Category: TV

It is November 20, 1989. It is the last day you will be able to smoke on US domestic flights, as President Bush is about to sign the smoking ban into law. The Namibian Constitutional Assembly we mentioned last week starts work on writing a constitution for the newly independent country. Lebanese president René Moawad is assassinated in Beirut. Space Shuttle mission STS-33 launches on Wednesday night, the first night launch since the shuttle program resumed after the Challenger disaster. The heavens and the Earth literally aligned that day, with a conjunction of Venus, Mars, Uranus, Neptune, Saturn and the Moon, which probably looked pretty cool but has absolutely no greater significance.

Except for the fact that, again literally, within one week of breaking out, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia is more or less won. On Monday, the demonstrations in Prague had grown to half a million people. On Wednesday, the Federal Television threatens to go on strike unless allowed to air uncensored reports on the protests. Thursday, the Minister of Defense announces, despite the fact that the military has just told him they’re totally ready to do it, that he’s not going to have the military go in and break up the demonstrations. And on Friday, the entire government resigns. This isn’t quite the end of Communism in Czechoslovakia: it’ll be the middle of next week before they alter their constitution to allow non-communists to run the place. By the end of the year, dissident playwright Václav Havel will be President, a move widely considered one of the best outcomes of any revolution ever. In fact, the Velvet Revolution goes so fast and so smooth, despite the fact that there were at least five points where Communist hard-liners could have crushed it (Mostly by crushing the protesters. With tanks.), conspiracy theorists apparently claim the whole thing was staged as a cover for the ruling government to sneak out the back door while surreptitiously maintaining their power in secret. Czechoslovakia, always something of a marriage of convenience for many of its peoples, would eventually dissolve into the independent Czech Republic and Slovakia at the end of 1992 in what’s sometimes called the “Velvet Divorce”.

Future American Idol Candice Glover is born this week. Back to the Future Part 2 opens in theaters Wednesday. Next Friday will bring us National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. The following weeks, we’ll see The War of the Roses, Glory, Driving Miss Daisy, Tango and Cash, Born on the Fourth of July, and, of course, literally the last of the ’80s Kids’ Action-Adventure Movies, The Wizard. The Wizard is remembered mostly now as it was perceived mostly then, as a shameless commercial tie-in with Nintendo that had no redeeming features and which drew its market entirely from the promise of seeing thirty seconds of pre-release footage from Super Mario Bros. 3, but this perception does the movie a terrible disservice, as, if you actually watch it, it’s a perfectly good ’80s Kids’ Action-Adventure Movie, in the vein of such classics as The Goonies, Explorers, Flight of the Navigator and Adventures in Babysitting (Not that it’s quite as good as any of those, but it’s certainly no more than a little worse. Maybe more on par with Big Shots or The Legend of Billy Jean). Besides, I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad.

“Blame it on the Rain” takes the top position on the Billboard charts. New on the top 10 this week are Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville with “Don’t Know Much”, a song that usually dampens my eyes a bit, and Phil Collins with “Another Day in Paradise”. It will take the top spot for the last two weeks of the year and the first two weeks of 1990, right after a two-week stint by what is the most famous Billy Joel song if you were ten at the time, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, which is at number 5 this week, teaching me everything I know about American History. This is Phil Collins’s second number one this year, the other being “Two Hearts” back in January. This has, on balance, been a good year and intensely ’80s year for music: “Every Rose Has its Thorn” in January, “The Living Years” in March, “Eternal Flame”, “The Look”, “She Drives me Crazy”, and “Like a Prayer” in April, “Listen to Your Heart” and “When I See You Smile” in November, and “Another Day in Paradise” and “We Didn’t Start the Fire” in December. There were, of course, also some real oddities, like Milli Vanilli hitting the top spot three times despite never actually singing anything, former Kids Incorporated star Martika making it to number one for two weeks in July with “Toy Soldiers”, or the week that Prince had a number one hit. Prince having a number one hit should be the least remarkable thing in the world, except that he did it with “Batdance”.

If I seem to be drifting forward in time a little bit with my history and pop-culture recap this week, it’s because after this week, Paramount is pretty much done airing new shows for the rest of the year. Friday the 13th goes out with “Femme Fatale”, in which a cursed 16mm film print can exchange a noir leading lady for a live one. Star Trek The Next Generation‘s final offering for the year is “The Vengeance Factor”, an episode I don’t recall being impressed with that much. Head over to Vaka Rangi to see why I’m wrong. I do recall being so surprised that Riker actually had to kill Yuta and couldn’t talk her down that I completely missed the fact that, due to the difficulty of the special effects shot with other things moving in the frame, Picard just sits completely motionless as Riker shoots someone dead in front of him. Also on TV this week, a new Columbo on Saturday, and MacGyver airs “The Ten Percent Solution”, which is about honest-to-goodness Nazis, and ends on an honest-to-goodness “We are everywhere” ending, with Mac and his friends discovering a Nazi conspiracy infiltrating all levels of American society in secret.

If I was hoping to work toward a thesis that Debi’s evolution as a character is the emotional center of this series, I could not have asked for a better follow-up to “Loving the Alien” than “Night Moves” (Also, coincidentally, if I was hoping to work toward a thesis of the show liking to use song titles for its episodes). Though I’ll warn you up front, as with many things in this series, there’s not going to be consistent follow-through on that (Also, again, the song titles thing).

“Night Moves” is the first properly Suzanne-centric episode we’ve had. And it’s a bit problematic. While it’s hardly a low-stakes episode, a lot of the plot is coded female in a cliche and deliberate way: a good bit of the episode’s thematic grounding is based around the relationship between mothers and daughters, and the alien plot is balanced with a very soap operatic character plot. Now, there are certainly elements of soap opera that adventure TV will benefit from importing over the next decade, but what we see here is only the most superficial borrowing, essentially character tension for its own sake, a kind of cheap sensationalism that’s made worse by the obvious truth that they’d never try something like this with any of the male characters. It’s also an episode that suffers from some pretty grating omissions, lots of things that seem to either set up or resolve story elements that just aren’t there. It’s easy enough to figure out what’s going on, but it often feels like the emotional justification or payoff for things just isn’t there.

Also, Dylan tells me that it isn’t scary, and that he’d have liked it better if it were. This is the first episode I’ve let Dylan watch, as I remembered it as having only fairly contained violence and no gore to speak of. There were a couple of things I hadn’t remembered were in this episode, and I wouldn’t have let him watch it if I’d remembered, but fortunately, he didn’t seem to notice. I’m pretty liberal with what I’ll let Dylan watch. I try to avoid anything I think will scare him too badly, though I can’t always judge what will scare him, and he claims to like scary things (Though to this day, there’s one episode of his favorite show, Transformers: Rescue Bots, that he won’t watch because he’s scared of Colonel Quarry). We restrict shows with fighting if we catch him imitating it, but he’s been pretty good about it, and I have a hard time finding a rational basis for declaring War of the Worlds more violent than Power Rangers.

The Morthren are once again in trouble this week, because their nutrient tanks have gotten contaminated, and there’s dissension in the ranks a-brewin’ with various non-speaking roles fighting in the background over the chance to suck the last few drops of precious protein-rich fluid from the ceiling phalluses. One Morthren’s been placed in a bag hanging from the ceiling for emergency medical treatment after he foolishly ate an unspecified “Earth food”, which has caused a serious allergic reaction, in the form of rapidly growing face-pustules which explode open with blue glow-stick juice rather than the usual green. On my first watching, I assumed this was a fatal reaction, but he’s still there later, so presumably the effects were messy but not life-threatening. Too bad they can’t eat, say, flowers.

Hunger has made Mana and Malzor even more passive-aggressive toward each other than usual. Mana’s working on a solution, but Morthren plants won’t grow in Earth soil, exposed to Earth air under Earth sunlight. The physical acting from Catherine Disher is really great in this scene. She very clearly conveys that she’s in physical discomfort. But because her body language isn’t meant to be entirely human, she doesn’t quite look like the thing that’s wrong with her is hunger. But it’s still clearly something like hunger in that it’s constant, nagging, and distracting, but not like the pain of an injury or illness. She’s short-tempered, maybe a little shaky, often hunched over rather than her normal stiff-backed pose, and, a very specific tic, she keeps touching her throat. She’ll eventually develop a workaround using heavily polluted soil and a prism, whereupon she’ll muse lovingly on the prospect of exterminating humanity, which I assume is just the hunger getting to her, because this is really the first time she’s shown a specific interest in genocide: she’s otherwise tended to view the mechanics of wiping out humanity as sort of beneath her. Also, the native food is poisonous and, as established earlier, the air is so toxic to them that minor cuts lead to life-threatening infections within minutes. This planet does not seem like a good choice for them to invade.

