Author’s note: For the benefit of those who haven’t read my first post on this series, in these “Antithesis” articles, I intend to review and analyze the second season of War of the Worlds The Series under the self-imposed fiction that the first season of the series does not exist, and that this is an entirely new show with no antecedent other than its loose connection to the 1953 movie.
It is October 2, 1989. Over the weekend, Glen Frey and Don Henley performed on-stage together for the first time since 1981 and the US Post Office issued a stamp with a Brontosaurus on it, prolonging the century-old conflict over whether or not there’s any such thing as a Brontosaurus. Yesterday, Denmark legally recognized civil unions of same-sex partners, the first country in the world to do do. The guys who sing on behalf of Milli Vanilli top the charts with “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You,” better known as “The Milli Vanilli Song that isn’t Blame it On the Rain“. Cher, Madonna, Janet Jackson and Warrant also chart. TV is all new this week, with ABC showing MacGyver ahead of Monday Night Football, ABC airing new episodes of Alf and The Hogan Family ahead of a TV movie about domestic abuse survivor Tracey Thurman, which would leave its star, Nancy McKeon, typecast in the public consciousness for years.
Star Trek the Next Generation is still in reruns, starts its season with “Evolution“, the one that doesn’t have a damned clue how nanomachines work, running in many markets in a 7 PM time slot on Saturdays. At nine on many of those channels is the final season of Friday the 13th The Series, which, strangely unrelated to its namesake, documents the adventures of an antiques store owner and her partner, who track down cursed objects sold by the former proprietor. Mostly antiques that provide some boon to their owner in exchange for a human sacrifice, like a murder-powered cradle from the Titanic that can cure sick babies. Looks like the first few episodes aired out of order, as the actual season opener will air next week in a special two-hour block. The episode that airs this week is meant to be the season’s third, “Demon Hunter”, which will pit newly-promoted-from-guest-star Johnny Ventura against a demon summoned by a murder-powered cursed dagger.
Over the next week, independent stations who buy content from Paramount will air “The Second Wave,” the first episode of Frank Mancuso Jr.’s Sci-Fi action-adventure series War of the Worlds, sometimes syndicated abroad as War of the Worlds: The Second Invasion.
The basic concept is a little bit complex: in an alternate near-future, society has collapsed due to a failed alien invasion some time in the past. The aliens have now returned from space to complete their conquest, opposed by the last survivors of a now defunct government alien-fighting taskforce.
The opening title sequence is interesting. The art style of the sequence reminds me a lot of the model work in Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. Kind of artsy and unusual for a US action-adventure series of this era. Almost all American TV shows use a montage for their title sequence. The last action-adventure I can think of that didn’t is Knight Rider, and even that still had a couple of short clips integrated to put faces to the names in the credits. The only other adventure series airing at the time to use a purely “artsy” title sequence I can think of is Star Trek the Next Generation.
This one starts with the world blowing up. A world, I guess, perhaps it’s not meant to be clear which. The remainder of the sequence is a fly-by view of a dilapidated city shrouded in fog, devastated by rioting. Over the theme music, a news reporter describes the scene:
There’s rioting breaking out through the city. Fire is continuing to burn everywhere. Troops are shooting people. My God, I…I don’t know why! There’s a woman dying in front of me, and no one’s helping her! There are conflicting reports about who or what started the chaos. Will someone tell me what’s happening? This is madness! What is this world coming to?
The words are original, but the style, the content, and the delivery are all very reminiscent of Orson Welles’s 1938 adaptation. 
The sequence culminates with the destruction of a monument — a statue of Revolutionary War-era soldiers being shattered and pulled to the ground. Cracks in the pedestal resolve into the series title.
After this, we’re treated to a very fake-looking late ’80s computer rendered purple and brown planet, spinning in space. It glows red, then explodes unconvincingly. We cut to a very fake-looking late ’80s computer rendered Earth, which darkens visibly as a shadow grows across it. Symbolism!
We cut to a dystopian urban sprawl full of filthy urchins, barrel fires and left over smoke from every outdoor scene in Captain Power. Announcements of a police curfew are audible, and between buildings we can occasionally see what looks like a military cordon. A dateline tells us that this is “Almost Tomorrow”. Driving through the sprawl is our hero Harrison Blackwood. 
He’s a scruffy-looking, bearded type in a battered Cadillac. He stops at a pay phone to inform his friend, Suzanne McCullough, that he’s on his way to a secret meeting with a “General Wilson”, who they haven’t heard from in some time.
