Category: TV

It is November 6, 1989, and there’s no point in burying the lede: the cover of Time this week proclaims, “Moscow lets Eastern Europe go its own way,” and that about sums it up for this week in international news. Last Wednesday, East Germany opened its border with Czechoslovakia. By Friday, East German refugees were filtering into the West German city of Hof. Tomorrow, the East German leadership will resign en masse, save for head of state Egon Krenz. This Thursday, they’ll save their fleeing populace the trouble of a stopover in Czechoslovakia (And the resulting hassle in Hof) by opening up the Berlin Wall. They hadn’t actually intended to just open the thing up, but rather introduce new regulations for border-crossings, but the word got out and when a mob of East Germans showed up at the wall, no one was left in the government with balls big enough to order the guards to shoot them, so that was that. Years ago, I read about a woman who considers herself married to the Berlin Wall. On her website, she says, “My husband used to guard the border between east and west Germany. He is currently retired.” Mrs. Berlin-Wall’s husband suffered numerous small indignities over the following days and weeks as unofficial demolition commenced months in advance of the wall’s official decommissioning. This was all greatly exciting to the Germans, as well as to the Americans, who largely attributed the whole thing to former President Ronald Reagan. Far less optimistic about it were British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President François Mitterrand, neither of whom were especially happy about the prospect of Germany reuniting, or, well, existing at all, really.

All other news pretty much pales in comparison to the news from Germany. In other Cold War events, on Friday, Petar Mladenov will replace Todor Zhivkov as the head of Bulgaria’s Communist party, beginning that country’s transition to democracy. At home, tomorrow’s elections will see the first elected African American mayor of New York and Governor of Virginia, great and historic moments we can now look back on and say, “Why the fuck did it take so long?” even though we all know the answer. Friday, the WordPerfect Corporation will release WordPerfect 5.1, proficiency in which will, according to my mid-1990s High School teachers, be the single most marketable skill for a person my age who works with computers.

Unseating Janet Jackson, Roxette takes the top spot on the Billboard chart with “Listen to Your Heart”. Network TV is all new this week. Star Trek the Next Generation does “The Enemy“, a pretty straightforward “Enemy Mine” plot about Geordi getting stranded on a hostile planet and having to work together with a shifty Romulan to escape. Only it also apparently has an uncomfortable subplot about Worf refusing to donate blood to a dying Romulan which I have completely forgotten. Friday the 13th The Series gives us “Hate on Your Dial”, in which the cursed radio out of a ’54 Chevy helps a racist travel back in time to save his klansman father from a murder conviction.

After the bad taste “Breeding Ground” left in my mouth, “Seft of Emun” is refreshing. A good, solid, enjoyable episode. Not, as I find myself saying all the time, perfect: the plot stumbles in a few places, characters have unjustified mood swings, and the resolution feels forced and there’s a shockingly awful child actor. But all the same, it’s a very likeable episode.

It’s also a very visual episode. War of the Worlds has been fairly distinctive, visually, among shows in this style and format of the era. This is less profound watching it now, because making your sets damp and filthy and keeping your key lighting low are fairly standard practice these days for anything trying to be Dark and Gritty. But TV has a long history of clean, brightly-lit dystopias, probably because TV cameras have a hard time with low light: War of the Worlds could only look the way it does because it was shot on film — though there’s a couple of scenes at the Morthren base in this very episode that have the “flat” look of video tape. This episode in particular uses more than the average number of special and visual effects. When they roll out the visual effects, you can really tell that this is a Mancuso show: there are certain effects and techniques that I guess he must like or something, because War of the Worlds looks a lot more like Friday the 13th The Series when the folks in the post-processing department get their Video Toaster on.

The Morthren are having an energy crisis. They’ve resorted to attacking smugglers to acquire “radioactives” — there’s apparently a big street-trade in radioactive minerals. No one ever specifies why. The world is a post-apocalyptic hellhole, so I assume the default response is so that punk-rock addicted juvenile delinquents can build dirty bombs in their basements, but you’d think trade like that would be handled clandestinely, rather than in a big Portabello Road-style street market, which I’ll get to in a bit.

After a shootout with some stylishly-dressed radioactive material smugglers, the Morthren try to clone themselves a guy who can get them the materials they need, but Earth-based power supplies aren’t compatible, and they cook him instead. I’ve noticed that the Morthren have a hard time using locally-sourced materials: they can’t use human power sources here, have a considerable failure rate trying to breed, and in a couple of weeks, it’s going to come up that they can’t eat the local food. This whole conquest of Earth thing seems like they may not have thought it all the way through. Indeed, the notion that the invasion of Earth was not a strategically well-thought-out idea is going to be something that haunts the end of this season.

Malzor consults the Eternal about their power supply issues, and returns with the news that the Eternal has ordered him to awaken “Seft of Emun”. Mana doesn’t like the idea, given how much power it will take to bring her out of stasis, and Malzor shouts at her about defying the will of the Eternal. Given that Malzor had just said himself that he hadn’t wanted to do it until he’d been ordered to, his reaction seems a little intense.

Mana begrudgingly plugs some crystals into a casket-shaped pith-pod, which ejaculates some steam and opens up to reveal Seft in a really nice practical effect. She’s a priestess from the planet Emun, with the psychic ability to convert radioactive minerals into the sort of energy crystals the Morthren use. Unlike the Morthren, Seft’s natural form looks humanoid, and the Emun seem to follow an at least roughly human family structure: Seft has a son, Tori, also in stasis, and she refers to a husband, presumed deceased. A flashback as she awakens depicts Emun as a sylvan world with two suns and a purple sky, and shows its conquest by the Mothren.

The Morthren are depicted in their original form, the best look at them we’ve seen so far. While clearly inspired by the 1953 movie, this version is larger and bulkier. They have two arms with three enormous fingers, a single, three-segmented eye, and wear cloaks with large cowls. They carry energy weapons that remind me a bit of the copper-powered weapon from Tobe Hooper’s remake of Invaders from Mars. The shape of the bulbous end of the weapon is probably based on the cobra-head of the heat ray from George Pal’s War of the Worlds, though it’s made not of metal, but a dark, dense form of the organic material that makes up most Morthren technology. From the sound of it, the Morthren completely exterminated Seft’s people and devastated their planet. Given that the Morthren seem to have no problem hanging out on Emun in their natural form, and the natives are able to spontaneously produce a compatible power source, it seems a little odd that they chose to move to Earth rather than Emun when their own planet went up. On the other hand, back in “The Second Wave”, Malzor said that Mothrai was an idea created by the Eternal rather than a physical place. Could it be that the Morthren did invade Emun, and it was actually a conquered and renamed Emun that we saw explode at the beginning of the series? That would actually simplify a lot of things and make a lot of sense, though there’s one great honking wall-banger with it that will come up at the end of the season.

Malzor is alternately polite and cruel to Seft, addressing her politely and referring to her by title, explaining her situation and their need for power crystals, and channeling a 1930s movie gangster by reminding her what a shame it would be if something were to “happen” to her son’s stasis pod. One touch I really like is that she doesn’t recognize the Morthren at first: she’s never seen them in humanoid form before, and it isn’t until Malzor starts making demands that she figures out what’s going on. Seft agrees to make crystal for the Morthren to protect her son, and she’s whisked of to a street market.