We hop on over to a farming commune somewhere outside the unspecified city where the show takes place. Farmer John Owen and his dog are out at night for some reason when they spot what they assume to be “city folk” gleaning from the fields. These fields are full of ordinary-looking corn, but the farmer makes an offhand comment about how the thieves aren’t liable to find much since the soil isn’t especially arable, what with the apocalypse.

Because this is television, the dog quite naturally has an inexplicable ability to sense the presence of evil and runs off. And here’s how you know that all that fruity peace and love bullshit from last week was a load: we hear the distinctive sound of Morthren weapons and the dog stops barking. If there is one thing ’80s television has taught me, it’s that anyone who kills a dog is utterly, irredeemably evil. John goes off to investigate and is struck by a Morthren weapon set to gurn.

Back in the city, Blackwood, Suzanne and Debi are part of a mob trying to buy fresh produce off of a street vendor. They trade a pair of boots and a knife for a sack of apples, but Debi gets mugged as they’re pushing through the crowd. And in keeping with our theme of Debi’s evolution from an ordinary thirteen-year-old to a stone cold killer, Debi responds by chasing the thief, knocking him down, and kicking the shit out of him while screaming, “I’ll kill you!” over and over until Blackwood and Suzanne pull her off of the guy.

Upon returning to their underground lair, Suzanne declares that she’s had enough of this shit and resolves to take Debi away to live with her mother. Blackwood points out that Suzanne hasn’t spoken to her mother in years, and that she “doesn’t know what the country is like anymore,” alluding to the vague apocalypse that’s going on. Kincaid volunteers the grizzled loner cliche that running away doesn’t solve anything. Suzanne calls her mother, Rebecca, on the video phone, and, over sappy Full House music, begs her to put them up for a while. There’s some obvious tension between them, with mom assuming Suzanne’s gotten herself into some kind of trouble by the very fact that she’s calling, and Suzanne essentially begging for forgiveness. They do try to get into what the beef is between the two of them later, but even after hearing them explain it, it’s still sort of vague and doesn’t really add up.

As soon as she gets off the phone, Rebecca steps out of the room to meet her husband, and you can take three guesses who it is. Yep. John, now a clone, is Suzanne’s stepfather. It’s easy enough for the audience to tell that something is off about him, as he’s a bit distant and strangely unconcerned about the disappearance of his beloved dog, but it’s not enough to alert his wife yet: she only really becomes bothered the next day when he reveals that he’s gone behind everyone’s back and leased some of their land to the “government” for experiments in soil restoration.

Clone John demonstrates the interesting way that clones are handled in this show. The cliche would for him to be weird and sort of zombie-like. Instead, like Clone Jo last time, the clone retains much of his original’s personality, just reoriented to serve the Morthren. He’s personable with the other members of the commune. He plays off his sudden willingness to rent out some of their land to a secret “Department of Agriculture” project as determination to save the failing farm. Later, when Ardix mentions the need to replace Rebecca with a clone, he even says that he’s “looking forward to it,” eager to bring his wife “in” on things. All the way back to “The Second Wave”, there’s been a theme of the clones thinking of themselves as legitimately equivalent to the originals, not an ersatz copy, but rather a “perfection” of the flawed original. In its way, it’s a bit like a religious conversion.

Suzanne is surprised the next day to be met at the gate by armed guards, but their handsome and charismatic leader is expecting her and waves her through after a little bit of flirting. Kincaid and Blackwood say their goodbyes and head back for the city. Well, Blackwood says goodbye; Kincaid just stands around with his hands in his pockets looking awkward.

Rebecca welcomes them, then she and Suzanne stand around awkwardly and make vague allusions to the unspecified falling out in their past, including an obvious sore spot when Rebecca mentions Debi’s father, Danny (Though she doesn’t say anything specific enough to guess at his fate, or how this plays into the tension between them). John, very surprisingly, is welcoming to Suzanne and acts as a peacemaker, even diffusing the situation when Rebecca freaks out upon discovering that Debi’s carrying a gun.

As a scientist (turns out Suzanne is a microbiologist, which I never woulda guessed in a million years), Suzanne is curious about the “government” experiment, and John introduces her to Paul Fox, who predictably turns out to be the handsome and charismatic flirty guy from the front gate. They flirt and discuss soil decontamination while Rebecca and John have an argument about trusting the government. I gather this commune must have been a bunch of aging hippies who dropped out of polite society years ago to stick it to The Man, but have since grown up and become grumpy in the face of harsh reality.

Back in the city, Kincaid and Blackwood celebrate their new living arrangements by going to a strip club and making me regret letting Dylan watch this with me. I mean, we’re obviously only talking about “Seven O’Clock on a Saturday on Broadcast Television In 1989”-levels of luridness, but still. In keeping with the gold standard of gender essentialist bullshit in ’80s television, without the civilizing influence of a woman, the two have regressed to somewhere between fratboys and cavemen, and eventually get in a fight over whether or not they miss the girls, and it almost comes to blows, but another patron gets annoyed at these two yoyos shouting right next to him when he’s just here to ogle the dancers and takes a swing at Blackwood, prompting our heroes to forget their argument and team up to ruin that poor stripper’s evening by trashing the place. Blackwood gets to be a particular badass, casually dropping someone with an elbow to the face without even looking.

Suzanne and her mother have it out with more vague arguing about the still vague tension between them. The most concrete thing we get is that Rebecca apparently “took up with” a string of different men over the years before settling down with John. This leads to a real-for-real proper Soap Opera style slap-fight, because, damn it, Suzanne, slut-shaming your own mother is not cool at all.

Suzanne runs off to Paul Fox, who comforts her with some platitudes about giving people the benefit of the doubt. While that’s going on, Ardix turns on the prism in the greenhouse to get the plants to grow by altering the spectrum of the sunlight… In the middle of the night. He warns the clones that the atmosphere will become toxic to humans as a result, and then kills a bird in case the audience doesn’t know what “toxic” means. And then he apparently teleports back to the Morthren base in the city because 30 seconds later he’s there (in different clothes) to watch Mana pour hydrogen peroxide over a potted plant she’s grown and then have an orgasm as she drinks the resulting foamy mixture. Ardix promises her that they’re preparing additional greenhouse sites while she feeds some of her plant juice to the bagged sick alien from the first scene. They inform Malzor of their success and let him take a swig of plant juice as well, in order that the audience can see Denis Forest’s O-face, since this episode has, as Dylan said, not been very scary so far.

Even without Ardix magically being on the farm one minute and the Morthren base the next (The entire rest of this episode seems like it takes place over the course of a single night, and he’ll be back again before the climax), this scene feels misplaced. Like, shouldn’t she have confirmed that her technique produced edible food before they built a big honkin’ greenhouse? I seriously kind of think that this episode was originally plotted out to start with all the scenes at the Morthren base, followed by the confrontation in the city, then all the scenes at the farm. But they went back and chopped up all the sequences so they could interleave them to make the pacing feel more modern. Like we saw with Captain Power, one of the things that they really like to do in War of the Worlds is cut back and forth frequently between the “hero” plot and the “villain” plot. The technique keeps the show moving and makes it feel fast-paced even when not much is happening. In Captain Power, it became grating because it left you with the feeling that both sides were simultaneously omniscient and incompetent, as it seemed like Lord Dread and Captain Power would invariably find out instantly about what their respective sworn enemies were doing, and frequently gave the impression that Lord Dread personally micromanaged every single thing that happened in his empire. In War of the Worlds, they’re better about having the two sides in the dark about each other, but the interleaving of scenes is made without any real respect for either the logic or the logistics of the plot. As a result, you end up with stuff like this, where Mana, ostensibly a consummate scientist, is halfway through implementing their farming program before she concludes her preliminary experiments. Or last week, where one half the cast goes through six times as much plot in the same span of time as the other.

Continue reading Antithesis: Night Moves (War of the Worlds 2×08)

This is Harrison Blackwood. These may be the last words I ever speak on this Earth.

It is November 21, 1988. Following the massive success of the US’s general election a few weeks ago, Canada holds federal elections of their own, reelecting Brian Mulroney and the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. Ted Turner buys Jim Crockett Promotions and turns it into the WCW. Liberace’s former beau, Scott Thorson, is sentenced to a year in jail and two on probation for his role in a drug-related robbery ring. Over the weekend, LA Law‘s Corbin Bernsen celebrated his recent victory defending Donald Duck on kidnapping charges by marrying Max Headroom star Amanda Pays. Tomorrow, the US Air Force will publicly unveil the Northrom Grumman B-2 Spirit, better known as the Stealth Bomber. In Perestroika news, on Friday, American chessmaster William Donaldson and Soviet grandmaster Elena Akhmilovskaya will elope (The marriage lasts about a year).

