Category: War of the Worlds

It is March 18, 2008. Three mortar shells detonate near the US Embassy in Yemen, killing two. Presidential Candidate Obama delivers his “A More Perfect Union” speech in Philadelphia, addressing race relations in America in response to recent “controversies” surrounding his relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In other news this week, David Paterson becomes governor of New York following the resignation of Eliot Spitzer over a prostitution scandal. Paterson is New York’s first African-American governor and the nation’s first legally blind governor. The world economy continues to fall apart in the wake of the housing bubble collapse. The stock market takes a big hit in the wake of an emergency bailout of Bear Stearns, though the decline is cushioned a bit by their proposed sale to JP Morgan Chase. The Fed plans to dramatically cut its rates this week. The dollar is down, oil and gold are up. Pakistan’s parliament elects its first female speaker, Fahmida Mirza. Western China suffers a 7.2 earthquake. My parents have their thirty-seventh anniversary.

The top spot on the Billboard hot 100 this week goes to Usher with “Love in this Club”, which shot fifty spots up the charts from last week. Flo Rida, Chris Brown, Rihanna and Sara Bareilles round out the top five.

This week’s Power Rangers Jungle Fury is “Dance the Night Away”, because it’s four words and for some reason the showrunner since 2005 has had this thing where he makes all the episode titles have the same number of words as years he’s been in charge. The History Channel removes two words from its name, and the other from its content. Over the weekend, ABC Family aired The Cutting Edge 3: Chasing the Dream, the second of three highly improbable sequels-sorta-but-more-like-remakes to the 1992 theatrical romcom. ABC proper debuts Miss Guided, a midseason replacement about a high school guidance councilor which received vaguely favorable reviews but not a huge amount of viewership. It’ll be gone for good in a month. FOX airs the third and final episode of their new comedy-drama, The Return of Jezebel James before having the remaining episodes sent upstate to a farm where they can run and play all day. Carole King guests on The Colbert Report. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart comments on future-president Obama’s speech, saying, “At 11 o’clock AM on a Tuesday, a prominent politician spoke to Americans about race as though they were adults.” Jeffery Sachs is his guest.

BBC Four gets its highest-ever ratings when it airs The Curse of Steptoe, a drama based on the making of the iconic comedy series Steptoe and Son (Better known on this side of the pond as the inspiration for Sanford and Son). Series 4 of Doctor Who will premiere in two weeks with “Partners in Crime”.

Enchanted, I Am Legend, The Seeker, Love in the Time of Cholera and Atonement are released on home video.

Also this.

You guys. Srsly, you guys. Oh em gee. You know how I said that The Asylum’s War of the Worlds would have been better had it been worse? Turns out I was mistaken. Or not. I’m not sure. In 2008, The Asylum decided to let C. Thomas Howell direct and star in a sequel to their 2005 mockbuster.

H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds was The Asylum’s first mockbuster. It was early in the process of them finding their characteristic style and lacks the over-the-top revelry in audacity that would come to define them. Rather, it’s a movie that wants — desperately at times — to be taken seriously. It’s incredibly, painfully, nonsensically earnest. They made several more non-mockbuster films in the following time, but here is a brief recap of the mockbusters they made in the intervening three years:

• King of the Lost World
• Snakes on a Train
• The Da Vinci Treasure
• When a Killer Calls
• Pirates of Treasure Island
• Hillside Cannibals
• The 9/11 Commission Report
• Dragon
• Transmorphers
• AVH: Alien vs Hunter
• 30,000 Leagues Under The Sea (Technically not a mockbuster, but it sure sounds like one)
• Invasion of the Pod People
• I Am Omega (I dig the way they merged in a reference to 1971 film “The Omega Man”, another adaptation of the original Mattheson story)
• Alan Quartermain and the Kingdom of Skulls
• 100 Million BC
• Death Racers
• Journey to the Center of the Earth (C’mon, you’re not even trying now.)
• Monster
• Street Racer (Though the actual plot is a Fast and the Furious clone)
• Sunday School Musical

So it’s probably fair to say they’d figured out their wheelhouse by now. War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave is basically nothing like its predecessor. Where the first film was, inexplicably, a somber meditation on the grim desperation and loneliness of war, War of the Worlds 2 seems to be the result of someone looking in the wastepaper basket the morning after an orgy between left-over bits of Stargate SG-1, Independence Day, Battlefield Earth and a little bit of The Matrix.

It’s hard for me to know how to approach this movie. You remember how years ago I tried to review Zardoz, and I got about as far as Sean Connery in a diaper and was just like, “Nope”, because the whole movie is such a mess that the basic act of writing it all down in a linear medium like prose is going to make it sound way more coherent than it actually is?

War of the Worlds 2 is no Zardoz, but what it is is all over the place. The first movie might have made a serious miscalculation in what they decided the story should be about, but at least they made one. This movie has four or five movies’ worth of concept all just sort of tossed in with very little sense of rhyme or reason. The individual parts — well, they aren’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but most of them are at least coherent. But they add up to an incoherent mess, rather than a story with such mundane things as a beginning, middle and end.

A little montage of the first movie gives us the very few details that are relevant to the sequel: Earth got invaded, then the invaders died. C. Thomas Howell’s voice-over makes an interesting shift to the tone of the novel’s ending, though:

But as we searched the internet and waited in line for our soy lattes, they needed only one thing to survive: our blood.[br]But as they harvested, there was something they hadn’t planned on: we fought back. All the world’s armies, all the Earth’s inhabitants down to the smallest microbe joined together to drive them back where they’d come from.

You’d normally expect that the odd non-sequitur jab at latte-drinkers was something in the vein of the artilleryman character, berating wimpy liberals who couldn’t fight back like real manly men, but instead, the message he gives is one of unity. Unlike the traditional presentation, where man and “all his defenses” failed, only to be saved by bacteria, they instead present the alien defeat as a united effort, the Earth as a whole coming together to drive off the invaders. That’s quite a nice, otherworldly idea, sorta Final Fantasy-ish… And they do balls-all with it.

The opening montage shows the hexapod walkers from the first film, but those won’t be reappearing. The new design demonstrates that the visual effects guys actually read the book this time, as they’re tripods now. The humans will refer to them as such (Though they more often use the term “squid-walker”) even before the second wave arrives, so chalk it up to a retcon. The CGI is better, in a strictly “Three years of industry developments in what commodity 3d rendering technology can do” sort of way, but it’s offset by a lot of more adventurous FX shots, such as the tripods straddling buildings. Also, they can fly. As the name implies, the squid-walkers have also become more cephalopod in design rather than insectoid. In flight, they seem to have been inspired by the sentinels from The Matrix. We don’t see the aliens themselves at all, and the humans never refer to them as being a distinct thing from the tripods: the squid-walkers themselves are described as being alive, but the dialogue goes back and forth on whether the walkers are themselves the intelligent beings running the invasion, or if it’s just that the alien technology is organic in nature. It seems like maybe the aliens aren’t discreet individual organisms but some kind of amorphous colony-creature made up of “brain” nodes and purpose-grown techno-organic machines, but it’s inconsistent.

The toxic green mist doesn’t appear in this movie. Maybe it just wasn’t relevant to the parts of the invasion we see, but the increased emphasis on aliens “harvesting” humans would likely preclude it. The beam weapon is mostly similar to what appeared in the first movie, but rather than skeletonizing its victims, it’s revealed to be a kind of teleportation ray, vacuuming up humans into a storage compartment in the walker. This… Comes across a lot faster than I think they meant to. I mean, I got it right away, but I think it’s supposed to be a surprise when we see people alive later after being shot.

The movie wastes no time revealing the new tripod. The very first post-montage scene finds one attacking a town that is run down, but more in a “2008 economic crisis” sort of way than a “Two years after civilization was routed by an interplanetary war” sort of way. Everyone seems to be living on the street in tents and shanties rather than in the abundant unoccupied buildings, because reasons.

Everyone’s very upset when the squid-walker appears and zaps first a child, then who I assume is the kid’s mom, and there is a general panicked flee, but no one actually seems surprised that the aliens have returned. In a coherent movie, would be the first part of a subtle build-up to a big twist later. But this movie is such an incoherent mess that you’ll either figure it out way too early or not at all, and in either case, it doesn’t really make much sense.

It’s here that we meet two minor characters that the movie thinks are major characters. Their names are Shackleford and Sissy, and they have no backstory and we will only see them a couple of times. I think Sissy might be Shackleford’s daughter, but I don’t think they ever actually say so. There’s something indeterminately “off” about Sissy, which is one of the few things in this film which actually will become clear later. She’s fearful; he’s resigned. They must have some previous arrangement set up because without any need to exposit about what they’re doing, he takes out a syringe, draws some of her blood, and injects himself with it. Against her protests, he runs off to get himself teleport-zapped.

We’re doing okay so far, aren’t we? I mean, it sounds like we’re doing okay. This scene builds up a little sense of mystery, a little suspense. We’ve got the impression that society is still in the early stages of recovery after the previous invasion. We’ve established that the aliens are back. We don’t know the deal with Shackleford and Sissy yet, but if you come in knowing at least the gist of The War of the Worlds, you can reasonably guess that they’re trying to exploit the alien weakness to microorganisms. So maybe this movie is going to be about Shackleford trying to find a virus that will defeat the aliens once and for all. Or maybe Shackleford will be the MacGuffin, and our actual hero will have to mount a daring rescue to retrieve him from the aliens.

Except that none of that happens. This scene isn’t indicative of the state of the Earth. Shackleford only appears one more time. What we learn about Sissy doesn’t add up. Heck, Shackleford doesn’t even accomplish the thing he just set out to do — there’s no indication he actually does get himself captured here.

Our only two returning characters from the previous movie are George Herbert and his son, Alex, still played by C. Thomas Howell and his son Dashiell. The elder Howell is the only actor in this movie who can do anything that even vaguely resembles “acting”. His son is spared from being utterly awful only by the fact that the two have a very natural rapport with each other.

George and Alex are living in a cabin in the woods… Somewhere. The last movie made a concerted effort to namecheck vaguely realistic geography the filmmakers almost certainly had only read about in books. This one is completely groundless, geographically. It’s settings are all “somewhere rural”, “somewhere urban” or occasionally, “somewhere Martian.” Two years after the invasion, the world is in a state of what wikipedia charmingly calls, “peaceful anarchy”. The details of this new world are pretty sketchy. It doesn’t seem like infrastructure or government have been reestablished; everyone’s pretty much on their own. There’s some sort of remnant of an organized military, but it’s not clear what actual authority they have. There’s no signs of any kind of organized government except for the fact that George carries “food coupons” which apparently have value.

I have no sense of why the world is the way it is, either. Remember, the war ended two years ago. Stopped dead. Certainly, given the scope of the devastation, you wouldn’t expect the rebuilding to be complete by now, but it doesn’t seem like it’s even started. It’s as though no one’s actually interested in putting civilization back together: they’d all rather just go live in the woods and scrounge for dented cans of ravioli (It’s George’s birthday, and Alex scrounged him one as a present. George appreciates it, but is upset that his son was off scrounging in the big scary world without escort).

But maybe it’s just because they’re in America. Maybe in this universe, the GOP won in ’08 and they decided to cut taxes by not having a country any more. We do see a shitty CGI “Recognizable landmarks of the world getting destroyed” montage later in the film and it seems like London and Paris have been completely rebuilt.

Conspicuously absent from this scene of domestic tranquility is George’s wife, Felicity. They never say what happened to her. She’s only mentioned once, and only in enough detail to imply that she died. Alex never mentions her at all.

Their scene of domestic tranquility is shattered when George’s bicycle-powered radio starts squealing out a strange distortion which apparently is supposed to be the same thing he heard on the radio right before his truck died in the previous movie. Only it’s not, and the explanation he gives later has nothing to do with it. But it convinces him that the aliens are back and he’s got to go warn the, uh, I don’t know, “authorities”, I guess. He locks Alex in the basement with a can of soda, half a bag of chips, the last double-A batteries for his Game Boy, and his watch, then sets off for… Somewhere.

“Somewhere” in this case is “Free Forces Base and Lab”, a fortified encampment in a city that was either built out of recovered scrap like piles of wrecked cars and sheet metal, or actually just was a junkyard before they look it over. To gain access, he shows a laminated, government-issued ID card, which, again, suggests that the infrastructure to make things like machine-printed, laminated government-issue ID cards still exists, but phones and public utilities and sleeves do not (it’s coming). I really do think maybe the idea is actually that civilization is way less “collapsed” than it seems, and it’s just that it’s Trump’s America and no one wants to put civilization back together.

He meets with Dave and Victoria to show them his findings. I won’t go as far as to say that Kim Little, who plays Victoria, is a terrible actress who obviously only got the part because she’s married to David Michael Latt. I can’t tell: she might actually be fine, except for the fact that she’s affecting this ridiculously fake southern accent that’s so thick that Lawrence Olivier couldn’t emote convincingly through it.

What follows is, not making this up, a solid ten minutes of the thickest expospeak bullshit since Star Trek got cancelled. The whole scene is a continuous clusterfuck of nonsense. Many individual lines of dialogue make sense — I kinda suspect they are simply cribbed directly from Wikipedia articles — but it’s rare for any two lines to be consistent with each other, or indeed have anything at all to do with each other. Highlights include a “diagramatic cipher that allowed us to steal from the Squid Walker technology”, and “the Schwartzchild effect,” as well as these bullet points:

• The scientists are translating the alien language, but they “need a key”, because alien languages work just like substitution ciphers. Also substitution ciphers work such that if you don’t have the key, you can still figure out the gist of things.
• George has detected a “shift in matter” four days ago which indicates that the aliens have created a wormhole in orbit. After trying out “wormhole”, “vortex”, and “Einstein-Rosen Bridge”, they will eventually settle on calling it a “time hole”.
• The aliens are from Mars, by the way. I know we all assumed this, but the last movie never came out and said it. Weirdly, they explain that they never actually saw the aliens coming to Earth from Mars: they used their “time hole” to get here. Which means that the humans have absolutely no basis for knowing the aliens are from Mars.
• Dave is keeping his former boss in the closet. She pumped herself full of diseases in order to create a “concoction” that they hope will magically turn into a super-virus that will kill the aliens. While this concept will come up again, its presence here is entirely irrelevant. Also, viruses do not work that way.
  • Is this a thing? I see a lot of zombie stories which also play the “We mixed a bunch of viruses together and they fused to form zombie juice” card.
• In the past two years, they’ve built a fleet of fighter jets enhanced with alien technology, which mostly works except that they aren’t sure if they can survive leaving the mesosphere because they can’t get the shields working without the cipher key, and as we all know, the exosphere is a kind of energy barrier that you need shields to breach.
• These scientists like to end sentences with, “Or so I thought.”

They give him a tour of the inside of a Squid Walker, which is basically just torn rubber sheets, and looks kinda like the inside of the ship from the Doctor Who serial “The Claws of Axos”. The ship is controlled by a lump in the middle which Victoria describes as a “conduit to a vortex generator, or so I thought,” which is weird, because they only just learned about the whole vortex-generating thingy a minute ago. Turns out that it’s actually a, “UHF frequency modulator. Comparatively speaking.” Also, later it’ll be an alien brain that is connected to the central hive-mind of all aliens. It’s like this movie was written by throwing Wikipedia into a Cuisinart.

So the transmission that George heard turns out to be the alien wifi password, and plugging it in lights the alien brain thing up. And also makes all the alien-enhanced jets lift off and hover around, to the surprise of the military commander, Major Kramer. Kramer allegedly met George shortly after the invasion and the two became friends. He looks like the kill-crazy soldier who is going to fuck everything up, especially since he’s dressed in a wife beater and a Class A Army uniform jacket with the sleeves ripped off. But he turns out to be a total mensch who does at least one useful thing.

Blessedly absent is the bit where no one wants to believe the aliens could possibly be back and George gets shunned until it is too late. Indeed, everyone seems to have pretty much expected the aliens would come back eventually, and find George completely convincing. George’s relationship with the others is inconsistent: he’s on friendly terms with Kramer and Dave, but hasn’t been to the base recently enough to know about any of their work, or to have met Victoria, and Kramer doesn’t know about George’s wife. Dave invites George to come live on the base (and Kramer does the same a few minutes later), mentioning that there’s a school there for Alex, and I can’t figure why he hasn’t done this already. It would make perfect sense if he’d been holed up at the remains of his old observatory: big telescopes aren’t portable, so you’d have him opting to stay isolated to do his work. You could have some character tension with George conflicted between staying at his telescope to watch for aliens and taking Alex to be with other children. But they’re living out in the woods and his telescope is a dinky little portable model even smaller than the one he had in his backyard last movie. The findings he presents suggest that he does have access to a network of telescopes, though. So maybe the cabin is near a large telescope array, but that’s the sort of thing you’d want to show, and maybe tell us about.

George rushes home to collect Alex while the others make preparations for war. George runs out of gas on the way and has to barter with some rednecks in a pointless scene that takes way too long. As a result, he arrives just in time to see Alex emerge from shelter and get zapped by a Squid Walker. Because of course he did. It’s not like the aliens who came here for absolutely no reason other than to abduct humans for juicing would stick to the major cities and population centers. Obviously they would show up and send a single walker out into the woods three hours from what passes for civilization to abduct a single child and pointedly ignore his dad who is a couple of yards away.

