Category: War of the Worlds

It is October 9, 1989. Just two days after celebrating the fortieth anniversary of its existence, the German Democratic Republic begins to dissolve in earnest as the Peaceful Revolution kicks into full swing with a large-scale protest in Leipzig which local party officials opt not to violently suppress. Three days earlier, the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize, partly on his own merits, partly as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, and partly to piss off China. What with all that going on, it seems kind of glib to mention that also today, Soviet news reported a UFO landing in Voronezh and Penthouse‘s first Hebrew edition hit newsstands. Last Wednesday, Secretariat died and Dakota Johnson was born, but as I am not Christian Gray, I am going to beat neither a dead horse nor a live woman.

Janet Jackson and Madonna have leapfrogged (leaptfrog?) Milli Vanilli with “Miss You Much” and “Cherish” respectively. MacGyver, Major Dad and Alf are new. Later in the evening, ABC will show the LA Raiders beat the New York Jets 14-7, as LA Coach Art Shell becomes the first African American to coach an NFL game. Simultaneously, George Strait and Kathy Mattea win big at the 23rd Country Music Awards on CBS.

In the backwoods of syndication, Star Trek the Next Generation hasn’t started its third season yet (I have no idea how I forgot the first two episodes of this season, beyond the fact that I find them largely uninteresting). Star Trek the Next Generation airs “The Survivors“, which kinda feels like TNG doing a Jerome Bixby script. Friday the 13th The Series aired its actual season premier, a two-parter called “The Prophecies”, a few days late. Rather than dealing with a cursed object, this one plots the gang against devil worshipers trying to summon the Antichrist. The episode serves as a cast transition, with leading man Ryan Dallion being magically regressed to childhood at the climax to serve as a human sacrifice. I think the conclusion is something like it turns out that his alcoholic mother has cleaned up her act and she decides to have another go at raising him. He’s replaced by Johnny Ventura, a reformed con man who’d guested last season. Today, they air an episode titled “Crippled Inside”, which for whatever reason is one of the few episodes I personally remember very well. On his first solo mission, out of naivety, Johnny hesitates in reclaiming an antique wheelchair from the paralyzed girl it’s both healing, and allowing to take horrible vengeance on the cliche High School Mean Girls directly responsible for her injury. The episode ends with pretty much everyone dead and Johnny screaming in rage as he impotently tries to murder a wheelchair with an axe (cursed objects are indestructible).

Mancuso’s other, less beloved series airs “No Direction Home”. We open minutes after the end of the previous episode, with the Blackwood survivors having retreated to Kincaid’s Awesome Van. They’re haunted by little flashback montages of the closing minutes of the previous episode. Kincaid mumbles something about the possibility of being followed, which, in fact, they are.

The aliens are in the process of abandoning their base, what with them somehow psychically knowing that Blackwood and Kincaid survived the explosion. Mana isn’t happy about having to leave her pickled human experimental subjects, conveniently bagged in more of that green orange pith and hanging from the ceiling, and she shows her displeasure by getting all passive-aggressive about Malzor’s failure to murder the cast. Malzor does some sneering and insists that, “They haven’t escaped.”

I’m digging this tension between Malzor and Mana. Malzor, for the most part, seems to have little respect for science, and just wants to get on with the murdering. Mana, on the other hand, seems like she finds Malzor’s bloodlust unseemly and is all about the science. Of murdering people. That tension is going to be there for the whole season, and at the end, they’re even going to make a stab at justifying it in a shockingly banal manner. But — and this is a huge problem with this show — it’s not tremendously consistent, as we are going to see moments of something approaching tenderness between them.

Malzor’s insistence that they haven’t escaped is in turn because a couple of Morthren soldiers in a Cadillac gets on at the next ramp and starts following Kincaid. While Blackwood climbs to the back of the van, takes out and loads a gun, Kincaid does a very quick three-point turn, which befuddles the aliens so much that they crash their car. There is something just a bit hilarious about Blackwood taking so long to load his gun that the whole incident is over before he’s ready, and they’re savvy enough not to call overt attention to it.

The aliens manage somehow to crash their car into an entirely different set, coming to rest outside a homeless shelter run by Father Tim (Angelo Rizacos). Father Tim is a good sort, and immediately tries to help the drivers, despite warnings from Ralph, one of the regulars. Ralph is mentally ill or mentally handicapped: his friend, who is credited only as “Lady at Mission”, will later attribute his condition to unspecified government experiments. Because it’s a dystopia. Accordingly, his warnings that the men in the car are “wrong men” will go unheeded, because the characters don’t realize that they’re in an action-adventure TV show in the 1980s, where being non-neurotypical invariably gifts a person with a magically infallible sixth sense for detecting Evil. The aliens pull Father Tim into the car when he sees the glow stick juice dripping from them and drive off. Lady at Mission fruitlessly tries to comfort Frank that Tim probably just jumped into the back seat of the car to help them drive to the hospital, but Frank isn’t having it.

Kincaid takes the van to an industrial building which appears abandoned but is still, in accordance with how these things work, leaking steam and has big fans slowly turning in front of all the lights. They descend into a set of underground passages which lead to an abandoned underground bunker dating to the “war scare” back in the fifties. I assume he means the Cold War, but this is, after all, War of the Worlds. It may just be me, but the place kinda looks like it might possibly be a refurbishment of the Power Base set from Captain Power. That sort of thing happens a lot in TV, big fancy sets being expensive and not much use after the show ends (For example, though I’ve never gotten a canonical source to confirm it, in addition to being redressed as various other bridges in the TNG era, I’m pretty sure the USS Enterprise bridge from Star Trek III also appeared in at least two seasons of Power Rangers). Blackwood is concerned that Debi is still in shock, but Kincaid just kind of passively brushes it off, and gets mopey about his dead brother when Blackwood finds a picture of them. Sounding a little uncomfortable and nervous, Kincaid offers Suzanne a trunk of hip late-’80s/early ’90s women’s clothes he for some reason has.

They haven’t said it outright in terms more explicit than the ambiguous “Almost Tomorrow” dateline, but this show is meant to be set in the near future. We get one very forthright indication of this when Kincaid pulls out an honest-to-goodness videophone to call his superiors. Using the codename “Lone Wolf” (presumably, he got it from page 1 of the book, “World’s most predicable code names”, right after “Maverick”), he speaks to a low-resolution black-and-white 1 fps image of General Wilson’s secretary, and has to shout at her to “cut the crap” to finally speak to a Major Yaro, apparently the highest person up in the food chain they can still find. Yaro is weird and evasive, claiming to be Kincaid’s new contact in Wilson’s absence, presses him for information about the Blackwood Project (he claims that there’s been reports of “an accident”, but that he doesn’t know the details), and tries to talk Kincaid into giving up his location. Kincaid smells a rat and hangs up on him.

The exchange is a bit weird, with Kincaid using the threat of showing up in person to get through to Yaro, then freaking out when he suggests showing up in person. But more to the point, the framing story it’s trying to establish doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s easy enough to work out what’s meant to be going on: as Blackwood immediately realizes, they’re being cut loose and disavowed. What’s far harder to make sense of is why and how. On the one hand, the set up here seems like the idea might be that the government has been infiltrated by the Morthren, who are cutting off the Blackwood team’s life-line. But that doesn’t really make any sense. If the Morthren had access to institutional power, why do they keep moving to abandoned power plants and coming up with cunning plots to assert social control or gain resources, when they could just, like, give themselves a giant ranch somewhere secluded while they order the national guard to start disappearing people?

No, in some ways it’s more like the government just really wants to pretend this whole “alien invasion” thing isn’t happening. That’s weird, because it’s really not like The X-Files where no one’s ever able to present proper evidence or anything. There was a war. The Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, and Los Angeles City Hall all got blown up. This is history. People in this world know about aliens. And the Blackwood Project’s existence seems to indicate that the government considers aliens an active threat. This isn’t like Stargate SG-1, where the government was trying to shut them down in the early seasons on the premise that if we just buried the Stargate, the Goa’uld would almost certainly leave us alone, what with it being a hella long way to drive to get here.

It’s like the government is being obstructionist just to be obstructionist. Which I guess is not all that far out there — I’m writing this article just weeks after one half of the US Government wrote a letter to a country we were negotiating an anti-nuclear deal with to say, “Look, just give up. Our side does not want peace with you, so no matter what deal you make, once we take over the government in the next election, we’re going to break the agreement because we’re pretty sure that, this time, starting a war in the middle east for no good reason is going to work out super for us.” But here in the ’80s, with glasnost and perestroika and the Berlin Wall getting ready to fall, I would have hoped that folks would think, “Okay, the government might be obstructionist. It might be corrupt. It might be incompetent. It might be self-serving. But in the event that genocidal aliens were invading, they would probably not actively try to make their job easier.”

At a very basic level, the point of the scene is, “The government is going to be no help. They’re on their own.” More than that, even, the scene conveys the message that this is the sort of story where the government is going to be no help and you’re on your own. The scene is pure genre convention, like the scene in every second-rate cyberpunk story where the author takes five minutes to explain an insanely elaborate series of death traps that the Evil Megacorporation has set up to prevent unauthorized access to the room where they keep their zombie-making virus that they’re trying to market as a bioweapon. Is it remotely practical or a sound investment to secure your bioweapon at the end of a narrow walkway with no rails above a one mile deep pit with utterly sheer sides lubricated with nanoscale graphene that drops you through six yards of electrified monomolecular razor wire into a pit of acid, which is boiling, and also to make the door out of two panes of nanometer thick glass sandwiching five million times the lethal dose of a nerve agent that slows your perception of time so that the one-thirty-second of a second it takes to kill you feels like a thousand years of the most intense agony the human mind is capable of experiencing, before you fall into the pit of razor wire and acid, oh, and also the door is electrified too? And for that matter, exactly what is your business plan for these zombies, given that you try this approximately once a year and every single time, it’s ended with everyone dying and the trillion-dollar death-trap-slash-research-lab you built exploding?  And what about Scarecrow’s brain? You know who you are.

Continue reading Antithesis: No Direction Home (War of the Worlds 2×02)

It is October 10, 1988. Over the weekend, a fire caused $2000 in damage at the Seattle Space Needle and Felix Wankel, inventor of the rotary engine, died. A new ATF regulation passed in 1986 comes into effect, requiring hard liquor labels and advertisements to state their percent alcohol by volume instead of or in addition to the more traditional system of “How much do you have to water it down before using it to douse burning gunpowder” (I’m not even making that up. “100 proof” originally meant “Not too watered down to give to sailors, as evidenced by the fact that you can pour it on gunpowder and still get the gunpowder to burn,” which by a remarkable coincidence, is about 57% ABV, which in US usage is rounded to 50%, meaning “proof” is just twice the ABV, but keep in mind when drinking abroad that in the UK, proof is 7/4 the ABV, so 100 proof is 7% stronger). Billboard’s new chart isn’t out yet, leaving “Love Bites” at the top. MacGyver‘s a repeat, but ALF is new, a riff on It’s a Wonderful Life, with a guardian angel showing Gordon how much better off everyone would be if he’d never moved in with the Tanners. Friday the 13th The Series airs “And Now The News”, wherein Ryan and Micki track down an old-fashioned radio which dispenses psychiatric advice in exchange for frightening listeners to death.

War of the Worlds airs its second episode, “The Walls of Jericho”. This is a pretty uneven episode. The first half has a lot of the same first-time-jitters I found so grating in the last episode. In fact, despite the fact that there’s an explicit six week time gap, the first half of this one feels like a very direct continuation of the first episode’s story. “The Walls of Jericho” is basically about two things. In one plot, the Blackwood Project tries to justify its continued existence, while in the other, the aliens try to assure theirs. It’s kind of a plot-Voltron, with the first half of the episode floundering as the two plot threads limp along, but then for the last half, the two halves of the plot join up and form a giant plot-robot of awesome.

The title sequence is a simple montage of clips from the pilot as Harrison sets up the premise via narration, but at it’s end, the screen fades to black, over which a line of the episode’s dialogue is played. This week, it’s John Vernon announcing, “They sure don’t die pretty, do they?”. What’s been cut from the DVD is an intertitle afterward showing a poorly rendered CGI alien hand reaching up over the top of a globe.

Ironhorse is getting antsy and wants to get on with his life, to which end he’s started unsubtly suggesting that maybe the aliens all died when they blew up their war machines, since they haven’t heard any more out of the aliens since then. The rest of the team is less optimistic and has been working on studying Forrester’s research.

Suzanne presents her theory about how alien possession works. She describes it as a combination of osmosis and “cell-phase matching”, a term which, so far as I can tell, she made up in the previous episode. She has a little flash animation to demonstrate the process, in which a triangular alien cell ejaculates its innards into a human cell, whereupon the little triangular bases of the alien DNA wrap themselves around the human DNA helix, which kills the host cell but gives the alien access to the host’s memory, because that is how memory works I guess. They have the good sense to keep it pretty vague, but there are some pretty sizeable gaps in the explanation, like the handwavey bit where they pretend that the description they give — which I guess isn’t too far off from how gene therapy works — could end with an intact alien consciousness possessing the memories of the host. I think there’s an implication here that the aliens lack any sort of fixed internal organs, and rather than having a single brain, their cognitive processes are sort of distributed through all of their cells. Which, okay, neat sci-fi concept, nice potential for a Golden-Age style story where an alien survives getting cut in half but ends up schizophrenic because the halves of his mind diverged while he was healing. But how you get from there to absorbing the contents of a human brain I’ve no idea (also, it’s not clear why aliens would be susceptible to bullets if their bodies are made entirely of undifferentiated tissue). Also, no one ever talks about the question of what happens to the bulk of the alien’s biomass.

