'No reason to get excited,' the thief, he kindly spoke. 'There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.' -- Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower
Okay so I’m not going all the way to London for this, but if it ever shows up stateside, I know what I want for my next birthday.
I think the generic term is “Immersive Experience”. I don’t know how long this sort of thing has been around, but they’ve been popping up a lot in the DC metro area, sometimes at places like National Harbor which are built for large exhibitions, or in disused retail space, of which there is quite a lot. Last year, we went to see the immersive Vincent Van Gogh experience, which was super cool, and we’re doing one called “Dopamine Land” tomorrow. But then, since I ended up with the right advertising cookies I guess, this appeared to me today:
It feels like every time I post an article about my collection of War of the Worlds-related swag, there’s an implicit “This will probably be the last of these,” about it. Well, this will probably be the last of these. But I’ve got a little bit more pocket money recently, so it’s entirely possible I will blow a few bucks on a fanzine or something.
Just in case you were worried there was some art you’d missed.
Anyway, a while back I blew fifty bucks or so on the print press kit for War of the Worlds. Just the folder of press releases, sadly; not the globe. Even more sadly, as I was scanning it, I discovered that it’s not even complete. But all the same, for the sake of history, I might as well talk about this…
The version of the press kit I managed to snag is a cardstock folder emblazoned on the front with the same “Alien hand grabbing the Earth” art that’s on basically everything else. The hand is the thinner, more skeletal version of the hand, like we saw on the novelization, rather than the beefier ones used for visuals in the show. The cover uses an unadorned sans serif font. Internally, the title of the show is rendered with the Science Fiction Warp Trail Effect we’ve seen a bunch of times before.
The back is a plain starfield with a small copyright notice at the bottom. The folder is in the same style as the one that was used for the fancier globe-style press kit, but is simpler and lacks dividers.
The kit I received contained nine 8×10 glossy black and white photos and eleven documents. I’ve seen all these photos before – most of them were reproduced in Elyse Dickenson’s concordance. It’s nice to have them in this quality, though. Because this is 1988, these are photographic prints rather than 4-color process prints, which means I’m in luck if I ever decide I need to have a mural-sized black-and-white picture of Jared Marten printed up. There are headshots of the four leads, three group shots, and two set photos. It looks like the globe kit also included the promotional reference photos for compositing. According to the documents, the press kit originally came with a copy of the novelization.
This is pretty much the most common promotional photo used for the series.
While painstakingly destapling the documents for scanning, I discovered that the pages had been shuffled at some point, and a bunch were missing. Here’s what I’ve got:
An introductory document that gives the series premise and credits. It’s one page that ends with a continuation mark, but the rest is missing.
A document describing possible angles for media coverage. The first page is missing. This was stapled to the introductory document, implying it’s one complete document, but page two starts in the middle of a sentence that doesn’t begin on page one.
A three page document suggesting promotional tie-ins for the show.
A typewritten press release about the show on KCOP 13 letterhead
Biographies for Sam Strangis, Greg Strangis, Herbert Wright, Tom Lazarus, and Jonathan Hackett. For some reason, there’s two copies of the second page of Sam Strangis’s bio.
Biographies for Richard Chaves, Jared Martin and Philip Akin.
If there was a manifest page, it’s missing, so I can only speculate at what isn’t here. I assume there was originally a bio for Lynda Mason Green, and at least two additional pages to cover the gaps in the first two documents. I guess it’s possible that there’s nothing missing, though. The page numbers all work out right, so it could be that the first two documents really were one continuous thing and the discontinuity between pages one and two is sloppy editing. No bio for Lynda seems obviously wrong though.
Page two of the media coverage document begins with the tantalizing parenthetical, “(Gene Barry’s character from the 1953 film)”, but embeds it in a paragraph about the upcoming festivities for the fiftieth anniversary of the 1938 radio show. It goes on to suggest interviewing effects supervisor Bill Sturgeon, modelmaker Greg Jein, and special effects coordinator Bernie Laramie, as well as Ann Robinson. It ends on a suggestion that the potential for another outbreak of mass hysteria like (allegedly) in 1938 would be a good angle for a story about the new series.
The promotional tie-in suggestions guide is even more interesting. They point out that Halloween is coming soon, and already has a historical association with the franchise, so why not print your station’s logo and the series logo on bags of candy for trick-or-treaters? I mean, other than the fact that this is definitely not a show for children of trick-or-treat age. I mean, a dude gets his face casually slapped off by a little old lady. “This would also be a prime opportunity to sponsor a WAR OF THE WORLDS party, perhaps in conjunction with a local dance club and college campus.”
Ah yes, those college kids love their media themed dance parties.
They again point out the Grover’s Mill celebrations, suggesting that plane ticket to New Jersey might be a good contest giveaway, and pointed media departments to Creation Conventions and Starlog magazine as resources if they’re interested in getting involved with the local convention scene.
Another aspect of brand promotional opportunities that seem obvious but I never would’ve thought about on my own is that the actors from a broadcast show in this era would be expected to record promotional bumpers for the local stations. A station could write to Paramount with their requirements and get back a ten second tape of Jared Martin saying, “I’m Jared Martin and you’re watching War of the Worlds on WDCA 20,” or suchlike, as explained at the bottom of page two.
The last section, though short, is pregnant with denied potential. They point readers to Simon and Schuster for discounted copies of the novelization to be given away for promotions, and promise other merchandise to come in the months ahead. “Additional premium items with the WAR OF THE WORLDS logo will be available for purchase,” they optimistically promise, then claim that they are planning to release T-shirts, sweatshirts, posters, more novelizations, and sleepwear. Yes, dear reader. Somewhere, tucked away in a warehouse in Los Angeles, I can only assume, I can only hope, I can only pray, there is an unreleased prototype version of a Lieutenant Colonel Paul Ironhorse camisole.
The KCOP press release contains no new information, but is a neat physical artifact. Its most interesting feature is what it chooses to highlight in each performer’s capsule bio. For Martin, Dallas, of course, but also his Broadway work in Torch Song Trilogy. For Chaves, obviously Predator, but also an Aristotle Onaissis biopic.
There’s something similar in the press kit bios for the production team. For Jonathan Hackett, they highlight his role as the production manager on Follow That Bird. Yes. The Sesame Street movie. Tom Lazarus has an extensive resume, and they cite some things you’d expect (Though I guess by 1988, his work on Knight Rider wasn’t noteworthy any more), but also his 20 educational films for Psychology Today and his work on – I am not making this up – Mazes and Monsters. Sam Strangis’s bio is oddly short – only a single page including the press contact blurb. It’s also weighted toward his works in the ’60s and ’70s, giving the unfortunate impression that his heyday is behind him. The younger Strangis’s bio gives a surprising amount of words to The Karen Valentine Show, an unsold pilot from 1973.
While I’m sure every other thing I’ve read about the War of the Worlds cast draw primarily from these bios, there’s still a handful of tidbits in there I hadn’t heard before. A fun fact from Richard Chaves’s writeup is that his first acting role playing a Native American character was as “Irondog” in the third The Gambler movie. Philip Akin has a sweet anecdote wherein he declined a nice pair of loafers from the costume department because his research for the part suggested they would be hard for a wheelchair-user to put on unassisted. They note that Norton would come to be known for his distinctive printed T-shirts. Which I had, being honest, never noticed. Another new piece of trivia for me is that Jared Martin was in Marat/Sade. This sticks in my mind because yesterday, I learned that Abe Vigoda was too, through not, as far as I can tell, the same production.
