Aliens invaded. For no especial reason other than “Because otherwise this movie wouldn’t keep happening,” four randos have decided that where the US military has completely failed, they can succeed by blowing up alien tripods with home-made bombs.
There’s something about this shot that makes me think of Don Quixote.
Anyway, Anders’s plan is for Marissa to wave a flare at a tripod that’s just milling around in the desert, and get it to chase her over some explosives they’re improvised. Marissa vlogs the lead-up, in which she alternates between panicked insistence that she can’t do it and panicked insistence that she can, but the plan goes off. Later, Marissa vlogs about the experience, and gives the strange tidbit that she got a strange sense from the tripod that it was looking at her with regret. Another strange and tantalizing detail here, the possibility that the aliens don’t actually want to do this, and are acting out of desperation. But as with everything else in this movie, it comes out of nowhere, goes nowhere, and is inserted randomly at an awkward point later in the film. where it doesn’t really fit. Only after the tripod is down, Anders notices another tripod in the distance, and they’re forced to flee. Anders and Marissa escape, but Sera, Roger and Eyebrows get vacuumed up in order to provide motivation for the final act, where they liberate the prison camp in Paradise City.
“The United States government is urging every citizen to protect themselves. Every man, woman and child is now responsible for their own safety. If you have a firearm, you need to use it,” says a news broadcast as we see groups of random people walking down a random street carrying weapons. Nope, no idea who they are. Nope, won’t become relevant later.
Our remaining heroes do a lock-and-load montage and approach the city. Seeing an alien structure in the distance, they have a nigh-incoherent conversation:
Anders: What’s that? Looks like an oil refinery. Marissa: It’s not pretty. I don’t like it Anders: There’s not going to be anything left. Marissa: Way to think positive. Anders: Under the circumstances, we’ll have to see, won’t we?
While Anders is setting up, Marissa records another vlog and is interrupted by one of the many armed civilians freely wandering the streets in this alien-occupied city. He looks like the world’s cheapest Bradley Cooper knock-off. His name is Rennick, as Anders will later somehow know despite never having met him. Also, fun fact, “rennick” is apparently slang for anal sex. What the everloving fuck is even happening in this movie? The scene is nonsensical and contributes nothing. He assumes she’s with another “company”, implying that there’s an organized resistance, but has no objection when she tells him, roughly, that she’s on her own and has brought a bunch of bombs. He tells her that his group is also planning to blow the place up, though he doesn’t take any issue when she demands that he wait because she’s got “people down there.”
Not-Bradley Cooper is more interested in her vlogging. He offers to take her back to, I guess, his leadership to get some more information about the defenses around the prison camp, but he gets vacuumed up by the aliens around the first corner, which is weird given that they keep cutting to really large groups of people walking around freely. Though they completely vanish now. Once again, it goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing.
Anders returns and blows up their car to distract the prison camp guards. The prison proper consists of a wrought iron fence with the gate chained shut. I love the basic insanity of this. Ordinary chain. Ordinary lock. Ordinary fence. The tripods don’t have hands and the aliens themselves are ridiculously physically unwieldy, I can’t even begin to imagine them ushering people into this fenced-in area and then closing and chaining the gate.
They’re reunited with Bradley Cooper, Roger and Eyebrows, but Sera has been taken to a “black temple” nearby. Anders blows up the chain on the gate and Marissa blows up… Something off-screen. Eyebrows and Marissa scream at each other for a few seconds over the fact that they’re ditching her with Bradley Cooper while they go rescue Sera.
The rescue consists of walking down a long, dark, greenscreen tunnel with no context until they find an alien who is in the process of eating Sera. Or rather, in the process of pulling her into the slimy sheet vinyl curtain that is meant to represent its mouth.
Cthulu ’16: Why choose the lesser evil?
Probably meant to be some kind of cephalopod-ish thing. Reminds me a lot of The Crawling Eye. Anders compares it to the sorts of dates Roger brings home. I think it is meant to be very large, but I can’t tell because you never see it on-screen with anything else to give scale.
They shoot at the ceiling, though, and this seems to stun it or something, causing a contextless shot of a grody alien, uh, thingy… retracting. Probably a blood-sucking proboscis, sure, but without context, I am going to assume that being shot caused this alien to lose its erection.
They pull Sera free of the alien. Her pants are torn, her legs are covered in gunge, and she needs help walking for the rest of the film, but there’s no visible injuries. Marissa decides that she needs a Badass scene, so she says, “So I guess this is where I’m supposed to ask you where your from and what you want. But honestly, I don’t care. Come on guys, let’s kill this bitch!” This time, they shoot at chest-level until its eyeball retracts, which I guess means that it’s dying.
Aliens invade. Gallons of bleach get drunk. Three vague characters bicker over snacks. When we left our characters, they were fleeing their occupied city.
For more comic relief, Roger suggests that “they” might nuke the city to get rid of the aliens. Given the complete destruction of the federal government at this point, I’m not sure who “they” are. Anders dismisses the possibility as ridiculous.
It’s ironic how much the top of that mushroom cloud looks like Bob Ross’s hair.
So of course we jump-cut to the city exploding in a mushroom cloud as they drive away. Roger crows a happy little “told-you-so”, not at all upset about the fact that he’s probably just sucked up enough radiation to ensure an unpleasant lingering death. Fortunately, the EMP effect does not disable their car, and the shock wave we literally see pass through them doesn’t force them off the road or anything.
There’s some weird discussion over whether “they” are going to nuke all the cities. Anders thinks it unlikely — “One or two cities would be a good deterrent, if they do anymore than that then we’ll have to start from the beginning and be like cavemen.” This dialogue is seriously close to gibberish. They haven’t seen any military presence, and speculate that the military was wiped out first, and that’s a little bit of a strange conclusion since they literally just saw evidence of the military at work, and they’re still planning to go to Paradise City. Where the grass is green and — never mind. Marissa mentions planes flying overhead in her next vlog, and is hopeful that this means that the military is back. Or that the director realized that airplanes flying overhead were about to ruin his shot. Nothing ever comes of it.
I wonder if the people in that other car way down the road have an exciting story of survival too.
The news clears both Paradise City and the previously-unmentioned Little Haven as “radiation-free zones”, but adds that the aliens seem to be building a base camp in the former. The news reporting is surprisingly timely and accurate given the collapse of society. This could be an interesting contrast from basically every other adaptation, where a big part of the tension and suspense comes from how quickly the lines of communication break down. You could, if you wanted, frame it as commentary on the way that, say, post-9/11, the constant drumming of the 24-hour-news-cycle has made global tragedy and catastrophe seem more pressing and omnipresent. But you’d have to have a lot more faith than I do that this movie is intentional.
A more pragmatic, Doylist way of looking at it is that they got to the end of principal photography and realized that the movie was meandering and borderline incoherent, so they filmed a bunch of second-unit “news” footage to connect the story together. And I’m honestly kinda fine with that in principle. It could be an interesting experiment to send some people out with cameras and some backstory, then have an editor try to piece what they got back together into a coherent movie. An interesting experiment. For an art film. Probably not the way you want to do a low-budget Sci-Fi horror movie.
I… Actually, isn’t that just a pointsetta?
They reunite with Sera and Eyebrows, whose car has broken down, and discover something that you hardly ever see included in War of the Worlds adaptations: the red weed. There’s a longish rambling discussion where Roger and Anders meander their way through muddy memories of old movies to get out the concept of terraforming and they speculate that the black smoke was actually seeding the land. This is based entirely on Eyebrows seeing a plant Sera doesn’t recognize — just one, not, like, a whole field or something — and it never comes up again.
We’re getting on toward the midpoint of the movie, so if Alien Dawn is going to turn out to have anything to say, it should really get on with it. Finding Paradise City under alien occupation, Roger resolves to slip in under cover of darkness to reconnoiter. This leads to a heartfelt scene where everyone looks sad about the fact that he’s probably going to die. Then Marissa and Anders go off together for this strange exchange:
Marissa: You know, you’re funny. Anders: Huh? Marissa: I think if this hadn’t happened, you know you and me, wouldn’t have happened either, right? In the real world? Anders: Oh, yeah, the normal world at the bar, when things were… I don’t know, maybe you’re different. Marissa: You’re different too. Crazy… but different. Anders: You may be right, this would not have happened. But, uh, now everything is different, everything is changing.
Rachelle Dimaria is actually a decent physical actor. I wonder if she’d be any good in a real movie.
Ignoring the organically clumsy dialogue, I guess the gist here is that Anders and Marissa are a couple now? When did that happen? The only scene that even hinted at affection between them was when he comforted her back on day four (There are intertitles to let us know how much time is passing, though I could not actually the transition to day 8, which I think is now). She’d otherwise been way more affectionate with Roger. There seemed like there might have been something setting up a love triangle with Marissa, Anders and Roger, with Anders showing signs of jealousy when Roger hugged her, but they never pursued it.
Does this scene appear in the movie? Of course not.
It is August 6, 2012, and it can really only be a coincidence that the Curiosity rover has landed on the surface of Mars today. A Chevron refinery in California catches on fire. Reality TV start Donald Trump tweets “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud,” making him a laughinstock and guaranteeing him no future in the public eye. Or not. Whatever.
I gather there is some sort of sporting event going on in England involving James Bond or something. Not the US’s best showing today: we earn one gold medal today, for women’s pole vault. Russia takes home seven medals, three of them gold. Great Britain picks up two golds and a bronze. The US will finish the games with a commanding 103 total medals, with China coming second with 88. Stateside, the Orioles beat the Mariners.