The street market is a kind of Mad Max-themed Renaissance Festival, with vendors selling exotic foods on sticks, weapons, drugs, clothes, and even muppets (I am not making this up). As it happens, Blackwood is at the market as well. He’s at the minerals booth, because he needs sulfur and magnesium. He never says why. It sounds like it might be dietary, as Suzanne is out at the same time looking for vitamins (Which are obtainable only via a “contact” who has demanded that she come alone. This will not come up again). The vendor, Blade, is one of the smugglers from the opening scene. She is the textbook archetype late ’80s successful post-apocalyptic female trader, with big earrings, big hair, and big shoulder pads, like a less colorful version of the cover of the April 1987 issue of Playboy (G’head, look it up. I’ll still be here when you get back). She reminds me a lot of Mindsinger from Captain Power, and claims to have, “Alum to zinc and everything in-between.” Later, we’re going to find out that she’s another of Kincaid’s parade of old female friends he’s on a flirty basis with. While Blackwood is inspecting rocks, some Morthren soldiers escort Seth to the booth so she can pick out raw materials. No one recognizes Blackwood, but Seft manages to brush his hand as they’re ushering her away, and this apparently creates some kind of psychic connection between them, as Blackwood is compelled to follow after her until he loses her in the crowd.

When he returns to the bunker, he hears her voice in his mind, and is drawn into a shared vision of the market at night, where she begs for his help, but does not yet specify the details. She’s forced out of the vision when Mana shows up with a crystal and a couple of rocks for Seft to play with. She cuddles them for a bit, strains, and then a bluish halo effect replaces the crystal with a bigger one. Seft refuses to do any more, since the low-quality rocks don’t work quite right and trying to use them will kill her. She and Mana get into it a bit about the whole genocide of Seft’s race thing, which leads to Mana slapping her. Well, it leads to Mana gently waving her hand in the general vicinity of her face while an impossibly loud slap sound effect plays.

After Seft demonstrates a failed attempt at crystal making, by hugging some rocks until they turn into a pile of broken glass, Mana agrees to let her go pick out her own supplies. I know I’ve said a lot of times that it’s borderline criminal how badly this show uses Catherine Disher, but she seems really on the mark here. It’s clear that she’s disgusted by the idea of being dependent on an alien, but she’s also pragmatic, and she’s scientifically curious about the process. She cottons on to the very obvious fact that Seft is up to something, and cautions Malzor that she might possess other weird alien powers than just hugging rocks into magic power crystals.

Kincaid stops by to visit Blade at the market. Luckily for us, this is charismatic, flirty Kincaid rather than the mopey version we get so often. Blade tells him about the attacks on her radioactive materials shipments. Kincaid is aloof, not really interested in her problems. Blade starts to explain about the alien weapons used in the attack, but is interrupted by a customer. While he’s off getting a drink, Seft returns with Ardix and a soldier to make some late-night purchases. For no very good reason, though, when Blade brings up the matter of payment, Ardix loses his cool and has her killed, and then they run away just before Kincaid returns, summoned by Blade’s death-screams. The aliens have too big a lead on him, but Kincaid does get a good look at both Ardix and Seft — though he somehow misses the fact that she’s in obvious distress and being forced.

Between Malzor patiently explaining how scary and violent humans are and them sending Seft back out to try again, Blackwood has a nightmare. He’s summoned back to a vision of the market where Seft leads him to a store (I assume it’s a store. We never see any actual wares for sale, or indeed a shopkeeper or customers or anything. It could be a restaurant for all I know) then her face turns into a Morthren in natural form. This freaks Blackwood out so bad that he wakes up in a sweat and instinctively grabs his gun and waves it around, and needs to be calmed down with hugs from Suzanne and Debi. He blows off Kincaid about Blade and sneaks out to find the shop from his dream.

Continue reading Antithesis: Seft of Emun (War of the Worlds 2×06)

Contact with that crystal is affecting your behavior!

I’m in total control, Suzanne.

It is November 7, 1988. Since last week, Geraldo Rivera got his nose broke when a fight broke out on his talk show and Emma Stone was born. Tomorrow, George Herbert Walker Bush will win the presidential election, inaugurating the Bush Presidential Dynasty, and 900 people will die from an earthquake in China. Today, Donny Lalonde fights Sugar Ray Leonard at Caesar’s Palace. Had Senate Joint Resolution 390 passed, today would be “Memorial Day for Victims of Communism”.

“Kokomo” is the number one song on the Billboard charts, the only number one from The Beach Boys since 1966, though they’ll crack the top 40 once more in 2013 when a new Greatest Hits compilation comes out. They Live had its US theatrical premiere Friday. Election coverage will preempt prime-time TV until Wednesday. On General Hospital, Dr. Tom Hardy marries Dr. Simone Ravelle, the first interracial marriage on daytime TV, another thing for your checklist of, “Wait, that only happened in the ’80s?”. Friday the 13th The Series airs “Master of Disguise”. This week’s murder-powered cursed artifact is the makeup case of John Wilkes Booth.

No particular idea why, but “The Second Seal” is one of two episodes of War of the Worlds that tends to pop to the front of my brain, and I implicitly think of it as being archetypical of one of the series’s two major modes. Like most of the episodes so far, this one’s plot is based around the aliens trying to acquire resources to build their army and assure their survival on Earth. This episode also follows the format that I kind of nostalgically think of as the default War of the Worlds structure (Even though it isn’t really all that common in the series; that’s just me imposing my own assumptions about default storytelling structures onto the show), with Harrison and Suzanne off having an “adventure” plot, while Ironhorse goes off on his own to have an “action” plot, and Norton stays home to act as “mission control”. Also, Jared Martin and Lynda Mason Green act drunk for half the episode.

Based on Norton’s discoveries, Harrison, Suzanne and Ironhorse have traveled to nearby (This episode establishes that the cottage is located in the San Francisco Bay area) Fort Streeter to look in the vaults of “Operation Deep Ice”, a large collection of alien artifacts and Dr. Forrester’s research papers. Original Mission: Impossible alumnus Greg Morris takes a break from his recurring guest role on the Mission: Impossible revival to play the fort’s commanding officer, General Masters. Because it’s a tiny, tiny world, Masters went to school with General Wilson, and also knows Ironhorse from the invasion of Grenada. He invites Ironhorse to an awards banquet in order to get him out of the way for act 2.

Sadly, General Masters will not make it to the banquet himself, as the news reporter parked outside trying to get an interview is really an alien, and when the General stops to sexually harass her (Seriously. He makes suggestive comments about her twice, and later, one of the other officers will imply that Masters is a bit of a skirt-chaser), he gets possessed. There’s a slight misdirect, as you kind of expect the reporter to possess him (They’ve already established that she’s an alien as the General’s attache had been possessed by an alien hiding in her van), but it’s actually his driver who does it once he waves her off.