George does the Long Night of the Soul thing where he cries and yells at God and compares himself to Job while organ music plays in the background. But fortunately for George, the little audio montage that plays of him remembering conversations with his son accidentally includes one of the lines of exposition from the base scene, prompting George to realize that his son was not vaporized, but teleported up to the mothership, so he sets off for what looks like the same town from the first scene, to get himself zapped.

We’re roughly a third of the way through the movie at this point, and basically, it gets a lot less dense from here on out. Given all the ’80s media I consume, one thing I can safely say about this film is that, for its many flaws, it’s very modern in structure. Which is to say that unlike ’80s movies, which tended to spend more than half of their runtime on build-up and only have the aliens or pirates or Nazis show up for act 3, they basically load all the setup into the first third of the movie, and the next hour is going to be pretty consistently action and adventure. I mean, it’s not like they have a whole lot of time to waste on buildup given how many largely-unconnected plots they’ve got going on.

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m going to take a little break here before continuing with the story next time. For all I complain about the movie being incoherent, I can look back now and see that basically every plot development which happens from here out has already been set up. And the weird thing that means is that what’s wrong with this movie (what’s most wrong with this movie, at least; bad acting and bad CG are the low-hanging fruit) isn’t a lack but rather an abundance. There’s just too much. The movie suffers badly from a lack of focus. What I said about the technobabble scene is really a microcosm for the movie as a whole: individual threads of plot are often coherent and make sense, but there’s just so many of them, and they’re all just tossed together with no sense of what the various components have to do with each other or whether they belong in the same movie.

The most egregious example is when Dave shows off the sick scientist in the closet. Why does he think George needs to see this? What does he reckon an astronomer will gain from seeing that they’re giving people the plague in the hopes of magically creating an alien-killing superbug? The Doylist answer is that the act 3 resolution will lean on the fact that George already knows that infecting people with a bunch of diseases is a plausible way to create a super-bug that will defeat the aliens. I mean, it isn’t — it’s just not, sorry, but at least I am convinced that the movie thinks it is. The Watsonian reason Dave thinks George “has to see” it is… Because shut up. The first half of the movie is full of thing after thing after thing that happens for no reason better than, “Because the second half of this movie will require it to have happened.” It’s not so much set-up as justification: it feels like the movie really begins thirty minutes in, and the first part is someone’s fanfic written after-the-fact to explain away all the deuses-ex-machina.

So there’s just one thing left this movie has to do to get all its ducks in a row, one more piece to position on the playing field. We’ve met all the major characters at this point save one. He’ll appear immediately after the break. If you’re familiar with the casting in Asylum films, you might know that most of their films, in addition to their regular staple of actors, include one “big name”. Not a big big name, at least a name there is a good chance you’ve heard of. Someone who was way better known 20 years ago than they are today, who probably took the job just for the trip to whatever sunny location they were filming in. Bruce Boxleitner. Lance Heinrikson. William Katt. Lou Diamond Phillips. Lorenzo Lamas. Greg Evigan. Judd Nelson. This film is no different, though there is perhaps a slightly lower chance of you recognizing the name. Our last major character is Pete, played by Christopher Reid.

Don’t recognize him? Here, let me try this one:

This is going to be… Interesting.

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• War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave is available from Amazon.

Somehow, I’d forgotten that. I remembered, of course, that both seasons had done an episode where the alien plot involved using their technology to built a Blotto Box (an apocryphal General Mischief Device capable of destroying telephony equipment over the lines), but what’s really surprising is that both seasons specifically did an episode where the alien blotto box plot is largely secondary to a character-driven plot about a guest character who’s suffering from severe mental trauma leaving their familiar surroundings and trying to get by out on the street with no support system or companionship.

I mean, that’s weird, right? Two times they had this very sci-fi idea of using Science-Flavored-Bullshit to esplode telecommunications equipment remotely, threatening the entire communications infrastructure, and two times the actual episode is an intimate affair focused tightly on the guest characters. It didn’t escape notice at the time. There were complaints about “The Defector” being essentially the same plot as “The Meek Shall Inherit” on that mailing list thread I pretended not to understand at the end of the Antithesis article.

Normally, this is the point where I start talking about how, despite telling basically the same story, the approach is radically different from one season to the next because the first season is set in an ’80s world of optimistic resignation to a sudden apocalypse, while the second is set in a ’90s world of grimdark pessimism about a malingering one. But the truth is, once you get beyond the conceptual level, these two episodes really aren’t telling the same story at all. Kemo’s engram, for instance, remains a recurring and persistent threat throughout the episode: it actually keeps killing people after its first appearance, and unlike the Mortaxan weapon, it actually kills named characters with whom the regulars interact. From the point of view of the Blackwood Project, all that the aliens do in “The Meek Shall Inherit” is to delay Harrison’s attempts to place a long-distance data call and try to steal a truck (Come to think of it, they never actually learn why the aliens are in the truckyard). There’s your excuse for no one noticing the similarities between first and second season plots: the humans frequently end first-season episodes with only a partial understanding of what it was the aliens were up to.

The whole plot with Sylvia is entirely unlike the one with Kemo. Kemo’s story arc is really far closer to “The Prodigal Son“. He’s an outcast from his people, ostracized for being a “freak” and a “half-breed”, and now he seeks to undermine his own people’s leadership to bring the war to an end. But for all that the second season is supposed to be more grim and dark, Kemo, obviously, is the sympathetic one, while Quinn is delightfully, ostentatiously villainous. I could imagine either character returning later in the series as an ally, but Kemo would do so as the legitimate, “noble villain changes sides and demonstrates a way for human and alien to live together in harmony” while Quinn would clearly be more, “unscrupulous villain enters an alliance of convenience while plotting his sudden yet inevitable betrayal.”

But “The Meek Shall Inherit” remained the more obvious point of comparison for most viewers, and the reason for that has to do with the expectations of the target audience. Here’s the operative question: what are these respective episode about?

How you answer that question depends a lot on how you approach the show. And to illustrate that, let me vaguely recall an argument I had years ago with someone who didn’t think that the modern incarnation of Doctor Who was nearly as good as the original. His argument was that the stories were childishly simplistic, and to illustrate his argument, he summarized that the first-series episode “Dalek” thus (More or less):

A Dalek from the time war is found by a rich asshole. It escapes, killing a lot of people along the way, and then commits suicide for no good reason.

By contrast, he offered up an explanation of the first-season serial “The Daleks”:

The Doctor tricks his companions into exploring a technologically advanced city where they are captured by the Daleks. Since they are also dying of radiation poisoning, Susan braves the jungle outside to find medication and meets the peaceful Thals. The Thals try to make peace with the Daleks but are ambushed. In order to retrieve a missing component of the TARDIS, the Doctor manipulates the Thals into fighting the Daleks, with one party braving a dangerous passage guarded by horrifying monsters. The Thals defeat the Daleks just in time to stop them from irradiating the planet.

Obviously, asserted the fictionalized straw-man version of my interloquotor, the original series story was far more deep and complex, while the modern story was a triviality. But, of course, most people who have actually seen the 2005 episode would find that first capsule summary, while strictly technically accurate, misleading to the point of dishonesty. So let’s try another one:

A Dalek from the Time War is found by a rich asshole. For the first time, we see the depth of the Doctor’s post-traumatic stress over the events of the war when the sight of a living Dalek throws the peaceful man into an actual murderous frenzy. While said rich asshole demonstrates that his own inhumanity is comparable to that of the Daleks, the Dalek demonstrates a surprising grasp of human psychology by manipulating Rose into touching its casing, so that it can use her temporal energies to restore itself. However, it gets more than it bargained for when, as it tries to escape, it finds itself compelled to act on human motivations and from a human sense of empathy. Rose’s prompting helps the Doctor to realize that his animosity toward the Dalek undermines his most core values. In the first appearance of one of the longest-running recurring themes in the series, a Dalek who breaks free of its insular Dalek mindset is driven inescapably toward its own destruction, and it ultimately begs to be euthanized, rather than continue to live in its altered state.

And contrariwise, you could give a far less sympathetic summary of the 1963 story:

Everyone goes exploring a spooky alien city and then they get captured and sit around slowly dying for an hour before they escape. The Daleks shoot some guys and everyone runs away and then they spend another hour arguing about what to do next. Then there’s this random cave crawl that’s just there to waste half an hour and then they defeat the Daleks mostly by shoving them.

I mean, okay, the unsympathetic read of Serial B is still longer than the unsympathetic read of episode 1×06. So is the three hour ordeal of actually watching the thing. Neither version of either description is per-se wrong, but they reflect very different ways of addressing the question, “What’s this story about?”

There’s any number of ways to characterize the difference. “Literal” versus “Literate”. “Frock” versus “Gun” (This is a much looser fit than the others). “Hard” versus “Soft”. “STEM” versus “Humanities”. “Rational” versus “Emotional”. “Masculine” versus “Feminine”. Which terms you like to use will almost certainly come down to which side of the schism you’re on, since almost all of the pairs implicitly assume one side or the other to be “more” right.

It is a simple fact of life that “traditional” Science Fiction, what’s generally considered the “golden age” stuff is in large part not actually interested in telling stories. I’ve had this proclaimed to me proudly by fans of it: “Proper Science Fiction, not that baby stuff for girls and humanities majors, isn’t about people, it’s about ideas and science!” The great thrust of “traditional” science fiction is predicated on the assumption that what makes a story good is not the way in which it is told or that it induces catharsis or meets an emotional need in the reader, but rather rests solely in the cleverness of its ideas and how logically they are spooled out to their conclusions. I’ve said before, I think, that structurally, an awful lot of “traditional” sci-fi stories are more akin to jokes than narratives: they consist of a vestigial narrative which exists not to function as a narrative normally does, but to organize a lengthy setup which culminates in a punch-line, and the merit of the story hangs solely in how clever the punch-line is. For a science fiction story, the punch line is usually something like, “It was Earth all along” or “Turns out he was in Hell the whole time” or “And then the aliens eat them” or “No, John, you were the demons. And then John was a zombie.”

I follow the site 365 Tomorrows, which publishes a short science fiction story every day. Most of them are “traditional” sci-fi (to the point that walking through their archives you’ll occasionally hit a run of stories that are shockingly racist or sexist in a really old-school way, particularly some form of “Basically the Vietnam war straight up happened again. Only in space this time.”), and that’s cool. I can enjoy the odd bit of traditional sci-fi, especially if it’s short. A few weeks ago, they ran possibly the most egregiously “traditional” story I’ve ever read, banal enough that I’m surprised terrible people didn’t nominate it for a Hugo. Your unsympathetic capsule summary would be, “The author is very proud of having realized the first thing they tell you in intro to Astronomy, about how traveling in space is traveling in time and really wants to explain it to you.” Less vaguely, one character simply expositions to another the scientific principle on which their job works, which he for some reason doesn’t already know.

I’m getting a little away from myself here. The point is, the appearance that “The Meek Shall Inherit” and “The Defector” are substantially similar derives primarily from choosing to construct the answer to, “So what’s this episode about?” from a very traditionally sci-fi point of view: they’re both about an alien plot to take over human telecommunications systems and blow them up. And yet, through a really weird coincidence, the other thing that the two episodes have in common is that they aren’t really about that after all.

So where do we find ourselves? Somehow, we’ve stumbled back into the thesis that haunted us all the way through Captain Power: we are watching a show — two shows, really — implode because they’re haunted by the future. It is 1989 and 1990. The science fiction trends that will carry us into the 1990s aren’t here yet. The audience for a show like this in 1989 and 1990 just aren’t prepared for the answer to “So what’s this episode about?” to have so little to do with the Big Sci-Fi Alien Idea.

Here, then, is the weirdest thing of all. For once, I don’t get to compare two episodes across the season and say, “The basic story is the same, but the two seasons take a completely different approach”: this time, it turns out that, while they started from the same Big Sci-Fi Alien Idea, the basic story is completely different, and yet, for whatever reason, both episodes approach it in the same way: as a side-story that exists primarily to set the stakes for an episode that is primarily a character drama.

It’s not the cold. It’s something else.

It is February 13, 1989. An insider trading scandal breaks in Japan involving the Recruit company, implicating many government officials. Chairman Hiromasa Ezoe is arrested and the scandal will eventually lead to the resignation of Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita among others. Tomorrow, Ayatollah Khomeini issues a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, prompting years of occasional assassination attempts and talk show appearances. The first GPS satellite is placed in orbit. Wednesday will see the first election in Sri Lanka since 1977 after a violent campaign season. It’ll also see the Soviet Union finish pulling its troops out of Afghanistan, having learned the hard lesson that you should never invade Afghanistan. Thursday will see investigators announce that the Pan Am Flight 103 disaster was caused by a bomb hidden in a tragically named Toshiba Bombeat tape player.

Roy Orbison’s Mystery Girl album, released, as you’ll recall, last week, makes it onto the Billboard top five albums. Since Traveling Wilburys Volume 1 is still on the charts from last year, this makes Orbison the first artist since Elvis to have two top-five albums at the same time despite being dead, a feat not repeated until Michael Jackson died in 2009. Ukeleleist and frequent crossword puzzle clue Tiny Tim throws his hat into the ring in the New York mayoral race. “Straight Up” and “When I’m With You” trade the top two spots on the hot 100. Sheena Easton, Samantha Fox, Rick Astley and Information Society enter top ten, unseating Phil Collins, Def Leppard, Taylor Dane, and Karyn White.

Friday the 13th the Series airs “Better off Dead”. Cursed syringe lets you transplant brain tissue. British TV gets its first LGBT talk show, Channel 4’s Out on Tuesday (later retitled Out). US TV is still all new in prime time, but nothing I particularly remember. Ted Danson hosted Saturday Night Live last Saturday, Leslie Nielsen will host this coming one.

Also on Saturdays, as I’ve neglected to mention so far, is the short-lived Spencer for Hire spin-off A Man Called Hawk. I mention it because the titular character is played by Avery Brooks, who would go on to play Benjamin Sisko on Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Hawk’s habit of addressing his mentor by the moniker “Old Man” would carry over, as, eventually, would his shaved head and goatee.

But Deep Space Nine is far off in the future for right now. Star Trek the Next Generation gives us “The Measure of a Man”, a courtroom drama in which Captain Picard must prove that Data is sufficiently a Real Boy to be allowed to go on living rather than being dissected for study so that Starfleet can start mass-producing android slaves. At the time, I remember rather liking this. I would, in later years, go on to like procedural dramas, plus it’s just adorable that when he thinks he’s leaving, Data packs a little miniature hologram of Tasha Yar. Later, I would sour on the episode. It would become increasingly bothersome that in the 24th century, we could still be having big court cases about whether or not a person was deserving of basic human rights, and whether or not it was okay to enslave someone. Especially when Star Trek Voyager did almost exactly the same legal drama (Though I’ll admit, I loved the sadistic legal twist in that one where the court stuck it to the cartoonishly evil publishing company by declaring that, while they were unwilling to expand the legal definition of “person” to cover holograms, they were willing to expand the legal definition of “artist” so that a hologram could hold a copyright). Also, the stupid nonsensical bullshit of Riker being press-ganged into prosecuting the case against his will for the sake of “conflict”. Later still, I read what Josh Marsfelder had to say about it at Vaka Rangi. Even if he wasn’t completely sold, his general approach closed the loop for me. Star Trek makes way more sense once you realize that the Enterprise is the only place where people actually earnestly hold to the ideals the rest of the Federation only presents as aspirational goals in order to make themselves feel better about being pragmatic capitalist-informed soft-imperialists. I feel a much greater kinship to the Enterprise crew once I came to realize that they’re the people who missed the memo about which of the things we all purport to believe are really just lies we tell ourselves to not feel like monsters.

This week is a special treat. It’s the final appearance of Ann Robinson as Sylvia Van Buren, and her role this week is considerably more substantial than her previous appearances. This episode really makes the case for her being a major character in the series moving forward, and I can only assume that it’s down to nothing more than the fact that we’re into the final third of the season that we don’t see her again after this one.

“The Meek Shall Inherit” is not an episode that ranked particularly high in my radar before. I mean, I remember it being “fine”, but not really anything special. Under closer scrutiny, it holds up well. Or maybe I’m still just pissed about “He Feedeth Among the Lilies”. Like “The Prodigal Son”, I feel like this episode was supposed to air earlier in the season, before “Among the Philistines”, and probably before “Choirs of Angels” and “Dust to Dust” as well. There’s no direct evidence either way for whether it fits before or after “The Prodigal Son”, but my gut instinct is that it goes before that one as well, if only to amplify Harrison’s surprise when Quinn name-drops Sylvia.

