with an incredibly lethal engineered toxin. A lot of these are basically Bond villain plots. And they’ve run through ten of them in a matter of months. It took Bond fifteen years to run into that many. But it’s not just Ironhorse being Ironhorse: remember, no one ever questions the wisdom or necessity of Mason engineering a secret radiation-resistant process into his grain, and the response here to the theft of enriched nuclear power rods isn’t to mobilize the National Guard, the FBI and G.I. Joe, but rather to issue a BOLO to meter maids. The only way this makes a lick of sense is if this is a world where stuff like domestic terrorists defeating the US army on US soil, and accidental releases of deadly bioweapons, and daring daylight theft of weapons-grade plutonium is enough of an everyday occurrence that people have learned to cope. And this is 1989. We’re still half a decade from the Oklahoma City bombing, and a whole decade away from 9/11. I’m not saying that the 1980s were devoid of violent acts of terror, far from it, but I’m pretty sure that, “Unknown people stole enough enriched plutonium to make a bomb,” would result in pants-crapping freak-outs if it happened today in our more cynical times. Airports would be shut down. People would be mobbing — let’s see, 1989, so… Hechenger’s? — for duct tape and plastic sheeting. Very Serious People would be on TV suggesting we ought to round up everyone with a beard and dark complexion.[br]One of the things about this show that is often taken as a weakness is the way that the world seems superficially unchanged despite that whole “devastating invasion from space in the 1950s” thing. But more and more, there seem to be these hints that it’s not the “World outside your window.” More and more, I’m accepting the possibility that War of the Worlds is actually set in a dystopian world that’s right in the middle of a societal collapse, but one that’s so deeply in denial that it’s still clinging to the idea that everything is fine. By the time we get back from a quick cut back to the Land of the Lost cave to explain that the aliens have built a bomb, which they’re going to use to blow up the disarmament summit, Ironhorse is ready to beat down Harrison’s door to accuse him of treason and haul him up before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He even tacitly accuses Suzanne of complicity for being “so quick to defend him.”

And the writers presumably think he’s made a compelling argument, because they move to abate our worries by cutting to Katya’s hotel room, where Major Kedrov beats down the door looking for her, only to find that she’s apparently fled out the window.

Just as Ironhorse is about to call the TSA and have Harrison put on the no-fly list, he shows up (In a different suit than he was wearing in the last scene for some reason), with Katya in tow, because, duh, she wants to defect. Ironhorse and Harrison go off to argue about this, (with Ironhorse bringing up the nuclear theft briefly in an attempt to shame Harrison over his dereliction of duty). Meanwhile, Katya, Suzanne and Norton make awkward smalltalk. Katya compliments them on the Cottage’s decor, which Norton appreciates, but Suzanne takes a bit of umbrage when Katya asks if she did the interior decorating. Since she’s a Strong Modern Female Character and a Scientist Dammit. At least, this week. Anyway, Katya explains that, despite being a nuclear physicist, she still enjoys interior design as a hobby, so there.

Weirdly, Ironhorse, who’d earlier been so dismissive of political concerns and didn’t like the idea of nuclear disarmament, is really upset that Harrison’s gone and created a political scandal that might derail the peace talks. Also weird: it’s clearly daytime in the hallways and night time in the rooms.

While all that was going on, the three alien nuclear plant workers were accosted by a policeman, who they possess, since one of them has for some reason lost her face.

The next morning, they drop their bomb off across the street from the summit. The alien side of the plot feels very 1970s Doctor Who, with aliens threatening a peace conference, but then they cut back to the cave, where the aliens speculate on the sure success of their plan and call for maps so they can find the greatest population centers for planting future bombs, essentially ushering in a sort of Carnival season for Mor-Tax (fitting for what comes after Epiphany).

I think they may have lost track of what their plan is here. The whole point of blowing up the peace conference is to provoke war between the US and the USSR so that they’d wipe themselves out in a nuclear conflagration. I won’t even make a call as to whether or not this plan is really plausible: on the one hand, yeah, tensions are high and setting off a nuke pretty much anywhere would probably lead to the end of the world, but on the other hand, it’s not like the US or the USSR would seriously believe the other side was responsible. If their plan is just to ratchet up the Cold War tension until Mistakes get Made, I guess starting an age of nuclear terrorism is a good way to do it. It seems like they’re proceeding here from the idea, though, that blowing up cities with nuclear bombs is a low-cost solution for wiping out humanity. Which, okay, it took basically zero effort for them to build this bomb, but it’s strongly at odds with the whole series-concept of the aliens being resource-poor and needing to work through subterfuge.

But leaving that aside, I like the character work from the alien field team. There’s a neat shot of one of the nuclear plant workers beaming with pride as the Advocates charge them with their mission over the radio. Immediately upon arming the bomb and abandoning their van, they’re accosted by a little girl who “reminds” them to feed the meter. The cop-alien protests that, being a cop, he isn’t liable to get a ticket. The little girl protests that even policemen have to follow the law, so he decides that she made a threatening move and puts sixteen bullets in her. Such sweet, old-fashioned simple times, when you could tell a genocidal alien disguised as a policeman that even cops have to follow the law and not get tazered. The alien looks to the girl’s mother for help, but she just nods at him, smiling. I guess if you want to claim logic for the scene, the alien decides that it would be better not to arouse suspicion, because he puts on an insincere smile and thanks the little girl for reminding him, then takes out a nickel and offers to lift her up so she can put fifty minutes on the meter for him.