His bio includes a quote along similar lines to what we’ve seen before about Martin’s take on the character, that he’s playing him as a “sexy” intellectual. I like that idea on paper, particularly given how it slots in with Gene Barry’s character in the film, but in practice, I never found Sex God Harrison convincing. I know Jared Martin was able to convincingly play “sexy” given his experience in Dallas, but I never felt he managed to thread the needle in War of the Worlds largely because his eccentricities were clearly meant to be charming, but more often were offputting. He’s too Big Bang Theory and not enough Stargate. The bio also mentions that he prepared for the role by reading Sagan and The Oxford Companion to the Mind, and there’s a brief mention of his interest in photography.
I’m glad to have one more physical artifact from this show. I wish there were more. I was promised sleepwear. It’s nice to have the original sources for some of the details we’ve seen crop up in various articles and other readings, and even if this doesn’t add much of anything new, it’s certainly interesting to see what Paramount thought were the show’s major selling points back in 1988.
After we evacuate, this facility will be like Chernobyl.
Guest starring the Cardassians
It is May 8, 1989. Manuel Noriega has just lost the presidential election in Panama. Wednesday, he will declare the election invalid on account of he does not wish to stop being president. If this seems like a bizarre and unlikely turn of events, just wait till November! Friday, a freight train will derail in San Bernardino, California, destroying seven houses, killing four people, and damaging a gasoline pipeline. Two weeks later, the pipeline will explode, killing two more people and destroying eleven more homes. Space Shuttle Atlantis returns from its latest mission, which I mentioned last time. British Rail employees start refusing to work unpaid overtime and start just leaving when their shifts end.
Cyndi Lauper, John Mellencamp and Simple Minds all have albums out this week, none of them among the artists’ best-known, though Mellencamp’s Big Daddy is really good. A Night to Remember features Lauper’s version of “I Drove All Night”, a song that was written for Roy Orbison (Due to Orbison’s death, his version of the song would not be released until 1992), which is best known for its 2003 cover by Celine Dion. In the Hot 100, Bon Jovi overtakes Madonna. New in the top ten are “Rock On”, “Patience” and “The Wind Beneath My Wings”, displacing “Funky Cold Medina”, “She Drives Me Crazy” and “Room to Move”, three songs at least one of which, maybe two, are not disgustingly transphobic.
Earth Girls are Easy is the only worthwhile thing out in theaters this week, for a very loose definition of “worthwhile”. Home video is even more dire. The only thing I could find is a VHS release of a couple of episodes of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series. A plurality of prime time shows have already gone on their summer break. The fourth Amityville Horror movie has its TV debut Friday. MacGyver is new, “Renegade”, an episode I don’t remember. ALF ends its third season with “Having My Baby“. Star Trek The Next Generation is “Q Who?”, the first introduction of the Borg. Friday the 13th the Series gives us “Wedding in Black”, a rare episode where the magical artifact of the week, a snowglobe, isn’t covered by the physical indestructibility that protects the usual cursed objects, because who can resist smashing a snowglobe. Also, Satan is in this one.
As I have said far too many times by now, War of the Worlds as a television show suffers tremendously from nothing grander or more complicated than that it was made in the 1980s. Because this is a show which would’ve benefited greatly from a consistent narrative voice and clear and coherent world-building, and that is just not how television worked in the 1980s. When you look at modern mythology-heavy franchises, like the MCU or Star Trek, a thing that they emphasize is that there is a complete and coherent backstory and world in which these events are taking place, and either there is someone behind the scenes who has a full picture of what is going on, or, at the least, there is someone who makes sure as each new piece of mythos is introduced, that it slots naturally into what came before and will continue to fit moving forward. That trend was, to a significant extent, “invented”, at least for genre television, by Babylon 5 and codified by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and just straight-up was not a thing in the ’80s. In the ’80s model of television writing for the most part, every episode exists in a sort of vacuum – a kind of Halloween or Highlander franchise model, where each installment could be treated, explicitly or implicitly, as a direct sequel to the first, and any other installments that happened in the middle may or may not be canonical any more, in whole or in part, with no rhyme or reason to what’s left out or in. So KITT gets the same new feature six times, and Angus MacGyver has about ten million old buddies who mean a lot to him but who he mentions exactly once and never again and genetic engineering is an absolute taboo in the Federation except for that one time that a group of scientists were genetically engineering superhumans and everyone is completely chill about it and it occurs to exactly no one to mention the near-destruction of human civilization the last time someone tried that.
This picture is here mostly because I want to call out the fact that those computer monitors aren’t even real. The screens are printed, like the “Proptronix” cardboard TVs they used to put on the furniture in department stores.
This isn’t simply a matter of television writing being immature. In many ways is was immature – television in the 20th century largely evolved from the “low” theatrical traditions, particularly vaudeville. But primarily, it was about the material reality of television distribution. Even when there were only three channels, very little television had the luxury of being able to assume a consistent audience from week to week, and once television stopped being a primarily live-to-air affair, the reality of distribution meant that individual episodes could be preempted, reordered, or dropped altogether, and this happened a lot. Reruns were sporadic at best and home media was nonexistent. Trying to tell a single, ongoing story a fool’s errand if you were going to alienate casual viewers and even devoted viewers stood a solid chance of having their attempts to follow the story foiled because the President decided to declare war on drugs that evening, or because the local affiliate got the tapes wrong, or because the wind was blowing in the wrong direction for you to get the DC stations that night. There was a tradition of serial television, originating back in the radio days, but it was restricted to soap operas, considered, in their way, the most disposable sort of entertainment. You had things like the prestige TV mini-series, but those were definitionally “special events” – it wasn’t something you could sustain for more than one very special week. It wasn’t until the proliferation of cable television, home media, and digital distribution, coupled with increased production values that came as the visual style of TV converged with that of film, that it made sense for “serious” television to become properly sequential, fusing elements of the fully serialized daytime melodrama with more tightly plotted episodic stories.
War of the Worlds is a product of that tradition of show-writing, but it desperately wants to be a show with a rich and heavy mythos. The writers have a very good sense of how to signify that an element is meant to be important and carries gravitas in a mythological sort of way. But they have absolutely no follow through. The alien burial site list from “The Second Seal“; Harrison’s Russian girlfriend from “Epiphany“; Harrison’s American girlfriend from “He Feedeth Among the Lilies“; Ironhorse’s spiritual journey from “Dust to Dust“; the ongoing misadventures of Little Bobby in “Thy Kingdom Come“; the only plot element that ever gets brought up more than once is Quinn, and if we’re being honest, that’s less of a plot element and more of “We had two chances to get John Colicos to ham it up so of course we were going to do that.”
And maybe you could convince yourself that had this show gotten a second season, they would’ve come back to these things, but to be honest? I don’t really see it. Because in the mode of ’80s TV storytelling, there is no such thing as forward motion. Just look at how many episodes end on an essentially nihilistic statement about the impossibility of progress. The standard ending of these episode is a draw: the plan of the week gets derailed, but not in a way that brings the Blackwood Project any closer to defeating the aliens, and also now a bunch of people are dead. This isn’t a show that is gearing up for an evolving storyline, even though it absolutely should be.
