Category: War of the Worlds

So that happened.

There are remarkably few terms on which you can defend the execution of “Time to Reap”. You’re pretty much stuck with, “Bless their hearts, at least they tried.” And maybe, “At least it’s better than ‘Synthetic Love’.”

At this point, is it even worth pointing out the extent to which it contradicts the first season? There aren’t actually too many problems on a simple numeric basis: really just the two.

The portrayal of Sylvia shouldn’t bother me so much, but it does. Ann Robinson’s performances in the first season, despite being small parts, are incredibly powerful, and it really rubs me wrong. She played Sylvia as a much older woman struggling with severe mental illness, but still recognizably the same character she’d played back in 1953. The version of Sylvia here is just a random generic fifties mom. Blackwood clearly thinks of her as a mother figure, despite the fact that first-season Harrison never spoke of having been raised by Sylvia. He refers to Clayton as his adoptive father, but never calls Sylvia his mother: it’s implied (stated outright in the novelization) that her breakdown occurred while Harrison was still young. This is also the only time she’s referred to as “Mrs. Forrester” rather than “Ms. Van Buren”. It seems unlikely (Again, ruled out explicitly in the book) that first-season Sylvia and Clayton ever married, her illness and institutionalization precluding it.

If I’m more bothered than I ought to be by the rewriting of Sylvia, I’m also less bothered, emotionally, by the far bigger giant show-stopping bug with regards to the first-invasion aliens. Namely, Blackwood and Malzor are in agreement that the 1953 invaders died back in the fifties. Blackwood raises the idea that some of them may not have died “right away”, but even this is presented only as speculation. There’s no indication that the aliens survived in a state of dormancy instead of just dying. You know, the entire premise of the first season. I’d be more upset, but I’ve long since stopped expecting them to maintain any sort of parity with the first season.

In fact, it’s never really seemed like they were even trying to maintain continuity with the second season premiere. No one’s mentioned the first wave, or their fallen comrades, or the government project they worked for before being disavowed. There’s still some sense that the war has been going on for some time, and a recognition that the Morthren weren’t originally humanoid, but the concept of the current batch of aliens representing a distinct shift in the war has been largely forgotten. Note, for example, that the aliens Kincaid and Blackwood shoot in 1953 still explode into glow-sticks and evaporate, even though Blackwood had commented back in “The Second Wave” about the Morthren looking different when they die. Or how completely inconsistent Malzor’s compassion for the first wave is with his behavior in the opener, when he declared them all failures and had them executed en masse.

But if they meant to completely cut bait on the first-season premise, it’s odd that there are several little touches that relate back to elements of the first season. The reappearance of references to Blackwood having been raised by Forrester, which hasn’t been mentioned at all so far this season. Of course, the dying aliens in the past use the first season design, rather than something closer to the movie. And more, they’re wearing the refrigerated suits the aliens developed in “The Walls of Jericho”, just as they did in “Seft of Emun”. That’s largely just a practical matter, of course.

More interesting is the repeated references to radioactive contamination of the crash site. This seems like it ought to be a straightforward reference. Why are the aliens at Linda Rosa still active when the rest have lapsed into hibernation? Because the radiation is keeping the bacteria in check. And yet Blackwood never acknowledges this — you’d think he would. Just a simple, “Of course! That’s why he came here, Kincaid,” moment. Why add the detail of the radiation without using it? And why bother at all if you’ve written the entire first-season radiation angle out of the show?

As it stands, Blackwood and Kincaid never do learn why Malzor came back in time, or whether they’ve thwarted his plans. For that matter, neither does the audience. But our heroes seem singularly unfazed by this. There’s no angst-ridden note at the end with Blackwood unsure if their interference had positive or negative effects. They don’t know that Malzor was inoculating the others, they don’t know about the alien who got away. For all they know, Malzor came here to pull a spare transmission out of the warship.

Based on my limited resources, fan-reaction to this episode wasn’t as strongly negative as it was to some of the other episodes (“The Defector”, for instance, was panned because in 1990, the magic-computer-bullshit didn’t have the advantage of being charmingly ridiculous). But one of the complaints that caught my eye is that more than one person was hoping for some evidence that the radical inconsistencies between the first and second season were due to history being altered here. That would certainly be interesting — perhaps even interesting enough to redeem the fact that they’d done it in the first place. The archetype for time travel timeline-alteration episodes in science fiction of the time is very directly “Time got changed, this is bad, we’ve got to set it right by the end of the episode” — we’re about three weeks out from Star Trek the Next Generation‘s definitive example, “Yesterday’s Enterprise”. It wouldn’t be until years later that shows like Eureka and Primeval (And perhaps the Terminator franchise as a whole) would embrace the idea of making dramatic changes to the fictional world via a time-travel episode and having to just live with the consequences. Star Trek itself wouldn’t try this until the 2009 movie (Though technically, I think “Yesterday’s Enterprise” did have the timeline permanently altered by giving Starfleet uniforms collars, which they hadn’t had before).

You can sort of see how it would play out, in light of another one of this episode’s most fundamental problems: the 1950s world just does not look like they’re five days out from a global invasion. The people we meet in the ’50s, Miranda, Tommy the newsie, the cab driver who doesn’t take Malzor to Linda Rosa, Sylvia, none of them are acting like they’ve just lived through an invasion that’s killed or displaced millions of people across the world, razed the Earth’s major cities, toppled the Eiffel Tower, and forced man to question his place in the universe. General Mann is more worried about the Red Menace than the little green one. The only person who seems to have actually been traumatized by this war is Young Harrison.

You can still get a cab, people are still “scurrying to and fro over the Earth, about their little affairs,” TVs in shop windows still show local broadcasts. The evening paper comes out on time. Funny thing, that. The newspaper Blackwood buys upon their arrival is the four-star edition. Four-star editions are published in the late afternoon or evening — my dad, who prefers to read the paper when he came home from work rather than in the morning, was a subscriber to the Baltimore Evening Sun until its demise in 1995. No real problem with that, but if the evening paper just came out, how is it that Blackwood, Kincaid, and Malzor spend the next twelve hours there without it ever being nighttime? In September, in the Los Angeles area, there should be a bit less than thirteen hours of daylight. You just can not make the evening paper, the visit to Sylvia, General Mann’s press conference, Blackwood and Kincaid’s capture at Linda Rosa, and the final showdown all take place in the daytime unless they’re all meant to happen in a span of two to three hours. If we assume that the sun sets right after they leave the Forresters’ house, there’s not enough time left even if General Mann’s press conference is at dawn. Note that (though travel times might get contrived) the problem completely goes away if Malzor’s time limit is cut down to, say, four hours. That would also resolve the issue of Suzanne apparently just standing around making awkward small-talk with Miranda for twelve hours — twelve hours which apparently also span only a single night. The news boy is at his post. Miranda certainly doesn’t look like she’s just getting off after a 24-hour shift desperately fact-checking sources and trying to make sense of garbled, contradictory reports and fielding phone calls from families desperate to know if their loved ones are dead or alive. She may not have made page one, but she managed to land an interview with a celebrity scientist who’s currently out-of-contact for important government meetings.

As ridiculous as all this sounds, though, it should also seem maybe just a little familiar. This 1950s world is the same kind of world as the first season: no one’s actually denying that the invasion happened, but everyone’s just gone back to their regular lives as though it hadn’t.

Sound familiar? It’s a difficult thing to square away logistically, given the scope of the devastation the movie implied (And “Time to Reap” doesn’t really deny this, with headlines about the destruction in Europe and calls for foreign aid), but the black-and-white world Blackwood and Kincaid visit is very much in keeping, if not with the details, at least with the broad strokes of the first season’s world. The aliens aren’t forgotten, exactly, but most everyone’s moved past them, is more concerned about the Russkies, and gets kind of snippy if you even bring them up.

The world that Blackwood and Kincaid visit seems primed to evolve into exactly the sort of “World outside your window” that the second season eschewed in favor of grimdark dystopia. So what’s with the disconnect?

I think that when you factor in elements like the radiation, or the references back to Harrison’s childhood, or the lone inoculated alien escaping, you could make the case that there’s remnants of a bridge between the seasons here. I’ll go as far as to speculate — and again, I have no special insight here — that at some point, the idea was on the table to have this episode function as the explanation for the radical shift from the first season.

Continue reading Synthesis 6: It’s Just a Jump To the Left

It is January 29, 1990. In Cold War news, Tiraspol, Moldova briefly declares independence. Over the next few days, a McDonalds will open in Moscow and George H. W. Bush will propose that the US and Soviet Union cut back on their militaries, because he’s a pinko wimp who doesn’t love America. I mean, I assume. That’s what they usually say when someone suggests that the US doesn’t actually need a military big enough to take on the whole rest of the world at the same time. Joseph Hazelwood goes on trial for his actions as captain of the Exxon Valdez. Ava Gardner and Helen Jerome Eddy die. Of course, what everyone’s talking about today is the big news from the sports world, one of the most exciting sporting events of the year. I am of course talking about Steffi Graf beating Mary Jo Fernandez in the 48th Women’s Australian Open. Oh and also something about a Superb Owl, with the ’49ers beating the Broncos 55-10. I was more concerned about turning eleven, the Annual Major Sporting Event occurring on the Sunday nearest my birthday, as was tradition until it slipped forward a week in 2002.

Michael Bolton remains at the top of the charts for a second week with “How am I Supposed To Live Without You”, and Paula Abdul enters the top ten with “Opposites Attract”. ABC opposed the Super Bowl with an airing of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. In first-run Star Trek, The Next Generation gives us “The High Ground”. I know I watched this at some point. I remember something about there being this super-powerful dimension-hopping teleporter that damaged your DNA if you used it too much. I don’t remember the details. It’s not very good. I mean, it’s probably okay as a story, but it’s basically a traditional Roddenberry Morality Tale about terrorism, except that it never gets around to making any sort of moral statement about terrorism. It’s curiously ambivalent on the matter, offering only the banal platitude that terrorism is bad (mmkay?) because it hurts innocent people, but qualifying it with, “But maybe sometimes the terrorist have a legitimate complaint, and sometimes the establishment is even more evil and ruthless. But terrorism is still wrong. I think.” Also, there’s an offhand comment about Irish reunification that got it banned in Ireland. Mostly it just feels like pointless wheel-spinning. Here’s the take on it from Vaka Rangi.

Friday the 13th The Series provides “Midnight Riders”, an episode which, curiously, does not involve a cursed antique. Instead, on their way back from an off-screen adventure, the gang gets waylaid in a town haunted by vengeful biker ghosts in a sort of supernatural Bad Day at Black Rock. This might have been a trial-run for the plans Mancuso and company had to expand the scope of the series in the fourth season, introducing a broader range of paranormal threats.

Without me occasionally harping on it, you might have forgotten this by now, but War of the Worlds the TV series is, at least on paper, a sequel to the 1953 film The War of the Worlds. I know this can be a little hard to believe. On very rare occasions, there’s a direct allusion to it: the vague similarity of the Morthren weapons in Seft’s flashback, or the three-fingered tool Mana uses, but for the most part, there’s very little connecting the series with the show. It’s not forthrightly contradictory: we learn very little about the aliens in the movie (I mean, okay, they come from Mars in the movie, but surely that’s only speculation), and the fact that the Morthren are far less invincible for the series is well-justified as the result of a massive change in their fortunes after their early defeat. The biggest point of tension is the Morthren’s exclusive use of organic technology, as opposed to the alien-yet-recognizably-technological devices of the first invasion. But this is largely an aesthetic issue. Such a major aesthetic shift is strange to be sure, but not really any stranger than, say, Klingons changing from shifty white guys in Fu Manchus and shoe polish to bumpy-foreheaded space-samurai. It might be nice to see a flashback episode some day set on Morthrai with the Eternal decreeing that their defeat in 1953 was divine punishment for using too much copper and ordering them to convert their technological base over to green orange pith, but we can get by without it.

All the same, if you’re going to do a sequel to a movie from thirty-five years earlier, you’d kind of want there to be some connection. Even if the extent to which basically everything from the movie has changed is reasonable, there’s still the question of why you’re bothering. This is how I generally feel about reboots and reimaginings. I don’t mind if you change up a whole lot of stuff, but if you’re going to change things to the extent that the reboot doesn’t at least offer us a new perspective on the original, why bother? Why not just do something new? I liked, for example, Power/Rangers not for being a grimdark reimagining of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, but rather for the way it took those old Power Rangers concepts and asked us to think about the questions which a (as Samurai Karasu over at Ranger Retrospective would put it) Karate Show for Babies would never even give a first thought, let alone a second. Questions like, “Isn’t strongarming a bunch of children into fighting alien monsters once a week kind of an awful thing to do that would leave them with irreparable psychological damage?” On the other hand, the similarly grim live-action short film Voltron: Red isn’t nearly so compelling, because watching Lance slowly die of asphyxiation in a defunct red lion doesn’t really reframe anything from the thirty-year-old cuisinart-rewrite of Golion.

In any case, this episode of War of the Worlds is the first (and for the most part, only) time the series will seriously engage with its origins as a sequel to the 1953 George Pal film. And it’s… Well, to be honest, it’s kind of a hot mess. I hate to keep banging the same gong, but just like we’ve already seen time and again, it’s another episode where the acting is pretty good, the direction is pretty good, the character drama is strong, the concepts are interesting, the visual composition is great… And the plot is confused and directionless. It just sort of meanders in the general direction of a denouement and ends without bothering to accomplish anything or give any kind of resolution.

The Eternal orders Malzor to… Something. Something that Malzor protests is, “Beyond our capabilities.” The scene feels sort of out-of-order, especially with the audience only hearing Malzor’s side of the conversation. The Eternal brings up the first wave of the invasion, who died, as we all know, from harmless Earth bacteria in 1953. To Malzor’s surprise and confusion, the Eternal proposes that they use time travel to change the outcome of the earlier invasion. It’s clear in context from Malzor’s reaction that bringing up the 1953 invasion and time travel is a shift in the topic of conversation, so I’m really curious what it was the Eternal had been ordering right at the beginning that the Morthren, “have no such power” to do. My understanding is that time travel isn’t something the Morthren can normally do, but the Eternal is going to use its godlike powers to set something up.

Sadly, this clashes with my pet theory that the Eternal isn’t actually an intelligent being, but some sort of shared cultural neurosis of the Morthren. You can still salvage it, since the phenomenon the Morthren harness to enable time travel could be naturally occurring, but it’s a stretch. It would have the rather nice side effect of depicting Malzor as being close to a breakdown.

He promises the Eternal that, “Those who inhabit the Earth, some will be our slaves. The rest will have never been born,” and then orders Mana to rob some blood banks and gather some scientists to do immunological research. While that’s going on, he flips through some forty-year-old file photos until he finds the H. R. record of a 1950s G-man who, through an amazing coincidence, looks exactly like Denis Forest in some makeup and a wig. Using their amazing technology, the Morthren shine a green light on his face which gives him minor plastic surgery and a haircut. Pity they didn’t have this last week; they coulda done something about Kemo’s scars and saved themselves a lot of bother.

Reports of the blood bank robberies make the news, grossing out Debi. Suzanne fails to connect it with the aliens (and why should she?) and suggests that the thieves probably mean to sell the blood on the black market. The news report is interrupted for a weather report, announcing that a hurricane is moving inland from the east coast, causing gale force winds and flooding in the city. I guess we have confirmation now that the city is on the east coast. Kincaid and Blackwood return from a supply run and confirm the severity of the storm.

Then the power goes out and everyone notices that their watches are magnetized.

The weather anomalies are a good example of the writing being incredibly muddled and confused this week. We’ve just been told that the storm they’re experiencing is due to an, “Unusually high tide” along the gulf coast, which, in turn, scientists theorize is caused by, I am not making this up, “A planetary alignment that occurs only once in several centuries.” Oh goody. Vaguely specified planetary alignments are always a reasonable go-to explanation for negative space wedgie bullshit happening in a sci-fi show, because it’s totally reasonable that when the planets all align, the laws of physics get suspended by a gravitational force that is four orders of magnitude smaller than the difference in the gravitational pull on the Earth by the son from perhelion to aperherlion. But none of that even matters, because in a minute, they’re going to cut back to the Morthren and Ardix is going to tell Malzor that he’s only got twelve hours because that’s how long it will take for the energy from the supernova to pass beyond Earth’s orbit. What supernova? Never mind. Maybe the implication here is that the Eternal done blew up a star in order to facilitate Malzor’s Back to the Future reenactment. Because (a) the Eternal can do that, (2) the energy from a supernova would reach Earth in a matter of days rather than centuries, and (iii) this would somehow allow time travel. This is like that episode of Doctor Who where the Cybermen blow up a star in a different galaxy and this somehow diverts a meteor shower toward a space station near Earth.
And on top of all this, the opening shot of the episode is of the sun, showing prominent solar flares in a way that seems like they’re trying to foreshadow that the solar flares have something to do with the window for time travel. That, at least, has the benefit of being a bullshit pseudoscience justification for time travel that Stargate SG-1 would later accept (I’ve always assumed that the second wave arrived via some kind of teleportation rather than by ship, as evidenced by the way that they at no point seem to have a, y’know, ship. It would certainly be an interesting coincidence if the Morthren time machine — realized as a large, circular portal controlled from a nearby pedestal — was actually a repurposed interstellar transporter, which could achieve time travel by sending the traveler on a parabolic orbit across the path of prominent solar flare).
But just to add insult to injury, in a moment, Blackwood and Suzanne are going to be discussing this strange weather — the weather that’s prompted flood warnings, and they’re going to notice that it’s exactly the same as Norton (Remember him? Their colleague from the pilot who they haven’t mentioned all season?) had observed when the second wave arrived: “Lightning and thunder and never any rain.”
So what we have here is a major storm, which is caused by a hurricane, and also by a planetary alignment, and also by solar flares, and also by a supernova. Which is causing high winds, thunder and lightning, power failures, electromagnetic effects, magnetizing watches, and floods, but not rain. This all happens in the space of about five minutes. Was the writer drunk?

