Category: War of the Worlds

I got myself a little Christmas Present:

Four film cels from the 1970s pitch reel for George Pal’s proposed War of the Worlds TV series. These are from the close-up of Matt Jeffries’s sketch of an  alien weapon system:

For comparison, here’s a screenshot from the DVD transfer I reviewed back in ’15:

Unfortunately, the acrylic stand got scuffed up a bit in the mail, and I damaged the sticker a bit, but the film cels are intact, and it’s pretty damn cool to have an actual piece of physical history. Plus it was considerably cheaper than what I’ve paid for way less cool War of the Worlds things like the audio tapes. Since even I have more sense than to pay what it would likely cost me to get one of those 1988 Press Kit globes, this is likely to be the best bit of swag I ever get my hands on.

The seller also threw in this neat War of the Worlds sticker neat from Grand Rapids Comi-Con:

Depending on when you’re reading this, the seller might still have a few if you’re interested.

Merry Christmas.

Or maybe I’m just grumpy because it reminds me so much of the other “Drugs are bad, mmkay?” episode.

We haven’t done one of these in a while, because we pretty much burned through all the episodes that pair up well. There’s a handful of episodes that have close similarities in their sci-fi plots, but neither season really uses the “big sci-fi concept” as the primary focus of its stories very often, and the actual centers of the respective stories don’t tend to have a lot to do with each other. They’re both built around the sci-fi concept of mind control via signals embedded in music, for example, but “Choirs of Angels” is centered around the big set piece of Ironhorse comforting Harrison as he comes down from a bad trip, while “Terminal Rock” is primarily about Kincaid trying to rescue the flame-of-the-week’s brother from a life of delinquency. And “Breeding Ground” is (to my consternation) mostly about the tragedy of Doctor Gestaine, while “Unto Us a Child is Born” is a straight-up creature feature heavily inspired by It’s Alive.

In the case of comparing “So Shall Ye Reap” to “Synthetic Love”, though, it’s time to do some introspection. Because in this case, it’s not just the sci-fi kernel of the stories that are similar, the plots at large are broadly similar in interesting ways, and also they display similar flaws. More importantly for our purposes, they differ from each other in ways that I think are really representative of the shift from season one to season two.

Speaking purely on the technical merits, I am hard pressed to call one or the other “better”. Certainly “Synthetic Love” made me angrier, while “So Shall Ye Reap” just kinda left me cold. The first season’s complete failure to make any sort of proper statement is disappointing, but I guess that’s better than the outright moral repugnance of the second season’s implication that ending the war on drugs was a major contributor (indeed, possibly the main contributor, since it’s the only one that is explicitly called out) to the collapse of society. On the other hand, though, “Synthetic Love” at least tries to contextualize drug abuse – the junkies it shows us are sympathetic, many of them clearly suffering from mental illness and explicitly using narcotics to self-medicate. The overwhelming presentation of addicts is as victims with a disease in need of medical help, rather than as a dangerous “criminal element” to be corralled in the name of “law and order”, with even the junkies who resort to violence in order to fund their addiction depicted primarily as pathetic rather than as dangerous thugs. Remember, this was at a time when the prevailing view of “the drug epidemic” among white America was heavily centered around visions of gang violence at the hands of dark-skinned, drug-fueled “super-predators” (Admittedly, one wonders how much the presentation was skewed by the racial demographics of the Toronto acting scene of 1989).

The season one episode doesn’t lean into the racially-charged gang violence motif either, of course, but it’s thoroughly divorced from any sort of cultural context. Involvement with the actual drug trade is entirely off-screen; we don’t see any “regular” addicts, just kidnapping victims who have been forcibly addicted to the alien drug as part of the experiment. What it does do is show us a drug which does what unhip white people have always kinda imagined vaguely-defined “drugs” did anyway: turn people into super-powered, unthinking, unstoppable murder machines. It’s practically Reefer Madness. And while it’s clear in text that it’s special alien tinkering that has made the drug do this, the way people react to it, and the ease with which Suzanne and Norton work out the details conveys a potent subtext: sure, this is a specially modified drug, but turning anyone who so much as looks at it instantly into an unstoppable super-powered killing machine is a normal sort of thing for drugs to do. Note that they’re willing to share that with Novak before they reveal the truth about the aliens; there’s nothing explicitly alien about the drug modifications themselves.

When you couple the lack of any sort of social context with the mindless murder machine aspect, “So Shall Ye Reap” ends up leveraging the same, “Drugs are bad, mmkay? Because they’re bad. They’re really bad. For reasons. Reasons of them being bad,” thing that I disliked so much about “Synthetic Love”. Both stories rely heavily on the presumption that the audience will do the heavy lifting for them, so they don’t actually need to do the work of convincing you that drugs represent an existential threat to the audience’s white middle-class heteronormative American way of life. In “Synthetic Love” this manifests throughout the story largely as a kind of overall laziness – a laziness that crops up over and over again in the second season, really (Remember the completely unsold and offhanded assumption that the audience would go along with Suzanne in being horrified by the concept of test tube babies? Not that season one was entirely free of it; remember when Suzanne conveyed the apocalyptic horror of Y-fever by describing it as, “The same thing that killed all those people,” with no further explanation of who “all those people” were). Season one isn’t nearly as big on “moral panic” episodes, so the impact isn’t as manifest. But that final scene is one place where it really sticks out. Harrison and Novak look positively repulsed by the test subjects licking up the alien drug from the floor. Harrison looks like he’s going to be sick. Ironhorse has this stoic, thousand-mile stare that seems like it wants to say something like, “I’ve seen this before, once, long ago, in Mai Lai. I tried to forget it. I tried so hard…” This is a show where we’ve seen people get their faces casually ripped off, and people melted, and people get an alien fist shoved through their face. Earlier in this episode, we saw a woman’s head get turned around a full 180. But it’s people in hospital gowns licking Pepto Bismol off the floor that prompts the big reaction shot. That’s almost a punch-line: hero stoically ignores scene after scene of bloody gore, but someone eats something off the floor and it freaks them out.

This presumption that the audience would go along willingly may also be why no one in the production phase did anything about the extent to which the aliens’ plot makes no sense. The second season is messier, more slipshod, and generally lacks the sparkle of the first, but at least the Morthren tend to be working from plans that make a basic kind of sense and are oriented toward a reasonable goal. Humans are dangerous and the Morthren don’t have the resources to attack directly, so they set up a plan to pacify humans, particularly the unruly street-mob sort of humans (who we’d established back in “Terminal Rock” were a direct, persistent threat in a way that the dysfunctional power structures of the dystopian setting really failed to be). Almost every second season episode shows the Morthren working toward a specific goal of either acquiring something they need or mitigating a specific threat. Almost every first season episode shows the Mor-taxans pretty much going, “Let’s kill a bunch of humans by….” then throwing a dart at a copy of Newsweek. There are exceptions of course, and it’s noteworthy that in the first season, the exceptions are the really good episodes, while in the second season, not so much. This week, the thing the dart hit was “designer drugs”. It’s not a good plan, to the point that the script itself doesn’t seem to have a solid handle on the details. Again, it feels almost like a Matt Groening joke being set up. Can’t you imagine a scene in Futurama that arrives at the punchline, “Oh no; your plan to make them uncontrollably violent has made them violent. And uncontrollable!” (shades of The Simpsons‘s “That throwing stick trick of yours has boomeranged on us!”).

And yet, the detachment from social context ends up being the saving grace of “So Shall Ye Reap” in some ways. It kept the episode down to a level of merely disappointing, rather than being actively upsetting like “Synthetic Love”. “Synthetic Love” is at its heart a pretty disgustingly reactionary story. Pretty much all of society’s ills are blamed on narcotics, and the narrative frame feels like a “Take that!” to anyone who favors decriminalization. More than that, even, the depiction of rehab centers as something sinister – not just because they were involved in the Morthren plot, but even before that, tainted by their association with the pharmaceutical industry – seems to be selling a message that not only is decriminalization wrong, so is treating drug abuse as a medical rather than criminal problem. It may not come right out and say it, but process of elimination leaves you with the sense that the message here is, “Addicts don’t need treatment; they need punishment.”