As we’ve seen a few times by now, there’s often a feel in War of the Worlds that we’re watching the aliens and the Blackwood team coincidentally happen upon some other, more ordinary show already in progress. That’s the case again this week, as Harrison and Suzanne pass briefly through some sort of military-themed office romance. You probably know the one. Lt. Amanda Burke is thoroughly smitten with her coworker, Lt. Hamil. But he’s cool and conventionally attractive and kinda looks like a young Ted McGinley, while she likes opera and is Hollywood Homely, which more-or-less means that she’s fairly attractive but has an unflattering haircut and glasses. So of course he’s constantly brushing her off with lame excuses while she’s trying to be all subtle and win his heart through dogged persistence. Later on, Suzanne will probably give her a makeover. There’s also an administrative assistant who’s warm for Ironhorse, and of course that’s supposed to be hilarious because she’s middle aged and therefore the thought of her having a sexual identity is obviously laughable.

Is it just me, or do they look like they’re posing for their freeze-frame in the credits?

And because this is 1988, the audience is supposed to find this cute and relatable rather than looking forward to all of these characters dying messily. It’s okay. We’ll get through this. After tracking down the vault number (it takes a little while because it’s misfiled as “Operation Dee Pice”), Lt. Burke uses her voiceprint to unlock the elevator down to the vast underground storehouse (because of course voiceprint locks are a thing they use. Amanda’s password is “Yabba Dabba Doo”.)

The vault in question turns out to be mostly empty. Amanda doesn’t go out of her way to be obstructionist, but she won’t let them check any of the others without authorization. Ironhorse promises to get it and leaves the others for the General’s party, despite the fact that his spider-sense is piqued by the alien-possessed soldiers milling about outside.

While Lt. Ted McGinley is getting himself possessed, Harrison sets up his Tandy T1000 laptop and acoustic modem-slash-speakerphone (The most outlandish thing in this show: in this underground military archive, Harrison finds a rotary phone with a direct outside line on which he can multiplex voice and data.) and calls Norton, who, as per usual, promises to hack into the secure military network and search the archive’s inventory for the rest of the haul. There’s a bit of a fresh side to Harrison in this scene: in the past, he’s generally tended to get manic and forceful, but here, he’s melancholic instead, disappointed to be denied access to his father’s (I think this is the first time Harrison refers to Clayton as his father without qualifying the relationship as “adoptive”) work when he’s so close.

Suzanne puts some tissue samples under the microscope and reveals that these isolated samples are still showing cellular activity, which is terrifying and interesting and won’t come up again. The former General Masters and his legion of aliens decide this would be a good time to take the vault. Doudy middle-aged administrative assistant is killed, but Lt. Burke narrowly escapes because rather than stopping to notice the sound of the secretary getting shot, she got on the elevator to bring Harrison and Suzanne a box full of sandwiches and fashion magazines.

Suzanne and Lt. Burke settle in for a bit of girl-talk while Harrison naps, and holy crap, Suzanne actually does give her a makeover. Well, she takes off her hat and glasses, and teases her bangs a little. Look, I’m not going to go all indie street cred and disparage Hollywood standards of beauty in favor of I don’t know what. But look, Burke looks the way she looks, and it’s not like she can trade in her uniform while she’s on duty. She can make the sexy librarian thing work with a little effort. “Take off your hat and glasses and tease your bangs a little” is not an improvement on this. In fact, it kinda just makes her look silly. Also, Suzanne’s advice for snaring the hunky Lt. Ted McGinley is pretty much just to throw herself at him. I am in favor of taking the direct approach, and heartily disapprove of the societal pressures that more or less order women to express sexual interest only in the form of subtle hinting. But there’s at least two problems with this: first, she’s already tried that, directly asking him out on a date a few scenes ago. He shot her down so hard that I was rooting for him to get hollowed out and used as a meatsuit. Secondly, this is Suzanne giving the advice. One of the very first traits the show explicitly gave us about Suzanne is that she’s not the type to throw herself at a man. And to add insult to injury, that’s going to be a major part of the next act.

Amanda gets a brief chance to think that her “makeover” has paid off, as Lt. Ted McGinley comes on to her the moment he sees her. As it turns out, the voiceprint lock on the elevator door is sophisticated enough to detect when someone is alien-possessed, and thus, his password (The most obvious dudebro password of the ’80s) won’t work. So he ushers her into the elevator with sloppy makeouts, and once she’s exclaimed her “Yabba-Dabba-Doo!”, right when she’s expecting him to whip out his third appendage and stick it in her, instead he whips out his third appendage and sticks it in her.

A typo leads Norton to locate another vault of interest: it had been filed under “D. Eep Ice”. Suzanne and I both think this sounds like par for the course with bureaucracy, but Harrison is instantly convinced that this is, in fact, a brilliant form of added security, intentionally misfiling the collection in order to obscure it, and orders Norton to look up various misspellings. Unwilling to wait while Ironhorse gets the paperwork lined up, Harrison picks the lock to the next vault, which is chock full of thirty-year-old file boxes and alien artifacts. And also a boom box that’s so 80s that it is identical to the first picture that comes up if you google “80s boom box”.

Harrison reaches for an alien device that looks kinda like a dousing rod — it’ll later be revealed as a handheld weapon — but his approach wakes up a small crystal pyramid that glows green. When he tries to show it to Suzanne, it tosses him into a pile of boxes. Harrison appears no worse for wear physically, though: he pushes the boxes aside, shouting at Suzanne that he doesn’t need her help, then violently shoving her away with a shout of, I am not making this up, “You’re not my mother!” so he can get back to fondling his crystal.

Continue reading Thesis: The Second Seal (War of the Worlds 1×06)

WWE legend “Rowdy” Roddy Piper died after suffering a heart attack in his Hollywood home. He was 61.

Born Roderick George Toombs, Piper joined the WWE in 1984 after getting his start with the NWA in the late 1970s. He and Hulk Hogan met in landmark matchups including MTV’s “The War to Settle the Score” and the first WrestleMania, where Piper and “Mr. Wonderful” Paul Orndorff took on Hogan and Mr. T.

Piper’s agent Jay Schacter confirmed the news, first reported by TMZ, to Variety.

“WWE Legend ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper Dies at 61”, Variety

I’m maybe just a little bit creeped out to discover that a day after I published my article on the 1988 movie They Live, its lead actor, Roddy Piper, passed away. It’s even creepier given that my google search history from last week is full of “Is Roddy Piper dead?” searches, because I half-remembered hearing the news of his cancer diagnosis from 2006 and wanted to check if he was still alive. I never came right out and said it in the article, but, for what it’s worth, he was really quite good as an actor in that movie.

Anyway, rest in peace, Mr. Piper. I’m sure you’re kicking ass and chewing bubblegum with the angels now.

I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubble gum.