Blackwood stops by Debi’s room to give her a candle, and they have a pleasant chat about her homework, which is on the history of Rock ‘n Roll. Seriously. When is this show set, anyway? They chat a bit about what life was like in the ’50s, when life was, “nice and normal”. Debi finds the concept of milk delivery, newspaper delivery, and ice cream trucks impossible to believe. Um. We have two of those things now. I get that Debi lives in a dystopian hellhole which wouldn’t have luxuries like ice cream trucks, but just how long has the world been like this if she can’t even imagine them? Debi’s not that old, of course, but if the collapse of civilization isn’t recent, when was it? The most logical time for it to happen would be back in the ’50s, in the immediate aftermath of the war. But, as we’re about to learn, Blackwood was a small child during the war, so if civilization collapsed back then, he wouldn’t remember “sock hops and bebops”.

This isn’t really a character focus episode for Blackwood per se, but it does go into his backstory quite a bit. Clumsily. The magnetized watches must have triggered a memory for him, because he consults an old notebook and finds a reference to a, “Lightning storm with no rain and high winds,” associated with magnetized watches and power outages. The notebook belonged to Dr. Clayton Forrester, and is describing the events of the first invasion. I don’t recall there being high winds and lightning in the movie, though the magnetized watches and power failures are in there.

Lucky job he had that in his pocket when the safe house and all their stuff got blown up. Blackwood and Suzanne draw the horrifying conclusion that the unusual weather might herald another invasion wave. And you know what, I like this. All too often, even in modern sci-fi adventure, there’s a scene where the heroes have to speculate on what the enemy’s next move is based on limited evidence, and they luck into getting it exactly right, even though there are much more obvious possibilities that would fit the known facts. But this time, our heroes get it wrong, and they get it wrong because there happens to be a really well-supported possibility that fits their experience and the facts they know, and because there’s no way they could guess what’s actually going on from the facts at hand. Fortunately, their wrong guess is still close enough to point them in the right direction, so they grab Kincaid and hop in the Awesome Van, using some unnamed piece of scientific equipment to locate the epicenter of the lightning strikes, which they describe as generating “A tremendous displacement of energy,” and compare to a black hole. Kincaid’s not happy about this plan, as it’s not like they have any realistic chance of breaking the beachhead of a full-on invasion, but Blackwood insists that, at the least, someone has to be there to see it.

Another electromagnetic pulse disables the van, and they proceed on foot to the epicenter, which turns out to be in an abandoned amusement park. There’s no Watsonian reason for this. If the Eternal did indeed engineer the meteorological conditions to make time travel possible, I guess maybe it picked a place that was near the Morthren base, but not so close that it would give their location away? The obvious Doylist reason for the setting is because abandoned amusement parks are super creepy, and this show is supposed to be pretty scary. I’ll give it to them, a gunfight with aliens with shots ricocheting off of broken-down animatronic clowns is pretty awesome.

Mana determines that the death of the first invasion force was due to a single, specific microbe. She provides Malzor with a serum that will innoculate and heal the infected. They’ve never really talked about why it is that the modern Morthren of the second wave aren’t similarly affected — the fact that it’s only now that they’ve had to develop a treatment for that microbe is sort of weird. We do know that the Morthren are still extrememly susceptible to Earth diseases, with Ardix and Ceeto both suffering from life-threatening infections after fairly superficial injuries.

Each of you is charged with a specific role. The Eternal has created this moment for us, and we will not fail him.

We’ll bring about a new era on this diseased planet. Malzor gives what’s supposed to be an inspirational speech, and Ardix powers up the time machine. Blackwood and Kincaid follow a Morthren soldier into the funhouse, because of course they do. You don’t have a fight scene in an abandoned amusement park without a chase through the hall of mirrors, and you don’t have a chase through the hall of mirrors without one of two things happening. Option A is a big exciting scene of lots of mirrors shattering. They go for option B: the soldier shoots at Blackwood with his laser weapon, only to have it bounce off a series of mirrors in unlikely procession until he accidentally vaporizes himself. Suzanne tries to follow the men inside, but is restrained by an old woman who’s maybe dressed as a fortune teller? Or maybe she’s just dressed like a homeless person wearing a bandana. At any rate, she assures Suzanne that she can’t follow where the others are going for reasons she will explain once the camera cuts away.

Alerted by the gunfire outside, Malzor orders Ardix to turn up the power. He hurls himself into the glowing circular membrane of the time portal just as Blackwood and Kincaid arrive. The remaining Morthren run for cover rather than engage the humans, giving Blackwood an opening to jump into the portal himself, and Kincaid reluctantly follows. I haven’t said much about Julian Richings these past few episodes, because ultimately, he’s a very minor character, popping in for a line or two, and he’s great, but there’s not much to talk about. But I’ll stop a moment here to point out just how fantastic his Big-Shouted-NOOOOOOOO! reaction shot is here when he helplessly watches Blackwood and Kincaid launch themselves into the time portal.

There’s a particular visual idiom which Frank Mancuso Jr. really likes. He’s used it repeatedly in Friday the 13th the Series, and now he’s using it here. Like a reverse Wizard of Oz, time travel is depicted by the world switching to black-and-white. It makes you almost wonder if he thinks that the world was actually like that before the advent of color television. It doesn’t quite look like normal black-and-white television, though. I assume that the color was removed in post. The contrast is very sharp, and it gives everything a slight air of unreality which I think works nicely, but it’s just weird as hell because the 1953 movie was in color. In fact, it had really rich, deep color, that had its own sort of Technicolor unreality to it, and it’s just wrong to flatten that down to black and white. It’s almost like they’ve gone back in time not to a real past, but to a past TV show. Hey, y’know what? Let’s roll with that.

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It is September 7, 1953. In Cold War news, the UN rejected a proposal by the Soviet Union to grant membership to China. This might lose you a point or two on a world history test, because in 1953, China was already a member of the UN. This is because there’s kinda sorta two Chinas, but don’t say that in earshot of either one of them because it’s a touchy subject. The Taiwan-based Republic of China, though it had lost control of the mainland in 1949, would retain its UN seat until 1971. Nikita Kruschev becomes the head of the Soviet Central Committee. Last Friday, REM sleep was discovered. Senator Kennedy is getting ready for his wedding to Jacqueline Bouvier this Saturday. That boy’s going places, I tells ya. Later this week, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson will die. Because it’s the ’50s and Eisenhower is white, his replacement, California Governor Earl Warren, will be confirmed in less than a month.

“Vaya con Dios” remains on the top of Billboard Magazine‘s Most-Played and Best-Seller charts. It’ll be second only to Dean Martin’s rendition of “That’s Amore” for the year in general. Racket Squad, Studio One, and Robert Montgomery Presents are all new tonight. This week’s Dragnet, airing Thursday, is “The Big Revolt”.

Frankly, I’m still not convinced that trying to adapt last month’s George Pal film to a weekly series is a great idea. I mean, with the Martians all dead or dying, what’s this show going to be about, anyway? There are some hints. General Mann gives a press conference in which he mentions the urgency of the US gaining access to an alien mothership to learn its secrets before the Soviets can do the same. There’s certainly room here for a Cold War intrigue, maybe some kind of proto-spy-fi with agents tracking down spies and criminals armed with stolen alien technology.

This episode seems to represent a changing of the guard from the movie, marking General Mann’s last appearance, reducing Sylvia to a cameo, and moving Clayton entirely off-screen as he’s been called to Washington for a conference. In their place, we’re given a new main character, Miranda Watson, plucky junior reporter for the City Sun-Mirror. She dreams of getting the big scoop and making page 1 (Her interview with Clayton Forrester on the question of whether the aliens were really from Mars and not some other planet is on page 2), alongside the articles about how tough it is to be a beat cop, and trade negotiations with the AFL, and, oh, right, the devastation of much of the world by the Martian invasion last week. But for now, they won’t even comp her a copy of the newspaper she works for, as she’s got to buy one from Tommy, the news boy stationed outside the newspaper office.

Tommy suddenly notices something funny about the half-dollar his last customer used to pay him: it bears the face of the junior senator from Massachusetts. That seems forced. I mean, do you have any half-dollars on you at the moment? It’s not like they were any more common in the early ’90s. Half-dollars were the last silver coins in production in the late ’60s, so collectors hoarded them, and by the time the half-dollar was switched to nickel-clad copper in the ’70s, people had gotten out of the habit of spending them. Maybe Blackwood’s a gambler (The only place I know of that half-dollars are commonly used for any more is casinos, where they get used like a half-chip, or to pay out non-computerized slot machines). He shoulda given the kid a dime. Dimes haven’t changed their design since the forties. Besides, the newspaper only actually cost a nickel.He probably should’ve noticed sooner since it was nickel-clad copper instead of real silver. Miranda trades him a proper Franklin-head for the “counterfeit” one and sets out to learn more about the pair of mysterious strangers…

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Blackwood quickly deduces where they are by buying a newspaper from a conveniently placed newsie. It’s September 7, 1953, which is a really neat little detail: it’s twelve days after the movie was released. Blackwood tells us that this is five days after the alien defeat, which would mean the war lasted 7 days. That aligns with a bit of dialogue from the movie: one of Forrester’s colleagues does the math on the rate of alien progress and calculates that it will take them six days to conquer the world, so the date works out if we assume the aliens landed on August 26, the war started the following day, and the battle of Los Angeles was part of the final push. Blackwood also realizes that they’ve traveled in space, by a coincidence that completely beggars the imagination, to his home town. Which is probably near Los Angeles, for reasons I’ll get to in a bit. I’m not saying it’s unreasonable for the time portal to have sent them across the country in addition to sending them four decades back in time, but I’m not satisfied with the reasons for it. Why cross the country? Surely there must be enclaves of dying aliens all over the planet, probably some that aren’t surrounded by the US Military. For that matter, why did they come back to after the war? Maybe the time tunnel was limited to this exact place and time by natural forces, but if so, they should have said something about it.

Blackwood is also confused by their choice of destination. He guesses — another near miss — that they’ve come back to retrieve something from the past, since, per Forrester, not all of the aliens died right away. He’s at a loss as to what set of time travel story rules apply, but cautions Kincaid that anything they do in the past will alter their present. Guess how many times this comes up. He decides that the best move is to go home. This is when, very casually, they drop the major backstory-bomb of the episode: Blackwood’s parents died in the war, and he was raised by Dr. Forrester’s wife, Sylvia.

That’s… Kind of a big thing to just suddenly, casually drop into the middle of a random episode like that. I get that because the story began in medias res, you wouldn’t expect Blackwood to have any sort of “origin story”, but this is the first time we’ve mentioned the Forresters. It’s not like there hasn’t been ample oportunity in the show so far to have him pull out Clayton’s old notebook to reference some aspect of alien biology or technology that Forrester had discovered. It’s doubly weird because it’s not like we pick up with Clayton and Sylvia where the film left them: in the five days since the end of the movie, they’ve gotten married and adopted a kid. (And now he’s run off to Washington for a week-long conference. Shitty honeymoon.) It’s just such a waste to call back to one of the greatest couples of 1950s sci-fi and not really do anything with them. I see no particular resemblance between Sylvia Forrester in this episode and the character Ann Robinson played, and not just that Martha Irving looks nothing at all like Ann Robinson. I guess it’s reasonable that she would stay home and not be involved directly with aliens any more. Sylvia was an academic — she taught library science — but not a research scientist of the sort who’d be involved on a continuing basis with alien research. Plus, she was clearly traumatized by her experiences and was unlikely to want to assist her husband in his work. But the Sylvia we see here is just sort of “Generic Fifties Housewife.” The fact that she’s a newlywed, a new mother, and went through a highly traumatic, life-changing experience last week doesn’t really show on her at all.

It also makes me more interested than ever in the unspoken backstory for this series. Now that we know Blackwood is the adopted son of the Forresters, maybe that clarifies my confusion about how role on the team from the opening episode. The old team that gets cut down in the pilot, remember, was basically the General, three specialists, and Blackwood. You could sort of imagine now that whatever events led General Wilson to form his team might have involved Blackwood directly. Maybe the last invasion wave announced their presence by hunting down the Forresters, and he convinced Wilson to let him on the team to avenge his parents.

There’s a huge waste of opportunity here. Odd that the narrative doesn’t feel any need to explain who Sylvia and Clayton are. Is it really safe to assume the audience is that familiar with the movie? We’re still in the early days of home video, and the show’s had little enough to do with the movie so far. Kincaid doesn’t seem to need any explanation of who Clayton is, but he doesn’t appear to have known that he’s Blackwood’s adopted dad . It’s clumsy. We really should have seen small, casual references to Clayton throughout the season leading up to this reveal. Start out with Blackwood mentioning him to Kincaid right at the beginning when he says that the aliens have changed physically — something like “Back in the fifties, there was a scientist, Clayton Forrester, he theorized that the alien biology blah blah blah.” You’ve made sure that the audience knows to recognize the name as important when it comes up here. The thought occurs that probably the reason Blackwood kept his birth name, despite it being common practice in the ’50s that he’d have changed his name as part of the adoption is specifically so that it can be a surprising reveal that Clayton isn’t just an old scientist he respects, but his father. And yet, there’s no real weight to the reveal here.

Blackwood gets momentarily choked up on seeing Sylvia, but recovers quickly and presents himself as a colleague from Canada, reminding me of the running gag on Sliders of the heroes explaining their ignorance of local customs on alternate Earths by claiming to be Canadian tourists, who thus don’t know who won the Civil War or which color traffic light means “go”. She’s polite, but unhelpful, as Clayton’s out of contact. Before heading inside, she asks if he’s seen her kid, who’s probably hiding in his “secret hiding place”.

Blackwood circles around to the “secret hiding place”, which turns out to be a crude lean-to against the side of the house with open sides. Now, it might seem contrived that Sylvia can’t find the kid, but keep in mind, she’s lived here like five days max. Here we introduce Young Harrison Blackwood, played by Amos Crawley, an actor who is going to grow up to be a respected live-action and voice performer, but here is another terrible child actor. Blackwood and himself have a heart-to-heart. The kid is obviously upset about his parents being dead. If he’s bugged by the fact that his new replacement dad has abandoned him within a week, he keeps that to himself. When Young Harry says that he wants to be with his parents in heaven, his older self comforts him by giving him a Cat’s Eye shooter marble, a memento he’s been carrying around for the past forty years to remind himself of his parents.

They abandon the grieving child to go catch a press conference being given nearby by General Mann. General Mann is played by George R. Robinson, best known for playing Hurst in the Police Academy series. When I saw this casting choice, I was initially really bothered that, as with Martha Irving as Sylvia, Robinson looks nothing at all like Les Treymane. But seeing him in action, I was surprised to find that I didn’t have too much trouble accepting him as an older, wearier version of the same character. That said, it’s a rough fit for a General Mann who’s only a week older than when we last saw him. The General Mann of the film was urbane, a good communicator, and eager to work with others to get the job done. Robinson’s Mann is much more crotchety and “Get off my lawn you damned kids.” It doesn’t seem flat-out wrong, but it’s a big shift in the characterization to go unjustified.

Mann is clearly unhappy about having to deal with reporters. He refuses to confirm that they’ve got a group of alien survivors cordoned off in the devastated nearby town of Linda Rosa. The real Linda Rosa was a 19th century housing development south of Murrieta, California which briefly became its own town in the 19th century. Murrieta is a little more than an hour outside of Pasadena, and in the modern day, it’s a major bedroom community for LA, so it’s actually kind of a reasonable place for the Forresters to live, assuming that the fictional Pacific Tech is in roughly the same place as Cal Tech. Though in the fifties, Murrieta was mostly an agricultural town with a declining tourism industry linked to the local hot springs. I’m probably over-thinking this, but it’s really interesting that we’ve finally been given geographical clues that actually seem to point to a single, specific place that makes sense. Mann does confirm that the quarantine area is being monitored due to elevated radiation. Blackwood and Kincaid catch sight of Malzor in the crowd and give chase, but he evades them by ducking around a corner.

Having failed to hire a cab to take him to Linda Rosa, Malzor locates the FBI agent he’s been impersonating, murders him, and steals his car. I think. Actually, it kinda seems like he just climbs into a random car to evade our heroes, and by dumb luck, the real Agent Magruder is inside.

Miranda, having spotted our heroes at the press conference, approaches them, looking for an interview. Blackwood and Kincaid respond by carjacking her to get up to Linda Rosa themselves. She takes them for Russian agents, because, “Everyone’s worried about Russian agents right now, especially Senator McCarthy,” which amuses Kincaid a little. They immediately spill the beans about being from the future, because fuck the timeline. She doesn’t believe them, of course, until Kincaid points out that aliens are a thing. Seriously, he’s just like, “We’re chasing an alien. If you believe in aliens, you damn well better believe in us,” and she finds this completely convincing.

Malzor’s forged identification gets him past the military checkpoint. Our heroes aren’t so lucky, and get caught pretty much immediately. General Mann doesn’t find their advanced polyester clothes and digital watches at all convincing, and declares all three of them to obviously be Soviet agents and has them taken away.

Kincaid protests that they’ve only got two hours left of the original twelve, which is utterly bizarre on all sorts of levels. For example, really? They’ve been here for ten hours? Doing what? And more importantly, when did Kincaid learn about the twelve hour window?

Miranda fakes a panic attack as they’re about to be locked up, giving Blackwood and Kincaid an opening to dispatch the guards and free themselves. Kincaid gags Miranda with his bandana and locks her up to keep her out of harm’s way. There really ought to have been a line here explaining that by leaving her locked up, they were effectively clearing her from suspicion of being a willing accomplice to the two “Soviet agents” (I mean, maybe. It was the ’50s. They’d probably just conclude that she was a spy anyway because she hadn’t forced them to shoot her).

“Agent Magruder” affirms the general’s suspicions about Blackwood and Kincaid being spies, then demands to be taken to the alien mothership. General Mann is combative about it. This angers Malzor so much that he temporarily forgets what show he’s in and knocks the general out with a Vulcan neck pinch, then sticks one of those grub things from Ceti Alpha V in his ear, placing him under alien mind control.

The general drives Malzor to the crash site and stands guard outside. This is where we get our one and only look at the iconic Martian War Machine. They’ve been referring to it as a “mothership”, which is clearly wrong (the motherships were cylinders which contained three of the smaller warships), but it’s there, one of the most distinctive and famous space ships in the history of sci-fi.

Of course, by “It’s there”, I mean, “There’s a matte painting of one.” It’s a very nice matte painting though. Even in black and white, it captures the look of the original perfectly (The cobra-head looks maybe a little off, but that might just be the angle on the shot). Malzor kinda sings at it, for what reason, I can’t say.

The ship is crashed against a dairy. Malzor finds the ship’s occupants huddled inside. The aliens here look exactly like they did in “Seft of Emun” and “The Second Wave”, rather than the original movie design, and wear the same cowled suits with tubing all over them. There’s a surprisingly touching scene where Malzor regards his dying brethren with compassion, speaking words of comfort to them. One alien reaches out its three-fingered hand in desperation, and he takes it compassionately.

While he injects the survivors with his vaccine, Kincaid and Blackwood fight their way past the army to the crash site. Blackwood draws General Mann’s fire while Kincaid circles around… And shoots him. Yeah. Kincaid shoots General Mann. We don’t actually see him die — he’s still trembling when they move on — but it seems pretty likely those wounds are fatal. And it’s not like Kincaid knew he was mind-controlled or anything. He just up and murdered a two-star for no greater crime than being in their way and doing his duty to protect the US against suspected Russian spies. Surely, the murder of General Mann and Agent Magruder mean that the timeline has been altered, setting up a paradox that will — nah, I’m just kidding. Nothing happens and it’s never mentioned again.

Malzor passes the vaccine off to one of the 1953 aliens and orders him to find and innoculate the others as he sees the humans approach. Blackwood and Kincaid dispassionately gun down all the aliens they find, spraying the walls with their glow-stick blood as the air grows thick with the smoke from their evaporation. Meanwhile, in the future (I know, right?), Ardix declares that Malzor’s time is up and entreats him to return at once. The time portal just sorta appears at the end of the building, and Malzor makes a break for it. Blackwood sees him and they give chase. Though Malzor orders Ardix to cut the power to the time portal as soon as he emerges, I guess it takes the thing a few seconds to wind down. The Morthren flee just before Kincaid and Blackwood emerge, finding the black-and-white world of the past replaced by the black-and-brown world of the present. After checking under the house for any dead witches, they leave the house of mirrors to be reunited with Suzanne, who I guess has just been waiting there for the past twelve hours (Is it still night time twelve hours later? Of course it is. When I watched this show as a teenager, I kinda assumed the sun had gone out or something, it is so rarely daytime).

The old woman chuckles and declares that they, “Haven’t changed a bit,” and that she’s waited a long time to see how the story ends. Kincaid is confused until she returns his bandanna. Realizing that it’s Miranda, they all share a good laugh. You might reasonably ask how Miranda had known to be there. But I’ll let it slide; Kincaid easily could have told her the exact date, time, and place they came from on the trip to Linda Rosa, though why he’d do it, I’ve no idea. Also, I think it would have been better for her to show them the half-dollar rather than the handkerchief.

Back at the Morthren base, there’s a pointless scene where Malzor apologizes to the Eternal for his failure and asks to be punished. Based on his reaction, it seems like the Eternal just told him he was Very Disappointed and Try Harder Next Time. Given Morthren philosophy, I guess that bit does perhaps work as support for my theory that the Eternal isn’t real and Malzor is just crazy.

We finish on Blackwood in his room, gazing into the marble he gave his younger self. Because he’s got it back somehow. Because… Fuck, I don’t know. He’s in a funk, melancholic over seeing Sylvia again and revisiting the loss of his birth parents. Debi interrupts his reverie to ask him to teach her one of those old-timey ’50s dances, and he agrees, which I guess is supposed to be symbolic of Blackwood choosing to remember the happy things about his past as well as the sad.

Man, this episode. What a freaking waste. I have no problem with the premise; it’s a great premise. And the imagery is fantastic, especially the amusement park. I also really like the bookending scenes with Debi. I really want her to be this show’s moral center, and I love the symbolism of Blackwood choosing Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll as the thing from his past that he wants to pass on to her in light of the way that they’re both children of the alien war.

But the plot is basically incoherent garbage. Adrian Paul did an interview for Starlog where he said that the scripts for War of the Worlds were almost always delivered late and needed substantial revisions on the fly to cover over the worst of the plot holes. This seems like a really beleaguered production.

There are so many places they could have gone here. We get to revisit these amazing characters from the original film, but Clayton’s out of town and Sylvia’s a barely-recognizable cameo. You’ve got Blackwood’s dire warning about changing the past, but then they go and shoot General Mann with no repercussions whatever. We presume one alien does escape with the ability to immunize aliens the world over, but this has no impact on the timeline. Nothing gets explained, nothing justified. The show seems unengaged with its own past to the point of negligence. Don’t forget that in “The Second Wave”, Malzor eagerly executed the previous invasion force for their failures, yet now he’s eager to save the failed first invasion. After repeatedly hammering home the Morthren mindset of disdain and even contempt for anything perceived as imperfect, Malzor greets his dying comrades with affection and compassion. It’s not really clear what was at stake here, and what success or failure ought to look like. That one alien escaping sure seems like it should have made this an ultimate success for the Morthren, but it’s not. Are they setting something up for later? Any deferred impact from this would be a major cheat. What are they going to do, start the next season with the revelation that the escaped alien did inoculate more of the 1953 survivors, but for some reason they went into hiding for forty years rather than hop back in the war machines and finish conquering the world?

So many of the time travel tropes seem to just be tossed in because someone vaguely recalled them being things that happen in time travel stories. Meeting yourself as a young child, check. Dire warnings about what happens if you alter the past, check. Time passing in the present at the same speed as the future, check. Person you met in the past turning up as an old person when you return to the present, check (I don’t know why I feel compelled to mention, this, but that was the capacity in which W. Morgan Sheppard appeared in Doctor Who, as the 2013-version of Canton Delaware, their ally whose 1969 version was played by Sheppard’s son). Even the bit with Blackwood’s marble — a bauble of enormous personal significance to him, which we have never seen or heard of before and never will again. That scene feels like it must have been inspired by a botched reading of the scene in Star Trek IV where Kirk sells his glasses. How does he get it back at the end? Because reasons.

It grates on you. This episode could have been something really cool. But instead, it’s amateur hour.

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

 

Could you tell me… how what happened last night happened?

It is January 23, 1989 (Depending on your viewing area, it may actually be the following Saturday. Big variance in airdates across markets this week). The President of the United States is George Herbert Walker Bush. An earthquake in what’s now Tajikistan kills close to 300 people. The San Francisco ’49ers claim victory in Superbowl XXIII, beating the Bengals. Tomorrow, serial killer Ted Bundy will be executed in Florida. Wednesday, John Cleese will win a libel case against the Daily Mail after they accused him of being nebulously similar to the character he played in Fawlty Towers. A legal challenge to Jewish identity laws is raised in Israel, which will culminate in the Israeli Supreme Court ruling that Messianic Judaism counts as a form of Christianity, rather than Judaism, for legal purposes. Noted jazz man Billy Tipton and artist Salvador Dali died this week. Also, Friday is my tenth birthday.

James Brown is sentenced to six years in jail after a multi-state police chase. Madonna and Sean Penn file for divorce. Michael Jackson’s Bad tour finishes out its run. Debi Gibson releases Electric Youth, and Skid Row releases a self-titled album. Phil Collins’s “Two Hearts” hits the top of the Billboard Hot 100.

Remember when I brought up Morgan Sheppard last week? Funny thing: he’s in this week’s Star Trek the Next Generation, “The Schizoid Man”, in which he plays a dying scientist who uploads his brain into Data. If your nerdery runs deep enough, you might have anticipated that the part was originally written for Patrick McGoohan. Friday the 13th the Series is a tearjerker: “The Playhouse”, in which a cursed Wendy House takes a couple of abused children to a fantasy world, only, as per usual, there’s human sacrifice involved. Even Friday the 13th shied away from multiple child-murder, though, so the playhouse’s victims are just imprisoned. Belinda Metz guest-stars. I feel like I’ve mentioned her before, but I can’t think why…

This is a tough episode. See, I like mysticism, as a plot point. And I like when a show like this goes mad. And this episode goes mad with mysticism. And it’s got some fantastic special effects, and it’s a great character focus episode for Ironhorse. But therein lies the difficulty, because this episode is War of the Worlds taking a stab at looking into Ironhorse’s Native American heritage, which heretofore has mostly come up only in a very superficial way to give a little flavor to Ironhorse’s characterization. Only it’s 1989 in American Television on a Sci-Fi Adventure show.

So yeah. This week’s episode is Aliens versus Magic Injuns. There’s a lot of good stuff in here, but it’s inexorably bound up in a lot of stuff that’s… Less good. But look, they are really honestly trying here. They didn’t have to. And I am generally pro-trying. I am generally against reacting to a TV show making a genuine effort to present a positive depiction of Native American culture by screaming at them for being terrible at it. No, really, the only thing that’s grating about it is the general sense that, “Yup. Indian* Stuff Is Like That.” *I am not tremendously comfortable with using the word “Indian” to refer to the native peoples of the Americas, not least because that one’s already taken by the people who live on the subcontinent in southern Asia. But it’s the term used exclusively by the show, there’s places here where I think it would be misleading not to reflect their word choice. If War of the Worlds went mad with mysticism all the time, this wouldn’t be such a big deal. Or if War of the Worlds also included depictions of Native American culture that weren’t centered around mystical elements (And admittedly, they have made a few small gestures, such as Ironhorse’s paean to his tomahawk way back in “A Multitude of Idols”). The real wall-banger is that even though it can be explained and justified in the science-fiction context of the show, pretty much everyone just rolls with the idea that, “Oh yeah, Indians have magic powers,” as though it’s not especially remarkable.

R. D. Reid is a kind of poor-man’s Vincent Schiavelli, specializing in playing pasty, long-faced creepy guys, such as a pharmacist at a narcotics dispensary in some dystopian series or other. Here, he’s playing Mark Newport, an “archaeologist” who dresses like he’s the poor-man’s Indiana Jones. But he’s not. Right off the bat, we establish that he’s kinda shady because he uses a pair of bolt-cutters to cut down a “No Trespassing” sign. It’s not clear that the sign was actually blocking his way or anything, I guess it was symbolic. He’s here to do a little light grave-robbing at the Westeskiwin Indian Reservation. Westeskiwin allegedly means “People of the river”, and doesn’t appear to be a real tribe, though the name is similar to a Cree word that gave the name to a city near Edmonton. He cavalierly desecrates a sixteenth-century burial mound and steals a headdress featuring a large triangular cut stone.

Obviously, the first thing he does upon unearthing this delicate, ancient artifact is to shake out the bits of four-hundred-year-old dead chieftain and stick it on his head. Hey, it’s not like anyone was going to mistake him for a good archaeologist. Anyway, when he does, the headdress reveals itself as a primitive form of iPod by playing back a recording of tribal chants at him. Upon hearing this, he immediately freaks out, decides that the spirits have marked him for death, drops the headdress, runs for dear life and vows never to perform unlicensed archaeology again.

Nah, I’m just kidding. He finds the whole thing amusing, not scary at all, and instead gets instantly to thinking about how much money this find will bring in. Curiously, he does not choose to mention the whole “Magic Indian Chanting Powers” thing when he gives a press conference the next day to drum up interest for the upcoming auction. See, this is what I’m talking about. This guy’s discovered an ancient artifact with literal magic powers, and, sure, he finds it interesting, but he doesn’t even find it so remarkable as to include it when he explains why it should be considered the archaeological find of the century. It’s like, you know how you can hear the ocean when you put a conch shell to your ear? It seems almost like he reckons that ancient Native American headdresses are like that. You hear the sea when you put a shell to your ear; you hear ancient tribal chants when you put a Native American headdress to your ear. It’s cool, but nothing to get worked up about. He does eventually get spooked when the image of a bear appears in the sky, and beats a hasty retreat with his ill-gotten booty.

While this shameless assault on their cultural heritage is going on, the local shaman, Joseph Lonetree, is taking his son Darrow out into the woods for one of those important Native American Magic Rituals that Native Americans always happen to be doing whenever the white man has a camera crew in the area. I’m not really sure why he’s doing it: this is supposed to be the ritual in which Joseph initiates his son in the secrets of the tribe’s guardian spirits, and — I’m not really sure about this because, what do you know, they don’t bother to explain anything in detail — I think, basically make him an apprentice shaman. But it’s pretty clear from the get-go that Joseph doesn’t think Darrow is up to it. We’re not given the details, just little hints. He’s impatient with the older man, probably too integrated in the “white man’s world” and not in-touch enough with his heritage, bored by yet another retelling of the story of Kay-la-letivik, the tribe’s most prominent guardian spirit.

Because of how this show is going, he’s utterly nonplussed when his dad proceeds to make the crystal at the end of his staff glow, which summons a thunderstorm (An odd thunderstorm, as there’s thunder, lightning, but never any rain…) and a vague image that’s maybe the head of a bear appears in what is either a vortex of storm clouds, or just one storm cloud that they filmed while spinning the camera around in a circle. Darrow Lonetree declares that he’s performed the traditional ritual preparations, and informs the spirit of his CV:

I’ve been to college. I own a piece of land and I plan on building a house. And I’ve never lost a fight with anyone. I’m in excellent health, and I feel good about who I am. I’m ready to own the spirit.

By an amazing coincidence, Leah (who happened to come down while I was watching this one), I myself, years ago when I first watched it, and Elyse Dickenson way back in 1989 all had the same reaction: he sounds like a Yuppie.

Joseph’s face replaces the sky-bear in the clouds and declares that, as he failed to fast for the full required time, Darrow is unready. Receiving the spirit of Kay-la-letivik is pretty much the same as an HbA1C test. Joseph vanishes, leaving Darrow alone. I do not really blame the spirits. Darrow doesn’t really seem like the shaman type. I mean, his pitch to the sky-bear about his worthiness sounds more like the rejected suitor in a Victorian romance explaining to the dowager countess how he’s got excellent prospects and would make a fine match for her daughter despite being forty years older than her and being played by Billy Zane. But more to the point, his dad just summoned a storm, and a sky bear, and projected his face onto the heavens, and then teleported away, and his reaction is primarily one of boredom.

I’ll be honest with you, it’s kind of hilarious. A big part of the reason this show wasn’t more successful is that most of the audience didn’t fully appreciate that it was meant to be funny. Not slapstick, over-the-top comedy, but the more subtle kind of parody of, say, The Man From U.N.C.L.E, where the humor derives primarily not from punchlines and sight gags, but from the juxtaposition of the mundane and the fantastic. The aliens fail to blow up a peace conference because they didn’t have enough change for the meter. No one ever acts like there’s an alien invasion going on despite the fact that no one ever disputes that there’s an alien invasion going on. Darrow Lonetree goes to talk with the great spirit Kay-la-letivik, and tells him about his business degree, his 401k, and his respectable cholesterol levels. I mean, he’s totally unfazed by watching his father transmogrify himself into a giant sky-bear, yet he’s completely blase about the requirement to skip lunch before being granted actual honest-to-goodness magic powers.

The next day at the Cottage, our heroes huddle around the computer to watch the streaming feed of Newport’s press conference, because watching 1980s YouTube is a good use of supercomputer time. Newport’s claimed to have bought the headdress from a private collector, and expects to sell it for over a million. Ironhorse is obviously incandescent with rage over the desecration and sacrilege. Harrison’s response is more controlled, but he agrees with Ironhorse in principle, saying that Newport should be banned from antiquities trading.

This is another one of those nice scenes we’ve been having more and more of recently, where the team is casually interacting, working together and bouncing ideas off of one another. It’s a distinct contrast from the earlier episodes which would mostly see each of them sequestered away in their own research. I’d like to have seen some hinting that Suzanne’s the one driving at that, in light of the way she’d clashed with Harrison early on about her more collaborative style. My issue with it is that there’s no clear reason why they’re doing this. If they’re just watching the news on a lark, why are they watching it on the supercomputer instead of the television? If this is part of their alien-fighting work, it’s hard to see why right now — there’s obviously been examples before (“A Multitude of Idols” comes to mind) of Norton’s search algorithms alerting them to news items they should watch, but in all of those cases, it happened after evidence of direct alien involvement was referenced in the media. There’s nothing in this press conference that should have pre-alerted them to its relevance, and they’re clearly not expecting this to be alien-related.

There’s a Doylist explanation that we’ll get in just a minute, but the lack of a Watsonian one is (admittedly, only very mildly) grating. This scene would have made a lot more sense set up in the living room with them gathered around the TV. Or start the scene with Ironhorse storming into the lab in a huff because of a newspaper article, prompting Norton to pull up the satellite feed.

The reason that the scene was set up to place them in the lab with the press conference on the computer is that, while Harrison and Ironhorse are speculating on what sort of criminal charges should be brought against Newport, Suzanne has become fascinated with the large triangular crystal set into the headdress. Even on the small, grainy image, she can tell that the workmanship isn’t consistent with the provenance. The quality of the glass and precision of the cutting is way beyond sixteenth-century technology (And glassmaking wasn’t introduced to the New World until the seventeenth century anyway). Ironhorse and Harrison suggest that it might be mica or quartz, but this overlooks the fact that it looks nothing like mica or quartz.

Ironhorse realizes what she’s getting at, and accuses her of having picked up Harrison’s penchant for wild hunches. That’s a good point, actually. In earlier episodes, it totally would have been Harrison’s place here to be the one who wildly speculates an alien connection, probably causing tension between him and Ironhorse, with Harrison’s obsession over the alien angle seeming callous in the face of Ironhorse’s cultural heritage. But instead, Harrison’s on Ironhorse’s side and it’s Suzanne who brings aliens into it. This week’s script has a strange quirk of treating Suzanne, Norton, and to a lesser extent Harrison as largely interchangeable: the episode is much more sharply Ironhorse-focused than any previous episode has focused on a single character. Thus, we get the microbiologist rather than the astrophysicist or the computer scientist who notices something unusual about the precise mathematical design of a mysterious crystal.

Norton takes a screenshot of the headdress. The grainy, compressed NTSC image of the stone produces a computer model accurate enough to conclusively prove that the mathematical precision and complexity of the cuts are far beyond any human technology of the period. In case you’ve somehow forgotten what show you’re watching, that means aliens. Harrison suggests that he and Ironhorse go have a word with Newport.

I don’t remember if I’ve gone into detail about this, but since early in the series, the Advocacy has had this great old cyberpunk video-wall in their cave, a giant pile of tube televisions in different states of disassembly, all hooked up in a makeshift rack so they can watch all six TV channels at once. Or, more often, watch the same show on three different sets at once. Which sounds like a waste of time, but remember, alien-vision is always represented as an R-G-B color separation with the alignment shifted. Maybe they have to do that to keep from getting eyestrain. Advocate Xana (I think I’ll start referring to the Ilse von Glatz Advocate that way for clarity’s sake) observes that watching TV has finally paid off. One of the others protests that it’s done that at the cost of “softening the brain”. They identify the crystal in the headdress as the starter for one of their warships, and thus the ship itself is probably nearby.

While Newport is on the phone with the auction house, Joseph Lonetree magics himself into his office, and, depending on your point of view, either threatens or warns Newport that unless the mask is returned, Newport will die. He teleports away while Newport is on the phone with the police, but they eventually find him wandering around “lost” in an industrial park on the other side of town and toss him in jail despite his dispassionate explanation that it wasn’t technically a threat, since he used the passive voice: he didn’t say he was going to kill Newport, just that “A man who desecrates sacred tribal burial ground will die,” citing the legal precedent established in the landmark 1948 Supreme Court case “I’m not touching” v. “You”. At no point does anyone consider how Joseph Lonetree traveled the 100 miles from his home on the reservation to Newport’s office, or how he subsequently traveled to the opposite side of the unnamed town they’re in.

Not much later, Newport is visited by Ironhorse and Harrison, who present themselves as being “from the government” and ask to see the artifacts as potentially of interest in an “ongoing investigation”. Ahead of time, Ironhorse had cautioned Harrison to keep it cool and professional, not letting his personal feelings get in the way. Ironhorse, of course, with his special forces training, is an expert at keeping his feelings under control. Gee, it sure would be comically ironic if Ironhorse were to lose his temper and need to be restrained by Harrison…

Yeah, Newport doesn’t take kindly to being yelled at by Ironhorse and threatens to have them arrested. Harrison convinces Ironhorse to beat a hasty retreat, but since Newport mentioned having had “that crazy Indian” arrested, they decide to make the local police station their next destination.

Meanwhile, a trio of aliens absorb a trio of employees at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It’s one of the most brutally graphic scenes of the series so far, done as a series of POV-shots from the aliens, with a lot of people being grabbed and thrown around by alien third arms, though as per usual, we don’t actually see the possession. On the street outside Newport’s building, they revel in the fact that they’ve got official credentials, and therefore don’t even need to be stealthy.

Joseph Lonetree is released on bail by a guard who refers to him as, “Chief.” Lonetree clarifies that he’s a shaman, not a chief. “That means I can turn you into a toad.” He leaves a pile of still-living fish flopping around in his cell. How? Because Indians are magic. Why? I… Uh… Um… Indians are magic! (Upon reflection, I think maybe the idea is that he’s in a totemic relationship with the bear-spirit Kay-La-Letivik, which is to say, in some metaphysical sense, sometimes he turns into a bear. So maybe the live fish were his lunch. I don’t know.) The fish, and the water-marks on the floor, vanish when we cut back from the guard’s reaction shot.

Lonetree was expecting his children, but instead finds Ironhorse. Why didn’t his kids come bail him out anyway? Possibly they don’t know where he is yet: there’s no indication they’ve been informed. They don’t really react with any serious surprise when they find out, more a sort of mild chagrin that almost says, “Yeah, that’s our dad. Always teleporting himself a hundred miles away to threaten archaeologists and summoning live fish.”

Ironhorse offers Lonetree a ride back to the reservation and to help his tribe get their stolen artifacts back. Lonetree shrugs it off, saying that, “it is the way of things” that they’ll get their stuff back without human intervention. Just for the record, they don’t get their stuff back. Most of it gets destroyed.

Newport wryly comments that he needs a new lock for his door when he gets his third set of visitors for the day. He gives them sass when they demand to see the mask, so an alien grabs him — or rather, a paper-mache head that kinda looks like him — with his third arm, squishes his head a bit, then smashes his skull through the wall. The other aliens cavalierly destroy various artifacts until they find the headdress and rip out the crystal.

Harrison and Suzanne unwittingly pass the aliens on their way out as the scientists make a return visit to Newport’s office. I assume Harrison is hoping that swapping the belligerent Ironhorse for an attractive woman will get them a warmer reception, which makes this their second attempt to prostitute Suzanne out to people who’ve got something they need. Fortunately, it doesn’t come to that, as they find Newport well-beyond flirtation. They decide to slip out and make an anonymous call to the police. Harrison has Norton hack the police computers to keep them abreast of the details of the investigation.

Continue reading Thesis: Dust to Dust (War of the Worlds 1×13)

It is January 22, 1990. Two days ago, Soviet troops were sent in to suppress independence protests in Baku, Azerbaijan. 130 protesters are killed. Today, communism kinda collapses in Yugoslavia when the 14th (extraordinary) Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia ends, the country’s ruling party suddenly breaking up due to the fact that the whole country was on the verge of splitting up and going to war with itself, which will occupy the region for the rest of the century. Also last week, Marion Barry, the popular incumbent mayor of Washington, DC, famous for his work as an activist for civil rights, as an education reformer, and as a hero during a 1977 hostage crisis, became best-known for the phrase, “Bitch set me up,” uttered in response to the discovery that he was being videotaped smoking crack with his ex-girlfriend in an FBI sting operation. He would later serve six months in federal prison before being reelected as mayor in 1994. The McMartin Preschool trial finally ends, with all defendants cleared of child molestation charges. Space Shuttle Columbia returns from mission STS-32, bringing back NASA’s Long-Duration Exposure Facility (a free-flying structure placed in orbit in 1984 to house seeds, spores, and various materials that might be used in space stations, in order to see how they liked being left in space for five years) and a bunch of IMAX footage that would later be used in the films Blue Planet and Destiny in Space.

Today, Robert Morris becomes the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse act for releasing the Morris Worm, the first major recognized internet worm. Over the coming week, a hispanic Miami police officer will be found of being insufficiently white to get away shooting an unarmed black man. Avianca Flight 52 will crash in New York, killing 73. The crash is attributed to miscommunication between the plane and airport, leading to them running out of fuel. Benazir Bhutto will become the first modern head-of-government to give birth while in office.

Out in theaters this week is Tremors, a movie which I was really fascinated by in my youth because of the way it blended horror and dark comedy tropes, and also because I was twelve when I first saw it and it had a long scene of Finn Carter running from a snake monster in her underwear.

Tonight is the 17th annual American Music Awards. Bobby Brown and Paula Abdul win favorite male and female artists, New Kids on the Block are named favorite group, and their Hangin’ Tough takes favorite album. Milli Vanilli’s “Girl You Know It’s True” is named favorite song. This all seems like some sort of fever-dream now. Michael Bolton unseats Phil Collins for the top spot on the charts, and Technotronic adds insult to injury as “Pump Up the Jam” peaks at #2. A lot of churn in the chart this week: new to the top ten are Rod Stewart’s “Downtown Train”, Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin'”, Seduction’s “Two To Make It Right”, and Tesla’s “Love Song”.

MTV Unplugged premiered yesterday. Faced with ABC’s coverage of the American Music Awards, CBS and NBC respond with airings of Cocoon and Delta Force respectively. ‘Trek is off again, they’ll be back next week. Friday the 13th the Series gives us “Epitaph for a Lonely Soul”, like the four-hundredth episode where an antique has the power to suck out someone’s life-force and give it to someone else. The twist this time is that it’s a mortician’s aspirator, and he’s using it to resurrect attractive female clients, on account of he’s a lonely creep.

My God, you guys. This episode. Man-oh-man. Okay, the plot’s a little thin, the character development is haphazard, and the emotional beats aren’t entirely earned. But I don’t care, because this episode is lovely. This week’s War of the Worlds is about The Internet. It is 1990, and the World Wide Web doesn’t even exist yet, but this is an honest-to-goodness episode about the Internet. And I’m not talking about VR Cyberspace Bullshit like we got back in Captain Power (Oh, that’s coming. But not until April). No, this is old school Internet, with 31337 hax0rs. And this is just about the most wonderful techno-bullshit I have ever seen. Seriously, I came close to not even writing an article here, just OCRing the subtitles and pasting them in their entirety instead.

This is a Suzanne-and-Debi-light episode: about five minutes in, they turn up to announce that they’re leaving town for a few days because Debi’s got “exams”. There’s no elaboration on that, which, I mean, it’s a minor point and probably not worth the screen-time, but it does feed into the general sense that, to put it kindly, they’ve got a lot more ideas about how this world works than they have scope to fully integrate. I guess Debi’s in some kind of regulated homeschooling program that has yearly exams. That just seems weirdly mundane to be a thing in this world where the government’s in a state of pretty much total collapse and has shut down all social programs. I sort of took for granted that our heroes had gone to ground and were trying to live outside the system. Aren’t they on the lam or something? Seemed that way back in “No Direction Home”. In any case, they’re gone for the rest of the episode. Coupled with the return of Belinda Metz as Scoggs, I suspect this episode was filmed simultaneously with “Night Moves“.

Kincaid is almost out of ammo, and Blackwood needs replacement parts for their generator. Kincaid decides to check Craigslist. “The Internet” for the purposes of 1990 apocalyptic fiction is a system called “Grapevine”, a highly secure, highly robust network capable of accommodating perhaps as many as five users (Seriously. The UI design assumes exactly five users max), and includes such features as a non-private chatroom, email, and absolutely nothing else. The system is supposed to provide absolute secrecy and anonymity, aside from the fact that everyone uses the same cool post-apocalyptic nickname on-line as they do in real life, except for Kincaid, who goes by “Rogue”, because he’s all edgy and brooding and grimdark, and because “CatLover45” was already taken.

Kincaid’s usual contact for stuff like this is “Ace”, a middle-aged guy who lives in a warehouse. Kincaid’s never met Ace in person, and doesn’t know where he lives (beyond that it’s in “Quadrant 7”, because cities have quadrants now. At least eight of them, which technically, is too many), which probably makes buying stuff from him a little complicated. Luckily for Kincaid, Ace comes home while Kincaid’s on-line and signs onto Grapevine. Lucky timing. Too bad that The Internet doesn’t have any mechanism for someone to put up some kind of persistent document, a “page” of some sort, where a client could see what products a trader had to sell and somehow submit offers or purchase orders to be handled automatically by a program on the back-end. Perhaps even multiple documents arranged into some kind of “web” that could be accessed from around the world. We could call it the Global Document Lattice or something.

There’s a conceit about how computers work that I’ll put in here to help with your imagination. To operate a computer in this world, you just say aloud what you want to do, then tap on the keyboard a few times. At first, I thought maybe they were meant to be typing commands, and just repeating them aloud for the audience’s benefit, like when someone talks on the phone in an old movie (What’s that? You say I should repeat everything you say out loud so the audience can hear it? And I should use rising intonation, to pretend I’m actually repeating it in the form of a question?), but for every message or command, they only type three or four keystrokes. So it sure seems like they’re dictating to the computer. Yet they still need to use the keyboard, I guess to confirm the input? I don’t know. It’s weird and dumb, but has the glorious and magnificent result that we spend the entire episode listening to these 31337 hax0rs speaking aloud. Mostly chatroom conversation. The way it’s cut, you never actually see someone receive a message until the very end, but it seems explicit that they’re reading the messages rather than hearing them.

Since at this point, we’ve got about as long as any episode ever has without checking in with the Morthren, let’s check in with the Morthren. It’s demo day at the alien lair. A scientist named Kemo is showing off a new engram that can disrcreetly interface with human computer systems and “drain it”. Malzor, being a dick, is only interested in its offensive capabilities, and gets angry at Kemo when he says that the “direct pulse” still has some bugs to work out.

To save face (This is a joke that you’ll understand in a minute), Kemo offers to demonstrate just how effective his engram is by hacking one of the world’s most advanced networks, the Grapevine. Yes. Kincaid’s internet chatroom is one of the most advanced networks on the planet.

Maybe I was too hard on Malzor for complaining, because Kemo’s advanced, undetectable data-stealing engram… Immediately causes Ace’s connection with Kincaid to start breaking up. I don’t know what it would look like to Kincaid for Ace’s transmission to “start breaking up”. The writers were clearly imagining something like radio static. We get to see Ace’s screen replaced by an alien pattern that, for want of a better term, I will use the totally random phrase, “floating green weirdness.”

“My files are jammed,” declares Ace. And then I don’t hear anything over the sound of my own laughing for about five minutes. I can’t even begin to even. Thumping of the screen ensues, because that’s how you fix a stuck computer. Jammed files or not, Ace tries to send Kincaid… Something. Nope. No idea. He just says, “Here, take a look at this.” Kemo indicates that Ace has somehow stolen some data from the Morthren and passed it along. I… I guess by hacking him? Or something? How does that work? How does the engram interfacing with the human computer network cause Morthren data to end up on Ace’s computer? How does it make alien stuff appear on his screen? None of this makes any Godsdamned sense. If he’s opened up some kind of reverse shell into Ace’s computer, his data would all be on his end, not in Ace’s computer. If he had to deploy some kind of alien virus into Ace’s system, okay, but alien code won’t run on a human computer — they already established that, it’s the whole point of Kemo having to develop this new engram. So any of Kemo’s data that was deployed on Ace’s computer wouldn’t be alien code: it would be alien-created normal Earth-computer code. And in any case, there’s absolutely no reason that deploying this code would result in alien characters appearing on Ace’s screen. Even if some flaw in Kemo’s code caused it to screw around with the video bus on the remote system, it wouldn’t produce distinctively alien-looking patterns. It would most likely just produce complete junk.

I know. I know. Deep breath. It’s just a show, I should really just relax. Malzor panics and orders Kemo to kill the operator, despite that feature not having been tested. Kill. The. Operator. Kemo’s engram can cause a lightning bolt to shoot out of the screen of a computer and murder the user. I… I… I… <CRASH>

Okay. Okay. Fine. I’ll roll with it. Alien technology can make lightning bolts shoot out of your computer monitor and kill you, even though the monitor is just an ordinary television (I mean this. All the monitors in this episode appear to be ordinary NTSC television sets, not specialized high-resolution computer monitors) and the computer is a physically separate unit whose interaction with the display is limited to sending it an analogue signal telling the electron gun inside when to fire as it sweeps across the phosphors, and no, you can’t just overdrive the signal until it shoots death-rays out of the screen, because televisions don’t work that way and —

Look, we’re going to be here all day at this rate. The long and short of it is that Ace gets cooked. Kincaid jumps up in alarm and shouts to Ace in concern, even though he hasn’t seen or heard anything to indicate what’s wrong: all Kincaid knows is that Ace suddenly went off line, and given the state of public utilities these days, that really should just mean someone chopped down a telephone pole to steal the copper. But there’s really no sense in this episode that computer networks and the telephone system have anything to do with each other. Which I guess is possible, but it’s a big leap to assume that this city has some kind of independent data infrastructure that anyone can plug into and works basically like the internet, given that so far, the most advanced form of telecommunications we’ve seen is rotary-dial 1-fps video phones.

Killing Ace turns out to backfire for the Morthren, though. Literally: there’s a feedback pulse that electrocutes Kemo. Kemo’s electrocution is shown split-screen with Ace’s making it look as though the two are joined by a single tendril of electricity, to better symbolize that they are in this moment joined in a way that transcends the bounds of species and — Oh for Christ’s sake. They are going there. Kemo and Ace mind-meld. Via lightning bolt. From the screens of their computers. Okay, the Morthren have never heard of surge suppressors, I can accept that. But they don’t even try to justify this. They don’t even explain it. Kemo just has a bunch of Ace’s memories and his feelings and instincts now. Because fuck you, alien technology is magic.

We know that alien engrams are able to operate on human memory. We established that back in “No Direction Home“. We know that the aliens can transfer the human sense of identity during the cloning process. And we know that the cloning process creates a clone that isn’t just obedient to the Morthren, but has a Morthren sense of purpose and loyalty. So it’s not completely out of left-field. But it still requires that Ace’s completely normal human-made Earth-computer do the work on his end. Sucking out Ace’s mind accidentally, over the internet requires that the Earth-made consumer electronics in Ace’s lair magically reconfigure themselves at a hardware level to have the same technological capabilities as an alien engram. If you shove the power cord from your coffee-maker into the refrigerator, it doesn’t suddenly gain the ability to produce frappucinos. If I sound angry, it’s really not that. More sort of stunned. It’s like no one involved in the writing of this episode had ever seen a computer before and reckoned they were basically just genies who looked like televisions attached to typewriters.

They rush Kemo off to the infirmary and stick him in a bag and put a damp cloth on his face and everything, but they’re only able to save half of his face, leaving him very mildly disfigured with a bunch of scars on one side of his face, about on the level of an ill-considered prison tattoo. Our first hint of what’s happened is a classic old-fashioned reaction shot of Mana looking away in disgust when his bandages are removed. If you recall from “Loving the Alien”, the Morthren are obsessive about physical perfection, so of course Kemo is issued his pink slip and asked to kindly report for immediate execution. I want to stop a moment and consider that it’s a little weird that the Morthren were able to massively reconfigure their physical appearance, and we know they can xerox a human body while removing any scars or disfigurements, but they can’t fix Kemo’s burns.

They’re sort of cutely ginger with him about it. Kemo walks in on Malzor and Mana while she’s trying to fix his engram, and explains that the problem is with the feedback. Malzor politely takes him aside, and explains to him like he’s a senile grandpa that, look, they’re all super proud of him and everything, but what with his very mild disfigurement, they really have to have him put down. Kemo understands this, and even accepts it, but he’s been working real hard on this engram and reckons he ought to finish it before having himself offed. Mana gets catty at this point and insists that she’ll finish it herself. Malzor is more diplomatic, suggesting that he, “Let the knowledge that you have been of great value be your comfort.” But Kemo makes a big stink of it and demands to be allowed to talk to the Eternal. Once he’s out of earshot, Malzor notes that Kemo’s behavior indicates serious psychological damage in addition to his physical injury, but Mana’s already ruminating on Kemo’s comments about feedback, so clearly she’s willing to take advantage of his expertise even while calling for his death.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from the Morthren god. I’m pretty sure this is the only time someone other than Malzor addresses the Eternal directly. I’d love for it to turn out that the Eternal doesn’t really exist, that it’s some kind of group hallucination by the Morthren collective or something. We never see the Eternal actually do anything, there’s never any change in the tone of its whalesong, or any particular expression in its eye, so it would be interesting to imagine that whatever the reality of the Eternal is, the way the Morthren react to it is based purely on them projecting their own goals and desires onto it. That would add a neat angle to this one, since when Kemo begs for absolution, I guess the Eternal turns him down, because he ends up crying and is escorted away for execution. Mana and Malzor are troubled by the way he, “Showed fear before the Eternal,” and ominously foreshadow that he acted, “Almost like a human.”

Just as Kemo’s about to be tossed into the Morthren trash compactor, he suddenly realizes that he’d really rather not, yoinks the weapon off of one of his escorts (Which I guess clarifies one point of vagueness I’ve had all season: the weapons are discrete devices they hide up their sleeves, not, as it sometimes looks, a thing they grow out of their bodies on demand), shoves him into the execution machine, and shoots the other one. After a confused shout of, “What have I done?”, he escapes with absolutely no fuss despite the alarm having gone off, because the Morthren are shit at keeping people from escaping their secret base.

While this has been going on, Kincaid’s been getting increasingly desperate to find out what happened to Ace. He’s touched base with the other Grapevine users, Lonelyheart, Roller, and Scoggs. None of them have heard from Ace, of course, and none of them know where he lives, or even what he looks like: no one’s met him face-to-face. At least Blackwood acknowledges that this is kind of weird, given that no one seems to know how it is they hooked up with him, but he’s their main supplier for a bunch of stuff. Kincaid meets with Scoggs in person at the strip club, at which point Dylan came home from school and plopped himself down on the couch with me, making me 2 for 2 in “Episodes of War of the Worlds featuring scenes set in strip clubs which my four-year-old has watched with me.” My own parents, of course, would not let me watch Prime Time US Broadcast TV filth like this until I was ten. I turn the show off until he’s gone to bed.

Continue reading Antithesis: The Defector (War of the Worlds 2×10)

Well you’d certainly think Harrison Blackwood would bring this up when the Morthren try to subvert punk rock to control violent teenagers.

Or maybe not, I guess, if it’s too painful a subject. You can defend it not coming up pretty easily, I think. Besides, no one works out the role the music is playing until the climax, and we don’t have any scenes afterward where Blackwood would have a chance to reflect on how they’d tried this before. It’s easy enough to imagine that while Kincaid’s off with Rose and Larry at the end, Blackwood’s gone back to the shelter and is telling Suzanne all about how similar this is to what happened with von Deer and how proud he is of himself for not giving in to his addiction.

For that matter, the critical scene in “Terminal Rock” is that Blackwood suddenly notices that something’s affecting his behavior, looks around, and seems to just intuit that it’s the fault of the music. How does he come to that conclusion? Well, maybe it does indeed make sense that, as someone who’s been through it before, he’s more conscious of what it feels like when an alien audio embed is manipulating his behavior.

So what’s considerably more interesting to look at, just like our last Synthesis post, is how different the two episodes are in their approach.

I like subliminal audio embeds as a sci-fi plot device, in case you haven’t worked it out. Probably just one of those nexus things where that episode of Probe and that episode of Max Headroom and these two episodes of War of the Worlds hit when my brain was in the right place for it to make a lasting impression. Looking back over my notes from the past twenty-five years, I see that I wrote similar plots into an X-Files fanfic I wrote when I was twelve and a Knight Rider fanfic I wrote when I was sixteen and a Kids Incorporated fanfic I wrote when I was eleven and that novel I completely failed to finish when I was twenty-seven. In my youth especially, before I took a psychology class and a phenomenology class, I was attracted to the idea that the human brain could be treated like a computer and be “reprogrammed” by surreptitiously poking zeroes and ones into it (This may also hearken back to the short story “Von Goom’s Gambit”, which I mentioned tangentially back in my essay on They Live).

The most obvious point of contrast is probably that, while “Choirs of Angels” has the aliens use subliminal embeds for a targeted campaign against one person to manipulate them into solving their medical issue, while in “Terminal Rock”, they’re targeting a group of people, which, as I said last time, is far and away the more common plot. Come to think of it, there’s a very straightforward comparison between “Choirs of Angels” and “Breeding Ground”. Both feature an old colleague of one of the heroes. In both cases, the aliens can’t just clone/possess him outright due to his poor health. In both cases, the patsy is convinced that the aliens have something to offer that will benefit humanity.

Watching “Choirs of Angels” right after “Synthetic Love” has me thinking of another thing too, because there’s a very ugly trend that emerges when I look at “Terminal Rock” and “Synthetic Love” in close proximity. Because when “Choirs of Angels” has the aliens embed their message in the prog rock of Billy Carlos, they might be poking fun at record label execs, but there’s really no judgment passed on the musical style itself. Its aficionados, Harrison and von Deer, might be a little peculiar, but they’re respectable, laudable characters.

Continue reading Synthesis 5: The Rhythm is Gonna Get You

You will help us bring a new age to this planet

It is January 16, 1989. If you were born today, you’d be able to drink at my wedding. Last Friday, the UK was hit by a massive outbreak of the Jerusalem computer virus, a popular 1987 computer virus which triggers on Friday the 13th. Václav Havel is arrested today in Prague, which is sure to nip this whole democracy thing in the bud for Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union announces their plans to launch a manned mission to Mars. I wonder if they’ll beat the Americans there. The rest of the week will see the Solidarity party legalized in Poland, George Steinbrenner receiving a presidential pardon for illegal campaign contributions to Nixon, and the Stockton Schoolyard Shooting, in which a guy shot up a school in California, killing five and wounding 32. This was back when such things were considered unusual and shocking and prompted the sitting Republican president to issue an executive order banning the importation of assault rifles (for which he was not compared to Hitler). A backward, primitive time when we didn’t consider the systematic murder of children just a small price to pay for assuring the freedom of, for example, a bunch of rednecks to intimidate and threaten in the name of seizing public lands for their own use, yes, I am pissed.

Ryan’s Hope ends its run on TV. Romance/Romance (Starring Scott Bakula) and Ain’t Misbehavin’ close on Broadway. Bobby Brown takes the top spot on the Billboard charts with “My Prerogative”. MacGyver this week is “Deadly Dreams”, an episode featuring Dr. Zito, a Hannibal Lecter-inspired recurring villain (We’re still a few years out from the Silence of the Lambs film, but the novels Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs are already out, as is Manhunter, the first film adaptation of Red Dragon). Zito is played by W. Morgan Sheppard, a guy who you should keep in your back pocket for Kevin Bacon Game competitions given just how many franchises he’s appeared in, including Max Headroom, Star Trek and Doctor Who. He never appeared in anything War of the Worlds-related himself, so far as I can tell, but his son voiced Adrian Paul’s brother in Goliath between appearances in Supernatural, Star Trek, Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica. After MacGyver is the premiere of a TV-movie about Ryan White, a teenager who developed AIDS as a result of a blood transfusion for hemophilia. The importance of Ryan White in changing the attitude of the American public about the AIDS crisis can not be understated, firstly because it got the American public to actually start doing something about it, and secondly, because it calls out what assholes the American public are, since the vast majority of them were perfectly happy to let AIDS kill as many people as it liked so long as it limited itself to the gay community, drug addicts, and poor people in Africa. But you get one photogenic presumed-straight middle-class white boy, and it’s war.

There is no episode of Star Trek the Next Generation this week. Friday the 13th the Series gives us “The Sweetest Sting”, which, as you’ve probably guessed, is about bees. My god. And not even in the way you’d think: rather than straight-up killer bees, these are vampire bees who can transfer life force between people by stinging. Here is an additional bee joke, because I can.

This week’s War of the Worlds is an odd duck, in strangely good way. It succeeds on a lot of the levels that War of the Worlds usually doesn’t, while the show’s usual wheelhouses of dark comedy and strong guest characters are… Not absent, but perhaps pushed to the side for a bit. Instead, we get what’s really a pretty darn solid and coherent science-fiction plot, and a very traditional A-B plot structure that you wouldn’t be surprised to see in an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation or Deep Space Nine.

The A-plot is, at long last, a Suzanne-centric episode. Stylistically, a traditional SCIENCE^TM-based story in the mold of, say, British Science Fiction of the ’50s and ’60s (I recently was watching a Let’s Play and the host got to talking about early Doctor Who, and suggested that there was a trend in British Science Fiction of the ’50s and ’60s to build their stories around the concept of “Uh oh, something’s happened involving aliens. Let’s go back to the lab and science the shit out of this for an hour.”). Her plot is primarily a science-mystery, the show’s first real attempt at what’s sometimes called “competency porn”: a visual showcase designed around the simple demonstration of someone doing their job well.

The B-plot is another foray into “Harrison isn’t himself due to adverse influence.” That didn’t go well last time, but this time, he doesn’t act like a drunk fratboy and rough up Suzanne. Instead, we get to see Harrison much more vulnerable in a story that has very direct and obvious analogues to drug addiction and recovery.

It’s not like we haven’t had plots that decompose into an A and B side before. But so far, it’s mostly been a decomposition between the aliens pursuing their goals and the humans pursuing theirs in opposition. The aliens stay more toward the edges in this one. There’s no mystery for the audience as to what their plot is, but there’s very little showcasing of them actually pursuing it. Instead, we’ve got two groups of characters who are pursuing largely different things at the same time, in parallel, really only coming together at the end, when their combined experiences help to put together a larger puzzle. It’s just so easy to imagine this story happening not with Suzanne and Harrison, but with, say, Beverly Crusher and Riker. Or Jadzia Dax and Miles O’Brien. Or even Seven of Nine and Harry Kim.

We open with some aliens in the Land of the Lost cave cutting an album. It’s not very good, just them chanting “We are the travelers / We are your friends / We need your help / Believe in us,” over and over. Using their broken oscilloscope and toy cassette recorder technology, this is converted into a subliminal embed.

Because, oh yes, we are doing one of my favorite Sci-Fi plots, subliminal mind control via music. We’ve got shades of Probe and even a bit of Max Headroom mixed in here. Equipped with their subliminal embed, the aliens, who’ve adopted the forms of three of the most eighties-looking record company suits they can find and go to visit famed New Age musician Billy Carlos. He’s right in the middle of composing an otherworldly, ethereal piece that, I only just noticed, kinda sounds like a prog-rock remix of the Doctor Who theme. Far as I know, there’s no publicly available clean recording of the whole thing, which is a shame, because it’s a nice piece of music. It’s similar in style to the end theme of the show, though slower and more spacey. Billy Carlos is played by legendary Australian rocker Billy Thorpe, who also did the score for the whole series. His work for War of the Worlds doesn’t sound much like the stuff for which he’s best known, though you can maybe hear little hints of it in “Children of the Sun”.

Carlos objects to the suits showing up before he’s ready, and they respond by murdering him. The female suit, presumably the leader, replaces the outgoing message on his answering machine to say, in a sexy voice while looking straight into the camera, that he’s on tour. They replay the song he was working on, integrating the embed. This seamless mixing consists mostly of the female alien repeatedly ordering the others to crank the volume and she starts grooving to the music. The way the scene is shot gives it a very otherworldly feel that comes off as kind of Tales from the Darkside to me.

I’ve been impressed by the guest cast a lot with this show. This week isn’t the strongest outing in terms of performances, but it’s still an interesting roster. In addition to Billy Thorpe, we’ll be meeting Jan Rubes later as Dr. Von Deer. Rubes is an accomplished character actor who would go on to a recurring role in Due South, but you might know him for playing Daniel’s grandfather in the Stargate SG-1 episode about crystal skulls. Our aliens this week are played by Alex Carter, John Novak and Heidi von Palleske. Palleske’s got a solid acting resume through the ’90s up to today, but her acting career is overshadowed by her accomplishments as an activist against the export of asbestos, the use of which remains legal in Canada (Quebec was the world’s third biggest producer as of 2009), though mining finally ceased in 2012. Alex Carter mostly plays cops, agents and other government-heavy-types, such as Sheriff Logan in Point Pleasant, Lieutenant Lindo in Lincoln Heights and Detective Vartann in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. John Novak is best known for his voice work, including the English dubs of Death Note, and Gundam Seed, as well as Ninjago, but he also had a recurring live-action role on Stargate SG-1 as Colonel Ronson, the first commander of the Prometheus. And, in a move that might help you win at the Kevin Bacon game, he’s also one of the doctors who assists Grace in the hospital scene in the Doctor Who TV Movie (Since we’ve had so many already this week, free bonus Kevin Bacon Game tip: there’s an episode of Star Trek Continues that guest-stars both Colin Baker and the third Yellow Power Ranger).

In spite of what I said about this episode having a good, solid plot, we do still start out on the usual, “By an amazing coincidence, the heroes just happen to show up in the right time and place to get involved in the plot.” Harrison and Suzanne turn up at the lab of one of Dr. Eric von Deer. Suzanne’s been corresponding with her old professor for the past few months and he’s agreed to work with her over the weekend in the hopes of developing a means to block cell-phase matching. Von Deer is apparently an expert in the subject, which is a neat trick since as far as I can tell, “cell-phase matching” is a made-up term.

Since von Deer is a stereotype absentminded-professor, he’s completely forgotten his commitment to Suzanne in the face of some work he’s been obsessing over. He agrees to let her poke at his research to see if she can find anything useful and to give her the occasional spare moment.

In case there was any chance that the audience might be experiencing undue levels of suspense, that track Billy Carlos was laying down in the last scene has been playing for the entire duration of the scene. Once she takes her ear-plugs out, the receptionist had explained to Suzanne and Harrison that von Deer had been listening to it on repeat full-blast for the past month. Von Deer explains that he’d known Billy as a child and had been gifted with an advance-copy of the artist’s latest album.

No one in the world should really be surprised that Harrison is into the weird, new-agey synth vibes of Billy Carlos. He finds that, “his complex chord structure and his tonal progression — they tune my mind and stimulate my imagination.” Ecstatic to meet a fellow fan, von Deer gives him a copy of the tape. He feels the need to explain that he has a bunch of spares in case he breaks one. Then the RIAA rappels in and beats the crap out of him for music piracy.

Von Deer having multiple copies of the same tape is meant to be a character quirk, I think. To mark him as weird and nerdy, because who’d have more than one copy of the same tape? It’s not like it’s just good sense because playing an audio cassette continuously for a month absolutely will wear it out, which is why I no longer have a working copy of Laura Brannigan’s Best Of album. Later, we’ll find out he also wears two watches. Basically, they’re pushing the whole “Absent-minded science nerd” archetype with him. I bet his closet is full of identical copies of the same suit too. Surprised he doesn’t have a bow tie.

A limo pulls up outside as Harrison is leaving, and apparently just sits there looking sinister for like three hours, because it’s still there when we return to this location hours later. In the mean time, Harrison returns to the Cottage and tries to do some work while grooving to his new Billy Carlos album. This is a nicely subtle scene because they never come out and say what’s happening, but you can tell from Jared Martin’s performance that something is going on with Harrison, as he gets increasingly flustered, then something seems to “click” for him. Another nice touch here is that neither Harrison nor Dr. von Deer do any sort of mind-controlled-zombie thing. If anything, Harrison seems invigorated, with a little spring in his step as he pops down to the lab.

Ironhorse and Norton are busy looking at computer models that Norton hopes will let them eventually locate the alien base when Harrison pops in and tasks Norton with, “a career’s worth of work,” digging up pre-1953 DoD files to find evidence that something humanity did might have provoked the first invasion. Ironhorse is scandalized by the mere suggestion, but — correctly — no one overreacts at this stage, since it actually is a perfectly reasonable thing to research, particularly if there’s a possibility that, say, the isolation of pure folic acid (first done in 1945) posed an existential threat to the aliens (Or, y’know, that other thing that happened in 1945, but we’ll get to that). As a side-note, I’m glad to see Ironhorse and Norton casually working together in the background of this episode, even though the real meat later is going to be Ironhorse and Harrison inspiring a whole bunch of hurt/comfort fics.

In von Deer’s lab (Which is nicknamed “The Pit”, seemingly as set-up to a joke no one ever gets around to telling. Probably the same one from the pilot novelization), Suzanne immediately abuses her mentor’s hospitality by poking around in his computer files and setting off a security alarm, necessary for some “government work” he’s doing. I don’t think that a security lockout that triggers an alarm on someone else’s terminal in real time if someone just happens upon a particular file while doing a mundane search for relevant information is either a realistic or useful security precaution — either Suzanne ought to have had some way to know she wasn’t allowed to access that data before it got to the point of raising an alarm. But hey, ’80s computers.

Before they can get into it over the matter, the record company aliens decide to come in, after, I assume, spending the past few hours just sitting around in the limo. Von Deer leaves Suzanne in the lab while he meets with them. They challenge him about Suzanne’s presence in a very threatening way, but he assures them that she isn’t a threat. This show is getting progressively better at communicating things subtly, without lapsing into traditional Sci-Fi exposition dumps. Which is all the more surprising because they insist on structuring the show such that we always know the gist of the alien plan ahead of time. Without repeating what von Deer must already know at this stage, it becomes clear that they’ve convinced him they’re a peaceful race that seeks to uplift humanity once he’s developed a vaccine that will protect them from Earth bacteria, but they’ve got to operate in secret for fear that human governments will imprison and dissect them. Von Deer is completely convinced of their good will in spite of the way they keep doing over-the-top villain-talk stuff to tap-dance around their intentions rather than just plain lying: they keep repeating how they’ll “bring a new age” to Earth, or how they’ll “change humanity’s destiny”, or how “you will be baked. And then there will be cake,” or how Darth Vader killed his dad. Their performance isn’t just down to the subliminal music, though. The female alien is flirting pretty hardcore with the elderly scientist, including a sensual throat massage (not a euphemism) as she teaches him to pronounce alien words.

Continue reading Thesis: Choirs of Angels (War of the Worlds 1×12)

Happy new year! It is January 15, 1990, which is, it is really weird to think about, twenty years and one day before I get married. We’ve been away for a while, so let’s see what we’ve missed. Gorbachev met Pope John Paul II and two days later officially declared the Cold War over. East Germany amended its constitution, permitting political parties other than the Socialist Unity Party to run the country. Egon Krenz resigned as head of state and the SED dissolved a few days later. Václav Havel became the president of Czechoslovakia. Civil unrest broke out in Romania, and unlike all the other communist countries that were collapsing at the time, the Romanian government decided to double down rather than back down, ordering protesters to be shot. On December 22, the military abruptly switched sides. On Christmas day Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife were given a quick show-trial then summarily executed by firing squad.

In January, Turkmenistan, though still communist and not yet independent, held the first partially-free elections in the Eastern Bloc since Poland last year. Poland, by the way, withdrew from the Warsaw Pact at the beginning of the year. Demonstrations in Lithuania presage its independence in March, and protesters in East Germany storm the Stasi headquarters. Martial law in China, imposed after last year’s Tiananmen Square protests, is finally lifted on the tenth.

In non-Cold War news, David Dinkins was sworn in as the mayor of New York and Douglas Wilder as the Governor of Virginia. The US invaded Panama over Christmas break. Strongman Manuel Noriega surrendered on January 3. Mission STS-32 launched Space Shuttle Columbia into space for the tenth time. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is closed to visitors on account of how far it’s leaning.

The Billboard chart-toppers since we’ve been gone have been “Blame it on the Rain” by Milli Vanilli, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel, and “Another Day in Paradise” by Phil Collins, which remains the incumbent for its fourth week. “Pump Up the Jam” is also on the chart this week, as “Don’t Know Much” by Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville. New on the top ten this week is “Just Between You and Me” by Lou Gramm, one of those songs I find hard to remember from its title (It’s the one whose chorus goes “Even if heaven and Earth collide tonight…”).

Mr. Bean premiers on Thames Television. The Simpsons premiers on FOX. Bart Simpson is in fourth grade and Maggie is a nonverbal infant. Free Spirit, one of those “high-concept” sitcoms I’m so fascinated by gets its plug pulled after fourteen episodes. I remember nothing of the show whatever and it seems to be utterly unremarkable except that it was Alyson Hannigan’s first regular TV role. Square One TV starts its third season. Everything on TV is new this week, but largely unremarkable. Last week’s MacGyver is another of those ones where Mac gets whacked in the head and hallucinates himself into the old west or something. Without looking it up, I think it may be the one where he gets a wooden Swiss Army knife.

Star Trek the Next Generation takes the week off, but the preceding two weeks gave us “The Defector” and “The Hunted”. I remember “The Defector” pretty well. “The Hunted” I am pretty sure is exactly the same plot they would recycle for at least one of the later series. Possibly more than one. And possibly an episode of Stargate Atlantis too. Friday the 13th the Series returned last week with “Mightier than the Sword”, about a cursed pen that compels people do whatever they’re written as doing. So like that John Candy movie Delirious only not funny. It’s noteworthy because Micki straight-up murders the bad guy at the end. This week is “Year of the Monkey”, and involves a set of those see-no-evil/hear-no-evil/speak-no-evil monkey statues.

If you were hoping that after my very long break, I’d have something brilliant and insightful to say about this week’s episode of War of the Worlds, you’re going to be disappointed. I went through this a couple of times, but all I can come up with is that it’s a confused mess. On the most superficial level, it seems like it’s got something to say — the incredibly banal and underwhelming message that, “Drugs are bad, mmkay?”, screamed from the rooftops. But it spends much of its run-time undermining its own message, and never manages justify or quantify its own moral stance. It’s not even a fully coherent Space Whale Aesop (A speculative fiction morality tale wherein the fantastic elements undermine the moral lesson by giving it an air of fantasy that renders it inapplicable to the real world. Such as, “Don’t torture space whales.”) because while it seems to be going for, “Drugs are bad because aliens,” the actual alien drug is the least harmful thing in here. Except when it isn’t. I don’t know. Maybe I missed a page or something.

“Synthetic Love” tries to be an important episode to the mythos, and completely fails in this regard. Specifically, this is the only time we’re given insight into how the world came to be such a crappile. And man alive is it heavy-handed. There’s been hints, sure: Debi mentioning a senator skipping bail, the talk last time about the soil being infertile. But they’ve never actually come right out and claimed a causal relationship with the collapse of civilization until now. A voice on the TV in the background of the second scene of this episode is going to come right out and say that the economy has collapsed, and the welfare system has collapsed, and social services have collapsed, and it’s all the direct result of the legalization of narcotics four years earlier.

The government announced the final collapse of the welfare system. Rumored for the past month, the official shutdown of all welfare operations will begin at midnight tonight. The plight of millions of unemployed and homeless has reached unmanageable proportions, and the administration attributes the origin of the catastrophe to the legalization of narcotics four years ago.

You don’t say. Well, first-off, I guess we’re meant to understand that War of the Worlds is set at least four years into the future. Probably at least eight since it’s hard to imagine anyone seriously believing George Bush would end the War on Drugs. The TV voice makes a particular point that it was assumed that taking drugs out of the hands of the gangs and giving them to the corporations would make things better but has not. No reason is given for this. No reason is ever given for this. Okay, our motif here is grimdark punk-rock dystopian, so maybe it just goes without saying that corporations are evil and corrupt and make everything worse. I can get behind that, sure, but if you want to actually claim that corporations are worse than street gangs, I think that’s not something you can just handwave. Utterly missing from this discussion is any sense of “how” or “why”. Because it feels for all the world like this episode wants us to believe that drug legalization is the cause of the current state of affairs, and is just hoping we don’t remember that the previous episode told us that one of the attendant problems with this collapse is that they can’t get food to grow in the soil, and a few weeks before that they told us about bio-weapons testing on civilians. Because drugs, I guess.

There’s a note of triumphalism in it, sort of like you often see in religious end times stories — a sense of, “Take that, hippie scum! You thought legalizing drugs would make things better but this entirely fictional story about aliens proves you’re wrong!” Like all triumphalism, it doesn’t really care about the substance of the argument it’s dismissing. It takes for granted that if drugs were legal, nearly everyone would do them, become addicted, and turn into a drain on society. But for all that’s a very right-wing argument, it seems like the narrative’s sympathies are clearly with the addicts, and it strongly agrees with the idea of treating drug addiction as a public health crisis rather than a criminal one. If anything, addicts are depicted foremost as victims of corporate greed.

And yet, the big drug corporation is also painted sympathetically. They do try to do the right thing, and there’s indications of a social consciousness and sense of social responsibility that perhaps they wanted to seem fake, but don’t come off that way. Certainly, if we’re supposed to take away the message that it’s all the fault of Evil Corporations, we shouldn’t have Blackwood speaking approvingly of the narcotics-industry-run free rehabilitation clinics. Which he does.

You know what it reminds me of a little? Way back when I was talking about Max Headroom, one of the things I had noticed was that their critique of capitalism was subtly neutered: the system as a whole stank, to be sure, but it was always the fault of a discrete set of bad actors. A handful of sociopaths who’d wormed their way into positions of trust. Not like out corporate overlords, who totally want to do the right thing, and totally would on balance, if only they weren’t beholden to the advertisers and the shareholders.

Come to think of it, there’s a distinctly Max Headroom vibe to the look and feel of this episode. If “Night Moves” had kind of a Soap Opera feel to it, “Synthetic Love”, despite lacking any of the overt trappings and signifiers of it, feels weirdly cyberpunk. There’s no cyberweb or NuYen or Street Samurai, but there are elements of corporate plotting with overly elaborate plans which have been calibrated for maximum nastiness despite the fact that they could not possibly accomplish any sort of practical goal beyond increasing human misery (It’s even explicit that the drug companies aren’t profitable! It’s not even “They destroy lives, the environment and civilization to turn a profit.” They do all those things at a loss!). But I don’t just mean the plot: there’s been other plots that would lend to a Max Headroom episode (“Night Moves”, “Terminal Rock” and “Breeding Ground” all come to mind), but it would require a substantial rewrite to actually tell the story in that mode. Much more than any other episode so far, you could imagine this one ending with Edison Carter airing his “live and direct” expose on rehab clinics. You can pretty much use Edison, Theora and Bryce as drop-in replacements for Kincaid, Blackwood and Suzanne.

Except, of course, that Max Headroom had a sense of humor, and could revel playfully in the perversity of its setting, while War of the Worlds is more interested in just bringing us down. You’ll notice that there’s no analogue of the Max character in War of the Worlds. I think I would be a lot more forgiving of this show if it were more fun instead of just an endless tragedy parade. Having an element like Max to provide cynical commentary on the situation would also help with the fact that the heroes don’t actually do anything this week. Blackwood and Suzanne spend the entire episode doing chemical analysis, and Kincaid’s role is primarily to serve as a witness. They have nothing to do with the outcome of the story — everything would unfold in exactly the same way had they been omitted. For Max Headroom that sort of thing worked, since Edison’s power in that series wasn’t his ability to intervene in the plot as it unfolded, but to be there at the end with his camera to expose the truth. The truth-exposing part just doesn’t happen in War of the Worlds, and Kincaid isn’t much of a “watch but don’t interfere, and make sure you document everything” character anyway.

The aliens have invented a new drug called “Crevulax”, which sounds almost five percent more like the name of an alien from Doctor Who than like an actual drug. Allegedly, it fixes personality disorders and causes instant euphoria — we see it instantly calm someone who’s violently psychotic.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Ooh, I bet the effects are only temporary and when the withdraw kicks in, you become ultra-violent or explode or something.” You know what would have been a better plot than the plot of this episode? That thing you just said. No, we never see any evidence that there’s any negative side effects to taking Crevulax. Which is not to say that Crevulax isn’t secretly evil: it’s rather predictably so. But, based on what we actually see, it does work. Really well. But it’s somehow bad for some reason.

I guess maybe you could claim that Crevulax suppresses all violent instincts to the point where it leaves people unable to defend and take care of themselves, in a sort of Clockwork Orange or Serenity way (Or even closer, the Doctor Who serial “The Mind of Evil”). I’d say that fits best with the balance of the facts (Malzor does mention that pacifying the humans is one of their goals, though he seems to be in it mostly for the money this time). But no one ever says so or shows us this in action. You’d want there to be a scene where the Crevulax test subject gets jumped by street toughs or something and Kincaid has to save him because he’s completely unable to protect himself. But no, we’re just expected to take it for granted that Crevulax is bad because (a) aliens and (b) drug.

Malzor, operating again under the pseudonym of “Mr. Malcolm”, signs a lucrative deal with the head of Laporte Pharmaceuticals to distribute Crevulax via their charity free drug rehab clinics. I guess to replace methadone. Laporte is instantly convinced that Crevulax will turn around his company’s projected 13% loss this quarter though an aggressive policy of “giving it away for free”. Laporte’s plan seems to be:

1. Give Crevulax away for free
2. ???
3. Profit

Sure, okay, “the first one’s free” is standard drug-dealer MO. But once again, they never actually say that. Far too much in this episode is predicated on the idea that the audience will just go along with “Drugs are bad, mmkay?” Legalizing drugs will be bad because instead of the narcotics industry running like a business, businesses will run like drug cartels. Only without making any money because you can’t make legit money on drugs, because drugs are bad, mmkay? That murders will go up (42% according to The Exposition Channel) with legalization because drugs make people murderous. For that matter, the whole “Corporations are bad, mmkay?” thing is also something we’re meant to take on faith, given that Laporte never knowingly does anything evil and tries to make things right when he learns the truth.

You could probably say that Laporte ought to have been more suspicious and kicked “Mr. Malcolm” to the curb for being so transparently slimy and evil, but it’s not like he actually trusts Malzor beyond what he demonstrates firsthand in the Crevulax tests. Heck, he goes behind Malzor’s back to have Crevulax analyzed because he’s suspicious. The worst thing he does is to agree to Malzor’s terms when he claims that they’ll need a regular supply of “test subjects” to “calibrate” the Crevulax formulation process.

Yeah, about that. Crevulax is people, in case you haven’t figured it out. I shouldn’t play down the fact that this is evil and all, but it’s a very bush-league sort of evil. The aliens are killing a small number of people for the purpose of making a drug which legitimately seems to help people in very dire need. That’s sort of an “essay topic for freshman ethics class” kind of evil, not what you’d expect from either a secret alien invasion story or a giant evil corporation story.

The hook to get our heroes involved this week, insofar as they’re involved, is a guy called Mr. Jimmy. He’s yet another of those “Old friends of Kincaid with a problem” that we’d seen before in “Terminal Rock” and “Seft of Emun”. He’s got one line of dialogue that hints that maybe he became addicted to drugs due to chronic pain from an old leg injury, which is all we’ll learn about his backstory. We watch him try unsuccessfully to buy “a gram of rock” at a fortified pharmacy (Perhaps we’re meant to understand that the drug companies’ unprofitability stems from them relying on a product that actively hinders the buyer’s ability to hold down a job?), then almost get beaten up by a loan shark in a bar. Fortunately for him, Kincaid’s just sat down to a bottle of whiskey, hold the shot-glass full of pills.

Continue reading Antithesis: Synthetic Love (War of the Worlds 2×09)

So yeah. As many times as I’ve watched this series, somehow this is the first time I’ve noticed how much “Among the Philistines” prefigures “The Second Wave”. And not just in the broad strokes of “The aliens manage to get an agent inside the Cottage.”

“The Second Wave” begins with Blackwood going to a meeting set up by General Wilson which turns out to be a trap set by the aliens to capture him. That’s basically what happens in the first half of “Among the Philistines” as well, though in a slower way: Harrison and the gang are sent to a meeting with Adrian, who turns out to be an alien infiltrator.

Once the Blackwood team starts working with Adrian, we cut back to the Advocacy in their cave. One of them has sent a transmission to the council in anticipation of their success. Another cautions the first about getting ahead of himself because of the risk they’re taking on if the plan fails. It’s unusual to see the Advocates disagree on strategy — the only other time we’ve seen it was when one of them was sick. But there’s similar scenes in “The Second Season” of Malzor assuring the Eternal of their success, and the recurring element of tension between him and Mana over strategy.

It’s the third act of “Among the Philistines” where the parallels become really strong, though. In both, Ironhorse and his troops are sent off to a location they’ve discovered by studying alien transmissions, and in both cases, it turns out to be a trap. In both cases, Ironhorse is forced to breach security to get back into the Cottage when it’s been locked down in his absence. In both cases, there’s a climactic fight in the basement between Norton and an alien agent — for that matter, both episodes feature a fight between Norton and Ironhorse, though in very different contexts.

Even more specifically, both fights feature a member of the team dying at the elevator door. And in both fights, Norton is knocked out of his wheelchair, but manages to pull himself to something he can use to strike back: the wiring box in “Among the Philistines”, the alarm panic button in “The Second Wave”. Furthermore, both episodes feature a scene where the good guys would be able to safely escape the situation, except that Debi has gone and gotten herself into a position to be imperiled by the infiltrator, and someone’s got to risk themself to extricate her. And, finally, both episodes end with sombre survivors commemorating their fallen colleagues.

Despite their similarities, though, the two episodes are polar opposites in tone. Because their plots hit so many of the same points, this particular pair of episodes serve to highlight spectacularly just how different in tone the two seasons are. In both episodes, Norton is brave, and clever, and more competent in a fight than Ironhorse anticipates. But in “The Second Wave”, that’s not enough to save him (If you’ve got a good memory, I actually did make a crack about how Norton might have survived if he’d had a voice-controlled wheelchair. I did this totally not remembering the episode where he’d survived a similar fight by having his voice-controlled wheelchair ram the alien). In both episodes, Ironhorse is a brave and determined soldier, but in “The Second Wave”, he doesn’t manage to avoid falling into an ambush.

Part of the difference is that Norton and Ironhorse (and Blackwood, for that matter, given that he only evades capture himself due to Kincaid’s intervention) all seem a little bit dimmer in the second season. Ironhorse lets himself be led into a trap. Norton fails to recognize the clone’s intentions until it’s too late (In fact, Norton here lacks all the traits which “Among the Philistines” showcased, which certainly gives credence to the unpleasant theory that Mancuso just didn’t see anything to the character of Norton beyond “cripple”). But even more, Frank Mancuso’s War of the Worlds is set in a world that’s just downright nastier. That much you can see from the title sequence. Remember the episode of Friday the 13th from two weeks ago? Basically an old episode of The Twilight Zone rewritten to be nastier. That’s basically Mancuso’s approach here too. What happens when you remake “Among the Philistines” in a grimdark world that cuts you no slack?

You know what else it reminds me of? “Turn Left”. The antepenultimate episode of the fourth series of Doctor Who. A minion of the Trickster (a powerful extradimensional villain from The Sarah Jane Adventures who specializes in modifying history to sew chaos) creates an alternate reality around the Doctor’s companion, Donna Noble, where she never met the Doctor. Without her intervention, the Doctor is killed by the events of the second Christmas special. As a new timeline unfolds, Earth faces many of the same crises as in the third and fourth series, but with more tragic outcomes as the Doctor’s many friends on Earth are forced to sacrifice themselves to minimize the impact. By the nominative “present day” of the series, Great Britain is rapidly devolving into a police state with deliberate parallels to Weimar Germany after the destruction of London.

I bring it up because I think the general sense of that episode is that it’s not merely the absence of the Doctor himself which changes the outcome of the situations. The casts of the Doctor Who spin-offs The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood are sacrificed resolving events which, in the primary storyline, were resolved not by the Doctor himself directly, but by others who’d been influenced by his worldview. The altered timeline is shaped not by the Doctor’s actions but by his narrative gravity: it is a general recurring theme of Russel T. Davies’s take on the character of the Doctor that his presence in a story alters the nature of the narrative, creating, to oversimplify things, a more optimistic world, where people are a bit more prone to listening to their better angels and outcomes trend toward the better rather than the worse. In other words, the Doctor is the antidote to grimdark (One could be more specific: it is the gestalt between the Doctor and his companion which exerts this narrative gravity, for, in the major theme which Stephen Moffat carried forward when he took over the show, the Doctor seems to lose this power when he is alone).

Continue reading Synthesis 4: Raised on Biggie and Nirvana

Don’t you see? It’s not just our problem. If we lose this war, we lose the entire planet.

It is January 9, 1989. In Japan, Emperor Akhito has just ascended to the throne. Wednesday, President Reagan will deliver his farewell address to the nation before ascending directly into the heavens on a rising tide, leaving golden showers trickling down in his wake. I assume. In a weird bit of synchronicity, there was a peace summit between the US and the USSR since last we met, the outcome of which was an agreement by the Soviets to destroy their chemical weapons. The big news this week, of course, is the crash of British Midlands Flight 92 near Kegworth in England. The crash, the result of the pilots shutting down the wrong engine (The relevant indicators had recently undergone a design change) when one of them failed due to metal fatigue, killed 47.

Over the weekend, 42nd Street and Starlight Express closed on Broadway. The Lost Lennon Tapes are released on vinyl. The Billboard Hot 100 continues to stagnate, though there’s just a hit of movement at the bottom of the top 10 with the arrival of Def Leppard’s “Armageddon It” and Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal”. MacGyver, Alf, and Newheart are new. Star Trek the Next Generation returns from Christmas break with “Loud as a Whisper”, which is the one about the mute telepathic negotiator who speaks via three interpreters until they get offed. I’m told it’s really really good, but honestly I remember almost nothing about it. Friday the 13th gives us “Night Hunger”, in which a cursed car key, when bathed in the blood of a murder victim, upgrades your car to win illegal drag races. It’s sorta like Christine got crossed with Knight Rider and also that episode of Futurama where Bender gets turned into a were-car. Also, The Pat Sajack Show premieres.

It’s time for a little blast from the future. “Among the Philistines” was the eleventh episode of War of the Worlds to air, but the sixteenth produced. We’ve seen episodes out-of-order before without it being an issue; this isn’t really the sort of show with an episode-to-episode story arc. But this episode is actually going to reference things that haven’t happened yet. These won’t be spoilers for us, thanks to the order in which I’ve done things, but Harrison’s going to mention the name of the alien homeworld and the time-table for the invasion, which he’s not going to learn until February, in “The Prodigal Son”. He also places the events of the “The Resurrection” about a year earlier.

The lab set’s also been redressed a little, though looking back, the refurbished set actually debuted back in “The Second Seal” (Notably, after two episodes that didn’t have any footage set there), and I just didn’t notice because it switches back for a couple of episodes. I only noticed it this time because there’s a few shots where you can see the supercomputer, which actually looks like an honest-to-goodness Cray-1 now, the height of 1970s computing technology, all decked out in red leatherette.

There’s also one particular scene early on which seems very strange in context, but will make a lot of sense to you if I tell you now that this episode was probably supposed to fall immediately after “He Feedeth Among the Lilies” (Which will ultimately air before “The Prodigal Son”, but was produced after).

We open with Ironhorse’s squaddies — Ironhorse has squaddies now, another thing that won’t be introduced until later, though I do find myself thinking that it actually makes sense that it be this week’s events that prompts him to get some — setting up a fake car accident to serve as a road block. Stopping for the road block, three aliens driving a truck under the marque of the “Source Chemical Company” are captured alive. Harrison repeatedly stresses how important it is that they be taken alive for interrogation. Inexplicably, Harrison repeatedly saying this out loud right in front of them somehow alerts the aliens to the fact that the humans want to take them alive and interrogate them, so, exchanging a meaningful glance at each other, they each in turn punch themselves in the chest causing them to die in a spray of alien goo out their backs.

[br]I tried making an animated gif out of this, but it’s like half a second long and would give you motion sickness.

Harrison completely flips his shit over this. They’d set up the roadblock due to a tipoff from an unknown source, and Harrison is convinced that the fact that the aliens were able to commit suicide apparently by force of will when captured after he’s told them that he wants to interrogate them about the invasion means that the aliens must have been warned about the ambush. Maybe we missed a scene or something.

For reasons that will become clearer when we view this episode in its proper context, this latest setback pushes Harrison into a dark place. He sits in his office brooding angrily until Ironhorse shows up to ruin my policy of only shipping Ironhorse with Norton. He actually gives Harrison a heartfelt shoulder-massage and talks about the stress of fighting an unseen enemy, leading into another of Ironhorse’s famous tonal whiplash military anecdotes.

At the point, the prime discussion is the mission. Fighting an enemy you couldn’t see. It takes everything you have just to hold it together. I’ve been there. We fought all night at Khe Sanh. Pinned down. The screams, the dying that night. We all knew we’d be overrun. We’d be dead by the end of the night. In the morning, the mist cleared in the valley and they were gone. We’d done it. We’d held our position: we’d won. But that night was a million nights long.[br]You’re going through a night like that, Harrison. But the mist will clear. And we will have won.

I love it when Ironhorse goes into Dark Vietnam Anecdote mode. The music goes all grim and brooding and the lights dim, and I’m pretty sure they mixed in some jungle ambient sounds, and I just keep thinking of the scene in Gremlins where Phoebe Cates tells the story about how her father died (Or better, the scene in Gremlins II about why she hates Lincoln’s Birthday). While those two are exchanging meaningful looks, the aliens back in the Land of the Lost cave are having a Mua-ha-ha moment over how the death of the three aliens from the truck means that everything is going exactly according to their plans. So no suspense about that then.

Here, then, we introduce this week’s guest star, Doctor Adrian Bouchard, played by Cedric Smith. Smith is a prolific actor, known for his roles in Anne of Green Gables and Avonlea, as well as for voicing Professor Xavier in the ’90s X-Men cartoon, opposite Captain Power alum David Hemblen’s Magneto. Also, minor fact, at the time, he was married to actress Catherine Disher, who was, I’ve mentioned, their first choice for the role of Suzanne. Pity they couldn’t get her to do the show.

Adrian is a researcher who’s spent the last decade doing language research with a couple of dolphins names Mona and Mabel. His work will eventually lead to seaQuest DSV. The gang has brought him to a cool old mansion that’s being used as a government safe-house so they can talk to him about aliens. During the copious down-time involved in studying dolphins, he listens to the radio a lot, and had noticed a correlation between an “odd percussive transmission” he’d picked up and news reports of terrorist attacks. Applying his dolphin research to the transmissions had yielded the tip we saw the team respond to earlier. Adrian had done work with the Navy in the past, training dolphins to lay mines or something (They don’t go into detail, but I just keep thinking of the “dipshit stuff” Gillian had suspected Kirk of being up to in Star Trek IV), and had some military contacts who’d hooked him up with Harrison and company.

Adrian seems to have no awareness of the 1953 invasion, though he looks to be older than Harrison and therefore would have lived through it, probably as a teenager. And yet his response to the news that Earth is being invaded by aliens is not fear or panic, but simple scientific curiosity, asking about the aliens’ origin and technology. When asked, Harrison volunteers the name of their planet, that a colonization force of millions is four years away, and that they’ve tried without success to make peace with the aliens. Adrian agrees to help them decipher alien transmissions.

At their next coffee break, Harrison leaves Adrian alone with Suzanne so they can flirt a bit in the hopes it will make his sudden but inevitable betrayal a little less obvious. I mean, come on. Having an alien in human form casually flirt with Suzanne, feigning total sincerity? If we hadn’t seen the new alien commander last week humoring the little girl over the parking meter, I wouldn’t have imagined them capable of it.

What? You hadn’t worked out Adrian is an alien? I’m sure writer Patrick Barry will be happy to hear it. Yeah, it’s him again, back again after “The Second Seal”, an episode, you’ll recall, that I’d really liked in my youth but had serious misgivings about this time through. Anyway, it’s hard to avoid realizing that Adrian and his game-beaking ability to decipher alien transmissions is actually a trap when they keep cutting back to the Advocacy in the cave talking about how well their plan is going, which they do again now.

Adrian and Norton try running the algorithm against an incoming alien transmission on the safe-house’s mainframe, and there’s lots of computer-sounding gibberish about opening new windows and bitmapping the X-axis or whatever, but the signal is too big or something and the computer overloads, causing all the text windows to fade out and the whole system to go down. And the computer scientist person who has ever used a computer in me wants to call bullshit on that, but for all I know, ’80s mainframes did work like that. When Ironhorse comes in to see what’s wrong, he name-drops their supercomputer, and Adrian storms off in a huff, angry that they were screwing around with a Commodore 64 when they had a supercomputer.

Since Adrian’s background check had just come through before the computer crashed, Harrison is now at liberty to invite him to come back to the Cottage and work with them. Adrian claims that he wants to go back to his dolphins, but Harrison makes an impassioned plea about the fate of the world, and he agrees to be blindfolded and driven to their place.

There’s another new arrival at the cottage: Debi just got a new evil-detecting dog, Chekhov Guido, from Anton Chekhov’s Evil-Detecting Dog Emporium. Adrian and Guido, predictably, do not hit it off, with Debi barely able to restrain Guido from attacking, because Patrick Barry does not know the meaning of the word “subtlty”.

The supercomputer solves their overload problem, and begins producing translations of the alien recordings, which everyone assumes will be the key to swift victory. Norton cautions them that Adrian’s algorithm doesn’t work on older recordings for some reason, so there might be more to the cipher than they’ve figured out. The team wants to bring Adrian on permanently, and both Suzanne and Harrison make pitches to him, but he plays hard-to-get.

During a break, they realize that they meant to establish Norton’s action skills at some point and haven’t gotten around to it, so Norton and Ironhorse spar at bojutsu. At first, they seem to be evenly matched, but Norton finally opens a can of whup-ass so big that he breaks Ironhorse’s staff.

It turns out Norton was cheating: his staff has a metal core. Seriously, I hope Anton Chekhov got royalties for this episode. But I kid. I think it’s actually a good thing. This episode much more than any episode so far has made a point to set things up ahead of time. The climax of this episode is going to play out as a series of callbacks invoking things we learned in the first half. It’s a big departure from the, “Heroes just kind of stumble onto the alien plot by dumb luck and a series of coincidences put people in the right place at the right time to foil them.” It’s not as funny as “Alien plot to nuke a peace summit foiled because they only put an hour on the meter,” but it’s more dramatically satisfying.

It’s right around here that Debi announces that Guido has disappeared, maintaining her perfect track-record with pets. Suzanne isn’t going to let her have so much as a goldfish after this. In the words of Oscar Wilde, “To lose one pet due to the machinations of a malevolent alien race bent on world domination may be regarded a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness.” While everyone’s discussing their intent to hire Adrian on permanently (And give him Ironhorse’s parking space, according to Norton), Adrian decrypts another transmission, and announces that the aliens are up to some vaguely outlined plot involving nerve gas, and gives them the exact time and place where it’s all going down complete with a note to make sure to show up exactly on time and for the love of God, don’t come three hours early and scope the place out for an ambush ahead of time.

Continue reading Thesis: Among the Philistines (War of the Worlds 1×11)

On the twelfth day of Christmas, A Mind Occasionally Voyaging gave to me…

We must plan for the future.[br]A future without humans.

It is January 2, 1989. Happy new year. We have, of course, been to the beginning of 1989 before, so you know the broad strokes of it. Leonard Nemoy is enjoying his first full day of marriage to Susan Bay. Notre Dame beats West Virginia at the Fiesta Bowl, Miami beats Nebraska at the Orange Bowl, Florida State beats Auburn at the Sugar Bowl, and Michigan beats Southern California at the Rose Bowl. By week’s end, Comet Tempel 1 will reach perihelion (It would later be visited by NASA space probes Deep Impact and Stardust, the only comet we’ve visited twice. The former would carry a detachable baby space probe with which it would ram Tempel 1 as part of NASA’s “Let’s see what happens if you crash a space ship into a comet” program. Answer: SCIENCE^TM), a pair of French newsmen will test security at JFK by trying to plant fake bombs, Hirohito will die, and, in news that kinda prefigures the way this year is going for communism, Russian newspaper Izvestia will start running commercial advertisements.