On the other hand, though, at least the second season episode made me feel something.

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

The body of the latest victim is found pretty much immediately, though lacking a police escort, Harrison and the gang don’t get to the scene until after the local cops have pretty much finished up. Lieutenant Novak is kind of smug and smarmy about it, which is in keeping with her character so far, but you’d think she’d tone it down in light of the fact that she clearly does want their help. Sorta. The writing is a little confused on this point. OBSTRUCTIVE COP ARCHETYPE, everyone.

Suzanne confirms radiation on the body, which Novak apparently knew about, but she recognizes that it’s relevant to Harrison’s team and demands to know what’s up. Ironhorse gets all awkward and fumbly and defers to Harrison, but Harrison doesn’t make it into his explanation before Novak is called away for an important call.

Said call is the DEA, failing to confirm the team’s backstory. So the idea here is that to go undercover as DEA agents, the team made up fake computer records, but did not actually tell the DEA or get someone there who would vouch for them. Strike one. When Novak goes over to confront them about it, they clearly don’t recognize the name of the head of DEA field operations, strike two. And despite the fact that it’s really clear what’s going on, they still just try to bluff and deflect. That’s a sufficient strike to get them read their Miranda rights for impersonating federal agents.

Alas, poor Jack’s number is up, as he’s the next experimental subject under the guidance of the new head scientist, played by Angelo Rizacos. He… Also looks familiar. What is it with me and deja vu this week? New Scientist seems to have gotten the formula right this time, because Jack mugs around the cell for a few minutes doing “crazy” shtick before the aliens declare it time for the “final test”.

They bring in the blonde from earlier, who struggles as she’s forced down the stairs in order to pull off a gratuitous panty shot. Maybe it’s just my sour mood, but this episode’s use of cheap thrills feels like it completely misses “edgy” and lands squarely in exploitative. War of the Worlds is part of a wave of first-run-syndicated shows from this time period that traded heavily on the recent loosening of broadcast standards to offer something a little more graphic than standard network fare. That’s why you see a lot of anthology horror cropping up around this time period. This particular show is of course drawn from the tradition of pre-Alien Sci-Fi Horror, so even as it’s imported a lot from the gorier tropes of ’80s horror, it’s been fairly light on the sexualized aspects that grew to dominance in the horror genre through the ’70s and into the ’80s. When they do go that route, they usually play it for laughs. Here, it’s just a frame of nipple in a blipvert and an occasional panty shot and women in hospital gowns being menaced. The lack of levity (there’s an attempt, I guess, in the form of Sherry the Alien Prostitute complaining about how she has to do all the work despite her state of decomposition, but it’s… not actually funny) makes everything harsher and it just feels cheap.

She’s placed in the cell with Jack, and he just stares at her dully for a few seconds. We’re spared a scene of her desperately trying to appeal to his better nature, since she only has time to say, “What did they do to you?” before he breaks her neck. And by “breaks her neck”, I mean, “Twists a head and shoulder prosthetic around a hundred and eighty degrees.” The practical effect shot is bloodless and short enough that you might potentially miss it, but it’s gruesome in its bizarreness, a full 180 head-twist. She dies as she lived: with her underwear gratuitously visible.

At the risk of harping on it, I’m still having a hard time sorting out exactly what the aliens want this drug to do. They’ve said about a half a dozen things and shown about a half a dozen things, and they’re all in sort of the same general area, but they don’t quite line up, and they don’t add up to a plan that benefits the aliens in an obvious way. At a basic level, “Make humans kill each other,” is the bones of a decent plan. But the exact implementation? We start out with this blipvert thing and the claim that they’re breaking down the distinction between erotic and violent stimulation. That would suggest that the drug causes people to experience some sort of parasexual stimulation from killing. But that doesn’t track at all with what we see from Jack, who seems to have been rendered into a murder-automaton. To the point that after he kills the nameless woman, he just walks around his cell, bouncing off the walls like a roomba. But this isn’t going to be the behavior we see out of him or others affected by the drug later. And besides, a drug that renders humans into impassive automatic killers a few seconds after dosage might be useful for a battlefield situation maybe, but how does it work to sow chaos and disrupt human society through the street drug distribution network? People aren’t going to be lining up to buy drugs that instantly make you robotic and murderous. Drug cartels aren’t going to be pushing drugs like that. For the kind of usage the aliens have lined up, you’d want something that behaved like a normal street drug at first. Something where murderousness was either triggered later or was a symptom of withdrawal. “It’s a drug so addictive that addicts will murder in exchange for more,” or “It’s a drug so addictive that addicts will fly into a murderous rage if they can’t get more,” are both perfectly reasonable ways for this plot to go, but neither one is the actual alien plan here. Except… Both are kinda involved in what ends up happening also? And maybe it gives him superhuman strength? I don’t know. It’s clumsy is what it is.

Meanwhile, having set up this human plot that’s come to a head with the team being arrested by the Chicago PD for impersonating federal agents, you’re probably expecting some dark humor and intricate plot developments. Maybe the gang has to escape and is on the run from the cops, but at the last minute the aliens release the drug and there’s a tense moment where Novak has to choose between believing Harrison or the drug-crazed Jack, and…

Yeah, no. Harrison and the others spend a few minutes grousing about the indignity of being locked up (At this stage of production, they no longer, it seems, had access to the jail set from “Thy Kingdom Come“, so they’re just cuffed to chairs in a conference room. Not even a very secure-looking one, though it does have “INTERROGATION ROOM 1” stenciled on the door. I need not remind you that they have a “warehouse full of cages” set, so why not at least roll in one of those to make it look a little like the team is actually secured here?), then Novak comes in and lets them go. She’s spoken to General Wilson, who identified them as a counterterrorism group fighting a jihadi plot to flood Chicago with exotic designer drugs. Helpfully, she parrots back what he told her about them so that Harrison knows their new cover story is. Novak admits their DEA cover might be reasonable since the “real” story sounds a little crazy, though Ironhorse counters by comparing it to the Halabja chemical attack. Nice try, War of the Worlds, but you’re no Hideo Kojima. Metal Gear Solid can have a go at showing me an epic storyline about walking tanks and Russian cowboys and vocal cord parasites and then be like, “Yeah, but is this really any crazier than Mutually Assured Destruction?” War of the Worlds is not going to get away with that sort of crap. So. What Ironhorse actually says is, “Iraqi soldiers bombing their own people with poison gas.” I had to look it up to figure out what he was talking about. I mean, I’d heard references to Hussein using chemical weapons on his own people before, but I was too young in 1988 to know the specific details. And because I mostly heard it in the context of George W. Bush justifying the second Iraq war, I’d kinda assumed it referred to events from the ’90s. But what Ironhorse is referring to is an event from March 16, 1988, in which the Iraqi army declared the Kurdish population of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan to be collaborators with the attacking Iranian army, and bombed the town first with rockets and napalm, then with a combination of mustard gas, Serin, VS and Tabun. In 2010, the attack was officially recognized as a genocide by the Iraqi High Criminal Court and was declared a crime against humanity by the government of Canada. It is among the crimes for which Ali Hassan al-Majid was executed in 2010. So…. OBSTRUCTIVE COP ARCHETYPE? Done with that now. Novak gives the team carte blanche. The thing they set up with Norton hacking the police database? Nevermind. We are basically hitting the reset button on the human side of the plot at this point. Everything that’s happened so far? Padding.