Some images and phrases worm their way into the zeitgeist so powerfully that they completely eclipse their often-forgotten origins. The Sicilian proverb “Revenge is a dish best served cold,” or “I reject your reality and substitute my own,” from the 1985 film The Dungeonmaster (Even then, it’s probably a misquote of The Doctor from The Deadly Assassin). Or Kris Kristofferson’s 1969 song “Me and Bobby McGee”. [spoiler mode=inline ]Stay Asleep.[/spoiler]

A lot of people have a strong knee-jerk negative reaction when something undergoes major changes in adaptation. I get that, but it’s not a reaction I share. If anything, I think I prefer it when remakes go pretty far afield: it’s like, here’s a new thing that is a lot like that old thing you liked. Don’t get me wrong: Jem and the Holograms is going to suck so hard anyone in its direct path will need to be treated for exposure to Hawking radiation. But it’s not like anyone is going to say, “Yeah, the big problem with the 1998 Lost in Space movie is that they strayed too far from the source material.” When a remake or adaptation goes off the rails, it’s hardly ever because they “changed too much”: it’s far more likely to be because what they changed it to was a bad idea, or because the source material wasn’t amenable to adapting. [spoiler mode=inline ]Obey.[/spoiler]World War Z doesn’t suck because they changed it; it sucks because there was no way in hell adapting a pseudo-documentary into an action film was ever going to work (Or, as one critic put it, “They took an unfilmable book and turned it into an unwatchable movie”). The screenwriter for The Seeker may well have bragged that he didn’t actually read the book (Why do they do this? My best guess is that it’s because in Hollywood, the last thing you want to be accused of is being uncreative. To a Hollywood mind, “I read the book carefully and tried to make a faithful adaptation,” is essentially the same thing as, “I’m an unimaginative hack who plagiarized a beloved author.”), and yes, it’s a shitty, shitty, unwatchable movie. But y’know what? Back when I read The Dark is Rising in sixth grade, it seemed very strange and wrong to me, having been educated largely by ’80s films and children’s TV, that all six signs of the circle were actual, literal, physical things, and there was no twist where one of them was something abstract and existential like “love”.

Speaking of sixth grade, it was round and about 1990 or 1991 when I started consuming a series of science fiction anthologies published by Raintree and edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg and Charles Waugh. [spoiler mode=inline]Work 8 hours. Play 8 hours. Sleep 8 hours.[/spoiler] Each anthology had a loose theme, though there was a lot of overlap. I remember, on average, about one story from each of them. From After the End, there was a Bradbury story about an automated smart-house happily going along its daily routine, unaware that its owners had been incinerated by a nuclear explosion some time earlier. Time Warps, one of two time travel-themed books, had a story about some scientists who destroy the universe by using a time machine to create a paradox. The one I remember from Thinking Machines was about an automated, self-maintaining car that roamed the highways long after its passengers, unable to unlock the doors, had all died inside, though it turns out it also contained Arthur C. Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God and Frederic Brown’s The Answer. [spoiler mode=inline]Marry and Reproduce.[/spoiler] The Immortals contained a story of a scientist who discovered a formula that granted immortality, but caused total paralysis. Travels Through Time contained Asimov’s take on the several billion science fiction short stories where a time-traveling William Shakespeare flunks a freshman Shakespeare class. Another Bradbury story in Children of the Future, this one about schoolchildren on Venus who lock an unpopular girl in the closet so she misses the only hour of sunshine in seven years. The volume about Mad Scientists ended with Von Goom’s Gambit, in which an unlikable chess-player discovers, based on the popular sci-fi notion that the human brain is a computer, a series of moves that configures a chessboard as a binary computer program that crashes the human brain. He is eventually murdered by a cabal of respectable chessmasters who decide that the one thing they really can’t stand is a smart ass. [spoiler mode=inline]No independent thought.[/spoiler] The way I was able to find these anthologies when I went looking for them a couple of months ago was by checking out the publication history of the Philip K. Dick story I remembered from Bug Awful, where a time-traveler brings acid butterflies back in time while trying to sort out why the future is devoid of human life.

But the book I remember the best was Tomorrow’s TV. [spoiler mode=inline]Like and Subscribe.[/spoiler] I remember three stories from the predictably mercenary anthology in which people who wrote books warned readers that TV would be the cause of our civilization’s destruction. I wonder if anyone ever wrote a short story where books turn out to be evil and epic poetry is portrayed as the only wholesome, non-civilization-dooming means of education and entertainment. Tomorrow’s TV contained Jack Haldeman II’s A Scientific Fact, based on the popular but almost certainly false notion that the human brain permanently records everything it ever sees, so once a generation of people grow up watching TV, those years of 30 frames per second causes a massive echolalia epidemic when everyone’s brains get full. [spoiler mode=inline]Watch more TV.[/spoiler] Ray Bradbury’s The Pedestrian tells of a man who’s arrested and carted off to a mental hospital on the assumption that anyone who prefers to go out for walks instead of watching TV must be insane.

The final story in the anthology is Ray Nelson’s Eight O’Clock in the Morning. It tells the story of George Nada. After participating in a hypnotist’s stage show, he accidentally wakes up all the way and realizes, with the sudden clarity of a character in a golden age sci-fi story, that Earth is under the thrall of the four-eyed reptilian “Fascinators”. Not unlike The Silence, something about the Fascinators’ physical appearance compells humans to obey and not notice them as they order humanity to “[spoiler mode=inline]Stay Asleep[/spoiler]”, “[spoiler mode=inline]Obey the government[/spoiler],” and the like.

Yeah. It’s They Live. This was the first time, I think, that I became actively aware of how much something could change in adaptation. Or maybe not. It depends on when I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which may have been a few years earlier. John Carpenter’s They Live is even more liberal in its adaptation of the source material than Victor Flemming’s The Wizard of Oz, enough that I wasn’t 100% certain until a few years later, when I re-watched, looking out for Ray Nelson’s name in the credits. [spoiler mode=inline]Bookmark this site.[/spoiler]

Back in 1988, the point in the narrative where when I saw They Live, I didn’t like it much. I was nine, and the subtext went straight over my head, so it seemed like it was just a big dumb action movie with clunky dialog and violence of the mundane “people shooting each other” sort I never really cared for. I liked Eight O’Clock in the Morning, which is shorter and being a golden age science fiction story, is based entirely around having a clever twist at the end.

The movie is inspired not just by the story itself, but by “Nada”, a very straight 1986 comic book adaptation by Nelson and Bill Wray (Though the aliens are rather more Lovecraftian than Reptilian). It stars pro wrestler Roddy Piper as a drifter (Credited as “Nada”, but I don’t recall anyone actually saying his name) who comes to LA looking for work. Unlike the story, the movie takes the very ’80s approach of spending for fracking ever to get started. [spoiler mode=inline]All glory to the hypnotoad.[/spoiler] The first thirty minutes is just Nada going to work, making friends among LA’s homeless, and purposefully ignoring any sort of social commentary while little bits of foreshadowing happen in drips and drabs thanks to a local street preacher, pirate TV broadcasts, and Nada’s friend Frank making observations about the disappearance of the middle class and how much harder it is for a working man to get by than it ought to be.

The plot finally, mercifully, gets going when a church full of weirdos (Including the foreshadowing street preacher) gets raided and demolished by The Man, and this leads to Nada getting a pair of the sunglasses they’d been stockpiling. Rather than hypnotic control that’s broken by “waking up”, in They Live, the aliens broadcast a signal from a TV transmitter which interferes with human vision. [spoiler mode=inline]Tell your friends to read A Mind Occasionally Voyaging.[/spoiler] The sunglasses filter out the effect, though this has the side effect of rendering the world black-and-white, (The implication is that the aliens are colorizing reality, a subtle dig at Ted Turner, who, just a few months before this movie was released, had nearly been lynched when he announced plans to colorize Citizen Kane).