In “The US is really fucked up” news, a white supremacist killed six people and wounded four in an attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Wednesday, the killer in the 2011 Tuscon mass shooting (an assassination attempt on US Representative Gabby Giffords) will plead guilty on all charges and be sentences to life without parole. That same day, Texas will execute Marvin Lee Wilson, in apparent violation of the SCOTUS in Atkins v. Virginia, forbidding the execution of the mentally handicapped. Wilson’s recorded IQ was 61.
Also, we introduced him to bell peppers. I have to remember to show him this the next time he swears he doesn’t like them.
Dylan had three bottles of milk, squash, and carrots at school, naps four times, and is on nystatin for a rash. Last week, he whacked his face on one of the toys in the mobile infant room and needed an ice pack and comforting.
Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but for the seventh week in a row, the Billboard Hot 100 is topped by Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe”. She’d unseated Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” back in June. He’s down to number 5 this week. Katy Perry, Flo Rida, Ellie Goulding, Usher and Pink are also among the top ten, and I think we must be in that period when I started listening to top 40 music again between when I decided my commute was too short to listen to audiobooks and when I officially became Old and started listening to the news instead.
The reimagining of Total Recall is new in theaters this week. The Lorax is released on DVD and Blu-Ray. DreamWorks Dragons, a television series based on the How to Train Your Dragon film series, premieres tomorrow on Cartoon Network. Matthew Perry vehicle Go On will premiere Wednesday. Jon Stewart’s guest is Tim Gunn. Stephen Colbert’s is Pete Seeger, who plugs his new book, Pete Seeger In His Own Words, then sings “Quite Early Morning”. Thursday, the BBC will announce their upcoming docudrama on the origins of Doctor Who, An Adventure in Time and Space, which will air next November.
This is the point in the essay where I might say, “I do this for you, dear reader. I put myself through this for you.” But since hardly anyone reads these things, clearly I am doing this not for you but out of some kind of traumatic brain injury or something. Every time I think I’ve hit the bottom of the barrel, I come out the other side and it turns out that there’s just more barrel.
But I exaggerate. This movie is bad, but it’s not offensively bad. I didn’t really get anything out of this movie, but it didn’t hurt me or anything. Alien Dawn is a low-budget, direct-to-dvd movie sort of loosely based on The War of the Worlds. Sorta. It’s hard to really call it an adaptation as the narrative has almost nothing to do with the original. Or anything really. This movie doesn’t really have a “story” in the normal sense. There’s a general structure of progression, but there’s not what you’d call a “plot” until the final act, and even then, it’s less of a cause-and-effect sequence of events leading to a climax, and more of a “they set a goal and then mill around and then the goal gets accomplished.” So much nothing happens in this movie that there were times when I started to convince myself that it was actually some kind of hybrid War of the Worlds/Waiting for Godot adaptation.
You know what it’s like? Real weird to say it, but this movie is basically The Blair Witch Project with aliens. I don’t know if anyone actually likes found footage movies. On the one hand, there’s this sense of intimacy and unscriptedness and it’s like a Dogme movie only without competence. But on the other hand, nausea-inducing shakey-cam and implausible cameras and the knowledge that Hollywood is only making these things because of how cheap they are.
Alien Dawn isn’t a strict found footage movie, though something in the neighborhood of half the film is presented in the form of diagetic footage, either in the form of interference-distorted news reports from “BCC World” (A seemingly American station whose ident is shamelessly ripped off from the BBC) or scanline-distorted smartphone footage.
Fox’s chyron says “Do Invaders Have Obama’s Birth Certificate?”
They never identify the aliens as Martian in dialog, but like the Asylum version, the opening titles give an establishing shot of Mars before joining the action on Earth. For a movie which spends so much of its runtime going nowhere, Alien Dawn gets started in a hurry: there’s no twenty minutes of people going to and fro over the globe about their little affairs, followed by a night of idle speculation over a large meteorite. We start smack-bang in the middle of the first big push of the attack, with tripods already stalking through the unnamed city. Possibly. We see them several minutes before any of the characters do, I think.
The only adaptation we’ve visited that’s rolled out the tripods this fast is Goliath. There are some parallels between the pair of 2012 films, mostly to Goliath‘s favor. Alien Dawn‘s tripods bear a passing resemblance to those in the animated film, though they’re closer in design to the alliance tripods than the Martian ones. There’s a bit of a steampunk vibe to them, especially since we first see one belching black smoke (Which doesn’t seem like it actually belongs at this point in the narrative, but whatever). They’re much more mechanical in form than either of the Asylum designs, with a barrel-shaped body and hints of the AT-ST in the design of the legs. There’s a cage in the front which can contain captured humans, which, I think, get vacuumed up through its legs. The aesthetic is decidedly less “alien” than most of what we’ve seen in these forays, enough that you could imagine them being man-made, if only on a Metal Gear “It’s not a giant mech; it’s a tank with legs” sort of way.
Also, they stole all the lens flare machines from the JJ Abrams Star Trek.
The tripods aren’t the only things in the invader arsenal. I think we also see some flying machines, but only briefly, and we don’t get a good look at them. And there’s large cylinder ships which fall to Earth like meteors. These are obviously the transport craft, though they don’t show anything emerging from them. The rendering is decent for the tripods. Not exactly fantastic, but about par for a made-for-TV movie. The cylinders are considerably worse. We don’t see the tripods move much: they spend large parts of the movie just standing around. When we do see them move, it’s usually a close-up of the legs.
The tripod armaments aren’t explained in detail and are inconsistent. Their visual representation is usually more “floodlight” than “heat ray”, though not always. Sometimes, they cause explosions. At least once, a person hit by the weapon literally explodes into gore. More often, people jerk around as though shot by gunfire and fall down dead. There is one scene where it seems like maybe they’ve got a teleport beam as in the second Asylum film, but it’s impossible to tell. What is consistent, though, is the sound. The sound effect for the alien weapon is lifted directly from the 1953 George Pal film. It’s a wonderful sound effect, and just a little disconcerting to hear it coming out of these weird, low-budget CGI warships.
Our lead female character identifies herself to her convenient pocket-camcorder (Not even a smartphone. She just happened to be carrying a cheap camcorder when an alien invasion broke out) as Marissa Jean McCallum, and gives us the helpful information that it’s six in the morning on November 28. Helpful, but almost certainly wrong, since it’s broad daylight out. “I was driving and then all of a sudden some things just started happening!” she explains to the camera, pleading with anyone who finds the camera to deliver it to her parents in Colorado. No address or anything, just names and a state. This is intercut with news footage. Not just of the alien invasion, but also some stock footage of President Obama from 2009 announcing troop deployments in Afghanistan, repurposed here as him saying generic things about perilous times and the need for the American people to stay strong and resolute.
The first ten minutes of the movie are a nigh-incoherent mess which tries to use contextless scenes, quick cutaways and lots of digital effects to hide the fact that the city under siege consists of about a half-dozen extras repeatedly running down the same eighth-mile of street. The city is vacant enough to feel at odds with the scene the narrative is trying to paint: these aren’t meant to be the last stragglers who didn’t make it out with the initial evacuation, it’s meant to be the thick of it.
Yes, I believe this is a real thing that happened and not a film scratch added in post.
The narrative very lazily zeroes in on six characters who are going to end up being our primary and secondary cast. Exactly what relation the characters are to each other is vague, even to them. Marissa is with a blonde woman named Joni Mitchell, possibly on purpose. She gets winged by some aggressive lens flare and spends the rest of her time in the movie slowly dying of Vague Movie Injury disease. No one in this movie is played by anyone in particular, but Joni’s actress had a bit part in an episode of Power Rangers back in ’99. Elsewhere, an adult woman named Sera and a teenage girl named Tiffany are trying to hot-wire a car along with two men, Anders and Roger. Sera seems to be in charge of Tiffany, though they’re not related. Anders and Roger are brothers, but don’t seem to know each other very well.
Dammit, Alpha, I told you to find five teenagers with attitude, not these losers.
Also, Anders’s last name is Kaczynski. Anders Kaczynski. That is some holy-fuckballs-screaming-at-the-top-of-your-lungs symbolism right there. And yet I have no idea where the movie is going with it. I mean, there is an actual and deliberate implication built into this movie that Anders might be some sort of violent extremist — there’s multiple scenes where people are really troubled by his inexplicable bomb-making expertise. So okay, but… Anders is the hero of this movie. He is the action lead and also the romantic lead. He is also the effective mentor character to our point-of-view character Marissa. Why would you do that?
They have to abandon the car when the aliens show up and shoot a soldier directly in front of it. Sera loots his pockets, turning up a grenade which she waves around, insisting that they “won’t see it coming”, in a way that seems designed as foreshadowing, but never pays off. Anders is slowed down by what I think might be a ‘Nam flashback (There is exactly one line later that suggests Anders might have served in Iraq) and the guys get separated from Sera and Tiffany.
According to the news, “The people and the military are together,” now and troops are “handing out heavy weapons.” It’s hard to follow, but I think the gist is that the aliens are targeting military installations, so the military is abandoning their bases and going to ground, letting civilians appropriate whatever weapons they can carry. Anders’s gang had been planning to flee to nearby Paradise City, a “military stronghold”, which seems dumb under the circumstances.