The Escape Club cedes the top spot on the charts to Bon Jovi’s “Bad Medicine”. Will to Power’s “Baby, I Love Your Way/Free Bird Medley” is galloping up the charts, crippling the musical background of people who were just the right age in 1988 by becoming the definitive version of both songs. In two weeks, it’ll unseat “Bad Medicine”, followed closely by Chicago with “Look Away”. Tuesday, CBS will air Garfield: His 9 Lives. It’s good, but the book is better. My two favorite stories, “Babes and Bullets” and “Primal Self” are omitted (Babes and Bullets would be adapted into a full-length special the next year). Wednesday, they’ll air Star Wars, which is what that movie was called back then, none of this “Episode IV: A New Hope” nonsense. And in the not-too-distant future, this Thursday, AD, independent Minneapolis television station KTMA-23 will debut Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Much-delayed by the writer’s strike, Star Trek the Next Generation finally starts its second season with “The Child”. There is no way around this: “The Child” is a terrible idea for an episode. It was a terrible idea when it was drafted for Star Trek: Phase II back in the ’70s. It was a terrible idea when The Avengers used it for issue 200 back in 1980. It will be a terrible idea in 2012 when James Cawley adapts it for an episode of his Star Trek: Phase II fan series. It’s retrograde, demeaning, gender-essentialist, rape-apologetic, reproductive futurism bullshit and even the technobabble is debunked 19th century pseudoscience, and the script’s been adapted with a sledgehammer to fit it into the very different style of TNG and map the roles of Decker and Ilia onto Riker and Troi, characters who are only similar if you stopped paying attention to anything at all beyond the single paragraphs in the first draft of the series bible. Seriously, if you, as a writer, find yourself writing, “Female character is forcibly impregnated against her will by a mysterious alien force, but she’s cool with it because Motherhood is Magical and Wonderful,” just stop writing, go find yourself a bench vise, and crush your balls in it. Josh Marsfelder is as kind to the episode as just about anyone could be, which is still pretty unkind.

Friday the 13th The Series stays true to form with a plot that feels like it was constructed by rolling a bunch of dice: “Read My Lips” has Micki struggle to save a friend from her fiancé’s ventriloquist’s dummy, which has been brought to life by — I am not making this up — Adolph Hitler’s silk boutonnière.

With thanksgiving approaching, this week’s War of the Worlds is the last until Christmas. “To Heal the Leper” puts the aliens on the defensive again, taking desperate measures to avoid their sudden defeat. It isn’t as good as “Goliath is my Name”, but it’s still fairly solid. The big step backwards from last time is that Harrison and company end up having very little involvement in the actual plot: they spend the bulk of the episode operating in parallel to the aliens, and the one point at the end where the stories intersect is largely superfluous: the plot is held together in large part by the expedient of a whole lot of “And then Harrison just randomly happens to be passing by and notices…”

This does give the episode an interesting structure, though, one that’s even more “cop show” than we’ve been seeing so often, with Harrison taking on the role of a detective trying to track down the killer before he can strike again (That he fails in this regard is very much in line with the series’s general pessimism). Plus, Ann Robinson makes her second appearance as Sylvia Van Buren, which is absolutely lovely and I just wish they’d given her more screen-time.

By this point in the series, you hopefully won’t be surprised when I tell you that we open in a scene that feels like its own separate show. The zany comedy relief morgue assistant returns to the office after picking up lunch and goes looking for the brilliant but quirky medical examiner with a penchant for solving crimes… But finds that someone’s tossed the place, pulled all the bodies out of their lockers, ripped the skulls open, and absconded with the brains of the recently deceased.

Back in the Land of the Lost, the Advocacy is in a bad way, because one of them (Officially, the advocates are named Horek, Oshar and Xana, though this never comes up in dialogue) caught the Chicken Pox (To my younger readers, this is a disease that every human being on the planet used to get when they were like 10 or so, and parents would even deliberately infect their children because parents are terrible, vindictive people, thinking it was somehow “better” for all of them to get it out of the way at the same time. Occasionally (About 9,000 times a year back in 1988) this would lead to a kid dying, but that was a small price to pay for not having to take the extra days off work. It’s why just about everyone you know over the age of thirty has a small scar near their left eye), and though the aliens were able to treat the disease itself, the advocate has lingering brain damage as a result. The remaining advocates are rendered basically useless, their wisdom rendered “imperfect” without the third, and are prone to making impulsive, terrible decisions. That might be interesting to keep in mind given how often it seems like the aliens out in the field are prone to making impulsive, terrible decisions: it seems to be a feature of the alien mindset that they can only think properly when three of them are working together. But I also notice that we don’t see the alien scientists trioing off. I wonder if that’s related to the apparently disregard the Advocacy has for scientists. Could it be that the scientist caste is psychologically different from the rest of their race, trading the triumvirate structure for greater individual intellect? That could easily lead to a cultural bias against scientists, who’d be seen as those weirdos who don’t like three-ways and who are always sort of suspect because all the rest of their race turn into complete knuckle-draggers when they try heavy thinking without a spotter.

The aliens have built this giant lucite tetrahedron machine and stuffed it full of human brains, many of which are quivering under their own power in order to show that they’re still fresh enough to twitch, except for the fact that brains do not work that way. The alien scientists reckon that if they juice a bunch of human brains, they can create an elixir that will halt the brain deterioration in the sick advocate and allow him to recover. Unfortunately for them, the machine just blows itself up, because human brains don’t keep well in radioactive caves.

Despite the risk and the fact that they’re barely functional, the two healthy advocates decide to risk heading out into the human world where they can pick the freshest locally-sourced free-range artisanal brains. Thus, they stuff themselves and the third one into a trio of kidnapped joggers, played by young actors early in their careers, one of whom turns out to be future Sons of Anarchy star Kim Coates.

The Advocacy’s incapacity has not gone unnoticed back at the Cottage: Norton summons the others in a panic because the usually very regular pattern of alien transmissions had become erratic, then ceased altogether. Ironhorse tells a anecdote about the significance of the Coyote in Native American culture which turns out to have nothing to do with anything that happens in this episode, and seems like it’s just there to remind the audience that he’s a Native American (He’ll tell a similarly seemingly-relevant but actually pointless anecdote about eating the liver of one’s enemies later). Suzanne suggests the possibility that the aliens encountered a more radiation-resistant disease and it’s wiped them out once and for all. Ironhorse suggests that perhaps the aliens decided the invasion wasn’t worth the effort and just packed up and went home, though the look in Richard Chaves’s eyes says that even he is getting tired of this skeptic schtick.

Before Harrison can compose a thorough counterargument, he’s interrupted by a call from the mental hospital, summoning him to come visit Sylvia. In keeping with the laws and traditions of TV storytelling, they do not tell him why over the phone. Harrison brings Ironhorse along in the hopes of shutting him up about the possibility of the aliens leaving.A nice touch about the hospital scenes is that they’ve brought back the character actors from “Thy Kingdom Come” for the minor characters in the hospital, and they’ll return again the next time we see Ann Robinson. Diane Douglas, best know for playing a nurse in Billy Madison, plays Sylvia’s nurse. John Dee (not the adviser to Queen Elizabeth I) returns as the old man who walks around saying that it isn’t safe out there. John Dee, for what it’s worth, was a character actor famous through the ’80s for playing an old man, in such roles as “Old Man in Park” in Mom, The Wolfman, and Me, “Old Man in Lobby” in Switching Channels, “Old Man in Jail” in City of Shadows, and “Old Man” in Adventures in Babysitting (You may recall, Captain Power voice actor Deryck Hazel also had a small part). He also appeared as the old man in the Captain Power episode “The Mirror in Darkness“. His first TV role, for what it’s worth, was as Merlin in the 1979 Canadian educational series Read All About It!, a wonderfully goofy science fiction/fantasy series about poetic meter, magic, zoning laws, copy-editing, alien invasions, journalism, local politics, ghosts, and Canadian history some people probably fondly remember from middle school reading class, which I’d highly recommend except that the incredibly byzantine situation with its legal rights means that it’s never gotten a home video release and probably never will.

To Harrison’s befuddlement, Sylvia is doing perfectly fine — and is more than a little annoyed at his reluctance to accept that. She’s done her hair up, given herself a manicure, and is packing a bag because she’s decided to go on a vacation to see the outside world. The change in her symptoms has convinced her that the aliens really are gone, and she cautions Harrison about obsessing over them too much for fear he’ll end up institutionalized himself.