It’s a cute scene that really plays up the bathos, juxtaposing this very mundane act of kindness with the fact that these three are right in the middle of planting a nuclear bomb next door to a peace conference. He even tips his hat to the girl and her mother as they leave. And it’s going to get even funnier in a bit, because fifty-five minutes later, the meter-maid comes by and gives them the first of three tickets she’s going to issue before calling a tow truck.

Continue reading Thesis: Epiphany (War of the Worlds 1×10)

We all have to die some time.

Let’s close out the year. It is December 26, 1988. Since last we spoke, the Spitak earthquake killed 25,000 in Armenia. Estonia declared Estonian to be its official language, which probably seems hilarious to anyone too young to understand the whole “Soviet Union” thing. Pan Am 103 was destroyed by terrorists over Lockerbie, Scotland. US Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche was convicted of mail fraud, ruining once and for all his chances of winning the 1992 election. NASA unveiled its plans for a moon colony and manned mars mission. I haven’t looked, but I assume that all went according to plan. Vanessa Hudgens was born, and Roy Orbison died. Tomorrow, Bulgaria will give up jamming Radio Free Europe, and Hayley Williams will be born.

Two days ago, Mega Man 2 was released in Japan. Out in theaters are The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad, Rain Man, Working Girl, Beaches, Twins, and, of course, Dangerous Liaisons. Poison leads the Billboard top ten with “Every Rose Has its Thorn”. Also charting are Bobby Brown’s “My Perrogative”, Boy Meets Girl’s “Waiting for a Star to Fall”, and Guns N Roses’s “Welcome to the Jungle”. New in the top ten this week are Doctor Who-fan-music-video favorite Phil Collins’s “Two Hearts”, The Bangles’s “In Your Room” (Which honestly, I didn’t even know was a single), and Taylor Dayne’s “Don’t Rush Me”. Speaking of Doctor Who, the novelty song, “Doctorin’ The Tardis”, a mash-up of the Doctor Who theme song with Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part 2 by The KLF (performing as “The Timelords”) is on the Hot 100 for its second week at 83. It’ll peak at 66. Former Kids Incorporated star Martika’s “More than You Know” enters the charts at 91.

TV is virtually all reruns this week, including, I am not making this up, a rerun of the made-for-TV movie Ewoks: Battle for Endor. Is that the one with the big spider? Friday the 13th will not be back for another week. Star Trek the Next Generation is off this week, but while War of the Worlds was on break, they cranked out “Where Silence has Lease” (the one where they get sucked into a Weird Space Hole where a big disembodied face wants to murder them because it’s curious about this whole “mortality” thing), “Elementary, My Dear Data” (the Sherlock Holmes one), and “The Outrageous Okona” (the one where they hang out with a Han Solo-inspired vaguely rogueish antihero and also holographic Joe Piscopo).

You only have to get a few minutes into “The Good Samaritan” to notice two things. The first is that this is densely and effectively written episode. The second is that there’s something seriously wrong on a mechanical level. The audio mix is weird. The foley is awkward. The looping is painfully blatant. Characters speak with odd cadences and tones. Some of this may not be their fault. There’s several audio glitches in my DVD copy — a half-second of the wrong audio warps in during the credits, and the sound track goes out of sync after the commercial breaks. Perhaps these have been fixed in later pressings (I am not optimistic). But other audio oddities must have been audible to the original audience. Maybe stuff like this was less noticeable on a cheap ’80s television set?

“The Good Samaritan” was the third episode produced, after “The Resurrection” and “Thy Kingdom Come”, made while Sam Strangis was still operating with a skeleton crew due to the strike: the writing credit on this one is the obvious pseudonym “Sylvia Clayton”. That might explain some of the technical issues, if the production team was still finding their feet and under pressure.

All the same, like I said, the actual story is really well put-together. We see the best examples we’ve had so far of the writing conveying information to the audience effectively and efficiently without resorting to direct information dumps. There’s also a strong display of the rapport between the characters, which is especially interesting given that this episode was filmed before the relationship development they put on display in “A Multitude of Idols”. There are a few oddities though: Ironhorse is far more casual with the others than he should be, and they’re still clinging to that idea of there being sexual tension between Harrison and Suzanne.

We open with four extremely ’80s-looking thirty-year-olds pretending to be college students in a diner. Noticing that one of them has a cold, the waitress talks them all into trying the chicken soup. When she slips into the back to deliver their order, she lapses into alienese just for the phrase, “and four soups.” Really great way to be discrete: if anyone were listening in, they wouldn’t learn that she’d put in the soup order she’d just been given, they’d only learn that she’s an alien who speaks a language that sounds like backmasking. The line cook adds something from his flask to the soup, while they discuss their plans in alienese which, this time, hasn’t been subtitled, in order to increase the suspense for the ten seconds before we cut to the last survivor of the group being wheeled into the hospital.