Also, I’m not sure what it means for a city to be a “military stronghold.” There are sections of this movie — not the whole thing, just individual scenes — where the dialogue and world-building is so weird as to seem like maybe English isn’t its first language. It reminds me of clumsily translated video games: not outright wrong, but constructing phrases and even concepts that an American wouldn’t. Like Dingo only ever using the word “pals” to describe his comrades in Zone of the Enders 2, or people saying “New York City Police” instead of “NYPD” in David Cage games.
Oh, and they mention “Vice-President Clinton,” so there’s that.
But I don’t think this is necessarily accidental. It might actually be part of the movie’s confused symbolism. They waste very little time letting us know what we’re supposed to be comparing this invasion to. Roger refers to the invaders as “Muslims”. Anders immediately points out that they don’t know that (and adds, “It ain’t fucking terrorists” once they get a good look at a tripod), but unlike the Asylum version, they aren’t the least bit coy about the fact that any attack on America in the year 2012 would be presumed to be the work of a terrorist group affiliated with one of the middle eastern groups espousing radical religious ideologies — or rather, they’d assume it was the work of “Muslims” (with the caveat that they don’t actually mean that, since they’d consider Sikhs equally suspicious but not Indonesians). Later, the news footage will refer to the aliens as “terrorist invaders”, which makes the metaphor pretty explicit despite being flat-out wrong, since the aliens aren’t behaving like terrorists: they’re behaving like a traditionally-organized nation-state military force conducting an extremely traditional military invasion, but in modern news parlance “terrorist” is basically shorthand for “bad guy of non-European descent”, so I can’t fault it for mimesis.
Once night falls, the fighting dies down considerably, and Marissa chances leaving the shelter of the industrial building where she’s been sheltering in order to look for medical supplies for Joni. She runs into Anders and Roger pretty much instantly, and practices terrible personal security by inviting these strange men home with her, taking their word for it that they’re unarmed and mean them no harm, and letting them know up-front that her only backup is one woman too injured to move. Fortunately, they decide not to just overpower her and take all her stuff. Roger agrees to stay with Joni in the dark garage while Anders and Marissa loot a nearby grocery store.
The grocery store is another scene that feels like it’s had a stroke. It’s guarded by a man and a woman who claim the store is under military control, but get confused when Anders asks which regiment — not “they didn’t get their story straight” confused, but, “don’t even comprehend the question” confused. The man shouts that he’s been “doing this all day” and that, “People like you keep coming to me,” and it’s weird and feels unscripted, as though the actors were given the general outline of the premise, but had to improvise the dialogue. The defenders are armed and chase them away, but Anders circles around and disables them. We’ll see the woman again later in a confusingly out-of-context scene where she gets vacuumed up by a tripod and then eaten by an alien. I’d forgotten who she was by that point.
When they make it back to the garage, Joni is alternately vomiting up blood and vomiting up vomit. Turns out that in the dark, Roger had accidentally given her a glass of bleach instead of water. Now, that sounds hella suspect, but nothing follows that up: it seems to be a completely legit accident, meant to communicate only that Roger isn’t very smart.
Presumably neither is Joni, since, yeah, drinking bleach is dangerous, but you’d need to drink a whole lot of it to cause that kind of damage. How much? The LD50 of sodium hypochlorite is somewhere between 6 and 8 grams per kg. Joni is probably somewhere between 50 and 60 kg, so it’d take about 300 grams of the stuff to be more-likely-than-not lethal. But commercial bleach is mostly water. There’s only about 190 grams of sodium hypochlorite in a gallon of bleach. So even if she drank the whole bottle, the odds of it killing her are fairly low, though obviously, she’s already suffering from a vaguely defined shoulder injury. Not that you should take this as an incentive to drink bleach, since it will ruin your day even if it doesn’t kill you. You’d think she’d notice she was drinking bleach during the stages where it was causing superficial damage to her tongue and maybe esophagus, rather than continuing to swallow the stuff until it caused massive internal bleeding.
Roger blames the fact that it was dark and proceeds to get in the way while Marissa tries to save Joni.
After Anders and Roger shout at each other a bit, we skip ahead to Marissa’s next vlog, in which she explains that Joni’s dying (though apparently having her stomach pumped could save her), and she gives an anecdote about once having to have a horse with a broken leg put down. She indicates reluctance about having the men around, but concedes that she needs their help to murder Joni.
And then things get really uncomfortable, because Marissa unilaterally decides that Joni needs to be euthanized, but Joni does not agree with this. She initially solicits Roger to help with this, I guess since he’d almost done it accidentally earlier. He chickens out when Joni protests and begs for her life between fits of coughing up blood, so Anders does the deed. He’s very polite about it, talking gently and comforting her before he casually snaps her neck. Afterward, he and Marissa fight over the fact that he’s outwardly unaffected by what he’s done and uninterested in comforting her through her emotional trauma at having just made one of the strangers she’s just met murder another of the strangers she’s just met.
Perhaps this emotional detachment is meant to indicate that Anders is “off” in some way. You could certainly argue that Anders is meant to be a psychopath of some sort, and the name would certainly fit with that. But the movie just founders for a while instead. I think maybe there’s a stab at setting up a love triangle, with Anders reacting with clear jealousy when Roger moves to comfort Marissa, but they never follow it up.
Instead, they basically all take turns having the “broken hero” scene where they get despondent for a few scenes and seem to enter a fugue state that either persists until they get eaten by zombies, or that they snap out of because they see someone who looks like their dead sister. Anders downloads a copy of “The Terrorist’s Cookbook” and spends some time not talking to anyone and obsessively building homemade explosives and a bazooka that misfires.
Then Marissa goes stir-crazy and has her own freak-out episode, and now Anders is fine and he comforts her and becomes social again and they all bond over making bombs, and then they’re all lighthearted and joking over the “new skylight” formed when a section of the roof collapses after more cylinders fall nearby.
While this has been happening, news reports tell inform us of the destruction of the White House and the demise of the president. According to the chyron, one of his last acts was to declare a “worldwide state of emergency”, which I did not know the President could do. The ticker mentions other countries sending shipments of weapons to the US, though, which seems to hint that the invasion is local to the US.
Five days in, the gang decides it’s time to leave. Turns out the car they’d been trying to hot wire earlier is basically right outside. While they’re packing, though, the aliens roll out the black smoke, forcing our heroes to lock themselves in the rest room and argue over snacks.
The black smoke is a little underwhelming. Though newsreel footage warns people to stay inside and stuff towels under their doors and wear gas masks if you’ve got them, they seem to have a lot of stock footage of the stuff — including a shot that is clearly the exact same footage they just showed Marissa filming. Sera and Tiffany, who I am going to call “Eyebrows” from now on, because the character’s only noteworthy trait is having really prominent eyebrows, reappear and are able to survive the smoke by holding rags over their mouths and noses while they find a car in which to make their escape. The movie decides, for no good reason, to get silly for a bit. Once out of town, Eyebrows is forced to use a feminine hygiene product as toilet paper and is told to consider herself lucky it isn’t used. I hope I’m right and this movie didn’t actually have a script, because I do not like the idea of someone getting paid to write this dialogue.
The smoke attack only lasts a day, which is fortunate for Marissa when she gets tired of listening to Anders and Roger bicker and runs outside. For more comic relief, Roger suggests that “they” might nuke the city to get rid of the aliens. Given the complete destruction of the federal government at this point, I’m not sure who “they” are. Anders dismisses the possibility as ridiculous.
What can I say about this, then? In their proper historical context, “Unto Us a Child is Born” and “Breeding Ground” aired about eight months apart. There’s ten episodes between them, which is significantly fewer than than separate them in our treatment. I bring this up because it probably means something that for folks watching “Breeding Ground” back in 1989, the related first season episode was still a comparatively fresh memory.
The episodes are basically nothing alike, which is undoubtedly the right way for a series to do the same basic brief in consecutive seasons, and it’s surprising only insofar as this is the one and only time the second season directly acknowledges a specific event from the first (Unless you count Blackwood instinctively recognizing the mind-altering effects of the music in “Terminal Rock” as a nod to “Choirs of Angels”, but I’d hardly call that “direct”).
While “Unto Us a Child is Born” is very straightforward creature horror, essentially, as I noted, a simplified version of It’s Alive, “Breeding Ground” is a far more psychological horror. There’s only one real shock-moment of gore, the explosion of the first implant subject. It’s fairly discrete too, the “money shot” obscured by a curtain a la Cloverfield. There’s nothing comparable to the repeated assaults and dismemberment done by the hybrid in the earlier episode. There’s not even a climactic battle in the second-season story: it’s one of those episodes where the heroes are mostly following the aliens at a distance for the whole episode and only show up after-the-fact.
But if you remember my coverage of “Breeding Ground”, you’ll know that I had some pretty serious misgivings about the structural decisions that story made. Specifically, the way that it seeks to make Gestaine a tragic character at the expense of erasing the actual victim, Kate. Or the perennial problem across both seasons of the regulars being only incidentally engaged in the plot. That’s not a problem in “Unto Us a Child is Born”: it’s one of the tightest episode of the season structurally, and does a very good job of integrating the heroes with the story. So I’m inclined to say that the second season had a more interesting concept, but the first season did a better job of realizing its concept. Which is pretty much this series in a nutshell.
The difference in plot-emphasis is best summarized by the baby itself: the baby in “Breeding Ground” is born at the end of the episode, and we don’t actually see it until the very last shot. In “Unto Us a Child is Born”, the birth of the hybrid happens at the start of act 2. We see it as a baby, then as a child, and finally in its mutant form. It’s actively engaged in the story, serving as the antagonist for the final act. The other aliens only engage the protagonists briefly, and are dispatched trivially. In “Breeding Ground”, Ardix and Bayda are the primary antagonists, and serve as a menacing presence throughout the episode.