Ironhorse isn’t as pushy as he was back in “The Walls of Jericho“, but he thinks that Sylvia’s condition clinches it, and he certainly has a good point in that Harrison’s entire reason for dragging him along was that Harrison supposedly trusts her. Yet Harrison, having not gotten the answer he wanted out of her, is suddenly the skeptical one. John Dee wanders by, making his speech about how it’s not safe out there, and piques Harrison’s interest by pointing out a newspaper article about the brain-snatching at the morgue.

He drags Ironhorse along with him to go investigate, to the chagrin of both Ironhorse, and also Detective Harley, who’s working the case. Ironhorse is willing to humor Harrison at least far enough as to order the local police to call the President to verify their credentials, but he doesn’t see an alien angle. In fact, in a few minutes he’ll suggest an alternate theory which will sound ridiculous to you, but if you’ve been reading this blog so far, you’ll know is exactly the sort of thing popular culture would demand he consider in 1988: maybe it’s a satanic cult. There’s something cutely proto-Mulder about Harrison in these scenes, his scoffing, “Don’t be ridiculous, this obviously isn’t a satanic cult; it’s clearly aliens,” though it’s worth pointing out that Harrison never dismisses the idea of a satanic cult as outlandish per se, just obviously not what’s at work here.

Specifically, he asserts, and the others concede, that satanic cults wouldn’t have taken all the brains except for five which were removed but left behind. Only aliens, he insists, would break into the morgue, kill everyone there, open up all the skulls, and take every brain they found except for the brains belonging to people who’d died of Alzheimer’s, toxoplasmosis, trichinosis, and St. Louis Encephalitis (No word on what what wrong with the fifth brain). And I think it’s worth pointing out that Harrison’s justification implicitly accepts that satanic cults breaking into a morgue, killing everyone there, opening up all the skulls, and taking all the brains is indeed an entirely plausible explanation except for the detail of them leaving sick brains behind.

That explanation comes after Harrison skips lunch to have a long think about the problem. Said think involves burning incense and putting himself into a hypnotic trance. The others see the smoke under his office door, but completely fail to notice that it smells like patchouli, and therefore assume he’s decided to torch the place in frustration. When Suzanne can’t detect his slowed breathing, Ironhorse comes within an inch of giving him the kiss of life before Harrison wakes up and stops him before he makes Norton jealous (That’s right, I’m still shipping Ironhorse and Norton, dammit).

Meanwhile, the advocacy has set out into the big wide world. Keep in mind that the aliens have made their stronghold in an abandoned nuclear storage facility in the Nevada desert. The three advocates, once of whom, recall, is very ill, set out on foot, and walk as far as a nondescript meadow somewhere before it occurs to them that they probably should steal an RV (This is extra-weird given that it’ll be clear in a bit that they also brought that big Lucite tetrahedron with them).

This is where time and space go a little wonky. It’s still nighttime when Ironhorse and Harrison visit Sylvia at the Whitewood center, but the morgue attack has already made the newspaper, which implies it’s the next day (Technically, it could have been an evening paper; those still existed back in 1988, though they were on the way out), but the bodies haven’t been moved yet when they visit the crime scene — in fact, they’ve only just finished counting the bodies. We should also assume that the morgue, identified as being in  is comparatively close to the mental hospital, since it’s front-page news. But remember that “Thy Kingdom Come” placed Sylvia’s hospital several hours’ drive from the cottage, probably closer to Wolf Jaw than to San Francisco (There’s a Hadleyville in Oregon, which would totally make sense here, except that San Francisco to Hadleyville is an eight hour drive). The Advocates steal the RV that same night, and it’s daytime when we next see them. We don’t know what time it is when Harrison and Ironhorse visit the morgue, but the next time we see Harrison, it’s lunchtime. Okay. We can reconcile that. The morgue attack happens on, let’s say, around noon (The attendant is returning from lunch, remember). That night, Ironhorse and Harrison go to visit Sylvia. They stop at the morgue on the way back, and it’s weird that the crime scene is still swarming, but we’ll roll with it. But now it starts to get weird, as apparently, it’s lunchtime the next day by the time Ironhorse and Harrison arrive back at the cottage. But that requires that the aliens brought a truckload of brains back to their cave in Nevada, tried and failed to cure the sick advocate, and the advocates have had time to walk to a campsite where they could steal an RV in the space of half a day. To make things even weirder, Harrison later gives the date as the seventh, which would put the morgue attack four days earlier. Which, frankly, seems reasonable given how much the aliens do in that time, except that the bodies are still at the in situ at the crime scene. Also, October 3, or even 7, would set this episode almost a month before the last explicitly-dated episode, “Eye for an Eye” and two months before its airdate. Continue reading Thesis: To Heal the Leper (War of the Worlds 1×08)

It is November 13, 1989, a slow day in a big week. Prince Franz Joseph II of Lichtenstein dies and is succeeded by his son, Hans-Adam II. Yesterday, Brazil got around to holding its first free election after the fall of its military dicatorship in 1985, electing Fernando Collor de Mello, who would serve from 1990 until 1992, when he resigned in disgrace while facing impeachment. He is currently a member of the Federal Senate. Tomorrow, Namibia will hold elections for its constitutional assembly, leading to the adoption of its constitution and official independence from South Africa in March of next year. In South Africa proper, President de Klerk announces the dismantling of the Reservation of Separate Amenities act, the law permitting racial segregation in Thursday. It’ll be officially repealed next October. Lech Wałęsa, leader of Solidarity, Poland’s non-communist trade union which had evolved into a full-fledged opposition party during June’s partially-free parliamentary elections, addresses a joint session of the US Congress Wednesday. Wałęsa, an electrician by trade, would find himself the first democratically elected president of Poland the following year (Though the second president of the Republic of Poland, as the last head of the former communist state, Wojciech Jaruzelski, held the title until the election) and would serve until 1995, a couple of weeks after I did a report for my World Geography class where I said that he was basically a shoo-in for reelection. My bad. In other Cold War news, the Velvet Revolution breaks out in Czechoslovakia with a peaceful student demonstration in Bratislava, but more on that next time.

The Little Mermaid, Steel Magnolias, and All Dogs Go To Heaven open in theaters. Batman comes out on VHS. Roxette loses the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 to Bad English’s “When I See You Smile”, a song I can only assume was created to burn off all the leftover ’80s all at once since the decade was about to end. Breaking into the top 10 this week is Milli Vanilli with the song you’ve actually heard of. Star Trek the Next Generation airs “The Price”, a mind-numbing slog of an episode about the Ferengi trying to buy a wormhole and a telepathic ambassador seducing Deanna Troi, but at least it did provoke this revelatory comment about the nature of Troi and Riker’s relationship over on Vaka Rangi when Josh talked about the episode. Friday the 13th the Series airs “Night Prey”, which is about sexy, sexy vampires. Vampires were a recurring enemy in Friday the 13th the Series, but I only really remember the one from the first season, where they go back in time and inspire Brahm Stoker. Nothing of much note on network TV this week, though I do particularly recall Friday’s episode of Perfect Strangers, which guest starred James Noble (Most famous as Governor Gatling on Benson) as Larry’s father, in a plot involving the gang being trapped in a flooding basement as a result of Larry’s desperate attempts to elicit his father’s approval. It sticks in my head partly because of James Noble and partly because I particularly enjoyed the phrase, “I just want him to say ‘Well done, son,’ as something other than how he wants his steak cooked.”

So last week, War of the Worlds gave us an episode that did a lot to expand the world by introducing elements that seem important but will never come up again, and had a really terrible child actor. This week, it’s an episode that will expand the world by introducing elements that seem important but will come up again exactly one time, and has some pretty decent child actors.

“Loving the Alien” is primarily a character focus episode about Debi, and you can probably guess by the title what’s going to happen. Oh yes, Debi is going to snuggle with a Morthren. It is also, as you may again have guessed, long on reproductive futurism. Yes, it’s the “Daddy, what’s Vietnam?” of episodes, where children will pledge to break the cycle of war and violence while the adults use “for the sake of the children” as justification.

Knowing what we’re in for, we can at the least appreciate the craftsmanship of the arc between Debi and her new alien beau Ceeto. We’d better, because the other half of the plot is a bit of a mess, with the rest of the cast basically going around in circles and spinning their wheels in order to make sure everyone shows up at the climax at the same time.