The script is by legendary Star Trek alum D. C. Fontana. If you were to put all the scripts for all the episodes of War of the Worlds side-by-side and asked, “Which one of these do you reckon Fontana wrote?”, this is hands-down the one you’d pick. Basically everything that goes right in this episode is part of Fontana’s wheelhouse. It’s not hard to guess that the writer who gave us our most powerful insights into Mr. Spock, and a somewhat surreal reflection on mortality and the character of Pavel Chekhov would also be the writer to give us a more complex and substantial view of Sylvia Van Buren than “mad prophet”.

The plot proceeds along several tracks at once, a more complicated mode of storytelling than has really been typical for the series so far. Only of of the tracks — the one about Sylvia — is really properly good though. The alien plot doesn’t really stand up to any significant contemplation, but is at least well-integrated, unlike the early-season episodes which too-often had the alien and human sides of the plot fail to interact until the last moment. Ironhorse gets the third major plot thread. It’s an interesting thread with good character moments, but it is for the most part tangential to the main story: you could really have slotted it into pretty much any episode so far in the season equally well. For a story focusing on Sylvia, Harrison is curiously bracketed. He and Suzanne do have a minor plot-thread of their own, but it’s entirely subsidiary, just “While actual stuff is happening, Harrison and Suzanne try to find Sylvia.” Norton makes a strong showing early in the episode, but quickly fades into the background.

The episode starts out nice and strong, with an artfully done montage of people in a geographically nonspecific neighborhood displaying how dependent 1980s American culture is on telephony: a man in a phone booth making demands into a payphone about some kind of monetary transaction. 911 dispatchers directing emergency services. A big-haired teenage girl gossiping about, and I quote, what, “Bobby told Johnny that Linda told Cindy,” while her parents admonish her to get off the phone. It’s a strange and wonderful scene to look at now: there’s very little they need to communicate to the audience in explicit terms, because if you lived in the ’80s, the idea of a teenage girl ignoring her family to spread vague gossip via a wired land-line telephone, or of a junkie trying to arrange his next fix from a phone booth — of there being such a thing as phone booths — would be so straightforwardly obvious that it just takes flashing a few quick signifier to get the message across. And yet, in 2016, those are concepts as utterly alien as the phrase “Yahoo Serious Film Festival”.

Intercut with this montage is some linemen working on the phone lines. The reveal that they’re aliens is delayed until after the montage, and for once it actually works. We’re expecting something to happen, but until it actually does, it’s not clear if the linemen will prove to be the cause, or the victims. They activate an electronic device that features as its centerpiece a triangular crystal similar to the space ship starter from “Dust to Dust” (By which I mean “It’s clearly the same prop”). We cut back to the phone users, who are treated to a painfully loud noise and error signal. The teenage girl casts away the handset just before the entire telephone melts into the countertop. The man in the phone booth is less fortunate: the entire booth explodes with him inside it.

In the cave, one of the Advocates disdainfully questions the utility of their newfound ability to blow up telephones. Another explains that, what wit humans being social animals, creating massive disruptions to their communications will have an outside effect on human society and leave them vulnerable to other forms of attack. It’s interesting that the advocates speak of humanity’s social impulses with such smug disdain. The very clear implication is that they consider it a weakness the extent to which humans rely on interacting with each other rather than being self-sufficient isolates. But that’s a very strange position for the aliens to take given that their own society is so tightly constructed around triads. More than that, the alien culture is strictly hierarchical, to the point that it’s been a recurring theme that soldier-class aliens are unable to complete even fairly simple tasks without explicit guidance from leadership, and we saw the last time Ann Robinson guest starred that even the Advocacy becomes severely impaired if the bond between the three of them is damaged. It would have made more sense for the aliens to have aimed their derision at the weakness of human communications infrastructure, rather than the basic fact that humans rely on communications: it certainly would have squared well with what we know about aliens for them to find it laughable that humanity would use such a vulnerable means for something so important. The alien linemen report that they can implement the attack more widely, but require an additional power source. The advocates advise that they’re working on it.

In a night scene, we’re introduced to Molly Stone, our major guest star this week. She’s a street person, and seems to suffer from some kind of mental illness that makes her unwilling or unable to speak. At least, it’ll seem that way until she pretty much drops it halfway through. While she scavenges for food in a trash can, another homeless person, a somewhat older man called Pollito — pretty much a straight-up cartoon hobo from a depression-era short — admonishes her for using the ineffectual “silent bit” rather than contriving a spiel to elicit donations from passers-by. As an example, he approaches a passing couple, begging for change as the cold weather exacerbates his old war-wound. When they brush him off, he announces, “People don’t take care of their vets anymore. That’s why I dodged the draft.” Oh good. He’s going to be the comic relief homeless person. Joy.

Fortunately, he doesn’t last long. He meets up with some friends around a barrel fire, and the offer of alcohol entices him into the shadows, where an alien possesses him. Molly, following at a distance, sees it happen and flees in terror. The next day, after a series of events which will not be covered in this show (and honestly, are probably too tangential to the plot to be worth bothering with, but maybe some kind of quick recap would be nice), Molly ends up as a “charity case” at Whitewood. Nurse Hamilton — the same one we’ve seen in Sylvia’s previous episodes — brings Molly into a common room to show her around, but Molly becomes agitated when the nurse tries to relieve her of her bundle of possessions.

Sylvia is as lucid as we’ve ever seen her, and she’s going to remain largely that way for the bulk of the episode. Fontana takes her cues for writing Sylvia less from her first appearance in “Thy Kingdom Come”, and more from “To Heal the Leper”: rather than being constantly off-kilter, Sylvia’s condition is presented as manifesting in the form of isolated episodes, something akin to a panic attack, which punctuate long periods of normalcy. Outside of her attacks, she seems generally normal. She does show some anxiety later in the episode, but nothing out-of-line with the fact that she’s an elderly woman in an unfamiliar city, hunting aliens. If anything, she copes really well with being so closely involved in an alien plot, and with learning of the aliens’ terrifying ability to absorb human hosts. Over Nurse Hamilton’s complaints, Sylvia takes charge of Molly, offering to show her around and help her relax into her new setting.

Rather than boring us with that, though, the episode switches over to its B-plot. Or C-plot, depending on how you count them. A figure in black approaches The Cottage under cover of twilight. The figure is able to slip past the security and makes it as far as the living room without setting off an alarm, but the ever-vigilant Colonel Ironhorse appears from the hallway and overturns the invader with a flying kick. A scuffle ensues, and despite a few tense moments, Ironhorse emerges the victor, restraining his assailant and unmasking h—

Holy crap, it’s a girl! What a twist! Really, there are few better ways to properly demonstrate twenty-seven years of media progress than by the fact that here in 1989, it was meant to be a shocking twist that this character we have never seen before, never heard of before, don’t know what their game is, and have no sense of their role in the narrative happens to have zero Y-chromosomes. Also that we weren’t supposed to notice the hips or breasts until she gets unmasked.

But who is this strange woman, and why has she broken into the Blackwood Project headquarters? “Not bad, Coleman. Not good either. You made as much noise springing that lock as you would have setting off a flare,” (Are flares known for their noisiness?) Ironhorse admonishes. Yes, this was the traditional “Characters go on a dangerous mission and blow it, only for the shocking reveal that the whole thing was a training exercise designed to showcase the character flaw the episode will focus on them overcoming,” trope, as seen in Star Trek II, the Tomb Raider movie, Power Rangers, and pretty much every episode of the ’90s X-Men cartoon.

That said, its use here is a little bit off-label; normally, you’d frame this with a known-hero character getting defeated by a seeming-villain character: the Enterprise destroyed by Klingons, the X-Men cornered by Sentinels. If you’re introducing a new character, you’d generally frame the scene, as it is here, with the new character as an attacker, but you’d focus the scene on the established character, making them seem legitimately threatened, and ultimately defeated. Typically, you’d include a third character, the “big boss”, who arranged the whole thing as a way for the new character to prove themself, but leading to animosity between the new and established characters that would serve as the source of character tension until the climax. But this episode isn’t going to be about Ironhorse feeling inadequate because he got beat up by a girl until she saves his butt in the climax (More’s the pity: what actually does happen in this episode is close enough to being that plot that I wonder if it was in an earlier draft). Ironhorse bests Coleman. Not trivially, but there’s never any serious doubt that he’s the superior fighter. Neither is there any substantial plot about Coleman needing to prove herself as the rookie on the team: she’s just another minor character, really. There’s a little nod toward Ironhorse having some kind of character arc around needing to work past his reluctance to accept Coleman due to her gender, but it’s dispensed with quickly. I’m certainly not complaining that Ironhorse recognizes that any issues he has about women in combat roles are his problem, behaves like a professional and just sucks it up, but it leaves this side of the plot feeling disconnected from the larger story.

We get more of an explanation for what’s going on with this training exercise when Ironhorse dismisses Coleman for the evening and heads down to the lab. He’s assembling a special-forces team, dubbed “Omega Squad”, to handle direct confrontation with the aliens. In aired order, of course, we’ve already seen them, back in “Among the Philistines”. I’m a little hard-pressed to think what specifically would prompt this right now — maybe the events of “The Good Samaritan”, or Ironhorse’s complete failure to usefully leverage the local police in “The Prodigal Son”, if that one was meant to come first. But any of the first six episodes seem like they’d provide much better justification for giving Ironhorse his own private on-call unit, so why is this only happening so late in the season? Candidates for the team were selected based on a psychological profile Suzanne compiled for him. I’m going to have to go back at some point and see if I missed a line somewhere, because they seem to have settled on the idea that Suzanne is a psychologist and I have absolutely no recollection of this fact having been introduced at any point.

When Ironhorse challenges the accuracy of Suzanne’s profile, she counters by accusing him of being unwilling to believe, “a woman, any woman, has any place in a special unit designed to provide, quote, tactical backup in case of a major altercation with aliens, unquote.” Ironhorse dodges the accusation, but maintains that the other candidates are too rebellious. Suzanne insists that her profile is perfect for the mission as described. “How can you say that?” Ironhorse asks, “I mean, who’d you model this profile on, Rambo?”

Lynda Mason Green gives what is, in my opinion, her single best line delivery in the entire series, and, in a tone of utter innocence, says, “Why no, Paul. I modeled it on you.”

While this has been going on, Harrison and Norton are struggling with the phone system. Harrison “can’t save the world” until Norton can work out a way to connect to the mainframe at the Pentagon. And since this is 1989 and your normal TV audiences haven’t heard of ARPANET, the only way for one government facility to network with another government facility is via a dial-up modem (presumably with an acoustic coupler) over plain old-fashioned AT&T long distance service. Only that small-scale test the aliens carried out a day and a half ago, despite their limited power supply, somehow took out all the long-distance lines on the west coast. Norton can’t even route around the trouble by bouncing the call over to Hawaii and back through Toronto. Jokes about the phone company ensue which probably don’t really work unless you’re old enough to remember when it was just “The Phone Company” and not “Phone Companies“.

It’s the next day before connectivity is restored. Alongside this is a bit that strikes me as very D. C. Fontana. Norton’s coffee-fetishism resurfaces for the first time in months as he entreats Harrison to try a new blend he’s cooked up. In 1989, we’re still in the early stages of the proliferation of second-wave coffee. Starbucks has only recently started serving brewed beverages, so we’re still in the stage where it’s more about defining and appreciating specialty coffee, rather than the social experience of the coffeehouse. The Pacific Northwest, where we’ve presumptively located our gang is certainly the right geographical region for a nacient coffee-snob (Though remember, Norton was based near LA prior to the events of the pilot). Norton’s coffee snob credentials are meant to be part of his lovable quirkiness, and in that vein, I think it helps more than hurts that he’s a coffee-snob as written by someone who isn’t a coffee snob — no proper self-respecting coffee-snob would be working from canned grounds and a Mr. Coffee Automatic Drip brewer. And he probably wouldn’t have used too much chicory either. Norton’s curiosity gets the better of him and he snoops on internal phone company traffic, learning that the damage has been attributed to, “saboteurs unknown”. It’s pretty thin evidence, but Harrison agrees that this is the sort of show where if your milk goes sour before its sell-by date, it’s probably aliens, so he advises him to keep looking into it. They also make some snide remarks about eco-terrorists, the presumed default “more likely” culprit, which they dismiss since the saboteurs failed to go public with demands.

Like Norton’s coffee, this is a minor element that hearkens back to earlier in the series. Specifically, a slightly ramped-up bit of ’80s zeitgeist brought up as though it’s perfectly normal. We saw it before with cattle mutilations, LARPers going postal, biological warfare experiments killing “all those people”, even insurgent student groups taking over a nuclear waste depot. This show presumes a world that’s really unstable. Where if the phones don’t work one day, your first thought would be, “Oh, it’s probably a group of radical students protesting political prisoners in Antarctica.” What is less clear, because you and I are in the twenty-first century looking back, is that to a greater or lesser extent, that’s just how the ’80s were. Satanist cults sacrificing children in daycare, cities in the midwest becoming ghost-towns due to accidents at nuclear research labs, the occasional high-ranking military officer absconding with an ICBM and declaring himself the king of St. Louis, these weren’t things that ever actually happened, but they were things that were thinkable as real scenarios. To the point that we were all kinda surprised when they didn’t happen. Maybe even a little bit angry — and we’d see that anger manifest in the ’90s with the rise of Grimdark and with conspiracy theories becoming more mainstream.

But I’ve meandered away from the plot, which has been moving on its own during the phone outage. At Whitewood, Molly witnesses Sylvia having an attack. Nurse Hamilton has her sedated and refuses to call Harrison, as, “We’ve been bothering Dr. Blackwood far too frequently.” Once again, we see the weirdly casual strangeness of this world. It was established back in “Thy Kingdom Come” that the staff knows that her episodes coincide with natural disasters: she predicted the Mt. St. Helens explosion. But they’re treating her here like she’s — well, like every misunderstood character with precognitive powers in a work of fiction is treated by mental health professionals. They assume the crazy old woman ranting about three-fingered aliens just needs to be strapped down and sedated. As the drugs kick in, Sylvia drifts off, muttering pleas for someone to believe her. Unnoticed, Molly whispers her first line of dialogue: “I believe you.”

Continue reading Thesis: The Meek Shall Inherit (War of the Worlds 1×16)

Previously…

Aside from the fact that it seems to be under military occupation, the next town George and Kerry come to is bizarrely normal. They still have power, their cars are working, but George notes that they clearly don’t have communication. They stop to buy food at an Albertsons’, and George asks the shopkeep about it. He doesn’t know anything specific, has only heard conflicting rumors about the nature of the attackers, and isn’t sure if they’re going to have to evacuate. “Heard it was terrorists. Heard it was monsters from under the Earth. Heard it was the military screwing around with chemicals. Nobody knows what’s going on. Too much nonsense to go around worrying about the inevitable.” I get the sense from the way a group of people, presumably the shopkeep’s family, are gathered behind him, that everyone’s on edge, but lacking anything they can actually do in the near term, they’re just going about their business waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s a little surreal, given that this is the only town we’ve seen that hasn’t been hit, and the fact that nothing in the film actually relies on one particular town to be in good condition feels to me like it’s a deliberate attempt to evoke the notion of the strange capriciousness of war, where you might very well see one house or street or even town that remains perfectly intact, somehow overlooked by the violence around it.

On the steps of some large public building, George pulls out that photograph of his family to emote over it. He mentions to Kerry that his son’s nickname is “Wrangler” (a name we never hear anyone call the kid), just like Galileo, and that George had met his wife at the Smithsonian Star Trek Exhibit. I don’t remember seeing him there.

Hopewell is in worse shape. An alien walker attacks as George and Kerry approach a refugee registration post, and we see the first proper battle since the first one at the meteor pit. There’s numerous individual shots which are clearly meant as direct homages to the 1953 film.

The aliens reveal a new form of attack as well, disgorging small four-legged vehicles (these might be the aliens themselves, it’s not clear) with long, phallic tongues that look like a cross between an Arrakis sandworm and a Xenomorph.

They find George’s brother buried and delirious in the rubble of his demolished house. His dialogue is only partially coherent and hard to make out, but we get a bit of a sense of what sort of guy he is when he tries to comfort George, even as they pull back the debris covering him to discover that he’s been blown in half, his body ending abruptly in a CGI cauterized wound below his rib cage. With difficulty, Kerry persuades George to leave once his brother has died, but the two get separated on what I guess is the bank of the James river (The movie’s geography doesn’t extend much beyond place and highway names. The mountains in the background suggest that they got their ideas about the terrain of the Tidewater region from Disney’s Pocahontas).

George drifts downriver for at least a day in a small boat he finds, eventually abandoning it to sleep in a broken-down truck parked by the side of the river, allegedly north of Charles City, even though the river runs south of the city, and it’s not like rivers can get lost. He wakes with company, Pastor Victor, this film’s version of the Curate. Victor is kind, and composed, and takes care of George, whose cold has gotten really bad at this point. He thinks of the aliens as a form of demon, and believes their presence signifies the rapture, and therefore his faith will protect him. Admittedly, there’s a lot of different variations on rapture theology, but coercing an alien invasion to fit the model seems like a stretch, and Pastor Victor’s theology seems otherwise pretty mainstream, so this might just be down to filmmakers thinking rapture theology is a lot more mainstream than it is. He agrees to accompany George to Washington.