If you were hoping that the horrible alien toxin would produce some satisfying body horror, like his chest cavity collapsing or alien goo issuing from his orifices, sorry; it’s not that kind of show. The kid just dies painfully while one of the cooks watches from a distance. Back at the Land of the Lost cave, an alien identified only as “Commander” explains to the Advocacy how they’ve proven that their “spores” are fatal to humans, and they’re ready to start using them to wipe out the locals. They also bring by a bound young blonde in a halter top with a bare midriff, which the Commander explains is a “gift” to the scientists to use in their experiments. Also, presumably, a gift to the anticipated target audience’s “dudes who like seeing a young blonde in a halter top with a bare midriff in bondage” demographic.

Meanwhile, at a stock image of looking up at a skyscraper that I think I’ve seen before, a businessman with the incredibly unlikely name “Marcus Madison Mason” is giving a press conference. Seems he’s invented some kind of new miracle food-crop which, among its other magnificent properties, is completely radiation resistant, which will come in important after the inevitable nuclear conflict that’s coming. That’s not me being wry: Mason actually literally states this as his reason for adding radiation resistance. Mason speaks in a strangely slow monotone that makes him sound like he’s on something. It’ll probably come in handy when he gets alien-possessed later since no one will think it odd that he suddenly sounds like a robot. A quick pan around the room does a surprisingly modern job of communicating character wordlessly. Mason is disingenuous. The board of directors — which includes future Robocop regular David Gardner — is bored with all this humanitarian bullshit. Mason’s wife, an elegant middle-aged woman is proud of her husband. Mason’s personal assistant, a much younger woman, wants to bone him, and probably already has. The wife is clueless, as indicated by her whispered promise of a “special dinner” when they do their obligatory chaste post-press-conference smooch for the cameras. The secretary looks away, clearly pissed at Mason’s flagrant flirting with his own wife right in front of her.

As soon as they leave the conference, Mason, still speaking weirdly slow, drops the humanitarian facade and starts complaining about recouping their research costs, and making plans to bleed the third world dry and bribe government officials to expedite their export licenses. Once behind the locked door of his office, he starts making out with Teri, the personal assistant. The actress who plays Teri looked a bit familiar to me, and a little research turned up that she’s Lori Haller, who would go on to appear in a handful of things I’ve seen, most prominently, as Josie’s mom in Strange Days at Blake Holsey High, a show that I find kinda wonderful for the way that it is quite obviously an attempt to do a lighter and fluffier version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with all instances of the word “supernatural” struck through and replaced with “SCIENCE^TM!”. For example, there is an episode whose actual plot is that when one of the characters starts to feel unnoticed by his friends, he turns invisible. Only instead of it being due to the hellmouth in the basement, it’s due to the wormhole in the science teacher’s office. He blows off her offer for sex on the claim that he has to work late, and gives her a gold watch to make up for it. We immediately cut to him giving a gold necklace to his mistress, another, more pinup-y kind of young blonde, who responds by taking off her clothes to give the audience an eyeful of the kind of PG-13 near-nudity that could only come about thanks to the ever-laxening broadcast standards that have come with the breakdown of Big Three Network dominance.

Back at the cottage, a nice exchange with the regular cast. Norton’s reading an article about Mason in Plot Convenience Magazine, while Harrison is picking horses from the track list — a very obviously redubbed Norton explains to the befuddled Ironhorse that Harrison’s mathematical genius gives him an impressive betting record, even if it’s only on paper (Harrison likes probability but doesn’t approve of gambling). Ironhorse struggles with a Rubik’s cube, then tosses it away in frustration just as Suzanne enters to vent about how hard it is to genetically engineer radiation-resistant biological weapons.

Norton helpfully comments on Mason’s grain, which inspires them to have General Wilson get Suzanne a meeting. Mason explains the radiation resistance as being purely of his own personal invention, but doesn’t let on any of its secrets. But it’s clear from his thoughtful looks that, despite Suzanne’s high neckline and enormous shoulder pads, he’s concocting a plan to bed her, and she agrees to have dinner with him for further discussion and artless flirting.

The aliens, meanwhile, have decided that Mason’s grain would be a good way to distribute their killer spores, which is a good thing because otherwise, this episode is going to be kind of pointless. They send three possessed little old ladies to acquire him. The little old ladies are played by Anne Mirvish, who hasn’t done much else, Billie Mae Richards, a prolific voice actor best known for the voices of Brightheart Racoon and Tenderheart Bear across multiple incarnations of the Care Bears franchise, and Maxine Miller. Miller is this episode’s second actress who looks really familiar. Not from anything in particular as it turns out, though. In addition to considerable voice-acting credits which include Babar, Double Dragon, The Baby Huey Show, and Martha Speaks, she’s a fairly prolific character actor who pretty much always plays “little old lady” characters, in such shows as So Weird, Seven Days, First Wave, The Outer Limits, Dead Like Me, Smallville, Supernatural and The Flash (Ironically, in an episode titles “Who is Harrison Wells?”)

If you were thinking “Hey, three little old lady aliens, and this Mason guy is boning three different ladies!” you’re actually way ahead of the episode. The little old ladies watch Mason at lunch with his girlfriend, then follow her as she goes shopping. A scene later, the girlfriend, accompanied by only two little old ladies, calls Mason to make a date.