Mass production of the drug begins, but before they can release it, the aliens want to do a field-test to see how Jack performs outside their direct control. They give him a shot, order him to kill humans, and drop him off outside…

A strip club.

Guys, I don’t think I want to do this any more.

I’m not a prude. I don’t object to prurient elements in my sci-fi horror. Or in most genres, really. Like Rick Blaine, I don’t mind to a parasite, but I object to a cut-rate one. And this is cut-rate titillation.

I have almost nothing to say about the scene that follows. For the sake of completeness, Jack beats the crap out of several people while the camera keeps cutting away to an exotic dancer who doesn’t react to what’s going on. I guess I can point out that the crowd is quiet and polite and shows only modest interest in what’s going on on-stage. It’s also a diverse crowd, with at least two people of color and at least two women and people in different styles of dress from yuppie to lumberjack.

The cops show up after a commercial break to be amazed that one man could have caused so much destruction. The scope of the destruction isn’t honestly clear from the shot. There’s several bodies on the floor but two of them are moving and none of them have visibly mortal injuries. It was pretty clear the woman in the cell was all-the-way dead, but it’s less obvious here how many are just injured. There’s a splatter under the bouncer’s dropped baseball bat that’s probably blood, but a larger possibly-blood pool on the floor is ambiguous: it’s next to a tipped-over glass, and in this light, at this resolution, with this deinterlace filter, I’m not even a hundred percent sure it’s liquid. Looks like it might have a fold in it.

The dancer, for what it’s worth, is unharmed. She’s stopped dancing at least, and is sitting amidst the destruction kind of impassively. Jack had been very obviously leering at her, which does go back to that whole “breaking down the difference between sex and violence” thing, but then he left her unharmed so I don’t know. Jack escapes back to the waiting aliens, but the cops are close enough to give pursuit. The resulting chase scene is… Sloppy. Jack is jonesing for another fix, but his thrashing causes the alien to break her syringe before she can give it to him. He keeps shouting and thrashing, and there’s a bit where it looks like he’s speaking alienese, though I think that’s just clumsy scene composition. Then they drive off a dock or something and crash into the water.

I don’t know why. It would make sense if they’d decided to sacrifice themselves rather than lead the cops back to their base – that would fit with the call they make to the Envoy where she basically tells them to do just that. But the driving alien seems surprised when he suddenly drives off into the water. The way it’s composed is like he was distracted by Jack and couldn’t turn in time, but… he isn’t. He’s got plenty of time and Jack is only being very modestly disruptive. They may have cut something from this scene, because one of the aliens disappears. Maybe she’s just out of the frame, but I think Jack is meant to have killed her.

Being rather better at this than the aliens, Norton and Suzanne extrapolate from the drug variants they’ve already seen and work out what the final form of the drug will do: instant addiction plus fits of violence. Okay. That’s a clear at least. Also, you can’t quite make out what the computer calls the drug, but it looks like it says “Progaine”, which is a volumizing shampoo from the makers of (but not containing the active ingredient from) the hair-regrowth product Rogaine.

Once Novak learns about Jack’s death at the hands of the “terrorists”, she prepares to call every cop in the city in to shut them down. In order to stop her, Harrison is forced to spill the beans about the aliens.

Her reaction is mildly bemused skepticism. The scene is weird. The scene pretty much has to be weird. I wish they’d played up the early sense of, “Everyone does know about aliens but they find it hard to actively think about it,” because without that, you get these scenes that are weird but not really funny. Novak is all like, “That’s ridiculous! But also I am going to believe you! But also I will make wild threats about the consequences if you are lying! But still, aliens, you say. Okay. I accept that.” Maybe this would’ve been a better place for Ironhorse to make a comparison to Iraqi war crimes. If you’re going to go for the, “But is this outlandish sci-fi plot really any more absurd than war?” moral, go big.

Continue reading Thesis: So Shall Ye Reap (War of the Worlds 1×21, Continued)

I’ll do anything you want, just give me more!

It is the first of May, 1989. Much of this week’s news is a continuation of last week’s, but it was about a year ago in our time that we visited last week, so here’s a recap: Disney-MGM Studios, now Disney’s Hollywood Studios, opens in Orlando. Donald Trump takes out full-page ads in four major New York newspapers demanding the railroading of the Central Park Five. Andrés Rodríguez, who had taken over Paraguay in a coup back in February, was elected to the presidency of that country in what is widely considered both to be marked by fraud, and also the closest thing to a free and fair election Paraguay had ever had up to that point. He would leave office at the end of his term in 1993, the first Paraguayan head of state to leave office voluntarily at the end of his constitutional term since 1948, 1932 if you don’t count interim presidents appointed after coups. Oliver North is convicted for his role in Iran-Contra this week. In Cold War news, work begins on the first McDonald’s in Moscow and Hungary dismantles part of the Iron Curtain with Austria. Space Shuttle Atlantis will launch this week. Its primary mission is to deploy the satellite Magellan, bound for Venus. Mission Specialist Mary L. Cleave is the first female astronaut to fly on a shuttle mission since the Challenger disaster. Singer, songwriter, and domestic abuser Chris Brown will be born Friday. Margaret Thatcher celebrates ten years in office as Prime Minister of the UK, showing a level of commitment to a serious misjudgment the British government would not repeat until Brexit.

Barry Mantilow will release the album “Barry Mantilow” this week. It’s the last of his five self-titled albums, and the second one to be named “Barry Mantilow” (The others are “Barry Mantilow II”, “Barry”, and “Mantilow”). A California jewelry store will call the cops on a “suspicious person” skulking around who later turns out to be Michael Jackson in disguise, which is almost but not quite funny enough to make the obvious jokes in spite of the problematic racial angle. Madonna maintains the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for a second week. New in the top ten are Jody Watley, Cher and Peter Cetera, and Paula Abdul, with REM, the Bangles, and Milli Vanilli all getting booted clean into the 20s.

Nothing much in theaters this week, aside from K-9, which you may remember as “The Buddy Cop Movie With a Dog From 1989 That Isn’t Turner and Hooch.” It’s a week of new shows on TV, though. May Sweeps I guess. Tonight alone brings us a new MacGyver that I don’t really remember, a made-for-TV movie called Dark Holiday which is Lee Remmick’s last role, the season finale of Columbo, and a new episode of ALF. The rest of the week will give us an Oliver North biopic (I wonder if they filmed two endings…), another “Sam Solves Racism” episode of Quantum Leap(Quantum Leap is utterly fantastic, so don’t let my habit of complaining about the “Sam Solves Racism” episodes sour you on it), Perfect Strangers gives us “Wedding Belle Blues“, a delightful arranged marriage episode that I’m sure is great because I’m too tired to read Casey’s review right now myself. This Sunday will give us The Trial of the Incredible Hulk, the second of three TV Movies continuing the adventures of the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno version of the character. It features the unbelievably perfect casting of John Rhys-Davies as Kingpin, and, like the previous TV movie, was a failed backdoor pilot for another attempt at doing a low-budget Marvel TV adaptation, this time with Rex Smith as Daredevil. It also features the most wonderfully ho-yay scene in Live Action Marvel History Excluding Loki, as Matt Murdock lovingly cradles a traumatized, shirtless David Banner upon learning his dark secret.

Star Trek The Next Generation is “Pen Pals”, the shitty “The Prime Directive compels us to let the adorable rubber forehead child die,” episode. I could go off on a tangent here about how fucking amazing Star Trek Discovery is compared to any other Trek series when it comes to the Prime Directive, but we don’t have all day I guess. (Short version: whenever it comes up, it is pretty much immediately dismissed as, “We can be a little flexible when it comes to General Order One under the circumstances. Just don’t go playing God.”). Last time we did this, I got my Friday the 13th the Series episodes mixed up and told you about this week’s episode. So to close the loop, last week‘s episode was “The Butcher”, in which Jack has to re-kill a Nazi he’d fought back in the war, now resurrected by a cursed amulet.