This episode, by the way, is directed by Otta Hanus. Hanus, you may or may not recall, directed eight of episodes of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, including “The Ferryman“, “Gemini and Counting“, and “A Summoning of Thunder” — that is, Hanus directed the good ones (And also “The Mirror in Darkness“, but you can’t have everything). And this opening scene is more than a little Captain Power, fast-paced, violent, set in a crumbling urban sprawl, and pointlessly smoky. We’re going to see little touches of “Flame Street” later as well. I mentioned way back in “The Ferryman” that Hanus is most associated with children’s shows. Since Captain Power, Hanus had landed a regular gig on the Jerry O’Connell child-superhero series My Secret Identity. It’s fitting, then, that Hanus’s one contribution to War of the Worlds is its first child-centric episode — and the only one of the child-centric episodes to also be action-driven. If we were developing a theory of What Otta Hanus Is Good At As A Director, the balance of evidence seems to be “Directing young actors in heavily physical roles.” Because the physical acting from the child actors in this episode is really quite good. War of the Worlds, for an action-adventure show, has not been hugely great in its physical acting. Adrian Paul is perfectly fine, of course, as you’d expect (His weaknesses in this part have nothing to do with the way he uses his body), but Jared Martin is hit-or-miss and Lynda Mason Green is outright terrible in the action sequences, and the Morthren are all very deliberately stiff. We start out with mercenaries raiding the hideout of a resistance cell. We have resistance cells now. It’s not clear at first, but this is specifically a resistance against the aliens. There is an organized resistance against the aliens. They’re in friendly terms with the Blackwood group but aren’t apparently affiliated. I’m having a little trouble with just how weird this is. Does the general public know about the Morthren or not? There’s no organized governmental response, but it seems like that’s down to the government having been rendered so ineffectual or outright corrupt that they either can’t or don’t want to do anything about it. Which seems pretty over-the-top to me, but I’ll roll with it. Back in the pilot, Malzor referred to there only being “few” humans who knew about them, but in “Breeding Ground”, Gestaine didn’t seem to have any difficulty accepting the presence of aliens. We won’t be seeing this resistance cell again, and I’m not really clear on whether or not we’ll be seeing any resistance cells: there are organized groups who seem to be resisting something, but I can’t recall whether they’re clearly alien-fighters, or just an advanced form of street gang.

The Morthren are engaging the resistance this week using hired human mercenaries on the premise that there’s going to be a lot of shooting in this episode and those glowsticks cost money it will keep their soldiers out of danger, and the authorities will assume it to just be gang violence. Everyone at the hideout is killed except for Jo, the teenage daughter of Marcus Crane, the resistance leader. That’s Mia Kirshner, an actual genuine famous person, and this is her first screen role. It is a fairly small part, but she manages to really impress in it. Jo runs to what she thinks is her father, but it turns out to be Ardix wearing the same kind of hat.

The other survivor of Marcus’s group is Marcus himself, as he wasn’t there at the time. In an interesting move, Marcus’s contact with Blackwood’s team is Suzanne. In fact, I’d even speculate that he was the contact she’d been going to see in “Seft of Emun”, except that it becomes clear later that Marcus and Blackwood have met. Marcus and Suzanne meet up in the Awesome Van because he’s found an alien weapon, and he wants to send Jo somewhere safe while the Morthren and their agents are out for blood.

Even in a modern show, this would be a little interesting, and back here in 1989, it’s a bit exceptional. Jo gets kidnapped at the three-minute mark. Marcus and Suzanne meet to discuss Suzanne taking Jo a commercial break later, and Marcus won’t discover that Jo’s missing for another twelve minutes (Not counting commercials). That might not sound like a big deal, but take a close look. When Marcus mentions his daughter to Suzanne, we already know it’s too late. And conversely, when the mercenaries raid the hideout, we don’t know who these people are or why they’re dying. We don’t know why the Morthren want to kidnap Jo, or indeed who she even is. Practically any other time you see this sort of plot, it would happen the other way around: you’d put the scene with Marcus and Suzanne first, so that we knew who Jo was and why the Morthren would want to kidnap her. And you wouldn’t spend twelve minutes with Marcus still thinking that Jo was waiting for him back at the hideout — you’d have them go straight back there in the next scene and have him spend those twelve minutes desperately trying to find his missing daughter.

It’s almost as though this episode is playing around with disparities in knowledge and perspective. It’s par for the course by now that we know the details of the Morthren plan before the heroes do, but this episode in particular gets very complex about who knows what and when. And I’d like to think that’s deliberately reflective of the episode’s theme, namely the reproductive futurism bullshit that the children can see what the adults can’t.

Back at the Morthren base, we get our first look at what the alien educational system is like. Young Morthren stand (We have not yet seen a Morthren sit at any point in the series) at devices that look like a hybrid of a Virtual Boy and those phallic feeding devices from last week. Questions are asked in rapid succession, and they respond by squeezing crystals in the handles of the device. It’s clearly meant to be showing them things to accompany the questions, but all we see is a fibrous yellow region in the center of the device. Incorrect answers prompt an electric shock to the user, as we see when a student who kinda looks like Jonathan Brandis botches questions about Mayan history and the length of the Venusian day.

No zaps for this week’s new named character, Ceeto, though: he’s easily able to answer questions about strategy at the “Battle of Miantes in the Lower Galaxy”, and about countering human atomic weapons, and even “How do you feel?” with so much ease that he gets bored with it and wanders off. Ceeto is played by Keram Malicki-Sánchez, an actor, new media pioneer, filmmaker and musician. At the time, he was probably best known in Canada for playing Zardip Pacific in the educational series Zardip’s Search for Healthy Wellness, wherein he played an alien robot who’d come to Earth to lean about nutrition and exercise. He meanders over to the cloning device just as Ardix is doing his Edvard Much pose to duplicate Jo. Personally, I don’t blame a 14-year-old boy for wanting to watch a writhing Mia Kirshner clad only on in an amniotic sac, but apparently the cloning booth is off-limits to students, so Ardix rats him out to Malzor. As you’d expect, Mazor disapproves of Ceeto’s independent nature and desire to learn things for himself rather than being fed information in a simulator, so he’s punished by being strapped, shirtless, onto a big green thing and tortured. to teach him discipline. The number of scenes with shirtless gurning teenagers in this episode has now exceeded the threshhold where I am starting to get seriously concerned as to whether it’s okay for me to be watching this, and there are going to be two more of them.

Parallelism demands that we transition to Debi having a nightmare in which masked surgeons hold her down and put a sheet of rubber vomit on her face. This is a great surreal horror scene of the sort we kind of expect out of Mancuso, but it’s also so oddly specific that I wonder if there wasn’t originally supposed to be another episode before this where Debi experiences something scary and medical-related. Though Blackwood and Kincaid try to comfort her, she goes on a tirade about how much she hates living in a sewer, and how they’re all going to eventually get captured, cloned and/or killed. And bless her for trying, but this dialogue is just way too weighty for Rachel Blanchard. You can almost hear the writers struggling to figure out what an angsty teenager sounds like and just utterly failing. Kincaid spouts grizzled loner platitudes about how they need to let Debi find herself and how Blackwood should teach her how to fight and survive on the streets, and how he was homeless at her age and he turned out fine (aside from the fact that he lives in a sewer.) While they’re having this little heart-to-heart, Debi loads her backpack up with guns and pepper spray and sneaks off. There’s a great look from her as she pushes the clip into her gun. Reminds me of Crazy Slasher Debi from “Terminal Rock“. I’m pretty sure last week’s episode was the first time Debi held a gun, and she’s clearly not fully comfortable with one yet (It takes her three tries to get the clip in), but you can see a pattern of escalation as the season goes on, and while there’s a lot I don’t recall yet to come, one thing I do remember is that Debi is going to actually shoot someone by the end of the season (She’ll fire a gun in this episode, but just to shoot the lock off of a door). I rather like the idea that Debi’s been left sort of profoundly broken by these events, and that what we’re seeing over the course of the season is Debi being slowly turned into a soldier.

The first half of this episode is heavily invested in establishing Ceeto and Debi as parallel characters, and so at the same time as Debi’s making her escape, Ceeto’s been watching Mana give the clone Jo her orders: she’s to find her father and through him, the weapon. Jo cheerfully promises to retrieve or destroy the weapon. Asked about her father, she speculates that her father might be useful to them as he might know how to find other resistance cells, then, incongruously, promises to kill him if possible. The scene is a little tonally weird, since Jo seems sort of lighthearted the whole time. With the exception of Father Tim in “No Direction Home” and Stephen in “Doomsday“, a common theme about the cloning process is that the clone retains the personality of the original, but with their loyalties firmly turned toward the Morthren. The original Jo has exactly one line of dialogue, and it’s just “Daddy!”, so we can’t really compare, but later, when clone-Jo interacts with her father, she’ll act kind of similar to the way Debi is a lot of the time: a teenage girl who’s hardened and a little broken from living a hard life in a vaguely cyberpunk dystopia. But here, she’s different. Maybe what we’re seeing is actually Jo’s personality from before the invasion and the societal collapse: Jo the way she would be freed from the stresses of living rough in a world that could try to kill her at any moment.