So here we are, in the next-to-last episode, and it’s time to add in another big and overly signified element to the essential War of the Worlds mythos which will, of course, appear once and then never again. This time, it’s “Project 9”, which is an evil shadowy government conspiracy working with alien stuff. Which is kind of a weird flex in a show about a shadowy government conspiracy working with alien stuff.
The obvious difference between Project 9 (Whose name, I assume, is a reference to Plan 9 From Outer Space) and the Blackwood Project is that Project 9 is evil. In particular, while the Blackwood Project is explicitly tasked with fighting the aliens, Project 9 is focused on adapting alien technology for military use. This isn’t without promise; Stargate SG-1 would pick up on the same themes years later, introducing a human cabal that exploits alien technology for profit without regard for Earth’s place in galactic affairs. The big problem with Project 9 in War of the Worlds is, well, everything to do with it is complete nigh-incoherent garbage.
David Bowie sets up his solid gold bouncy castle in Antarctica.
Just at first blush, is it dumb that there are two military projects working on the alien problem? Well no, not really; what’s dumb is that there’s only two. Everyone ought to want a piece of this. What’s dumb is the whole conceit of “America is being invaded by an adversary with massive numbers and a technological advantage, and the adversary already has a foothold within the continental United States, and our plan to fight it consists of three nerds and a Lieutenant Colonel, because we definitely want this done on the DL.”
But hey, acceptable break from reality for the sake of having a show. Okay. But now we’ve got two projects, and the new one is even more secret than the first, and the two projects do not share information, and one of the projects doesn’t even know about the existence of the other. Now, “They are deliberately bad about sharing information because of territorialism and professional pettiness,” I could buy, but no, it’s deliberate that the alien-fighting project knows nothing about the alien-studying side and the people trying to prevent the aliens from conquering the Earth are not permitted any of the benefits to come from exploiting alien technology.
So what is Project 9 all about? Admittedly, it’s only Norton’s guess that Project 9 studies alien technology to try to adapt it for military use. The problem with that explanation is that the representatives of Project 9 that we meet seem almost serenely uninformed about the aliens and their technology. They don’t seem to know anything about the aliens. They don’t know about the alien capacity for cryptobiosis. They seem only vaguely aware of alien possession. And they don’t seem to take the danger posed by the aliens very seriously.
This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing for the sake of the story. You could imagine an interesting twist here where, say, Project 9 has only had access to alien technology, not the aliens themselves, so their view is extremely skewed – maybe they don’t even know that the aliens are alive and active again because that’s been withheld from them. Maybe they view the aliens purely from an engineering perspective and have no sense of them as a civilization…
Nicholas Coster is a pretty solid piece of guest casting. A regular on Santa Barbara for ten years, he also had a recurring role on The Facts of Life as Blair’s dad. And he was in Star Trek The Next Generation as the admiral who tries to abscond with Data’s daughter – in my head, I’d conflated him with Bruce Maddox and was surprised they didn’t have him do a cameo in Picard. Also, since Hamilton came out on Diskey+ last week, I’ll note that Coster had a small role as one of the less interesting delegates in the film version of 1776.
Except that the Project 9 scientist in this episode, a Colonel Alexander, doesn’t seem especially interested in alien technology; he’s interested in the alien itself as a biological specimen and his particular obsession is understanding the alien psyche. And on top of that, for someone who is obsessed with understanding the alien psyche, he seems to know nothing at all about it – certainly less than he’d have picked up from watching the presentation the Blackwood Project gave at that international conference a few weeks back. No, the only mode that Colonel Alexander really fits into is just straight-up mad scientist. But this is not a setup or a story that calls for a mad scientist. The mad scientist is not the dude the Pentagon puts in charge of the evil secret conspiracy to exploit alien technology; the mad scientist is the guy who gets rejected from that job and seeks revenge. This is like if the DOD called in Doctor Robotnik to help find a powerful alie- FUCK.
Anyway, integrating Alexander into this story leaves us with a clusterfuck of plot on top of what was already a bit of a speculative fiction plot orgy. Because this episode is sort of a mashup of The Thing and Alien and maybe sort of Die Hard… And Jeckyl and Hyde, a bit? It’s a big old mess, is the thing. Which is a shame, because there’s a lot of good stuff in here. It looks very good, and there’s a lot of good action, and the sense of tension is developed well, and it’s another one of those rare episodes where the whole cast gets enough to do. But the big picture just doesn’t quite gel into something properly cohesive. It’s not exactly that it’s meandering – in fact, the story is pretty focused both in plot and tone, avoiding the penchant for odd comedy subplots that have made the rest of the series on the one hand endearing but on the other, hard to pin down. The plot doesn’t wander: it moves in a straight line. To nowhere. The pity is just that the core they chose to focus on and build the story around is a pretty dumb contrivance.
Seems legit to me.
At a US Air Force Geological Site conveniently close to a US Air Force Nuclear Research Facility (I am not clear on what the US Air Force has geological sites for or what they do. Or why they are just randomly digging in them with excavating equipment), some excavation equipment digs up an alien space ship. It is moved to the convenient nearby Nuclear Research Facility because why not, and our heroes (Sans Norton, who more reasonably remains back at the cottage to provide support over the phone) are called in to have a look at it. There’s an interesting moment here where Norton asks whether Harrison is sure the craft is associated with “their” aliens. This is the first time all season that they’ve referenced the possibility of aliens other than the Mor-taxans, and despite there only being one episode left after this one, it won’t be the last.
It is indeed the gang from Mor-tax, of course, because there’s too much going on in this episode already to introduce another faction into the mix. But Norton’s question is fair: this ship looks very different from the ones we’ve seen so far. Twice this season, War of the Worlds has tried to reproduce the original movie’ fighting machines, with mixed success. They came pretty close both times, but the compositing was a little shoddy and the proportions of the “cobra-head” looked off. On the other hand, the alien hand weapon in “The Second Seal” and the ancient ship in “Dust to Dust” look fantastic, and despite not looking quite like anything in the original movie, they both look very consistent with the original movie. The materials and the colors and the odd combinations of curves and angles all feel very consistent with the design aesthetic of Al Nozaki’s design.
I don’t want to downplay how cool the alien ship looks. It’s just that it looks way more Star Trek than anything we’ve seen so far.
The alien craft here isn’t done as well as those, but it still shows an earnest effort to depict something consistent with the alien technology we know from the movie. It looks to be made out of the same materials and it’s the same copper color and it’s got similar triangle motifs. But the overall design is more Star Trek than War of the Worlds, with more straight lines and 45-degree angles. There are none of the fresneled lenses we’re used to seeing on alien ships, or the gentle lenticular curves. Instead, there’s sections of exposed – let’s say it’s supposed to be “crystal”, though it looks more like what it certainly is: crumpled cellophane. The overall shape screams “shuttle” pretty loudly, and Harrison identifies it as likely a scout craft. It also has a window in the front, through which we can clearly see an intact alien. Harrison buries the lede when explaining this to Norton for comic effect.
Recalling that Harrison was able to open the hatch on an alien warship back in the pilot, he explains here that this ship has a different opening mechanism, and sets Norton to researching it. This is when they are interrupted by the introduction of Colonel Alexander and Project 9 From Outer Space, who promptly takes over the project. Harrison and Ironhorse grumble angrily to each other about this, but orders is orders.