Here we are, then. The home stretch. The antepenultimate episode. Yes, I am taking my time. I still need to work out what I’m going to do with my life after I finish this. (There is a certain irony in the fact that I’ve been doing as close as possible to nothing in order that I don’t reach the end when I have nothing planned for what to do after. I coulda just finished up two years ago and done all the nothing I liked ever since). But I guess we may as well get on with it, or else I’ll still be doing this when the new TV series drops, and then I’ll pretty much have to.

According to The Forrester Papers, “So Shall Ye Reap” was the last episode to be filmed. I assume the reasons for this are logistical; I can’t imagine it was intended to be the last to air- the actual finale is coded very strongly as a season-ender. But it also feels like something from earlier in the season. The plot is broadly similar to a handful of other episodes: the aliens are pursuing a comically overblown mass-murder plot, the Blackwood team kind of slowly follows the trail toward them, the aliens plot ends up collapsing more from bad luck and their own incompetence than anything else, and the good guys show up too late to really have much impact beyond cleanup, because they spent the bulk of the episode doing some mild black comedy with colorful guest stars. There’s not really anything new in this episode or any sense of growth or forward progress. This episode could be dropped anywhere in the series and it would fit just about exactly as well. I guess I’m a little disappointed after we got strong episodes for Suzanne and Ironhorse recently, with so few episodes left, it felt like the show had actually decided to pick a direction, but now it’s backing down and just giving us a fairly generic “Mass Murder Plot of the Week” story. To make matters worse, while I know the remaining two episodes are going to be fairly strong plotwise, they’re not especially character-driven the way the preceding few have been.

One television sci-fi cliche War of the Worlds hasn’t really engaged with much is the mining of pop-consciousness moral panics for plots. They haven’t been shy about leaning on cold war fears – assimilation by a foreign collectivist horde or the looming threat of nuclear annihilation – but those were a little dated by this end of the ’80s. Science fiction has a long history of attaching a speculative angle to whatever moral fear is bothering the public at the time, comforting an audience who feels threatened by modernity with the promise that, yes, you’re right to be worried, and those kids with their video games and their loud music and their test tube babies and their self-help books and their interracial relationships really are destroying America, but they’ll get theirs in the end. Anyone have a weird feeling of deja vu? Anyway, the only time War of the Worlds has really dipped into this was “Goliath is My Name“‘s invocation of the Dungeons and Dragons Satanic Panic.

But I think the lack of such plots is more a matter of War of the Worlds having a lot of different things it wanted to try out rather than a deliberate avoidance. Had the show gone on, I assume we’d have seen more of these. The latest thing in the aliens’ succession of ill-considered plans to kill humans involves the moral panic that may well be the most eighties of all moral panics, the War on Drugs. Yes, the aliens have, “at great risk”, infiltrated the country’s drug syndicates. So take that, hippie scum, those jazz cigarettes you think are just a harmless good time are actually being sold by Middle Eastern terrorists… I mean godless commies… I mean ALIENS! Why? Well, I suppose it could be a way for them to raise human money to fund their other ventures. Or maybe they could be pushing drugs that render humans docile so that they won’t resist…. Why does this all sound familiar? Anyway, it’s none of those things, because the aliens aren’t really into subtlety; they’re into body horror and body count. No, it’s because the aliens have developed a designer drug that will turn humans into psychotic killers. There’s a hint of The Screwfly Solution in the details, as the alien scientist explains that the drug causes its victims to respond the same way to violent imagery as to sexual imagery.

At least, that’s the theory. They’re still working the kinks out. They’ve got a test subject strapped into a Clockwork Orange rig forcing him to watch blipverts of violent and sexual imagery. Seriously, why does this all seem so familiar? I am not clear on how this experiment works. It feels like they just liked the Clockwork Orange imagery and shoved it in, since it seems like that would be more in the vein of some kind of psychological conditioning similar to what we saw in “Choirs of Angels“. In any case, this version of the drug is a little off, because instead of just turning the victim murderous, it makes his brain leak out his ears.

The scientist assures an envoy that this is only a temporary setback and it’ll only take them a week or so to- Wait. Wait, wait. That scientist looks familiar…

Holy crap, it’s Hawk! Since we last saw Peter MacNeill, he’s had a small part in a Burt Reynolds movie, guest roles in Alfred Hitchcock Presents and T and T, and now, this.

…

Yeah, there’s not really any good way to spin this as Peter MacNeill moving up in the world. But he’s getting consistent work, and will continue to do so straight through to the present day, winning a Genie and two Geminis, and – this somehow did not come up in my series of articles about the show – a guest bit on Star Trek Discovery where he plays – I can hardly believe I am typing these words – Harry Mudd’s father-in-law.

The stylish be-shoulder-padded envoy gives Scientist Hawk the usual speech about how the Advocacy won’t tolerate failure and completely ignores his educated estimate of how long it will take to finish up the work in favor of ordering him sort it out in a day. I think technically we have only seen this one or two times before, but it sure does feel like about a million by now. Or maybe I’m just getting old. That the leadership caste neither trusts nor respects the scientific caste is old news by now, and it would be cool if this had a specific justification (Oh, I don’t know, say their failure to notice that the planet they were about to invade was deadly to them?), but they’re not going to get around to making any more progress on this theme before the season runs out, and besides, I already live in a world where the leadership caste neither trusts nor respects scientists and constantly undermines and ignores them to promote their own ill-advised agendas with catastrophic consequences, so I am a little less receptive to the dark humor of the situation.

Maybe if the human race is still around in five to ten years, we can look back with some distance on War of the Worlds the Series and reflect on how it anticipated certain social and political trends of the future and how they could derive as extensions of the collective cold war neurosis. Hell, that is actually where I started out when I began this project. Not that specifically, but more with the notion that one of the major reasons this show failed commercially was not simply that there are serious misjudgments in how it was made, but that such misjudgments were inevitable because the show required a media and sociopolitical backdrop which did not yet exist – that what the show wanted to do was enough ahead of its time that TV like that was neither a thing audiences were ready for nor a thing that show-makers had worked out how to do (On a technical, rather than sociopolitical, level, the show straddles an uncomfortable place between the ’80s model of disconnected adventure-of-the-week shows and the emerging ’90s model of story-arc-driven adventure shows, having a plot that calls out for material forward progress, but lacking a cohesive narrative voice to actually move things along).

Continue reading Thesis: So Shall Ye Reap (War of the Worlds 1×21, Part 1)

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKiBz9BZuEE

Special thanks to Orville Joder Jr. for uploading a somewhat cleaner copy of the press kit, albeit with the aspect ratio altered.

After the featurette, we have interviews with the leads. First up, Jared Martin, who the narrator is quick to remind us played Dusty on Dallas. In the time since I started this project, I’ve learned that Jared spent his later years teaching and making art, and that he contributed a lot to the production as a sort of de facto script editor as the production became even more harried in the second season. So it shouldn’t surprise me that he comes off as an introspective sort of actor.

Harrison Blackwood is a wonderful man. He’s an explosive, sexy, dynamic, delightful, intelligent, warm generous, he’s all of these things. He’s like if you went into a kitchen and there was a lot of food around, and you wanted to make up a dish and you wanted to put everything in the kitchen into that dish, it would be called Harrison Blackwood. Fun to play. Hard to get to, but fun to play.

At first, it seems like a bit of braggadocio. But you get to the middle and he starts likening the character to a poorly-planned casserole, and that’s nice. Just a subtle little hint that Harrison is maybe a bit of a Mary Sue. And note the use of the word “sexy”. He says it again later. Twice. An indication that the whole Sex God Harrison thing I’ve snickered at is, yes, deliberate.