There is also a big difference between the episodes in how much else is going on. “Unto Us a Child is Born” has the plot at the mall in its opening scene, but that vanishes immediately, and the episode is pretty much razor-focused on capturing the child and studying it. The whole of the episode is about the nature of the alien hybrid and very little else. “Breeding Ground” has a bunch of other stuff going on: Gestaine’s illness, and the larger matter of him being a victim of biological warfare testing. The collapse of the welfare state, healthcare costs and the moral dimension of for-profit medical insurance. The long-term survial of the Morthren species, for that matter: they deliberately set out to have a baby for the purpose of establishing that their species could reproduce on Earth; the Mortaxan hybrid is an accidental creation, and their interest in it is not about reproduction, but about vivisecting it to study its immune system.
And, of course, the Morthran hybrid’s story doesn’t end at the end of “Breeding Ground”: it’s one of very few episodes to have a direct sequel (Perhaps the only one. “No Direction Home” follows directly from “The Second Wave” but it’s arguable whether that’s really enough to make it count as a sequel per se. The series finale will also pick up on some events from “Loving the Alien”, but the plot is mostly unrelated). “The Pied Piper” revisits the infant we’d only briefly seen in “Breeding Ground”. Unlike the first episode, “The Pied Piper” is a story properly about the character of Adam. Who has rapid-aged from an infant to school-aged. And he kills a bunch of people who are doing medical work on him. In this regard, it’s a lot closer to “Unto Us a Child is Born”. Yet still, the second season episode feels the need to also have human antagonists by making the Creche staff and Martin in particular into vaguely sinister characters.
That’s one of the big, recurring shifts going into the second season: the addition of human antagonists. Other than mostly off-screen obstructionist bureaucrats, the closest the first season has come so far [Wait for it.] to a human antagonist would be Marcus Madison in “Feeding the Masses”, and he gets converted into an alien when the alien part of the plot really spins up.
“The Pied Piper” is also an interesting place to compare the seasons in light of the other connection I noted with respect to “Unto Us a Child is Born”. You’ll recall that I pointed out a superficial resemblance to the then-very-recently-released film The Fly II. The similarities are only skin-deep, though, on the level of what you’d expect if they’d pretty much just seen the trailer and decided to let it influence not the overall story, but maybe some of the visual motifs. There’s the basic idea of a chimeric baby rapidly aging and becoming monstrous, then at the end divesting itself of its foreign biomass to become fully human, but little of the actual meat of the story is duplicated. Through a weird coincidence, though, “The Pied Piper” seems to have picked up a lot of elements from the plot of The Fly II that “Unto Us a Child is Born” omits.
Like the film, “The Pied Piper” is set primarily in a sterile laboratory environment, and the related, um, alienation of the hybrid character from his humanity is a major theme of both works. There’s also the presence of something comparable to a “love interest” for Adam in the person of Julie. She serves a similar role to Daphne Zuniga’s character in The Fly II, helping Martin get in touch with his humanity as the first person to show him ordinary human affection, and being the major force that pulls him back from the abyss of giving in to his monstrosity — though obviously, the equivalent War of the Worlds character doesn’t succeed at this, in keeping with the series’s grimmer outlook.
Hi, I’m Bob Evil.
Cronenberg’s The Fly is focused largely on the body horror of its main character as he is transformed. Seth Brundle is both the protagonist and the antagonist of the story. The sequel changes things up by having a distinct villain, Anton Bartok, a classic ’80s villainous businessman, looking to exploit teleportation-based-genetic-abomination-making for profit. If this plan doesn’t work out, his fall-back is to apply for a job with either Weyland-Yutani, the Umbrella Corporation, or that company from Time Shifters. He spends the movie manipulating Martin and eventually gets his comeuppance by being horribly mutated when Martin steals a bunch of his DNA to cure himself of creeping monsterism. Martin’s motives are ideological rather than profit-based, but he serves a similar role and is similarly obsessed with exploiting genetic manipulation. And though it’s handled more sloppily, his death — accidental self-defenestration while being induced to relive the death of his son — certainly has the feel of a comeuppance to it.
Ah crap, someone had an accident with a nurse doll and a bottle of ketchup.
On finding the nurse’s body, the team mounts a search of the hospital for the escaped hybrid. In a move that I’m sure will work out great for him, once the others have split up into groups, Lang decides to pull out his uzi and go wandering off alone. Responding to no stimulus visible to us other than a change in the incidental music, he stops suddenly, looks around suspiciously, and searches a random laundry room. This is literally just down the hall from where he was standing with everyone else a minute ago when he declared that they’d finished searching “every inch of this floor”. “Every inch” must not have included the laundry baskets, because he sticks his hand one one and gets his thumb bit off before he’s beaten to death by the hybrid in its adult form.
Costume tests for the live-action version of the Arthur cartoon were not well-received
Gah. It’s like someone shaved a Troll doll. The aliens summon a nurse to the patient room where they’re holed up — the nurses seem blissfully unaware of the room-to-room search by armed special forces soldiers and instead joke about the doctors getting it on (The doctor they name is “Dr. Burns”. I choose to believe that this is Major Frank Burns, still determined to cheat on his wife thirty-five years later). The Nancy alien wants to simply beat the child’s location out of her, but they don’t have the time, so the guy who looks like William Katt does that thing where he sticks his fingers in her head and reads the room number out of her brain. He uses his human fingers, which is kinda weird, since every time they’ve done that before, they’ve used their alien third hand. It’s perhaps a little late in the day for me to object, but it’s a lot harder to swallow a dude effortlessly push human fingers through the side of a person’s skull.
At least it wasn’t a Q-tip. You’re never supposed to stick those in your ear.
Turns out they needn’t have bothered, though, because once they’re out in the hallway, Nancy has another flash of maternal instinct and takes off running, even giving her companions the slip. Elsewhere, the hybrid utters, “Mama” in alienese, meaning that there’s an alien word for “mama” (“ow-wa”, by the sound of it), which is weird given what little we know of their social structure. No one else in the hospital seems especially perturbed by a patient apparently running down the hall and forcing her way into the elevator, being chased by a pair of doctors she’s clearly trying to evade.
She takes the elevator up, I reckon, two floors, then switches to the stairs while Harrison and Suzanne find Lang. The reveal of his mutilated body is discrete compared to this episode’s other gore: he’s mostly out-of-frame, his visibly missing thumb to identify him to the audience. But I’d say it conveys the brutality of his death a bit more effectively than the cartoonish dismemberment of the nurse: you can see his legs sticking up from a laundry basket, and they seem at first unharmed until you realize the impossibility of their angle to the rest of his body.
Alien mommy and baby are reunited in the stairwell. He calls out “Mama!” in alien, she responds, “My baby!”, and they run to each other and embrace. But if you thought this would lead to a straightforwardly heartwarming reunion between parent and child, you’ve forgotten that War of the Worlds is still trying this whole “dark comedy” thing. And I forgive you for that because they are infuriatingly unwilling to really commit to being comically perverse, so it only comes up every once in a while. Mother and child run to each other and embrace… And then the Nancy alien declares her intention to bodily absorb the hybrid in order to “become whole again”.
The rest of her cadre catches up with her and protests that the Advocacy wants the hybrid taken alive. She refers to it as an “abomination”, and insists that it must be “sacrificed”. The baby seems untroubled by this. I really like the juxtaposition of Nancy embracing the hybrid lovingly while describing it as an abomination and plotting to kill it, and I doubly love that the hybrid isn’t bothered by this. They easily could have gone the other way with it and pulled an Alien Resurrection and had the hybrid messily reject its mother and ultimately die tragically because deep down it really just wants to be loved, but is still a crime against nature and has to die. But instead, we get a really properly alien relationship between parent and child: genuine affection, but at the same time, the alien wearing Nancy Salvo’s body and the alien part of the child are the same alien: it’s split between the two of them and wants to heal itself. And the child doesn’t even object to this because its alien side also wants to be made whole.
The ensuing falling-out between the Nancy alien and her companions leads in short order to a falling-out between Nancy and the stair rail, and then to a falling-down between Nancy and the landing. The child rushes to its mother’s side and lets out a howl of despair over the alien’s melted body. You’d normally expect this to be the part of the episode where the alien would go all First Blood and turn on its own kind to avenge its mother, but we’re late enough in the season that they finally seem to have gotten it through their heads that the human heroes should be actively involved in the resolution of the plot, so out in the hallway, Ironhorse suddenly has a flash of Spider-Sense or something, and suddenly looks up as though he’s felt a great disturbance in the force, and heads down the hall, breaking into a sprint as he nears the door to a random ward (According to the signage, it’s the ward where the aliens brain-sucked the nurse, but that’s neither here nor there). According to Elyse Dickson’s summary, he hears the commotion in the stairway, but I see absolutely no sign of this on-screen. He doesn’t even seem to be near the stairway when he reacts; there’s at least one more hallway to go before he reaches the stairs, and the aliens are several floors up from there.
You’re saying we have some kind of a half-breed on our hands here?
A monster, half-human, half-alien.
Clint Howard, Man of Action!