The next few scenes give hint at the background for these characters. Harrison and Suzanne, Suzanne’s daughter Debi, a wheelchair-using computer programmer named Norton, and a special forces unit commanded by Colonel Paul Ironhorse are part of some sort of secret organization that fights aliens. A bit like Torchwood by the look of it, only with less sex and exactly the same amount of killing off cast members. Their headquarters appears to be concealed under a McMansion where the team lives. There hasn’t been any alien activity for some time, and it’s got them antsy, and even worse, their leader, General Wilson, has gone missing. Norton is tracking unusual weather patterns — lightning strikes without rain, occurring at regular intervals, which we can assume to be some kind of interstellar transporter beam bringing the aliens to Earth.
I kind of imagine this team as being kind of analogous to Stargate SG-1. 
Harrison seems to be the expert on aliens, probably the Daniel Jackson analogue. Ironhorse is obviously O’Neill. Suzanne, I imagine, is Samantha Carter by default. We don’t know much about her role on the team yet, but she carries a gun despite being a civilian. Maybe she’s local law enforcement who some how got tangled up in this? That would also make her kind of similar to Gwen Cooper from Torchwood. General Wilson would presumably be General Hammond. Norton seems like the “mission control” character, so Walter maybe?
Meanwhile, an abandoned power plant is full of people with slicked-back hair in gray coveralls. Off to one side, naked people covered in K-Y jelly are being hosed off and issued gray coveralls. 
These, of course, will be our aliens for the piece, the Morthren. Two of them are marked out as leadership by their even more slicked back hair and the fact that their coveralls have shoulder pads and epaulets. They’ll later be identified as Malzor, played by Denis Forest, and Mana, played by future Forever Knight costar Catherine Disher. They make their way to a kind of giant green snotball thing with three people inside, naked and covered in K-Y jelly. Seriously, there is so much personal lubricant used in this episode that anyone trying to have an orgy in the Toronto area the week of filming would be totally not-screwed. They burst out in a weird parody of birth, and are carried away to be hosed off, except for one slimy nude chick who sticks around so that Malzor and her can exposition a bit: their planet, Morthrai, was just destroyed in a “light storm”. But their god, this kind of giant floating one-eyed brain-jellyfish-cthulu thing called “The Eternal” is on his way here right now, and is going to make Earth into a “new” Mothrai. The Eternal appears in the flesh a bit later, and speaks to Malzor in whalesong for a bit.
There’s a good sense of weirdness to the aliens here, but also a fair amount of depth: Malzor and Mana agree that humanity is a pestilence and are looking forward to slaughtering mankind unpleasantly. But while Mana seems to actively take pleasure in committing genocide, Malzor sees it more as a means to an end. Malzor, for his part, is much more interested in punishing the survivors of the first, failed invasion. 
Malzor also shows a lot of trepidation around the Eternal, like he’s scared of something, or perhaps just desperate to please. It’s a decided contrast from the very strong, determined attitude he shows when giving orders. In religious terms, Malzor seems very inwardly focused, most concerned with maintaining the purity of the faith — punishing traitors and heretics, as it were, while Mana is more outwardly focused, interested in conquest and punishing those outside the faith. In a way, she’s also interested in conversion, as we’ll soon see when she reveals the “weapon” she’s been building. There’s signs of friction between the two as well. Mana even complains to another alien, Ardix, that Malzor is too interested in punishing their own and not enough in committing genocide. Which is not to say that Malzor is completely disinterested in wiping out the humans: his first priority is to take out General Wilson’s team: Blackwood is, it turns out, walking into a trap.
Blackwood nearly misses falling into the trap, though, as his meeting with Wilson is in a punk rock bar in a bad part of town, and he nearly gets himself murdered in a knife fight with a street tough before two aliens show up in army uniforms to escort him out. He very nearly gets into a car with them when Adrian Paul pops up and shoots them. 
When shot, the aliens bleed the contents of green glow-sticks. Once dead, their faces and bodies sort of collapse inward, then quickly dissolve into dust. Their weapons seem to grow out of their bodies; they sort of appear in their hands without them apparently taking them from anywhere, and look sort of like large eyeballs with a long tendrill that extends from the back and wraps around the arm. They can fire small red blasts which maim, or larger green ones which vaporize their targets, as demonstrated by the wino who evaporates when Adrian Paul dodges a shot.
Blackwood notes that the aliens have changed: they decompose differently, and he’s surprised that the soldiers didn’t show physical degeneration. We’ll get a better understanding of what he means when we watch Malzor supervise some executions. The Morthren were not originally humanoid, it seems. 
Some of the first wave soldiers retain their native form, a brown, leathery creature with a single eye and three-fingered hands that look vaguely related to The Eternal. The second wave has perfected the reconfiguration of their bodies into human form, but the human-form survivors of the first wave all show severe scarring, sores and other indicators that their bodies are deteriorating.