Intermixed with all this, we get some more boardroom scenes with Mason to establish that he’s a pretty typical Robber Baron (According to IMDb, one of the suits in these scenes is our old friend Barry Flatman, but there’s only one guy I can’t rule out, and he doesn’t look much like him), and a scene back at the Cottage where Debi establishes that she likes playing with Suzanne’s lab rat, Caesar. The rat’s name should really be “Chekhov”.

While we’re back at the Cottage, Ironhorse spends a scene ribbing Harrison about Suzanne’s impending date with Mason, trying to get a rise out of him by noting that Mason’s “not a bad looking guy,” which, well, I guess I’ll just take his word for it, and that, “We may be losing our lady doctor to big business.”

So, um. What the fuck? I know it’s the ’80s and it’s a forelorn hope for me to imagine they might treat Suzanne like a human being and all, but “lady doctor”? And what’s up with Ironhorse trying to make Harrison all jealous? I guess Ironhorse sniping at Harrison shouldn’t be too surprising at this point, but this feels sort of dudebro for a guy who’s supposed to be a military hardass-type.

In keeping with the kind of heavily trope-aware show this is, Suzanne walks in on them to seek make approval on her little black dress, because clearly an academic weirdo and a straightlaced soldier are exactly the right guys to help her decide if her hair and shoulder pads are big enough. We get the cliche “Men awkwardly react when the female character they’d always been purely platonic with walks in all dolled up for a date and is Suddenly Hot.”

I do not like this cliche. I don’t like it so much that I am going to read against obvious intention here. Because while it is true that the writing clearly assumes that, yes, Harrison is attracted to Suzanne and is just in denial, and that yes, he’s supposed to be flustered by the thought of her being all sexied up and going out with a rich businessman, the truth is that Jared Martin does absolutely nothing to sell that. Given that we kinda know that Jared Martin can play Stupid Sexy Harrison, I’ve got to conclude that this is on purpose, and someone — the director, perhaps, or Martin himself — is mutinying against hamfisted attempts to ship those two. There’s no indication of repressed desire in Harrison’s reaction to Suzanne. The only emotion he shows in the scene at all is annoyance toward Ironhorse. His glower in the face of Ironhorse’s smug expression is easy to read not as anger at being “caught” by the soldier, but rather as frustration with Ironhorse’s insistence on treating his colleague as some sort of prize to be won. That is my story, and I am sticking to it.

Continue reading Thesis: The Good Samaritan (War of the Worlds 1×09)

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

We’re somewhere around the end of January, 1898, and readers of the New York Evening Journal have for a couple of weeks now been reading the adventures of an all-star cast of a war-fleet two thousand men and a hundred electrical space ships strong, set out under the command of Thomas Edison on an expedition to make war against the red planet in bloody retribution for the War of the Worlds they’d recently visited.

H. G. Wells had described the Martians as, “Minds which are to our minds as ours are to the beasts that perish.” Garrett P. Serviss is more direct: “During the brief war with the Martians upon the earth it had been gunpowder against a mysterious force as much stronger than gunpowder as the latter was superior to the bows and arrows that preceded it.” But thanks to the inventive genius of the Wizard of Menlo Park (with some nonspecific assistance by the world’s other great scientific minds), Earth was now equipped to go on the offensive. Though the Martians possessed superior intelligence, Edison had discovered the underlying scientific principles of their warships, the breakthrough which allowed him to develop technology that equaled and in some cases exceeded the would-be invaders — this will eventually be explained as a simple stroke of serendipity: Edison’s most fantastic inventions derived from highly precise manipulation of electromagnetic fields using a particular combination of metals not found on Mars.

Of the original crew of 2000, 940 remained when the fleet descended into the Martian atmosphere. And I can’t for the life of me account for those losses: I put the total number dead at fifty-five (Three to a meteor strike, forty in the two ships destroyed by heat ray, and twelve in the ground battle on the gold asteroid). It’s a bit difficult to square away the possibility of Edison losing half his fleet without the narrative noticing, so I’m going to assume this is just an editorial blunder.

Regardless, really, of whether the Earth expedition numbered just under a thousand or (as seems more likely) closer to two thousand, their initial survey of Mars daunts our heroes a little. Without coming right out and saying it, it seems like they’d taken for granted that Mars was a dying planet, and were surprised to find, “There could be no longer any question that it was a world which, if not absolutely teeming with inhabitants, like a gigantic ant-hill, at any rate bore on every side the marks of their presence and of their incredible undertakings and achievements.” They had somehow neglected to consider that two thousand men was not really a lot to conquer a population that numbered in the millions.