It is February 20, 1989. The first of the year’s two total lunar eclipses takes place tonight over Asia and Australia. An IRA bomb destroys part of a British Army barracks in Ternhill. As the week progresses, Pete Rose will meet with the baseball commissioner to discuss his gambling, the US will capture eight hundred pounds of heroin in a bust on a Chinese drug gang, the Finnish government will suggest everyone take a couple of days off to have sex, and Iran will put a three million dollar bounty on Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses. President Bush will visit Japan to attend the state funeral of Emperor Hirohito, who died back in January. This is not the trip where he barfs on the prime minister of Japan.
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure just opened in theaters. Charlie O’Donnell returns as the announcer on Wheel of Fortune after his departure in 1980. He’d remain in the role until his death in 2010. Falcon Crest star and Ronald Reagan’s first wife, Jane Wyman is hospitalized due to diabetes and liver failure. Advised by her doctor to retire from acting, she’ll return to the show for the final three episodes, make one guest appearance in Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman a few years later before giving up acting for good. Leslie Grantham’s last scenes on Eastenders air later this week.
“Straight Up” maintains the top spot on the charts. Entering the top ten are Debbie Gibson’s “Lost in Your Eyes”, Edie Brickell’s “What I Am”, and New Kids On the Block’s “You Got It”, subtitled “The Right Stuff” so you don’t confuse it with the Roy Orbison song which is hanging out in the 40s. The 31st Grammies are this week as well, with Bobby McFerrin taking home Song of the Year for “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. George Michael’s Faith is the album of the year, and Tracy Chapman wins Best New Artist. Other interesting Grammy winners include Phil Collins, whose song “Two Hearts” wins “Best song written specifically for a motion picture or television”. Danny Elfman wins his only Grammy this year for his theme to Batman. Despite still being dead, Roy Orbison splits one with k.d. lang for Best Country Vocal Collaboration on “Crying”. Into the Woods gets Best Musical Cast Show Album. And Robin Williams, of all people, wins two, for a comedy album related to his 1987 film Good Morning Vietnam and Pecos Bill, a children’s album.
MacGyver this week is “The Battle of Tommy Giordano”, where Mac has to rescue a child kidnapped by his mobbed-up non-custodial parent. Benji, The Hunted is this week’s Wonderful World of Disney. Glenn Close hosts Saturday Night Live this coming Saturday. “Scarlett Cinema” is this week’s Friday the 13th the Series. A cursed antique camera which lets you summon movie monsters. A werewolf-obsessed film buff gets himself turned into a werewolf, only to be ironically killed by garotting with, you guessed it, silver nitrate film stock. Star Trek the Next Generation airs “The Dauphin“. All I remember is that my friend Shelly wanted to off the shape-shifting bitch who had stolen the heart of her beloved Wesley Crusher. She was like eleven or twelve at this point. Josh doesn’t
No terra cotta floor tiles though.
So after taking a couple of weeks off to talk about shopping malls from the 1980s, let’s get back to War of the Worlds to visit a shopping mall from the ’80s. I have to admit, I got a pretty good chuckle out of this. Sadly, we don’t get many good looks at the place. One thing I’ve noticed during our trip through the nexus is that adventure shows of the 1980s, recorded on video tape in standard definition in a 4:3 format tend to be shot very tightly compared to modern shows. It wasn’t until I started writing this blog that I really bought into the superiority of widescreen as a television format. It really opens up a lot more options for scene composition. It’s very rare for a show like War of the Worlds to show both a character reacting to something and also the thing they’re reacting to in the same shot, and where a modern show would use a medium two shot, War of the Worlds typically goes for intercutting close-ups instead, so what’s on-screen a lot of the time is essentially a disembodied head.
What we do see of the random Toronto-area mall is a pleasant mix of nostalgia and modernity. The unnamed mall is large, open, bright and airy. The overall decor is basically modern, with softer angles and less stonework than the ’80s malls of my memory. It looks decidedly more modern than, say, Marley Station. Instead, it reminds me more of the upper floors of Towson Town Center, which, Wikipedia tells me, date to 1991, so that’s a fair cop. The signage is more retro — which is to say, contemporary to 1989. The only marquee I can clearly make out is for a Bulk Barn, Canada’s largest bulk foods chain. There’s also a Le Chateau whose sign was too out-of-focus for me to read, but I could identify it as the same logotype that I found in a photo during my research. I think maybe this was filmed at the Erin Mills Town Center in Mississauga, which opened some time in 1989, since I imagine “a week before the grand opening” is a good time to bring a film crew into a mall. The mall has been extensively renovated since then, so I can’t be sure from photos, but there’s some familiar architectural elements, and the mall has frequently been used as a filming location for TV and movies over the years. And it has both a Bulk Barn and a Le Chateau near the escalators, so that matches up.
But my weird obsession with indoor shopping arcologies is distracting us from our main point. We follow this week’s guest character, Nancy Salvo, as she takes the escalator up to the second floor, idly plays with a stranger’s baby, drops her popcorn when she bumps into a maintenance man who looks like a lot like a surly William Katt, and finally goes shopping for maternity clothes.
Okay. In close-up, he doesn’t really look that much like William Katt.
I say “maternity clothes” because Mrs. Salvo is pregnant, apparently heavily. Though between the aforementioned close shots and abundance of bulky ’80s clothes, I didn’t actually notice this. There’s not really any shots where she looks unambiguously pregnant, and the actress playing her, Amber-Lea Weston, is small and young-looking so it wasn’t even immediately clear that the character was an adult; she’s got a sort of Linda Hamilton-mixed-with-Justine-Bateman-circa-1984 thing going on and looks like the sort of twentysomething TV producers would cast to play a teenager. She’s best known for her role on the long-running Scottish-Canadian series The Campbells, about a frontier doctor in early-19th-century Ontario, though she also had a recurring role in the later series E.N.G., which, coincidentally, also starred Cynthia Belliveau, who you might remember as Karen from “He Feedeth Among the Lillies“.
Good morning, Jim. Here is your mission, if you choose to accept it.
Surly William Katt is an alien because of course he is. Along with two other aliens, he infiltrates the mall’s maintenance areas, locating an industrial set which is meant to be above the second floor concourse, but clearly isn’t because we can see the skylights in the mall, so we know there isn’t an entire multi-story space above the concourse, but never mind. The aliens start to open up a plenum and one of them opens his toolbox to reveal a petri dish full of Ecto Cooler on ice. They helpfully exposition to us that they’re testing out an alien toxin that the Advocacy hopes will prove an effective bioweapon. But one of the aliens kicks over an inconveniently-placed bucket of lubricant, and they panic. He puts the toxin away and insists they have to hide the evidence of their presence. I’d have thought that just pressing on so that any potential witnesses would be dead would be a more expedient solution, but what do I know. He shoos the others away to avoid capture while he destroys the evidence.
IMDB informs me that the unlucky alien is played by Clark Johnson, and that he’s the same Clark Johnson who’d go on to roles in The Wire, Alpha House, and, if not most famously, at least best-known to me, to play Detective Meldrick Lewis in Homicide: Life on the Streets. There is no way in a million years that I would have guessed it was the same guy. I’m only half-convinced now that this isn’t just a case of mistaken identity and it’s some other Clark Johnson, who happened to also be acting in the Toronto area in 1989 (Proper Clark Johnson would also have a recurring role in E.N.G.) and bore a passing resemblance.
In a stroke of bad luck, the machine oil immediately leaks through an overhead vent right as one of the mall cops walks by, and rather than just calling maintenance and telling them there’s a problem with the vents, he decides to investigate personally. Rather than just claim to be maintenance and apologize for the spill, the alien sets his toolbox to self-destruct (it implodes in a very nice visual effect shot) and tries to escape while the guard is incapacitated by the resulting fumes. While the other aliens are able to remove their maintenance coveralls and blend in with the crowd, the third alien is quickly spotted by security, who chase him with their guns drawn. Did mall cops normally carry guns in the ’80s? That feels wrong.
After brutally murdering another mallgoer by tossing him from the mezzanine, the alien attempts to hide in a clothing store dressing room, where, because otherwise we wouldn’t have bothered introducing the character, he finds and possesses Nancy Salvo. But this turns out to be a dangerous move for the alien, as the trauma of possession induces labor in the victim. She staggers out of dressing room looking decidedly unwell, lapsing into alienese as she panics over the inexplicable pain and disorientation she’s feeling. The sales associate who’d been helping her calls for an ambulance. The other aliens watch helplessly, unable to break cover.
She’s rushed to nearby Valley Hospital and sent to labor and delivery, where one of the technicians briefly notices that the fetal monitor is showing a triple-heartbeat. There’s never any elaboration on that, so I’m not sure if the idea is that the monitor is picking up the heartbeats of the mother, child, and alien, or if the baby is meant to have developed an alien triple-heart, and in any case, the aliens having discrete internal organs to begin with is something that hasn’t been consistently portrayed. No one notices that Mrs. Salvo is a radioactive reanimated corpse. In the waiting room, her husband is annoyed that he can’t be with his wife despite the ten weeks of Lamaze class — which is kind of a lot — but he’s relieved when they announce that, despite a difficult delivery, mother and baby are doing fine. The aliens watch from the waiting room, troubled by this development.
I don’t know much about grenade launchers, but shouldn’t it not be so easy to miss with one?
Intrepid reporter Mark Traynor got Too Close to Something Big. But never mind that, because the show won’t. The Morthren are out to get him because… They were already out to get him, and then he took a picture of one of them dying, so now they’re double out to get him. Meanwhile, they’re also making arrangements to provide publishing magnate W. R. Samuels with a life-prolonging elixir in exchange for using his Rupert Murdoch-like control of the media to do favors for them.