When Suzanne lets it slip that, although the aliens require radiation to remain active on Earth, they’re still vulnerable to deleterious effects from prolonged radiation exposure, Ironhorse jumps to the conclusion that even if any aliens had survived the battle at Kellogue, they must have all died since. He summons General Wilson for some more exposition.

Meanwhile, cattle mutilation! My minimal research suggests that the late ’80s was not exactly a big time for Alien Cattle Mutilation Stories. It was a big thing in the ’70s, given a signal boost by stuff like Satanic Panics (I always hear that phrase as part of a Schoolhouse Rock song: Satanic Panic, what’s your mechanic? / Mutilatin’ cows and sacrificin’ babies!), with good upstanding white Christian folk afraid that legions of satanists were exsanguinating livestock in rituals to awaken the beast, then died down for most of the ’80s, and had a resurgence in the ’90s that probably peaked around the time South Park premiered. The whole notion is based on a number of real-life incidents of cows and other livestock found dead, drained of blood, and with unusual wounds. Such events have been attributed, in order from most to least likely, to particular combinations of predation and scavenging, punk kids screwing around, convoluted insurance scams, pervs making really disgusting homebrew sex toys, cults other than satanic, cryptids such as El Chupacabras, satanic cults, aliens researching HIV, aliens with really kinky fetishes, aliens just fucking around with us, and spontaneous bovine inversion.

In any case, “aliens mutilate cattle” must have still had enough cachet in the mass media in 1988 that it seemed reasonable for it to be a Thing Aliens Did, because our introduction to the B-plot comes in the form of a comic relief hick farmer calling the local sheriff because his cows have been mutilated. Unfortunately, the local sheriff is of the “comic relief useless backwoods sheriff” archetype that I assume they’d have gotten Don Knotts or Alan Hale Jr. for if they’d been available, and he reckons it was probably just a wolf, despite the fact that wolves would usually eat some of the cow rather than just draining its blood. He helpfully suggests that the farmer hold a barbecue.

It is, in fact, aliens. Of course it’s aliens. As Suzanne discovered, while exposure to radiation neutralizes Earth bacteria, it also affects the aliens’ metabolism, causing their body temperature to eventually rise dangerously high. They’ve been out exsanguinating cows because… Okay, honestly we should all be grateful that they don’t go into the details of why bathing in cow’s blood helps with the whole metabolism thing.

Even the advocacy themselves are affected, with one of them already weakening and the other two looking decidedly Dawn of the Dead. He’ll be sidelined by the next scene for a cow-juice bath. One of the recurring themes in this show is that the advocates have very little patience or respect for the scientist class. They spend a good long time berating a scientist to his face about how long he’s taking to come up with a solution and how he needs materials to make stuff with rather than conjuring it out of thin air. I guess that maybe I’d be bitter too if my scientists had failed to notice that the planet we were about to invade was MADE OF POISON. The scientists have come up with a long-term solution to the heating problem in the form of refrigerated suits, but because Earth’s chemical composition is different from their own planet, they don’t know how to manufacture the plastic sheets and tubing they need, nor how to build the equipment to extract and liquefy nitrogen from the atmosphere using locally-sourced materials, so they’ll have to steal it.

The robbery of a plastics factory is depicted by way of having a cliché hard-nosed cop with the chief breathing down his neck about the paperwork investigating the scene. The only surviving witness speaks only Chinese, but fortunately, they’ve got an Asian guy on their crime scene crew who remembers just enough of his ancestral tongue to muddle through a translation. But since the cliche old Chinese woman just tells a story about the place being invaded by “dragons”, the investigation doesn’t go anywhere. This scene is basically more of the series’s trademark “black comedy”, and I am at least happy that they’ve gone for something more wry than the redneck humor they used twice in the last episode and once already in this one. It still doesn’t quite work, but it comes closer. The writers have a nasty habit of trying way too hard to be funny, and it hardly ever works. The scenes explicitly coded as “humorous” are far and away the least funny things in the show.

For instance, while all this comic relief has been going on, Uncle Hank has shown up at the cottage to demand Harrison justify his existence. John Vernon is far and away the best thing in this episode, and it makes me really sad that he becomes an entirely off-screen character after this. For all I am totally on board with the Harrison-Ironhorse dynamic being the thematic and emotional center of this show, I would also totally get behind restructuring the show with General Wilson as the “Brigadier”-character.

Richard Chavez plays Ironhorse as professional, intense, and no-nonsense, constantly grating against Harrison’s very different style. Their dynamic is a little bit reminiscent of the myriad cop shows about a pair of partners who don’t get along, where one of them is very by-the-book and the other isn’t, and one of them has a normal name like “Smith” or “McCoy” or “Johnson” and the other one’s name is a compound word at least part of which sounds like a building material, like “Slaterock” or “Steelbrick” or “Ironhorse”, and the title of the show is something like “Steelbrick & Johnson”. Ironhorse is a little bit Drill Sergeant-y, and that makes him sometimes just a bit silly because, though it’s in the opposite direction, he’s far enough over the top that he’s almost as much of a weirdo as Harrison.

John Vernon, on the other hand, plays General Wilson by just bringing way more gravitas than this show could possibly merit. Seriously, if you got him, Walter Cronkite and Martin Sheen in a room together, their combined gravitas would probably collapse into a black hole. He’s a bit Santaesque as he greets Debi, gracious to the Mr. Kensington, the groundskeeper, who he addresses by rank despite his long retirement, and respectful to Harrison even as he hands him his walking papers. A series of scenes each lead into the next as the gang apparently tour the estate.

The sequence is cut together kind of awkwardly. Wilson arrives, greets Debi and Kensington, and Harrison, openly suspicious about the General’s intentions, proposes to show him, “What he’s getting for his money.” Then bam, they’re in the lab talking about what they’ve learned about the aliens. Then Wilson asks Harrison about his theories regarding alien-related memory loss. Harrison is caught off-guard by the question and seems uncomfortable trying to answer it, so then we cut to them on outside on the patio.

Harrison’s explanation amounts to little more than a superficial description of the problem: people who have had alien encounters have a hard time remembering them, often requiring hypnotic regression therapy. This was, of course, a hot topic in paranormal studies, what with alien abduction narratives having a popularity boost from the publication of Communion the previous year. Harrison proposes that the effect might be due to a combination of an alien ability to affect human minds with a normal human psychological defense mechanism that suppresses memories of alien contact. Wilson gets a reflective expression and muses that he’d seen a lot of action during the 1953 war, but is unable to recall a single detail of it.

And then later, they’re sitting around the fireplace at night. General Wilson tells them a bit of the backstory of the cottage’s elderly caretakers, Mrs. Pennyworth and Kensington, who, despite their unassuming appearances, had been extremely valuable to the Allies while undercover in Berlin in the forties. I kinda get the impression that they want to imply that they’re basically retired John Steed and Emma Peel. He also muses on the history of the cottage, which had over the years been home to various scientists, diplomats and defectors. Norton is the first to cotton on to the fact that they’re being evicted. Wilson is very gracious and heartily thanks them for their service, but accepts Ironhorse’s conclusion that the aliens were either all killed at Kellogue or died shortly afterward from radiation. When Harrison challenges him on his assumptions, the General becomes suddenly angry and defensive, seemingly way out of proportion.

General Wilson’s anger, strange as it seems on its own, justifies the otherwise also very strange scene that preceded it. The implication, and I wish they’d been explicit about this, is that, even knowing what’s going on, Wilson is affected by this “alien amnesia”. His brain simply doesn’t want to register the aliens as an ongoing threat, and when Harrison tries to force him to, he defends himself by angrily shutting him down.

Like I said, John Vernon is great here. It’s almost like he’s visiting from another, very different show, one that’s more serious and less action-oriented. I think that may in fact be part of this show’s MO: little vignettes with guest characters that kind of feel like War of the Worlds has smacked into some other show in a a different genre. They’ve already done it twice in this episode: first, a little drive-by with a show about a quirky rural community with goofy law enforcement, then a hard-biting cop show, and it’s going to happen one more time before we’re done. This one, the military drama about the old soldier, is the only one that really works.

Continue reading Thesis: The Walls of Jericho (War of the Worlds 1×02)

Well that was harder than I expected.

As much as I might want to pretend that the second season of War of the Worlds is its own independent show, it’s incredibly clear here that this is a sequel to something: a lot of the structure and setup of “The Second Wave” doesn’t make any sense except with the knowledge that there’s a previous series. That said, it’s very much a sequel rather than a continuation. It’s just about possible to view season 2 as a later part of the same story as season 1, but only if you presume a lot of time to have passed. The thing “The Second Wave” is a sequel to isn’t the actual first season of War of the Worlds, but rather a slightly bent hypothetical version that retains the broad strokes of the aired first season, but also implies a number of differences both specific and broad. If this had been a real attempt at a “distant” sequel, a la Star Trek the Next Generation, you’d either want a clean break, with new characters and fewer ties to the past, or, alternatively, if we’re going for something like a “Distant Finale” or in-canon time-skip, a la Dawson’s Creek, Dollhouse, One Tree Hill, or Glee, you’d want there to be flashbacks later filling in the major gaps. With War of the Worlds, you’d want there to be an episode where something forces Blackwood to relate some of the tumultuous events that made the world go to hell. That’s not going to happen.

Mancuso, of course, didn’t think it was realistic that “our world” could lie 35 years in the future of the 1953 movie. The implication, then, is that the dystopia is the world as it was left by the invasion. But it’s interesting to observe here that the Morthren never claim credit for the state of the Earth. If anything, they instead take it as an indictment of humanity. Later on, Mana and Malzor will reflect that humanity’s destruction of the environment is making the world more amenable to their species. If you do want to force the two seasons together into one, perhaps the key might be the central observation I made during “The Resurrection”: that their world appears to be a sort of collective neurosis. Perhaps we can posit that the season one world is, if not already collapsing, very much on the brink. But the same shared neurosis that makes humanity reluctant to acknowledge the war is also preventing them from taking a particular interest in the immanent collapse of civilization. Something, we could propose, occurs between the seasons that forces the scales from everyone’s eyes. There’s evidence in the second season that the affluent and influential still retain a very ’80s sort of lifestyle, shutting out the poverty and social disorder of the lower classes. It could well be that the first season setting was every bit as dystopian as the second, but that we too are being shielded from the worst of it. And if that stretches your suspension of disbelief too far, just consider how much of the poverty, homelessness, mental illness, exploitation and despair in your own world you choose not to see.

I used to re-watch War of the Worlds from time to time from my off-air tapes, but I don’t think I’ve done it in close to a decade now. I bought the DVDs as soon as they came out, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t watched the second season in that format. This time through has really been a revelation. The very first thing you notice switching from season 1 to season 2 is how completely different the visual texture is between seasons. Very simply put, season 1 looks and feels incredibly 1980s, and season 2 does not. I don’t know if season 2 was shot on film — that would be unusual to be sure, but it certainly has a grain to it and a depth of field I associate more with film than tape. The lighting is completely different and the visual style is far more cinematic. The hair and fashions are also radically, almost shockingly different. Suzanne is the most obvious example of this: compare her shoulder pads and big hair in “The Resurrection” to her appearance in “The Second Wave”, and it’s like night and day.

The other big revelation on this watching is just how rough-around-the-edges “The Resurrection” is. The audio is terrible. The direction is terrible. Most of the characterization is terrible. Lynda Mason Green is terrible. I don’t even know what’s going on. Everything’s working much more smoothly in “The Second Wave”, as well it should be, since these actors have a year’s worth of experience working off each other by now (Except for Adrian Paul, who, as I noted, doesn’t seem to know what the hell he’s doing here. Seriously, he acts like a 14 year old being hassled by The Man). On a purely technical level, “The Second Wave” is the superior episode, which I wasn’t expecting at all.

It’s not a rout though: “The Resurrection” scores more highly on several fronts. The plot is rather more dense, with two parallel lines through much of the story as Harrison and Ironhorse follow different paths. There’s a bit of that in “The Second Wave”, with Blackwood and Kincaid following a parallel path to Ironhorse and his men at the alien stronghold, but there’s much less to it, really just a plot contrivance to allow for the rescue of Ironhorse. “The Resurrection” also spends a lot more time with the regulars, giving very rich character scenes to Harrison, Suzanne and Ironhorse (Norton gets less focus, but even he does get to introduce his wheelchair and talk about coffee). By contrast, Suzanne and Norton are barely characters in “The Second Wave”. Even Blackwood is only a minor player after his rescue at the punk club. And while Kincaid is important to the story, we don’t learn much about him yet.