Descending for a better look at the surface, Edison’s fleet runs afoul of a fleet of Martian airships, prompting more concerns that perhaps humanity had not thought this invasion all the way through, and maybe it wasn’t a great idea to stick every competent scientist on the planet on one ship. Returning to orbit, they decide to circumnavigate the planet for a reconnoiter before launching a proper attack. This leads into a brief but enjoyable “marvel at the alien wonders” segment, where everything on Mars turns out to be weird exaggerations of their terrestrial equivalents. Like the canals, much like irrigation canals on Earth, but far vaster in scope. These “canals” had been “discovered” by Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877, and basically kicked off the whole notion of Mars being potentially inhabited, and thereby being one of the inspirations for this story’s antecedent (though Wells doesn’t reference them directly). Two problems with this: first, that Schiaparelli didn’t actually claim to have seen canals (“canals” being only a loose translation of the Italian word “canali”, which can refer equally to man-made canals and to natural gullies or riverbeds), and second, that the canals don’t exist. In the early 20th century, improved telescopes, photography, and later, satellite imagery revealed that what Shiaparelli had seen was not a network of interconnected straight-line canals, but random disconnected dark streaks in the landscape. But in one last twist, earlier this year, NASA confirmed that liquid water does indeed still seasonally flow on the surface of Mars. And what’s more, the reason we know this is that these seasonal flows are extremely briny, and therefore they leave behind evidence of their passing in the form of hydrated salts in the Martian soil which appear as — I really hope you’ve guessed it — dark streaks in the landscape. Everything on Mars is huge and exciting and classy in a way that if you mix it with the narrative’s casual racism, means it could probably pull 35% of the vote in the Republican primary. The red trees average a thousand feet in height. The buildings are made entirely of metal. The density and composition of the clouds makes them iridescent. They’ve got dogs the size of oxen. The Martian capital stands at the edge of a lake half again larger than the Caspian Sea.

No sooner have they completed their circuit than the Martians mount their defense, shrouding the entire planet in a cloud of black smoke that seems like it must be related to the black smoke from the novel, though the narrator doesn’t seem at all familiar with it. The smoke is identified as stifling, but not poisonous, its main feature being its opacity, which precludes any sort of direct attack on the surface without the risk of being ambushed. Before Edison can consider the logistics of settling in for a long-term siege, the commissary decides that this would be the most dramatically appropriate time to reveal that something’s gone wrong with their food cube storage and they’ve only got about ten days worth of food left before they’re forced to resort to cannibalism.

Which honestly would make an awesome story, but instead, Edison works out the frequency for smoke and sets the disintegrator for it. They rain down disintegration through the smoke at the huge city around the Lake of the Sun until the Martians start shooting back with heat rays (though by now, they’re just straight-up “electric beams”), destroying one ship and damaging three or four more. For no clear reason beyond bloodlust, the fleet descends through the smoke and has a go at laying waste to the city below, but they’re badly outnumbered. Though the flagship “seemed charmed” in escaping destruction, the rest of the fleet is less fortunate, and of the more than 90 ships that had descended through the smoke, only sixty survive to retreat back to low orbit. Down another 600 men, they realize that a direct assault won’t work, but with their provisions dwindling, retreat isn’t an option.

At this point, the narrative gains a new character, Colonel Alonzo Jefferson Smith (who I think must be actually fictional, since I’ve found no reference to a real one), described as an, ahem, “Old army officer who had served in many wars against the cunning Indians of the West.” In another of those moments of over-the-top comedy racism, he later refers to the Martians as “Indians”. Colonel Smith comes up with the idea of sending a third of the fleet around to the opposite side of the planet on a raid, while the remainder stays in orbit over the Lake of the Sun, outside the range of Martian weapons, basically just firing randomly at the planet to keep the Martian defenses focused there. Naturally, the narrator accompanies Smith’s expedition, because otherwise the story would get really dull for a few chapters. Colonel Jefferson’s ship is able to land undetected in a sparsely populated area, and he and the narrator become what they briefly assume to be the first humans on the surface of Mars.

They are disillusioned in this respect very quickly, thanks to the combination of the dumb luck that keeps working in favor of the Earthmen and the sorts of things that always have to come up in this kind of old-fashioned pulp adventure story. To wit, the first building they come to, they find four Martians just sort of hanging out listening to the singing of a human slave girl, a descendant of ancient abductees — if I’m not mistaken, that also makes this the first alien abduction story. After murdering the owners, they get the girl to show them where the pantry is, and are able to reprovision the fleet with food cubes (They call it “compressed food”, one of the few inventions that the Martians and Edison both mastered). Colonel Jefferson’s expedition returns to the main fleet, pausing only long enough for a few paragraphs of exposition about Mars’s moons that is so randomly inserted that you expect it to end with Serviss telling us that knowing is half the battle.

An unnamed linguistics professor from Heidelberg identifies her native tongue as proto-Aryan. I get the feeling he might be based on a real person, possibly a parody, due to his distinctive Yoda-like speech pattern: “I have her tongue recognized!”, “This girl, to the oldest family of the human race belongs. Her language every tongue that now upon the earth is spoken antedates” (Holy fuck, an SOV dependent clause in the middle of an SOV sentence). But he’s no one I could identify. With a month’s worth of food, Edison decides that their only chance at winning the war will be if the human woman can reveal some key weakness. So the fleet withdraws to the shadow of Deimos for two weeks while he asks the linguists from the fleet to learn her language. They say they’ll try. Except for the Heidelberg professor, who says, “It shall we do.”