I like that he’s not self-aggrandizing too. He talks up Harrison’s intellect, but claims that he’s not a “hunk”, that his character isn’t the physical one, referring to Chaves as, “Another wonderful actor,” who handles the action.

In a separately recorded segment, he gets deep for a bit about the series premise:

It’s kind of a gateway story. It’s kind of the major story of the twentieth century. After we get our problems with nuclear warfare and feeding people and prejudice and hated out of the way and all those things that are holding us down as a species, we’re going to pack our bags and go into space. And this is a story about that, written at the very, glimmering beginning of this century of a man looking down the long barrel of time and wondering what it’s like out there.

He’s very animated when he talks about this, and I really believe him, even if I think he’s setting himself up for disappointment given that it kinda sounds like the show he actually wants to be doing is Star Trek. It’s very cool to see what he thought he was bringing to the character. He wants to be playing a thinking man’s hero, and though he doesn’t reference Clayton Forrester, I sort of imagine that Martin’s image of Harrison Blackwood tracks very close with the sort of dashing intellectual that Gene Barry portrayed in 1953.

What’s also telling is that Martin doesn’t mention Harrison’s less attractive qualities – that he’s a practical joker, that he’s pushy, arrogant, and, y’know, a weirdo. I always found that memorable about Harrison, whereas I mostly overlooked the “dashing leading man” qualities until doing this close rewatch. Given that Harrison’s less attractive, “nerdier” qualities fade away in the second season, when we can guess that Martin had more control over the fine details of his characterization, I think the evidence here is that the “weirdo” aspects weren’t something he was overly enamored of.

Next up is Lynda Mason Green, who… Does not seem fully engaged, if I am being honest. Not disintested; the opposite actually, she seems very intense in places, but the places where she’s intense don’t seem quite right, like she’s excited about something other than what she’s actually doing. She seems a little off. I mean, she isn’t at a loss for words or anything, but she speaks a little slowly and meanders a little and slurs the odd line and keeps rubbing her nose and I am going to be SUPER generous and assume she has a cold and it isn’t any of the other reasons an actor in the ’80s might seem a little out of it and keep rubbing their nose. One really weird aspect of the way she describes her character is that she claims Suzanne is drawn to the project specifically for the chance to work with Harrison. That’s pretty weird given that in the actual show, they start off not liking each other. On the other hand, taken together with Martin’s description of Harrison, it would fit well with the notion that Harrison was originally written as more of a “science celebrity” in the mold of Clayton Forrester (I’d assume that Forrester, in turn, was based on Richard Feynman, though I’m not entirely sure the timeline of Feynman’s public image tracks with that. Like, Feynman didn’t actually start at Caltech until 1952. TBH, it seems more like Richard Feynman is based on Clayton Forrester than the other way around).

Green says that in addition to the status that comes from working with Blackwood, Suzanne is motivated by the intellectual challenge of being the first to study extraterrestrial life. And, of course, her duty to protect the Earth on account of its where her daughter lives. She prioritizes that one, even though it’s probably the least interesting of the three. I mean, yeah, sure, of course the mother is motivated by protecting her daughter, but personally, I find the possibility of Suzanne being a bit mercenary and approaching an alien invasion foremost as an academic exercise to be way more interesting than the Mama Bear angle.

It’s the kind of story that hooks into… It can not die, because it hooks into a very very basic thing in humans. It becomes a fear of the unknown. It deals with the fear of the unknown, fear of evil, fear of darkness, fear of invasion from an unknown. It’s a very fundamental thing to lock into a peculiar kind human fear.

Richard is up next, and the narrator wastes no time pointing out that he recently worked with Schwarzenegger in Predator. True to his character, Chaves is a lot more reserved than the others, even though he’s pretty upbeat. Both he and the narrator make a point of Paul’s role as a weapons expert who can, “Fly anything that can fly, shoot anything that can shoot, drive anything that can drive.” Again, not really something that gets much emphasis in the show, where he mostly drives, y’know, a car, and shoots, y’know, a gun. Later in the interview, he describes himself as the “chaperone”, the one who carries a gun and steps out in front to protect and support the intellectuals, which is a much more spot-on description of how Ironhorse functioned in the bulk of the series.

If you’ve been following, you know by now that it’s only this time through that I really came to appreciate Ironhorse and by extension Chaves as the real break-out character. And so this is probably the interview that I like the best. Especially when Chaves straight-up confirms the character direction I envisioned for him in “Dust to Dust“. He explains that Ironhorse’s Cherokee side is largely under wraps when the series opens because, “The military has a control on him.” But his “mystical” side would come out little-by-little as the series progressed. I’m disappointed that the second season retool would end up cutting that avenue off, but I’m frankly even more disappointed that the first season spends so much time floundering that it only really had one or two moments where it made a concerted effort to lay that groundwork.

There’s a serendipitous bit of contrast when Chaves talks about his own background. While Jared Martin made it clear that Harrison Blackwood was “fun” but a stretch for him to get into, Chaves stresses the similarity between Ironhorse’s background and his own – their similar family and military backgrounds (I did notice that Chaves mentions that he’s from a military family, unlike Ironhorse, whose family didn’t support his decision to join the Army, though Chaves himself doesn’t bring up that difference). He also says that, while he’s frequently played military characters, he really likes being able to play one in a science fiction series. A lot of his work has been playing a military man in a realistic situation, acting out scenes that were very close to his own wartime experience (He mentions the play Tracers, which he coauthored), but playing a military man in a fantastical situation is a lot more fun.

Philip Akin goes last. I notice that the Canadian actors don’t get the benefit of the narrator reminding us what they’ve done recently. Akin’s interview also mentions Gertrude, and he talks up the extent to which his voice-controlled wheelchair is itself sort-of a character. He otherwise doesn’t really say much about his character, sadly. He contradicts himself a little, saying that his character is more laid back and dry, but also is the source of a lot of the show’s humor. I’m guessing that there’s some more here that was edited out, and he’s talking about the transformation we see over the course of the pilot, where in the early scenes, it’s apparent that Norton was intended to be comic relief, with his overblown Jamaican accent and coffee obsession and the bad attempt at making a running gag about bald microbiologists, that we watch progressively tone down just from one end of the show to the other.

His description of the series is a little confused, but it sort of circumnavigates something which the press kit doesn’t otherwise go into very much: the fact that War of the Worlds is as much horror as it is science fiction:

War of the Worlds has endured, I think, because it has been the first. And because of being the first, it has really captured something special. I don’t believe there’s been a show that’s created as much fear and as much interest as the times it’s been played. It was a novel idea and it doesn’t necessarily mean it was the first time this idea came up. But it was novel in the way it was presented, that it was grounded in our everyday reality. And I think that’s what made it so special. With a lot of science fiction, you have to go into the future to get the effect. And if you go into the future, you can distance yourself from the effect. Perhaps that’s what makes horror so interesting and so strong, because it’s everyday things that have a macabre twist.

This press kit was a neat find, and I’m glad I happened upon it. Pretty much any fan who watches this is going to appreciate the (admittedly brief) glimpses of the alien prosthetic and war machine model, and even more, it’s really cool to hear Jared Martin and Richard Chaves give us insights into what they thought they were trying to accomplish with their characters (Philip and Lynda get the short shrift as usual). Check it out if you’re so inclined.

 

Special thanks to Vincent Dawn for uploading this.

It can be hard, in a time when geek culture is so prominent and television has become a mature and respected medium, to remember how recently television was largely treated as disposable trash, and how little there was to consume about television shows beyond the text itself. Shows like Doctor Who or Star Trek were the exceptions in terms of shows for an adult audience which had significant merchandising. Anything that gave you a look behind the scenes was rarer still.

That’s not to say there wasn’t anything produced that would give you a look at how the sausage was made, but it was rare, and generally not intended for mass consumption. One thing which pretty much always did exist was a press kit. And through a bit of luck, the video press kit for War of the Worlds is now watchable on YouTube.