You could say that’s to be expected, of course, since “The Second Wave” isn’t a pilot, no matter what contrivance I’m blogging it under. We already know Harrison, Suzanne, Ironhorse and Norton. We met them way back in “The Resurrection.” But did we? The Harrison Blackwood we met in season 1 was a weirdo academic, and kind of a jerk, and an inexplicable ladies’ man. By “The Second Wave”, he’s a grizzled ’90s anti-hero who’s comfortable with a gun. There’s nothing in the episode to suggest that he’s a scientist per se — he knows a lot about the aliens, but nothing that falls clearly outside “stuff a seasoned alien-fighter might want to learn about his enemy”. Same for Suzanne. There’s no indication of their specific roles on the team, and as the second season progresses, there won’t be very much emphasis on it. That’s definitely a black mark against the second season. The first season followed in the popular action-adventure tradition of the four-person superhero team, with each character having a clearly defined role. Ironhorse was the muscle, Suzanne the expert in biology, Harrison the expert in all other forms of science, Aquaman to stop the levees from breaching, Ma-Ti to talk to the animals (Y’know, for all the flack that the power of Heart gets, Ma-Ti’s powers allow him to communicate telepathically at a distance, manipulate animals into serving him, literally make the bad guys stop and realize they’re being jerks, and to some extent mind control people into switching sides. By contrast, the only thing the fire ring can do is act as a flame thrower, and because it’s a kids’ show, he can’t even use it to just immolate Looten Plunder and be done with it. Wheeler is the one with the useless power), and Norton the dispenser of Plot Tokens whenever the narrative gets bogged down by calling them up to tell them what the supercomputer had just churned up. There’s far less of this in the second season, and while the characters aren’t exactly fungible, their respective roles in the various episodes tend to center more around temperament than skill.

The characterization isn’t nearly as distinctive in season 2 as it is in season 1: the characters are all much more similar to each other. Funnily enough, though, at the moment, this works to season 2’s advantage and season 1’s disadvantage: Blackwood, Kincaid, Suzanne and Debi might all be one-note characters, but they’re at least consistent in “The Second Wave”, rather than a disparate bag of quirks and mannerisms. But that victory for season 2 will be short-lived. As the seasons go on, we’ll get greater context and coherence out of the season 1 characters that will at least try to bring them together into developed characters, while we won’t see the same growth out of the season 2 versions.

Continue reading Synthesis 1: Next Phase, New Wave, Dance Craze, Anyways

Author’s note: For the benefit of those who haven’t read my first post on this series, in these “Antithesis” articles, I intend to review and analyze the second season of War of the Worlds The Series under the self-imposed fiction that the first season of the series does not exist, and that this is an entirely new show with no antecedent other than its loose connection to the 1953 movie. 

It is October 2, 1989. Over the weekend, Glen Frey and Don Henley performed on-stage together for the first time since 1981 and the US Post Office issued a stamp with a Brontosaurus on it, prolonging the century-old conflict over whether or not there’s any such thing as a Brontosaurus. Yesterday, Denmark legally recognized civil unions of same-sex partners, the first country in the world to do do. The guys who sing on behalf of Milli Vanilli top the charts with “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You,” better known as “The Milli Vanilli Song that isn’t Blame it On the Rain“. Cher, Madonna, Janet Jackson and Warrant also chart. TV is all new this week, with ABC showing MacGyver ahead of Monday Night Football, ABC airing new episodes of Alf and The Hogan Family ahead of a TV movie about domestic abuse survivor Tracey Thurman, which would leave its star, Nancy McKeon, typecast in the public consciousness for years.

Star Trek the Next Generation is still in reruns, starts its season with “Evolution“, the one that doesn’t have a damned clue how nanomachines work, running in many markets in a 7 PM time slot on Saturdays. At nine on many of those channels is the final season of Friday the 13th The Series, which, strangely unrelated to its namesake, documents the adventures of an antiques store owner and her partner, who track down cursed objects sold by the former proprietor. Mostly antiques that provide some boon to their owner in exchange for a human sacrifice, like a murder-powered cradle from the Titanic that can cure sick babies. Looks like the first few episodes aired out of order, as the actual season opener will air next week in a special two-hour block. The episode that airs this week is meant to be the season’s third, “Demon Hunter”, which will pit newly-promoted-from-guest-star Johnny Ventura against a demon summoned by a murder-powered cursed dagger.

Over the next week, independent stations who buy content from Paramount will air “The Second Wave,” the first episode of Frank Mancuso Jr.’s Sci-Fi action-adventure series War of the Worlds, sometimes syndicated abroad as War of the Worlds: The Second Invasion.

The basic concept is a little bit complex: in an alternate near-future, society has collapsed due to a failed alien invasion some time in the past. The aliens have now returned from space to complete their conquest, opposed by the last survivors of a now defunct government alien-fighting taskforce.

The opening title sequence is interesting. The art style of the sequence reminds me a lot of the model work in Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. Kind of artsy and unusual for a US action-adventure series of this era. Almost all American TV shows use a montage for their title sequence. The last action-adventure I can think of that didn’t is Knight Rider, and even that still had a couple of short clips integrated to put faces to the names in the credits. The only other adventure series airing at the time to use a purely “artsy” title sequence I can think of is Star Trek the Next Generation.

This one starts with the world blowing up. A world, I guess, perhaps it’s not meant to be clear which. The remainder of the sequence is a fly-by view of a dilapidated city shrouded in fog, devastated by rioting. Over the theme music, a news reporter describes the scene:

There’s rioting breaking out through the city. Fire is continuing to burn everywhere. Troops are shooting people. My God, I…I don’t know why! There’s a woman dying in front of me, and no one’s helping her! There are conflicting reports about who or what started the chaos. Will someone tell me what’s happening? This is madness! What is this world coming to?

The words are original, but the style, the content, and the delivery are all very reminiscent of Orson Welles’s 1938 adaptation. The sequence culminates with the destruction of a monument — a statue of Revolutionary War-era soldiers being shattered and pulled to the ground. Cracks in the pedestal resolve into the series title.

After this, we’re treated to a very fake-looking late ’80s computer rendered purple and brown planet, spinning in space. It glows red, then explodes unconvincingly. We cut to a very fake-looking late ’80s computer rendered Earth, which darkens visibly as a shadow grows across it. Symbolism!

We cut to a dystopian urban sprawl full of filthy urchins, barrel fires and left over smoke from every outdoor scene in Captain Power. Announcements of a police curfew are audible, and between buildings we can occasionally see what looks like a military cordon. A dateline tells us that this is “Almost Tomorrow”. Driving through the sprawl is our hero Harrison Blackwood. He’s a scruffy-looking, bearded type in a battered Cadillac. He stops at a pay phone to inform his friend, Suzanne McCullough, that he’s on his way to a secret meeting with a “General Wilson”, who they haven’t heard from in some time.

The next few scenes give hint at the background for these characters. Harrison and Suzanne, Suzanne’s daughter Debi, a wheelchair-using computer programmer named Norton, and a special forces unit commanded by Colonel Paul Ironhorse are part of some sort of secret organization that fights aliens. A bit like Torchwood by the look of it, only with less sex and exactly the same amount of killing off cast members. Their headquarters appears to be concealed under a McMansion where the team lives. There hasn’t been any alien activity for some time, and it’s got them antsy, and even worse, their leader, General Wilson, has gone missing. Norton is tracking unusual weather patterns — lightning strikes without rain, occurring at regular intervals, which we can assume to be some kind of interstellar transporter beam bringing the aliens to Earth.

I kind of imagine this team as being kind of analogous to Stargate SG-1. Harrison seems to be the expert on aliens, probably the Daniel Jackson analogue. Ironhorse is obviously O’Neill. Suzanne, I imagine, is Samantha Carter by default. We don’t know much about her role on the team yet, but she carries a gun despite being a civilian. Maybe she’s local law enforcement who some how got tangled up in this?  That would also make her kind of similar to Gwen Cooper from Torchwood. General Wilson would presumably be General Hammond. Norton seems like the “mission control” character, so Walter maybe?

Meanwhile, an abandoned power plant is full of people with slicked-back hair in gray coveralls. Off to one side, naked people covered in K-Y jelly are being hosed off and issued gray coveralls. These, of course, will be our aliens for the piece, the Morthren. Two of them are marked out as leadership by their even more slicked back hair and the fact that their coveralls have shoulder pads and epaulets. They’ll later be identified as Malzor, played by Denis Forest, and Mana, played by future Forever Knight costar Catherine Disher. They make their way to a kind of giant green snotball thing with three people inside, naked and covered in K-Y jelly. Seriously, there is so much personal lubricant used in this episode that anyone trying to have an orgy in the Toronto area the week of filming would be totally not-screwed. They burst out in a weird parody of birth, and are carried away to be hosed off, except for one slimy nude chick who sticks around so that Malzor and her can exposition a bit: their planet, Morthrai, was just destroyed in a “light storm”. But their god, this kind of giant floating one-eyed brain-jellyfish-cthulu thing called “The Eternal” is on his way here right now, and is going to make Earth into a “new” Mothrai. The Eternal appears in the flesh a bit later, and speaks to Malzor in whalesong for a bit.

There’s a good sense of weirdness to the aliens here, but also a fair amount of depth: Malzor and Mana agree that humanity is a pestilence and are looking forward to slaughtering mankind unpleasantly. But while Mana seems to actively take pleasure in committing genocide, Malzor sees it more as a means to an end. Malzor, for his part, is much more interested in punishing the survivors of the first, failed invasion. Malzor also shows a lot of trepidation around the Eternal, like he’s scared of something, or perhaps just desperate to please. It’s a decided contrast from the very strong, determined attitude he shows when giving orders. In religious terms, Malzor seems very inwardly focused, most concerned with maintaining the purity of the faith — punishing traitors and heretics, as it were, while Mana is more outwardly focused, interested in conquest and punishing those outside the faith. In a way, she’s also interested in conversion, as we’ll soon see when she reveals the “weapon” she’s been building. There’s signs of friction between the two as well. Mana even complains to another alien, Ardix, that Malzor is too interested in punishing their own and not enough in committing genocide. Which is not to say that Malzor is completely disinterested in wiping out the humans: his first priority is to take out General Wilson’s team: Blackwood is, it turns out, walking into a trap.

Blackwood nearly misses falling into the trap, though, as his meeting with Wilson is in a punk rock bar in a bad part of town, and he nearly gets himself murdered in a knife fight with a street tough before two aliens show up in army uniforms to escort him out. He very nearly gets into a car with them when Adrian Paul pops up and shoots them. When shot, the aliens bleed the contents of green glow-sticks. Once dead, their faces and bodies sort of collapse inward, then quickly dissolve into dust. Their weapons seem to grow out of their bodies; they sort of appear in their hands without them apparently taking them from anywhere, and look sort of like large eyeballs with a long tendrill that extends from the back and wraps around the arm. They can fire small red blasts which maim, or larger green ones which vaporize their targets, as demonstrated by the wino who evaporates when Adrian Paul dodges a shot.

Blackwood notes that the aliens have changed: they decompose differently, and he’s surprised that the soldiers didn’t show physical degeneration. We’ll get a better understanding of what he means when we watch Malzor supervise some executions. The Morthren were not originally humanoid, it seems. Some of the first wave soldiers retain their native form, a brown, leathery creature with a single eye and three-fingered hands that look vaguely related to The Eternal. The second wave has perfected the reconfiguration of their bodies into human form, but the human-form survivors of the first wave all show severe scarring, sores and other indicators that their bodies are deteriorating.

Adrian Paul’s character. John Kincaid, gives Blackwood a gun and introduces himself as a former soldier who had been working for General Wilson on covert missions. Just before Wilson vanished, he’d sent Kincaid on a mission that had turned out to be an alien trap. Kincaid suspects that aliens have infiltrated the chain of command and are responsible for Wilson’s disappearance. When they return to base, we further learn that Kincaid had once been in Ironhorse’s unit, but had been given the boot because Ironhorse is a no-nonsense by-the-book sort of guy who didn’t take kindly to Kincaid’s maverick-renegade-bad-boy thing. Ironhorse softens a bit toward him when he learns that his brother Max was killed in the last mission.

Norton is able to locate the abandoned power plant by judicious use of computers and science and something to do with the lightning, and Ironhorse decides to immediately go in with a couple of commandos. About thirty seconds after he leaves, Kincaid decides to secretly follow, and Blackwood tags along. While they sneak in through the roof and witness the execution of the first wave survivors, Ironhorse goes in through the front door, guns a-blazin’. I guess that the idea here is that the first wave were a more straightforward, traditional military target, and that Ironhorse is not used to facing an enemy whose tactics rely more on deception and stealth. They’re immediately detected by a small flying orange thing, a drone camera that sends images back to a stretched membrane where Malzor observes and orders only Ironhorse — it’s noteworthy here that Malzor knows both Blackwood and Ironhorse by name — to be taken alive.