The next day, the aliens make another attempt on Traynor, this time outside his house. Kincaid and Blackwood are somehow there to rescue him, and give him enough information to sway him to their side. His girlfriend, having seen the assassination attempt, confronts Rob Nunn. He feigns ignorance, but immediately runs to Bebe and resigns when she stonewalls him.
There’s a pattern in this episode that is abstractly interesting as a storytelling mechanic, but doesn’t gel well with the action-adventure format of the show. Namely, other than the aliens themselves, no one in this story is really “evil”, but everyone is antagonistic. Compare with “The Deadliest Disease”. That was a story chock full of villains — Brock, Tao, the other two gang leaders at the exchange, the double-crossing security guard, Brock’s clone, even the Colonel to a lesser extent. The Morthren manage to be the least villainous characters in the story, since they’re acting entirely on the defensive to preserve themselves in the face of a plague.
But here, Nunn wants to do the right thing, but he’s being held back by Bebe. Bebe wants to do the right thing, but she’s being held back by Samuels. And even Samuels is shown to be motivated purely by desperation to stay alive. It’s a cool and interesting idea that all these people who are at best just selfish are pushed to villainy by forces beyond their control due to the manipulation of the aliens, but it doesn’t really sit well with this show. The aliens aren’t Moriarty-like evil masterminds creating intricate webs of deception. They’re much more straightforward than that. In fact, the aliens themselves have only a tenuous hold on the situation, struggling to off one reporter. It’s not the kind of show this is. And especially in light of the way this episode feels like it’s trying to fit into the mold of those classic shows where a guy who “sees something he shouldn’t” has to become a fugitive wandering from town to town, writing wrongs along the way. That’s a concept that calls for small villainies: the racist small-town sheriff who covers up a murder or the corrupt paper mill executive who tosses a union organizer into the shredder.
Now that he’s better, he looks like the narrator from the old animatronic Winnie-the-Pooh TV series.
The next scene is the best one in the episode: Malzor and Samuels meet face-to-face. It’s a classic Nasty Party scene with Samuels and Malzor being cordial to each other while communicating mutual loathing. Samuels keeps trying to drive home how tenuous his influence actually is: it was hard for him to suppress Traynor’s story (Which Malzor claimed involved an experimental military cyborg — they’re really hammering on this cyborg thing). He tries to caution Malzor that he might not be able to keep up that sort of thing, and his influence over his government contacts is contingent on avoiding scandal. But Malzor hits back hard on the matter of Samuels’s dependence on their serum, and the old man caves instantly. Samuels is very subtly nervous through the whole scene.
Polite of her dead body to gently move its hand out of the way as he takes the envelope.
Traynor realizes too-late that he’s endangered his girlfriend by giving her the negatives. She’s strangled to death by someone who isn’t shown past the forearm. I don’t know why they bother; it’s not like we’d recognize Random Non-Speaking Assassin. We’re all meant to assume he’s Morthren, but the next scene reveals that they still don’t have the negatives and Malzor and Mana bitch at each other about it. After finding her body, Traynor and the others go off to confront Rob Nunn.
They find him drunk and packing in his office. A little bit of roughing up gets him to explain that he’s been under growing pressure to bury stories critical of the government and major corporations. So much for that thing about it taxing Samuels’s influence to have a story suppressed. Traynor works out that the orders to kill the story must have come from Bebe, and he and Kincaid storm off to confront her, leaving Nunn to get his neck snapped by the unseen assassin.
Samuels discovers just how far in over his head he’s gotten when Jennings brings him prints of Traynor’s pictures. “Cyborgs don’t disintegrate,” he says, in the tone of a man who knows this first-hand. He realizes that Traynor is right and “Dr. Adelson and Mr. Malcolm” are aliens. He freaks out, worried about their ultimate motives and the possibility that the serum might be more sinister than it seems. Jennings tries to reassure him, but betraying humanity to help invading aliens is a bridge too far for the old man. See? Even Samuels ultimately wants to do the right thing when he can get past his own fears.
There’s no explicit reveal that Samuels has the negatives — and by implication, it was his assassin who killed Traynor’s girlfriend. I think this is a misstep. Remember, Jennings had already gotten copies of the prints from Bebe. So why didn’t Samuels look at those five scenes ago? And given his horrified reaction when he sees the photo of a decomposing Morthren, I find it hard to imagine Samuels is the sort of guy who’d jump straight to, “You want those negatives? Okay, I’ll send a hit man out to kill a reporter’s girlfriend.” Perhaps it’s meant to show how desperate Samuels becomes when Malzor makes the negatives a hard condition of their agreement? But he never acknowledges the assassinations either. We’re to presume that it’s the same assassin who kills Rob Nunn and Bebe Gardner (Yeah. Spoilers). You’d think he might mention the fact that he’s had three people murdered when he has his moment of horror at realizing Traynor was right about aliens. The only way the scene really works is if you assume that the murders were done on Jennings’s initiative, and Samuels hadn’t know the details of it. But for that to work, you’d want a scene where Samuels orders Jennings to get the negatives and says something like, “I don’t care how!” and to have a confrontation later where Jennings reveals what he’s done to a shocked Samuels. And in any case, you’d want them to make an explicit reveal that, yes, it’s Samuels and not the Morthren who got the negatives.
Every scene she’s in, it’s like she’s visiting from a soap opera.
Traynor and Kincaid confront Bebe, who makes it clear that she’s frightened for her life if she tells them who’s behind it all, but she agrees to help anyway just before being shot by the off-camera killer.
Going to try something new this week. I’ve been told that these articles tend to run a little long, so from now on, I’m going to be splitting the essays in half if they run over 4000 words. Let me know if this gets to be a problem.
They make a big deal about the Herald being a respectable paper and “not a tabloid”. The paper is literally a tabloid (“tabloid” is a paper size)
It is February 19, 1990. A comparatively quiet news week. Science historian Otto Neugebauer dies in Princeton. In a commentary for US News and World Report, Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel writes, “For more than 40 years, there has been not one Europe, but at least two. One is the Europe of the West, the land of democracies and relative prosperity. The other is the Europe of the East, of totalitarianism until recently unchallenged, the Europe that has finally awakened.” Tomorrow, Leicester city centre will see three people injured by a bomb. The United Mine Workers reach an agreement to end the Pittston Coal strike.
Little change on the Billboard charts; Paula Abdul maintains the top slot. Michael Bolton and Skid Row fall out of the top ten, while entering it are The Cover Girls and Expose, the latter with “Tell Me Why”, a song I only know because I had their greatest hits album when I was young. Damn Yankees will release their self-titled debut album later this week.
Adobe Photoshop has its first release. Driving Miss Daisy returns to the number one spot in the US Box Office, having held it for three of the past four weeks. Among this week’s home video releases is Friday the 13th Part VIII. TV is new this week. There’s a miniseries about the Kennedys airing this week, as well as The Death of the Incredible Hulk, the final TV movie continuing the 1978 Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno TV series. MacGyver is “Jenny’s Chance”, a “Sting” episode where Mac and his friends go under cover with ridiculous fake identities to expose the murderer of a friend’s dad. Star Trek the Next Generation presents Yesterday’s Enterprise, and if I had anything new or important to say about it, I wouldn’t be blogging about the most obscure shows I can think of. Denis Forrest gets a little extra exposure this week, as he’s making his last guest appearance on Friday the 13th The Series as the villain in, ahem, “My Wife as a Dog”. It’s the only episode of the series where the cursed antique — a cursed leash which does exactly the thing you think it’s gonna — gives its user exactly what he wants, and he gets to live to enjoy it. Indeed, even though he ends up in jail, Forrest’s character is comparatively satisfied with how everything worked out.
This week’s War of the Worlds is… I guess I can say, “bless their hearts for trying,” at least. It’s not aggressively bad the way that “Synthetic Love” was. It’s not bad at all, really. It’s just thin and insubstantial. What’s there is okay taken sort of abstractly, but it doesn’t really feel like part of the world they’ve been sketching out. The aliens are, once again, somewhat bracketed this week. They’re present, and play an active role in events, but the story feels like a tangent from their perspective: there’s a brief mention of a satellite they want access to, and you get the impression that’s what they’re really focusing on, with this episode’s events being a minor sub-plot to that. If anything, this episode feels almost like a backdoor pilot for a potential spin-off. Except that the spin-off it’d be promising is a pretty bog-standard Walking the Earth show in the vein of Kung Fu or The Fugitive or The Master or The Incredible Hulk. Only without martial arts, a one-armed man or purple stretch-pants. And, I mean, it’s a perfectly competent backdoor pilot, but there’s not much of a hook. Nothing to make me think, “Yes, it’s worth spending an hour out of my week to watch this series, as it will provide me with something I haven’t already seen a thousand times already.”
Much more of the focus is placed on the human characters and the world they inhabit. This ought to be great: I’ve been wanting more insight into the dystopian setting. But it doesn’t really pay off. As I’ve said so many times before, a lot of what goes wrong in this show is the product of it existing in the wrong time for what it’s doing. What we see of the dystopia this week seems strangely un-dystopic, but perhaps that’s just because this is the dystopianism of 1990.
To wit, this week’s episode is about journalism, at least as much as it’s about anything. This week, we’re going to see that one of the major aspects of this dystopia is that the newspapers are dying, and the few that remain are under the thumb of rich assholes who use them to manipulate both the public and the political discourse to support their personal agendas. Yeah. In 1990, that was the scary dystopic future. Now, it’s, well, Wednesday.