It takes them three weeks, in the end, during which tensions are raised by a love-quadrilateral between the rescued woman, Jefferson, the Professor and “another handsome young fellow in the flagship”, but the Heidelberg professor eventually “masters the tongue of the ancient Aryans,” which he is confident, “will the speculations of my countrymen vindicate.” Which sounds kind of ominous in retrospect. The woman, who now identifies herself as “Aina”, tells the story of her people, and, um. Wow. This is some prime grade-A Von Daniken stuff. Her ancestors came from “The Vale of Cashmere”, which I think must refer to an old-timey name for Kashmir Valley, and not the section of Prospect Park. The Martians invaded and for some reason forcibly relocated the population to Egypt, where they used their amazing alien technology to build the Sphinx and also the pyramids, as a kind of reproduction of the mountains they’d been so impressed by in Kashmir (Serviss’s Mars being mountainless). Because the pyramids couldn’t possibly have been the work of “puny man”.

The Egyptian Martians were eventually afflicted by disease, just like their modern counterparts. I notice that it seems like Serviss has modified Wells’s presentation of the Martian downfall: it seems not to simply be that the Martians have no immunity to bacteria, but rather that they’re overly susceptible to one specific illness, not unlike the “Martian Flu” in The Great Martian War. They’d abandoned Earth then, but took Aina’s ancestors with them because they liked Earth music, but couldn’t get the hang of playing it themselves. Thousands of Mars-bred human slaves had served as entertainers to the Martian elite for millennia until Edison’s fleet had shown up. Fearful of a slave uprising, the Martians had slaughtered the humans, sparing only Aina, because this is a late nineteenth century adventure story and it always ends up being the undoing of one of the native chiefs that he’s taken a particular lecherous interest in the pretty white woman.

She goes on to explain that Mars is heavily fortified due to a war with, of all places, Ceres, and as such, the human force isn’t nearly great enough to defeat them head-on, but she does, as hoped, know their weakness. What follows is a detailed and boring account of nineteenth century scientific theory about Mars which is detailed and reasonable and which we have long-since learned to be wrong in every major respect. In brief, at the height of summer in the southern Martian hemisphere, the southern ice cap melts rapidly, and what with Mars being so flat (In the story. In real life, Mars is about three times bumpier per capita than Earth. But in 1898, all we knew of Martian topography came from its albedo, based on which Mars appeared to decompose neatly into “uniformly more shiny” and “uniformly less shiny”), the only thing that prevents the whole planet from flooding is that the water can flow from the shallow ocean on the south side of the planet to the shallow oceans on the north side through the Syrtis Major, where, it being winter up there, they rapidly freeze into the northern polar ice cap. Only the Martians threw up a big dam across Syrtis Major in order to control the movement of water back toward the poles and extend the growing season. And Aina reckons, because it seems to be something the Martians had worried about the Ceresans trying, that if they close the floodgates right around the solstice, it’ll flood the planet. That seems a little extreme to me, but I guess maybe they just mean it’ll flood the densely populated parts of the planet. And as luck would have it, the height of the seasonal flooding is happening right as we speak.

Which just leaves it to a small group of five — Edison, Smith, Serviss, Sydney Phillips (the “Handsome young man” from earlier) and Aina — to break into the most heavily guarded facility on the planet and sabotage it… Did Serviss just invent the Five Man Band trope? The actual mission doesn’t have much to it: they break in, shoot the guards, and close the floodgate. There’s two moments that might possibly be described as tense. When they reach the controls, Aina proves unable to help them determine which one closes the floodgates. And immediately afterward, they’re caught unawares by three Martian dam operators. The second problem is solved by the simple expedient of Serviss, Phillips and Smith shooting them with their disintegrators, which isn’t even as exciting as back when they rescued Aina, because it’s three-on-three rather than three-on-two, so they don’t even have to do any clever aiming to hit them all (Yeah, that was a thing. They had to angle their shots to hit two of them at a time because you’ve got to fiddle with the disintegrator for a minute to reset it between shots). The first is resolved by the even less exciting method of “Edison looks at the control panel for a minute and uses his genius to deduce which knob it is.”

Continue reading Deep Ice: We’d bring everybody down to his knees (Edison’s Conquest of Mars, Continued)

It is January 12, 1898. The modern city of New York just came into being when Brooklyn merged with the other boroughs. Tensions escalate between the US and Spain, and war is widely considered inevitable even with the sinking of the Maine a month away. Also, fun fact, some in Congress are suggesting that we ought to annex Japan. Tomorrow, Emile Zola will publish J’accuse, his defense of Richard Alfred Dreyfus. Friday, Lewis Carroll will die.

Topping the charts are “Eli Green’s Cake Walk” by Cullen and Collins, and the Manhattan Beach March by John Phillips Sousa and his band. Also, a bunch of songs I won’t mention because I am fairly sure their titles are now considered racial slurs. Speaking of which, Way Down East opens in New York, a play which will later be adapted to film by pioneering racist filmmaker D. W. Griffith. Yeah, sorry. 1898 is not a time period I have a lot of source materials for.

If you’re the reading sort, though, you may have just finished up reading one of two serials entitled Fighters From Mars, one in the New York Evening Journal, and the other in Boston Post. These two serials were attempts to capitalize on the popularity of a certain serial that had made its US debut the previous year in Cosmopolitan. And by “capitalize”, I mean, “rip the fuck off”, because Fighters From Mars, in both its versions, were just The War of the Worlds with all the geographical references translated to New York and Boston respectively, and all the boring science parts omitted. And they got away with it because I don’t know why. Probably something to do with international copyright law being a total clusterfuck back then, as opposed to the mild clusterfuck it is today.