Continue reading Antithesis: The Second Wave (War of the Worlds 2×01)

Previously…

And now, the conclusion…

While Harrison and Suzanne have been patiently waiting in the woods outside an alien-infested ghost town, Ironhorse and his sidekick have been tracking the “terrorists” using the more conventional means of interviewing drunken rednecks who show up at police stations with wild stories of hairless gorillas or people speaking in tongues. I like the way this plot is set up. As I said before, the direction, the audio and a lot of the acting in this is terrible, but the actual structure of the show is really fantastic. You basically have Harrison and Suzanne in one plot pursuing one track, while Ironhorse and Sgt. Reynolds are in an independent plot pursuing another track, both converging on the same place. I wonder if there were plans early on for Reynolds to be a regular character, because he works well enough as someone for Ironhorse to order around. He’s the one whose job is to dismiss the crazier parts of the story as drunken fantasy, while Ironhorse stays overly intense and military. Instead, Reynolds is going to buy it later in the story, which I guess kinda presages Jessie in the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Ironhorse and Harrison finally collide after his nap, when Delta Squad catches them in the woods near the ghost town. Harrison isn’t able to persuade Ironhorse that he’s making a huge mistake sending his men in to raid the place, and it turns into a bug hunt. Game over, man, game over. After a few minutes of dutch angles as Delta Squad is systematically murdered by aliens, Ironhorse decides it’s time to have a crowning moment of badass as he rushes in with a grenade launcher and manages to kill half a dozen aliens before he’s dropped by a three-weighted bola. He manages to get off one more good shot, which is snatched out of the air by a possessed redneck, though he just stands there staring at it until it blows up in his hand. A second bola restrains Ironhorse’s arms, forcing Harrison to come to his rescue on an ATV. Unable to find Suzanne after their escape, they dig in for the night, then search the re-abandoned ghost town in the morning, fearing she’s been taken. Fortunately, Harrison refers to her as “uptight”, which, in accordance with the laws of dramatic necessity prompts her to come out of hiding to chew him out over it. We also get our first look at what happens to the aliens when they die, as Ironhorse’s kills of the previous night have melted into white, foamy puddles dotted with human remains. There’s certainly some unreality to it — the identifiable human bits all look more than a little like discarded disguises from Mission: Impossible, but rather than looking cheap and fake, the rubbery skin and lack of blood or organs serve to reinforce the sense that the human victims have been, in essence, hollowed out and taxidermied.

Ironhorse is finally willing to believe that there’s “something” weird going on, what with the bolas and the terrorists melting when shot, but he still maintains that, “I don’t believe in ghosts and I sure as hell don’t believe in aliens from another planet.” Keep in mind, he is literally the only person in the show who has come right out and said he doesn’t believe in aliens.

They meet with General Wilson again, who plays really coy. He rambles a bit about how little they know about the capabilities, resources, intentions and strategies of their adversaries, then insists that their eyewitness reports still don’t count as “evidence”, especially as Ironhorse still thinks it’s just terrorists with magic powers. But then he does a weird about-face and admits that, yeah, it’s aliens. In exchange for being discrete about it, Wilson hires Harrison, Suzanne, and Norton and gives them unlimited funds, a secret base, their own private supercomputer, and Ironhorse.

At this point, they strike the sets, fire the minor cast members, and pack everyone up for a government property called “The Cottage”. This is about the one-hour mark of the show, and there’s a big transition at this point. It wouldn’t surprise me if the last third of the episode was filmed much later. The supporting characters vanish: Charlotte, Harrison’s colleagues, Ironhorse’s subordinates. Rachel Blanchard gets some lines. There are subtle shifts in characterization too, with Harrison becoming less of a jerk and Ironhorse being more personable and less shouty. And Norton’s got a mild Jamaican accent for a few scenes. Perhaps at this point they told him to tone it down, and it was mild enough that they didn’t need to redo it?

Ironhorse provides concierge service for Harrison and his team, following them around to make sure they don’t need anything. Norton falls instantly in love with having his own personal Cray. Suzanne laments about the difficulty of engineering a radiation-resistant bacteria. Suzanne: Someone sure spent a fortune. [br]Ironhorse: Well, the government wants to see that everyone’s happy, doctor.[br]Suzanne: Now all I have to do is find, no, better yet, create bacteria that is impervious to radiation, lethal to aliens and absolutely harmless to humans. Maybe I could just cure the common cold in my spare time.[br]Ironhorse: Well if you find yourself with any spare time, doctor, you must be doing something wrong. Have a nice day. Harrison has a very mild freak-out when he discovers that they’d decided the set they built for his office in the first half of the pilot was too expensive to tear down, so the government inexplicably decided to painstakingly recreate it in ever detail at the cottage (“I have two offices which are absolutely, disconcertingly identical,” is a cost-saving measure I have seen a handful of times in the history of TV). Ironhorse is confident that their stay here will be a short one, since the aliens lack significant resources, weapons, or numbers. It’s a reasonable conclusion for anyone to draw, particularly someone whose role in the show is mostly to be a reasonably-minded military man who is nearly always wrong because he thinks he’s in a world where the laws of probability are more powerful than the laws of dramatic necessity. But it seems kinda cold given what happened to Delta Squadron a few scenes ago.

Debi, who I would not blame you for having forgotten, turns up again to complain about having to move and leave all her friends, because they’ve forgotten that she’d already moved once this week and is not nearly charismatic enough to have made any new friends yet. Then she sees that they keep horses at the compound and is instantly okay with moving here and wants to take riding lessons. Because she’s a little girl and little girls are fickle and shallow, amirite? Oh, the hilarity! Debi isn’t much of a character this season, existing mostly just to occasionally pop up and complain about things, and once or twice to be a peril monkey. It’s hard to justify the character’s existence at all. She seems like one of several elements of the show that don’t serve any real purpose, but which they keep coming back to for some reason. My best guess is that they were concerned the show was tacking too dark, and wanted something to lighten the mood a little. Debi is here to be a character that the rest of the cast can show their softer side around. For example, that evening, they all gather around the fireplace, and Ironhorse, who spent most of last week’s segment barking orders, tells an endearing folk story from his native american heritage as a sort of ghost story for Debi, which is so cute that I forgot to check my watch and make a note of how long it took them to get around to having Paul Ironhorse dispense a bit of native american folk wisdom, in keeping with the fact that as of 1988, Graham Greene is the only indigenous person of the Americas who is allowed to hold a speaking role without breaking into folksy native wisdom. And that’s just because he only had like three lines of dialogue.

It is, at least, a plot-relevant folk tale, about his grandfather, a shaman, (because every native american has a shaman grandfather) encountering some prime grade-A Von Daniken bullshit an ancient petroglyph depicting what might possibly be an astronaut. Once Debi’s gone to bed, though, he dismisses the story as, “Indian folklore, nothing more, nothing less.” There’s just a hint in his expression, though, that he might have some regrets about the extent to which he’s forsaken his cultural heritage. This is a theme with Ironhorse’s character that will come up perhaps as many as two more times in the series.

While Team Earth does some endearing team-building exercises, Team Alien has moved into an abandoned nuclear test site in a cave in Nevada a leftover set from Land of the Lost complete with matte painting, where they prepare their next move, namely, “Justify a cameo from those martian war machines from the movie which literally everyone watching this show has been waiting to see, and is going to be kind of disappointed when they show up for thirty seconds then are never seen again.”

The plot kind of spins its wheels for five minutes to make it look hard. Norton isn’t having any success decoding the alien transmissions until Harrison reminds him about the alien fascination with the number 3, citing the three-lensed optics and three-craft battle groups from the movie, as well as the three-weighted bola from the ghost town battle. Then Harrison compliments Suzanne on her work in a scene that is weirdly out-of-nowhere flirty. There will be a couple of hints throughout the series of the possibility of romance between Harrison and Suzanne, but they’re fortunately rare, and this is the last we’ll see of Harrison the Sex God for this episode.

Continue reading Thesis: The Resurrection, Continued (War of the Worlds 1×01)

It is October 7, 1988. Robin Givens files for divorce from Mike Tyson. In the aftermath of Wednesday’s National Plebiscite, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet begins the process of transitioning his country into a democracy, culminating in presidential elections in 1990. I assume it took so long because he needed a couple of years to make sure he had adequate protections against prosecution once he was out of power. Also Wednesday, Senator Lloyd Bentsen famously told Senator Dan Quayle he was, “No Jack Kennedy,” shaming him so badly that afterward, he was only fit for the Vice Presidency of the United States of America. “Love Bites” by Def Leppard takes the top spot on the Billboard charts from Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy”.

ABC is in repeats. CBS and NBC show made-for-TV movies. Star Trek the Next Generation will not start its second season for close to two months. Keeping the time slot warm for them are Friday the 13th The Series, (which, rather than having anything to do with the films, is about a pair of cousins who inherit an antiques shop from a devil-worshiping uncle and subsequently have to track down the cursed objects he’d sold, typically antiques which bestow a boon on the user after they are used to murder someone. Like a garden tool that mulches human corpses into dollar bills. This week, Ryan and Micki track down a voodoo mask powered by a vengeful ghost) and the series premier of Sam and Greg Strangis’s War of the Worlds: The Series.

The basic concept is pretty straightforward: a small team of three scientists work together with an army colonel to thwart the plans of alien invaders who have recently awakened from hibernation after a failed attempt to invade the earth in the 1950s.

We open on a truck and the words “The Resurrection”. After a night-drive, they approach an army base identified by signage as “Fort Jericho”. The guards on duty take them for a delivery truck, and are therefore surprised when the drivers shoot them, then open the truck to reveal some friends on ATVs who drive around the place shooting anyone they find and also taking random pot-shots at the many fine barrels full of radioactive waste stored therein. It’s a slightly strange scene, with a lot of angles shot from the ATV-rider’s point of view with just the handlebars and the barrel of his submachine gun visible. It gives the sequence a bit weird of an FMV on-rails-shooter look to it, set to the soothing sounds of Billy Thorpe (Anyone know if the stuff he did for this series was ever released on an album?).

The terrorist leader Urick was played by Ilse von Glatz, who would continue on the show through the first season playing one of the alien leaders. In interviews, she said that it wasn’t the sort of show she herself would watch, but she had been impressed by the production values. This is especially interesting since it’s pretty well known that War of the Worlds was shot on the cheap. She only appeared in a few things after War of the Worlds. Already trained at Maxim’s de Paris as a gourmet chef, in the 90s, she changed careers again, studying naturopathic medicine. While I’m not a big fan of naturopathy, she doesn’t appear to have been a hard-liner about it, as later in life, she participated in clinical research trials for new cancer treatments before losing her own battle in May of last year.The shooters, a multi-ethnic bunch fronted by a blonde woman with a German accent and a white guy with a faintly southern accent, helpfully explain themselves as terrorists from the Non-Specific People’s Liberation Party, who plan to broadcast some demands (including the resignation of the president) and threaten to blow the place up if they don’t get their way. They don’t actually use the term “dirty bomb”, but it’s clear that’s what they’re talking about: using conventional explosives to contaminate a large area with radioactive waste. This is a bit of a surprising thing to find hanging out here in 1988; I didn’t think the possibility of terrorists using dirty bombs was a thing that entered the public consciousness until the turn of the century. 1980s fears about terrorism was,  I think, more focused on the (much less realistic) possibility of rogue actors making their own Real Deal Nuclear Weapons. Some more research tells me that there was an incident in 1976 where hoaxers claiming to be terrorists purported to have placed explosive containers of radioactive water from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation around Spokane. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the direct inspiration for this set-up.

But that’s a bit of a side-show, since their plan will never get to that stage. While looting the corpses of their victims, the terrorists pointedly fail to notice that the white slime from the blue radiation trefoil-marked barrels is dripping down onto the black “CLASSIFIED” barrels, apparently turning their lids into silly putty, since a leathery, three-fingered hand pushes its way through it in a scene so shocking it causes the show’s title to appear and forces us into a commercial break.

That image of the three-fingered hand is going to be the major icon of the series. There isn’t a lot of storytelling potential in this kind of ’80s action-adventure to be had out of the iconic 1953 war machines, so they just don’t come up that much. The alien hand, on the other, um, y’know, is something they can whip out whenever they like. The title screen used for the rest of the series, in fact, is going to show a computer-rendered alien hand wrapping around the globe, an image that’s iconic enough that Stephen Spielberg by a complete coincidence I am sure used the same concept in the art for his 2005 version of War of the Worlds. The hand itself is quite a bit different from the version in the movie, though. While it retains brown, leathery skin and three long fingers, the distinctive suction cups are missing, and the hand is larger and altogether more muscular. Ironically, the fingers look considerably more human, with joints and knuckles, the lines of tendons visible, running the length of the fingers, which are thick and long enough to wrap all the way around a man’s face.

We’re off to a strong start, introducing the heart and soul of the premise right up front. The terrorists themselves are a bit of a false flag, transparently coded as the villains of the piece in a pretty standard cold open of the sort you’d see on Knight Rider or MacGyver or even Columbo, where the first scene sets up the caper, then we introduce the hero in the next scene and get to watch him go through the process of figuring out what’s going on and putting a stop to it. And that’s basically the structure of “The Resurrection”, but the twist, of course, is that the caper they set up in the first scene isn’t the real one, and these terrorists are just a red herring for the aliens they unwittingly release. That, of course, is a traditional setup as well, as attested to by Mighty Morphing Power Rangers, Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue, Power Rangers Mystic Force, Jackie Chan Adventures, The Real Ghostbusters, The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, Adventure Time, Mighty Morphing Power Rangers: The Movie (Power Rangers really likes this trope), and about eight different episodes of Doctor Who (Not even counting the ones that never happened). But interestingly, it’s predominantly a kid’s show trope. Unless you count  Friday the 13th The Series, which can’t possibly be relevant.

So, having set up our plot, the obvious next step, in accordance with the laws of storytelling, is to introduce the hero. Our hero this evening will be Jared Martin (who, in 1988, I mostly remembered as the bad guy from an episode of Knight Rider) as Dr. Harrison Blackwood, an astrophysicist at The New Pacific Institute of Technology. His next three scenes (Which are intercut with the terrorists preparing to broadcast their demands) are a very dense, very effective introduction to the character. If I hadn’t watched the 1953 movie so recently and with a critical eye, I certainly would have missed some key elements of Harrison’s characterization at this early stage. Namely, the inspiration they take from his spiritual predecessor, Clayton Forrester. There are very clearly three major elements to the character of Harrison Blackwood that they want to get across to us right away:

1. He’s a Man of Action
2. He’s hella (“hella” is not a word I am normally inclined to use, but for some reason, I really like it in conjunction with “suave”) suave
3. He’s kind of a weirdo.

And I’ll say this for them: two out of three ain’t bad. The mix of these three aspects doesn’t really work at this stage. A lot of his character arc in this episode in particular is driven by the notion that he’s kind of strange and off-putting and inconsiderate and obstreperous (He is called out on this. It is only the second time in all of television I am aware of the word “obstreperous” being used. The other is in Are You Being Served?), with a penchant for profoundly not-giving-a-crap about how his actions affect other people that presages The Big Bang Theory. But then they turn around and start intimating that he’s got himself a way with the ladies. On the one hand, they want us to believe that it never even occurs to him that he’s being a complete ass making unreasonable demands of the people around him, but on the other, they have him turn on the charm and convince non-load-bearing plot structures to bend to his will. It doesn’t work here. You can absolutely have a “weirdo” character be lucky in love, and why not, but trying to do it in the form of “He’s a weirdo who can’t interact with other human beings properly, except that he can go all Idris Elba when there’s a female guest star for him to bed,” just makes the characterization look inconsistent. Rather than just being a cloud-headed dreamer who doesn’t get ordinary people, it implies that he does understand how to interact with people and chooses to be a jerk out of selfishness. Worse, this frames his suaveness as an insincerity: he comes off as a seducer who doesn’t care about other people but is happy enough to manipulate them to get what he wants. Thankfully, most of this will be quietly dropped for the remainder of the series, where the idea of Harrison caring enough about something that isn’t work to form a romantic bond will be treated, in keeping with the cliche, as something very special and profound and cause for surprise from his friends. Dropping the ladies’ man angle

I can’t help but wonder if this is casting-related. Just as Gene Barry’s wheelhouse was playing smooth, wealthy ladies’ men with a connection to law enforcement, Jared Martin was at the time pretty famous from his stint on Dallas as Sue Ellen’s lover Dusty. You can kind of imagine Greg Strangis selling the part to Martin, saying, “We were watching the old tapes of that Fantastic Journey thing you did back in the ’70s, and we were thinking your character would be kind of like that. Sort of an otherworldy, new-agey pacifist type. With a tuning fork.” And Jared Martin wold be all like, “Well, I can do that, sure, but you know these days people mostly think of me as this suave ladies’ man type from Dallas.” And pere Strangis nods sagely and says, “It’s a bit of a stretch, but how about we just throw in a couple of scenes to indicate that your character is really good in the sack? Like really good. Like Scott Baio good.”

Because that’s what it’s like. In a few scenes, we’re going to meet Harrison’s fiancee, Charlotte, played by our old friend, Freedom One herself, Gwynyth Walsh (You know who else she was, I just realized? Robot Aunt Em in Tin Man). And he is basically a jerk to her at every turn, then just pulls some John Hughes Movie bullshit and shows up at her door and kind of smugs at her for forgiveness after she breaks up with him and stops returning her calls — and she just instantly caves and lets him in and bones him. Harrison loves her because she’s “funny” and “smart” and “beautiful” and “has great legs”, but I think we’re also meant to dislike her because she’s trying to tempt him away from academia and into highly paid private industry and she doesn’t accept the importance of his work, man. But she keeps right on forgiving him because she’s infatuated with him. Their banter is surprisingly sexually charged, and I keep wanting to shout at her that he’s just not that into you, because he has less than no interest in any of the things that are important to her, but expects her to bend over backwards to accommodate what’s important to him. Also, he expects her to bend over frontwards for much the same reasons.

But that’s a couple of scenes down the road. In our first scene with Harrison Blackwood, the first priority is establishing the “weirdo” bit. This is pretty efficiently conveyed by having us open on him delivering a rambling lecture on the philosophy of science, which a change of camera angle reveals at the end to be delivered to a class of tweens on a field trip. Harrison’s cleverness, his sense of humor, and his lack of concern for the feelings of others are compactly expressed when he predicts to within a few seconds the angry entrance of one of his colleagues who’s just fallen prey to the classic “Bucketfull of confetti perched atop an ajar office door” practical joke. Doctor Gutterman’s humiliation and subsequent sputtering of vengeance threats is witnessed by two other colleagues, Doctor Ephram Jacobi, the department chair, who himself seems slightly smitten with Harrison, being weirdly deferential and implying that he basically gives Harrison free reign not only to terrorize his coworkers but also to use university resources however he likes. Hence the other character introduced in the scene, Dr. Suzanne McCullough, a microbiologist recently hired by Pacific Tech and handed over to Harrison because he’d asked for one, for reasons which take him an inordinately long time to get around to explaining. I’ll say this for Harrison at this stage: though he doesn’t immediately assume Suzanne is the microbiologist he asked for, he never expresses any surprise or reluctance at a female microbiologist, unlike everyone else in the show, who immediately insists that all microbiologists are nearsighted and balding (As of 2012, about 30% of all full-time academic faculty in microbiology were women, slightly more among PhDs).

Structurally, this is a really good scene, and it gets better as I mull it over in my head. In a very short space of time, we introduce two of the four major characters of the series and give us a lot of insight into Harrison and a pretty good feel for the character, and he’s certainly likeable by ’80s adventure show standards (Even if with distance and age, I’m inclined to view this version of the character as kind of a jerk because I am now old and bitter. And they do file the rough edges down quite a bit as the show goes on). It’s not at all frontheavy with exposition: at this point, we don’t know what Harrison’s deal is exactly, or what he’s interested in, or indeed how this could tie back in to the plot established in the first scene. There’s enough going on that, if you remember what movie this is ostensibly a sequel to, you can put the pieces together and make an educated guess though.

Unfortunately, though it gets better as I think about it, it gets worse as I actually re-watch it. On a technical level, it’s a mess. The biggest problem is the audio. That’s a problem for this whole episode, in fact. Dr. Jacobi’s delivery is weird and stilted, like he learned his lines phonetically, but I suspect the real problem is that they’ve dubbed him with different dialogue in post and the words don’t fit quite right. Suzanne’s lines also sound poorly looped. It’s going to get worse later, with the background sounds cutting out suddenly when a looped character speaks, or the audio quality and even volume varying considerably between shots. And there’s worse still a few scenes on. The shot composition isn’t great either, with Harrison frequently having part of his head chopped off. And then there’s Lynda Mason Green…

Continue reading Thesis: The Resurrection (War of the Worlds 1×01)

It is October 2, 1989. For good this time. Since the first season of War of the Worlds wrapped up back in May, the Tiananmen Square protests took place in Beijing, resulting in my website getting blocked by the great firewall of China. The B2 Stealth Bomber makes its first flight. The Nintendo Game Boy, the most popular computing device in the history of the planet, was launched, as was the Sega Genesis, which did what Ninten-Don’t. F W de Klerk becomes the last president of South Africa under Apartheid, having run on a platform, near as I can tell, of “Look, we all know this system is ridiculous and untenable, let’s try to wind it down in a way that doesn’t end with the giant bloody massacre most people reckon we’ve got coming to us.” That pretty much covers the sentiment of the whole world at the time, as Poland reestablishes diplomatic relations with the Vatican, Vietnam ends its occupation of Cambodia, and Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs opens a restaurant in Moscow. It is the waning days of communism in countries whose names don’t begin with the letter ‘C’. The last-ever large-scale anti-communism protest is held in East Germany. Last, because in a month, it’s going to be a moot point.

Ayatollah Khomeini, Lawrence Olivier, Mel Blanc, Jim Bakus, Irving Berlin, Ferdinand Marcos, Graham Chapman and Bette Davis die. Daniel Radcliffe, Joe Jonas, Carlos Pena, Hayden Panettiere, Avicii, Jason Derulo and Brie Lawson are born. The big films of the summer were License to Kill, Ghostbusters II, Batman and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Seinfeld, Hey Dude, Saved by the Bell, Tales from the Crypt, Baywatch, Doogie Houser MD, The Super Mario Bros. Super Show and Captain N The Game Master premiered, as did ABC’s new Friday night “TGIF” programming block, bringing with it Family Matters (The rest of the block consisted of returning shows Full House, Perfect Strangers and Just the Ten of Us).

And War of the Worlds is back. Sort of. I’ve had a hard time turning up sources, so I’m mostly going by hearsay, rumors, and mailing lists from the ’90s. This being syndication, ratings are more complex than usual, but the show had pretty good distribution through Paramount’s syndication mechanism. But there had been complaints against the show, mostly centered around the level of gore. Stuff like alien arms bursting out of chests, ripping holes through the faces of their victims, and messily dying in a pool of white foam and rubber skin was the sort of thing that only interested a subset of the mixed-demographic audience they were shooting for with Star Trek The Next Generation. Besides, the writing was on the wall for the Cold War that had informed so much of the style and theme of War of the Worlds. Glasnost and Perestroika were in full swing, Poland, Hungary, Albania and Bulgaria were already backing away from communism, Czechoslovakia, Romania and East Germany would join them by the year’s end. The Soviet Union had held its first and last comparatively free elections back in March and had formed an opposition party over the summer. So if it’s surprising that for the fall 1989 TV season, it seemed like a good idea to retool War of the Worlds away from being an obvious Cold War analogy, that’s only because it shows a certain amount of insight from the same class of people who come up with ideas like Dog With a Blog.

So the network executives reasonably declared that season 2 of War of the Worlds would be less gory and less Cold-War-y. They less reasonably also declared that it would be less Strangis-y, as Sam and Greg Strangis were out. Replacing them was Frank Mancuso Jr., whose qualifications included having made Friday the 13th parts 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7, and the strangely unrelated TV series Friday the 13th The Series, one of the few TV series on the air that had less to do with its namesake than War of the Worlds The Series (The only contemporary show I can think of based on a movie which had less is Mr. Belvedere). Now, it may strike you that this resume makes him a somewhat strange choice as a showrunner for their new less-explicit retool, but Frank Mancuso Jr. had one other important qualification: his dad was Frank Mancuso Sr., who was president of Paramount at the time.

What we find as he takes over the helm of the series is something interestingly paradoxical. Though the per se gore is toned down — the aliens, for example, now evaporate when killed, leaving only a puddle of glow-stick fluid, and carry weapons which vaporize humans — this doesn’t mean that the second season isn’t scary. In fact, if anything, the show tacks more toward horror tropes now, with the aliens portrayed as actively sadistic, rather than just utterly lacking in humanity.

Everything else about the show has changed too. I mentioned in my previous article that one of the fundamental oddities of the first season of War of the Worlds was that it didn’t feel like a world that had suffered a massive alien invasion thirty-five years earlier. It’s forgivable, I think, that the world would put itself back together fairly quickly, but very strange indeed that the configuration it would assemble itself into is so indistinguishable from the 1980s of the real world. After all, Europe and Japan put themselves back together after the world wars, but the world that resulted was very different from the waning 19th century colonial empires that had seen the century in. That’s one of the things that, say, Goliath came very close on (Even if it didn’t have time to really see it through): their world of 1914 is one that’s rebuilt itself after the war, but it’s one that’s still quite askew of the real world in many ways.

Mancuso felt much the same way. He found it implausible that the “world outside your window” could follow on a few decades later after a global war against the unstoppable alien invaders. Because I have the perspective of not living in the 1980s, I don’t think his alternative is the most plausible, but it’s within the bounds of reality. He proposes a straight-up ’80s dystopia. There’s little arable land left in the continental US due to pollution. The ecosystem has largely collapsed, most kinds of manufacturing have become economically unfeasible, violent gangs of Punk Rockers maraud the streets. Drugs are legal (And because this is the ’80s, this is taken to be one of the big contributors to the collapse of civilization), food and water are in short supply, income inequality is at an all-time high, the police have militarized and poverty is universal. So actually, Mancuso didn’t really propose a world all that different from the real world after all.

He also felt that the aliens were too alien; it was hard for the audience to get any sort of handle on them. Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing per se, but it’s a storytelling problem when you’re a jobbing writer for a weekly action-adventure series and not, say, Stanislaw Lem. The aliens can’t simply be distant, bizarre and irascible, because we have to cut to them plotting at least once an episode in order for the story to make sense: the design of an action-adventure plot means that we need some scenes from the “Villain Point-of-View” because one of the major sources of tension comes from what we know that he heroes don’t. So Mancuso retooled the aliens. Rather than a faceless horde with no sense of individuality, individual aliens are given names and personalities. Some of them are sympathetic at times. Rather than the millions-strong armada we’d been promised, the invasion force is whittled down to only a few dozen survivors, who are now more desperate and therefore more dangerous. Very presciently, given the arc of world history after the end of the Cold War, the new aliens are patterned not after the threat of invasion by the faceless conformity of communism, but rather after terrorists: specifically, they’re depicted as religious extremists who don’t merely want humanity destroyed to make room for their own kind, but who view genocide as a holy crusade against the infidels. That’s the biggest single thing Mancuso’s aliens add: they’re a theocracy, their leader serving as the high priest to a powerful, semi-corporeal being they worship as a god.

Now, just laid out on table like that, it doesn’t really sound bad, does it? I mean, it’s an ’80s dystopia, and I do love me my ’80s dystopias. But Frank Mancuso had a kind of a New Coke problem: he’d come up with what was, on paper, a good formula, one that addressed some of the weaknesses of the existing product. But he utterly failed to take into account the fact that there was an existing fanbase that was already invested in the show as it had existed, and who had specific things they liked about the first season.

Continue reading Deep Ice: To Them and Not To Us is the Future Ordained (Frank Mancuso Jr.’s War of the Worlds: The Series)

I’ll explain… Now.

It is October 7, 1988. In the six months since Captain Power went on hiatus, the Governor of Arizona was impeached and removed from office. Sonny Bono was elected mayor of Palm Springs. The Soviet war in Afghanistan wound most of the way down, proving for what surely will be the last time that it is stupid to get involved in a war there. Windows 2.1 was released. A third of Yellowstone National Park burned down. A NASA scientist testified before the US Senate that man-made global warming was a thing that was happening. The upcoming presidential race is whittled down to Michael Dukakis and George H. W. Bush. The Iran-Iraq war ended. Tom Browning pitched a perfect game. The Summer Olympics were held in Seoul. “Terminal Man” Mehran Karimi Nasseri got stuck in Charles de Gaulle airport, where he would remain until 2006. Space Shuttle Discovery launched from Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39, the first shuttle launch since the Challenger Disaster two and a half years earlier.

Magnum, PI ended its run, as did The Facts of Life, Jem, Max Headroom, Cagney and Lacey, St. Elsewhere and Punky Brewster. Family Feud returned to TV. Denver, the Last Dinosaur, China Beach, Just the Ten of Us, Garfield and Friends, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, Fun House and Monsters premiered. George Michael and Steve Winwood are the only musicians to hold the top spot on the billboard charts for more than two weeks.

More locally, I started fourth grade. This doesn’t seem quite right in my memory, the way everything lines up, but I can’t really dispute the evidence of the calendar. I remember fourth grade a lot better than I remember the years before it. We read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The Westing Game and Tolliver’s Secret. I made a really fancy volcano for science class. There was a standardized test we had to take and one of the reading comprehension passages was about the Black Death, which is where I learned literally everything I know about Y. Pestis to this day. I had a spiral notebook where I’d design marble race courses based on a game from LoadStar.

And, of course, I was eagerly anticipating the return of two shows: Star Trek the Next Generation and Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. Cheerios had run a contest for a cameo in an episode in the former where you got these stickers with pictures of the actors on them. I got Geordi LaForge and Wesley Crusher, but I traded the Wesley with my friend Shelly for one of the Enterprise-D, which you could redeem for a tiny little 4-inch Enterprise-D model, which I still have the back half of.

Of course, as we all know now, only one of those shows was destined to return to the airwaves that fall, and it was–

/dev/reality0 REBUILD COMPLETE. REMOUNTING RW. PLEASE ENJOY REALITY. WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE

— pretty obvious that it was going to be Star Trek. It took me quite a while to realize that Captain Power wasn’t coming back. I mean, the internet wasn’t a thing the way it is now, so unless you read entertainment-focused media (Which back then would have probably meant either TV Guide or the actual industry press), when a minor show died, you didn’t so much hear about it as just never see it again. I do remember at one point asking my parents when it was going to come back, but I don’t recall if they had an answer to give me.

My squirrely sense of time is an issue here. According to IMDB, Captain Power aired on Sundays and Star Trek the Next Generation on Mondays. But I’m absolutely sure they aired back-to-back. Syndication is, of course, funny like that. And the most sense it makes is to assume that Star Trek and Captain Power both aired on Mondays in my viewing area. Now, my sort of gut feeling is that they both actually aired on Friday, but that’s just because my memories of Star Trek are tangled up with eating pizza, which was obviously a Friday night thing (At a guess, I would imagine that Pizza on Fridays evolved out of a half-assed observance of Lenten fasting). But the more I talk about it, the more I suspect there may have just been a period when we moved pizza night to Monday to accommodate watching Star Trek on the color TV in the living room.  Which of course eventually evolved into having all our meals at the coffee table, but that was still years away.

This whole lead-in is because according to IMDB, the second season of Star Trek the Next Generation aired on Saturday nights. Now this doesn’t make any sense at all, because I’m absolutely 100% certain of what show aired right before it, and IMDB gives that one as airing on Mondays, and this time, I have twenty-five-year-old off-air VHS recordings of the original airings with the commercials left in to back me up. (I also have some old forum posts which suggest, at least in one viewing area in California, they did air back-to-back, but on Sundays).

In any case, I’m pretty sure that I was half-expecting to watch an episode of Captain Power in the fall of 1988 when I saw something else instead…

Did you know they made a TV series out of Blade Runner? No? Well, that’s okay, because you wouldn’t really, unless you had actually watched it.  Because in 1999, a Canadian production company decided it wanted to make a TV series based on Blade Runner. But they couldn’t get the rights to Blade Runner, so they went and did it anyway. And since Blade Runner was based on a book by Philip K. Dick (“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”), and Phillip K. Dick had also written a book (“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”) which had been adapted as a movie called Total Recall, which they could get the rights to, they called their Blade Runner adaptation Total Recall 2070 instead.

I mention all this because in 1988, I kind of suspect that Sam and Greg Strangis wanted to make a TV series based on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but couldn’t get the rights, so they did it anyway and called it War of the Worlds instead.

As you may have guessed by the way I’ve been telegraphing it for six months, I really like War of the Worlds. Which is sort of weird, because as a novel, it encapsulates about three fourths of what I hate about golden-age Science Fiction: a total disregard for character and plot, total reliance of exposition dumps, and an interest more in proving the author’s thought his science all the way through than in telling a story. And yet, I really like War of the Worlds. And even though back in 1975, George Pal couldn’t manage to get a TV continuation of his 1953 film, in 1988, veteran producer and production manager Sam Strangis (best known for his work on the Adam West Batman series, The Brady Bunch, and more other shows than I can name) and his son Greg Strangis (Whose resume is a bit less august, but still contains some high-profile entries such as Falcon Crest and Eight is Enough) were somehow able to get Paramount on-board with the idea of bringing War of the Worlds to the small-screen when Paramount’s first choice, a big-screen remake helmed by George A. Romero, didn’t pan out.

Continue reading Deep Ice: Only a reprieve (Sam and Greg Strangis’s War of the Worlds: The Series)

I’ll Explain Later…

It is some time in 1975, give or take. I can’t be more specific than that. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest wins best picture. Jaws has started the era of the blockbuster, basically creating a Hollywood culture based around huge “event” films and shunting smaller, less ambitious or more artistic films off to the ghetto of independent filmmaking. George Lucas founds Industrial Light and Magic to create the effects for Star Wars. Also, The Rocky Horror Picture Show opens, making it cool to sing along to Tim Curry in drag. Sensing the disturbance in the force, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert are summoned to PBS to star in their first show together, Sneak Previews. Moe Howard and Larry Fine die. Drew Barrymore, Sara Gilbert, Johnny Galecki, Zach Braff, Milla Jovovitch, Tobey MacGuire, Angelina Jolie, and Fergie are born. The music world gives us “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “Rhinestone Cowboy”, “Philadelphia Freedom”, “Love Will Keep Us Together” and “Sister Golden Hair”. The original version of “Lady Marmalade”, though released last year, hits #1 in March.

From the world of television, Jeopardy! ends its original run (It’ll be revived in ’84), Wheel of Fortune begins its. The Jeffersons premiers. Gene Roddenberry is contracted by Paramount to make a Star Trek feature film titled The God-Thing. It falls through, prompting Roddenberry to pursue the idea of bring Trek back as a TV series instead. A few scattered elements of The God-Thing are incorporated into Star Trek the Motion Picture, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier,  and that episode of Futurama where Bender meets God.

The 1970s are the closest thing the Star Trek franchise has to an equivalent of Doctor Who‘s “wilderness years”: a period full of false starts, noncanonical spin-offs, and one big movie that fans are quick to disown these days as being all style and no substance. It is widely and correctly believed that had Star Trek: Phase II made it to air, it would have, even if successful, killed the franchise stone dead. An evolutionary dead-end that would have locked Star Trek into one particular mode that wouldn’t have a way forward.

And while I do not in any way, shape or form dispute this as the obvious truth, there is, all the same, a part of me that longs for a ‘Trek that is informed by the 1970s the same way that the original series is informed by the 1960s, and The Next Generation is informed by the long ’80s. Because Science Fiction in the ’70s had a fantastic weirdness about it born out of an intense, almost overwhelming sense of not giving a crap about things like whether the science or indeed the plot made a lick of sense. You could have the moon go wander the far-reaches of the galaxy. You could selectively reinterpret Mormon cosmology as a galaxy-spanning space opera. You could have Earth invaded by evil fetish costumes. You could have Space Amish. You could even do Jason of Star Command. It’s all good. As we all know now, when Star Trek finally did return at the very end of the ’70s, it chose to take the High Road, trying to be serious and a bit artsy — even pretentious — without being “goofy”. And as much as Star Trek The Slow-Motion Picture is derided for its psychedelic plot and sloth-in-treacle pacing, “Serious and a bit artsy, even pretentious, without being goofy,” ended up being the dominant model of how Star Trek was going to work from that moment on. But it didn’t have to be. Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future showed us, I think, a model for how Star Trek could have worked if it had chosen to go lighthearted and unpretentious: still a bit artsy, but kinda goofy.

Speaking of Gene Roddenberry, though, dig this: in the ’60s, Gene Roddenberry’s office at Paramount was across the hall from George Pal’s. By the mid 1970s, George Pal’s star was waning. Though he worked on numerous projects (A sequel to The Time Machine; a sequel to When Worlds Collide; a sequel to The Wizard of Oz; and adaptations of Logan’s Run (Pal’s option would run out before he could get it off the ground and Saul David would later make the film instead) and HG Wells’s When The Sleeper Wakes (Didn’t get greenlit because Woody Allen was already working on a spoof, Sleeper)), the only one that made it to theaters was Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, which flopped. I think it was the age of the blockbuster that did it in for him. The same techniques that had won him numerous awards in the fifties and sixties just could not scale up to compete with the likes of Jaws and Star Wars.

So it’s probably fitting at this point in his career that George Pal would try his hand at television. It didn’t pan out. I don’t know how these things get decided, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Pal was kinda toxic in Hollywood for a while after Doc Savage. There’s not a huge amount of information available in the public sphere, but some time in 1975, George Pal put together a pitch for a Star Trek-like TV series based (loosely) on one of his great successes from twenty years earlier: he proposed making The War of the Worlds into a TV series.

George Pal’s pitch reel for the new series was released on DVD some years ago by a company called Retroflix. I haven’t been able to find any information about them or any indication of their legitimacy: they don’t seem to be any of the currently-extant companies by that name and I got my copy second-hand, but it’s viewable on Youtube in its entirety (links below). The pitch is divided into three parts. First, there’s an outline of the series, presented as voice-over accompanied by concept sketches. The second part is a little featurette in Pal’s studio talking about the design process and creative team. The last section is a short live-action demo reel. My DVD copy also included half an hour of rough-cut visual effects material from War of the Worlds and Pal’s other big 1950s Sci-Fi hit, When Worlds Collide without any accompanying explanation (Which is cool because some of the shots are scenes that take place at night in the film, hiding details visible in the bright studio lighting. Also, the heat ray effect is replaced by film scratches that look like lightning bolts. Not sure if they’d actually intended to use a lightning-effect at some point, or if that’s just a placeholder).