In terms of content, it’s similar to a demo reel or pitch tape, like the one we saw many long years ago for George Pal’s own attempt at making a TV show out of his movie. But there, the focus was on getting interest to move the project into production. Here, the show is already on its way to air and at least the pilot is in the can. The press kit’s target audience instead is the media. This twenty minute presentation is basically background research and B-roll for journalists to use when doing pieces on the show. In fact, I’m pretty sure this is the original source for some quotes I’ve seen in the various articles I’ve come across about the series.

About half of the 20-minute runtime is an overview of the series. It opens on stock footage from the 1953 movie, some of the same clips from the show’s opening. A narrator lays out the backstory as usual: an alien invasion, stopped by bacteria, then we cut to footage from the pilot, the scene of Ironhorse’s crew filming the dump site, as the narrator explains how the alien remains were stored and forgotten. We cut to the money shot from the credits of the alien hand pushing its way through the melting drum lid as the narrator informs us that one of the most highly acclaimed science-fiction stories of all time is coming to television:

We get some nice behind the scenes footage, a very short clip from “The Resurrection”, and from the jail scene in “Thy Kingdom Come”. There’s an interview with Greg Strangis, who explains how the series contradicts the film by changing the aliens’ death into forced hibernation, and their new ability to possess human hosts. Greg is filmed in the Land of the Lost Cave set, and though he’s upbeat, he doesn’t seem entirely comfortable giving an interview on camera, stumbling a little over his words and with a slightly nervous posture. His father seems much more comfortable in his own short clip, talking up the threat of aliens infiltrating society at all levels.

Continue reading Parenthesis: Enhance the image digitally? (War of the Worlds Press Kit Video)

It’s time. Let’s get this over with.

I could lie and tell you that it’s bittersweet, here at the end, to finally be done with Thomas and Yvonne Phelan’s Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II. It’s not bittersweet. It’s pretty great, actually. That I still have any fondness left for any form of War of the Worlds after this is kind of amazing. It’s pretty much been one shitshow after another. There are three small mercies here in the final act of this nightmare play:

1. Side four runs a few minutes short to accommodate the credits and copyright notice
2. The whole act is set on Mars, so we won’t be seeing any more of the Earth case
3. Just as the first tape led off with a full recap of the last ten minutes of episode 2, episode 4 leads off by replaying the entirety of the last scene of episode 3, so we technically already covered the last ten minutes way back in 2017.

We left off with the Orion crew, Jessica Storm, and her hired gun Walsh (the narrator implies that the rest of Storm’s crew is there too, but no one ever refers to them and episode four will have them back on Artemis) bitching at each other in a cave on Mars. They keep that up for bit, with Nikki needling Jessica for being passed over by NASA. Previously, they’d always asserted that it was Jessica’s lack of experience that gave Ferris the edge despite her superior test scores. Here, Nikki asserts that it’s Jessica’s complete inability to work with others or, y’know, lead in any sort of meaningful way. Jessica for her own part insists that it was simply sexism that led the “old boy scouts” at NASA to pick Jonathan over her.

After a bit more arguing, Townsend declares that the smoothness of the tunnel implies it was constructed with machinery, which adds credence to the possibility of a concealed exit.

They argue for a few more minutes about forming a search party before working out that there are nine of them. Walsh doesn’t want to go, and takes Jessica aside to reveal that he’s smuggled a gun down with him in spite of the Martians’ instructions. The gun is never mentioned in episode four. He tries to threaten Jessica out of sending him on a search party, but she convinces him that she’d detonate Orion-1 with her dying breath if he tried anything. As a consolation, she orders him to kill the Orion crew once they’ve found an exit.

The Orion crew notices them sharing a hearty villain laugh, but this has no impact on their behavior because why would it. The gang splits up, with Talbert, Townsend and Pirelli taking one tunnel, Morgan, Ferris and Walsh a second, and Jessica, Nikki and Rutherford the third, which I’m sure won’t end badly. As they disappear into a tunnel, Mark Rutherford, still thinking he’s a character from a ’50s sitcom, grouses to himself about it in a way that completely ignores the fact that he is a prisoner on Mars with a woman who has been hired to murder him.

Hey, wait up! Wait for me! I can’t believe those two. They’ll kill each other before the day’s over. How did I get stuck in the middle again? This is the last time I ever allow myself to come between those two…

Actually, in what is either a clever subversion or just the writers getting bored, team three doesn’t descend into any sort of love triangle antics. The reason that’s weird is that the next ten minutes is basically the same scene playing out twice. Because the adverse influence in these caves — episode four reveals this all to be an elaborate Tor simulation — teams one and two quickly devolve into deadly love triangles.

What?

The narrator informs us that the space explorers do not notice the faint, distant sound of machinery that is rhythmic and hypnotic. It kinda sounds like an old printing press. It is never explained nor does anyone ever mention it again. Presumably it is meant to be the mechanism that compels everyone to fight, “hypnotic” being the key term here. But I’ll note that they never actually explain it. They also don’t ever come right out and say that these scenes are some kind of simulation or illusion. Possibly they’re not; it could well be that these events really do play out physically, and are somehow undone later using Martian powers. If these events are a simulation, then the narrator’s description of a mechanical device nearby casting some sort of hypnotic spell is misleading at the least.

Talbert laments that they don’t have Mark’s phosphorescent subterranean lamp, which prompts Pirelli to get annoyed at his complaining. Talbert gets angry at being berated in front of Townsend. Pirelli doesn’t understand his complaint at first, but then comes around, as if his own mind is filling in a backstory to match his current state of mind.

Though that’s smart enough that I find it hard to believe that it’s what this story would be going with, especially as they leave the details unsaid rather than having different groupings of characters explain it in painful detail three times. Talbert confesses that he’s “sweet” on Townsend, and when she defends him to Pirelli, Pirelli becomes suddenly jealous, accusing her of two-timing him. Pirelli insists that the two have been in a relationship for some time, which makes Talbert fly off the handle, but only confuses Townsend.

Talbert and Pirelli come to blows, and the narrator tells us that “for the first time in her life”, Townsend finds herself unable to decide whether to intercede and who to help. It seems possible that they’re trying to make a point here about Gloria being unaffected by whatever’s happening to the others. That fits well with the hints in episode four that I took as suggesting she might be an alien changeling. But again, that’s far cleverer than I’ve come to expect from this, and again, you wouldn’t think the writers would have nearly enough chill to let it go without copious exposition.

Continue reading Deep Ice: I just wish the original material was better (Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II, Episode 3, Side 4)

We can do this. We’re gonna make it. One more cassette to go. Two more posts and we’re free.

So, did you reckon that the segue last time heralded a return to Mars and the actual plot? Have you learned nothing at all from our time together, dear reader? Well, good news: we will return to Mars this time. At the 30 minute mark. Out of thirty-five.

No, first it’s time for more adventures of Ethan Allen Ratkin. Young Ethan wanders into a “bad part of town,” we are told. This “bad part of town” comes off as pretty much being Sesame Street back in the ’70s before it got gentrified and working class monsters like Franklin and Forgetful Jones were priced out of the place. (Seriously, I recently watched some old Sesame Street from the ’70s and was really struck by how much shabbier it looked, but also how much more it looked like a real place that just happened to be a mixed community of puppets and humans. There’s people all over the place just going about their daily lives in the background and the whole street looks lived-in, unlike the contemporary street which is very clean and sterile and rarely has anyone visible on the street other than the characters actively participating in the scene.)