But in both cities, Fighters From Mars was followed up by a piece of original fiction by science and science fiction writer Garrett P. Serviss. A bit of a late Victorian Carl Sagan, Serviss was a writer and lecturer on science who helped to popularize astronomy at the turn of the century.

At the time, there was a bit of a fad on for a genre of fiction now called the “Edisonade”, fictionalized accounts of the life of Thomas Edison, who, at the time, was basically the Chuck Norris of Science, and because no one had found out how awesome and crazy Nikola Tesla was yet. And as Fighters From Mars wound up, Serviss decided to follow it up with a sequel in the form of an Edisonade, Edison’s Conquest of Mars.

Preemptively fulfilling the promise of Goliath, it’s the story of Thomas Edison and a star-studded cast unlocking the miracles of super-science to take the fight back to Mars. Hilarity and genocide ensues.

If we take The War of the Worlds to be Science Fiction’s Dracula, Edison’s Conquest of Mars is Varney the Vampire. It’s a pulpy action story that does all the tropetastic science fictiony things Wells refuses to. It’s got space battles, disintegration beams, alien abductions, food cubes, even aliens building the pyramids. If it weren’t for the fact that every chapter doesn’t begin with retconning the end of the previous one, you could see this getting turned into a Republic serial. It’s also weirdly star-studded, featuring Thomas Edison, of course, but also Lord Kelvin and Wilhelm Röntgen in prominent roles, with guest appearances by William McKinley, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Emperor Mutsuhito. Which must have been awkward what with Congress grumbling about whether or not we should conquer him. Weirdly, the book retains Wells’s convention of telling the story from the point of view of an unnamed (It’s an author self-insert. He’s named in an illustration caption as “Professor Serviss”, but his name doesn’t appear in the text of the story) science writer.

But just because Serviss’s sequel is aimed at a more lowbrow audience, it’s not simply a big dumb space adventure. Serviss’s science-fetishism has a different focus from Wells’s, but it’s no less prominent. Where Wells would go on lengthy digressions about alien biology and obsess over the horror of something that can be explained and justified enough to sound plausible yet utterly other, Serviss’s interests are based more around engineering. He devotes a lot of time to describing the man-made technological miracles that result from studying Martian derelicts. Rather than an interest in what shape life and technology might take arising under completely different conditions, Serviss’s speculative science is grounded more firmly in being just one or two steps askew of reality. Space flight and death rays are depicted not as something utterly alien, but rather as only a couple of breakthroughs away from the readers’ own reality. It is, in essence, steampunk, but approached from the opposite direction: rather than contemporary writers trying to invoke the trappings of Victorian science fiction, this is a Victorian writer trying to anticipate science fiction of the 1950s. Being just a step askew of reality describes the science of Edison’s Conquest of Mars in other ways too: his Martians are not cephalopods, but large, lumpy humanoids, not far off from the rubber forehead aliens of Star Trek.

The story opens with the final retreat of the Martians. New Jersey briefly reenters our larger story, as the few Martian survivors evacuate the planet from Bergen County in a “projectile car” launched by an explosion so powerful that it collapses the Palisades and levels the remains of New York City (which, don’t forget, literally only started existing in its modern form today). But despite the great destruction around the globe, mankind recovered, with the countries and regions which had been far from the fighting sending aid to help in the rebuilding. Serviss makes a surprisingly insightful observation, and one which is particularly relevant to us, given what I’ve been saying about the “alien amnesia” angle of the TV series:

But the worst was not yet. More dreadful than the actual suffering and the scenes of death and devastation which overspread the afflicted lands was the profound mental and moral depression that followed. This was shared even by those who had not seen the Martians and had not witnessed the destructive effects of the frightful engines of war that they had imported for the conquest of the earth. All mankind was sunk deep in this universal despair

Further dispiriting mankind were the observations by astronomers of increased activity on Mars, taken to indicate that a renewed invasion was being prepared. “But there was a gleam of hope of which the general public as yet knew nothing,” Serviss tells the reader, though: “It was due to a few dauntless men of science, conspicuous among whom were Lord Kelvin, the great English savant; Herr Roentgen, the discoverer of the famous X ray, and especially Thomas A. Edison, the American genius of science.” Headquartered at Edison’s lab (whose survival is kind of a surprise, given the scale of the destruction to north Jersey: Edison was based, as the story confirms, in West Orange), the world’s most famous scientists had learned from the Martian debris and figured out how to reproduce and counter the power of the invaders.

This is simultaneously the most and least steampunk thing about the book: there’s actually no steam. It’s 1898, the age of the miracles of electricity. Everything, everything in this story is electrical. The word appears over a hundred times. Edison’s key breakthrough from the Martian debris is, “How to produce, in a limited space, electricity of any desired potential and of any polarity, and that without danger to the experimenter or to the material experimented upon.” Pretty much everything falls out from that. First and foremost, since (Serviss finds this somehow both too technical and too obvious to need to explain beyond an analogy to the tail of a comet which sounds like complete bullshit to me) gravity can be counteracted by an electrical force, Edison’s discovery leads immediately to the invention of powered flight, a whole five years before a non-bullshit method of powered flight would be invented by a couple of bicycle repairmen. By polarizing the exterior of an airtight metal craft, one of those great old-timey bullet-shaped science fiction space ships, Edison could make the ship repel itself away from the Earth. A test-flight to the moon proves the whole thing plausible enough that humanity gets the bright idea of invading Mars, and it’s on.