The only new movie releases this week that I’m familiar with are American Ninja 3 and Communion, a Christopher Walken flop based on Whitley Strieber’s 1987 book about alien abduction. The networks start back up with new programming this week, though even the shows I’m familiar with aren’t doing episodes I remember particularly. Nothing has moved in the top ten since last week. Star Trek the Next Generation returns next week. Friday the 13th the Series gives us “13 O’Clock”, which is pretty much the Twilight Zone episode “A Kind of Stopwatch” but meaner. We once again run into one of our old friends, Gwynyth Walsh, who acquires a magic pocket watch that stops time for an hour at one in the morning. Only since this is Friday the 13th, it only does that as payment for murdering someone, and she gets it by murdering her husband, the previous owner. I think the major part of the plot is her trying to track down and murder a couple of orphans who witnessed the murder, and naturally, it ends with her frozen in time. I’m kinda fuzzy on the middle part, because I remember it mostly as being one of those episodes that did a much better job of selling how completely screwed the good guys were and how the villain was basically invincible and they had no chance whatever of stopping her, and a worse job of making it believable when they go ahead and win anyway. Also, the visual effects for both the stopped time and the watch itself (which magically manifests a “XIII” where the “I” should be when stopping time) were really impressive by the standards of the day, and got them an Emmy nomination. If I recall correctly, stopped time, like time travel in this show, was represented by a switch to black-and-white with a fuzzy ghost-trail motion blur effect.

War of the Worlds this week is about as close as a show like this can get to a Christmas episode. By which I mean it’s called “Epiphany”, which is also the fancy name for the religious observance that happens after the twelfth day of Christmas (That is, on January 6, because the “Christmas Season” begins with Christmas and ends on Twelfth Night, rather than the modern American tradition of it beginning on All Saint’s Day, climaxing the day after Thanksgiving, and finally ending on Boxing Day when the radio stations stop playing Christmas music and all the Christmas stuff is marked down 50%). It also happens to be today, which is why I extended my originally planned four weeks of padding for the mid-season break out so long, the same way I padded out Captain Power to make the finale fall on April Fool’s Day.

What does this episode have to do with the childhood of Jesus (Epiphany traditionally commemorates the events from Jesus’s birth through the wedding at Cana, with the western church’s celebration centering around the Adoration of the Magi, and the eastern church around the Baptism of Jesus)? Very little, as close as I can tell. The secular meaning of the term (The feeling of a sudden, profound realization) doesn’t seem to fit especially either. There’s a few minor points that, at a stretch, could be made to fit, and we’ll talk about them later.

So if not a straightforward epiphany, what are we in store for this episode? A mixed bag, as this show tends to be. First thing I’ll say is that the pacing is fantastic. After a few missteps early in the season, the pacing has generally been very good in War of the Worlds, but this one especially. This episode was filmed between “The Good Samaritan” and “Goliath is My Name”. It’s not quite as good as “Goliath”, but there’s absolutely signs of progress. Another “as always” is that the character roles are fantastic, with some particularly good moments from both the guest cast and the regulars. Also, they managed to land legendary actor and “enthusiastic” nudist Patrick Macnee.

On the other hand, though this show is really always about the Cold War, this is the first one to address it directly, and it’s a little over-the-top. This episode is pretty much all about the actual Cold War, and the role of the aliens in the plot is curiously bracketed: they basically stop being active participants by the midpoint. The story works just fine, but in all honesty, 99% of it would work just as well if they weren’t in it at all. The dialogue is curiously clunky — probably related to this being another script attributed to an obviously fake writer, this time “Sylvia Van Buren”. The overall gist of what’s going on is fine, but the actual specific words coming out of people’s mouths seem ill-chosen. Suzanne is woefully underused, having only really the one worthwhile scene and getting more than her share of the dialogue clunkers. Worst of all, this episode sees the return of Sex God Harrison.

The story opens up with three creepy, alien-possessed nuns taking a tour of some kind of crime-infested dystopian urban sprawl (That is, San Francisco), like we’ve suddenly turned into a show set in a post-apocalyptic societal collapse grimdark future or something. They watch two men come to blows over a parking spot, watch the world’s worst David Spade impersonator steal a purse, and watch some bullies rough a kid up for his lunch money (When he asks why they didn’t do anything to help, they remind him that, “God works in mysterious ways.”). All this street crime in a one-block radius proves the research the aliens need for the military commander to conclude that humanity is absolutely going to wipe itself out via “tribal” warfare in a couple of decades anyway.

Why they generalize from street crime to the Cold War is unclear, but they decide that it’ll only take a very little bit of prodding to persuade the major powers of the Earth to nuke each other out of existence. Curiously, no one points out that an added benefit of triggering a shooting war between the US and the Soviet Union is that the radiation will render the planet safer for Mor-Taxan immune systems.

At the cottage, everyone’s watching the Plot Convenience Channel coverage of upcoming nuclear disarmament talks which will be going on nearby the next day. Not unlike last week, there’s some good non-verbal communication when they cut around the room to show Suzanne, Harrison and Norton all looking happy and hopeful at the news, while Ironhorse grimaces and looks pensive. He snaps off the television in frustration, declaring that the plan to simultaneously dismantle an American and Soviet nuclear device is, “The beginning of the end,” because, “Nuclear warheads are the only guarantee of peace we have right now.” Harrison, clearly humoring him, politely asks for an explanation, and Ironhorse launches into a text book defense of mutually assured destruction, insisting that the superior Soviet numbers in conventional weapons make an invasion absolutely, unarguably inevitable absent the threat of nuclear retaliation.

Surprisingly, the writers decided to let Suzanne be the one to challenge him. They cut to her rolling her eyes during Ironhorse’s speech. Once he’s done, she points out that his entire philosophy is predicated on the idea that the “reds” actually want to launch a ground invasion of the United States. He calls her naive for even imagining otherwise, and she pretty much calls him an idiot. Ironhorse insists that the strong dominating the weak is a law of nature, and cites Darwin at her. Norton tries to break the tension by offering up the very obvious joke that, having discussed politics, perhaps they could move the conversation on to religion. This scene is actually really cool in that we see the three scientists sort of instinctively banding together against Ironhorse, but they’re all very different in their approach. Suzanne is the only one who becomes combative. It’s consistent with past episodes where she’s been quick to annoyance and anger forced to suffer fools, but it’s surprising that they’d give this scene to her and not Harrison. There’s a reason for that, though.

Harrison slips out unnoticed during the argument to take a personal call from one of this week’s guest characters, Dr. Katya Rhodan. Since we spent a whole scene establishing that there’s nuclear disarmament talks going on, she’s obviously a Russian nuclear physicist who’s in town to attend the conference (In a minor nice touch, she namechecks Dr. Jacobi, Harrison’s boss from Pacific Tech, who we haven’t heard mention of since halfway through the pilot). She’s also an old flame of Harrison’s having, as we later find out, spent three days hiding from her KGB handlers and boning him at a physics conference in 1980 — which may be the most relevant that Harrison’s astrophysics training will ever be to the plot. She’s cagey on the phone, because we’re doing Cold War Intrigue, but you’ve already figured out the score, haven’t you? I mean, there’s only one way a Cold War intrigue goes from this setup. She sets up a lunch date with Harrison then hangs up just ahead of being accosted by her KGB babysitter, Major Valery Kedrov, played by John Steed himself, Patrick Macnee, in a role which he treats with complete professionalism aside from the fact that he gives not a single fuck about whether or not he sounds even the least little bit Russian. I mean, what, was the director going to order the dude who played Satan himself in Battlestar Galactica to put on a fake Russian accent?

He’s a straight-up stereotype Cold War-era KGB heavy, speaking in veiled threats and exuding that very polite distrust that makes it really clear how numbered the Soviet Union’s days are, and really exposes the fallaciousness of Ironhorse’s worldview: not once does he ever treat any of the Americans with the level of suspicion or suppressed hatred that he treats one of his own. Ironhorse thinks that the Russians are gearing up to invade the US? Judging by Major Kedrov, they’re more likely gearing up to invade Russia. Not that the notion of one’s own government spending as much effort trying to keep its own citizens in line as protecting them from outside attackers is something entirely alien to anyone in our post-9/11 world. What Macnee brings to the character is a sense of gravitas, and the way he sells the urbane front the character puts on. He’s an extremely political character, never making actual threats or even outright stating a position, while still communicating with authority and intimidation.

He politely accuses Katya of “frivolity” for using the pay phone rather than the one in her room. She counters, with undisguised distaste, that it would be inappropriate for her to make a personal call on the government’s dime, spitting the word “Comrade” at him. There’s just the tiniest flash of anger from Kedrov when, unable to challenge her logic, he simply tells her that he’s going to note it on his report.

The aliens snatch three Nuclear Power Plant employees right as they’re going off shift, and return the next morning to steal some fissile material so the aliens can make an atomic bomb. Now, there’s an obvious problem with this: the kind of material used in nuclear power plants isn’t suitable for making a bomb, the plutonium isn’t enriched nearly enough to cause a chain reaction (Also, I don’t think you use plutonium in power plants). You might counter this by supposing that the aliens are going to make a dirty bomb — a conventional explosive that uses low-grade material not to cause a nuclear explosion, but rather to contaminate the area with radioactive pollution. Or perhaps it’s just a matter of the aliens using their alien science to somehow convert the low-enriched material into weapons-grade material with the meager resources they have on-hand. But by the time word of the theft gets back to the Blackwood team, it will be on the news that, no, the stuff they stole was high-enriched weapons-grade stuff. Because shut up.

Harrison slips out for his lunch date all dappered up, making a big point of being evasive and dismissive when Ironhorse demands on knowing his plans so that Ironhorse being suspicious of him can be a thing later. When he arrives at the restaurant, despite not having seen her for eight years, he recognizes Katya from behind, across the patio. When he greets her, she pulls him into an embrace that knocks her ridiculous broad-brimmed ’80s hat off. And let me tell you, this scene really reaffirms my impressions last week: the affection between Harrison and Katya is clear and intense here, and you can’t compare his behavior in this scene to the scenes where he’s meant to be “jealous” about Suzanne and believe that Jared Martin is trying to convey the same class of emotion in both scenes.

We aren’t privy to the content of their conversation yet, though, because the camera pulls back to reveal that they’re being watched from a distance by Ironhorse, who’s secretly photographing them with a discreet SLR camera with one of those totally discreet ginormous telephoto lenses. He looks to his right, though, and notices that he’s not the only one spying on the romantic reunion: Major Kedrov is also photographing them. Ironhorse brings up his camera and snaps off a few shots before Kedrov too senses that he’s not alone, turns, and gets a few snaps of Ironhorse before retreating. I can not stress this enough: the scene is played completely straight, and is possibly the funniest thing I have seen so far in this series.

Ironhorse immediately assumes the worst, that Harrison’s gone and gotten himself smitten with a godless Red and now plans to defect so he can run off to Moscow and make the beast with two спинка with her, if you know what I mean (I don’t even know what I mean. I’m not even sure that’s the right sense of the word “back” in Russian). He’s so wound up in his worries about Harrison going pink that he’s barely interested when Norton and Suzanne intercept news about the theft at the nuclear plant. You know. This is the second episode in a row where Ironhorse has shrugged off events that could lead directly to the extermination of mankind with an, “Eh. Not my department.” I know that Ironhorse’s whole character is based around this Brigadier/Agent Scully-style, “Skeptical past the point of reasonability,” thing, but who exactly does he think is poisoning the world’s food supply and stealing nuclear materials? Let’s go back to the pilot for a minute. The very first scene of the very first episode depicts domestic terrorists (In the novel, at least. Since we never get any details on-screen, you’re welcome to assume they’re foreign in the aired version, what with their random generically-foreign accents) attacking and capturing a US Military installation and plotting to, in essence, set off a massive dirty bomb. That much actually happens — it’s not just a fake-out to hide the aliens. And Ironhorse spends the first hour of the series convinced that terrorists are now schlepping around the pacific northwest with a truckload of radioactive waste in order to do bad stuff and hurt Americans. As the series progresses, Ironhorse proceeds to be skeptical about lethal levels of radiation at a liquid nitrogen plant, the theft of trucks carrying radioactive waste, the theft of an incredibly lethal bioweapon, a spate of murders involving bizarre mutilations, and a deliberate attempt to taint the world’s food supply with an incredibly lethal engineered toxin. A lot of these are basically Bond villain plots. And they’ve run through ten of them in a matter of months. It took Bond fifteen years to run into that many. But it’s not just Ironhorse being Ironhorse: remember, no one ever questions the wisdom or necessity of Mason engineering a secret radiation-resistant process into his grain, and the response here to the theft of enriched nuclear power rods isn’t to mobilize the National Guard, the FBI and G.I. Joe, but rather to issue a BOLO to meter maids. The only way this makes a lick of sense is if this is a world where stuff like domestic terrorists defeating the US army on US soil, and accidental releases of deadly bioweapons, and daring daylight theft of weapons-grade plutonium is enough of an everyday occurrence that people have learned to cope. And this is 1989. We’re still half a decade from the Oklahoma City bombing, and a whole decade away from 9/11. I’m not saying that the 1980s were devoid of violent acts of terror, far from it, but I’m pretty sure that, “Unknown people stole enough enriched plutonium to make a bomb,” would result in pants-crapping freak-outs if it happened today in our more cynical times. Airports would be shut down. People would be mobbing — let’s see, 1989, so… Hechenger’s? — for duct tape and plastic sheeting. Very Serious People would be on TV suggesting we ought to round up everyone with a beard and dark complexion.[br]One of the things about this show that is often taken as a weakness is the way that the world seems superficially unchanged despite that whole “devastating invasion from space in the 1950s” thing. But more and more, there seem to be these hints that it’s not the “World outside your window.” More and more, I’m accepting the possibility that War of the Worlds is actually set in a dystopian world that’s right in the middle of a societal collapse, but one that’s so deeply in denial that it’s still clinging to the idea that everything is fine. By the time we get back from a quick cut back to the Land of the Lost cave to explain that the aliens have built a bomb, which they’re going to use to blow up the disarmament summit, Ironhorse is ready to beat down Harrison’s door to accuse him of treason and haul him up before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He even tacitly accuses Suzanne of complicity for being “so quick to defend him.”

And the writers presumably think he’s made a compelling argument, because they move to abate our worries by cutting to Katya’s hotel room, where Major Kedrov beats down the door looking for her, only to find that she’s apparently fled out the window.

Just as Ironhorse is about to call the TSA and have Harrison put on the no-fly list, he shows up (In a different suit than he was wearing in the last scene for some reason), with Katya in tow, because, duh, she wants to defect. Ironhorse and Harrison go off to argue about this, (with Ironhorse bringing up the nuclear theft briefly in an attempt to shame Harrison over his dereliction of duty). Meanwhile, Katya, Suzanne and Norton make awkward smalltalk. Katya compliments them on the Cottage’s decor, which Norton appreciates, but Suzanne takes a bit of umbrage when Katya asks if she did the interior decorating. Since she’s a Strong Modern Female Character and a Scientist Dammit. At least, this week. Anyway, Katya explains that, despite being a nuclear physicist, she still enjoys interior design as a hobby, so there.

Weirdly, Ironhorse, who’d earlier been so dismissive of political concerns and didn’t like the idea of nuclear disarmament, is really upset that Harrison’s gone and created a political scandal that might derail the peace talks. Also weird: it’s clearly daytime in the hallways and night time in the rooms.

While all that was going on, the three alien nuclear plant workers were accosted by a policeman, who they possess, since one of them has for some reason lost her face.

The next morning, they drop their bomb off across the street from the summit. The alien side of the plot feels very 1970s Doctor Who, with aliens threatening a peace conference, but then they cut back to the cave, where the aliens speculate on the sure success of their plan and call for maps so they can find the greatest population centers for planting future bombs, essentially ushering in a sort of Carnival season for Mor-Tax (fitting for what comes after Epiphany).

I think they may have lost track of what their plan is here. The whole point of blowing up the peace conference is to provoke war between the US and the USSR so that they’d wipe themselves out in a nuclear conflagration. I won’t even make a call as to whether or not this plan is really plausible: on the one hand, yeah, tensions are high and setting off a nuke pretty much anywhere would probably lead to the end of the world, but on the other hand, it’s not like the US or the USSR would seriously believe the other side was responsible. If their plan is just to ratchet up the Cold War tension until Mistakes get Made, I guess starting an age of nuclear terrorism is a good way to do it. It seems like they’re proceeding here from the idea, though, that blowing up cities with nuclear bombs is a low-cost solution for wiping out humanity. Which, okay, it took basically zero effort for them to build this bomb, but it’s strongly at odds with the whole series-concept of the aliens being resource-poor and needing to work through subterfuge.

But leaving that aside, I like the character work from the alien field team. There’s a neat shot of one of the nuclear plant workers beaming with pride as the Advocates charge them with their mission over the radio. Immediately upon arming the bomb and abandoning their van, they’re accosted by a little girl who “reminds” them to feed the meter. The cop-alien protests that, being a cop, he isn’t liable to get a ticket. The little girl protests that even policemen have to follow the law, so he decides that she made a threatening move and puts sixteen bullets in her. Such sweet, old-fashioned simple times, when you could tell a genocidal alien disguised as a policeman that even cops have to follow the law and not get tazered. The alien looks to the girl’s mother for help, but she just nods at him, smiling. I guess if you want to claim logic for the scene, the alien decides that it would be better not to arouse suspicion, because he puts on an insincere smile and thanks the little girl for reminding him, then takes out a nickel and offers to lift her up so she can put fifty minutes on the meter for him.

It’s a cute scene that really plays up the bathos, juxtaposing this very mundane act of kindness with the fact that these three are right in the middle of planting a nuclear bomb next door to a peace conference. He even tips his hat to the girl and her mother as they leave. And it’s going to get even funnier in a bit, because fifty-five minutes later, the meter-maid comes by and gives them the first of three tickets she’s going to issue before calling a tow truck.

Continue reading Thesis: Epiphany (War of the Worlds 1×10)