Ethan stops outside a pawn shop to be confused by the concept. This is, apparently, the first business he has passed whose purpose confuses him. Pawnbroking is a pretty old profession, and it’s maybe just a little weird that it hasn’t fallen into the scope of Ethan’s theoretical knowledge. The clearly want to make a point here about the schism between Ethan’s book-learning and his street-naivety, but they don’t really know how, so this scene is a lot of Ethan not understanding simple concepts until they are explained to them, then instantly grasping their underpinnings in theoretical economics, then completely failing to make even the smallest logical extrapolation from that.

The shopkeeper comes out to shoo Ethan away from loitering. Like everyone else, he’s a broad, overplayed stereotype, this time a dated archetype of a Brooklyn shopkeeper, with a heavy New York accent. We should probably be grateful he’s not coded strongly as Jewish given War of the Worlds II‘s hamfistedness about such things. I imagine him somewhere between Walter Matthau and Mr. Hooper. Again, the writing clearly wants him to come off as parasitic, but can’t pull it off, leaving us with a real weird (honestly, weird to the point of being kind of enjoyable) sense of him being some sort of kids’s show character. He doesn’t understand Ethan’s big fancy-school words like “mirth” or “collateralized loan”, but gives Ethan a detailed and extremely forthright explanation of his business – he literally says that he profits by human misery.

He explains that people who are down-on-their-luck take out loans from him, backed by something of value. Ethan understands the concept of an interest-bearing loan backed by collateral, but somehow doesn’t realize that the pawnbroker is talking about interest-bearing loans until he explains it. He goes on to assert that most customers can’t repay the loans, so he keeps the collateral, which Ethan doesn’t understand to be a good thing until he is told that the claimed collateral is sold at a profit. Whereupon Ethan instantly understands the economics of the situation and can’t understand why his father doesn’t go into the business.

But the irony doesn’t really land because there’s too much going on in the joke. Pawn shops thrive on human misery, thus it would be an appropriate line of work for Ronald Ratkin, the world’s most cartoonishly evil man. But Ethan doesn’t know and doesn’t believe that his dad is evil. He muses on it anyway, though, because despite being literally told by a pawnbroker that pawn shops work by exploiting people in trouble, he still doesn’t actually see anything evil about it. Just like they do with everything else, the writers rely too much on the audience to just take for granted that pawnbrokers are parasitic to make up for their failure to actually convey anything (An even bigger ask in 2019, given how much the public image of pawn shops has been rehabilitated). Even with the pawnbroker outright calling his business exploitative, the description he gives…. Just doesn’t really convey that. When people are in trouble, he offers them help. That he does it at a profit doesn’t actually make him any worse than any other participant in capitalism. And as he dispels Ethan’s misconceptions, he honestly doesn’t come off as doing anything but what is completely reasonable – recouping his investments and minimizing his risk. There’s no real addressing of the actually unsavory bits of the business – the usury and handling stolen goods – so he comes off as not really significantly different from anyone else who makes secured loans. The only real difference is that reselling forfeited collateral is a major part of his business model.

Fortunately for Ethan, Steinmetz (It is literally always referred to by its full name, “Steinmets Psychiatric Hospital”. It’s just me shortening it) is well enough known that a random pawnbroker in the bad part of town knows where it is. It’s in Connecticut. Now, we have absolutely no idea where this is taking place, so it might as well be on the moon. But the Pawnbroker suggests that it would cost Ethan about $500 to take a cab there. I have no idea how inflation has affected cab fare over the last 20 years, but given current rates, a five hundred dollar cab ride to Connecticut would suggest we’re somewhere in the DC Metro area. Which I guess is plausible. It doesn’t really track with the idea of Nancy imagining they’d send a limo to drive her to Mission Control. But a cab to Connecticut from the general neighborhood of either Johnson Space Center or Kennedy Space Center would be an order of magnitude higher. Of course, it’s plausible that the pawnbroker is simply being facetious, since “Take a cab clear up the Atlantic seaboard,” is not really a serious suggestion, but… It really doesn’t come off that way.

The pawnbroker offers Ethan a dollar an hour doing odd jobs around the shop, to which Ethan responds by misquoting Benjamin Franklin and attributing it to his father. This provides the opening for the pawnbroker to go on a tirade about how evil Ratkin pere is, that he’s responsible for the water shortage and also somehow responsible for the poverty of this particular neighborhood. This continues the pattern of Ethan being told by strangers what a piece of shit his father is which will culminate in Ethan’s decision to turn against the old man in the final episode. Of course, as usual, everyone hates Ratkin and knows the details of Ratkin’s evil machinations despite his complete control over the media and the fact that everyone also thinks that Ratkin is a paragon of industry and it would be political suicide for the government to act against him.

Also, given that the pawnbroker has just explained in excruciating detail how his business is built around human suffering and preserving the cycle of poverty, it’s weird that he’d hold such animus toward the guy who’s almost certainly driven a lot of people to the pawn shop to trade grandma’s wedding band for a half-gallon of water.

Ethan turns the job offer down, but instead pawns his gold watch. Thanks to his shrewd negotiating skills, he’s able to argue the pawnbroker up to seven hundred dollars. Still a far cry from the watch’s true value, but what can you expect. He’s clever enough to reject the pawnbroker’s usual “It’s probably fake,” and “It’s probably gold-plate,” and “Watches aren’t worth much,” but possibly accepts that the engraving (“To ER From RR”) will make it impossible to sell. It feels like a missed opportunity that the pawnbroker doesn’t bring up the possibility that the watch is stolen. I mean, a three thousand dollar gold Rolex is not something a child would normally have, so he could easily have justified underbidding Ethan on the grounds that he needed to protect against the potential for loss if the watch turned out to be stolen. We do get to actually hear the negotiation, though the transaction itself is handled by the narrator, who also foreshadows that Ethan sees a flash of movement through the window of the pawn shop as he leaves.

The narrator tells us that Ethan intuits that taxicabs are rare in the bad part of town, so he sets out in search of a better neighborhood, when he is confronted by the character we know will later become Ethan’s sidekick, Kyle Jordan.

Continue reading Deep Ice: Children should be cared for. They need love (Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II, Episode 3, Part 3)

Guys, I can’t believe I’m saying this. I’m shook. I’m confused. The world no longer makes sense. You might want to sit down.

War of the Worlds II: The New Batch actually said something relevant and important and made a relevant political observation. I know, right? Now don’t get too confused; it still sucks ass. But there’s actually a hint of a political idea in there which resonates with the world we live in.

I’m pretty sure it was an accident.

The first ten minutes – ten minutes – of side two covers exactly this ground: Tosh Rimbaugh is off the air, and the station isn’t going to reinstate him until and unless DeWitt recovers. Tosh is upset about the damage to his brand, of course, and not even slightly cowed by his role in an attempted murder, repeatedly blaming the victim and rolling out his, “De-Witless!” catchphrase. He still sounds more like Oliver Hardy than Rush Limbaugh as he splits his fury between the radio station management and Jefferson Davis Clark. He makes plans with his long-suffering PA, Seth, to appeal directly to the affiliate stations, planning for the contingency where he starts producing the show itself and directly marketing it. This is long and logistical and boring, but by War of the Worlds II standards, largely inoffensive. But then they get to the real meat of it: Seth brings up the fact that a JD Clark has got himself a Legal Defense Fund which – in a stunning example of a thing that they set up in this series actually paying off somewhere down the line – argues that Clark wasn’t culpable for his actions because they were induced, like a fit of temporary insanity, by-

Wait for it.

Wait for it.

I promise it will be good.

ECONOMIC ANXIETY

I. Am. Dead. Fucking. Serious. Way back at the beginning of Episode One, they introduced the then-irrelevant tidbit that the courts had recently ruled that certain kinds of government dereliction imputed a legal right to commit otherwise legal acts to make up for the difference: a kind of Gotta eat to live, gotta steal to eat precedent. And that comes full circle here with the idea that Clark should not be held responsible for trying to kill DeWitt because of the government’s failure to protect his job. That no, he wasn’t motivated by sexism, stoked by a loudmouthed mysogynistic blowhard with, just for the sake of argument, a comb-over and inability to tell when he’s used too much bronzer. No, no, they say, it was ECONOMIC ANXIETY.