Adrian Paul’s character. John Kincaid, gives Blackwood a gun and introduces himself as a former soldier who had been working for General Wilson on covert missions. Just before Wilson vanished, he’d sent Kincaid on a mission that had turned out to be an alien trap. Kincaid suspects that aliens have infiltrated the chain of command and are responsible for Wilson’s disappearance. When they return to base, we further learn that Kincaid had once been in Ironhorse’s unit, but had been given the boot because Ironhorse is a no-nonsense by-the-book sort of guy who didn’t take kindly to Kincaid’s maverick-renegade-bad-boy thing. 
Ironhorse softens a bit toward him when he learns that his brother Max was killed in the last mission.
Norton is able to locate the abandoned power plant by judicious use of computers and science and something to do with the lightning, and Ironhorse decides to immediately go in with a couple of commandos. About thirty seconds after he leaves, Kincaid decides to secretly follow, and Blackwood tags along. While they sneak in through the roof and witness the execution of the first wave survivors, Ironhorse goes in through the front door, guns a-blazin’. I guess that the idea here is that the first wave were a more straightforward, traditional military target, and that Ironhorse is not used to facing an enemy whose tactics rely more on deception and stealth. They’re immediately detected by a small flying orange thing
, a drone camera that sends images back to a stretched membrane where Malzor observes and orders only Ironhorse — it’s noteworthy here that Malzor knows both Blackwood and Ironhorse by name — to be taken alive.
Continue reading Antithesis: The Second Wave (War of the Worlds 2×01)
I like the way this plot is set up. As I said before, the direction, the audio and a lot of the acting in this is terrible, but the actual structure of the show is really fantastic. You basically have Harrison and Suzanne in one plot pursuing one track, while Ironhorse and Sgt. Reynolds are in an independent plot pursuing another track, both converging on the same place. I wonder if there were plans early on for Reynolds to be a regular character, because he works well enough as someone for Ironhorse to order around. He’s the one whose job is to dismiss the crazier parts of the story as drunken fantasy, while Ironhorse stays overly intense and military. Instead, Reynolds is going to buy it later in the story, which I guess kinda presages Jessie in the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
in accordance with the laws of dramatic necessity prompts her to come out of hiding to chew him out over it. We also get our first look at what happens to the aliens when they die, as Ironhorse’s kills of the previous night have melted into white, foamy puddles dotted with human remains. There’s certainly some unreality to it — the identifiable human bits all look more than a little like discarded disguises from Mission: Impossible, but rather than looking cheap and fake, the rubbery skin and lack of blood or organs serve to reinforce the sense that the human victims have been, in essence, hollowed out and taxidermied.
Ironhorse is finally willing to believe that there’s “something” weird going on, what with the bolas and the terrorists melting when shot, but he still maintains that, “I don’t believe in ghosts and I sure as hell don’t believe in aliens from another planet.” Keep in mind, he is literally the only person in the show who has come right out and said he doesn’t believe in aliens.
Then she sees that they keep horses at the compound and is instantly okay with moving here and wants to take riding lessons. Because she’s a little girl and little girls are fickle and shallow, amirite? Oh, the hilarity! Debi isn’t much of a character this season, existing mostly just to occasionally pop up and complain about things, and once or twice to be a peril monkey. It’s hard to justify the character’s existence at all. She seems like one of several elements of the show that don’t serve any real purpose, but which they keep coming back to for some reason. My best guess is that they were concerned the show was tacking too dark, and wanted something to lighten the mood a little. Debi is here to be a character that the rest of the cast can show their softer side around. For example, that evening, they all gather around the fireplace, and Ironhorse, who spent most of last week’s segment barking orders, tells an endearing folk story from his native american heritage as a sort of ghost story for Debi, which is so cute that I forgot to check my watch and make a note of how long it took them to get around to having Paul Ironhorse dispense a bit of native american folk wisdom, in keeping with the fact that as of 1988, 
The plot kind of spins its wheels for five minutes to make it look hard. Norton isn’t having any success decoding the alien transmissions until Harrison reminds him about the alien fascination with the number 3, citing the three-lensed optics and three-craft battle groups from the movie, as well as the three-weighted bola from the ghost town battle. Then Harrison compliments Suzanne on her work in a scene that is weirdly out-of-nowhere flirty. There will be a couple of hints throughout the series of the possibility of romance between Harrison and Suzanne, but they’re fortunately rare, and this is the last we’ll see of Harrison the Sex God for this episode.