George finds some berries with antioxidant properties, to help with Victor’s fever, because the writer forgot which one of them was sick, and they somehow fail to notice that an alien walker is standing directly over them. They escape unscathed, but Victor’s faith takes a major blow when he finds one of his parishioners, who curses him and God both over the death of her children.

They somehow cover about a hundred miles by nightfall, since Victor’s crisis of faith next manifests in him reminiscing about a woman he’d been attracted to in Stafford as they pass it. They narrowly survive when the aliens release a low-hanging green toxic gas, similar to the black smoke that appeared in the novel. Victor becomes increasingly distant, just muttering that he’s hungry over and over for several scenes. After passing a destroyed cruise ship in a small pond, they hole up in a veterinarian’s abandoned home office. While they scavenge, George notices a man in an adjacent house. He runs outside to meet him, and the man seems utterly casual, almost unaware of what’s going on. They’re both forced back inside by encroaching green smoke, and we never see the other guy again. He looks more annoyed than frightened.

While they wait out the smoke upstairs, Victor finally voices his fear, that God might have abandoned them. Before George can respond, an alien craft crashes near the house, and the floor gives out below them.

As his faith deserts him, Victor challenges George on why he’s still trying to get to Washington. He cites the physics principle that if two randomly moving objects in space have a higher probability of meeting if one of them stands still. Victor finds this unsatisfying, as he’d privately hoped George was simply acting on faith. After George has a nightmare about finding his wife’s mangled body in the debris, Victor finally snaps.

Because it’s been more than four days. Yeah. That’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back: the bible is “very specific” that the rapture will occur three and a half days after the killing starts, so the fact that he’s still here means that he’s been… Left Behind (yes he uses those words). This is not a variation on rapture theology I’m specifically familiar with, but hey. I just like his absolute certainty that the bible is “very specific” that if aliens show up and take more than three days to cause the resurrection, it means that God has abandoned you.

George takes stock of their provisions. While explaining why you can’t eat food that’s past its sell-by date since it will expose you to toxins that weaken your immune system, he has a Lightbulb Moment about the immune system, and declares that the way to fight the flu is to inject a “stronger, deadlier virus,” and looks for Chekov’s Rabies Vaccine (Which Victor had spotted shortly before the house fell down on them), claiming, since weapons hadn’t worked, a virus might, since it’s “life fighting life”, and that injecting an alien with rabies vaccine will “Spread toxins that will carry a deadly disease.”

Hooboy. Should we take inventory of what’s wrong with that?

• Moldy food isn’t necessarily unsafe, especially dry goods like the ones they’re looking at.
• You don’t cure the flu by injecting a “stronger, deadlier virus”. That would kill you. You sometimes treat some diseases by introducing a weaker, less deadly one.
• “Spread toxins that will carry a disease” is gibberish.
• Viruses aren’t technically alive. Turns out that in 2015, ten years after this movie was made, evidence was found that viruses evolved from ancient precursors to modern cells, and do count as properly alive, contrary to what was generally believed previously. You can have this one, movie.
• Only rabies vaccine is a dead virus vaccine, so no, even if viruses are alive, the ones in that vaccine aren’t.
• Also, it’s really really hard for viruses to jump species, since their mechanism of operation is DNA-specific, so it’s highly unlikely that an Earth virus would affect aliens. (Bacteria are completely different)
• Also, viruses don’t release toxins. That’s bacteria.

Victor hears shouts outside and clears some dirt from the shattered windowframe. They see a man and a child cocooned by the aliens in glowing materials some distance off. To their horror, a three-fingered alien hand pierces the chest of the man, causing him to thrash in fast-motion accompanied by a sucking sound. George hears the child cry out for his father and imagines it to be Alex. Victor restrains him, but he too is completely broken by this. He finds a bottle of wine and drinks it, declaring that he no longer believes in anything but himself, and that there is no God. He confesses that he’s been leading George not toward DC, but toward shelter in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It does not say much for the astronomer’s sense of celestial navigation if he can’t tell the difference between north and southwest.

A large alien tentacle breaks into their shelter, and George saves Victor by injecting rabies vaccine into it, and, because this is a movie, of course it works. Yes. This is the first War of the Worlds adaptation to propose that the aliens are, in fact, defeated, by a deliberate act of a human being. I mean, we never see a living alien after this point, but okay, they do not actually outright say that this is what kills them for reals. If you want, you can interpret it not as causality but foreshadowing: George demonstrates that disease could work so that it isn’t a deus ex machina when it turns out to be what does them in at the end.

In fact, I think that’s the best way to interpret it. There is one unquestionable thing which this movie does better than any other adaptation we’ve talked about, and it’s foreshadowing. Right from the get-go, we’ve had this theme of disease bouncing around. Alex has a cold right at the beginning, then George battles severe flu-like symptoms for much of the movie’s second act. The subject of antibiotics and medicine comes up several times, even George’s dodgy claims about why you can’t eat spoiled food play into it. Every other adaptation fails to mention disease until the epilogue. The only thing that even comes close is the mention in the George Pal film that alien blood is anemic.

Oh, and also diseases cause the aliens to discharge pink electricity. Oh, Asylum, don’t ever stop being ridiculous.

Victor’s faith is restored instantly by George’s success. It’s a short-lived victory, though, since the tentacle comes back ten seconds later and sneezes on him, causing the pastor to dissolve gruesomely. George is so shaken by the horror of it that he just curls up under a rug and hides. In the morning, the aliens are gone, but George is still so rattled that he only notices after hours of wandering around the demolished basement, pointedly trying to not look at Victor’s remains.

He finds some carrots in the garden of a house that has a tractor trailer sticking out of its roof, then nearly misses noticing his wife’s car abandoned on a street. Inside, he finds the ring-box he’d given Alex, now empty. His pained, tired expression is difficult to pin down to a single emotion. The scene is weakened a little bit by the fact that I have no idea where it’s taking place. Is he in Washington? (No, not yet). Why is her car here? Did someone steal it trying to flee? Are we meant to wonder if she herself tried to abandon DC? And more importantly, is that what George thinks? The only working cars we’ve seen in some time were in the nameless, untouched city before Hopewell. Is this as far as she’d gotten when the aliens arrived and, like George, she had to walk the rest of the way? But why would it be here, then, if Victor had been leading George south-west? The reveal of Victor’s detour doesn’t really contribute anything to the story: there’s no indication of how much this puts George out or that it serves as a measurable delay (Given where they started, Victor couldn’t actually have taken them that far out of their way without crossing back over the river; even going due west would still have gotten George generally closer to DC).

He collapses from exhaustion in a wooded area (How the hell is he navigating anyway?) and the photo of his family gets carried away on the wind. When he discovers it missing, he breaks down. He throws himself on the ground screaming, and cries himself to sleep.

I’ll admit, this movie is doing a good job of depicting the slow, grinding despair that wears people down until they finally snap, not over a big thing, but something small that is just one step too far. Victor’s spiritual crisis starts twenty minutes before it actually comes to a head. It goes from a moment of doubt and uncertainty, to the fear that he’s been rejected by God, to his own rejection of his faith, with incremental steps along the way, not just the cliche, “I just discovered the problem of theodicy so now I am an angry cliche strawman atheist played by Kevin Sorbo in a Harold Cronk film.” George’s breakdown is even slower.

A lot of it is dialogueless, too. After Victor’s death, George is alone for the first extended period in the film, and when George is alone, his only dialogue is the occasional prayer. He’d been alone for two segments before, before and after meeting Kerry, but those are short sequences on film, just a few quick cuts to suggest the passage of time. Here, we stay with George much longer as he wanders through ruined and abandoned towns, becoming ever more distraught.

In parallel to their initial meeting by the shed in the woods, it’s Kerry who finds George, again unconscious, at his lowest moment. Kerry insists that DC is gone, and asks George to come with him to the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he claims hundreds of soldiers and other survivors are gathering. And here, Kerry starts to sound more like the novel’s artilleryman, from whom his character is clearly inspired:

Kerry: It’s just us now. Today we hide, tomorrow we rebuild
George: Tomorrow?Kerry: Today, tomorrow, next year, ten years. We start an army. For us. For those of us who are brave enough to fight

But this is a red herring, because Kerry isn’t the real equivalent of the artilleryman. George slugs him for his insistance that Washington has been destroyed without survivors, only to find a gun to his head, weilded by Samuelson, who informs him that, “An assault on one of my officers is punishable by death in my new world.”

Samuelson has gone full-Busey now. He’s promoted himself to General in the “Eastern Resistance”, calls George’s brother a pussy, laughing at the story of his demise, and even seems to have developed a case of Tourette Syndrome, as he breaks off in the middle of a sentence to stammer the word “shit” repeatedly several times. A grinning lunatic, he conscripts George under threat of death.

Despite his lunacy, though, Samuelson is still able to recognize George’s value as a scientist. “It’s the scientists that will win this war. It’s the scientists that have won every war. He is exactly what we need. You will die. I will probably die. Why? To buy his brain more time to beat these fuckers.” Just to demonstrate how much more valuable he considers George than anyone else, he suddenly draws his gun and shoots Kerry in the head, saying, “Compared to his knowledge and intellect, you are so worthless that, you know, I think, you know, I might as well, I think, I might as well just do this.”

In most movies, Samuelson would straight up be the “real” antagonist here. The aliens, after all, are going to take care of themselves: they’re more a force of nature than an antagonist. It would be Samuelson who’s the actual threat for the protagonist to overcome. That could work as an angle. It’s always been one of the difficulties in adapting this particular story that the hero has little to no agency: the story isn’t especially about him, and nothing he does particularly leads to the resolution. The aliens are the iceberg, or the earthquake, or the asteroid: what’s lacking is someone to be the human antagonist who wants to suppress the cure for the zombie plague so he can sell it, or lock the third-class passengers below deck so they can’t get to the lifeboats. We need a Billy Zane.

But here, the movie does something unexpected. They instead take a sort of a page from the novel, by demonstrating the gulf between Samuelson’s powers and his ambitions. Because he might talk a good game (Well, a crazy game, but it sounds reasonable on paper), but he’s far less of a threat than he seems. Before he’s even gotten to gloat over Kerry’s body, George smashes his head in with a rock. The remaining soldiers barely glance at their fallen “General’ before just wandering away. They may have been willing to obey him in their desperation to find anyone who could tell them what to do, but there’s no real loyalty there.

It’s daytime in the next scene, as George approaches the Lincoln Memorial. From the angle, he must be approaching via the Arlington Memorial Bridge, though the design of the bridge is entirely wrong, as are its proportions, and the Potomac comes almost up to the steps of the monument. Which is facing the wrong way. Honestly, it looks more like the Jefferson Memorial from its placement relative to the water. The broken-off bottom half of the Washington Monument is visible in the distance, and the dome of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum can be seen in some of the long shots, though the National Mall has been largely turned into a quarry, and what landmarks you can see are all proportioned wrong for the real-world distances. So business as usual, really.

After sitting alone at the monument for some time, he sees one of the smaller alien quadrupeds standing motionless in the ruins of a building that looks nothing like anything in that part of town, and decides he’s had enough. He walks up to the alien machine, and accuses it of having taken away his family, his God, and his life, and demands his death of it. Instead, the machine collapses at his feet, which is kinda disappointing to George, given how far gone he is. As he looks down, confused, at the fallen alien, survivors emerge from hiding to confirm that the alien is dead, and reveal that the invaders have been slowly dying over the past few days. George asks about his son, and one of the survivors tells him that they’ve got “lots of children.”

First Alex, then Felicity, emerge from hiding and scramble over the debris to embrace George as the camera pans up to reveal defunct alien walkers standing amongst the ruins of the city, framed by a shot of damaged but not-demolished DC landmarks you could not possibly all get into the frame at the same time.

It’s hard to say what to make of this movie. I mean, come on. This is The Asylum. They’re supposed to be making cheap schlock full of bad CGI, excessive gore and brief nudity. And obviously, all of that is in here. But then there’s all this other stuff. What this adaptation really seized on in a way that no other adaptation we’ve looked at has is the way that living through war or natural disaster slowly drains and grinds people down, that you simply get worn out from it. It’s a movie that wants to show the slow, subtle horrors of war rather than the large, grandiose ones. That’s the angle, and it’s one that works really well for this particular story, whose plot, after all, is mostly, “A man walks a long way and sees the horrors of war.”

Time is always at a premium in a movie, and that makes it surprising how much time this movie takes with its characters. George’s slow breakdown, Victor’s slow loss of faith, even Samuelson’s quasi-megalomania are built up over time rather than coming as a sudden, explosive character change.

There’s also an interestingly underplayed religious angle. Science and religion, of course, are not natural enemies, though it’s widely believed so by people who are either sixteenth-century Catholics, modern American evangelical protestants, or atheists who believe the previous two groups represent the only possible ways religions could work. But Hollywood almost always wants to present the two as opposed, and almost always wants to come down on the side of religion, even if you’re not an explicitly religious filmmaker. You’d expect to see a conflict between Victor and George, with the scientist opposing the pastor’s religious views. But George is clearly a man of faith himself, and while he may not agree with the details of Victor’s eschatology, he isn’t dismissive of it, and at least broadly agrees with the general principles of a higher power watching out for them. George never has a “come to Jesus” moment where he submits himself to a higher power and is rewarded, though: like Victor, his faith is challenged by the tragedy he experiences, but there’s no real sense of his beliefs being changed. Kinda like racism in last week’s TV series episode, it’s unusual to see the religious element being addressed at all, without it rearing up to consume the plot and themes of the story.

But what stymies me is this: why? Why is the studio that will one day give us Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No trying to make a serious movie about the horrors of war? Why is any studio trying to make a serious movie about the horrors of war and also cheap CGI aliens, excessive gore and brief nudity? How am I to take your deep and complex character arcs seriously when your aliens have acid-spitting penis-tentacles? Who is the intended audience for a movie like this?

On a technical level, the movie is mostly okay, nothing special. The CGI was terrible when it was made and age hasn’t made it charming, but the cinematography in the scenes without visual effects is adequate. The acting is also adequate, again, nothing special. Aside from the CGI, there’s really very little outright bad about it. It’s surprising how geographically grounded it is, but also how haphazard: place names and directions are right, but scale is all over the place. It’s like the writer charted out George’s journey on a political map, but didn’t bother to look at the scale or the topography.

There’s references to the Blue Ridge Mountains which seem to be meant as symbolism for the concept of giving up and going to ground, much as Washington is a symbol for carrying on and moving forward, and again, geographical symbolism? In an Asylum film? The hell?

It punches above its weight. It does an okay job of it, with a couple of strong characters (Though it’s a heck of a sausage-fest; there are four speaking female roles, but only one has more than four lines, and Felicity only has at most a dozen) and some powerful themes that are well-realized. But who the hell comes to The Asylum for that? Why would you do this? What were they thinking?

And where would they go from here?

And now for something… exactly the same.

It is June 28, 2005. In Afghanistan, eleven Navy SEALs and eight US Army Special Operations aviators are killed in Operation Red Wings when a reconnaissance team is compromised on the ground, and the helicopter sent to their aid is shot down. It is considered one of the worst tragedies in US Special Forces history. The final design for Manhattan’s Freedom Tower is unveiled.

Diary of a Mad Black Woman and The Even Stevens Movie are among today’s home video releases. In theaters this week are Batman Begins, March of the Penguins, and Romero’s Land of the Dead. Dead to Rights: Reckoning is released for the PlayStation Portable. Lesley Gore, best known for “It’s My Party”, releases Ever Since, her first album of new material in thirty years. Mariah Carey is number one on the charts with “We Belong Together”, followed by Gwen Steffani’s “Hollaback Girl”. Kelly Clarkson holds two spots in the top ten, with “Behind These Hazel Eyes” and “Since U Been Gone”, both holding steady since last week at numbers 6 and 9.

World events preempt the first half-hour of prime time, but ABC goes on to air the first episode of Empire, a miniseries about the rise of Caesar Augustus. Star Trek is off the air, of course, with the finale of Star Trek: Enterprise back in May. Ten days ago, Doctor Who wrapped up its first season with Christopher Eccleston’s final episode, “The Parting of the Ways”. We’re a little more than half-way through the run of Power Rangers SPD with Saturday’s episode, “Perspective”, their take on Rashomon. I mean, kinda. They half-ass it, literally just showing the same footage four times with dialogue that’s almost identical except for which character is being praised by the others. The episode serves primarily to tease the introduction of Sam, the time-traveling Omega Ranger, when the show returns from a short break. Morgan Spurlock is Jon’s guest on The Daily Show.

The Asylum. A film production company whose business model is based fifty percent on targeting people who only ever watch movies “ironically” and fifty percent on confusing old people into disappointing their grandchildren on movie night. “What do you mean? I thought you liked those Transmorphers. Fine, we’ll watch that other one you like, Snakes on a Train.” They churn out low-budget films, usually starring one B-list actor who you’ve actually heard of, packed with cheap sensationalism, but not quite as trashy as a proper grindhouse film, and you could sorta imagine that if Jaws had never happened and the Hollywood Blockbuster weren’t the dominant form of “proper” movie, these would be considered pretty much business-as-usual. They’re not on par with “real” movies, but they’re basically competent, at least half of the time.

Though a lot of their movies stand on their own, Sharknado being the most infamous, their bread-and-butter is what they term “Mockbusters”. These are films with a similar title and vaguely similar concept to a major studio film, released within a few days of their counterpart. They claim, grandparents aside, that they’re not trying to confuse anyone, but are honest about their intention to piggyback on the marketing hype of high-budget films. If the public’s already in the mood for a movie about the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse, they say, why not put out three or four of them? Given the glut of zombie movies a few years ago, or Warner’s shameless and misguided attempts to imitate the Marvel Cinematic Universe with DC, or the DreamWorks/Pixar wars, or, heck, the cluster of airport disaster films in the late ’70s, it’s hard to fault them for anything more than being especially shameless about it. There were two major studio films about Hercules in 2014, why should The Asylum get worse flack for making a third?

Heck, The Asylum is only really responsible for a third of the War of the Worlds adaptations that came out in 2005.

The thing is, of course, that they’re just so shameless about it. The DaVinci Treasure. AVH: Alien vs. Hunter. Death Raceers. The Day the Earth Stopped. American Warship. Atlantic Rim. The Terminators. Battle of Los Angeles. I’m not making any of these up.

But before Transmorphers and Paranormal Entity, before Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies and Android Cop, long before Mecha-Shark vs Mega-Shark and Sharknado, before 2012: Doomsday, 2012: Supernova and 2012: Ice Age, even before the Sherlock Holmes movie where he battles a giant robot Tyrannosaurus (Seriously, this exists), there was H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.

HG Wells’ War of the Worlds was The Asylum’s first Mockbuster, and its success — Blockbuster ordered a hundred thousand copies — is a big part of the reason that the company took the path it did. But while the next decade would see The Asylum progressively going further and further over-the-top, becoming more self-aware, and reveling in their own ridiculousness, here in 2005, they were still looking to be an ordinary, respectable, low-budget movie maker. You’re not going to see any giant sharks, zombies, or robot dinosaurs in this movie. The most outlandish thing you’re going to see is giant alien war machines with death rays, and, I mean, it’s War of the Worlds. You pretty much have to.

And that is… Kind of a problem with this movie. I find myself in the weird position of saying that this movie would be better if it were worse. Because David Michael Latt’s movie is… Fine. It’s okay. It is an intensely okay adaptation of the novel, adapted, as almost every other one is, to the present day. It’s moderately faithful to the plot of the novel. Thematically, it’s quite different, but it’s different in that it is strongly focused on the impact of the invasion to humanity rather than getting bogged down in the technical details of the aliens. The aliens themselves are somewhat liminal figures: most of their appearances in the movie serve to mark the end of a sequence, the point where everyone stops doing what they were doing and runs away to the next scene. Allegedly, the movie’s themes were heavily inspired by Roman Polanski’s 2002 film The Pianist, a movie set in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw during the Nazi invasion of Poland. So this is clearly a movie that wants to be heavy and serious and say things about the human condition.

And then you get shots like this:

Also, it has Jake Busey in it. “Take my somber movie about the horrors of war seriously: it’s got Jake Busey in it,” said no one ever, except David Michael Latt.

That’s really the big stylistic failing of the movie. There’s very little specifically wrong with it: it’s a weak movie with second-string talent behind it, but it’s not an outright failure on a technical or narrative level. No, the problem this movie has is that if you put it next to almost any other movie ever made, and asked me to argue why you should watch War of the Worlds instead of the other one, I’d be hard-pressed to tell you. Put it next to a good movie, and the good movie is better. Put it next to a bad movie, and the bad movie might at least be an interesting sort of failure. Put it next to the great thrust of movies that are somewhere in the middle, and, well, whichever, I guess.

The invaders are never specifically identified as being from Mars. In fact, I don’t think anyone ever comes out and calls them aliens. Not, as in some of our past examples, that they play coy about it and try to convince us that no one believes it’s aliens; more like the fact that the invaders are extraterrestrial is just so obvious that no one needs to point it out. One person does refer to the invaders as “terrorists”, but it’s not meant as a denial of the truth, but as a demonstration of how completely the lines of information have broken down, that no one’s been able to disseminate details about the attacks. The opening credits do show a Martian landscape, though, just in case we were unsure. It’s overlaid with “computer-vision” effects, as if to suggest we’re seeing the point of view of a Mars rover — Spirit and Opportunity were still big in the public consciousness a year into their extended missions. We return to Earth to meet our hero, played by once-promising actor, guy who was the second choice to play Marty in Back to the Future right behind the other guy who didn’t play Mary in Back to the Future, and person I keep confusing with the millionaire from Gilligan’s Island, C. Thomas Howell. He’s playing an astronomer named, in keeping with federal guidelines on protagonist naming in Wells adaptations, George Herbert.

He flirts heavily with his wife, Felicity, as they prepare for a trip to Washington to mark their anniversary. The scene doesn’t come off as especially salacious on paper, but she’s just gotten out of the shower and her breasts are exposed for so much of the scene that there is really no excusing this as anything other than really shameless titillation, and there was absolutely no warning that this was going to happen in this movie, and it’s the only nudity in the thing. After a little backstory and foreshadowing — their son has a cold — he heads downstairs. They don’t say it directly, but I gather Mars is in opposition, because his son, Alex (played by Howell’s real-life son), is trying to find it in the backyard telescope before they leave. George doubts it will be visible in full sunlight, but his son thinks he sees it. What he’s actually seeing is a CGI meteor, which impresses George enough that his wife is worried.

Her worries are borne out when the phone rings. It’s the observatory, where George’s boss wants him to come in and look at this wicked cool meteor shower. They never actually say where the Herberts live. The contextual clues seem like they indicate somewhere in the middle of Virginia: the only other place mentioned by name is Hopewell, which is a city in Virginia (Though also the name of unincorporated towns in West Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland). But Felicity mentions it being a five-hour drive to DC, which would put them much farther away. And her car has Delaware plates. They also mention highways numbered 85 and 40, which might suggest he’s somewhere in the vicinity of Chapel Hill, Raleigh, or Durham, North Carolina, and that’s reasonable since Duke and UNC both have associated observatories.[br]But personally, I think the most interesting place he could be that’s five hours’ drive from DC, would have to be Green Bank, West Virginia, where the Robert Byrd Radio Telescope is located, though it doesn’t quite fit, since they’ve got a cordless telephone and cell phones, which are, check this: illegal in Green Bank, on account of they don’t want anything interfering with the radio telescope. But maybe they live in the next town over or something. But keep Green Bank in mind if you ever find yourself wanting to write a radio telescope-related horror story.[br]Actually, never mind. The third time I watched it, I caught a line about halfway through where he mentions being from Greensboro. Which means he presumably works at a fictionalized version of the Cline Observatory at Guilford Technical Community College. So kudos to the filmmakers for actually getting the geography more-or-less right, even if they seem not to understand how walking works. He promises his family that he’ll catch up with them the next day. His wife takes it badly, which is entirely fair, because it’s their anniversary and he’s doing the cliche fictional man-who-always-puts-work-ahead-of-family thing. It comes from nowhere and goes nowhere and has nothing to do with his character development. There’s no plot arc where he has to learn to put his family first or anything: this whole development exists purely to give George the specific motivation of reuniting with his family later.

There wasn’t even a hint of tension in the family unit so far, so it feels very out-of-nowhere when Alex asks if this means his parents are going to divorce. To reassure him, George puts Alex in charge of the diamond ring he plans to give Felicity on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial when he proposes renewing their vows.

Time goes just a little wonky, as it’s night in the next scene. Possibly it was late afternoon when they left. That would track with the idea that George not arriving in Washington until the next morning was a reasonable thing to suggest, but Felicity imposes an urgency on their departure that seems like she’s got plans to actually do something when they get there. That makes it unlikely that their plan was to roll into DC in the middle of the night.

Another meteor streaks across the sky and George’s car suddenly dies in the middle of nowhere. Or not. Looked like a lonely country road, but when he gets out and walks to the impact site, it’s filled with people, confused and curious. George himself is confused as hell that the object didn’t make a bigger crater. He makes a little stab at that ’50s sci-fi movie thing where declaring himself a scientist automatically puts him in charge, but he doesn’t really have the confidence to impress anyone since his scientific background doesn’t answer any of the relevant questions about what the object is, where it came from, or why no one’s cell phone works.

What he can do is to help a woman whose boyfriend fell into the pit. Actually no, help is too strong a word. Try to help. One of the things this movie does well is its use of themes and symbolism: for most of the film, even before the invaders get involved, George fails at basically everything he tries to do. Just as the combined might of man will prove unable to turn back the aliens, whether it’s driving to work, taking his family on vacation, persuading his wife to sleep with him while packing, or helping a guy out of a crater, George Herbert’s best efforts always come up short. They actually could have turned this into a pretty powerful theme with just a little more work, though in a movie like this, it might push the whole thing into the territory of glurge. This low-budget alien invasion movie needs complex symbolism like a hole in the head.

Continue reading Deep Ice: It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation (The Asylum’s War of the Worlds, Part 1)

It is February 12, 1990. Carmen Lawrence becomes the first female premier of Western Australia. The Open Skies conference begins in Helsinki between NATO and Warsaw Pact nations, establishing rules for unarmed aerial surveillance flights. The treaty will be signed at the end of next month, but won’t come into effect until 2002. Tomorrow, the East German government will head over to Bonn to discuss reunification with the west. They don’t make any concrete headway, since no one really has a lot of faith in the East German government at the moment (They’re only minding the shop until free elections can be held in a few weeks), but this is basically the point where everyone’s resigned themselves to reunification happening, with the French, the British and the Russians having pretty much given up trying to prevent it. Later this week, the UK will restore diplomatic relations with Argentina for the first time since the Falkland Islands invasion in 1982, but relations have remained tense. Wednesday, ten years after completing its primary mission, and just before shutting down its cameras to conserve power, Voyager I looks over its shoulder and snaps a series of 60 images which are stitched together to form the “Family Portrait”, a panorama view of the solar system showing six planets (The others were in bad positions at the time), and including the “Pale Blue Dot” image of Earth from 3.7 billion miles away. The 11th Panchen Lama may have been born this week, depending on whether you agree with the Chinese government or with the Dalai Lama.

Yesterday, Buster Douglas beat Mike Tyson by knock-out in the ninth round in Tokyo to become Heavyweight Champion of the World. In California, debates rage over the use of the pesticide Malathion to combat the Mediterranean fruit fly. Since last July, a series of medfly infestations had more than doubled the cost of the state’s eradication efforts. The outbreaks were deliberate, ostensibly engineered by an eco-terrorist group to protest the use of the pesticide, which they considered environmentally hazardous. Which, I mean, duh, but actual science did not bear this out at the time. Also, Malathion is what you use to kill medflies, so releasing medflies to stop Malathion seems like a singularly dumb idea. All the same, California will stop aerial spraying next month and start a program of releasing sterilized insects.

Nintendo releases Super Mario Bros. 3 in North America. The Rolling Stones begin their first-ever tour of Japan. MC Hammer releases his album Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em. Ike Turner is sentences to four years for cocaine. “Opposites Attract” finally puts Paula Abdul at the top of the Hot 100. Chicago, Roxette, Janet Jackson and Milli Vanilli enter the top ten. Tom Petty, Technotronic, and Jody Watley drop off.

MacGyver this week is “The Treasure of Manco”, an episode with a very Scooby-Doo twist at the end (Spoiler: [spoiler mode=”inline”] The Inca treasure criminals force Mac to help them find turns out to be an ancient granary[/spoiler]). ABC will show the 1985 Romancing the Stone sequel, The Jewel of the Nile this week. Fox will air The Princess Bride. I also notice that at some point we wandered into the window of another of my favorite weird short-lived sitcoms, Grand, an over-the-top soap-opera spoof in the vein of the much more famous Soap. Tom Hanks hosts Saturday Night Live on Saturday, with musical guest Aerosmith performing the Wayne’s World theme. Friday the 13th The Series is “The Long Road Home”, a Scary Redneck Episode involving body-swapping. Angelo Rizacos guest stars.

“A Matter of Perspective” is this week’s Star Trek the Next Generation. Commander Riker is accused of murder on a planet that’s really into CSI-style crime scene reconstructions, so they use the holodeck to reenact the various witness accounts. So basically, TNG does Rashōmon. At least, that’s how I remember it.

This week, we’ve got yet another episode that is pretty solid as a stand-alone piece, but seems a poor fit for the established series. The regulars are largely sidelined and there are elements that don’t tie in sensibly with the greater context. On the other hand, we’ve got a story that is, with a few glaring holes, mostly coherent, a certain believability to the way events unfold, and the “rogue clone” plot that literally everyone has been wanting to happen since the moment they first unveiled the cloning machine back in the premiere. So what’s it all about? Here’s a quick precis:

Two houses, both alike in dignity,
In fair vague town where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

Admittedly, I’m going to indulge in a little wishful thinking on this one, but only because I think my interpretation is so obviously correct. One of the sizable chunks of this episode is a Romeo and Juliet plot. Between two dudes.

That’s not the only thing this episode is about, though. There’s a bunch of other stuff in there, about cartel wars and father-son relationships, and evil government conspiracies and desperation to save one’s own skin. And since this is War of the Worlds, there’s also some stuff with aliens in there too. With this show’s track record, you might expect it to get a little clusterfucky with all that stuff going on, but remarkably, it all hangs together very organically for the most part. This is probably the best episode we’ve had all season in terms of keeping a lot of balls in the air at the same time. Not, mind you, that it’s the best story they’ve had so far, but it’s the first episode that’s suggested the writing staff might actually be able to competently handle a complicated plot. More or less.

I do have to keep couching my approval of this episode, though, because there are still points of clumsiness. Weirdly, most of them have to do with the presence of the regulars. To wit, the Blackwood team contributes almost nothing to the plot this week, has very little reason to even be in the episode, and have been inserted with all the grace of the white people in a Godfrey Ho ninja movie. Just about everything that goes wrong in this episode stems from them shoving the plot out of the way to make room for the regulars.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We start out with Malzor, using his cover identity as “Mr. Malcolm”, visiting a Colonel West.

No, wait. Not him. This guy:

West is in charge of “Project Solomon”, which is developing a “med cell”. Nanotechnology had been a field of growing interest in the 1980s, and the use of scanning tunneling microscopes to manipulate individual atoms in 1989 really made the possibility of microscopic robots explode into the public consciousness. War of the Worlds, surprisingly, is one of the first TV shows to use them in an episode. Far as I know, only Star Trek the Next Generation got there sooner, and not by much — biomedical nanotech came up in last September’s “Evolution“. But War of the Worlds is not really interested in the science fiction implications of a new kind of technology. The details of how it works are largely irrelevant to the plot. Even the basic fact that it cures disease is only relevant to two of the players, everyone else being motivated primarily by its monetary value.

Malzor is interested in the macguffin, er, med cell, because the Morthren have contracted a disease which is killing them, messily. And because their technology is organic, it’s infected as well, causing alien snot to drip from the ceiling and the feeding machines (I wonder if this episode was originally meant to fall before “Night Moves”). He’s already made arrangements to trade hyperdrive technology to Colonel West in exchange for the cell, and now demands that West move up the delivery. It’s probably a small thing, but the whole deal with Colonel West doesn’t really hold up to the kind of scrutiny you give these things when you head up to the fridge. On the face of it, it’s weird that the Morthren would go out-of-house for this sort of thing, and weirder that the government would have the wherewithal to develop something like this, given how utterly dysfunctional it had been shown to be previously. But then, only last week, we saw that they were backing the Creche, again, for reasons that never become clear. Weirder still is that West seems eager to trade it for hyperdrive technology. I mean, sure, hyperdrive technology is cool and all, but there’s an abundance of evidence that Earth is not in any fit state to exploit something like that. What exactly would Colonel West do with a hyperdrive? Who is the market for interplanetary travel in a world like this? It’s not like you can just cut bait and move to Mars — an offworld colony would be utterly dependent on Earth, at least for the first few years. The presence of the Morthren here on Earth implies that there probably aren’t any more hospitable worlds in nearby star systems either. The only remotely practical reason I can come up with is to exploit the resources of other planets, but there’s still decades of work between having a hyperdrive and having the infrastructure to strip-mine the asteroid belt, and I see no evidence that setting up infrastructure to do anything is within the power of the government at this point. Even if there were some obvious practical reason, it seems unlikely that such a thing would be Colonel West’s ballywick. Is he the head of the department of Medical And Also Space Travel Research?[br]Stranger still is the Colonel’s relationship with Malzor. They’re implicitly working together. I think the fact that hyperdrive is on the table implies that West knows what Malzor is. Okay. We’ve seen hints before that the government is tacitly working with the aliens, or at the least, wittingly looking the other way about them. Yet we have absolutely no sense of why this is going on. Sure, there’s the whole “the government is evil and up to no good” thing, but there’s no amount of comic book villianry that really justifies the government allying itself with alien invaders out to wipe out the human race. Well, maybe Joker-levels. But Leah and Dylan are currently playing Lego Batman 3, and even the Joker decides to team up with the heroes to save the Earth in that one.  West can’t deliver, though, because the med cell prototype has been stolen. Flashbacks show us a gloved hand unlocking the storage device and retrieving a jar of windex from a research facility which apparently hired the same decorator as the Creche. The thief (who, strangely, gets a name, “Kevin Gray”, despite never actually appearing) destroyed the research before leaving, and was in turn killed himself by whoever took delivery of the cell. Malzor and West engage in some dick-waving about finding the med cell, with Malzor insisting that he’ll take care of it, while West demands that Malzor keep a low profile and let him handle it with a “special team”.

So, you care to guess which special team he has in mind? That’s right. Colonel West, dressed in the same fedora and trenchcoat outfit as the heavies from last week, meets with Suzanne in what I think is the same strip club where Scoggs works, because they are seriously running out of money for sets.

She leads him to the back room, where Blackwood and Kincaid are waiting. They’re obviously reluctant about the whole thing, and Blackwood offers a quick recap of how they’ve been cut off and disavowed by the government. They’re also troubled that he was able to get in touch with them, since only General Wilson would have known — an surprising claim, given that Wilson had disappeared before the team went to ground. West says that his orders come from, “a higher level,” but he won’t say who he’s working for.

With some prodding, he gives them the background on the med cell: it’s, “A sort of micro-robotic doctor,” with potential applications in medicine, botany and biochemical engineering. Those last two might do something to explain why the government is involved here: after last week, I can just about believe that there are factions exploring, in essence, sci-fi technology in a desperate attempt to put the world back together again. He also somehow knows that the med cell will be out of the country after 48 hours.

He’s identified the thief as one of his own security men, which is why West has come to Blackwood and company: they’ve been on the outside long enough that none of his people will know them, but, inexplicably, they still count as being cleared for this sort of thing. Not that this will prove relevant in the slightest, since we’re not going to see them do any investigation of West’s operation at all. Seems pretty ballsy of West to go to the team of alien hunters to help him recover the thing he’s setting up to trade to the aliens. Does he not know Malzor is an alien? How could he not know? What, does he think “Mr. Malcolm” is just some dude who happens to have hyperdrive technology?

But back to that later. Somehow, everyone very quickly figures out approximately where the med cell is. Despite the fact that we’ve had several episodes which touch upon the economy of this dystopia, we’ve somehow never heard before that the gray market of the city is centered around a place called “The Exchange”. It’s a large indoor bazaar that comes off maybe a bit more “Vendor’s room at a Sci-Fi Convention” than “Wretched hive of scum and villainy.” It’s dominated by three gangs, led by “the black guy”, “the Iranian”, and Tao, leader of the Chinese syndicate. Gee, I wonder which of these guys is going to be a major player in the story…

Security at the Exchange is provided by Brock. I think his security force is all white, which might not actually be deliberate, but I’m guessing it is, with the whole point here seeming to be that the Exchange is run along pretty strict racial lines. Brock’s son Gerry is one of the guards on the floor. He nearly gets shanked chasing a pickpocket, but is saved by Bing, Tao’s son. The two have a friendly, easy interaction that screams to me that these two are old friends and almost certainly have at least one alcohol-facilitated night of mutual self-discovery that they feel super awkward about now but privately replay in their minds every night. Or they might actually be straight-up dating, but I’m already stretching believability here. The point is, whether the writers actually realized it or not, these two come off very strongly as starcross’d lovers.

Both boys are dressed down by their respective fathers for the incident. Brock is aggressive and bullying, while Tao is more reserved and… Well, he doesn’t actually say anything about the family honor, but he’s a straightforward enough Old Chinese Guy stereotype that I think it’s safe to assume it was in the shooting script and just got cut for time or something. But both fathers make it clear that they care about their sons in their own respective ways, and mostly are upset out of concern for their safety. Brock yells at Gerry for not waiting for backup, while Tao shames Bing for getting involved in an unnecessary fight. Hey, would you look at that: parallel scene construction. I know, right?

The two boys meet up immediately afterward so that Gerry can make a big deal out of his gratitude and Bing can try to look cool and aloof, and you just know these two are going to make out later. I mean, unless they both die in some avoidable tragedy primarily of their parents’ doing. But what are the odds of that?

Meanwhile, everyone else in the show has worked out that the med cell is at the exchange. Blackwood somehow managed to verify Colonel West’s story, and they’ve identified Brock as the former employer of the dead security guard. Kincaid decides to go undercover at the Exchange to investigate the link to Brock (weird, though, that Brock doesn’t have any connection to the theft of the med cell) while Blackwood and Suzanne take the rest of the day off so that we don’t have to pay them for a day of filming search the guard’s apartment.

Malzor too has realized that the cell is at the Exchange, though he doesn’t say how he worked that out. He visits Brock in his office and contracts him to locate it. When Brock meets him outside for the details, though, Malzor has him kidnapped. Mana worries that the cloning chamber is infected, but Malzor insists that they have no choice. I mean, other than just letting the guy do the job they hired him to do without all this dicking around with clones. Hard to say for sure, but it seems like using her energy to power the cloning process is much harder on Mana than usual, and in the next scene, she’s got a small spot on her cheek. If you weren’t paying attention, you could easily mistake it for a birthmark, but it blossoms into a large black sore by her next scene. Malzor overrides her for the second time in as many minutes when she suggests that they need to do extra tests on the clone to make sure that the infection hasn’t corrupted it. I’m sure nothing will go wrong.

Continue reading Antithesis: The Deadliest Disease (War of the Worlds 2×13)

I have nothing really against humans, but as a group, they stink. I say kill them all.

It is February 6, 1989. Pinko Commie Liberal Gun-Grabber Ronald Reagan, just a few weeks out of office, delivers a speech at the University of Southern California in the wake of last month’s Stockton school shooting in which he says, “I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth or home defense. But I do believe an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon nor needed for home defense.” Though, fun fact, an AK-47 is not a machine gun. Los Angeles will ban the sale of semiautomatic weapons the next day. As the week goes on, Ron Brown will become the first African American to chair the DNC, and Barbara Harris will become the first woman to be ordained a Bishop in an Anglican church. Isiah Thomas will be born tomorrow.

In Cold War news, the Polish government initiates the Round Table Talks with the Solidarity party. The Communist regime had hoped they could just co-opt the opposition by giving them a place at the table that would make them more invested in the status quo. Instead, it gave Solidarity the legality and legitimacy that would lead in short order to the collapse of the Communist regime in Poland.

The collaborative live album Dylan and The Dead is released. Their July, 1987 performance of “All Along the Watchtower” is fucking incredible. Tomorrow, Elvis Costello will release Spike, which includes his Paul McCartney collaboration, “Veronica”, also known as, “Probably the only Elvis Costello Song you can remember (Unless you’re like me and really like “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes”. That same day, Roy Orbison’s final album, “Mystery Girl”, is released posthumously. Its highest-charting song, “You Got It” will hit number 9 on the charts in April. Phil Collins drops nine spaces this week, just barely hanging on at number ten. Taking his place at the top of the chart is Sheriff with “When I’m With You”, one of those great late-’80s power ballads that stretches the word “Baby” out to nine syllables over five seconds. Except that the song was actually off of a 1982 album, and the band had broken up back in ’85, and it’s one of the only chart-toppers of the era not to have a music video. There doesn’t seem to be any particular story behind this happening; it’s just the eighties.

Composer Joe Raposo died yesterday. His credits include the theme songs to Three’s Company, The Electric Company, and the recently-debuted Shining Times Station. But his most famous contribution to television music was his work for Sesame Street, which includes “C is for Cookie”, “(It’s not easy) Bein’ Green”, “ABC-DEF-GHI”, “Sing”, and the iconic series theme song. It’s also rumored that Cookie Monster was inspired (At least in the detail of having one particular culinary obsession rather than being a generic Glutinous Monster) by Raposo’s love of cookies.

Sky Television becomes the UK’s first satellite TV network. US network television is all new this week, including the epic Western miniseries Lonesome Dove. For the first time since 1978, a new Columbo airs, the series having been brought back and moved to ABC. “Columbo Goes to the Guillotine” pits the detective against an alleged psychic who murders a stage magician, with the complication that the psychic is defrauding the government into contracting him as a consultant. MacGyver gives us “Cleo Rocks”, which features the return of Teri Hatcher as the comedy peril-magnet Penny Parker and Mac’s arch-nemesis Murdoc, an internationally renowned assassin for the Bond-Villain-esque “Homicide International Trust” and infamous master of disguise. Only by “master”, I mean, “You can tell it’s him the first time he appears on screen even though he’s facing the other direction and only half in the frame. Friday the 13th The Series is a bit interesting this week. “Face of Evil” is a sequel to last season’s “Vanity’s Mirror”. An aging model finds a cursed compact, not recovered after its last appearance, and uses it to restore her own beauty in exchange for murdering or mutilating other models. This is odd, because in its last appearance, the compact’s powers were completely different, causing men to fall obsessively in love with the bearer. They try to spackle over this discontinuity by suggesting the compact’s power is actually to “give you what you want the most,” love for the lonely teenage girl, beauty for the vain aging model, which technically makes the compact way more powerful than pretty much anything else in the series, including the ones which can cause the apocalypse. Star Trek the Next Generation is “A Matter of Honor”, the one where Riker spends a semester abroad on a Klingon ship. I want to say I think I was underwhelmed by this episode when it aired. Over at Vaka Rangi, Josh focuses on the coolness of its 3-D Viewmaster adaptation, which is a fair cop. Even today with our smart phones and our occulus rifts, we haven’t quite managed to reproduce the awesomeness of adapting TV shows to the 3-D Viewmaster format.

This week’s episode is the first one I’ve watched on our new 65″ TV, which rendered it almost unviewable. Looks like I’m going to have to re-rip my DVDs. Last week aside, War of the Worlds has generally had a really impressive guest cast. This week is probably where it tops out with the first appearance of John Colicos. Colicos was an extremely talented and versatile actor best known for playing villains that were between “just slightly over the top” and “did somebody order the LARGE HAM?” In the Star Trek franchise, he’s known for playing Kor, the Klingon commander from “Errand of Mercy“, a role he reprised decades later for three episodes of Deep Space Nine (His final scene has a bit I really love. On the pretext of seeing Worf off on a suicide mission, he asks if he has a message for his wife. Worf fumbles, assuming the senile old man has forgotten that his wife had died last season. Kor takes advantage of Worf’s confusion to drug him in order to take his place, and says, roughly, “Don’t worry, when I get to Klingon Heaven, I’ll tell her you miss her.”). But what he’s really known best for in the domain of Science Fiction is a role he played back in a weird 1970s show. I am, of course, speaking of The Starlost, where he played the butch manly leader of an all-male society of butch manly men who mostly wrestled. Well, that and Battlestar Galactica where he played Baltar.

I’ll cut to the chase and tell you who he is right now. Colicos is playing “Quinn”, a reclusive artist known as the “Painter of Light”.

No, wait. The “Sculptor of Light”. Like this:

Okay, so maybe actually more like “The Sculptor of Video Toaster Post Processing Effects”. But anyway, he’s also an alien.

Not just any alien, though. See, Quinn is something we haven’t seen before (Though I suppose there are shades of him back in the novelization with Xashoron). Quinn is a renegade: an alien on the run from and actively opposed to the advocacy. This is, on the face of it, unthinkable. Everything we’ve seen so far suggests that the aliens are utterly, unquestioningly loyal, being possessed of little capacity for independent thought to begin with, to say nothing of rebellion.

The explanation, rather straightforwardly, is that Quinn is insane. Specifically, he’s been living among humans for so long that he’s adopted human traits. He hasn’t exactly “gone native”, but the tension between his Mortaxan psychology and his human lifestyle has driven him “half-mad”: he admits as much to Harrison. And do you think John Colicos can pull that off? Yes, of course he can. This part was basically written for him.

I mean, except for the bits where he seems to be channeling Shaft. I don’t know where that came from. But, inexplicably, he still pulls it off. We first see Quinn on the run from the NYPD. Or rather, from some people who wear NYPD uniforms and bear noticeable radiation sores. They’re briefly incapacitated by a blinding light from a device hidden under Quinn’s seemingly-dropped hat (Why they decide to gather around the hat and gingerly pick it up is hard to explain), giving Quinn time to take the chase to the rooftops. The first officer to reach him fails to make the jump to the next building and Quinn takes obvious delight in refusing his pursuer’s plea for help as he tries to pull himself up from the ledge. After stomping on the policeman’s hand, he watches with a smirk as the surviving aliens below watch their comrade decompose. Our first indication of Quinn’s complicated nature comes when he tosses off a one-liner: “To life immortal, sucker.”

At the Cottage, the gang is getting ready to head to New York, where they’ll meet with General Wilson to brief the UN on the alien situation. While he’s in New York, Harrison has something more exciting planned, though: he’s received a personal invitation to meet Quinn and an opportunity to buy one of his sculptures. Norton is floored, and even Ironhorse is impressed, even if he describes the infamously reclusive artist as a, “phony who sells art that disappears when the lights are turned on.”

Quinn’s limo picks Harrison up in New York, and the artist demands he wear a blindfold for the trip back to the studio in order to protect his privacy. He leads Harrison to a seat on a raised platform in a large, dark room that reminds me a lot of Jessica Morgan’s studio from Captain Power. His blindfold removed, Harrison is awed by “The Universal Truth”, an installation consisting of interwoven patterns of blue beams of light. It’s always a problem when you include a character in a work of fiction who’s meant to be a master artist, especially if the medium of your fiction is able to display the art. You can maybe get away with writing a famous painter or sculptor or musician into a book. But try writing a story about a world-renowned poet, and you’ll be expected to actually produce some competent poetry. The light-sculpture Quinn shows Harrison honestly is less “world-famous artist” and more “competent wedding DJ”. The other Quinn we see in this episode might be a bit lackluster due to the visual effects used to render it, but you can at least imagine that if you saw this holographic space scene hovering in the air in real life, it would be pretty neat. The Universal Truth is just night club lights. But Harrison’s impressed and that’s what really matters. He couldn’t possibly afford a work on this scale (Maybe the problem here is that the good part is off-camera?), but Quinn, whose attitude has shifted from brusque to playful, gives it to him as a gift, and throws in a metal bracelet identical to his own.

Quinn moves the topic of conversation to the possibility of alien life. Quinn: Tell me, Harrison, do you believe there’s life in outer space?[br]Harrison: How could I not?[br]Quinn:That answer reminds me of the little old Irish lady who, when asked if she believed in ghosts, replied, “No, but they’re there.” Harrison asks if Quinn takes his inspiration from the stars. When Quinn answers that the stars are the source, “of imagination itself, and of life immortal,” Harrison realizes that something is up. I’m struggling here to remember if Harrison has ever heard the aliens say their catchphrase before. Maybe in “Eye for an Eye”?

Quinn reveals that he’d “made contact with aliens” back in 1953, near Harrison’s home town in California. I mentioned a long time ago that there are only two characters in the series who call Harrison “Harry”. Sylvia is one. Quinn is the other. He even mentions this: he apparently knew Sylvia and Clayton personally, which brings up the interesting possibility that Quinn played some role in Sylvia’s affliction. Quinn possesses a rare mutation which grants him immunity to Earth bacteria, and has lived, “Thirty-five long, lonely years, on a hostile, alien planet called Earth.” “You’re an alien,” Harrison realizes. Quinn gives him a fantastic crazy-eyes stare. “Oh, no, Harry. You’re the alien.”

Continue reading Thesis: The Prodigal Son (War of the Worlds 1×15)

It is February 5, 1990. Two really big things in the news this week. On the second, as part of his strategic, “For the love of God, please don’t let our decades of racist oppression lead to us all being massacred the way we really, really deserve,” plan, F. W. de Klerk promised to release Nelson Mandela from prison. He’ll make good on it this coming Sunday. Wednesday, the Soviet government will vote to allow opposition parties in the USSR, giving up their legally mandated monopoly on power.

In entertainment news, Future-Parallel-Universe-Doctor Who Rowan Atkinson marries makeup artist Sunestra Sastry. The marriage would last until 2015. The 1960s game show Supermarket Sweep is reincarnated by Lifetime. Network TV is all new this week, including a new MacGyver where Mac takes on Yakuza interference with the logging industry, and a new Columbo directed by and guest-starring Patrick MacGoohan, the fourth of his five appearances in the series. Friday, CBS will use its Special Presentation bumper for the last time to introduce The Bradys, a shockingly ill-considered revival of The Brady Bunch as an hour-long drama. Leah Ayers replaced Maureen McCormick, who’d recently given birth and wasn’t available for filming. The show’s kind of a bummer, with Marcia battling alcoholism, Bobby being crippled in a car crash, and Peter getting into an abusive relationship. It quietly vanished after six episodes. I remember that we made a real effort to watch it, but just could not bear it.

Michael Bolton retains the top spot on the charts for one more week, but Paula Abdul’s hot on his heels, leaping over Rod Stewart’s “Downtown Train” to land in the number 2 position this week. “Janie’s Got a Gun” hops into the top ten, displacing Phil Collins’s “Another Day in Paradise”. Star Trek the Next Generation this week is “Deja Q”, which is the one where Q gets turned human and hijinks ensue. I recall liking bits of it at the time, but Josh Marsfelder makes a sold argument against it. I think the failure of this episode is that there’s a tension among the writers over Q’s status as a trickster god archetype, and whether, to simplify it a bit, he’s Loki or he’s Coyote (Anansi is probably a better fit here, but I’m more familiar with Coyote), and this episode ends up having him be neither. This is the episode where he pretty much transitions from “Otherworldly trickster god” to “Picard’s wacky uncle with godlike powers”. Friday the 13th The Series presents “Repetition”, which is kind of a cross between one of the more outlandish episodes of CSI and one of those French farces. A reporter accidentally runs over someone, but he happens to have one of those useful cursed artifacts that lets you raise the dead in exchange for killing someone else. And since he’s a decent sort and doesn’t want to kill anyone, he proceeds to go on a murder spree in order to resurrect each subsequent victim. It ends exactly the way you know it’s going to, with him offing himself to break the cycle.

This week’s episode, as is the recurring theme for this series, is weak on plot and storytelling, but strong on style. The plot is thin and the characters pointlessly obstructive and evil for no reason other than “Because you need bad guys in this part of the story,” and the lead characters are bracketed off for most of the story, but there’s some interesting visuals and a great, almost dream-like, atmosphere. In many ways, it feels more like an episode of, say, Tales From the Darkside than War of the Worlds. And for once, the style they’ve picked to go over the substance actually works.

To follow up our last episode’s cavalier disregard for the history of the franchise, this week, we have a direct sequel to an earlier episode. War of the Worlds scoffs in the face of your foolish attempts to fit it to any sort of master narrative.

Unfortunately, the episode it’s a direct sequel to is “Breeding Ground”. Yes, we’ll be bringing back the the alien child, born of a human woman who was marginalized in her own story because fuck 1980s screenwriting. After a flashback to Malzor doing the Lion King bit at the end of “Breeding Ground”, we see that the baby, who is two months old according to Mana, has rapidly aged-up to the equivalent of a nine-year-old human, who they’ve named “Adam” out of their cultural love of symbolism. I’ll allow it because we’ve already established that the Morthren get a kick out of mocking Christianity, though it’s not really a theme they’ve followed up on in a while.

There’s another issue implicit in this as well: child actors. Joel Carlson plays Adam. He’d previously appeared in the 1989 movie Communion, and would go on to appear in Superboy as an alternate-universe version of young Clark Kent. And he’s not great. Not aggressively awful, but stilted in a way that doesn’t feel intentional, and he’s got a twee lisp on top of it. There’s one other speaking child part, the rest are all just dead-eyed extras. Mana reckons that the reason Adam is so sullen and withdrawn and his “energy grows lower each day” is that his “human side” isn’t getting the human interaction it needs. They hadn’t really been clear on Adam being part human before: my assumption back in “Breeding Ground” was that, like the others, he’s fully Morthren, but has been outwardly engineered to look superficially human. But now it seems that Adam is something different. His behavior reminds me a lot of the clones: physically “perfect”, psychologically human, but with Morthren loyalties and a Morthren value system.

So they’re going to send him off to boarding school, where interacting with other dead-eyed child actors will hopefully perk him up. There’s a place called “The Creche” outside the city, “Where this society has focused its efforts on improving itself.” Malzor has a secondary motive in sending Adam there as well: the Creche has information that the Morthren can use. It strikes me odd that Malzor is the one here — throughout the episode, really — who’s pushing the scientific agenda, while Mana is more concerned with Adam’s wellbeing, even to the point of giving her superior a stern talking to about pushing him too hard. This might be a rare piece of foreshadowing to where her character goes at the end of the season, or maybe the writers just forgot which character was which. You never can tell with this show.

We cut to a guy named Martin Daniels (Oddly, IMDB lists the character as “Paul Daniels”, but he’s not credited that way nor is he ever referred to by any name other than “Martin”) having an argument with his wife about their son’s prospects. The child, Patrick, is a prodigy, and dad wants to ship him off for special schooling and discipline and no fun, while mom wants her child to be a child and do fun child things. When she threatens to leave him and take Patrick with her, Martin calls her a bitch and roughs her up. Unfortunately, Patrick sees this and flees, and, as basically always happens in this sort of story, runs straight into the path of a delivery truck. A keen eye might have caught that this scene is strangely well-lit and not especially post-apocalyptic, and indeed, the smash-cut reveals that we’ve been watching the night terrors of a slightly older Martin, who’d been dozing in his office until his past guilt roused him. He’s drawn to the window by calls of, “Daddy! Daddy!” from outside, and sees Adam standing in the driveway, but for a moment, he sees not Adam, but Patrick.

He immediately thinks to call Suzanne, because… Okay, I don’t know. Suzanne was friends with his now ex-wife. For some reason, he reckons that her expertise will be relevant. Maybe the show’s forgotten that she’s a microbiologist and thinks she’s a PI? Not that I blame them, since it’s only come up once in passing. It takes him a week to get hold of her, this being one of the disadvantages to living in a sewer in a post-apocalyptic urban dystopia.

He, “wasn’t about to turn him over to the police,” and I think by now we’ve seen enough of how this world works to accept that without further explanation. He gives her Adam’s photo and fingerprints and asks her to help him find out who the kid is. Adam has no discernible social skills and won’t speak (I’m calling him “Adam”, but at this point, he hasn’t told the humans his name yet), but he reminds Martin of his dead son. Suzanne agrees to help.

Before meeting Adam, Martin gives her a quick tour to help establish how atmospheric and creepy the Creche is. He takes her to the Creepy Room “Imagination Chamber”, a room decorated in a sort of Salvador-Dali-does-Alice-in-Wonderland style with a large ravine in the middle.

Here, we meet the other two scientists at the Creche. “Billy” (I don’t recall him having a last name) is a sort of Vincent Schiavelli-wannabe who contributes little to the episode. The other scientist participating in their torture of an infant is Ms. Ghoulson, which is pronounced “Goalson”, except, presumably, when she’s not in earshot. She kinda looks a little like Daily Show contributor Kristen Schaal, and is basically the grumpy adult character from a children’s breakfast cereal commercial who does not approve of children eating fun and exciting non-bran-based cereals.

They’re running an experiment where Billy coaxes an infant into crawling toward him in spite of the ravine between them. There’s a silent, tense moment where we’re meant to fear that the baby is going to fall in before the reveal that the pit is covered by a transparent panel (Which clearly isn’t there in the long shots) — they even intercut a reaction shot of Suzanne taking a little gasp, because apparently she reckoned they were indeed actually trying to coax a baby into walking over a cliff, but only objects when the baby actually does it. The experiment here is clearly based on 1960 Gibson and Walk “Visual Cliff” experiment. The big difference, of course, is that the goal of the Visual Cliff experiment was to determine when infants develop depth perception: virtually all normally-sighted infants will either refuse outright or display extreme reluctance to crawl out over a cliff to get to their mother. Initially, it was assumed that this meant that depth perception developed around the same time as crawling, since smaller babies would happily wiggle themselves over the cliff. Later experiments with heart-rate monitoring showed something more complex: infants as young as three months noticed the cliff, it just didn’t affect their behavior. The conclusion researchers drew was that the ability to perceive depth develops very early, but it’s only much later that an infant develops the concept of falling, and is able to appreciate that crawling off a cliff is the sort of thing that might result in them having a bad time. Whatever the interpretation, the version shown here is has been twisted to do something very different, essentially, “Let’s see if we can break this small child of innate in-built behavior and teach them to like being gaslighted.” Deeply disturbing, but pretty in-keeping with this episode’s motifs. They explain this as a trust exercise: in order to ensure that the students will accept the accelerated teaching program, they train them from birth to blindly trust their teachers, even to the point of, for example, crawling into an open pit on command. I will note as the episode goes on, it takes very little coaxing for the children at the Creche to turn on their teachers, so I have to reckon that these trust-building exercises have not actually been subjected to any sort of efficacy testing.

Having thus established how creepy and unpleasant the Creche is and showing us the big conspicuous visual cliff and the shiny Russian revolver hanging on the wall, Martin and Ms. Ghoulson takes Suzanne to the playground — sorry, “recreation area” — to meet Adam. They’ve spent hours trying to get through to him, without getting him to talk or participate in physical activity. Even his classmate Julie (Lisa Jakub, an actually competent child actor, who’d go on to appear in Mrs. Doubtfire and Independence Day, but the part is too small here to really appreciate her acting), can’t entice him to try playing ball. Mrs. Ghoulson snaps at the other children to stand back, and proceeds to look utterly scandalized when Suzanne dares to try speaking gently to him and being nice, and looks utterly horrified when this prompts him to tell her his name and actually interact with her. When Suzanne asks if he’s feeling okay and whether he’s hungry, it’s more than she can stand and she snaps at Suzanne that, “He’s fine and he ate a short time ago!” Bran flakes, no doubt.

Suzanne counters that the kid looks sickly and needs to rest, but now that he’s talking, Martin immediately decides to forget about all that crap about building trust and shit, and strap the kid in to run experiments on him. There’s a little disconnect here in that it seems like Martin has already decided that Adam is Special, hence his determination to learn his secrets and test his powers. But it’s not at all clear why he’d think that at this point, since we’ve established that Adam has thus far refused to participate or interact in any way, so there shouldn’t be any evidence so far that Adam is anything other than one of the tn Martin is trying to lift humanity above. In fact, you’d really expect someone like Martin to be dismissive of Adam, interpreting his lack of social skills and unwillingness to talk as evidence of some sort of mental defect, only to have him later shocked by the reveal that Adam is actually highly intelligent. Instead, Martin knows there’s something special about Adam from the beginning for no clear reason.

The test is a pretty straightforward “Strap him in a chair and make him do math problems” affair, in which Adam demonstrates an understanding of Laplace’s Equation. Laplace’s Equation is a second order partial differential equation that’s useful in a whole bunch of science-related fields because it describes harmonic functions which can model the difference in potential energies between different points in space, which lets you do stuff like describe gravitational fields, electrostatic fields, and heat transfer. And yeah, second order partial differential equations are hard. But we’re talking “Undergrad-level physics” stuff, not “Wile E. Coyote, Super-Genius” levels. Certainly a heck of a feat for a child, but I don’t know if it would realistically be drop-everything-and-freak-out impressive in a place that regularly deals with child prodigies. Martin is blown away that a nine-year-old could possibly do work so far in advance of his own students, and Mrs. Ghoulson calls his knowledge of algorithms, “Above genius level.” Or rather, his knowledge of “ahl-goo-rheezim”. It’s not like she has a fake German accent the rest of the time or anything, it’s just this one word the pronounces utterly bizarrely.

Suzanne is troubled by the way they’re treating this strange and possibly traumatized child and pulls Martin aside to demand an explanation. He vaguely explains that, “The public can’t even begin to understand,” the work they do, but that he believes, “All children should be tested to see where they fit in.” Because Children Are Our Future. Oh goodie. Reproductive Futurism. Don’t worry, they don’t get into it too deep. The salient point is that Martin is dangerously obsessed and up to something vaguely sinister, even though they never actually expand on what these vaguely sinister goals might be.

Suzanne suggests that maybe Martin doesn’t actually want Suzanne to find Adam’s family and he doesn’t deny it. Which is fine and all, except that now we’ve got a big plot hole in the area of what she’s doing here in the first place. When Suzanne arrived, he gave her Adam’s picture and fingerprints and told her he wanted her to find Adam’s family. Now, it seems that he doesn’t want that at all, so why did he go to the trouble of tracking her down? There’s still an open question of why Martin would contact Suzanne even for tracking down Adam’s parents. Why does he think Suzanne would be particularly good at this? They’re not especially close, so it’s unlikely he knows the details of her current circumstances — that she lives with a roguish ex-military type and a roguish action-scientist who are good at knocking heads and getting access to hard-to-find information via their 31337 network of contacts and strippers. And given that the Creche has highly-placed government backing, Martin should have official contacts of his own through which he can make inquiries, which would make a lot more sense than him asking Suzanne for help, given the direction her investigation is going to take. Thematically, it might make sense that he sought her out because (for reasons that I can’t explain) he thought her particular skills might let her get through to Adam and coax him out of his shell. Except that doesn’t work either, not only because there’s nothing we know about Suzanne that would suggest she’s especially good at that sort of thing (And even if she did turn out to secretly be a child psychologist in her spare time, it beggars the imagination to suppose the Creche didn’t already have one of those on hand), but more directly because everyone at the Creche seems outright resistant to actually letting her do anything to reach out to him.

What would make a lot more sense to me would be if he’d reached out to Suzanne immediately after finding Adam, but something had changed in the week it took his message to get to her. If, say, Adam had remained nonverbal but had done something to indicate his intelligence. Or if he’d been given a medical examination that revealed something unusual about his biology. But it’s clear that they’ve only just discovered how intelligent Adam is, and the alien aspects of his biology are only going to be discovered later. There could have been an interesting angle here, with Martin being actively conflicted between a genuine desire to help Adam and his scientific obsession. But I don’t really feel it. There’s no sense of Martin struggling or changing over the course of these scenes, so it’s as though he’s just nonsensically decided to undermine his own plans by inviting an outside agitator to come interfere in his work, and it’s just dumb luck that her unconventional, “Say hi to the kid and ask him how he’s doing,” approach paid off.

Pressed by Suzanne, Martin admits the truth: the students at the Creche were genetically engineered. Suzanne seems to take this in stride, but then reacts with a look of horror when he refers to them as, “test tube babies”. Probably just a poor editing choice to compose the reaction shot that way, but the clear implication is that the phrase “test tube babies” can be safely tossed out to generate simple, visceral revulsion. Which is a big fuck-you to a smallish number of eleven-and-unders who might possibly be in your audience.

Blackwood has only a passing knowledge of the Creche, and Suzanne fills him in on the details, describing the students as, “The most unhappy kids I’ve ever seen.” Seems like a stretch. I mean, the baby seemed happy enough. The older kids were maybe a little glum, outside on a cold, overcast day, dressed in red berets and herringbone longcoats that kinda read “French boarding school” to me. But they didn’t seem any unhappier than the mundane kids in the first act of any story where the dull gray lives of prim and proper schoolchildren in a repressive educational setting have their lives turned upside-down by a whimsical, quasi-supernatural new student, hippie teacher, or nanny with demonic powers. In fact, possibly the coolest thing about this episode is the way its horror aspects are juxtaposed with tropes and trappings more often associated with whimsical children’s stories. It’s called “The Pied Piper”, but it’s also a bit Peter Pan, but coupled with bits and pieces of, say, Frankenstein and maybe a little bit of “It’s a Good Life”. One of the many weak spots in the plot is that Suzanne never elaborates convincingly on her objections to the Creche. We know it’s a sinister place because it’s heavily coded that way, with Martin’s clear obsessiveness, Ms. Ghoulson’s cereal-villain attitude, and the creepy Salvador Dali room. But that’s all motif: there’s never any concrete reason given for it. It could just as easily turn out that there’s nothing wrong with Blake-Holsey High the Creche and this is really a story about not judging by appearances.

Suzanne personally and the narrative at large both assume without question that the people at the Creche are up to no good, and up to no good in a more specific way than is ever really addressed. At first, Suzanne’s concerns run less to the children being an affront to nature and more to them being abstractly mistreated. But that “abstractly” is a problem. What we see of this “mistreatment” doesn’t go beyond standard boarding school story cliches, and the complaints you could actually make based on what happens on screen you could equally well level against Hogwarts (Personally, I think there was far too little “Angry parents sue Hogwarts out of existence over the cavalier maiming of their children” in that series).

There’s a strong sense that Martin has some specific and nasty end in mind with his genetic manipulation, rather than the abstract, “Make humanity better,” but that’s the only end we’re ever given. When he and Suzanne come to words over it, he’ll talk about humanity’s desperate need for, “minds capable of correcting 2,000 years of mistakes,” but then he’ll meander into the concept of customizing, “a child’s appearance and personality like ordering a meal from a menu,” which… I mean, it’s kinda tangential to the whole “Saving humanity from its past mistakes” thing. Is he looking to make a load of money selling designer babies? Or is this a traditional mad science thing where he’s just obsessed with what’s scientifically possible and isn’t thinking about the consequences? The gobsmackingly obvious answer would be that he’s trying to “resurrect” his dead son by inventing a form of genetic engineering that would allow him to have another child with all the same traits as Patrick. But that isn’t in here, and in 1990, the sci-fi answer to reincarnating a dead kid is “cloning”, not “genetic engineering” (The story changes when you get to the 21st century and start to understand things like epigenetics and the fact that differences in the prenatal environment mean that a genetic duplicate of a person won’t necessarily resemble the original much more than any sibling).

Suzanne doesn’t come right out and give him the “Tampering in God’s domain,” speech, but she does fixate on the word “manipulate”. She gets close to actually hitting on a good point: that Martin is a control freak. His desire to control his Patrick’s life indirectly led to his death, and now he wants to manipulate and control a generation of children from the genetic level to mold them in his own perfected image. But rather than zero in on it, Suzanne sticks to trite platitudes about how humans weren’t meant to be perfect or how he treats people like machines or how terrible it would be if no one had a cleft palate.

And I’m not saying that genetic engineering for the purpose of “improving” humanity is okay or anything, but, especially from a character like Suzanne, who’s meant to be a scientist, I expect her argument to be based on reason rather than leaning, as it almost entirely does, on the assumption that the audience will just viscerally agree that genetic manipulation is Unnatural-therefore-Wrong. Because that is an immensely privileged argument to make, with its implicit assumption that there is a hard-and-fast line between treating diseases and deliberately “perfecting” humanity. Are we to say, “Harlequin Ichthyosis is sufficiently horrible that it’s okay to cure it using gene therapy, but a strong genetic predisposition toward obesity is just a trait and we shouldn’t tamper in God’s domain… Even though that genetic predisposition drastically increases the chances of an early death”? Or maybe, “If it can be controlled by traditional medical means, then you can’t use genetic manipulation, and it’s just tough cookies if when you’re thirty, they repeal the ACA and you can’t pay for your antidepressants any more”? The closest Suzanne comes to an actual rational argument rather than a simple visceral, “designer babies are unnatural” is her claim that, “there’s no way to predict the long-term effects of this,” which just seems like a lame counterargument.

Continue reading Antithesis: The Pied Piper (War of the Worlds 2×12)

They’re — They’re hurting me. They’re putting something inside me

It is the week of January 30, 1989. Canadian Prime Minister Mulroney shuffles his cabinet. Over the course of the week, the Soviets will pull their last armored column out of Afghanistan, Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner will be overthrown by a military coup, and P. W. Botha will resign the presidency of South Africa for health reasons. Though his presidency had seen the legalization of interracial marriage and racially mixed neighborhoods, he remained a staunch supporter of apartheid and an opponent of the reforms made by his successor, F. W. de Klerk.

George Michael and Randy Travis win big at the 16th annual American Music Awards. “Two Hearts” retains the top spot on the charts, but there’s a lot of churn further down in the top ten: Paula Abdul, Bon Jovi, Tone-Loc and Tiffany are all in; Bobby Brown, Poison, Annie Lennox, and Michael Jackson are out. Her Alibi and Who’s Harry Crumb? premier this week, movies I mostly know from seeing their boxes on the shelf at the video place. WTTW-11 in Chicago demos HDTV to some members of the press, who are suitably impressed. The FCC would approve the technology almost two years later. PBS begins airing segments of the British children’s series Thomas and Friends intercut with new American-made framing segments as Shining Time Station, inexplicably starring Ringo Starr (For subsequent seasons, he’d be replaced by the even less explicable George Carlin).

In the second of their four time-travel episodes, Friday the 13th The Series gives us “Eye of Death”, about a antique murder-powered magic lantern which allows a shifty antiques dealer to acquire Civil War artifacts straight from the source. He ends up getting tele-fragged when they turn the lantern off as he’s coming back through. Star Trek the Next Generation gives us “Unnatural Selection”, which is noteworthy for the fact that it sure as hell seems like a straight-up rip-off of the original series episode “The Deadly Years”. Some scientists are rapidly aging to death, and it turns out that this is because they genetically engineered their children to have hyper-aggressive immune systems As Josh Marsfelder put it, the moral is basically, “Don’t tamper in God’s domain or else you’ll be stuck in a shitty knock-off of an original series episode.” I find it interesting, at least, for being, “The one where the Federation is explicitly and deliberately doing transhuman genetic engineering and everyone is cool with it, despite the fact that every single other time this comes up, the repeated theme is that humanity absolutely shits its pants over the idea of doing genetic engineering because of that thing that happened with Ricardo Molteban.”

Memories and imagination can be tricky. “He Feedeth Among The Lilies” feels large and important in my memories. An episode intended to set up future events and spin out character development. It’s supposed to have implications for the future. Multiple fan-writers went on to pen sequels to it.

But I went and watched it again and… Well, to sum it up, the plot of this episode is, “Harrison gets laid. It doesn’t end well.” It’s not bad, really, but it’s thin. Not a lot happens. The entire episode revolves around Harrison getting a girlfriend, and even that is curiously abbreviated. The alien presence is little more than foreshadowing for the not-at-all shocking ending — the only point at which it starts to feel like the same kind of show it has been so far is the very end. Its biggest sin, though, is that the whole thing is a heavily telegraphed slow-motion fridging, and we don’t even get to see the fridge opened at the end.

We’ve seen a few times already how War of the Worlds attempted to capitalize on collective neuroses that were part of the public zeitgeist at the time, even when they don’t quite fit in with the rest of the established continuity of the series. The cattle mutilations back at the beginning of the series, for instance: they don’t really make a lot of sense in context or lead to anything, but aliens mutilating cattle was a Thing that was popular in the tabloids at the time, so they felt compelled to tie it in. You may or may not recall that Satanic cults were mentioned in passing at the time, though only for the purpose of being tossed out as an alternate explanation to aliens. And we’ve run into the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of the 1980s in other places, up in the paragraphs at the tops of the articles where I talk about what else is going on in the world that week, and I hope that you’ve taken away from that by now that this stuff isn’t entirely unconnected. It isn’t a coincidence that you get these particular panics at these particular points in history: there’s something about living in this part of the 1980s that makes “My child’s teacher is secretly a satanist” or “Aliens are exsanguinating my cows” or “Dungeons and Dragons will make my children commit suicide” an attractive crazy thing to believe, moreso than, “My neighbor is a secret Soviet sleeper agent,” or “Dancing may lead to our children having premarital sex,” or “I saw Goody Proctor consorting with the devil”.

So why these particular paranoias here and now? You’ll probably have to ask a social scientist for the details, but I think some of it has to do with the winding down of the Cold War. We addressed the spirit of Glasnost back in “Epiphany”, and one of the things that struck me there is how fair-handed they were with the Soviet establishment — Major Kedrov is clearly coded as antagonistic, but it’s a respectful antagonism, one that’s heavily invested in maintaining the status quo. They’re on different sides, but they’re not really opposing each other per se. I’ve often said that nothing in the ’80s makes a lick of sense unless you realize that everyone was acting from the assumption that nuclear war was inevitable. I think what we see with these panics is a sense that western culture had grown “comfortable” with the persistent threat posed by the cold war — we were locked in this stupid, pointless, neverending struggle that was eventually going to kill us all, but so were they. It was familiar. The “real” danger was the danger of an unknown outsider tipping the balance. Once the cold war actually ends, things are going to shift — it’ll suddenly be a lot more popular to look back at stuff like Reagan deliberately antagonizing the Soviets in order to scare Americans into voting for him, and start worrying that the government might be actively Up To No Good rather than just hillariously incompetent, and we’ll see the public start taking a greater interest in conspiracy theories and shadow governments with stuff like The X-Files (It’s not like this hasn’t already started here in 1989, but it hasn’t really hit its stride yet), but that’s a story for another day.

Speaking of The X-Files though, whatever motivates them, in among the social worries in this part of the nexus is an increasing interest in alien abductions. Later this year, Whitley Strieber’s 1987 novel Communion is going to be adapted as a Christopher Walken film. Once again, alien abductions aren’t a thing which the Martians of the 1953 movie ever did, and it’s different in key ways from the alien possession used so far in the series, but in hindsight, we should have seen it coming.

The interesting thing about alien abductions is that they tend to a whole bunch of specific common elements — paralysis, missing hours, reports of having foreign objects inserted into one of two very specific places (the other one is the navel), being surrounded by quasi-humanoid figures with distorted proportions. Carl Sagan pointed out that if you eliminate the flying saucers, the same elements also come up in premodern reports of demonic attacks. If you’re a believer, you might take this as evidence that the reports are true, not random dreams or hoaxes, and that they’ve been going on even before the concept of extraterrestrial life entered the public consciousness. If you’re a skeptic, you might instead conclude that there’s something wired into the human brain that is inclined to generate certain patterns of hallucination given the right stimulation, onto which sufferers project additional details as befits their cultural context, be it aliens, or demons, or the fair folk.

So this week, the gang from Mortax is going to try their hand at alien abduction and human experimentation in order to unlock the secrets of the human immune system. The opening scene finds doctors and paramedics shocked as they wheel a gravely injured patient into an operating room to find it’s been hastily stripped. Doesn’t really speak well of the hospital’s reputation that they were the first ones to notice. At the Land of the Lost cave, some alien candy stripers try cutting up a prisoner they’ve conveniently tied to a metal frame in a crucifixion pose, but the radiation means that he “spoils” too fast.

The advocates are wary about moving their experiments away from the safety of their cave, but this is counterbalanced by the better “selection” they’ll have on the outside: it turns out that the raid on the hospital also netted them an ambulance, which they can use as a mobile surgery to conduct experiments in the field.

And then, I guess, six months pass. There’s no interstitial titles or anything to indicate this, but the rest of this episode is going to require that the aliens have been doing field experiments on humans using this particular modus operandi for at least half a year.

By the sort of remarkable coincidence that has become part of the standard operating procedure for this show, Harrison and the gang are over at the safe house (The same one where they met Adrian in “Among the Philistines”) conducting interviews with alien abductees. Now, this episode is kind of threadbare plotwise, but there’s just a bit of that War of the Worlds wonderful weirdness around the periphery that I can at least enjoy. For example, the first interview we see is with an older couple, Arnold and Pat Thistle, who consider it very important that Harrison understand that they’re good, respectable, upstanding Christians, and not the sort of lowlife perverts who go around getting abducted by aliens. It’s got a very nice “First paragraph of Harry Potter,” vibe to it, with the Thistles clearly more troubled by what the neighbors would think than by the fact that they met aliens. They also give the just shockingly wonderful and surprisingly accurate description of the aliens as looking like “A cross between a giant frog and a huge, slimy walnut.”

There’s some more interviews, either shown in-progress or by having the team review recordings. A man who was paralyzed during a motorcycle ride and experimented upon, a woman pulled from her car, and Karen McKinney, a sound editor who was attacked while jogging and left with a ten-hour memory gap and recurring nightmares. Mixed in between the interviews, the team reflects on their findings.

At first, I wasn’t crazy about the characterization of the regulars in these scenes, but it’s grown on me. Ironhorse, as usual, is pessimistic, but there’s clear character growth from his hardcore skepticism in the early part of the series. He had been supportive of the “Blackwood plan” (Harrison takes umbrage at the name, intended as it is to characterize the program as one of his flights of fancy) initially, but doesn’t think they’re learning anything they don’t already know: that the aliens exist, have three fingers, are slimy, travel in multiples of three, and are jerks. He thinks it would be a better use of their time to locate and interview veterans from the 1953 war and government employees from the period who might help them locate storage facilities like the ones in “The Second Seal”. Harrison actually concedes both that Ironhorse’s plan is a good one and that his own plan has been slow to yield new information: it’s Suzanne who takes the lead in defending the value of what they’re learning about the aliens, and even she doesn’t provide any examples of new information they’ve discovered.

I get the feeling that Suzanne is being written here under the assumption that she’s a psychologist rather than a microbiologist. I think she’s meant to be interested in what they’re learning about alien behavior from the abductions. And as the episode goes on, Harrison will defer to her expertise in conducting interviews. Harrison notes that everyone they interviewed described essentially the same experience — basically the classic “Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind” archetype of being paralyzed while out alone in the middle of nowhere by a bright light (A flashback shows it to be a something like a flashlight with a green triangular lens, possibly a callback to the device Harrison contrived in “The Second Seal”), laid down with inhuman figures hovering over them, and probed in one of the usual places. Weirdly, though, Harrison’s claim that all the interviews reported the same thing doesn’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny: namely, the Thistles don’t report being paralyzed and probed. Their story involves the aliens “looking for something” using a “strange device” that’s probably similar to the vacuum-cleaner-metal-detector affair they’d had in “Eye for an Eye”.Suzanne suggests a psychological origin: mass hysteria. Curiously, it’s Ironhorse who shoots the idea down, due to the diversity of times and places where the incidents occurred.

There really isn’t enough going on in these scenes: it feels like the plot is just spinning its wheels. Nevertheless, they’re very good scenes for depicting how the team has really come together by this point in the series. One thing that’s very clear watching them is that the members of the Blackwood team have developed a comfortable working rapport with each other. While they still disagree on strategy and on how to interpret evidence, they’ve learned to respect each other’s opinions and methods. Harrison himself says that there’s no requirement that they all agree about every strategy and gives Ironhorse his blessing to pursue a different angle of investigation. Ironhorse, for his part, limits his complaints to the purely practical. He’d supported the plan initially, and has only changed his opinion because of how it’s been developing. And it’s kinda neat that at this point, even if it was Harrison’s idea, it seems like Suzanne’s taken more interest than he has — I get a distinct impression that Harrison himself is starting to lose interest in the plan at this point. Having everyone respectfully differ about priorities and understand and appreciate each other’s respective different working styles is something rare for the conflict-driven nature of adventure TV, with its long and august history of “He’s a gung-ho man of action / he’s an introspective scientist / How will they ever get along?” set-ups. It’s rare even for the show we’re talking about. And it’s going to get even rarer as television marches into the ’90s and the oppressive gravitational force of grimdark keeps whispering, “The good guys should all hate each other and not get along! That’ll make it seem so dark and edgy and exciting!” Yet at the same time, you can see this development here as prototypical of another, better form of maturation TV will undergo in the ’90s, in that characters are gaining the capacity to grow and change not just individually, but as a group.

Cut back to the Land of the Lost cave, where the advocates are characteristically worried about their progress. The alien nurses explain about how the ambulance they’ve heisted will speed things up, but the leadership is worried about how the humans keep polluting the planet and if they don’t take it over soon, the place might be too trashed to be worth the effort. An odd observation, with a bit of an edge to it in the, “Do we really have the moral high ground over the aliens, when we kill each other and destroy our own planet?” sense, though, as these sort of things often do, it falls a little flat the same way it falls a little flat when Doctor Who has Davros challenge the Doctor’s morality: dude, you’re basically space-Hitler, yes, we do too have the moral high-ground here. I think it would have worked better thematically, especially when we’re already working this, “Aliens thrive on radiation” angle, to have pollution be somehow beneficial to the aliens. Maybe have them come from a world that’s naturally warmer, so greenhouse gasses make the place more amenable. Of course, it wouldn’t be relevant in this episode, but it’s not like this scene has much of a point to it anyway, beyond giving the camera something else to show in what would be an otherwise long, unbroken sequence of Harrison thinking about Karen McKinney.

Because, for no better reason than, “She’s a traditionally attractive woman, in a very eighties sort of way,” Harrison’s come over more than a little bit smitten with one of the interviewees. This is part of the reason behind his decreased interest in the rest of the interview process: he wants to focus on helping her recover her memories. By which I mean he wants to bone her. And also help her recover her memories. But mostly bone her. He calls her up at four in the morning, wanting to meet. Fortunately, she’s just woken up from a terrifying nightmare and is in the mood for an early breakfast. Harrison, Karen and the elephant in the room discuss her problem. Beyond the nightmares, she’s deeply troubled by the gap in her memory. She’s had numerous physical and psychological tests done without learning anything, and you get the sense that she’s primarily afraid that she’s had some kind of psychotic break and might be mentally ill, and I’m getting increasingly uncomfortable about that elephant. Harrison proposes hypnotizing her.

Given that it’s 1989, and repressed memories being recovered under hypnosis is all the rage, and also that she’s allegedly trying everything and anything she can think of to unlock the secret of her missing time, you might imagine that she’s already tried that. But it’s also an alien invasion show, so of course it had never occurred to her that hypnosis is anything more than a parlor trick and none of her doctors have suggested it to her and what about that elephant? She consents to hypnosis.

Ironhorse dutifully repeats the same scene from Epiphany back in the lab where he frets over Harrison having slipped out in the wee hours without telling anyone, with the added complaint that Harrison blew off the morning’s interviews. Harrison turns up while he’s complaining to ask Suzanne to do a psychological assessment on Karen, because microbiologist. Norton’s only contribution to the episode is to ask if Karen is hot, and when he will get a chance to creep on a psychologically vulnerable alien abduction victim. This is probably karmic punishment for me having praised him so highly a few weeks ago. Then Harrison goes off to flirt with Karen some more, culminating in makeouts before bringing her back to the safehouse to be interviewed by Suzanne.

Suzanne starts out with ink blots, which Karen mocks, having been through all this before. She’s also snarky about Suzanne’s next cliche psychology technique, word association. But that one pays off creepily, because after going through all the standard “red/blue”, “apple/orange”, “sex/mother” stuff, Suzanne tosses out, “alien”, and Karen’s instinctive reaction is, “rape”. Which means it’s finally time to talk about the elephant.

Let’s step behind the [more] tag here because of there’s about to be a sidebar about sexual assault.

Continue reading Thesis: He Feedeth Among The Lillies (War of the Worlds 1×14)

Busy couple of weeks, baby and all. I’ll try to have something more substantial for next week.