The pitch begins with a montage of clips from the film, but a story that’s been heavily modified. The narrator sets the stage as “late in the 20th century”, when mankind has achieved world peace, zero population growth, a “stabilized” ecology and ocean farming. This peace is shattered by an invasion “from the infinite depths of space”. We’re told that the invasion lasts for “decades” before, as is tradition, the aliens all keel over due to common Earth viruses. There’s a few things in the backstory that don’t quite add up, of course. The clips, which admittedly should be counted only as demonstrative, clearly show 1950s military being routed and 1950s cities being razed. The fact that microorganisms take decades and not days to kill the aliens is not a problem in and of itself; The Great Martian War does something similar, after all. And frankly, the basic conceit of harmless bacteria wiping out the aliens is tricky to hang onto once you’ve specified a proper space-faring civilization rather than just a civilization that’s more advanced, but still mostly planet-bound, able only to invade their nearest neighbor by launching ballistic space ships out of giant space-cannons: protection from alien disease should be something they already knew to look out for. In the original book, it’s not a big deal because the Martians only have experience of the two habitable worlds and theirs doesn’t have microorganisms. So I think ultimately, it’s a small thing to modify the ending so that a disease kills the aliens not because they hadn’t thought of it, but because after years of fighting somebody screwed up taking off his hazmat suit. Further, one thing that isn’t retconned is that the war is a total rout for the home team. It’s hard to imagine a global war lasting for decades when one side has absolutely no defense. The 1953 movie is frequently cited for its religious themes. Among the religious allusions in the film is the estimate that, unchecked, the aliens could conquer the entire world in six days, the same length of time as one of the biblical creation stories. The Great Martian War has to dial the aliens’ invulnerability way down to stretch the war out over multiple years. This is a point where it just doesn’t work to have it both ways: either the aliens are utterly invincible and can conquer the world quickly, or the aliens can be held in check but not defeated, to slow the war down.

The narrator does not say it outright, but I think we have to presume that recovered alien technology is adapted for Earth use, because Earth’s response is to launch a fleet of six “Hyperspace Carriers” in the general direction of the alien retreat. The proposed show centers around the crew of one of these ships, the Pegasus, commanded by Colonel James Anderson. The conceptual sketch of Pegasus isn’t entirely original. It’s quite clearly an upside-down version of an AMT model kit from the late 1960s, originally marketed under the name “Leif Erickson Galactic Cruiser”.

The Leif Erickson is an interesting ship in its own right. The model kit originally shipped with an accompanying two-page short story about the ship’s adventures, and some Beat Poetry set to Theramin music on a paper record, which is a bit of media so obscure that I’m only like 80% sure I know what it is (Probably the thing more often called a Cardboard Record). It’s never, so far as I know, appeared in any films or TV shows, but allegedly, it does show up in the background in some storyboards for Filmation’s Star Trek animated series. That’s not theft, and neither is its use by George Pal, because the Leif Erickson, the Filmation Storyboards, and indeed the War of the Worlds concept art were all designed by the same guy: Matt Jeffries.

Yes, that Matt Jeffries, designer of the original USS Enterprise and basically everything else in the original Star Trek (Except the shuttlecraft. Jeffries did design one, coincidentally also named for Leif Erickson, but his design was deemed too good for this fallen, sinful world expensive and a simpler one was used instead). And that may well account for the biggest part of the visual texture of the demo. Namely, while it does feel very Star Trek, even more than that, it feels retro. The Pegasus/Leif Erickson has an old-fashioned feel to it, even for 1975. And the images we see of the inside of the ship are much the same. The bridge of the Pegasus has some obvious similarities to the Enterprise, but also reminds me a bit of Raumpatrouille Orion, or even Lost in Space. The costumes even bear a resemblance to Star Trek — not the series proper, but the early versions from the pilot.

We’re given a broad outline of a series-long story arc, which frankly shocks the heck out of me from 1970s TV. The Pegasus is described as a “fortress in battle,” “a place to grow up in,” and “a place to find love.” The Pegasus is cut off from contact with Earth near the planet “Mega”, and as another Earth ship had gone missing there fifteen years earlier (presumably they’d have worked out the timeline in a way that didn’t imply that Earth was completely defenseless and engaged in a decades-long war while at the same time sending interplanetary star ships out into deep space), Earth decides to recall the rest of the fleet to just hang out near home in case the aliens come back.

The first plot arc would see the Pegasus sending landing parties to Mega, where they’d discover that the earlier ship had been destroyed and its crew abducted. On Mega, they’d also meet the movie aliens again, who would now be revealed as merely a servant race to an even greater power. Following rules that would later be set in stone by Power Rangers, Stargate SG-1 and Dragonball Z and Yu-Gi-Oh!, as the Pegasus followed the trail through space, they’d encounter the various thralls of the unseen overlords in strictly ascending order by menace. The movie-aliens would be followed up by a race of cave men with force-lances, then by mind-controlled human captives.

The culmination of the arc would take the Pegasus to the homeworld of the overlords themselves, the planet Endor. Yes, really. Keep in mind here that Return of the Jedi is still almost a decade away. I haven’t been able to find any particular references explaining how “Endor” came to be a planet name. The most likely connection I can think of is that “Endor” is the elvish name for Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings, though that’s some prime-ass nerdery right there. The name itself is biblical: it’s the name of a Canaanite town which is known to have produced at least one witch, which is probably also where Agnes Moorehead’s character on Bewitched got her name. Pal’s Endor is no forest moon, though. It’s a bit more Mordor: a polluted wasteland, weak suns dimmed by smoggy skies. The pitch stops short of explaining the nature of the unseen overlords, but does show sketches of a space battle between the Pegasus and movie-style war machines.

Continue reading Deep Ice: And One Day, Take the War to Them (George Pal’s War of the Worlds: The Series)

I’ll Explain Later…

It is August 26, 1953. America is still reeling from the USSR’s recent demonstration of their shiny new H-Bomb, “Joe 4”, and even worse, last week’s publication of Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which made the controversial claim that women, some of them possibly the readers’ own mothers, may have, at some point, had sex, and, unthinkably, some of them might even have enjoyed it. The US and the UK are just finishing up overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran to keep the Shah in power, an act which they reckoned could not possibly backfire and foment decades of animosity between Iran and the west.

Les Paul and Mary Ford top the Billboard charts with “Vaya con Dios”. TV is in repeats for the summer, but next week, NBC will announce an experimental color episode of Kukla, Fran and Ollie. Super Circus is on the cover of the TV Guide.

Tomorrow, Roman Holiday will premiere in theaters, but today, the third of this year’s movies about Martians premiers (The other two are cult-classic Invaders From Mars and Abbot and Costello Go To Mars (Though technically, that one does not involve Martians; they actually go to Venus; the movie’s named for a scene where they mistake New Orleans at Mardi Gras for the red planet)): George Pal’s feature film adaptation of War of the Worlds.

There’d been talk about adapting The War of the Worlds as a feature film at least as far back as the 1920s. Cecil B. DeMille had been approached about it in 1925. and Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s. Ray Harryhausen shot some test footage of a novel-accurate Martian emerging from a cylinder-ship in the 1940s. But it wasn’t until the early 1950s that producer George Pal (already a big name in Science Fiction from Oscar-winners Destination Moon and When Worlds Collide) and director Byron Haskin adapted the story for the big-screen.

This is the big one. The definitive big old alien invasion movie. There will be famous monster movies with aliens, or movies about alien wars in space, but with the possible exception of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, there isn’t going to be another full-on aliens-invade-Earth-in-force (I know technically The Thing and Superman II are both movies about aliens that invade Earth, but I think characterizing them as “alien invasions” in the same way as War of the Worlds, Independence Day, Battle: Los Angeles, Edge of Tomorrow, etc., are is a stretch.) film that really rises above the status of cult classic until the ’80s. Depending on how mainstream you need a movie to be to count, maybe not until 1996’s Independence Day.

Pretty much everything about this movie is iconic. And until the inexplicable decision of literally (not literally) every filmmaker on Earth to do their own adaptation in 2005, this movie’s imagery and iconography became the unquestioned, unchallenged dominant version of the story in the public consciousness.

But is it good? The short answer is “yes”. The long answer is… a qualified “yes”. It is possibly the first genuinely visually breathtaking science fiction movies to be filmed in color — it won an Oscar for its special effects. They slot in a fairly convincing love story with human characters who are more fleshed out than in the other direct adaptations we’ve looked at. The pacing is pretty solid. Ann Robinson’s Sylvia van Buren is one of the strongest female characters that had ever appeared in a science fiction film at the time (That is not to say that she is actually a Strong Female Character; about half of her role is about screaming at things. But by fifties standards….).

When we get to the plot, though… Well, it’s… okay. I guess. You know how The Big Bang Theory ruined Raiders of the Lost Ark by making us notice that Indy doesn’t actually do a damned thing that affects the outcome of the movie? Nothing any of the characters do in War of the Worlds ends up having any bearing on the outcome of the story. This shouldn’t be a surprise at this point, after all, it’s the whole point of the original novel. But still, it’s not really the kind of story that works well as a movie — this is and always has been a big problem for adapting “traditional” science fiction for mainstream audiences. Traditional science fiction isn’t written like a proper story; it’s more like an RPG sourcebook. The author’s real goal is to communicate the details of this fictional world he’s come up with, and the narrative, such as it is, is just a framework for organizing the exposition. But, of course, humans like narratives. At a fundamental level, the thing the human brain does is to organize a chaotic collection of input stimuli into coherent narratives. Back when we talked about The Great Martian War, I pointed out that it wasn’t enough for them to just recount the “history” of the war: they needed an angle. That’s one thing The History Channel has come to understand about making documentaries: that people for the most part don’t want to watch an encyclopedic recitation of facts, but rather they want a story, even if the story is only there to organize that same set of facts. Turning a big pile of facts into a narrative is what makes history different from taxonomy.

Given all this, there are basically two ways you “solve” the basic problem with War of the Worlds as a narrative. First, you can just straight-up change the ending. That’s what The Great Martian War does, making the infection that brings down the Martians not simply a matter of them being immediately doomed upon landing, but the result of biological warfare by the Allies. That’s also what the Asylum’s 2005 version does, with its implication that the alien defeat may have been due to the actions of the protagonist, who injects one of them with rabies vaccine (We will deal with the fact that rabies vaccine is dead-virus and therefore does not work that way when we come to it). The other approach is to treat the story like a disaster movie: the protagonists can’t stop the earthquake or volcano or Hippocane (In the past three centuries, only about five hundred people have died from shark attacks. Hippopotamuses kill about three thousand people every year. Sharknado 3: Hippocanes, Sharknado 4: TropicAligator Storm, Sharknado 5: Polar Bear Vortex, and Sharknado 6: Mongoosesoon coming this fall on SyFy. And next year, Sharknado 7: Owlvalanche), their story is about survival under desperate circumstances, perhaps with an element of escape or rescue. That’s pretty much how Orson Wells and Howard Koch structured the second half of their 1938 adaptation, and it’s pretty much how the Spielberg 2005 version did it. Roland Emmerich combines both in Independence Day to make a film that, for its flaws, is eminently watchable.

The problem with the 1953 War of the Worlds is that it kind of half-asses the second approach. It has its moments; the farmhouse scene, and the final scenes in Los Angeles, but they don’t really add up to a cohesive narrative. The film is mostly “Look at us try and fail to fight the Martians,” interspersed with scenes of Sylvia and Clayton that are very nice and all but don’t add up to a whole story.

We open with a little montage of newsreel footage showing clips from World War I and World War II as a narrator, who apparently thinks this is a teaser trailer, speaks about how advanced science and technology of their respective days went into fighting the two great wars, and how now, “Fraught with the terrible weapons of super-science comes The War of the Worlds!” An animated introduction takes us on a little trip through the solar system. The narrator does a fairly close adaptation of the first four paragraphs of the novel, explaining the plight of the Martians as their world cooled and became unable to support life. He does a quick reconnoiter of the solar system, giving comically inaccurate assessments of each planet to explain why it wasn’t suitable for Martian colonization: Pluto’s atmosphere is frozen (Pluto has no atmosphere and isn’t a planet anyway), Uranus and Neptune have identical methane-ammonia atmospheres, Saturn’s surface is buried under miles of ice (Saturn has no surface), Jupiter, though the closest planet to Mars, has a rocky surface of lava-and-ice volcanoes with burning hydrogen fires (Jupiter has no surface, no volcanoes, and is further from Mars than Earth), Mercury is hot and has no air (So at least they got that right), and Venus, though mentioned in the script, isn’t in the filmed version of the montage at all, so presumably the Martians just forgot it.

We transition to live action with a practical FX shot of a meteor falling to Earth, alarming some park rangers and townspeople outside a movie theater as it disappears between the two matte paintings of mountains at the far end of the set. You’re going to have to try to remember how impressive this all looked in 1953, because I don’t think there’s a single shot in this movie (excepting the stock footage) that isn’t on a soundstage, and it’s really blatant about it. The impact starts some fires, and the first responders are impressed by the “meteor”‘s size (if you know what I mean), so they send Comedy Relief Deputy Ranger Fiddler to go round up a couple of scientists they happen to know are camping nearby. Since it’s the fifties, “Science” is its own field, and one scientist is pretty much as good as another. Fiddler proceeds to eat their dinner, steal their cigarettes, and conscript them to go have a look at the meteor. This is where we meet the hero of our story, Dr. Clayton Forrester (No, not that one), played by Gene Barry. I suspect that Gene Barry had a lot of influence into the characterization of Dr. Clayton Forrester. He’s a bit unusual as Movie Scientists go, presented as a bit of a celebrity — it’s mentioned that he’d been on the cover of Time — and the fact that he owns his own plane seems suggestive that he’s got money. And, at least in his first few scenes, he’s hella suave. Post War of the Worlds, Barry was primarily known for playing wealthy ladies’ men with some connection to law enforcement. First as the titular Old West US Marshall in Bat Masterson, then later as an independently wealthy homicide detective in Burke’s Law. The other thing I personally remember him from is playing the killer, a wealthy philandering psychologist, in Prescription: Murder, the pilot movie for Columbo. Much later, in the ’80s, he’d originate the role of Georges in the Broadway adaptation of La Cage aux Foilles (Admittedly, he did not play a Ladies’ Man in that one). His last film role before his death in 2009 would reunite him with War of the Worlds co-star Ann Robinson for a cameo in the 2005 Spielberg version of War of the Worlds. Forrester, along with a couple of his colleagues, is an astrophysicist from the fictional Pacific Tech, out in the woods to do some fishing… And also some amateur prospecting. Is that really a thing? I have no idea.