Anyway, Ceeto slips out after the clone and quickly finds his way to a street market that may or may not be same one from last week — the muppet vendor is still there, though now there’s a stall where you can buy pigs’ heads, chickens’ feet and whole rats. His acting all weird an alien attracts the attention of the Thompson Twins, who we’ll be seeing again later. Debi and Ceeto finally get around to meeting each other when she saves him from getting run down by a very slow-moving car. The music tries to tell us that the two have an instant and intense connection, though they themselves behave with all the awkwardness of a pair of sixth-graders at a middle school dance. Technically, I guess that makes it a realistic depiction of a couple of kids in their early teens forming an instant romantic connection.

Some other plot has been happening while this was going on, and that leads me to my big complaint about this episode. The normal laws of how television works say that when we cut from one scene to another, unless the narrative gives us some reason to believe otherwise, we should normally assume that time is still moving forward at the usual rate. You might show two scenes in series which are meant to occur at the same time, just because the camera can’t be everywhere at once, but in general, everyone has to travel through the same net amount of time.

And that’s where this episode gets sloppy. Because, like I said, about twelve minutes passed in audience-time from when we left Suzanne and Marcus to them arriving at the hideout to find everyone dead. Another five minutes pass before Marcus is reunited with what he thinks is his daughter at an abandoned theater. The next time the plot threads sync up is at the 20 minute mark, when Blackwood goes to comfort Debi some more and finds her gone, while the Morthren discover Ceeto’s absence.

Continue reading Antithesis: Loving the Alien (War of the Worlds 2×07)

Did you see that Parkins boy’s body in the tunnel?
Just the photos. Worst thing I’ve ever seen. Kid had no face. What kind of monster would do that?

It is November 14, 1988. This week, the Soviet Buran space shuttle will make its first and only unmanned test flight. The Soviet Union would collapse before the next scheduled test flight in 1993, and the Buran shuttle would spend the next decade gathering dust in a hanger in Kazakhstan until a storm brought the dilapidated hanger down in 2002. Here’s some neat pictures of the two remaining unused Buran shuttles. Pakistan holds its first free election in a decade, electing Benazir Bhutto as their Prime Minister. She’d hold the office until 1990, then be reelected in 1993, and was widely assumed to be about to return to that position in the 2008 election before her tragic assassination.

The Escape Club’s “Wild Wild West” unseats “Kokomo” in the music charts. Yesterday, The Wonderful World of Disney aired “Mickey’s 60th Birthday”, which I remember pretty well, but not as well as 1984’s “Donald’s 50th Birthday”. Mickey angers a Peter Cullen-voiced wizard and is cursed such that no one recognizes him, and has to get help from the casts of Family Ties(History doesn’t back me up on this, but I could have sworn this was after Family Ties had ended its run, making this a reunion show), The Golden Girls and Cheers to make his way home, while the cast of LA Law defends Donald against mousenapping allegations. ABC will spend the week showing the first half of the World War II miniseries War and Remembrance, the sequel to 1983’s Winds of War. Friday the 13th the Series brings us “Wax Magic”, in which, let me see if I can get this straight, a sculptor wax-dips his wife, then uses a cursed handkerchief to bring her back to life, but then she’s got to commit axe murders to stay alive.

I’m very worried now, after last week, because three weeks ago, if you’d asked me what my two favorite episodes of War of the Worlds were, I’d have said “The Second Seal” and “Goliath is my Name”. And then it turned out that “The Second Seal” was loaded down with gender essentialist bullshit, so what are we in for this week?

We’ve touched just a little bit on the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. That multi-headed hydra grew out of a storm of influences that were all coming together at this point in history: the growing influence of the religious right and their fierce desire to cast themselves as holy warriors against a demonic conspiracy; reactionary disapproval of the increased visibility of women in the workforce (particularly in the association with ritual abuse at day care centers, which caught zeitgeist of a public already primed to disapprove of working women leaving their children in the care of “strangers”); growing distrust of academia; increased visibility of religious and sexual minorities; increased visibility of psychological disorders and any number of other forces that made people particularly willing to believe that dark forces were conspiring to kill their children.

In 1979, James Dallas Egbert III attempted to commit suicide in the steam tunnels under Michigan State University. The media, incorrectly, decided that this had something to do with his interest in Dungeons and Dragons. In 1981, Rona Jaffe published a fictionalized version of the misreporting, Mazes and Monsters, later adapted into a TV movie starring a young Tom Hanks as a college student who suffers a psychotic break while live-action-role-playing in the steam tunnels under his college (Neither the book nor the movie asserts that the game caused the break, but both imply that his interest in the game was symptomatic of the underlying pathology). In 1982, Patricia Pulling founded the group “Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons” after she decided, for no clear reason that her son had committed suicide due to a D&D curse on his player character. In 1984, Jack Chick’s tract, Dark Dungeons asserted that D&D was a satanist recruiting tool (But then, Jack Chick thought that about freemasonry, communion wafers, rock and roll, the NIV, and women wearing pants). And in 1988, Chris Pritchard and a group of friends conspired to murder his stepfather to inherit the family fortune. Since Pritchard and his friends were D&D players and admitted to mapping their college’s steam tunnels (Am I the only person who went to a college without a network of underground steam tunnels?) for the game, the media decided that must have been the catalyst, directly blaming the game in both of the 1992 TV movies about the crime.

Going out on a limb here, I’m going to guess it’s that story that put the writers in mind to do an episode whose plot revolves around LARPing in the steam tunnels under a major university. What we have this week, in part at least, is essentially War of the Worlds crashing into Mazes and Monsters.

The advocacy has dispatched a pod of alien soldiers to the then-fictional “Ohio Polytechnical University” (In an odd coincidence, the University of Akron recently adopted the phrase as part of their branding) to steal the “Y-fever”, an experimental bioweapon they plan to use to make North America “look as pleasing” as the documentary they’re watching about the Bhopal disaster. For some reason, the alien unit goes under cover dressed as Blues Brothers (their incidental music even includes a jazzy harmonica riff). For some reason, this works, as they show up at what I assume is a Blues Brothers theme party.

Why they go to this party is a mystery, since they’re under orders to stick to the steam tunnels under the campus in order to remain covert. Like I’ve said before, there’s a lot of evidence that the aliens… Are not all that smart. The plan here is something like, “This is a sneaking mission, so dress up in fancy dress. If by some chance the fancy dress lets you blend in, make yourselves look extra suspicious by wandering around restricted but easily-accessible steam tunnels.”

Naturally, this plan puts them in the path of a group of body-doubles for The Goonies LARPers. They’re playing “Aliens and Asteroids”, which is an entirely realistic name for a late ’80s role playing game trying to cash in on the success of Dungeons and Dragons. The market was flooded at one point with such stuff: Tunnels and Trolls, Shinobi and Samurai, Villains and Vigilantes, Bandits and Basilisks, Bunnies and Burrows, Orcs and Oubliettes, Ninjas and Narwhals, Houses and Humans, Powers and Perils, Sense and Sensibility, and the like. Now, as you all know, the mutants have invaded our universe, and we have but one choice. The mutants travel over time and space to do battle. They are foresworn [sic] to annihilate us. This is something we can not allow. Intelligence reports that their staging area is in the Orion chamber. We’ll intercept them there and wipe them out. With luck, we’ll be the rulers of the universe by lunch. But I should be clear here: we can safely guess that no one involved in the writing of this episode actually knew a damned thing about Dungeons and Dragons or about role playing games at all, beyond what they’d seen in Mazes and Monsters. Because this game isn’t a pen-and-paper RPG. From what we see of it, it’s Urbex Laser Tag with a sci-fi backstory. Fun fact: there is a modern laser tag-based LARP. It’s called Lasers and Logic.

The “Venusians” are your standard well-balanced eigenvector of ’80s teen stereotypes: the preppy (as indicated by his popped collar), the classic nerd (as indicated by his glasses), the rebellious indie chick (one large, exotic earring), the hot chick (The one they send to distract the guard, one of the first screen roles for future Crossing Jordan star Jill Hennessy), the allegedly homely chick who is actually way hotter than the hot chick, the short, smarmy wisecracker who is usually from Brooklyn (Think Marshall Blechtman or Vinnie Delpino or The Booch or anything Samm Levine has done), and the jock (who isn’t actually here yet because he’s got football practice or something). So basically a bunch of people who would almost certainly never be seen together in real life mixed with a certain amount of confusion as to whether they’re college or high school stereotypes. I note that we’ve got an even gender balance, which is a nice touch abstractly, even if it’s kind of hard to accept as a historical reality given the considerable social pressures of the 1980s.  Also, they look like the cast of Kidd Video. I am not going to bother to learn most of their names, and I am not even sure they all have them.

Parkins, the classically nerdy one, gets separated from the others while mutant-hunting and comes across one of the Elwood gang. There’s an odd presumption here that the players would not recognize each other on sight (Later, the preppy will mention that the mutant players don’t know the jock), as he assumes the Elwood to be a mutant. And despite the fact that it was only 30 seconds ago that the preppy explained to the homely chick that you have to shoot a mutant in his laser tag target for it to count, he immediately shoots him in the face. With a visible laser beam. Jerk. Once the Elwood realizes that he has not just been decapitated, he walks over and peels the kid’s face off, which I’m not going to show you, in case you are eating.

As was the case in the past two episodes, the Blackwood Team becomes involved in events more due to coincidence than anything else. Norton interrupts Harrison’s meditation to accuse him of upsetting Suzanne. There’s a callback to the friction we’d seen between them back in “A Multitude of Idols,” with Norton referring back to them working out their differences. The usually laid-back Norton is up in arms because Suzanne is crying in her lab, and he assumes it’s Harrison’s fault.

Philip Akin is playing Norton a bit differently in this episode from previous ones. There were moments before where he’s bring out this hangdog, put-upon thing, but he goes all-in this week: rather than the unpleasant fratboy persona he’s defaulted to recently, he’s focusing on being irritable, annoyed when his work isn’t appreciated or when he’s distracted from it. It’s an improvement over the way he’s been acting, except for the fact that there’s no justification for it or any build-up.

Harrison, on the other hand, shows some actual character growth. Indeed, these first scenes at the cottage seem like a direct response to “A Multitude of Idols” that’s very parallel in construction. Rather than taunting Suzanne and justifying his own behavior, Harrison instead goes down to the lab to check on her, and preemptively apologizes on the assumption that he actually had done something to upset her without realizing it.

Instead, she’s crying because she’s received word of Parkins’s disappearance. They actually go to the trouble of filling in a bit of Suzanne’s backstory here: we know from the pilot that she’d been in Ohio prior to coming to Pacific Tech. We now learn that she’d left Ohio Polytechnic (Home of the Molecules) when she found out that the “pure research” dream job she’d been working was actually developing bioweapons. Admittedly, I am not a microbiologist, but I am not sure how one could be developing bioweapons without realizing it. Parkins had been her lab assistant, and he was the one who blew the whistle on the project. Though Harrison suggests that he’s just out somewhere on a bender (it’s Greek Week), Suzanne is worried that there’s been a lab accident and cover-up, as the bioweapons under development include Y fever, which she warns us is, “The same biotoxin that killed all those people”. Um. Oh, those people. Yeah. Lynda Mason Green is way too over-the-top in this scene, crying and sobbing when literally all she knows at this point is that he missed debate club this morning.

Harrison offers to help, by which I mean he volunteers Norton. A search of the AM and FM bands turns up campus security walkie-talkies (just roll with it or we’ll be here all day) where they hear the title-card conversation, confirming Suzanne’s fears. Harrison and Suzanne set out for Ohio, with Ironhorse in tow to bring them back after the 48 hours he’s grudgingly allowed them. “You’re my hero, colonel,” Harrison says, “Strong, determined, and sensitive.” Continue reading Thesis: Goliath is my Name (War of the Worlds 1×07)

So let’s talk a little about “Breeding Ground” and “Seft of Emun” as relates to the first season, and about “Eye for an Eye” and “The Second Seal” as relates to the second. I was originally just going to babble a bit about the use of alien-induced mind-altering in “The Second Seal” compared to “Terminal Rock” and “No Direction Home”, but then I actually watched the episodes, and…

The simplest thing in this cluster of episodes to get worked up about is the appearance of the first-season alien costumes in the Seft’s flashback. We got a little glimpse of them in “The Second Wave”, but not a good look. The costumes are the same for obvious reasons, but you’ll note that if this version of the alien form is meant to have three arms, we never see them pull the middle one out. Of particular note is the accouterments (Did you know that the plural of “accoutrement” is “accouterments”?). You may notice that the Morthren in “Seft of Emun” are wearing the suits we saw them manufacture in “The Walls of Jericho”. That’s a very easy thing to get upset about, but this one, ironically, I think actually makes for better continuity with the first season. Obviously, it’d be a mistake if the aliens in the flashback, aliens who haven’t yet come to Earth (they’re vague about when the invasion of Emun happened. Mana says only that Seft has been asleep for “the time it takes to cross a galaxy.” The invasion could have happened before the 1953 invasion, or closer to the series’ present as a prelude to the arrival of the second wave) were wearing literally the same refrigerated suits. But there’s nothing to imply that the aliens didn’t have combat uniforms prior to coming to Earth, and it makes a lot of sense to imagine that the suits made in “The Walls of Jericho” were typical of alien fashion. So there’s really no reason that the uniforms worn by Morthren soldiers at some unspecified point in the past shouldn’t look basically the same as the uniforms they made for themselves on Earth. That said, much later in the series, keep an eye out for a completely different style of Morthren clothing. We saw an alien hand weapon in “The Second Seal”, an elegant sort of metal dousing rod. It’s a new design for the show, but one that looks perfectly in keeping with the visual style of the alien technology in the 1953 movie: it looks like copper, it has the same sort of curves and lines, and it fires green pulses that closely resemble the “skeleton beam” of the war machines. Even though we never saw anything like it in the George Pal movie, if you hold that thing up next to the Al Nozaki war machine, there’d be no question in your mind that they were designed by the same race. That’s particularly pleasing after just how unimaginably fucking awful the detached gooseneck weapon-arm looked in “Eye for an Eye”.

The Morthren weapons used on Emun take an entirely different approach. They’re essentially just sci-fi rifles, but for one very interesting addition. They’ve got these bulbous lamp-heads attached to the top like bayonettes. What’s strange is that they’re so very clearly meant to look like the cobra-head of the Nozaki prop, but they’re incredibly different in a way that’s deliberate, rather than the incompetent clusterfuck we saw in “Eye for an Eye”. Rather, it feels like Mancuso’s propmasters set out to harmonize the 1953 designs with the visual motif of the show and meet in the middle.

This was going to be tricky business, given that absolutely nothing we’ve seen of Morthren technology looks even the tiniest bit like the technology from the 1953 movie. The Morthren weapons therefore are the right shape, but they’re made not out of a coppery metal, but out of a dense, fiberous substance, and the weapon fires not a heat ray or skeleton beam, but a narrow beam identical to the usual Morthren hand weapon. In some regards, it’s a nice touch to try to bring the styles together like this, but on the other hand, it really serves to draw a big red circle around just how little this show has to do with its namesake. It reminds you that, so far, there’s been nothing in the show which requires or even benefits from this being a sequel to the 1953 movie — you can attribute the societal collapse to the invasion if you like, but the show is never going to come right out and do that itself.

Season 1, on the other hand, has just done a pair of episodes which draw heavily on the past continuity of the universe, even attempting to harmonize the 1953 movie with the 1938 radio play (I wonder, had the Strangises remained in command for the second season, would the Blackwood Project have set out for Buffalo to investigate a series of small sorties in ’68, ’71 and ’73?). Once again, when the first season draws from its source material, it does it with an eye toward details and and very literal, straightforward reference of the past. The second season approaches its past much more abstractly, almost impressionistically.

The big point of comparison in the last four stories we’ve visited, of course, is the unforgivably awful way women are treated in “The Second Seal” and “Breeding Ground”. And while it’s miles better on this front, “Seft of Emun” still features the shameless fridging of Blade, and to a lesser extent, Seft. These three articles were uncharacteristically difficult for me to write, almost as much of a chore as some of the late-season Captain Power ones. For the first two, the difficulty was essentially the same: these are both technically proficient episodes, that hit on a good mix of action, adventure and drama, and which speak to some of the issues I’ve been having with the series so far. They’re both episodes I very much want to like. There’s a fantastic guest cast in “Breeding Ground” and amazing performances out of Julian Richings and Patricia Phillips. And “The Second Seal” had always been one of my two favorite episodes. But how do I overlook something like Harrison grabbing Suzanne, violently shaking her, then throwing her to the ground shouting, “You’re not my mother!”? Or Kincaid stonily asserting that they’re going to give a seventy year old woman an abortion in their squalid underground lair whether she likes it or not?