And then, more padding. Five minutes of Nada wandering through LA, seeing that every billboard, sign, and product label is really a hidden message to obey, consume, and worship money, and that practically everyone who looks affluent or successful is actually a large-eyed skeletal creature. [spoiler mode=inline]Conform.[/spoiler] He finally spends enough time calling people ugly that the overlords cotton on and two alien cops attempt to arrest him. We’re a little shy of the halfway point of the movie, though the equivalent part of the short story is only 40 lines in, and we’re still on the first page of the comic. In the film version, Nada kills the cops and steals their weapons. In the other versions, the aliens are more subtle. Rather than confronting George face-to-face, the local police chief, identifying himself as George’s “controller” calls him on the phone and orders him to die of a heart attack at eight o’clock the next morning.

Hiding from the cops, Nada ducks into what turns out to be the bank from every movie that has a bank robbery scene, where he utters the line destined to enter public consciousness when Duke Nukem steals it in 1996. Being all out of gum, he shoots the place up, discovering in the process that the aliens’ gold watches are secretly teleportation devices and communicators.

George Nada has a go at waking up his neighbor by shouting at her and slapping her. While the short story is terse enough that this might not imply any more violence that one would use to rouse someone from a stupor, the comic version is graphic and sexualized and horrible, with the neighbor, nipples visible through a sheer, form-fitting dress, sent flying, because it’s the ’80s and a comic book, and graphic, sexualized brutality toward women is just a thing that happens. [spoiler mode=inline]New War of the Worlds posts on Wednesdays.[/spoiler]

John Carpenter wisely elected to deescalate the violence in the film version. Nada hijacks a young cable executive, Holly, and forces her to help him escape his pursuit. He tries to persuade her to try the sunglasses, but she refuses, pointing out that regardless of what she sees, since she thinks he’s insane, she’d just lie and tell him whatever she thought he wanted to hear. He turns his back on her for a moment, and somehow, she’s able to throw him through a plate glass window. We’ve established that she’s human, so there’s absolutely no justification for her being able to do this, beyond, “It’s an action movie. Tossing a grown man through a sheet of plate glass is really easy even if you’re much smaller.” [spoiler mode=inline]New Doctor Who posts on Saturdays.[/spoiler] She very calmly and dispassionately calls the police, though the camera lingers on his dropped sunglasses as foreshadowing.

Nada finds another pair of sunglasses in a trash truck near the church and tries to persuade his friend Frank to put them on. Frank, who has been watching TV and assumes Nada is a psychopathic spree killer, refuses in the form of a six minute long fight scene between the two of them. This is basically the climax of the film: six minutes of Roddy Piper and Keith David beating the snot out of each other. Twice now, the plot of this film has come down to Roddy Piper’s desperate quest to get someone to try on a pair of sunglasses. [spoiler mode=inline]Call your mother. She misses you.[/spoiler]

Once Nada’s beaten Frank badly enough that he can force the sunglasses onto him, they mill around for another five minutes walking off their injuries, check into a motel, and make gay jokes about sharing a room. A resistance leader recognizes Frank’s glasses and invites them to a meeting.

The resistance serves very little purpose in this movie other than to facilitate a huge exposition dump. [spoiler mode=inline]Re-Elect Mayor Lutsky.[/spoiler] The meeting is five minutes of Frank and Nada milling around as resistance members explain how the aliens are using Earth the way the US uses the third world, that there’s a human elite who help the aliens in exchange for wealth and power, how the gold watches work, how pollution and wealth inequality are all the fault of the aliens, and how the mostly-human cops are scouring the city for the resistance, having been told that they’re communists. Given that the resistance wants to kill the wealthy, reduce income inequality, and ensure that the working class gets their fair share, technically, I think they are communists. Also, they get a pair of contact lenses to replace their sunglasses, so that we can see the actors’ faces for the showdown. Also, Holly shows up, having presumably tried on Nada’s sunglasses. Then the army or the police or the aliens or something storm the place and kill everyone except for Holly, Frank and Nada.

Nada and Frank escape when Frank’s watch creates a portable hole that dumps them into some passages. They get to attend a meeting of human collaborators, celebrating their profits, and run into a homeless man from early in the movie, now a wealthy collaborator (We can probably assume he’s the one who sold out the church). Assuming them to be fellow collaborators, he shows Frank and Nada an intergalactic spaceport (for no reason other than that it looks cool) and a cable news studio where aliens broadcast their control signal.

All three versions of the story eventually lead the hero to this news studio, though the motivation and plan is different. In the film, the resistance leader had mentioned the possibility of blowing up the transmitter for the alien control signal, and Frank thinks this sounds like a good idea. In the short story, the plan is not so straightforward, since the mind control seems to be an intrinsic property of the aliens. [spoiler mode=inline]We are your friends.[/spoiler] George assumes that the aliens will realize what’s happened and place him back under control when he fails to die at the appointed moment, so he determines that his only chance to stop them is to act quickly. George notices that the aliens are unable to control him if they show any sign of fear or uncertainty. He calls the police chief back and announces that he’s found a way to wake people up and plans to liberate the planet — as soon as word spreads among the aliens, they all reflexively fear him, rendering him immune to further control. He heads to the TV studio in order to interrupt a live broadcast.

They shoot their way up to the roof, pursued by soldiers with, for some reason, Ghostbusters PKE meters. They meet up with Holly on the way, who shoots Frank in the head once Nada is around the corner. Yes, Holly is a collaborator. A twist which would be a shocking betrayal if Holly had been in more than three scenes. Nada shoots her, then shoots the transmitter, and a moment later, is shot himself by a police helicopter. Nada dies flipping the bird as the transmitter explodes, and the film ends on a montage of clips as all around Los Angeles, people start to notice the aliens who surround them and dominate their media, including an alien Siskel and Ebert complaining about the tastelessness of directors like John Carpenter. We close on a scene lifted directly from the comic adaptation, where a naked woman (The only nudity in this movie. I assume it was a last-minute bid to get an R-rating because back then, it made you more marketable) [spoiler mode=inline]Bring back Firefly.[/spoiler] looks down from the TV at the man she’s riding to see that he’s an alien.

The short story’s ending is similarly bittersweet, but with a better twist. George shoots an alien newscaster (With a dart-gun he’d taken from an alien earlier), then, with the newscaster still on-screen, orders humanity to wake up while imitating the Fascinators’ “croak”.

It was George’s voice the city heard that morning, but it was the Fascinator’s image, and the city did awake for the very first time and the war began.

George did not live to see the victory that finally came. He died of a heart attack at exactly eight o’clock.

There’s a fair bit of violence in the short story. It’s easily overlooked because Nelson is pretty terse particularly when it comes to description, but George Nada murders an alien wino by beating his head in with a brick, slits the throats of two more, and shoots several. In fact, it seems likely that some of the guards he kills in the TV studio are human, as he mentions not wanting to do it (The comic omits that part). There’s also a scene where he finds a clutch of alien children and goes all Anakin Skywalker on them. This is all rendered pretty gruesomely in the comic.

The film is curiously much less violent. Its biggest action scene is the fistfight between Nada and Frank. And while Nada might have a higher body count, running around Los Angeles with an assault rifle, it’s curiously bloodless carnage. [spoiler mode=inline]Follow me on Twitter @lraszewski.[/spoiler] Even Nada’s own death is bloodless, despite him catching a half-dozen rounds from a machine gun. Moreover, Holly is the only human Nada kills — the film frequently cuts in Nada’s POV to assure us that his other victims are all aliens. Even Holly, he only shoots in self-defense, as she’s holding a gun on him. For that matter, Nada never even kills any aliens who aren’t directly threatening him.

The other big thing about the film, of course, is the political angle. There’s no real hint in Ray Nelson’s story about why the aliens are doing this. The aliens have conquered the Earth because that’s just what aliens do. [spoiler mode=inline]Go back to sleep.[/spoiler] They appear to occupy all walks of life. Several of the aliens Nada kills are clearly working-class or poor. There’s no clear end to which they’re manipulating humanity, other than the desire to live unmolested and occasionally eat humans.

Other than a handful of alien soldiers, the aliens from They Live are all presented as wealthy elite. More than that, they’re presented as directly responsible for the downfall of the middle class, the stagnancy of wages, unemployment, pollution, income inequality, in short, they’re basically space-Reagan. They Live is basically turning the bourgeois into aliens so that they can get away with saying, “And therefore we should hunt down and kill the wealthy.” [spoiler mode=inline]If you like this article, link to it.[/spoiler] This is possibly the most communist Big Dumb Action Movie I’ve ever seen. Television replaces religion as the opium of the masses. Every good or even sympathetic character is a laborer — heck, there’s even a strong element of “The biggest obstacle for the working man is the way the bourgeois manipulates them into fighting each other instead of working together against the true enemy,” which Frank basically says outright to Nada early in the film, and is brought home when they spend seven minutes beating each other up. I have no idea how John Carpenter got away with it.

But as is always the case, there’s a serious risk you run when you wrap your social commentary in a fantastic setting. By making his bourgeois class into space aliens, Carpenter is effectively absolving humanity: it’s not our fault that our consumer culture is impeding material social progress, or that we passively sit back and allow 90% of the world’s wealth to concentrate in the hands of one percent of its population: we’re being mind-controlled by aliens. We don’t need sweeping systemic changes — you don’t even need a revolution: the actual revolutionaries get squashed in less time than it takes Nada to put sunglasses on Frank. What you need is one dude with a shotgun and some one-liners.

I am not a big fan of communism. [spoiler mode=inline]Paul is dead[/spoiler] But I think that the communist critique of capitalism has a lot of truth to it. And a big part of that critique is that the abuses and failures and waste and suffering that comes out of capitalism aren’t the result of the people at the top being evil skeleton-faced space aliens: those problems are inherent to the system. You can’t have a completely non-abusive capitalism, because it won’t be competitive with abusive ones. The best you can ever do is to manage your externalities. Find something you can abuse that doesn’t mind. Or, more historically, find something you can abuse that won’t fight back.

And that, curiously enough, brings us back to War of the Worlds. Because what’s the original War of the Worlds but a science fiction parable that seeks to ask, “Okay, Victorian England. You like sailing all over the world and conquering less advanced cultures with your superior military technology. How would you feel if someone else did that to you?” And here’s my twist ending: They Live may borrow the structure of its plot from Eight O’Clock in the Morning. But at a fundamental level, this movie is really John Carpenter’s War of the Worlds. It’s a spiritual reimagining, updating Welles’s fundamental question for 1980s America: “Okay, Chicago-School Neoliberal (A term which, in America, you have to explain, because “neoliberal” uses a definition of “liberal” that is completely the opposite to the one typically used in political discourse. Short version: privatize everything) America. You like flying all over the world and setting up sweatshops, strip-mining natural resources and keeping the third world in poverty to provide low-cost consumer goods and vastly enrich your monied class. How would you feel if someone else did that to you?” [spoiler mode=inline]Next week, back to War of the Worlds with 1×06: The Second Seal[/spoiler].

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• They Live is available on DVD and streaming from Amazon.
• Nada was originally published in 1986 by Eclipse Comics, and can be read in its entirety here.
• Eight O’Clock in the Morning by Ray Nelson can be read here.
• [spoiler mode=inline]Stay asleep.[/spoiler]

It is October 30, 1989. Tammy Faye Bakker moves into a motel to stay near her husband, who was sentenced to half a century for fraud last week. Smith Dairy of Ohio brings all the boys to the yard with a world-record 1,500 gallon milkshake. The prolonged Battle of the Bay finally ended Saturday when the Oakland Athletics won game four. The second national tour of Les Misérables will move from LA to San Francisco on Wednesday. Friday, hundreds will gather in Sofia, Bulgaria to demand democratization.

This is Janet Jackson’s last week at the top of the charts with “Miss You Much”. By Friday, she’ll have swapped places with Roxette. Opening in theaters this week is Valmont, the second movie in the past eleven months based on Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Unlike last year’s more successful Dangerous Liaisons, which was based on Christopher Hampton’s 1985 play, this one is adapted directly from the 1782 epistolary novel by Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos, which, fun fact, is the very first thing I ever bought on Amazon, on March 14, 1999. I’d just seen the play and really liked it, plus I was really into epistolary novels. MacGyver, 21 Jump Street and Alien Nation all air new Halloween episodes. CBS reruns last year’s Garfield Halloween special. NBC shows a special called The Wickedest Witch starring Rue McClanahan and Burgess Meredith, which has, as far as I know, never been shown since.

Star Trek the Next Generation offers up “Booby Trap“, an episode that is very good if you are watching it in 1989, but less good in the light of next year’s “Galaxy’s Child“, which recasts it from a story in which Geordi falls in love with his ship via a holographic avatar to one where Geordi creates a holographic simulacrum of a real woman because he’s a nerdy mechanophile who can’t handle Real Girls (made worse still by later repeated implications that the Real Leah Brahms is destined to leave her husband for Geordi because his creepy stalker approach works, for they are fated to be together). It’s pretty much always Halloween for Friday the 13th The Series, which airs “Bad Penny”, a sequel to last season’s “Tails I live, Heads you die”, featuring a magic coin that can trade one person’s life for another’s.

War of the Worlds is curiously un-Halloween-themed with “Breeding Ground”. At least “Terminal Rock” had people in fancy dress. That said, there’s something very sci-fi horror about “Breeding Ground”, in a particularly Outer Limits sort of way. Certainly, it’s the farthest they’ve tacked in the direction of actual horror so far, and the result is an episode that’s tonally very rich. It’s also an episode that’s important in the ongoing storyline — the events of this episode will be referenced again later in the season (also in last week’s episode, as they must have aired them out of order). There’s a particularly strong showing from some of the characters, a sympathetic antagonist of sorts, and some nice detail fleshing out the world.

But at the same time… I don’t know if it’s all that good. The weak spot this week is the regular cast, and that just does not bode well. Jared Martin in particular is well off his game. More than that, their involvement in the plot is utterly superfluous. In many ways, this episode would be better if you just cut them out and retooled this as an episode of one of the half-dozen horror anthologies that have sprung up recently. The action of the story is tremendously thin, just enough to serve as a cursory skeleton for showcasing societal collapse and body horror. It’s not that the plot itself is weak: it’s more like the wrong parts of it are happening to the wrong people.