At the crash site, the locals, who seem like a colorful and quirky bunch (I’m kinda sorry we won’t be seeing more of them), speculate on the possibility of turning the large, half-buried cylindrical metal object into a tourist attraction.

It’s here that Clayton meets his costar and obvious love interest Sylvia Van Buren — she’d been one of the locals outside the movie theater two scenes ago. They do the whole Meet Cute thing, with Sylvia, who knows of Forrester, but doesn’t recognize him in his glasses and camping gear, launching unprompted into a paean about the famous scientist who’s on his way to look at the meteor. He’s smooth, breezily dismissing her hero-worship before revealing his identity: “You didn’t wear glasses in Time,” she explains. “They’re for long distance,” he explains, “To look at something close, I take them off.” Then he takes off his glasses so dramatically that The Who try to summon themselves into existence a decade early to sing the first bar of “Won’t get fooled again”.

Since Clayton’s Geiger counter indicates that the meteor is radioactive, and it’s still too hot to approach, they all decide to go off and have a square dance instead. We cut to later that night. While the characters whose names I can remember are off doing that, the three yokels they left behind see a section of the meteor unscrew, and now we get our first look at the “Cobra-head” of the alien war machine. The locals mention that Mars is in opposition and guess that it’s the origin of what they now know to be an alien spacecraft. Their immediate reaction is to assume it’s friendly and put together a white flag to let it know they’re peaceful. For their trouble, post-production waves a sparkler in front of the camera and vaporizes them.

I’m going to need to find a word other than “iconic” to describe these things, but the cobra-head is just so damn… Iconic. It looks a bit like a gooseneck lamp. In fact, swimming around in my childhood memories is a very young version of myself poking at a small gooseneck table lamp and pretending it’s a Martian war machine. It’s got a scalloped lens on the front that pulses red and orange, and it makes this great THRUM-THRUM-THRUM sound that quickens right before it fires. The firing sound itself is on the one hand a typical sort of shrill CH-CH-CHOO, but in context almost sounds like it’s spitting.

The firing of the heat ray causes a power outage at the square dance and also knocks out the phones, hearing aids, and stops everyone’s watches. Forrester realizes that a powerful magnetic field is to blame, and a borrowed pocket compass shows the source of the disturbance to be the meteor. Forrester and the town sheriff narrowly avoid joining the three ash-piles they find at the scene, and the army is called in. An unnamed reporter interviews a scientist who’s less cool than Forrester, who spends several minutes making wild guesses about the physical nature of the aliens (who no one’s actually seen) and how their spacecraft work as we see a montage of people listening intently to radios, presumably an homage to the 1938 version.

A plane flies over the pit to drop a flare, prompting the cobra-head to emerge once again and spray first the air then the army with sparks. The reporter is cut off when his microphone’s cable is cut. At Forrester’s advice, the surviving soldiers call in some stock footage of troop movements and set up camp. Sylvia, wearing a red cross armband, has been conscripted to bring coffee and donuts while Clayton introduces General Mann (Les Tremayne) to the locals. The general brings news that cylinders have been falling all over the world: Santiago, Long Island, London, Naples, Fresno. General Mann explains that the landings are following a pattern, but no one has worked out what the pattern is. I am not sure how you can assert the existence of a pattern without identifying it, but there you are. This cylinder is the first one they’ve been able to surround before the Martians emerged, despite the fact that this is also the first cylinder to land.

One of the particular elements that this version adds is the significance of the number three to the aliens: the cylinders land in groups of three, and each contains three machines. We’ll later see that the aliens have three-fingered hands and their single eye has three segments. Some people interpret the aliens as having three hands and three legs as well, but we don’t get to see them closely enough to be sure.

The Martians finally emerge from the impact crater after a bit more military stock footage, giving us our first look at the entirety of the war machine. It is, of course, a thing of beauty, and it’s a real shame that the original props were all melted down for recycling (There’s a very good reproduction often mistaken for the original which once belonged to Forrest Ackerman, but that was a new model made a decade later from the original blueprints for the movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars). George Pal had seen Warwick Goble illustrations (Which, as I’ve mentioned, Wells himself loathed) which depicted the fighting machines as essentially flying saucers on stilts. Taking inspiration from that, the body resembles a manta ray, the cobra-head extending up from the back. There’s a large green lens on the front, similar to the orange lens of the cobra-head. The wingtips are also green. In this first scene, little columns of sparks can be seen extending downward from three points on the underside. Though often thought of as a flying craft, Forrester explains that they don’t technically fly, but are, as in the novel, tripods, albeit ones which use force-fields as invisible legs. The sparking effect to indicate the legs was difficult to film and a fire hazard in the studio, so it’s not visible in later scenes. The other thing that’s really impressive is how smooth their motion is. I don’t even know how you go about building something like this in 1953: the neck articulation is electromechanical puppetry, not stop-motion. Of course, the gooseneck-design makes it look more articulated than it actually is, but we see the cobra heads turn smoothly left and right, and bend upward and down.

As the army prepares to attack, Sylvia’s uncle, Pastor Collins decides that someone ought to try, um, preaching at the Martians, since, “If they’re more advanced than us, they should be nearer the Creator.” He more or less tells Sylvia she should go out with Clayton, then wanders out into No Man’s Land reciting the 23rd psalm. Ann Robinson has these great big expressive eyes, and whenever she’s terrified by something she goes silent, stares at it wide-eyed, and sort of shivers, which is exactly the same thing my niece does when she gets really excited. The army opens fire as soon as the lead Martian ship’s heat ray dispatches him.

Unfortunately for the army, the war machines are encased in an “electromagnetic covering”, a bell-jar shaped force field that flashes briefly visible under fire. It’s a simple optical effect; they filmed a couple of those glass domes you put over mantle clocks and superimposed it over the ships, but it looks cool today to see these transparent, solid objects sort of flash in and out of existence in time with the flashes of munitions. The army is quickly routed. The black smoke of the original novel is replaced by a “skeleton beam”, green blobs that issue from the manta-wingtips along with a sound that Star Trek would later use for photon torpedoes. Forrester describes it as cutting across magnetic lines of force — any object it strikes flashes red, then green (human targets’ skeletons flash visible X-ray style), then simply ceases to exist.

Sylvia and Clayton attempt to escape the carnage in a light aircraft, but while trying to steer clear of both the war machines and the stock footage of air force jets, Forrester crashes and they’re forced to spend the night cowering in a ditch as the Martians pass. The next morning, they flirt a bit while finding an abandoned farmhouse and making breakfast, between bouts of Sylvia remembering to freak out about her uncle’s death. Obviously, it’s a bit of a cliché to have a woman reduced to hysterics in the face of horrific events, but I do like the way she keeps alternating between getting herself composed and losing it whenever something reminds her of Uncle Matthew. It gives a real sense of her fits of hysteria being less “women, amirite?” and more a matter of her actually trying as hard as she can to keep cool, and little things pushing her over the edge. It’s probably just coincidental, but it comes off as a surprisingly true-to-life (at least, by fifties standards) portrait of PTSD.

The awkwardness of Clayton and Sylvia flirting with each other between crying fits is broken up when a Martian cylinder ship crashes into the farmhouse. Tellingly, Sylvia manages to keep herself together when Clayton is knocked unconscious. This scene is clearly inspired by a similar scene with the narrator and a curate in the novel, and accordingly, there’s a close encounter with a Martian. They first decide to investigate the house by sending in this cute little guy. Don’t you just want to hug him? Kind of reminds me of Twiki from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. It’s got this sort of iris-like semicircular metal shutters that close over the optics when it withdraws, and as it closes, it kind of looks like it’s frowning and going to sleep. It’s almost shockingly twee. They hide. It leaves. Then it comes back and spooks Sylvia by sneaking up behind her and tapping her on the shoulder, so Clayton murders it with an axe.

Inexplicably, instead of just skeleton-beaming the house out of existence, one of the Martians decides to get out and reconnoiter in person. It sneaks up behind Sylvia and spooks her by tapping her on the shoulder, so Clayton throws an axe at it. I mean, okay, I’ll give them that these are clearly meant to be visual money-shots, the one time we get a good look at an alien. But really, in all important major respects, they just did the exact same scene twice.

Now, the alien. I just don’t know. The actual design of the Martian overall isn’t as iconic as the war machine, but it’s still a pretty famous look. Later, the scientists will declare the aliens to be anemic, and that actually comes across in the way that, even given how different they look from humans, they still manage to look recognizably sickly. It’s a particularly nice touch that the alien’s three-segmented eye is so similar to the camera lens. And the hand is fantastic, with its three long fingers ending in suction cups. Unfortunately, they decided to have the thing move, and boy howdy does this muppet move like it’s a muppet (I tried to get an animated GIF of this, but it’s only on-screen for twenty frames and doesn’t loop well). It’s awkward and doesn’t look real at all, and you almost expect it to let out a Curly Howard-style “voop voop voop voop voop” as it runs. Clayton retrieves the camera head as a trophy and Sylvia has one last freak-out when she finds that the alien somehow managed to get blood on her scarf before they leg it.

The work of setting up the romance between Clayton and Sylvia taken care of, the narrator takes over for a while to assure us that the World War II stock footage they’ve cut together with some close-ups of the war machines really is the rout of mankind in the face of an indestructable unearthly foe, paying special attention to the war in India, China, Finland, Turkey and Bolivia. I have no idea how they chose which countries would get named specifically, I assume it involved darts and a mercator projection. Washington is singled out as the only strategically important world capital to have escaped destruction.

In Washington, General Mann gives a briefing on alien battle tactics as they make the decision to break out the nukes on the alien nest near Los Angeles. On the other side of the country, Clayton and Sylvia finish walking back to Pacific Tech from the middle of nowhere, leading to a short Science!^TM montage as Clayton’s colleagues, a group of old white men and one old white woman, study the alien blood and camera eye. They pronounce the aliens physically “quite primitive”, reflect on how “everything about them comes in threes”, and plug the camera into an opaque projector so they can see the world how the aliens do. Which turns out to be a bit fisheyed and slightly green-tinged. They wave it in Sylvia’s face for no clear reason other than to freak her out. Everyone packs off to watch the atomic bomb fall on the Martians.

It’ll be delivered — they make a special point of telling us — by the Northrop YB-49 “Flying Wing”, courtesy of more stock footage. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a War of the Worlds adaptation make a special point of giving us overly detailed information about military minutia, and I guess they come by it honestly given Wells’s style. The inclusion of the Flying Wing here is presumably an homage to Thunderchild in the novel, a steamship that manages to take down a tripod and buy time for a shipload of evacuees to escape before its destruction. It’s probably unintentional that they share a bit of the same irony: torpedo rams, like flying wings, were far more important in public consciousness than they ever were as practical military craft.

The Flying Wing doesn’t fare as well as its inspiration, however; a few seconds after the bomb goes off, the war machines emerge from the smoke utterly unscathed. “Guns, tanks, bombs! They’re like toys against them!” General Mann laments. He orders Clayton and company back to the lab, convinced that their only hope now is for Science!^TM to find a solution. They pack up the lab and leave in a convoy, but rioting mobs desperate to flee the city pull Clayton from the truck and cold-cock him.

We’re treated to a montage of Martians destroying nothing I recognize (other than that building that also gets destroyed in The Giant Claw. (It turns out that it’s Los Angeles City Hall. The footage is also recycled for the 1984 V miniseries)), and as night falls, Clayton gets so desperate that he starts thinking about the safety of his colleagues and Sylvia rather than just complaining about the destruction of his scientific instruments. Recalling an anecdote she’d told him back at the farmhouse, Clayton does a quick tour of every church in the city, hoping to find where Sylvia’d holed up. He finds her just as a war machine approaches for a final onslaught.

Then, just as we ultimately knew it must, the war machine drops out of the sky and crashes slowly to the ground. A door opens and an alien arm reaches out, then falls limp. Clayton pronounces the alien dead, then observes, “We were all praying for a miracle.” Church bells ring out as Clayton, Sylvia, and the assembled masses look heavenward and we cut to a montage of fallen war machines near damaged monuments — a bent and twisted Eiffel Tower, the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro and a shattered Taj Mahal as the narrator does the usual bit about the littlest thing God in his wisdom put upon the Earth, which gives way to a chorus of voices singing a few bars of “Now thank we all our God”.

Continue reading Deep Ice: A Million to One, But Still, They Come (George Pal’s War of the Worlds)