Norton manages to turn up some of Forrester’s research notes indicating the possibility of using ultrasound to activate the alien technology. They let Alexander embarrass himself by breaking a diamond drill bit and reflecting a hydrogen-fluoride laser off the ship before telling him. Alexander is all haughty and waves off their silly attempts to open the ship even after his own efforts have failed, but of course it works.
Sadly, Ironhorse does not wear one of his Dad Sweaters. But check out Suzanne’s.
This is really where we get into what I was trying to say before about Alexander and Project 9 being a big old mess. On the matter of opening the ship, he was dismissive of Harrison’s expertise, despite his own efforts clearly demonstrating that he had no idea what he was doing. A scene later, we see him finishing up a conversation with Suzanne about alien biology where it’s clear that he’s humoring her and isn’t really paying attention… Except that Suzanne claims he’d been interrogating her intensely, desperate to learn everything she knew about alien biology. He’s dismissive of Ironhorse’s security concerns, instantly assuming the alien to be dead and apparently ignorant of their capacity for cryptobiosis. The alien politely waits until no one is looking to open its eye and look around, then promptly plays possum until the middle of the next act.
Everything points to Project 9 being profoundly ignorant about the aliens themselves. Which would be fine if the idea was that Project 9 had only ever been exposed to alien technology, not the aliens themselves. Except that Alexander is also apparently completely ignorant about alien technology. And more, we never see Alexander take any interest in the ship itself: in fact, all he seems to care about is the alien. Now, if you had a broader backstory here, maybe something good could come of this. Maybe Project 9 was denied access to the aliens themselves and Alexander is so eager to finally see a real alien that his judgment is compromised. There’s the faintest shadow of hinting that Alexander is frustrated with his inability to comprehend the alien mindset and is desperate to bridge that gap. That’s a story with a very different scope to this episode, though, and something that really should be explicit. Heck, there’s a good place for some setup here with Alexander’s failure to open the craft. Throw in a scene later where he laments about the fact that Harrison is easily able to do what he couldn’t despite his own years of study and have him explicitly link it to Harrison’s firsthand experience with the aliens. Instead of leaving Project 9 as a complete cipher, give us some sense of what it’s like from Alexander’s perspective. That would go a long way to tie his motivations together into something that makes sense. But I think they wanted to preserve Project 9 as being purely “the shadowy, evil version of the Blackwood Project,” and possibly didn’t even notice how incompetent they come off.
There. Not shady at all.
We lack the insight into Project 9 to fully make sense of Alexander’s actions. But there’s hints, at least, that he’s not on the level. In particular, Alexander slips into the room with the alien craft, dismisses the guards, then takes a scraping of the alien and draws a syringe of its internal goo. Which, okay, that is fine; he’s a scientist studying the alien. This all makes sense. But he’s incredibly furtive about it, repeatedly looking over his shoulder, making sure no one sees him. He’s in charge here, so why does he need to be sketchy about it? It feels like there should be another character here – someone bureaucratic, who’s pitting the Blackwood team against Project 9, and thus pressuring Alexander to make rash decisions in order to advance his work. In the story as it stands, Alexander is doing double duty as the desperate scientist taking stupid risks to prove himself and also as the dispassionate Peter Principle “suit” who gets in the way of the heroes doing their plucky heroic Sciencetm. Meanwhile, the regular cast is playing the plucky hero band who has been sidelined by the bureaucratic process, except half the time they’re… not really?
In my hypothetical imaginary rewrite of this episode, Alexander would be the Golden Boy of Project 9, used to being respected and treated as a wunderkind (I would probably cast someone younger as Alexander and keep Nicholas Coster as the “suit”). He rolls in expecting to show up Harrison and his gang of misfits, but is quickly and very publicly humiliated when Harrison opens the capsule where he failed. The “suit” character hands the mission back over to Harrison and Ironhorse, with a veiled threat that maybe Project 9 isn’t working out the way they wanted. Harrison tries to make peace with Alexander, showing respect for his scientific abilities, but Alexander’s ego won’t stand for it, and he starts making increasingly rash decisions in his desperation to show up Harrison and get a major breakthrough.
That would certainly be a much stronger build up than we actually get to what comes next: without much in the way of explanation or preamble or justification, Alexander starts musing on whether or not he could learn to think like an alien by shooting himself up with alien goo. This is not actually where the episode goes, with Alexander slowly becoming more alien in his thinking and ultimately struggling to retain his human identity; he just gets possessed the usual way. Which is even more the pity since that would also be more interesting than what actually happens.
Its a pretty good tripod. A little generic in a still image, but they move really well and theyre filmed in a way that makes them almost more like Kaiju than war machines.
Another way in which Spielberg’s War tips its provenance is in the human response to the aliens. When you compare it to, say, Independence Day, certainly both movies show the gung-ho attitude of, “Rar! Let’s go kick some alien ass!” But War of the Worlds breaks from the military fetishism of a Roland Emmerich or a Michael Bay. Independence Day, for all its big dumb military bravado, is still operating in the ’50s Sci-Fi Monster Movie mold, at least insofar as the fundamental approach is, “Let’s go science the shit out of it.” The military response might be showy, but it’s organized, based on the strategic combination of intelligence and strength. In fact, despite how almost perfectly dumb the movie is, it depicts this fusion of brains and brawn in a wonderful harmony, this beautiful Voltronning of Jeff Goldblum’s brains, Will Smith’s charisma, Randy Quaid’s comic relief and Bill Pullman’s rugged manliness that come together to Captain Planet the shit out of the aliens. In this respect, Independence Day is actually closer to the 1953 War of the Worlds than Spielberg is. Because Spielberg’s War doesn’t show humans responding with strategy and determination and pluck; it shows a response inspired more by Toby Keith and Alan Jackson: We don’t care if this will work; we don’t care if this is the best use of resources; we don’t even care if we’ve picked the right target: we just want to hurt someone as we have been hurt. Not, “We need to withstand and endure and repel this enemy,” but “We need to make them hurt, Blood calls out for blood.” This isn’t the response of the confident, assured, imperial power that’s just had its landmarks blown up in 1996; it’s the response of the confused, scared country that just got a black eye from nowhere and is willing to sign off on an invasion of any random country the President has a grudge against because, “We have to do something.”
The tripods having bell-jar force fields is probably an homage to the 1953 movie, but the way it’s shot, it almost feels more like an homage to Independence Day. A lot of this film feels like Spielberg saying, “No, Roland, an alien invasion would be grim and unpleasant, not exciting and flashy.”
This is basically the character arc, such as it is, of Ray’s teenage son Robbie. Robbie isn’t there for the initial attack. He takes a long time to believe what’s going on. But then he suddenly becomes hell-bent for leather about joining the army to fight back, culminating in a tense character scene where he begs Ray to let him go. And, I mean, it doesn’t work as a narrative arc; it’s played as though this is a big “Father must learn to respect his son as a man and let him find his own path,” moment, but… It’s not. Nor, really, should it be. Robbie is objectively wrong here and that is kind of important. The right response to the aliens is not to fight back; it’s to do exactly what Ray wants to do: run away and stay alive and the aliens will take care of themselves. Also, kind of important, the idea that Ray has some kind of trouble respecting Robbie’s right as an adult (as a man, really, because the cultural baggage that implies is relevant) is not supported by anything else in the damn story. Ray is an irresponsible absentee father who is very bad at parenting. The rest of his arc, where it really ought to be going, is him proving himself as a father by the lengths he goes to in protecting adorable moppet Dakota Fanning (Who starts off like she might have a decent arc herself about needing to find confidence in her own precociousness in the face of her overbearing mother and deadbeat father, but who basically just turns into a glassy-eyed peril monkey in a portrayal which is very realistic for a child in trauma, but honestly not good storytelling), which will culminate in him murdering a dude and risking his life against a tripod to rescue her. That’s Ray’s emotional climax: Dakota Fanning gets captured and he has to allow himself to get captured to rescue her, which he does by contriving to get sucked up the tripod’s orifice while holding a string of grenades.