While the aesthetic of this episode is straight-up horror, the plot is more that of a tragedy in the classical sense. It is, specifically, a story about a noble character who finds himself in a situation where a personal flaw allows external factors to twist his noble traits to inevitable disaster. It even observes the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action for the most part, and the parts that don’t are the weakest.

The fallout of this that the same character is, depending on your point of view, the protagonist, the villain, or the victim. This episode, much more than the others, feels like it’s written partially under the assumption that the Morthren are supposed to be the heroes: the ones engaged in the noble work of trying to assure their survival in a hostile world. As with so many things in this show, it’s a very interesting conceit, but it’s setting the show up for failure when there’s so much else in the show determined to depict them as ’80s horror movie villains.

This episode, wisely, puts us one step removed from actually siding with the aliens by introducing a patsy. This is our tragic “hero”, Doctor Emil Gestaine, played by Gerard Parkes (Who you may remember for playing “Doc” in Fraggle Rock and its highly controversial feature film adaptation, The Boondock Saints). He is, to all appearances, a skilled and compassionate doctor, once considered the top man in his field. The Morthren have sought him out because the survival of their species relies on them being able to breed on Earth, and for reasons which they do not go into, this requires they find a way to implant “seeds of the Eternal” into human hosts.

When we open, Doctor Gestaine is performing one of these implantations, using one of those three-fingered tongs we noted last week to shove a glowing “seed” into the back of some dude who probably just came in to get his tonsils out. Gestaine will later justify his actions in the name of the scientific knowledge humanity stands to gain. His other motivation is more immediate: he’s suffering from a degenerative illness which they’ll eventually explain as the result of his time on a medical team trying to save the victims of biological warfare experiments run awry (Because it’s a punk-rock dystopia. Of course the government is running secret biological warfare experiments and releasing them on their own people). The Morthren have provided him with a treatment, in the form of a test tube of red liquid with some green pith on top.

Denis Forest and Catherine Disher only get a few minutes of screen-time this week. Instead, it’ll be Ardix and Bayda doing most of the heavy lifting. There’s a great shot of them in shadow which feels very X-Files. The implant doesn’t take, and and the host’s back explodes, but not before he has time to run down a hall in the filthy, broke-down hospital, right past Harrison Blackwood and hide behind a plastic sheet for the sake of discretion before his back explodes.

Blackwood, fortuitously, had been on his way to visit Gestaine, an old friend, in hopes of scoring some megacillin (the Canadian brand name for benzylpenicllin, an injectable form of penicillin used for treating syphillis (and other things, but that’s the first thing on every list I’ve found), but which I bet the writers just used because it sounded like it means “Penicillin, only moreso, because it’s the future”), since Suzanne is sick, though she’ll be perfectly fine the next time we see her. There’s a small scene near the beginning establishing Blackwood’s trek to the hospital which has some nice world-building. A radio in the background mentions rioting “on the east side”, which the newscaster attributes to the “rash of unexplained droughts” back in “Doomsday“, which this episode is clearly meant to be set no more than a day or so after. It’s still raining, hard enough that the downspouts are overflowing. Also, Blackwood’s wearing the same shirt. Debi, updating Kincaid on the day’s news, mentions that, “Another senator skipped bail.” Kincaid’s bought morphine on the black market, which pleases Blackwood though no one says why especially, so I am going to assume that a drug problem is part of Blackwood’s Rugged proto-’90s grim anti-hero shtick. Blackwood’s quest is motivated by Kincaid’s failure to bring home any antibiotics, which he seems strangely glib about, despite how seriously the other three react. Blackwood is so taken aback by this that he hugs a random patient (Seriously, that guy he’s hugging in the animated gif just appears out of nowhere and vanishes in the next shot) then winds up a pay phone to call Kincaid (Yeah, phones wind up. It’s the future).

So the aliens need a new victim to experiment on. Fortunately, a few scenes earlier, we were introduced to Kate Barrows (Helen Hughes She’s got a long resume, but only one thing jumped out at me: she was one of the ghosts in the pants-crapping horrifying (but somehow only if you are a small child) 1985 French-Canadian movie The Peanut Butter Solution), an elderly woman, a former exotic dancer, whose apartment suggests that she’s living in the past, surrounding herself with old magazines and posters, even a weird black-and-white cardboard standee. But she seems happy enough, singing along to an old Victrola as she dances around her apartment. Her spirits aren’t even brought down by the fact that she’s behind on her bills, uninsured, and desperate for a welfare check that hasn’t come because the welfare office is on strike (Because societal collapse). What does get her down — lays her flat out on the floor even — is that she’s also got a bad ulcer that Gestaine can’t legally operate on because she’s poor and this is a dystopian future.

While she’s waiting to die in the fifth floor “People we’re going to let die because they’re poor” ward, Ardix and Bayda find her and decide, for reasons they don’t explain, that she’d make a good replacement victim. Gestaine wants none of it after their previous failure, but gives in the second Ardix waves that pith-covered test tube in his face, on the condition that, “This time, we’ll do it my way.”

By “his way,” he means that he’ll fix Kate’s ulcer, and while he’s in there, he installs a glowing alien baby-seed in her uterus. While he’s doing that, Blackwood and Kincaid break into the morgue. Because it’s the future and human life is cheap, the morgue keeps bodies not in refrigerated vaults, but hanging from the ceiling in plastic baggies. A rare moment of amusing banter:[br/]Kincaid: Oh God, I hate these places.[br/]Blackwood: By the time you’re in one, you won’t care any more. Blackwood scrapes something that looks like a green slug out of the first victim’s body while expositioning to Kincaid about Gestaine’s past. Back at the base, Blackwood examines the sample under a microscope and determines that it’s a fusion of human and alien cells — the first evidence they’ve ever seen of the aliens having the ability to combine their biology with the native population. Suzanne notes that the aliens have tried this before and failed. This must be a reference to an event in the unseen backstory about General Wilson’s alien-fighting team. It’s a bit annoying that they don’t follow up on this, since it’s rare for anyone to talk about the events before the destruction of their old HQ.

Also worth noting is that this scene answers two of the questions I’ve raised in the past. First, we learn that Harrison is some kind of biologist, as he’s able to identify the tissue by visual inspection. I probably should have guessed from the fact that he habitually carried a sample vial around with him in “Doomsday” (Though not this week, as he has Kincaid take one from the morgue. Maybe he hasn’t had a chance to clean the one he used last time). A biologist and a chemist seem like a very realistic pairing to be working on an alien-fighting team, and it’s surprising that a TV show like this wouldn’t have gone for something flashier and less realistic. The second thing we have absolute confirmation on now is that Debi knows about the aliens, as she’s the one who draws the conclusion that they’re trying to cross-breed. Pity, that could have made a good episode in itself.

The gang makes plans for the now instantly cured Suzanne to go undercover as a candy striper (This is the Future, so those old-timey nurses’ caps are back in) while Ardix and Bayda try to be friendly and comforting to Kate, who’s instantly about six months pregnant. They come off really creepy instead, though Kate doesn’t notice. Gestaine has passed the aliens off as federal researchers, who paid for her medical care in exchange for participating in their experiment. Kate is alarmed for about ten seconds and then is cool with it.