Edison’s next miracle invention is… A sonic screwdriver. Sort of. The word “sonic” never comes up — not “electric” enough for this story. But that’s pretty much what it is. A weapon which induces harmonic vibrations in whatever it’s aimed at. Turn the dial to the resonant frequency of the dominant material in something, push the button, and it vibrates itself out of existence. Edison demonstrates this by setting it to 386 MHz (Yes. Edison has documented the harmonic frequency of feathers) and vaporizing all the feathers off of a bird. And then he does a quick frequency sweep to disintegrate the rest of the bird. Because Edison is a dick. To demonstrate that the device had applicability beyond torturing small animals, he deploys a battery of the devices to safely demolish a dangerously unstable condemned building.

A warfleet is commissioned, and ahead of its launch, all the important nations send their leaders to Washington to celebrate, and here things get silly for a bit. Kaiser Wilhelm throws a brief fit, jealous that a good old-fashioned monarch like him should have to take a backseat in the greatest war ever waged by man to a democratic republic. He also gets upset when Edison declines to attempt to make the science of the Disintegrator, “Plain to the crowned heads.” (Czar Nicholas gets a kick out of that). Wilhelm is also bothered by the smell when Edison demonstrates the disintegrator on an inkwell. I know next to nothing about Kaiser Wilhelm, but I do love the idea of him just being a belligerent jackass who wants to prove his length and girth by getting his war on, given that more or less that is how the history of the German Empire is going to go.

There’s a big go-round to fund the mission, whose price tag is estimated at $25 billion (Being 1898, it’s phrased in the delightfully archaic “twenty-five thousand millions of dollars”), about $650 billion in today’s money. Which frankly is ridiculously cheap for an interplanetary war. With no one wanting to be outdone, the US immediately puts up a billion, to the delight of everyone, even, “One of the Roko Tuis, or native chiefs, from Fiji,” who, “Sprang up and brandished a war club.” Yeah. This book is going to be just delightful in its fair and nuanced treatment of other cultures (The author seems to be particularly enamored with the Emperor of China, who’s described as friendly and affable, is amused by everything, prone to dispensing Ancient Chinese Wisdom, and whose dialogue I won’t quote here because it all sounds like it’s coming out of the mouth of a white college girl whose YouTube video is about to go viral. Sufficed to say, if this were adapted for the screen, he’d be played by Christopher Lee in yellowface). A bidding war breaks out between the Germans and the British, and the king of Siam throws in a huge diamond. Since the author is American, the US agrees to scratch up the difference after the various countries of the world have all been shamed or goaded into bankrupting themselves, and Edison’s given a no-bid contract not subject to any sort of oversight. Nice work if you can get it.

The fleet launches six months later, a hundred ships strong. The narrator scores a spot on Edison’s flagship. It’s never explained why he’s got so much access to Edison, but you don’t really need to justify a media-savvy guy like Edison singling out a reporter prone to fawning. Also assigned to the flagship are Lord Kelvin, Lord Rayleigh, Röntgen, Sylvanus P. Thompson, and, randomly, Moissan (the guy who invented Moissanite). During their shakedown cruise to the moon, one of the ships is pierced by a meteor, killing “two or three” of the crew. The others are safely evacuated from the airless ship and eventually recover, because what’s a couple of hours sucking on hard vacuum?

They stop over on the moon to bury the dead and repair the damaged ship, and discover that though it’s just as uninhabitable as in the real world, it had presumably not always been so, as there’s evidence of a long-gone civilization, including a giant footprint. Now, when I was a kid, it felt like it was a convention in adventure stories, children’s and adults’ alike, that the heroes in an adventure story weren’t allowed any sort of material gain: the Grail falls into the pit when the seal opens up, One-Eyed Willy’s ship breaks through the cliff wall and sails out into the sunset, Alexander the Great’s tomb self-destructs, the treasure in the old haunted mansion is “worthless” Confederate money, the Atlantean computer made out of platinum falls into the magma pit, the alien healing device disintegrates when touched, the super-warp-drive engine breaks after one use, that sort of thing. The only stuff you got to take home with you was fake rewards like “self-confidence” and “character”, and if any of the plot coupons you collected along the way actually did have a resale value, they had to be expended in the final battle. I didn’t cotton on at the time, but that was a fairly recent adventure trope when I started encountering it. In older adventure stories, like, say, this one, adventuring was in large part all about that, ahem, booty, with loving descriptions of the valuable swag the heroes won along the way. Accordingly, the moon’s got mountains made of diamond (Probably. Moissan offers that they might be something similar to diamond but even more valuable. Because space.), and everyone resolves that what with the moon diamonds, this invasion will basically pay for itself.

Continue reading Deep Ice: I believe they’re learning how to fly (Garrett P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars)