Category: TV

[Content advisory: The following article contains several animated loops of gore which, though transparently fake, is probably icky enough to be upsetting to some]

“You haven’t got a prayer.”

It is October 17, 1988. Phillip Morris offers $11 billion to buy Kraft. A Ugandan jetliner crashes near Rome due to heavy fog. HRH Queen Elizabeth II makes her first visit to Spain. Pianist Keith Jarrett performs a solo concert in Paris, one of his last solo performances before being diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. President Reagan signs the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, 25 USC sections 2701-2719, establishing federal regulation of gambling on Native American reservations.

UB40’s cover of “Red Red Wine” has unseated Def Leppard on the charts, but in a few days, they’ll yield to Phil Collins’s “Groovy Kind of Love”. The Bills beat the Jets 37-14 after a MacGyver repeat. ALF is new. 60 Minutes has its twentieth anniversary special. That pesky writer’s strike means that Star Trek the Next Generation still hasn’t started its second season yet. Friday the 13th the Series airs “Heads I Live, Tails You Die”, which has something to do with a plot to summon Satan, and also features the first time they kill off Micki (She gets better. One of the popular cursed antique powers is the ability to trade one life for another).

The third episode of War of the Worlds gives Toronto a break from pretending to be California for a bit, and has it pretend to be Regina instead. That’s right, the aliens are heading north this week. A quartet of portly flannel-clad hunters sporting radiation scars are out in the woods somewhere near Wolf Point, Montana. Using a device made out of a typewriter mated to Captain Kirk’s phaser rifle from the second Star Trek pilot, they bounce a green special effect off of what looks like a radio telescope (It’s probably a large satellite television receiver, but we’re talking about a huge dealie that looks a lot more like an RT-70 than a C-Band satellite dish) outside of Wolf Point, Montana (Fun fact: Wolf Point is the hometown of Marvel Superhero William Talltrees, aka “Red Wolf”). They do not elaborate on the details, but the gist of it is that they are receiving the location of a storage facility near Regina, Saskatchewan housing a large number of dormant aliens. Under orders from the advocacy, they set off for Regina, but are hampered by the fact that the only thing falling apart faster than their host bodies is their car. They’re able to hitch a ride to the Canadian border on a prison bus that is conveniently taking a busload of inmates to Canada for an inter-prison hockey game. Which I guess is a thing.

This is all greatly disturbing to this week’s very special guest star, Ann Robinson, reprising her 1953 role as Sylvia Van Buren. She’s gone mad, you see. On top of that, the tap on her sink is dripping and it’s driving her up a wall. Her room is graffiti’d with Mondrian designs and a sketch of an alien hand, helpfully annotated, “Three fingers, not five like me.” She holds her own hand up to her face, clearly imagining a three-fingered one reaching for her before she gives in to some sort of seizure and starts screaming. Nurses rush in to restrain her, and we see that she’s been clutching a picture of Harrison. A second picture on her nightstand is of Clayton Forrester.

I know I shouldn’t nitpick about it, especially as this series is an artifact of the pre-photoshop era, but there’s something I find kind of cute in how blatantly those photos are publicity headshots. I mean, you could make an argument for the picture of Gene Barry (Though, if they worked together for years, it’s a bit strange that the only picture she has of him is from the fifties), but the picture of Jared Martin is a black-and-white publicity shot for this show. So it’s a picture of Harrison ca. 1988. Who in 1988 would have a framed current photo of a loved on in black and white?

I mentioned before, Ann Robinson had pretty much dropped out of acting in the ’60s. This, and some small-time B-horror movie earlier in the year were her first acting gigs in years. She’s really really good though. She comes back to a character that she played for one movie a length of time earlier roughly equivalent to my whole life, and delivers a performance that is spot-on. That bit where she freaks out at her own hand: I am instantly convinced that I’m watching Sylvia Van Buren thirty-five years later.

Mental illness is difficult to portray in film and television, and it’s hardly ever done well. This is not the world’s most accurate portrayal. But it’s better than most. And it’s clear that Ann Robinson is having an absolute ball with the part. In a couple of scenes, Harrison will explain that her work as Forrester’s assistant (There are no direct references to her pursuing a romantic relationship with Forrester after the movie, though most fans prefer to believe she did. If they did marry, it could be seen as a pleasantly progressive touch that she kept her maiden name for professional purposes. On the other hand, she is not referred to as “Mrs.” at any point, so it may be that their romantic relationship was curtailed by her illness. Harrison refers to Clayton as his adoptive father, but does not describe Sylvia similarly, despite the obvious familial affection between them, which also supports the idea that she became incapacitated quickly, and therefore wasn’t around to raise Harrison) on “Project Ezekiel” had somehow (he theorizes it was due to exposure to alien tissue samples) made her a “human electromagnetic barometer”. She gained the ability to predict earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions (Mt. St. Helens is mentioned by name), but was afflicted with migraines, seizures, cliche psychic nosebleeds and severe bipolar disorder. It’s hinted that her psychological symptoms may be due not to the alien influence directly, but to medical experimentation by government scientists trying to understand her abilities: “They hooked electrodes up to my brain, until I couldn’t even remember my name.”

Sylvia’s rough night has prompted the staff to summon Harrison. To show how important this is, Harrison is actually driving this time, rather than napping, even though he’s got Ironhorse in tow. The rapport is very different between them than it was last week. Ironhorse is far more comfortable with the scientist and is more willing to listen to him. He’s still stiff, and it’s still his job to be the skeptical one, but he’s learned to respect Harrison’s judgment even when he doesn’t agree with it. He’s even calling him by his first name. The Ironhorse here draws more from the version of the character who sat around the fireplace telling old Indian Folk Tales back in the pilot. Ironhorse explains that his special forces training has taught him to avoid getting close to people, but he’ll give Harrison a bye now that they’ve “faced death together.” By which he means alien-popsicling that guy in last week’s episode, and not the time they had to run from alien war machines or the time before that where Harrison dragged him out of a combat zone on a quad.

Harrison hasn’t yet told Ironhorse the details on Sylvia; all he knows is that Harrison has a “contact” for alien information. He’s insisted on coming along so that he can establish a relationship with her, “In case you should suddenly die.” (“As opposed to slowly die?” Harrison asks). Ironhorse launches into some Sun Tzu stuff about how only fools fight without knowing their enemies. When he sees the sign for the mental hospital, he assumes Harrison’s contact is undercover, and Harrison, in a very nice and pleasantly subtle character moment, becomes visibly uncomfortable.

He gives Ironhorse the full story once they arrive, and he takes it in stride, which is surprising. You’d really be expecting Ironhorse of all people to be the one who’s skeptical of the elderly mental patient who can predict earthquakes, but instead he just rolls with it. I’m disinclined to complain about it because having Ironhorse be skeptical here, particularly having him be skeptical of Ann Robinson, would just be tedious and callous. Just before they’re summoned up to visit, Harrison is confronted by another elderly patient, who cautions him, “It’s not safe here.” Harrison counters that it’s not safe out there either, to which the patient sighs and mutters to himself, “Oh. I’d forgotten that.”

Sylvia is confused and only partly coherent. At first, she mistakes Harrison for Clayton. She’s frightened by Ironhorse, but calms down when he introduces himself and makes a point of showing her respect as a “distinguished veteran”. At least for this week, Ironhorse’s character has evolved a bit, playing less as the “gruff cop” archetype and more, well, military. These are, I think the two fundamental sides of the Ironhorse character. I said before that Ironhorse isn’t a tremendously dynamic character. I stand by that, but I should probably add some qualifications. Even from the pilot, we see both aspects of the character: polite, reserved “military” Ironhorse, whose mission is to facilitate Harrison and his team’s scientific efforts, and “cop” Ironhorse who wants that annoying scientist out of his hair and isn’t going to listen to any of this crazy talk about little green men. Last week, with General Wilson around to play the “military” role, Ironhorse slipped fully into the “cop” persona, which is presumably why the parts between him and Harrison all felt so much like Hypothetical ’80s Buddy Cop Show Flagstone and Roberts. The key difference, I think, is in how the us/them distinction is drawn. To a soldier, at least, one in a modern, nominally free society, civilians are “us”, and the enemy are “them”. The “enemy” is out-there: a soldier leaves his home to go “over there” and fight the enemy. And for all the honor and the glory, a soldier is fundamentally a servant to the civilian population, the folks back home, who it’s his sworn duty to protect (I should probably acknowledge that this is an exceedingly American understanding of soldiering, which you can only really develop if you’re a country with moderate geographic isolation that hasn’t fought a war on its own soil in a very long time). A cop, on the other hand, doesn’t have the benefit of the same hard distinction: the people he’s sworn to “protect and serve” and the people he’s supposed to be removing from society are the same group of people — sometimes they’re the same individuals. In conventional warfare, the “good guys” and the “bad guys” have the common courtesy to wear different colors, and the people who aren’t wearing one of the designated colors is a designated civilian, and you’re not supposed to shoot them (This is, of course, far truer of wars that had been fought up to 1988 than wars that have been fought since). But the nature of a cop’s job actively encourages them to view the world not as having a hard delineation between “enemy” and “non-combatant”, but rather to view the world in the muddier terms of “enemy” and “potential enemy”, and anyone who isn’t wearing a badge is to be treated with suspicion. Consequentially, Ironhorse-the-soldier is serious, and stern, but he can also be affable. He knows that Norton and Suzanne and Harrison are on his side, and that his duty is to protect humanity. For Ironhorse-the-cop, duty is to get the bad guys, and these three scientists he’s been saddled with are at best a distraction, and anyone he meets might turn out to be “the enemy” at any minute. Over the course of the series, we will, I hope, see patterns emerge in what brings out each side of Ironhorse. The tension between the two Ironhorses is a natural fit for a setup where “the enemy” is an invading army which can hide in plain sight as literally anyone you might run into. But on a larger scale, it’s also a natural fit for the viewing audience in a time where it’s starting to become clear that it’s no longer possible to fight a “traditional” war with two well-defined sides consisting of uniformed state actors facing off on well-defined battlefields. In 1988. And here I am, in 2015, writing this while the city where I lived for thirteen years is literally burning in riots while the police are determined to “restore order” almost more in the manner of an occupying army putting down an insurrection. Sylvia has sensed that the aliens have returned, and it causes her both physical and emotional distress. She locates the aliens somewhere in Montana, but when she starts screaming for Harry (There are only two people in the entire series who call Harrison “Harry”. Make of that what you will) to “kill them all,” the nurses insist on sedating her and make Harrison leave.

The nurses bring up an interesting point. It’s clear that they understand that Sylvia’s condition is something more than just delusions, as one of them mentions her prediction of the Mt. St. Helens eruption. But they’re unphased by her talk of aliens. There’s a long history in film and television of characters with special abilities being presumed insane, with their caregivers blithely, even forcefully dismissing their “delusions” even in the face of evidence. But this is a little different. Are we to believe that they accept her ability to predict natural disasters, but assume the alien business is pure fantasy? I mean, okay. I could buy that. It’d be a lot more sophisticated than you’d expect without further elaboration, but I could just about imagine a reasonable doctor concluding that some abnormality in her brain made her sensitive, but that the aliens were something she hallucinated to explain the unusual sensory input. But since this is War of the Worlds, we might instead conclude that, yeah, the nurses know about aliens, and just don’t care.

Based on Sylvia’s claims, Norton identifies the alien transmission from Wolf Point. Ironhorse notes that Wolf Point is on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation: “Great. First the white man, now aliens.”

Sadly, they don’t do anything with the Native American angle this week. Their stopover in Wolf Point is a brief one, just long enough to meet with the Sheriff, who can’t understand what “terrorists” would want with their town (Psst. Haven’t you noticed that you seem to have a giant radio telescope for no reason?). As luck would have it, though, he does have a VHS tape of the previous night’s football game, showing a distinctive triangular interference pattern at the same time as the transmission.

While Norton and Ironhorse try to interpret the tape from a portable set-up in their Awesome Van, Suzanne and Harrison pay Sylvia another visit. She’s feeling better, though still decidedly odd, and has picked up a penchant for speaking in rhyming couplets and bursting into cackling laughter at inappropriate moments. Suzanne is given the idiot ball for a minute and dismisses Sylvia as hopelessly befuddled and mad. It’s an ugly thing for her to say, and a real mar on her character for this episode. She only does it to give Sylvia a set-up to explain that, yes, of course she’s mad, what with the whole world being “topsy-turvey”, which segues into her identifying the interference patterns on the tape as being indicative of the workings of the alien eye. Looking at it through a three-faceted glass pendant which she describes with the really wonderful phrase, “This doohickey from old Saint Nicky,” she’s able to tell that the embedded message is a satellite image of the Earth. That information is somehow enough for Norton to decipher the message prompting our heroes to set off for Canada.

While that’s going on, the aliens, having switched bodies with some inmates, make their escape during a hockey game. I mentioned before that there were four aliens, which seems strange, because they normally travel in packs of three. There’s no in-story justification, but the reason from a writing perspective is that they need one to sacrifice at this point in the narrative: the alien rips an arm off of one of the human players (I say “rips”, but it’s more like “gently holds on to it as the guy skates away and it just sorta falls off,” but there’s a weird choppy slow-mo effect as it happens so it’s hard to tell what’s going on) and the others escape while everyone is distracted by the big rampaging goalie who melts when shot. As they need to change bodies again in a hurry, they flee to a nearby gas station.

It’s here that we meet Little Bobby. “Little Bobby” is an early role for Canadian actor, producer, voice actor, rapper, podcaster, pro-wrestling manager and commentator, and former Kraft Dinner spokesbaby Stuart Stone. We’re introduced to him playing with a set of Star Trek the Next Generation action figures in the back of his parents’ station wagon on a road trip to Canada, along with his elderly grandmother. Mom, dad, and grandma are all predictably snatched by the aliens while Little Bobby is in the rest room, and for absolutely no reason that could be justified within the confines of the plot, the aliens, now wearing dark sunglasses, opt neither to kill him nor abandon him, instead deciding to, like, adopt him. Mom Alien even orders the others to “Speak as the body would speak, for the sake of the child.” (Does she say it in her normal human voice, or in her creepy liquid Goa’uld voice? I’ll let you guess) They hint at the possibility of possessing him when he’s older, but otherwise seem to be kind of awkwardly parental to him, admonishing him to eat his salad and praising him when he works out that it’s an appropriate time to say, “To life immortal.”

Little Bobby reminds me a bit of that Not-Wil-Wheaton kid from The Stuff, as they have a passing physical resemblance and their backstories are vaguely similar. I’ve referenced Little Bobby before. At some point in the development of this show, they had the idea of making him a recurring character. Not even making this up. At some point in development, they thought it would be a good idea to occasionally check in with Little Bobby as the reanimated, zombie-controlled corpses of his parents and grandmother tooled around the US and Canada in their station wagon, always looking for a way to alert the authorities, and always being laughed off because he is a child and oh, isn’t it hilarious when the police refuse to take a child seriously when he insists that his parents are hurting him? (In this episode, it plays out with him holding up signs from the back of the car begging for help from a passing carload of nuns, who chuckle to themselves and mime at him to indicate that he should take it up with their Boss). They even talked about doing the ’80s equivalent of a viral marketing campaign based around the theme of “Save Little Bobby”.

Wiser voices prevailed, and Little Bobby is never seen or heard from again after this episode, which is chilling in its own way. Presumably, the aliens kill him, or else he’s simply abandoned and dies of exposure. (There is a scene of Little Bobby encountering soldiers in the woods which is supposed to imply that he gets rescued, but as far as I can tell, all the soldiers get killed by the end) And here I was all set to thank God and say how great it was that they didn’t go with this ridiculous running gag. But the more I think about it, the abandonment of Little Bobby is really symptomatic of the large structural problem with the series as a whole. Namely, that this show keeps throwing out big ideas that strongly telegraph that they’re setting something up for the future, and then quietly dropping them as though they’d never happened. I can only think offhand of a single specific incident from one episode that gets picked up on in a later episode.

Do I think that the Little Bobby Subplot is a good subplot that would make a good running gag? No. Of course not. Being glib about child endangerment is the kind of joke hardly anyone could pull off, and almost everyone who could would know better than to risk it. But, if nothing else, they’d have been committing to something. And in committing to something, particularly something this utterly absurd, they’d have been making a firm stand about what kind of show this is. And that would give us some sense of direction rather than the sort of thematically aimless meandering they do where it’s never completely clear if they’re blundering into moments of black comedy and absurdism on purpose or not.

Besides, the weekly adventures of Little Bobby Whose Parents Are Alien-Possessed Reanimated Corpses would be some delicious low-hanging fruit for me to riff on for a few hundred words in every essay.

Continue reading Thesis: Thy Kingdom Come (War of the Worlds 1×03)

I wasn’t actually planning on doing another one of these so soon. A direct one-to-one comparison between every pair of episodes isn’t likely to be very enlightening as we get further into the season. There will be interesting points of comparison, but the seasons don’t address the same things at the same times. For example, members of the clergy appear in episodes three and four of the first season, and a mind-influencing alien artifact will turn up in episode seven. While the Morthren go on the offensive straight away, fully the first six episodes of season 1 are about the aliens trying to adapt to Earth and recover the resources they’d brought with them back in 1953; they won’t get down to the business of actually trying to exterminate humanity until the middle of November, and that was basically when I was originally going to do the second Synthesis post. The Morthren will eventually have to start going on the defensive, but not for a few more weeks. But as I’ve been watching ahead in preparation for future articles, I think it might be worthwhile to talk a bit about the differences in how the two seasons are structured.

At the moment, the situation for the first-season aliens is pretty precarious, while the second-season ones seem to be in a pretty solid position. In “The Walls of Jericho”, the aliens are in serious danger of not surviving the episode. By comparison, there’s no real question of the Morthren living the episode out. The first season aliens need to steal because they have no capacity to manufacture the things they need to survive, while the Morthren, despite having no obvious supply lines seem (at least so far; this will change) to be entirely self-sufficient, able to grow whatever technology they need. Notice that when they discover the missing engram, Ardix’s first reaction is to brush it off as they’ve got spares.

The first season aliens struggling to survive in a hostile environment with no resources but what they can steal and scavenge is a really unusual villain plot for an alien invasion story. The bones of it sound far more like a hero‘s story. As I’ve mentioned before, there are lots of times in War of the Worlds where the Blackwood team serve the narrative role of antagonists: the aliens set up a caper to get something they need to survive, and the plot is essentially a chase with the nominal heroes trying to catch the aliens while the aliens desperately try to get away. With an inevitable Mentos the Freshmaker twist at the end where it seems as though the aliens have been caught, only to reveal that they got away with the thing they needed before the big bad heroes blew up the factory.

This is all very strange and it’s certainly interesting, but I can’t help feeling it’s a serious narrative flaw qua alien invasion narratives. You can certainly argue that it’s very clever to subvert the traditional alien invasion trope of a distant, nigh-invulnerable, all-powerful alien invader, particularly in a sequel to what’s essentially the progenitor of the trope. But it’s not enough to just be clever. If you’re going to put the aliens into the narrative role of the protagonist, you don’t necessarily need them to be sympathetic, but I think it’s a mistake to invert the trope of the all-powerful, nigh-invulnerable, resource-rich alien invader while retaining the traditional aspects of them being distant, irascible, homogenous, and exceedingly expendable.

The problem — part of the problem, for there are several — is that the stakes feel all wrong. Harrison will occasionally fly off the handle about how the fate of the entire planet is at stake, but I’m just having a hard time buying that when half the plot is wrapped up in how goofy these aliens are and how precarious their situation is. There’s a palpable excluded middle-ground between “aliens become extinct” and “aliens conquer the Earth.” Despite them telling us that their situation is dire, their priorities never quite seem to reflect that. The deaths of their soldiers are never treated as anything more than an inconvenience (We have no idea yet the size of the alien force, but it’s small enough that locating alien burial sites will be next week’s top priority), and the advocacy reacts to the prospect of heat-death with more annoyance than anything else.

Mancuso’s version of the aliens are of course very different in this regard. Sure, there are still soldiers to be cannon fodder, but there’s also named characters who we can actually care about. The stakes aren’t exactly lower, but they’re certainly more intimate. Malzor and Mana may grumble about taking over “the world” abstractly, but the world of season 2 feels very much like it’s contracted down to a single city. Of course this doesn’t make a lick of sense from a plot perspective, but it gives us a kind of thematic and narrative cohesion that the first season lacks. It’s sort of like video games. The first season is sort of like an early open-world game, a la the first few Grand Theft Auto games: a huge, sprawling world with little in it but buildings you can’t go into and NPCs you can’t interact with. The second season’s world is smaller, but it’s a world more densely packed with people who are actual people rather than cardboard standees labeled “Hick farmer”, “Useless Sheriff”, and “Superstitious Chinese Woman”.

And even without the threat of looming extinction, the Morthren manage to sell it in a way the first season aliens (I know what they’re called. For no good reason, I’m going to refrain from saying it until the show introduces it. Also, it’s a much more awkward name than “Morthren”) didn’t. We have arguments over resources. In particular, Malzor goes after Mana for losing the engram, and losing two soldiers when they go to retrieve it. It reminds me a little bit of the Doctor Who 25th anniversary story, Silver Nemesis, which aired just shy of a year before “No Direction Home”. It’s a serial I like well enough, but it gets a lot of grief, owning to the fact that it’s pretty much got three different plots going on, one of which is complete crap involving Nazis, and another which is exactly the same plot as they’d done better a month earlier. But I bring it up because it’s the only story where you see Cybermen having a disagreement. More than once, a lieutenant takes the Cyberleader to task over the fact that they’re going to run out of Cybermen if they don’t stop getting killed. Aside from the fact that Cybermen have absolutely no business getting stressed out and snippy, it’s a subtle and effective way to convey the fact that the Cybermen are in a slightly desperate position and only have limited resources (I mean, they also apparently have a big honkin’ battle fleet hanging out in orbit, but you can’t have everything. David Banks, who played the Cyberleader, went on to write a supremely readable book about the Cybermen in which he found the implication that the Cybermen are resource-impoverished so convincing that he concludes the battle fleet is actually fake). Mana, likewise, calls Malzor out when his schemes fail to pay off. There’s a real sense here that the Morthren have to make cost-benefit analyses when sketching out their plans, that, unlike their season 1 counterparts, they can’t simply throw expendable soldiers at problems.

In addition to the overall structure of the series-long arc (insofar as you can call the plot of a TV show from the ’80s an “arc”), the individual episodes are structured very differently as well. On this front, what’s very tangible to me is how much closer “No Direction Home” is to the style and pacing of modern TV. Remember, in “The Walls of Jericho”, our heroes don’t actually get involved in the plot until about halfway through. For the first half of the episode, the aliens are off working on their plot, but the heroes are busy having tea and exposition with Uncle Hank.

Now, that’s something: there’s a corresponding scene in “No Direction Home” to General Wilson shutting the project down in “The Walls of Jericho”, but it’s much faster and sort of offhand, handled via videophone between Kincaid and Major Yaro, a character we’ve never heard of before and never will again. The scene with Wilson is great, of course, with its hints about alien amnesia and John Vernon’s scene-stealing gravitas. But it’s also largely a sideshow to the whole alien-fighting thing that the show is ostensibly about. When Kincaid calls Yaro, we basically take two minutes to give closure to the first season setup, and, importantly, we do it after we’ve already had our first action scene. Season one is going to keep on loading the first two acts of each episode with lots of setup and exposition, and keep the action down to the last ten minutes. Compare that with something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which nearly always put the gang into a fight in the first few minutes of the episode, just to get things going. Or, say, the modern Doctor Who, where we generally start out with the Doctor emerging from the TARDIS and walking directly into the plot. The first season of War of the Worlds is a lot more like Classic Doctor Who, where they were contractually obligated to spend a full half-hour not involving the Doctor with the plot so that there could be a shocking reveal for the cliffanger. Classic, sure, but it is not a coincidence that Doctor Who is going to get cancelled before War of the Worlds does. The nineties are encroaching and they will not put up with this “Making TV is hard! Let’s see how much time we can burn off without actually having anything happen!” ’80s bullcrap.

Don’t mistake me for saying that the problem is that the first season isn’t action-oriented enough. I think I said early on that the first season of War of the Worlds reminds me a little bit of Columbo in a structural sense: the first act tends to focus mostly on the actions of the antagonists, and leaves the viewer knowing more than the heroes, who, through the remainder of the story, are going to be “solving” the mystery set up at the beginning. Columbo, though, wouldn’t work as a CSI-style forensic drama. In an episode of Columbo, we jump straight from the murder to Peter Falk bumbling around the crime scene asking the murderer, “Uh, just one more question, sir.” War of the Worlds instead tends to have a long and fairly dull second act where our nominal heroes squint at microscopes and computer print-outs to try to figure out what the aliens are up to, and it isn’t engaging drama, because what they’re doing isn’t, despite Philip Akin’s considerable efforts to make HVAC maintenance thrilling, all that interesting to watch, and it isn’t engaging mystery because we already know the answer (“The Walls at Jericho” is especially bad in this regard since it takes so long for them to figure out that liquid nitrogen is used for the only thing liquid nitrogen is used for).

In fact, you’ll notice that the chase scene at the beginning of “No Direction Home” leads directly into the alien plot at the mission — it’s the same Morthren soldiers chasing Kincaid’s van who abduct Father Tim. This makes our heroes themselves the catalyst that starts up the specific plot of the week. And we’re going to keep seeing that Mancuso’s version of the series gets the heroes more directly involved in the story earlier in each episode.

I’d be lying if I said the first season wasn’t creative and original. It’s full of clever things and interesting things. But at this stage, those interesting and creative and original things just don’t seem like they’re things that are well-suited to a weekly action-adventure TV series. The dark comedy, the equal-time they’re giving to characters that are utterly inhuman, the very deliberate cheesiness of the stock characters and extras, it’s like they’re halfway trying to make serious respectable science fiction, and half trying to make the next cult classic B-movie. And neither of those things are where the strengths of TV as a format lie. The second season is far less ambitious, but what it does, it does well. Mancuso’s War of the Worlds is never going to give us the joy that is watching John Vernon charge a pick-up truck full of aliens while wielding an assault rifle. But the Strangis’s version isn’t going to give us an alien exorcism. I keep coming back to the same place with these: Season 1 is a better idea, but I think season 2 is a better show.

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• War of the Worlds the Series is available on DVD from amazon.com

It is October 9, 1989. Just two days after celebrating the fortieth anniversary of its existence, the German Democratic Republic begins to dissolve in earnest as the Peaceful Revolution kicks into full swing with a large-scale protest in Leipzig which local party officials opt not to violently suppress. Three days earlier, the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize, partly on his own merits, partly as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, and partly to piss off China. What with all that going on, it seems kind of glib to mention that also today, Soviet news reported a UFO landing in Voronezh and Penthouse‘s first Hebrew edition hit newsstands. Last Wednesday, Secretariat died and Dakota Johnson was born, but as I am not Christian Gray, I am going to beat neither a dead horse nor a live woman.

Janet Jackson and Madonna have leapfrogged (leaptfrog?) Milli Vanilli with “Miss You Much” and “Cherish” respectively. MacGyver, Major Dad and Alf are new. Later in the evening, ABC will show the LA Raiders beat the New York Jets 14-7, as LA Coach Art Shell becomes the first African American to coach an NFL game. Simultaneously, George Strait and Kathy Mattea win big at the 23rd Country Music Awards on CBS.

In the backwoods of syndication, Star Trek the Next Generation hasn’t started its third season yet (I have no idea how I forgot the first two episodes of this season, beyond the fact that I find them largely uninteresting). Star Trek the Next Generation airs “The Survivors“, which kinda feels like TNG doing a Jerome Bixby script. Friday the 13th The Series aired its actual season premier, a two-parter called “The Prophecies”, a few days late. Rather than dealing with a cursed object, this one plots the gang against devil worshipers trying to summon the Antichrist. The episode serves as a cast transition, with leading man Ryan Dallion being magically regressed to childhood at the climax to serve as a human sacrifice. I think the conclusion is something like it turns out that his alcoholic mother has cleaned up her act and she decides to have another go at raising him. He’s replaced by Johnny Ventura, a reformed con man who’d guested last season. Today, they air an episode titled “Crippled Inside”, which for whatever reason is one of the few episodes I personally remember very well. On his first solo mission, out of naivety, Johnny hesitates in reclaiming an antique wheelchair from the paralyzed girl it’s both healing, and allowing to take horrible vengeance on the cliche High School Mean Girls directly responsible for her injury. The episode ends with pretty much everyone dead and Johnny screaming in rage as he impotently tries to murder a wheelchair with an axe (cursed objects are indestructible).

Mancuso’s other, less beloved series airs “No Direction Home”. We open minutes after the end of the previous episode, with the Blackwood survivors having retreated to Kincaid’s Awesome Van. They’re haunted by little flashback montages of the closing minutes of the previous episode. Kincaid mumbles something about the possibility of being followed, which, in fact, they are.

The aliens are in the process of abandoning their base, what with them somehow psychically knowing that Blackwood and Kincaid survived the explosion. Mana isn’t happy about having to leave her pickled human experimental subjects, conveniently bagged in more of that green orange pith and hanging from the ceiling, and she shows her displeasure by getting all passive-aggressive about Malzor’s failure to murder the cast. Malzor does some sneering and insists that, “They haven’t escaped.”

I’m digging this tension between Malzor and Mana. Malzor, for the most part, seems to have little respect for science, and just wants to get on with the murdering. Mana, on the other hand, seems like she finds Malzor’s bloodlust unseemly and is all about the science. Of murdering people. That tension is going to be there for the whole season, and at the end, they’re even going to make a stab at justifying it in a shockingly banal manner. But — and this is a huge problem with this show — it’s not tremendously consistent, as we are going to see moments of something approaching tenderness between them.

Malzor’s insistence that they haven’t escaped is in turn because a couple of Morthren soldiers in a Cadillac gets on at the next ramp and starts following Kincaid. While Blackwood climbs to the back of the van, takes out and loads a gun, Kincaid does a very quick three-point turn, which befuddles the aliens so much that they crash their car. There is something just a bit hilarious about Blackwood taking so long to load his gun that the whole incident is over before he’s ready, and they’re savvy enough not to call overt attention to it.

The aliens manage somehow to crash their car into an entirely different set, coming to rest outside a homeless shelter run by Father Tim (Angelo Rizacos). Father Tim is a good sort, and immediately tries to help the drivers, despite warnings from Ralph, one of the regulars. Ralph is mentally ill or mentally handicapped: his friend, who is credited only as “Lady at Mission”, will later attribute his condition to unspecified government experiments. Because it’s a dystopia. Accordingly, his warnings that the men in the car are “wrong men” will go unheeded, because the characters don’t realize that they’re in an action-adventure TV show in the 1980s, where being non-neurotypical invariably gifts a person with a magically infallible sixth sense for detecting Evil. The aliens pull Father Tim into the car when he sees the glow stick juice dripping from them and drive off. Lady at Mission fruitlessly tries to comfort Frank that Tim probably just jumped into the back seat of the car to help them drive to the hospital, but Frank isn’t having it.

Kincaid takes the van to an industrial building which appears abandoned but is still, in accordance with how these things work, leaking steam and has big fans slowly turning in front of all the lights. They descend into a set of underground passages which lead to an abandoned underground bunker dating to the “war scare” back in the fifties. I assume he means the Cold War, but this is, after all, War of the Worlds. It may just be me, but the place kinda looks like it might possibly be a refurbishment of the Power Base set from Captain Power. That sort of thing happens a lot in TV, big fancy sets being expensive and not much use after the show ends (For example, though I’ve never gotten a canonical source to confirm it, in addition to being redressed as various other bridges in the TNG era, I’m pretty sure the USS Enterprise bridge from Star Trek III also appeared in at least two seasons of Power Rangers). Blackwood is concerned that Debi is still in shock, but Kincaid just kind of passively brushes it off, and gets mopey about his dead brother when Blackwood finds a picture of them. Sounding a little uncomfortable and nervous, Kincaid offers Suzanne a trunk of hip late-’80s/early ’90s women’s clothes he for some reason has.

They haven’t said it outright in terms more explicit than the ambiguous “Almost Tomorrow” dateline, but this show is meant to be set in the near future. We get one very forthright indication of this when Kincaid pulls out an honest-to-goodness videophone to call his superiors. Using the codename “Lone Wolf” (presumably, he got it from page 1 of the book, “World’s most predicable code names”, right after “Maverick”), he speaks to a low-resolution black-and-white 1 fps image of General Wilson’s secretary, and has to shout at her to “cut the crap” to finally speak to a Major Yaro, apparently the highest person up in the food chain they can still find. Yaro is weird and evasive, claiming to be Kincaid’s new contact in Wilson’s absence, presses him for information about the Blackwood Project (he claims that there’s been reports of “an accident”, but that he doesn’t know the details), and tries to talk Kincaid into giving up his location. Kincaid smells a rat and hangs up on him.

The exchange is a bit weird, with Kincaid using the threat of showing up in person to get through to Yaro, then freaking out when he suggests showing up in person. But more to the point, the framing story it’s trying to establish doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s easy enough to work out what’s meant to be going on: as Blackwood immediately realizes, they’re being cut loose and disavowed. What’s far harder to make sense of is why and how. On the one hand, the set up here seems like the idea might be that the government has been infiltrated by the Morthren, who are cutting off the Blackwood team’s life-line. But that doesn’t really make any sense. If the Morthren had access to institutional power, why do they keep moving to abandoned power plants and coming up with cunning plots to assert social control or gain resources, when they could just, like, give themselves a giant ranch somewhere secluded while they order the national guard to start disappearing people?

No, in some ways it’s more like the government just really wants to pretend this whole “alien invasion” thing isn’t happening. That’s weird, because it’s really not like The X-Files where no one’s ever able to present proper evidence or anything. There was a war. The Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, and Los Angeles City Hall all got blown up. This is history. People in this world know about aliens. And the Blackwood Project’s existence seems to indicate that the government considers aliens an active threat. This isn’t like Stargate SG-1, where the government was trying to shut them down in the early seasons on the premise that if we just buried the Stargate, the Goa’uld would almost certainly leave us alone, what with it being a hella long way to drive to get here.

It’s like the government is being obstructionist just to be obstructionist. Which I guess is not all that far out there — I’m writing this article just weeks after one half of the US Government wrote a letter to a country we were negotiating an anti-nuclear deal with to say, “Look, just give up. Our side does not want peace with you, so no matter what deal you make, once we take over the government in the next election, we’re going to break the agreement because we’re pretty sure that, this time, starting a war in the middle east for no good reason is going to work out super for us.” But here in the ’80s, with glasnost and perestroika and the Berlin Wall getting ready to fall, I would have hoped that folks would think, “Okay, the government might be obstructionist. It might be corrupt. It might be incompetent. It might be self-serving. But in the event that genocidal aliens were invading, they would probably not actively try to make their job easier.”

At a very basic level, the point of the scene is, “The government is going to be no help. They’re on their own.” More than that, even, the scene conveys the message that this is the sort of story where the government is going to be no help and you’re on your own. The scene is pure genre convention, like the scene in every second-rate cyberpunk story where the author takes five minutes to explain an insanely elaborate series of death traps that the Evil Megacorporation has set up to prevent unauthorized access to the room where they keep their zombie-making virus that they’re trying to market as a bioweapon. Is it remotely practical or a sound investment to secure your bioweapon at the end of a narrow walkway with no rails above a one mile deep pit with utterly sheer sides lubricated with nanoscale graphene that drops you through six yards of electrified monomolecular razor wire into a pit of acid, which is boiling, and also to make the door out of two panes of nanometer thick glass sandwiching five million times the lethal dose of a nerve agent that slows your perception of time so that the one-thirty-second of a second it takes to kill you feels like a thousand years of the most intense agony the human mind is capable of experiencing, before you fall into the pit of razor wire and acid, oh, and also the door is electrified too? And for that matter, exactly what is your business plan for these zombies, given that you try this approximately once a year and every single time, it’s ended with everyone dying and the trillion-dollar death-trap-slash-research-lab you built exploding?  And what about Scarecrow’s brain? You know who you are.

Continue reading Antithesis: No Direction Home (War of the Worlds 2×02)

It is October 10, 1988. Over the weekend, a fire caused $2000 in damage at the Seattle Space Needle and Felix Wankel, inventor of the rotary engine, died. A new ATF regulation passed in 1986 comes into effect, requiring hard liquor labels and advertisements to state their percent alcohol by volume instead of or in addition to the more traditional system of “How much do you have to water it down before using it to douse burning gunpowder” (I’m not even making that up. “100 proof” originally meant “Not too watered down to give to sailors, as evidenced by the fact that you can pour it on gunpowder and still get the gunpowder to burn,” which by a remarkable coincidence, is about 57% ABV, which in US usage is rounded to 50%, meaning “proof” is just twice the ABV, but keep in mind when drinking abroad that in the UK, proof is 7/4 the ABV, so 100 proof is 7% stronger). Billboard’s new chart isn’t out yet, leaving “Love Bites” at the top. MacGyver‘s a repeat, but ALF is new, a riff on It’s a Wonderful Life, with a guardian angel showing Gordon how much better off everyone would be if he’d never moved in with the Tanners. Friday the 13th The Series airs “And Now The News”, wherein Ryan and Micki track down an old-fashioned radio which dispenses psychiatric advice in exchange for frightening listeners to death.

War of the Worlds airs its second episode, “The Walls of Jericho”. This is a pretty uneven episode. The first half has a lot of the same first-time-jitters I found so grating in the last episode. In fact, despite the fact that there’s an explicit six week time gap, the first half of this one feels like a very direct continuation of the first episode’s story. “The Walls of Jericho” is basically about two things. In one plot, the Blackwood Project tries to justify its continued existence, while in the other, the aliens try to assure theirs. It’s kind of a plot-Voltron, with the first half of the episode floundering as the two plot threads limp along, but then for the last half, the two halves of the plot join up and form a giant plot-robot of awesome.

The title sequence is a simple montage of clips from the pilot as Harrison sets up the premise via narration, but at it’s end, the screen fades to black, over which a line of the episode’s dialogue is played. This week, it’s John Vernon announcing, “They sure don’t die pretty, do they?”. What’s been cut from the DVD is an intertitle afterward showing a poorly rendered CGI alien hand reaching up over the top of a globe.

Ironhorse is getting antsy and wants to get on with his life, to which end he’s started unsubtly suggesting that maybe the aliens all died when they blew up their war machines, since they haven’t heard any more out of the aliens since then. The rest of the team is less optimistic and has been working on studying Forrester’s research.

Suzanne presents her theory about how alien possession works. She describes it as a combination of osmosis and “cell-phase matching”, a term which, so far as I can tell, she made up in the previous episode. She has a little flash animation to demonstrate the process, in which a triangular alien cell ejaculates its innards into a human cell, whereupon the little triangular bases of the alien DNA wrap themselves around the human DNA helix, which kills the host cell but gives the alien access to the host’s memory, because that is how memory works I guess. They have the good sense to keep it pretty vague, but there are some pretty sizeable gaps in the explanation, like the handwavey bit where they pretend that the description they give — which I guess isn’t too far off from how gene therapy works — could end with an intact alien consciousness possessing the memories of the host. I think there’s an implication here that the aliens lack any sort of fixed internal organs, and rather than having a single brain, their cognitive processes are sort of distributed through all of their cells. Which, okay, neat sci-fi concept, nice potential for a Golden-Age style story where an alien survives getting cut in half but ends up schizophrenic because the halves of his mind diverged while he was healing. But how you get from there to absorbing the contents of a human brain I’ve no idea (also, it’s not clear why aliens would be susceptible to bullets if their bodies are made entirely of undifferentiated tissue). Also, no one ever talks about the question of what happens to the bulk of the alien’s biomass.

When Suzanne lets it slip that, although the aliens require radiation to remain active on Earth, they’re still vulnerable to deleterious effects from prolonged radiation exposure, Ironhorse jumps to the conclusion that even if any aliens had survived the battle at Kellogue, they must have all died since. He summons General Wilson for some more exposition.

Meanwhile, cattle mutilation! My minimal research suggests that the late ’80s was not exactly a big time for Alien Cattle Mutilation Stories. It was a big thing in the ’70s, given a signal boost by stuff like Satanic Panics (I always hear that phrase as part of a Schoolhouse Rock song: Satanic Panic, what’s your mechanic? / Mutilatin’ cows and sacrificin’ babies!), with good upstanding white Christian folk afraid that legions of satanists were exsanguinating livestock in rituals to awaken the beast, then died down for most of the ’80s, and had a resurgence in the ’90s that probably peaked around the time South Park premiered. The whole notion is based on a number of real-life incidents of cows and other livestock found dead, drained of blood, and with unusual wounds. Such events have been attributed, in order from most to least likely, to particular combinations of predation and scavenging, punk kids screwing around, convoluted insurance scams, pervs making really disgusting homebrew sex toys, cults other than satanic, cryptids such as El Chupacabras, satanic cults, aliens researching HIV, aliens with really kinky fetishes, aliens just fucking around with us, and spontaneous bovine inversion.

In any case, “aliens mutilate cattle” must have still had enough cachet in the mass media in 1988 that it seemed reasonable for it to be a Thing Aliens Did, because our introduction to the B-plot comes in the form of a comic relief hick farmer calling the local sheriff because his cows have been mutilated. Unfortunately, the local sheriff is of the “comic relief useless backwoods sheriff” archetype that I assume they’d have gotten Don Knotts or Alan Hale Jr. for if they’d been available, and he reckons it was probably just a wolf, despite the fact that wolves would usually eat some of the cow rather than just draining its blood. He helpfully suggests that the farmer hold a barbecue.

It is, in fact, aliens. Of course it’s aliens. As Suzanne discovered, while exposure to radiation neutralizes Earth bacteria, it also affects the aliens’ metabolism, causing their body temperature to eventually rise dangerously high. They’ve been out exsanguinating cows because… Okay, honestly we should all be grateful that they don’t go into the details of why bathing in cow’s blood helps with the whole metabolism thing.

Even the advocacy themselves are affected, with one of them already weakening and the other two looking decidedly Dawn of the Dead. He’ll be sidelined by the next scene for a cow-juice bath. One of the recurring themes in this show is that the advocates have very little patience or respect for the scientist class. They spend a good long time berating a scientist to his face about how long he’s taking to come up with a solution and how he needs materials to make stuff with rather than conjuring it out of thin air. I guess that maybe I’d be bitter too if my scientists had failed to notice that the planet we were about to invade was MADE OF POISON. The scientists have come up with a long-term solution to the heating problem in the form of refrigerated suits, but because Earth’s chemical composition is different from their own planet, they don’t know how to manufacture the plastic sheets and tubing they need, nor how to build the equipment to extract and liquefy nitrogen from the atmosphere using locally-sourced materials, so they’ll have to steal it.

The robbery of a plastics factory is depicted by way of having a cliché hard-nosed cop with the chief breathing down his neck about the paperwork investigating the scene. The only surviving witness speaks only Chinese, but fortunately, they’ve got an Asian guy on their crime scene crew who remembers just enough of his ancestral tongue to muddle through a translation. But since the cliche old Chinese woman just tells a story about the place being invaded by “dragons”, the investigation doesn’t go anywhere. This scene is basically more of the series’s trademark “black comedy”, and I am at least happy that they’ve gone for something more wry than the redneck humor they used twice in the last episode and once already in this one. It still doesn’t quite work, but it comes closer. The writers have a nasty habit of trying way too hard to be funny, and it hardly ever works. The scenes explicitly coded as “humorous” are far and away the least funny things in the show.

For instance, while all this comic relief has been going on, Uncle Hank has shown up at the cottage to demand Harrison justify his existence. John Vernon is far and away the best thing in this episode, and it makes me really sad that he becomes an entirely off-screen character after this. For all I am totally on board with the Harrison-Ironhorse dynamic being the thematic and emotional center of this show, I would also totally get behind restructuring the show with General Wilson as the “Brigadier”-character.

Richard Chavez plays Ironhorse as professional, intense, and no-nonsense, constantly grating against Harrison’s very different style. Their dynamic is a little bit reminiscent of the myriad cop shows about a pair of partners who don’t get along, where one of them is very by-the-book and the other isn’t, and one of them has a normal name like “Smith” or “McCoy” or “Johnson” and the other one’s name is a compound word at least part of which sounds like a building material, like “Slaterock” or “Steelbrick” or “Ironhorse”, and the title of the show is something like “Steelbrick & Johnson”. Ironhorse is a little bit Drill Sergeant-y, and that makes him sometimes just a bit silly because, though it’s in the opposite direction, he’s far enough over the top that he’s almost as much of a weirdo as Harrison.

John Vernon, on the other hand, plays General Wilson by just bringing way more gravitas than this show could possibly merit. Seriously, if you got him, Walter Cronkite and Martin Sheen in a room together, their combined gravitas would probably collapse into a black hole. He’s a bit Santaesque as he greets Debi, gracious to the Mr. Kensington, the groundskeeper, who he addresses by rank despite his long retirement, and respectful to Harrison even as he hands him his walking papers. A series of scenes each lead into the next as the gang apparently tour the estate.

The sequence is cut together kind of awkwardly. Wilson arrives, greets Debi and Kensington, and Harrison, openly suspicious about the General’s intentions, proposes to show him, “What he’s getting for his money.” Then bam, they’re in the lab talking about what they’ve learned about the aliens. Then Wilson asks Harrison about his theories regarding alien-related memory loss. Harrison is caught off-guard by the question and seems uncomfortable trying to answer it, so then we cut to them on outside on the patio.

Harrison’s explanation amounts to little more than a superficial description of the problem: people who have had alien encounters have a hard time remembering them, often requiring hypnotic regression therapy. This was, of course, a hot topic in paranormal studies, what with alien abduction narratives having a popularity boost from the publication of Communion the previous year. Harrison proposes that the effect might be due to a combination of an alien ability to affect human minds with a normal human psychological defense mechanism that suppresses memories of alien contact. Wilson gets a reflective expression and muses that he’d seen a lot of action during the 1953 war, but is unable to recall a single detail of it.

And then later, they’re sitting around the fireplace at night. General Wilson tells them a bit of the backstory of the cottage’s elderly caretakers, Mrs. Pennyworth and Kensington, who, despite their unassuming appearances, had been extremely valuable to the Allies while undercover in Berlin in the forties. I kinda get the impression that they want to imply that they’re basically retired John Steed and Emma Peel. He also muses on the history of the cottage, which had over the years been home to various scientists, diplomats and defectors. Norton is the first to cotton on to the fact that they’re being evicted. Wilson is very gracious and heartily thanks them for their service, but accepts Ironhorse’s conclusion that the aliens were either all killed at Kellogue or died shortly afterward from radiation. When Harrison challenges him on his assumptions, the General becomes suddenly angry and defensive, seemingly way out of proportion.

General Wilson’s anger, strange as it seems on its own, justifies the otherwise also very strange scene that preceded it. The implication, and I wish they’d been explicit about this, is that, even knowing what’s going on, Wilson is affected by this “alien amnesia”. His brain simply doesn’t want to register the aliens as an ongoing threat, and when Harrison tries to force him to, he defends himself by angrily shutting him down.

Like I said, John Vernon is great here. It’s almost like he’s visiting from another, very different show, one that’s more serious and less action-oriented. I think that may in fact be part of this show’s MO: little vignettes with guest characters that kind of feel like War of the Worlds has smacked into some other show in a a different genre. They’ve already done it twice in this episode: first, a little drive-by with a show about a quirky rural community with goofy law enforcement, then a hard-biting cop show, and it’s going to happen one more time before we’re done. This one, the military drama about the old soldier, is the only one that really works.

Continue reading Thesis: The Walls of Jericho (War of the Worlds 1×02)

Well that was harder than I expected.

As much as I might want to pretend that the second season of War of the Worlds is its own independent show, it’s incredibly clear here that this is a sequel to something: a lot of the structure and setup of “The Second Wave” doesn’t make any sense except with the knowledge that there’s a previous series. That said, it’s very much a sequel rather than a continuation. It’s just about possible to view season 2 as a later part of the same story as season 1, but only if you presume a lot of time to have passed. The thing “The Second Wave” is a sequel to isn’t the actual first season of War of the Worlds, but rather a slightly bent hypothetical version that retains the broad strokes of the aired first season, but also implies a number of differences both specific and broad. If this had been a real attempt at a “distant” sequel, a la Star Trek the Next Generation, you’d either want a clean break, with new characters and fewer ties to the past, or, alternatively, if we’re going for something like a “Distant Finale” or in-canon time-skip, a la Dawson’s Creek, Dollhouse, One Tree Hill, or Glee, you’d want there to be flashbacks later filling in the major gaps. With War of the Worlds, you’d want there to be an episode where something forces Blackwood to relate some of the tumultuous events that made the world go to hell. That’s not going to happen.

Mancuso, of course, didn’t think it was realistic that “our world” could lie 35 years in the future of the 1953 movie. The implication, then, is that the dystopia is the world as it was left by the invasion. But it’s interesting to observe here that the Morthren never claim credit for the state of the Earth. If anything, they instead take it as an indictment of humanity. Later on, Mana and Malzor will reflect that humanity’s destruction of the environment is making the world more amenable to their species. If you do want to force the two seasons together into one, perhaps the key might be the central observation I made during “The Resurrection”: that their world appears to be a sort of collective neurosis. Perhaps we can posit that the season one world is, if not already collapsing, very much on the brink. But the same shared neurosis that makes humanity reluctant to acknowledge the war is also preventing them from taking a particular interest in the immanent collapse of civilization. Something, we could propose, occurs between the seasons that forces the scales from everyone’s eyes. There’s evidence in the second season that the affluent and influential still retain a very ’80s sort of lifestyle, shutting out the poverty and social disorder of the lower classes. It could well be that the first season setting was every bit as dystopian as the second, but that we too are being shielded from the worst of it. And if that stretches your suspension of disbelief too far, just consider how much of the poverty, homelessness, mental illness, exploitation and despair in your own world you choose not to see.

I used to re-watch War of the Worlds from time to time from my off-air tapes, but I don’t think I’ve done it in close to a decade now. I bought the DVDs as soon as they came out, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t watched the second season in that format. This time through has really been a revelation. The very first thing you notice switching from season 1 to season 2 is how completely different the visual texture is between seasons. Very simply put, season 1 looks and feels incredibly 1980s, and season 2 does not. I don’t know if season 2 was shot on film — that would be unusual to be sure, but it certainly has a grain to it and a depth of field I associate more with film than tape. The lighting is completely different and the visual style is far more cinematic. The hair and fashions are also radically, almost shockingly different. Suzanne is the most obvious example of this: compare her shoulder pads and big hair in “The Resurrection” to her appearance in “The Second Wave”, and it’s like night and day.

The other big revelation on this watching is just how rough-around-the-edges “The Resurrection” is. The audio is terrible. The direction is terrible. Most of the characterization is terrible. Lynda Mason Green is terrible. I don’t even know what’s going on. Everything’s working much more smoothly in “The Second Wave”, as well it should be, since these actors have a year’s worth of experience working off each other by now (Except for Adrian Paul, who, as I noted, doesn’t seem to know what the hell he’s doing here. Seriously, he acts like a 14 year old being hassled by The Man). On a purely technical level, “The Second Wave” is the superior episode, which I wasn’t expecting at all.

It’s not a rout though: “The Resurrection” scores more highly on several fronts. The plot is rather more dense, with two parallel lines through much of the story as Harrison and Ironhorse follow different paths. There’s a bit of that in “The Second Wave”, with Blackwood and Kincaid following a parallel path to Ironhorse and his men at the alien stronghold, but there’s much less to it, really just a plot contrivance to allow for the rescue of Ironhorse. “The Resurrection” also spends a lot more time with the regulars, giving very rich character scenes to Harrison, Suzanne and Ironhorse (Norton gets less focus, but even he does get to introduce his wheelchair and talk about coffee). By contrast, Suzanne and Norton are barely characters in “The Second Wave”. Even Blackwood is only a minor player after his rescue at the punk club. And while Kincaid is important to the story, we don’t learn much about him yet.

You could say that’s to be expected, of course, since “The Second Wave” isn’t a pilot, no matter what contrivance I’m blogging it under. We already know Harrison, Suzanne, Ironhorse and Norton. We met them way back in “The Resurrection.” But did we? The Harrison Blackwood we met in season 1 was a weirdo academic, and kind of a jerk, and an inexplicable ladies’ man. By “The Second Wave”, he’s a grizzled ’90s anti-hero who’s comfortable with a gun. There’s nothing in the episode to suggest that he’s a scientist per se — he knows a lot about the aliens, but nothing that falls clearly outside “stuff a seasoned alien-fighter might want to learn about his enemy”. Same for Suzanne. There’s no indication of their specific roles on the team, and as the second season progresses, there won’t be very much emphasis on it. That’s definitely a black mark against the second season. The first season followed in the popular action-adventure tradition of the four-person superhero team, with each character having a clearly defined role. Ironhorse was the muscle, Suzanne the expert in biology, Harrison the expert in all other forms of science, Aquaman to stop the levees from breaching, Ma-Ti to talk to the animals (Y’know, for all the flack that the power of Heart gets, Ma-Ti’s powers allow him to communicate telepathically at a distance, manipulate animals into serving him, literally make the bad guys stop and realize they’re being jerks, and to some extent mind control people into switching sides. By contrast, the only thing the fire ring can do is act as a flame thrower, and because it’s a kids’ show, he can’t even use it to just immolate Looten Plunder and be done with it. Wheeler is the one with the useless power), and Norton the dispenser of Plot Tokens whenever the narrative gets bogged down by calling them up to tell them what the supercomputer had just churned up. There’s far less of this in the second season, and while the characters aren’t exactly fungible, their respective roles in the various episodes tend to center more around temperament than skill.

The characterization isn’t nearly as distinctive in season 2 as it is in season 1: the characters are all much more similar to each other. Funnily enough, though, at the moment, this works to season 2’s advantage and season 1’s disadvantage: Blackwood, Kincaid, Suzanne and Debi might all be one-note characters, but they’re at least consistent in “The Second Wave”, rather than a disparate bag of quirks and mannerisms. But that victory for season 2 will be short-lived. As the seasons go on, we’ll get greater context and coherence out of the season 1 characters that will at least try to bring them together into developed characters, while we won’t see the same growth out of the season 2 versions.

Continue reading Synthesis 1: Next Phase, New Wave, Dance Craze, Anyways