That right there is one of the biggest weaknesses of this story. Kate is the victim in all this. She’s the one who’s had her body violated against her will, who’s suddenly found herself pregnant, well past childbearing age, with an alien baby, been taken advantage of by a doctor she’d trusted, and is being kept a prisoner. No one is ever going to actually give her any consideration, ask her her opinion, or respect her decisions. Worse still, aside from one cursory nod at the end, the plot is going to do its darnedest to make Emil Gestaine out to be the victim in all this, the well-intentioned doctor who’d made a great sacrifice to help humanity, who’d been preyed upon due to his one weakness (The illness he acquired trying to save people, natch) and and ultimately destroyed by his choices and his circumstances. When Blackwood confronts him, they even give him a big hero speech where he tries to take the moral high-ground because, “I come down here every stinking day of my life, to fight a war against rape, murder, disease and despair.” It takes serious balls to position yourself on the anti-rape side right after you’ve forcibly impregnanted a non-consenting woman. What the fuck, War of the Worlds?

Blackwood hijacks the ambulance when they try to move Kate to the alien base for the delivery. Kincaid, predictably, wants to give Kate an abortion (without asking her of course), and the others sort of tacitly agree, even though they really want to study the implantation process and learn what they can about alien biology. They make a point of sending Debi out of the room while they discuss this, though they have no qualms about talking right in front of Kate.

Malzor and Mana show up in order to get in the contractually required scene where they bitch at each other. Mana considered the plan too risky and hates the idea of using humans as hosts, while Malzor takes her reluctance as a lack of faith in the Eternal’s ability to look out for his own. Gestaine gives up Blackwood in exchange for his life and arranges a meeting in which he fesses up about his condition and his work with the aliens (One nice facet of Gestaine’s tragic flaw: he hints that his interest in a cure for his condition may be more about his failure to save the Georgetown victims than about saving his own life). Blackwood notes the rash that’s spreading over Gestaine’s hands and neck as evidence that their cure may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

There is an ambiguous cut to Malzor declaring, “We have contact,” which either refers to the fact that the Morthren are about to spring a trap on Blackwood, or that they’ve done something to Kate Barrow, as we cut over to her suddenly waking up and clobbering Suzanne with an ultrasound wand to make her escape.

Kincaid saves Harrison from ambush by splattering a soldier’s glow-sticks across what might be an old Chevy Vega (though I can’t imagine what a Chevy Vega would be doing in The Future), they stop back at the shelter to find Suzanne, then hit the streets looking for Kate, basically to keep them from outrunning the plot before Kincaid suddenly realizes without prompting that she’d obviously just go back to the hospital.

Gestaine confronts Ardix, who confirms that he’ll eventually build up a tolerance to their medicine. It’s not clear how on-the-level Ardix is here. He claims that they had no way of knowing how long the medication would be effective, and that they hadn’t actually said he’d get a permanent cure. He seems like he’s implying that they did the best they could and weren’t deliberately screwing him over, and suggests that Gestaine should be “glad for the moment we gave you.” And despite realizing that Blackwood was right about the aliens, Gestaine is still willing to go along with them for as long as the alien medicine will keep him going.

Kate delivers the baby in the traditional “more or less like real life but cleaner and faster” way. The camera makes a point of not letting us see the baby at this point. Ardix and Malzor both look briefly alarmed, but it’s hard to tell with Julian Richings and Denis Forest. They may actually be trying to look proud or happy or something. Gestaine takes one look at the little alien and does the traditional tragic catharsis, “My God, What Have I Done?”

Having been delayed by a car-fight against more soldiers, Blackwood and Kincaid arrive at the hospital to find the aliens gone and Gestaine dead on the floor in a pool of blood. It may just be that the director needed a way for them to see that he’s dead, but I’ll note that Gestaine wasn’t vaporized by an alien weapon. And if you look close, I think there’s a scalpel in his hand. I’d take that to mean that he killed himself in remorse, though I guess it’s also possible that he took a swing at Ardix and just got shoved head-first into something. After lingering a long moment to let us take that in, the show finally remembers Kate, who’s still alive, crying for her baby. They’ll return to her in the penultimate scene, sitting quietly in her darkened apartment to indicate the soul-crushing despair she feels. Or whatever. Too little, too late, I’m not buying that she’s a real character with feelings and motivations. I’m half surprised they didn’t just shove her in a refrigerator given the way the story has treated her more like a plot token than a character so far.

There’s a weird coda before that, back at base where Kincaid comes in like Rush Limbaugh’s Santa Claus, as black market drugs are available again. Suzanne, Harrison, and Debi all look so happy to get big old bottles of pills. Well, thank God they resolved that whole “black market drugs are in short supply” plot thread. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night.

We end with Malzor presenting the baby to The Eternal. Malzor gets a little weepy and sentimental, and why not. He holds the child aloft, Lion King-style, to reveal… A perfectly normal human-looking baby. So… Gestaine took one look at a perfectly normal human-looking baby and decided to off himself? I give up.

This episode almost works. There’s a lot that’s good about it. Gerard Parkes is great, as you’d expect. And the things it sets out to do, it does well: there’s a compelling tragedy going on around Emil Gestaine. You’re probably bored by now of listening to me go on about how fantastic Julian Richings is, but this is probably his strongest episode. He’s fantastically creepy, particularly in an “uncanny valley” sort of way, where he acts like someone who has only ever observed human behavior from a distance and is just going through the motions. Watching him try to be comforting to Kate, he’s horrifying. Even more impressive is his Mephistopholean manipulation of Gestaine, striking this balance between friendly and threatening, sincere and deceptive.

But then it drives straight into a big old brick wall of wrong. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast aren’t in nearly the same form as Parkes and Richings. This is a Kincaid-lite episode, so we’re stuck with mopey-passive Kincaid rather than one of his other personalities. Jared Martin spends a lot of the episode just being ineffectually angry. Gestaine is a once-great physician who is now performing unethical experiments on people and has already killed at least one person. This ought to be easy. But when Blackwood confronts him, it’s as though his only argument against what Gestaine is doing is “You’re working for genocidal aliens.” This is the place where you always have the, “You used to help people! You took an oath! You betrayed Shiva!” speech, but instead, Blackwood just tells him, “This is a war, but you’re on the wrong side.” He makes it about sides rather than what it ought to be about.

And what it ought to be about is that without her consent, Gestaine performed a dangerous, unethical medical procedure on an unwitting woman and impregnated her. Kate Barrow, who is (going by her actress) seventy-one years old, wakes up from surgery pregnant. This bothers her for approximately thirty seconds. She’s being attended by the two creepiest people she’s likely ever met, but she never gives any hint that she notices this. Within a few hours, she’s at least second trimester. This should be horrific. This should be a story about someone who finds their body being taken away from them, who has a something growing inside her, who is being lied to and deceived and used and manipulated by mysterious, creepy Stepford smilers. This should be Rosemary’s Baby.

The tragic victim in this story should be Kate Barrow, and Kate alone. Not the fscking guy who did this to her.

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• War of the Worlds: The Second Invasion is available on DVD from amazon.com