I’m dying. I mean more than the usual amount caused by the soul-crushing reality of life in 2019. Somehow, despite their scattershot, unengaged, underinformed, ultimately directionless political meandering that never amounts to more than “Get off my lawn you kids!”, the Phelans managed to happen into the idea that in the face of female president being shot by a blue-collar yokel literally named after the president of the Confederacy, people would rush to the idea that it was totally “economic anxiety” that put him up to it.

This happy thought is going to carry me almost all the way to the next scene (which sucks). The remainder of Rimbaugh’s scene is, in all honesty, kinda okay. It’s almost a nice touch listening to him line-by-line absorb and internalize this new narrative: he will, in fact, usurp the leadership of Clark’s defense fund, use his access to manipulate Clark into publicly exonerating him of any involvement in the shooting, and at the same time push the “economic anxiety” issue as a new cudgel against the DeWitt administration.

Wow. A scene I… Kinda don’t hate. The whole character of Rimbaugh is misguided and too cartoonish, but there is a sort of stylized realism in how he fails to move an inch even in light of the assassination attempt – the sociopathy of his complete lack of sympathy isn’t coupled with him adopting the mannerisms of a comic book villain the way everyone else in this thing does. And the process whereby he rewrites his own attitude toward Clark in order to assimilate the ECONOMIC ANXIETY argument into his worldview is… Truer to life than I wish it were.

And then the following scene was so bad that it took me basically all the rest of the time between my previous post and this one to force myself to listen to it.

Continue reading Deep Ice: More Men Were Back at Work (Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II, Episode 3, Part 2)

Previously…

Hey, guess who’s exactly stupid enough to have set up an alert to let him know when a copy of the episode of War of the Worlds II he couldn’t find before turned up on Amazon.

That’s right, I am masochistic enough to have spent additional money for the chance to listen to a twenty-year-old audio drama I hate. So here we are, folks, the missing chapter in the long-lost saga of Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II, episode 3: “The Tor”.

If you’re just joining us, two years ago, this rabbit hole in which we find ourselves brought us to an audio play by Thomas and Yvonne Phelan, nominally a sequel to the 1938 Mercury Theater version of War of the Worlds. In fact, the audio play has had approximately sweet fuck all to do with the famous Orson Welles broadcast, instead being a political soap opera and soap box for the authors to make snide comments about things they don’t really understand but certainly don’t approve of about how the world is going these days. The overarching premise is that pollution and inept leadership and a fickle populace have caused a global potable water crisis, or possibly the water crisis was manufactured by the world’s richest asshole, and in order to save the world, a space expedition was sent to Mars to look for water. The bare-bones connection between this and the 1938 radio play is that their shuttle was able to make the trip thanks to retrofitting with reverse-engineered Martian technology.

It is bad, folks. Just awful. The writing is stilted and weird, the characters who have any personality at all are playing weird, over-the-top shticks that seem to have been chosen at random, it’s full of lengthy, irrelevant asides, subplots that go nowhere, and there’s just too many damn things going on for any part of the story to ever get anywhere.

I hate it. If you’ve been wondering why my throughput dropped off so significantly in the middle of 2017, well, okay, it’s mostly because my kids are now both of an age where they requires a lot more of my higher brain functions, but also it’s because reviewing the other three episodes of this shit burned me the hell out.

But I will not let this thing beat me. Come along therefore, and let us slay this dragon together. This is “The Tor”.

The good news up front is that fully half of side 1 is dedicated to the narrator’s boring recap of the story so far and a replay of episode 2’s cliffhanger. In case you missed it, the away team, minus Mark Rutherford, just returned to Orion I, and did a painfully painfully protracted scene where everyone took turns saying “Jessica Storm!” in an alarmed tone while Nikki Jackson assumed they were just musing on how unpleasant it would be had her old college roommate and soap opera villainess been part of the crew rather than realizing that they were trying to tell her that Jessica Storm was, in fact, right behind her with a gun, having commandeered the ship.

Storm is just about to complete her mission by murdering the Orion crew when Mark Rutherford beams himself aboard. Why? Fucked if I know. When they left Mars, he slipped away for reasons that weren’t explained at the time and never will be, but apparently all he did while he was gone was to make arrangements to beam back up for reasons aren’t explained at the time and never will be.

Jessica demands he tell her about the Martians. The Orion crew begs him not to, since she’s planning to kill them all either way, but Mark gives in when Jessica shoots Nikki in the arm. “My arm. You shot me right in the arm,” she says in what I am pretty sure predates the same bit from Austin Powers, and also is not funny. Jessica keeps using the word “ventilate” to describe what she’s doing, like a ’30s gangster moll. Her hired gun Walsh is super pissy the whole time because he assumes Storm is going all soft and womanly by wanting to interrogate the prisoners rather than simply murder them immediately. This is part of the whole “Walsh thinks Jessica is going soft and is getting ready to turn on her,” thing that came up elsewhere, a contrivance that serves no purpose whatsoever.

Everyone sounds real, real bored during this entire exchange. Art imitates life. Anyway, Mark tells her that the Martians will beam them all down at four in the afternoon if they stand in a circle and think happy thoughts and do not carry any weapons.

Neither Jessica nor Walsh are cool with leaving their weapons – Walsh isn’t cool with any of this and still wants to just murder everyone and go home – but Jessica quietly plots for him to rig Orion 1 to explode and take the remote detonator with them instead of their guns. The narrator wastes another two minutes going into excruciating yet boring detail as Walsh hides plastic explosive around the ship. Details include the fact that plastic explosive looks like gray putty, but is, in fact, plastic explosive (the narrator uses the obsolete term “plastique”, which I haven’t heard in years, but I kinda remember still being in fairly common usage, despite being outdated, back in the ’80s. Not sure about the ’90s).

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Nancy Ferris was, if you can remember that far back, was threatening the son of World’s Richest Man and Bond Villain Ronald Ratkin in an attempt to escape captivity. His son being the only thing Ratkin treasures more than world domination, the thugs are forced to hold back while she makes an escape in a scene that is so exciting that of course they do not actually perform it but just have the narrator tell us is very tense. When we actually do drop into performance mode, it’s a boring cliche talky scene of Nancy and young Ethan Allen Ratkin bonding over his loneliness and her maternal instinct and her confessing that she’s probably not going to murder a child and him admitting that his dad is kind of a dick, and him finally agreeing to show her a safe way out of the complex, in exchange for helping him find his mother. In this action-unpacked escape sequence, they burn a few more minutes with Nancy pussyfooting around explaining what a sanatorium is, and piecing together the link to those cancelled checks she’d seen in Ratkin’s office.

In his office, Ratkin cackles maniacally at the thought of how he can just have his guards kill Nancy since Ferris wouldn’t have any way to know. Which really just calls attention to the fact that Ferris would have no way of knowing if Ratkin hadn’t even bothered kidnapping Nancy in the first place; he could’ve just lied, since Artemis jammed communications with NASA. We don’t even get to actually hear the cackle, as this is yet another scene delivered to us via narrator.

Thus we end side one, with approximately sweet fuck all having been accomplished. I should be upset, but mostly I’m happy to have gotten through it so quickly. I fear the remaining parts won’t be nearly so quick, which is compounded by the fact that if you’ve read by treatment of episode 4, you should know that none of the many, many, many, many pieces on the board are going to move more than a couple of squares over the course of this episode.

This article has been brief because I really hate this series with a consuming passion by now. Nothing happened in this part, and I feel absolutely no impetus to stretch it out any longer than I have to.

This is the end of side one. Please flip the cassette over to continue on the next side.