War of the Worlds is, at the end of the day, part of the sci-fi horror genre. This was true to some extent in 1953, and it’s far truer in 1988-1989. There’s undeniably a history of violence specifically against women being a staple of the horror genre — season 2 is the work of Frank Mancuso Jr., a man who’s very well known for his work on a film series whose entire premise (particularly during the part of the franchise he’s most associated with) is built around a masked revenge-zombie taking a machete to teenage girls for the sin of putting out. But even Friday the 13th doesn’t have Jason forcibly impregnate someone, then treat Jason as the victim for the remainder of the movie (I think. The last few movies got pretty weird). The kind of violence we see in these episodes isn’t within the tradition of the slasher movie, but is much more in line with simple, straight-up abuse. And while that abuse may not be outright glorified, it is at no point treated with the gravity it deserves.

The eighties were a different time, and the public sense of social consciousness wasn’t as advanced as it is now. But somebody ought to have noticed Harrison acting like a wife-beater. Somebody ought to have noticed that Kate might as well have been a sack of potatoes for all the agency she has in the plot. I didn’t get it when I was nine. I didn’t get it again later when I was fourteen and it was airing in reruns on The Sci-Fi Channel. But I get it now.  You can explain, and you can justify, but people still had to write this. Someone sat down and said, “You know what would make a good story? Let’s have an alien crystal zap Harrison and make him slap Suzanne around a bit. Ooh, and let’s have that make her horny, and she can spend the rest of the episode trying to get into his pants.”  Someone had to sit down and say, “Let’s do a tragic story about a noble doctor who is tricked by the Morthren into sticking an alien fetus in an elderly woman. Oh, never mind how the woman feels about this; the story’s really about the doctor and his pain.”

Those someones were Patrick Barry and Alan Moskowitz. Patrick Barry’s resume is pretty short. He’ll go on to write two more episodes for the first season of War of the Worlds, his only later credit is for an episode of Transformers: Beast Wars almost a decade later. He was also a staff writer for the mid-80s animated series M.A.S.K., a sort of Transformers/GI Joe hybrid about a counterterrorism agency that used transforming vehicles (Twenty-five years later, GI Joe adopted the MASK toyline, recasting the lead character as leader of a Joe specialist unit), which I liked because, did you just listen to the premise, of course I would like that. His biggest credit is for the first-season Star Trek the Next Generation episode “Angel One“. It’s surprising that the same writer who gave us TNG’s first explicitly feminist episode would turn around and give us this. Though “Angel One” is also complete crap, and fails so hard in its attempt at feminism that I think Vox Day nominated it for a Hugo, so maybe that explains why Barry didn’t have a little light go off in his head to tell him this was a bad idea.

Alan Moskowitz is harder to dismiss. His resume is fluffy, but long, with a lot of sitcom credits, including the 1991 revival The Munsters Today (This version was my first introduction to the franchise, which managed to transcend its status as a really shameless knock-off of The Addams Family by being really clever and visually appealing. The series would go on to be rebooted in 2013 as Mockingbird Lane, an absolutely beautiful clusterfuck that couldn’t decide what kind of comedy and/or family drama it wanted to be. Also its theme song is sampled in the Fall Out Boy song Uma Thurman), Charles in Charge, and the TV adaptations of Harry and the Hendersons and Police Academy, as well as Out of this World, on which he served as a story editor. That seems pretty far afield from sci-fi horror, which might explain why the story is set up like body horror but all the emphasis is on the tragic downfall of Doctor Gestaine instead.

It’s hard (and probably unnecessary) to declare one or the other “worse”, but on balance, I’m bothered more by “The Second Seal”. “Breeding Ground” does manage to deliver some reasonably good tragedy, even if its heart is in the wrong place. And it doesn’t involve character assassination against the leads.

Now, with the distance of years and the insight that comes from looking through the lenses of how television has matured over the past quarter-century and how much more socially aware we are now of the culture of violence against women, what “The Second Seal” reminds me of is — you’ll have to bear with me here — “The Twin Dilemma”.

I’m going to have to unpack that a little, aren’t I?

“The Twin Dilemma” was the final story of season 21 of Doctor Who. Back in 1984, executive producer and sexual predator John Nathan-Turner made the really bizarre decision to pull Colin Baker’s first story back up to the end of the season, rather than giving the creative team a couple of months to think things over and doing it at the start of season 22. It was declared that the previous Doctor had been too nice, so the next one would be meaner, and that maybe the audience shouldn’t entirely trust him. Also they dressed him in a clown costume.

So to really drive home that this new Doctor was Edgy and Unpredictable, ten minutes into his first episode, he tries to strangle his companion to death with his bare hands.

Just as we can try to “justify” Harrison’s behavior by the fact that his mind is being affected by the alien crystal, defenders of “The Twin Dilemma” (NB: There is actually no such thing as a defender of “The Twin Dilemma”) can point to the fact that the Doctor is suffering a particularly intense bout of post-regenerative trauma when he does this: his brain literally isn’t working correctly. But like I said before, someone had to write this. Neither the Doctor nor Harrison Blackwood are real people, alien mind-control crystals aren’t a real drug, and post-regenerative trauma isn’t a real mental illness. These things all do what the writer says they do. And Anthony Steven in 1984 and Patrick Barry in 1988 both, at some point in the creative process, asked themselves, “What’s a good way to show that this character has become dangerously unhinged?” and the answer they came up with both times was, “Let’s have him batter a woman he’s close to.” Right from the get-go, there’s an assumption that having your male lead commit violence against women is a way to make him “dangerous” and “edgy”, rather than, y’know, abusive. The whole scene, in both cases, is set up to minimize the importance of the victim and emphasize the altered state of the attacker. If you’re a kid in 1984, watching “The Twin Dilemma”, the lesson you’re learning is that when you see a man attacking a woman, you should think, “That poor man! I wonder what adverse influence is compelling him to do this?”

But you know, for me, these are things you could walk back. Okay. This happened. You have the hero confront that. Have him come down, and realize the horror of what he’s done, and have to live with the fact that something like that is inside of him, and have him work to make it better.

Guess what both “The Twin Dilemma” and “The Second Seal” do next? Did you pick “not that”? They both instead go on to compound their sins by never once having the hero apologize. Doctor Who could have, maybe, recovered from having the Doctor try to murder Peri with his bare hands, but it would have had to try, and to do that, it would have to have first admitted that it had done wrong, which never ever happens. Rather, the Doctor simply dismisses his behavior as a temporary aberration due to his trauma — he never actually addresses the fact that the person he tried to murder is a person and might have feelings about almost being murdered. In fact, he compounds his sin by declaring that he’s immediately got to go live as a hermit and take her with him. At no point is his vicious unprovoked attack on Peri treated as something about her: he engages in what looks for all the world like classic abuser behavior by making himself out to be the victim, cruelly betrayed by his own synapses, and then making a direct move to isolate the actual victim by dragging her off somewhere where she’ll be alone with him and unable to escape.

Harrison doesn’t do that. I’d probably say that Harrison does not behave as badly as The Doctor (Even beyond the fact that Harrison never gets as violent as The Doctor does). But War of the Worlds behaves at least as badly as Doctor Who on this count. Because while the Doctor may have behaved exactly like you’d expect a domestic abuser to behave, at least Peri, the actual victim, never backs him up. But once Harrison’s forcefully exposed Suzanne to the crystal against her will, mind-altered Suzanne responds to his macho bullying by getting turned on by his rugged manliness. And when they speak about it later, Harrison talks about the incident as though him roughing her up and her coming on to him were morally equivalent things. The juxtaposition between their behavior, particularly in light of Harrison’s reaction to it once he comes down, implicitly sexualizes the violence. The show itself is going out of its way to frame Harrison’s actions in a particular way that completely hides the fact that physical abuse and heavy flirting are not even remotely the same thing.

When Doctor Who did this, it was the third of the classic series’s three cardinal sins (The others being the Doctor’s abandonment of Susan in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” and Nyssa’s failure to react to the murder of her father, destruction of her planet, and genocide of her entire species with anything other than dull surprise in “Logopolis”), and the one that finally killed the show off, and that was a show with twenty years under its belt. I’m not prepared to give up on War of the Worlds for this, but this show can’t afford to keep pulling shit like this.