The sky looks so fake here I half believe this too is an homage to the very obvious soundstage on which all the outdoor scenes in the 53 movie were shot.
Having Robbie exit the narrative in the second act could have worked with Ray’s arc, had it been played as Ray’s nadir – the big mistake which finally kicks him into turning his life around. Except that the scene does not come off like that in any way, shape or form. It isn’t played as “Robbie challenges Ray and Ray gives in because that is what he always does and besides, the army will probably take better care of him anyway. But oh no, he’s made a terrible mistake and now his son is imperiled and/or dead!” No, it’s played as Ray realizing and accepting that he must let his son go be a man. And Robbie turns up at the end perfectly okay and having somehow made his own way to Boston for the tearful reunion at the end. Robbie should’ve died. Ray should’ve seen Robbie die and realized that no, he can’t delegate the survival of his children to anyone else. I mean, you could let Robbie live if he turns out to be not-quite-dead or something, but we have to be shown that Ray is wrong to let Robbie go. And the entire tone of his departure has to be different, showcasing Ray’s inadequacy and his son’s stupidity, rather than trying to sell us Robbie’s sincerity and maturity and Ray’s begrudging acceptance.
The similarity to promotional images for the TV series did not go unnoticed by the dozen or so hardcore TV series fans who still cared in 2005, provoking hopes that Paramount might stop pretending the TV series never happened.
But anyway, it is June 29, 2005. Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck get married. Princess Alexia of the Netherlands was born a couple of days ago. Yesterday, three US Navy SEALs died in Afghanistan as part of Operation Red Wings. Last week also saw the passing of John Fielder and Paul Winchell, the original voices of Piglet and Tigger (Fielder also, weirdly enough, played Jack the Ripper in an episode of Star Trek). I’m kinda struggling to fill this news section; a lot of stuff happened in 2005, but not so much in the last week of June, and I’m holding one of my news snippets back for dramatic reasons. Leslie Gore of all people has a new album out. AMD files an anti-trust suit against Intel.
Tomorrow, Viacom will launch Logo, its LGBT-themed lifestyle channel. The short-lived surrealist sitcom Stella debuts on Comedy Central tonight. Doctor Who just finished up its first series with “The Parting of the Ways” a week and a half ago. The most recent video game I’m familiar with to be released is Psychonauts last Wednesday.
The weekend’s theatrical releases include the big-screen version of Bewitched and George Romero’s return to the Living Dead series with Land of the Dead.
Anyway, remember how there were, for some reason, like three different War of the Worlds film adaptations in 2005, when there had previously only been, like, one ever? I’ve kinda joked about why that might be, but I never really came right out and said it. Because it turns out that there is, in fact, a perfectly reasonable explanation for why you’d have multiple War of the Worlds films coming out right around now.
June 29, 2005, also happens to be the day that the design for One World Trade Center, then called the Freedom Tower was released to the public
It’s because the middle of 2005 is roughly the amount of time it takes, from initial pitch, through getting the money, through writing the script, through editing and post-production, to make a movie, if you started shortly after September 11, 2001.
It’s said that in England, a hundred miles is a long way, and in America a hundred years is a long time, and that’s why England made Doctor Who and the US made Star Trek. Maybe that’s also why War of the Worlds has always been more popular with American audiences than in its native country. Or maybe it’s because the comparative geographical isolation of the US compared to Europe made the idea of invaders coming abruptly out of nowhere feel more plausible to US audiences, while British audiences had grown up expecting that any invaders they ever faced would be showing up from one of the several countries right next door they’d been having wars with on a regular basis since the dawn of time.
However the details play out, that’s why it happened when it did. Oh, I’m sure that the myriad early-21st-century adaptations had roots that went back further, but the catalyst that made so many people finally decide that the market was there and it was time to make this concept into a concrete mass-media product was the fact that it suddenly became incredibly, painfully relatable to audiences to imagine a world where a civilization which had long thought itself invincible one day looked up without warning to see death literally drop out of the sky in a sudden, shocking act of violence that sent us reeling and challenged everything we believed about our place in the world order. We’re still reeling.
The Morgan Freeman Voiceover at the beginning is accompanied by this montage of humans busying themselves to and fro about their little affairs, all done from these very strange, alienating angles that very effectively convey the idea of an outsider perspective. Once the aliens arrive, they switch to a lot of weird, alienating low angles that emphasize the sense of feeling small and powerless in the face of epic events. It’s good cinema, even for all the movie’s flaws.
Like basically everyone else who’s thought about it, I identified Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day as a sort of loose adaptation of War of the Worlds, almost at the level of parody. But of course, it’s not quite, is it? At its core, Independence Day is a disaster movie where the disaster happens to be aliens. And disaster movies are pretty much always fundamentally stories of hope. About the indomitability of the human spirit and what we will do to survive and prevail against overwhelming odds. They are stories about survival and rebuilding. We keep going. We fight back. We retake control. War of the Worlds is not about survival. It’s not about rebuilding. It’s about trauma. Even in the original novel, it’s about trauma. Most of the book is about bearing witness to the destruction, to the hopelessness, to the loneliness. Survival and rebuilding happen, but they’re mostly a footnote; the actual guy who’s actively trying to build a new civilization and take the war back to the aliens? He’s a joke.
There are a lot of homages to the 1953 film, mostly visual, like Ray’s watch getting frozen. I have nothing really to say about them in the context of any proper analysis, but I guess it’s nice. I guess. I… It doesn’t really add anything ultimately? But hey, I recognize that reference, so woo.
It is on that level, and really only on that level that Spielberg’s take on War of the Worlds really works, and it’s only through the lens of 9/11 that the movie really makes sense. I’m not going to go as deeply into the plot of this movie as I do for some adaptations, but let’s start with the big flashy divergence from the book: the Martians (I’m not sure they every say they are from Mars, but the opening sequence keeps showing Mars when it refers to them. I suspect this is basically a weasel to excuse the fact that an intelligent civilization going unnoticed on Mars is a hard sell in 2005) don’t bring the tripods with them, but rather beam into tripods that were hidden underground for millions of years.
It is May 1973. In Chicago, the Sears Tower becomes the world’s tallest building. Secretariat wins the Kentucky Derby. Skylab is launched. Bruce Lee is hospitalized for cerebral edema, the condition that would fatally recur later that summer. Charges are dismissed against Daniel Ellsberg for his role in releasing the Pentagon Papers. In Frontiero v Richardson, the US Supreme court rules that military benefits must be granted equally to female service members.
George Harrison releases “Give me Love”; Stevie Wonder releases “You are the Sunshine of My Life.” The former will not top the US charts until June; the latter snags the top spot for one week, between “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Ole Oak Tree” by Dawn with Tony Orlando, and “Frankenstein” by the Edgar Winter Group. Zepplin plays Shae Stadium.
On British television are Doctor Who with the last two parts of “Planet of the Daleks” and the first two parts of “The Green Death”. Stateside, there’s Good Times, Sanford and Son, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Brady Bunch, “New” shows for Bill Cosby and Dick Van Dyke, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, M*A*S*H, All in the Family, I could go on forever. Ooh, this one’s interesting: Valerie Perrine is the first woman to appear nude on US TV in the PBS production of Steambath. And the Watergate hearings start airing, interrupting daytime TV.
And Marvel Comics introduces Killraven, a gladiator from the far-off world of 2018, in which the Earth has been conquered by Martians – those same invaders who attacked the Earth in Wells’s original novel, returned in the year 2001 having developed immunity to Earth’s bacteria. So, if I want to take a look at this beloved classic character, what am I in for? Let’s just check The Complete Marvel Reading Order…
Of the stories in the collection, “The Oath” comes closest in style, tone, and content to the movie. It’s very anime. Maybe even a little more anime than the film proper. While hand-drawn with a deliberate sketchiness that isn’t present in the very smooth computer-animation of the film, the designs are the same, and there’s a lot of imagery that ends up in them movie – ARES HQ, the Leviathan, even a cameo by Kurshirov and Roosevelt (I think; they’re both visibly younger despite the scene being set no more than a year before the movie opens). It’s clearly meant as the centerpiece of the book, longer than the other stories and with a more traditional, linear narrative.
“The Oath” even foreshadows the opening scene of Goliath. After an establishing framing device of an injured ARES soldier reflecting that he’d, “Honored the oath,” we jump into a flashback. In Albuquerque, 1899, our unnamed narrator (It is surprisingly easy not to notice that they never bother to say his name. Having noticed, though, I’m annoyed now) watches his family get vaporized by the Martians. A few more pages show the futile human resistance, but the narrator is impressed by Sheriff Chavez, who stands his ground against a tripod, dual-wielding six-shooters and comes out of it alive for no clear reason beyond the good timing of the Martians dropping dead right as one of them grabs his leg (I feel like this aspect is underdeveloped, like there ought to have been a reveal later that post-war Chavez has a wooden leg or something).
One of those backpack heat rays appears in this picture. It’s never mentioned in text and doesn’t appear anywhere else, but it’s here.
The orphaned narrator spends a year in a refugee camp, then is forced into living rough on the streets. It’s Chavez who eventually catches him when he turns to pick-pocketing on the gotta-eat-to-live-gotta-steal-to-eat principle. Chavez takes the narrator in and raises him like he’s part of the family except for the fact that the narrator falls hard for Chavez’s daughter. He learns all about the importance of book-learnin’ and also manliness, which is symbolized by “that night” (no referent is given, but the art shows them having gone out into the wilderness for, I guess, manliness lessons) when Chavez reveals that he’d had the courage to face down the Martians on account of the manly need to honor one’s oaths, such as the one he’d taken as Sheriff to defend the town.
In the fullness of time, Nameless graduates from high school and signs up with ARES. He makes out with Maria then ships out to learn more important life lessons about manliness and fighting Martians and soldierly camaraderie which are expressed in the form of a two-page spread of people posing heroically in front of ARES HQ. After basic training, he’s assigned to a radar post a few hours’ drive from Albuquerque (Radar wouldn’t be developed in the real world for another twenty years, but primitive radio ranging systems were being developed at the time), and proposes to Maria on his first visit home.
When the Martians finally come, it’s preceded by an airburst explosion which knocks out the radar station’s electronics. Nameless and his friend Leon are sent toward Albuquerque to find a place where the phone lines are working so they can send warning to ARES command. Nameless finds a spot to splice his field phone into the telephone lines and gets the warning out, but he and Leon are accosted by a tripod. Like their Japanese counterparts, Nameless and Leon aren’t armed with heat rays, and the machine gun proves ineffective. Leon sacrifices himself, crashing his beloved motorcycle “Collette” into one of the tripod’s legs, which topples it. As the tripod starts to recover, Nameless retrieves a bazooka (again, 1914 is early for shoulder-fired missiles, but only by a hair or two… But where did he get it from? He wouldn’t’ve been carrying it while climbing the telephone pole, and one assumes the rest of their gear would’ve been in the motorcycle). He’s taken off his feet by a near-miss from a heat ray, but gets off a shot, not at the tripod itself, but at the cliff face above, the resulting rockfall crushing the tripod. We return to the framing scene as we close on Nameless, sitting in what might be a pool of his own blood, his survival uncertain (I choose to believe he made it, though it’s a bit of a stretch tonally), telling the absent Maria how he’d completed his mission, warned ARES, defeated the tripod, and kept his oath.
You know, it’s not just the style of story or the visual paradigm that feels close to the film. It’s also a lot like Goliath in the extent to which it paints a bigger (and honestly, more interesting) world than it actually shows. The storytelling style here is very abbreviated, often seeming to just quietly skip over things which really ought to be important. Like the protagonist’s name. Or what he was doing out in the wilderness with Chavez “that night”. Or his relationship with the rest of his unit beyond the fact that he’d take Leon with him on three-day-passes so they could take Maria out joyriding on Collette. His relationship with Maria is the one place where this highly compressed storytelling style really works – I did believe their relationship, even if the fact that he seems to fall in love with her at the age of about eight is a little uncomfortable.
The more serious flaw in the story is that the climax is kind of poorly justified. Sure, thematically it works that Nameless would need to make his stand, refusing to back down in the face of impossible odds. But as part of the story they are telling? They’ve completed their mission. ARES has been warned. That tripod isn’t a threat to anything except them. He wouldn’t be forsaking his oath to return to base, report the enemy location, and get reinforcements. Especially once the tripod is down and effectively limited to harming things in its own line of sight. What’s lacking here is any connection between the tripod and the rest of the story – defeating the Martian doesn’t accomplish anything for Nameless. If the tripod had been headed for Albuquerque, this would all just work: Nameless would be defending Maria, Chavez, his home. But they’re still over a hundred miles from Albuquerque. It wouldn’t even have to be Albuquereue per se; if it were another town, or a passing convoy, or a civilian family out for a Sunday drive – anything – that would create some stakes where Nameless had to choose to endanger himself to honor his oath to defend the Earth. But if it’s just him who’s in danger, the oath doesn’t really come into it. He’s not putting his life on the line for something. And that almost makes the climax into a joke. Instead of the story of a kid who makes good by learning the importance of upholding one’s obligations, Nameless effectively seems to have learned entirely the wrong lesson, throwing his life away for no clear reason out of a misguided belief that all that matters is a show of bravery. That isn’t how I want to interpret the story, and that isn’t how I think we’re meant to. But that’s what we’re left with when Nameless is never shown to have had a meaningful choice whether to stand his ground or run, and we’re never shown any stakes if he had chosen otherwise. Continue reading Deep Ice: Some Quick Thoughts About Heavy Metal Summer 2011 War of the Worlds Special, Part 2
Nothing like this appears in the movie or in any of the stories, but it probably should’ve.
It is Summer, 2011, though time no longer has meaning. Having finally gotten rid of my old Subaru, I go through a weird little debacle with the MVA about returning my plates and cancelling my car insurance. I am on a cruise to the Bahamas but will be chased home by a hurricane. Space Shuttle Atlantis returns from its final trip – they hadn’t changed the videos at Kennedy Space Center yet to reflect that the shuttle program had ended. South Sudan had seceded from Sudan. Anders Brevik kills seventy-eight people in the course of two terror attacks in Norway. Gaddafi is overthrown in Libya. LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” tops the Billboard charts for much of the season. The biggest movies of the summer are Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and Captain America: The First Avenger. Somehow – this all seems like a dream now – Duke Nukem Forever comes out.
A very, very long time ago, I talked about the animated film War of the Worlds: Goliath. I stand by my assessment from five years ago, in that it’s a decent movie with strong worldbuilding, interesting characters, fun notes of alternate history, and beautiful visuals, but it suffers from a lack of narrative focus that makes it feel less like complete story and more like a clip show of a longer treatment. I thought it was okay at the time, and years of suffering though much worse adaptations has made me even more nostalgic for it.
Well, in the lead-up to Goliath‘s release, Heavy Metal, the famous French-inspired dark-fantasy-science-fiction-vaguely-naughty comics anthology, did a special issue compiling six comics that serve as a sort of loose backstory to the movie. It’s a bit reminiscent of The Animatrix, with each story in a different style, set in the world of the main story, but only tangential to the primary narrative. They’re small and mostly nice to read, and I don’t have a huge amount to say about them, but I thought I’d give them a quick once-over for completeness’s sake.
What? Metal gear?
The first story is “St. Petersburg”, and I think it’s the backstory of General Kurshnirov, the future-leader of ARES (I mean, it’s clearly meant to be him, but he’s not referred to by name. He wears a locket similar to the one Kurshnirov carries in the movie, though the picture inside is visibly different). The story has a bit of dialogue, but the actual storytelling is almost entirely visual. It tells of a cavalry charge on the banks of the Neva River during the first invasion. It goes about as well as can be expected, but, spurred on by thoughts of his beloved Katya, Probably-Kurshnirov survives, only to look back across the river in horror to see St. Petersburg in flames.
This is a lushly-drawn story, in a very high-detail quasi-realistic style that reminds me a bit of oil painting. There’s a few panels of Kurshnirov in particular that remind me of Yoji Shinkawa’s character art for the Metal Gear Solid series, and one panel of a horse and rider being vaporized that is really haunting. Themes and moods come across very clearly, though the last few panels leave a lot to the imagination; I’m mostly drawing from outside knowledge of Kurshnirov’s backstory in my interpretation of the ending. I imagine that if I’d read this before seeing Goliath, it might’ve been a powerful moment when Kurshnirov looks at his locket and you realize that, oh shit, he’s the guy from that story. Coming to it now, years later, I feel a little bit like I’ve cheated myself out of the proper experience. Continue reading Deep Ice: Some Quick Thoughts About Heavy Metal Summer 2011 War of the Worlds Special, Part 1
In a twist that is completely shocking to anyone who has not seen television before, John Kincaid’s presumed-dead brother, Max, is not actually dead, but has been turned into a cyborg by the Morthren and sent out to kill his brother for reasons which are never made clear. So far he has murdered several people who are not his brother, most recently Scoggs, the stripper-slash-hacker who has appeared several times as a trusted ally of the team.
I liked Scoggs, and if there were more than two episodes left to this series, I would be upset with this send-off. Shellshocked, Kincaid escapes back to the Awesome Van while Max is randomly shooting the bartender. He tries to call home, but Debi had been warned not to answer the phone in case Bradley were setting them up. Or because she’s got headphones on and doesn’t hear it. This seems like overkill.
It’s only Suzanne who meets with Bradley, and he promptly arrests her when she gives him the run-around. But like I said, Bradley seems like a decent sort. He reckons that Max was captured and brainwashed, and is now after his old unit. Suzanne has a hard time believing this, which is real weird given that she knows about the Morthren cloning process. But it occurs to her that Max would know where Kincaid lives, and that spooks her into being helpful, what with her daughter being there. This is an interesting thread of plot, because according to the setup, Max shouldn’t know about the shelter, since his personal memories have all been erased. But it would make sense for Suzanne to assume that Max is a clone, not a cyborg, in which case she’d wrongly assume he’s got Max’s memories.
Except that no one mentions cloning at all in this episode – no one is surprised that Max is a cyborg rather than a clone, no one suggests he might be one, and Kincaid just inherently knows that it’s his real brother and not a forgery, and thus can’t bring himself to shoot him. And what’s more… It turns out Max does know where the shelter is, as he goes there, but, miraculously, they choose not to make Debi a peril monkey with a hostage-taking scene; she’s able to stay out of his way as he searches the place, but being in his old home triggers something, as Max starts having visions of his brother. Mana and Malzor recognize this as a fault in the program, having not previously questioned how Max knew where to go. They also will make no use of the fact that they now know where the shelter is. Y’know, a thing that could be really huge, like in Captain Power. I realize that was something like ten million years ago that I reviewed Captain Power, so I won’t be hurt if you don’t remember.
This is all the reaction we are going to get to Scoggs’s death.
Blackwood hooks up with Kincaid, and has a momentary pained expression when he learns Scoggs’s fate – the only reaction we are going to get to her death. Kincaid is coy about who his attacker is, but insists on returning to the shelter, having determined by magic that Max will go there next rather than, like, walking out to the parking lot of the strip club where Kincaid is currently sitting. The plot, such as it is, starts falling apart at this point, really. They’ve run out of patience for having things happen for a reason. Everyone shows up outside the entrance to the shelter. Max is distracted enough to hesitate instead of shooting at Kincaid immediately, but does blow up Bradley’s car, leading to a “thrown by the fireball” action sequence for him and Suzanne. Kincaid magically knows that he’s the only one Max is interested in, and hops back into the Awesome Van to draw him away. Suzanne explains about Max to Blackwood, who somehow instantly knows Max must be a cyborg. Bradley’s reaction is, “But we don’t have that technology,” which is a very weird thing to be your objection.
Yes. I believe this is a continuous shot where Jared Martin’s fist really did connect with Chuck Shamata’s jaw.
Max chases John for a while, but then crashes for no clear reason, and John pulls over and goes back to check on him. He’s not there, and we cut back to Blackwood, who magically intuits that Max would be compelled to return to the place where he “died”. Bradley randomly decides that he thinks John is conspiring with Max… to… something… I guess… So Blackwood cold-cocks him, and act which will have no repercussions later. Bye Bradley. You woulda made an adequate recurring character I guess.
Also, I’m about 80% sure this is the same warehouse where Kincaid and Blackwood shot all those aliens in 1953 back in “Time to Reap”
Sure enough, Max has indeed returned to the generic snow-cover abandoned warehouse district (See, this is why it has to happen on the anniversary of his death; otherwise there would be no explanation for why the snow is all in the same place as in the flashback. Also it’s daytime now. John and Max confront each other, and Max starts glitching out so bad that his flashbacks are in color now. Also, his flashbacks are from a third-person POV, being the same shots they used in the opening scene, even though they have Max’s Terminator-Vision HUD over them. Malzor and Mana start to worry about Max’s lack of commitment to this whole fratricide project, even after Mana “increases the power to the program,” and Malzor orders her to kill him.
It is April 30, 1990. In Los Angeles, Alex Trebek marries Jean Currivan, a real estate broker. Space shuttle Discovery returns from space after deploying the Hubble Space Telescope. The coming week will see talks between the government of South Africa and the African National Congress and Latvia’s independence from the Soviet Union as part of the “Singing Revolution”, of which we have not heard the last. Frank Reed, another of the hostages in the Lebanon crisis, is released.
This is not an overly dense month in pop culture, so I’ve already covered the fact that Spaced Invaders is in theaters. British Satellite Broadcasting began transmitting satellite TV yesterday. They’d merge with Sky Television by the end of the year. Sinead O’Connor still tops the Billboard charts with that song by Prince. Madonna has Vogued her way into the top ten.
ITV will start broadcasting The Upper Hand tomorrow, which is apparently a British adaptation of Who’s the Boss?. CBS airs the recently-rediscovered pilot episode of I Love Lucy in a primetime special. TV is generally new again. MacGyver‘s season ends with “Passages”, another head-trauma-induced fantasy episode. This time, comatose and near death, Mac experiences a fusion of Egyptian afterlife mythology and a cruise ship, and gets to see his parents and grandfather. I was surprised how foppish his dad comes off. This is also the reveal that Mac’s grandfather has died. My Two Dads is new. China Beach is new. There’s a TV movie called Child in the Night which is Elijah Wood’s first role as a named character. Roseanne is new, so is Matlock and In the Heat of the Night. Quantum Leap, Cheers, Twin Peaks, Full House, Dallas, Just the Ten of Us, all new. Due to the amount of time since I did this last, Casey has finished up his review blog by now, but I can still point you at it for Friday’s Perfect Strangers, which is a Rashomon riff of sorts. I’m starting to recognize pretty much everything in the TV listings by now. “The Spirit of Television” is Friday the 13th the Series‘s offering this week. Antique TV summons vengeful ghosts. You know the basic idea by now. Star Trek the Next Generation gives us “Hollow Pursuits“, an episode which is bad on many levels, is mean-spirited, treats addiction as a joke, treats sexual harassment as a joke, and has the crew acting profoundly unprofessional for the sake of making a butt-monkey out of Barclay. I’m angry just thinking about it. Never mind. Moving on.
So… There is perhaps a bit more to me dragging my feet on this one than my usual tendency to drag my feat. See, I watched War of the Worlds as a kid. Back in 1990. I watched it again in the mid-90s when it reaired as part of the Sci-Fi Channel’s “Sci-Fi Series Collection”. They aired the whole thing like three or four times. But through a strange series of coincidences, I have never actually seen this episode. I didn’t get out much in High School, but somehow I had a conflict at least one time it aired. And another time the cable was out. One time the power was out altogether. A decade or so later, I bought a set of bootlegs off the internet, and through what feels like malicious conspiracy, that one was damaged and I couldn’t get the DVR to play. So it wasn’t until the second season finally got an official DVD release that I had the ability to actually see this one.
After all this time, there’s a certain weight to it. This is basically it for me: the last “new” piece of War of the Worldsthe Series I am ever going to consume, at least from an official standpoint. So I’ve been kind of hoarding it. And I guess it’s time to finally dive on in. This is “Max”.
And it’s The Terminator. It’s just straight-up War of the Worlds doing a knock-off of The Terminator. Maybe I should not have waited thirty years to watch this.
We open “ONE YEAR AGO”, a flashback which is, per their custom, in black-and-white. We are introduced to the titular Max as he discovers a charred corpse with an assault rifle outside a generic snow-covered abandoned warehouse in the generic snow-covered abandoned warehouse district of Toronto the unnamed east coast city where the show takes place. Somehow I had internalized the notion that Max’s final mission had taken place out of the country. I checked the subtitles for episode 1, but I guess I imagined it?
Max emerges from the Guardian of Forever.
In case you’ve forgotten – it’s been a while – Max here is Max Kincaid, brother of our designated hero. He’s the straight-laced… Guerilla soldier of fortune who runs black ops missions from his secret sewer lair… This episode is going to be mostly about characterization; the plot is pretty thin. After ten weeks of Star Trek: Picard, I am used to it. But it’s kind of asking a lot of me to accept for the sake of this episode that Kincaid is a complete fuckup who constantly needs his brother to bail his ass out, when he’s been an omnicompetent polygenius for the rest of the season. It’s also a bit of a stretch to buy this uncharismatic beef slab with a vaguely-defined probably-generic-Eastern-European accent as Kincaid’s beloved brother, but I can cope.
Once he’s inside the warehouse, he’s surprised by his own brother, who I guess wasn’t supposed to be there but came anyway to back his brother up. Max gives him some stern words about doing as he’s told and following proper procedure and sticking together. Kincaid then immediately runs off ahead, leaving his brother without backup. Kincaid is barely out of the frame before Max gets shot a whole bunch of times by Mana with a phaser set to gurn. Once he’s on the ground, she shoots him a few more times for good measure. Malzor is there too, because he is a hands-on kind of manager.
I do like that Max is taken down in a scene that is very similar in composition to when Colonel Ironhorse was captured back in “The Second Wave“. But even if I ignore the fact that John runs off for absolutely no reason despite having directly said that the reason he came was to have Max’s back, I still find this scene questionable. This would be set some time before “The Second Wave”. But I’m pretty sure that the aliens have to move shortly after that story and Mana mentions being annoyed that she has to leave all her captured human test subjects behind. Also, what’s with the charred remains at the beginning? We’ve never seen the Morthren do that to anyone before or after. It appears that Malzor and Mana are the only ones there; Max doesn’t take out any soldiers, and we don’t see any indication of John doing so either. Which conflicts with Kincaid’s report of having seen how Morthren die during this fight. I don’t think the scene as shown here contradicts the strict letter of how Kincaid described it before, but it sure does violate the spirit, since it seemed heavily implied that Kincaid saw Max die, and that he died in a fire-fight. In the flashback version, it’s not at all clear why John thought Max was dead. If he saw him get shot, sure, he might not realize that he was only stunned. But he’s nowhere around when Max is taken. Particularly after what happened with Ironhorse, you’d assume Kincaid would be open to the possibility that his brother was captured rather than killed.
The hard part is that if Mana touches the sides, Max’s nose will light up and buzz.
In color, and thus the present day, Mana is giving Max’s body the Six Million Dollar Man treatment. Okay, there’s some attempt to leave suspense as to the identity of the cyborg they are building, but come on; you don’t show us Max in an episode titled “Max” then cut to the creation of a cyborg they tell us is being made from a captured soldier and really expect it to be a surprise when it turns out to be Max. It’s hard to express just how much Max looks like an anatomical model in these shots. We first see him with his chest open, and not in a surgical sort of way, but like he’s just had a panel removed to show his bloodless internal organs and perfectly white rib cage, all very clean and dry aside from the coating of K-Y Jelly that everything Morthren has to it. We get a look at a piston in his right arm to demonstrate how robot he is. Mana installs his eyes – the left one has been given a zoom lens, while the right one is actually a miniaturized version of the little flying tracker drones they have and fetches his face out of a container and attaches it.
His face has little clips on the inside to hold it on now.
For vague reasons, they reckon that he’s the perfect subject for their new plan to turn humans into cyborg soldiers, on account of he was a member of an elite military unit that had caused them trouble in the past. Though he won’t remember any of that and as a cyborg, his effectiveness as a soldier will be based more on the fact that he is bullet proof and good at tossing people through things than on military training. Possibly they just like the irony.