We open on a truck and the words “The Resurrection”. After a night-drive, they approach an army base identified by signage as “Fort Jericho”. The guards on duty take them for a delivery truck, and are therefore surprised when the drivers shoot them, then open the truck to reveal some friends on ATVs who drive around the place shooting anyone they find and also taking random pot-shots at the many fine barrels full of radioactive waste stored therein. It’s a slightly strange scene, with a lot of angles shot from the ATV-rider’s point of view with just the handlebars and the barrel of his submachine gun visible. It gives the sequence a bit weird of an FMV on-rails-shooter look to it, set to the soothing sounds of Billy Thorpe (Anyone know if the stuff he did for this series was ever released on an album?).
That image of the three-fingered hand is going to be the major icon of the series. There isn’t a lot of storytelling potential in this kind of ’80s action-adventure to be had out of the iconic 1953 war machines, so they just don’t come up that much. The alien hand, on the other, um, y’know, is something they can whip out whenever they like. The title screen used for the rest of the series, in fact, is going to show a computer-rendered alien hand wrapping around the globe, an image that’s iconic enough that Stephen Spielberg by a complete coincidence I am sure used the same concept in the art for his 2005 version of War of the Worlds. The hand itself is quite a bit different from the version in the movie, though. While it retains brown, leathery skin and three long fingers, the distinctive suction cups are missing, and the hand is larger and altogether more muscular. Ironically, the fingers look considerably more human, with joints and knuckles, the lines of tendons visible, running the length of the fingers, which are thick and long enough to wrap all the way around a man’s face.
His next three scenes (Which are intercut with the terrorists preparing to broadcast their demands) are a very dense, very effective introduction to the character. If I hadn’t watched the 1953 movie so recently and with a critical eye, I certainly would have missed some key elements of Harrison’s characterization at this early stage. Namely, the inspiration they take from his spiritual predecessor, Clayton Forrester. There are very clearly three major elements to the character of Harrison Blackwood that they want to get across to us right away:
Robot Aunt Em in Tin Man). And he is basically a jerk to her at every turn, then just pulls some John Hughes Movie bullshit and shows up at her door and kind of smugs at her for forgiveness after she breaks up with him and stops returning her calls — and she just instantly caves and lets him in and bones him. Harrison loves her because she’s “funny” and “smart” and “beautiful” and “has great legs”, but I think we’re also meant to dislike her because she’s trying to tempt him away from academia and into highly paid private industry and she doesn’t accept the importance of his work, man. But she keeps right on forgiving him because she’s infatuated with him. Their banter is surprisingly sexually charged, and I keep wanting to shout at her that he’s just not that into you, because he has less than no interest in any of the things that are important to her, but expects her to bend over backwards to accommodate what’s important to him. Also, he expects her to bend over frontwards for much the same reasons.
It is October 2, 1989. For good this time. Since the first season of War of the Worlds wrapped up back in May, the Tiananmen Square protests took place in Beijing, resulting in my website getting blocked by the great firewall of China. The B2 Stealth Bomber makes its first flight. The Nintendo Game Boy, the most popular computing device in the history of the planet, was launched, as was the Sega Genesis, which did what Ninten-Don’t. F W de Klerk becomes the last president of South Africa under Apartheid, having run on a platform, near as I can tell, of “Look, we all know this system is ridiculous and untenable, let’s try to wind it down in a way that doesn’t end with the giant bloody massacre most people reckon we’ve got coming to us.” That pretty much covers the sentiment of the whole world at the time, as Poland reestablishes diplomatic relations with the Vatican, Vietnam ends its occupation of Cambodia, and Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs opens a restaurant in Moscow. It is the waning days of communism in countries whose names don’t begin with the letter ‘C’. The last-ever large-scale anti-communism protest is held in East Germany. Last, because in a month, it’s going to be a moot point.
It is October 7, 1988. In the six months since Captain Power went on hiatus, the Governor of Arizona was impeached and removed from office. Sonny Bono was elected mayor of Palm Springs. The Soviet war in Afghanistan wound most of the way down, proving for what surely will be the last time that it is stupid to get involved in a war there. Windows 2.1 was released. A third of Yellowstone National Park burned down. A NASA scientist testified before the US Senate that man-made global warming was a thing that was happening. The upcoming presidential race is whittled down to Michael Dukakis and George H. W. Bush. The Iran-Iraq war ended. Tom Browning pitched a perfect game. The Summer Olympics were held in Seoul. “Terminal Man” Mehran Karimi Nasseri got stuck in Charles de Gaulle airport, where he would remain until 2006. Space Shuttle Discovery launched from Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39, the first shuttle launch since the Challenger Disaster two and a half years earlier.
But they couldn’t get the rights to Blade Runner, so they went and did it anyway. And since Blade Runner was based on a book by Philip K. Dick (“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”), and Phillip K. Dick had also written a book (“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”) which had been adapted as a movie called Total Recall, which they could get the rights to, they called their Blade Runner adaptation Total Recall 2070 instead.