And we don’t even get a Matt Frewer in a rubber mask to make cynical jokes about the media. In fact, while it’s nice that the show unambiguously presents the state of the media as a bad thing, this particular angle on the horrifying near-future seems sort of… Quaint. Our evil media mogul suppresses news stories and has people whacked and bribes senators, but compared to, say, manipulating major nations into starting pointless wars, he seems like small potatoes. He’s not even all that evil. Venial, to be sure, but there’s nothing here on the level so much of J. Jonah Jameson, to say nothing of really properly supervillainous media moguls like Ned Grossberg, Elliot Carver, Charles Magnussen, The Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe, or Rupert Murdoch. I could maybe buy this as an episode of Knight Rider, but this is a show about aliens in a dystopian future. Is it too much to ask that our corrupt media be a little over-the-top?
There was a second here when I thought this was James Doohan. Then I cleaned my glasses.
Our Rupert Murdoch expy this week is W. R. Samuels. He’s currently housebound, and when we meet him, he’s confined to bed and living in a plastic bubble, under blue lighting, having come down with a terminal case of Bad Makeup and Disheveled Hair. He’s visited by Ardix, under the cover name “Dr. Adelson”. They make a stab at playing this as a shocking reveal by not showing his face for the first minute he’s on screen, but I’d know that long head and alien body language anywhere.
Oh, yeah, I’m in complete suspense to find out who that guy who literally looks like Death is.
Posing as, I guess, some kind of Generic SCIENCETM Company, the Morthren are offering Samuels a serum that will prolong his life in exchange for him using his influence to get them various things they want, starting with the use of a government satellite. The serum hasn’t worked yet, though, so Samuels isn’t prepared to pay up.
There’s a certain structural similarity between this episode and the previous one. They both follow the pattern of the Morthren offering the fruits of their technology to a human with power and influence in exchange for a MacGuffin. And like “The Deadliest Disease”, they both spend the middle part of the episode focused neither on the heroes nor the villains, but on the guest cast. Our guest cast this week starts with David Ferry as Mark Traynor. He’s an intrepid reporter for the Midtown Herald, the only remaining newspaper in Unnamed City I’m Still Guessing Is Near DC. He visits the same bar-slash-strip-club that Blackwood and Kincaid frequent, and as luck would have it, they’re seated at a back table tonight.
Wait, no, that’s not right. I mean, yes, it’s David Ferry, but what’s this picture from?
Traynor isn’t interested in them, though. I think he’s here for a story, though we never learn what in particular the story is about. A couple of obvious villains show up, pull out shotguns and start shooting. It’s not clear at first, but Traynor is their target, which in my opinion is bad pacing. You don’t start out with the bad guys trying to kill the reporter. You start out with the bad guys killing the reporter’s source, and then he witnesses it, and that‘s what gets him on their list. Kincaid and Blackwood return fire, drawing the attackers off, and chase them outside. Traynor follows, his camera at the ready.
Outside, the bad guys switch to I guess a grenade launcher, because they manage to explode a barrel that Kincaid uses for cover. He shoots one, revealing their attackers to be aliens. It’s strange to see the aliens using human weapons. In context, they’re presumably meant to be under cover, but I think this is the first time we’ve seen the aliens think of that since “Night Moves”. Nothing in the rest of the episode suggests that Kincaid and Blackwood came out to the bar tonight expecting to run into aliens, but they aren’t surprised to see them. Admittedly, the fact that you literally can’t pop down to the bar for a couple of beers without getting attacked by aliens isn’t really beyond the world the series has established, but one of the thinner parts of the plot is that the gang never shows even the slightest curiosity as to what it is the aliens are up to this week. They’re more concerned about Traynor, because he’s got photographs of a decomposing alien and of them.
Personally, I’m not all that clear how two or three stills of this could possibly be coherent enough to be evidence of anything.
They’re forced to flee when the cops show up, and back at base, they explain to Suzanne that if Traynor’s photos go public, there’s a danger of a mass panic, with an unprepared populace getting themselves killed while trying to hunt aliens. Blackwood and Kincaid suggest that the fact that most people are “tuned out” and that the government has been unwilling to involve itself has kept the Morthren from escalating into open warfare, which is an interesting point. They make plans to track down the reporter, and Suzanne buggers off for the rest of the episode. We won’t see her again until the coda (Okay, turns out she’s in a couple more scenes, but she has essentially no presence in them, so I forgot).
I mean, yeah, canning is an important post-apocalypse skill, but does Pete strike you as the type?
Pete, the Major, Victoria and Alex enjoy a delicious picnic dinner outside of George’s house. Judging by the number of mason jars on the table, the entire meal seems to have consisted of pickles. Everyone’s in good spirits, except for Alex, who’s glum because he misses his dad. Oh noes, I guess this means that George didn’t make it due to that fatal illness he was dying of in the previous scene.
I mean, come on. Did they really expect anyone to believe that for a second? They’re at his house. If George had died, do you really think everyone would have driven the three hours to his house three months later to have a picnic? Honestly, the scene doesn’t make a whole lot of sense even with George alive. Why are they here and not at the base? George had been considering moving to the base before the invasion anyway so that Alex could have some company. With George out of the picture for three months, what, has Alex been living alone? Did Pete move in? Do they all stop by for a picnic once a week?
The reveal that we all knew was coming happens when Dave shows up with George, who’s still pretty fragile, but is recovering. See, it would almost make sense for them to all come out to George’s place if this was specifically a party to celebrate his homecoming after three months in the hospital. But it’s a surprise that George is ambulatory. Alex wasn’t expecting it, and it doesn’t seem like the others were either. With George still looking pretty fragile, it also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that they’d drive him all the way out here, presumably with the intention of leaving him there in Alex’s care — he’s clearly not fit to take care of himself yet. This scene would make a lot more sense set at the base. And if you don’t know that this is George’s homecoming, isn’t it a little weird for this particular collection of people to be here for a random picnic three months later? The thing that unites these characters is that they’re the named characters in this movie. Major Kramer had a preexisting relationship with George and Alex, but Victoria only met George briefly for one scene, and she’d never met Alex. Pete doesn’t seem to know any of the others, and their banter over lunch suggests that they’re still only casual acquaintances. There’s nothing per se wrong with this group of people being here, but why them specifically? Why aren’t any of the other pilots there? Or any of the other scientists from the base? Or the other rescued survivors from the mothership? Why? Because the budget won’t cover it. This scene is a mess. It’s here for tone, not for plot.
The gang celebrates George’s homecoming by turning on the radio (Does it seem weird to anyone else that there’s still regular radio service playing music after the apocalypse?). But everyone falls silent for a few moments and ends the film in quiet trepidation when the music gives way to the same distinctive pattern of interference that harbinged the second wave. We end the movie with a scene like so many others in this movie: watching people react to things the film can’t show us.
In 1986, Christopher “Kid” Reid and Christopher “Play” Martin formed a hip-hop duo known as “The Fresh Force Crew”. By 1987, they’d changed their name to “Kid ‘N Play”, and would go on to release three albums, two of which would go gold. Their extravagant hair, big personalities, and positive, poppish-style put them in the sweet spot of R&B/hip-hop music that wasn’t too scary for white parents in middle America to let their children listen to. They would go on to land two number one singles on the Billboard Rap chart. After DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince passed on House Party, Kid ‘n Play would go on to star in the first three films of the franchise, and Class Act, a film loosely based on The Prince and the Pauper. The duo also featured in a single-season NBC Saturday Morning Cartoon, a short-lived Marvel comic book, and made guest appearances on Sesame Street and Square One TV.
Chris Martin went on to found a multimedia company, and later became a professor of Hip-Hop and Music Studies, first at North Carolina Central University, then later at Florida A&M; Chris Reid would make guest appearances in numerous ’90s sitcoms, and go on to do voice work.
And also this.
This is Pete Silverman. I think he’s ex-military — there’s a reference to him having lost his unit, but it’s hard to follow in context, and unclear whether he’s talking about the first or second invasion. This invasion wave seems a little mismanaged. The aliens opened their “time hole” four days ago, and as of right now, they seem to be coming down as single isolated Squid Walkers who just kind of roam around sucking people up. In a few minutes, they’ll actually invade in force with hundreds of walkers, but these first few aren’t acting like a reconnaissance party, and there are indications that the aliens have been abducting people continuously for some time.
It’s another symptom of War of the Worlds 2 being a disjointed clusterfuck: if you follow George through the story, there’s a moderately heavy low-action adventure story about a desperate man trying to rescue his son during an insidious, long-term alien invasion that is conducted as a series of small, continuous raids over a long period of time — at least a few days, possibly much longer — and focused on abducting individual humans one at a time. But then there’s all those other characters we met in the boring exposition section: Victoria, Dave and Major Sleeveless. They are fighting an alien invasion that is sudden, rapid, and widescale, takes place from beginning to end over the course of no more than a day, and is based entirely around the aliens blowing up piss-poor CGI recreations of easily-recognized world landmarks. The two halves of the story don’t flat-out explicitly contradict each other, but the structure of the plots aren’t properly compatible, meaning that it comes completely out of nowhere when they crash into each other.
Pete enters our story by waking George as he dozes in his truck after a long night of searching a city for a convenient Squid Walker. Maybe it’s the same city where the base is. Maybe not. I mean, the skyline is the same, but it’s also obviously the same neighborhood in the same city where the opening scene with Shackleford and Sissy was filmed, but that’s absolutely not the same place. Pete frantically warns George to leg it, as there’s a Squid Walker just around the corner. Instead, George hops out of the truck, grabs a shotgun that he just happens to have (I have no per se objection to George having a shotgun. Given that he seems to live in an isolated cabin in the woods in a society that lacks basic infrastructure, it makes a lot of sense for him to have taken up hunting. But I do take some issue with the gun simply appearing in this scene without explanation or introduction, especially given that it’s unlikely he had it at the base), and starts shooting at the walker, daring it to zap him.
He wakes up inside a walker, accompanied with a slight motion blur visual effect to suggest his disorientation. His display of badassery has earned Pete’s respect, even if it didn’t buy him enough time to escape. George is the last to recover of the prisoners, who also include a woman I initially mistook for Sissy and a man in clerical collar whose tone and body language suggest that he’s in the middle of a psychotic break, but that may just be bad acting. George explains that this isn’t his first time inside an alien ship, but before they can plan an escape, something weird and psychedelic happens and the screen goes gray and swirly. Possibly this is related to the inexplicable bit rot that happened to my hard drive last week.
I wasn’t going to bother including it because you can barely make anything out, but it felt like it’d be cheating to just say it goes all weird and psychedelic for a bit.
The aliens arrive at the base. Kinda. We see one guy on lookout from a stack of gutted cars get teleport-zapped, but they never actually attack the base in force or anything. There’s never even any sense of urgency from the scientists that their location might be in danger, and the aliens certainly aren’t shooting the place up. Major Sleeves is loading up the jets with plague missiles and demanding that Dave and Victoria get the shields working so they can go to space and shoot at the mothership. One thing that’s curious about both movies is that we never actually see whether or not normal human weapons can take out the alien craft. In the first movie, the aliens basically rout the military before it can organize a full-scale response. We rarely see anyone engage an alien ship in a fire-fight, and when we do, it’s limited to infantry with small arms. In the second movie, the human resistance has armed itself strictly with biological weapons and they don’t engage the walkers themselves, saving their weapons for the mothership. There’s some implication of invincibility to the walkers, but we never get to see it. The utter inability of human weapons to defeat the alien craft is a common theme in adaptations of War of the Worlds, but isn’t actually in the original. There, probably in deliberate parallel to the experiences of European Imperialists invading less technologically advanced lands in basically the whole rest of the world, the weapons of the locals could defeat individual tripods, given the opportunity. It was just that the Martians’ destructive power was so much greater that it hardly made any difference if you could take out the occasional tripod: they’d blow up your cannon and six others before you got your second shot off. They launch without the shields, hoping Victoria can email the upgrade en route. The pilots are surprised when their ships lift off on their own — the major didn’t feel the need to tell them about the autopilot until this moment. Not teaching your pilots how to operate their craft ahead of time seems like an unsound tactical move.
Victoria announces the approach of two dozen alien ships, though I suspect a lack of communication between the scriptwriter and the visual effects department, because the alien attack force looks much, much larger. Why they’re all congregating over a city that’s already half-demolished and largely abandoned, I’ve no idea. They don’t seem to be especially interested in attacking the Free Forces Base or the fighter squadron itself. I mean, yes, they take some shots at each other (Major Sleeveless has to shout at his men to hold their fire and save their munitions for the mothership), but it’s less like they’re going after each other and more like taking potshots as the two sides pass each other. More Frogger than Missile Command.
One of the few notes of surprising competence is that it’s night in Paris, evening in London, and daytime in the US.
It’s also more or less at this point that a montage shows us the aliens attacking the rest of the world, played here by terrible CGI models of Paris and London, neither of which look like they’ve seen even close to the devastation that Washington showed in the opening recap. Given how quickly the lines of communication collapsed in the first movie, they maybe could have gone with the idea that the first invasion was limited to the US. The rest of the world would be plunged into an economic crisis that might have precluded anyone making preparations for a second wave, but wouldn’t have faced the infrastructure collapse that turned the US into a third-world country. But there’s nothing in dialogue to suggest that, and George’s opening monologue certainly doesn’t support it. There’s one building in one shot that has a scaffold around it. So maybe they were trying to say that the rest of the world got similarly demolished, but they went hard to work spending the past two years rebuilding, while the US was tearing the sleeves off its collective shirts and setting trash cans on fire because “building new infrastructure” is not really a thing the United States does these days.
It’s nice to see Tim Hines’s CGI London footage get more work.
Back inside the Squid Walker, or in the alien mothership, or, I don’t know, somewhere, George and the others have been strapped in for alien nomming. In time, it will be explained that the aliens aren’t actually consuming the human blood they take at the moment: those pesky microorganisms still render it lethal. But the aliens are dicks, so they’re still extracting blood from their victims, and just placing it in storage while they work out how to build a lifestraw.
I think we all pretty much knew this was going to happen at some point in this movie.
The blood extraction process involves “filtering” — this doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense the way it’s explained, but it sounds like maybe they pump you full of something to decontaminate you while extracting your blood, but the process doesn’t work well enough yet for the blood to be entirely safe for human consumption? This process involves the aliens sticking an IV in your arm, putting a sheet of fake vomit over your face, and shoving a rape tentacle down your throat. Because I really, really needed to see C. Thomas Howell and Chris Reid deep throat some alien wing-wang.
They are saved from a fate worse than appearing in a Chuck Tingle story (Hugo-nominated Molested by the Man-Meat From Mars no doubt) by Sissy. Who is here for some reason! She rescues Pete, George and the girl from the previous scene who I’d mistaken for Sissy, and it’s still hard to keep them straight. Aside from Kim Little, every female actor in this movie looks, sounds and acts basically the same.
I woulda done an animated GIF of Unnamed Woman Eaten By Wall Vagina, but there’s too much fog in the scene for it to compress well.
Sissy peels them out of their confinement and promises to help them escape, cautioning them not to touch the walls. Not-Sissy pretty much immediately disregards this warning, touches a wall, and gets eaten by it. Sissy leads our heroes to a different wall… And tells them to throw themselves at it. Pete finds these instructions contradictory. But after Sissy vanishes into the wall, George decides that it’s better than nothing and follows.
After an interminable amount of teasing us that they won’t manage it in time, Adam authorizes Samus to use the Varia Suit Upgrade Victoria uploads the shield code to the fighter squadron basically the second they cross into the mesosphere, allowing them to make it the rest of the way into space. No sooner do they get to the mothership, though, when a time hole opens up. Why does the mothership leave now, right in the middle of the invasion? What are the squid walkers on Earth planning to do without it? What’s it going to do back on Mars?
War of the Worlds 2 laughs at such pedestrian questions. The fighter group gives chase, flying into the Time Hole before it closes. Finding themselves under siege (nominally, at least) with the Earth’s entire defense force having just disappeared into the time hole, Dave suggests that he and Victoria get drunk. I’m going to assume, “and fuck” was omitted because they weren’t sure if Victoria was meant to be George’s love interest or not.
Pete and George inexplicably find themselves in the abandoned city from the first scene. Pete’s relieved; George just wants to get back to the alien ship to find his son. George is pretty consistent through the middle part of this movie about not giving a fuck about the larger issue of the alien invasion and just wanting to find his son. It’s one of the few nice character touches in the movie in how it avoids the more traditional B-Movie Sci-Fi trope of the scientist obsessing over ScienceTM-Exclamation-Point to the detriment of those around him until he has his big character awakening moment at the climax and finally decides to put his loved ones ahead of his work. George is perfectly prepared to let the world burn if it gets him his kid back. Pete makes several references to PTSD, suggesting George is suffering from it, but also claiming it himself when apologizing after an angry outburst.
They find a truck that won’t start. Suggesting that his military skills and/or street smarts can find a way to start it in spite of an apparent dead battery, Pete pops the hood, to discover that the battery isn’t so much “dead” as “absent”, as is the engine. Being very thick, they do not work out the significance of this. They eventually catch up with Sissy, who takes them back to Shackleford, who is gravely ill by now. He offers them moonshine and exposition.
This is their reaction to finding the truck’s engine compartment empty. Because providing an actual truck with no engine would have broke the budget,
In addition to what I’ve already said about the aliens filtering and bottling blood, he tosses in the extra explanation that rather than juicing them along with everyone else, the aliens are pulling captured children aside for experimentation to improve the filtering process. Why children in particular? Because we need an excuse to get George back to Alex. He also drops the incredibly obvious revelation that they’re not on Earth, but in a simulated environment on Mars. This being why there’s no resources and the truck had no engine. Shackleford and Sissy were among those taken in the first invasion, two years earlier. Why exactly they’d recreate a truck with no engine is a mystery. Why the refugees who lived in the city weren’t using the many fine empty buildings for shelter instead of living on the street is a mystery (It would have been cool if the buildings turned out to be hollow shells because the Martians only copied what they could see from the cameras on their ships. But the buildings do turn out to be whole inside). How people have been surviving without supplies for two years is a mystery. Why, when we see a street torn up later, there are clearly water and sewer lines running under the fake pavement, is a mystery. This movie is very mysterious. To prove his claims, Shackleford has Sissy take them into one of the buildings, where, behind an emergency exit door, they find an alien corridor (This is conveyed via reaction shot. Actually having a door open into the alien set was outside the budget). Sissy panics and runs off, never to be seen again. Bye Sissy!
