Category: War of the Worlds

Guess where I am this week! That’s right, once again I have descended into the house of the mouse to face murderous Floridian climate in the name of standing in hour-long lines for a three minutes ride! But look, ragging on Disney is all well and good, but, y’know, they do good work. I don’t like travel or crowds or heat or the outdoors, but I had a blast the last time I went to Walt Disney World all the same. So, in light of the occasion, why not?

It is January 18, 1987. Let’s see. The president of Ecuador got kidnapped last Friday. The treasurer of Pennsylvania will commit suicide on live television this Thursday. It is otherwise a fairly quiet week. Nintendo releases Zelda II: The Adventure of Link in Japan, but the US release will take another two years. The Tortellis, a sort-lived spin-off of Cheers, debuts this week. Howard the Duck comes out on home video. Labyrinth and Flight of the Navigator will both come out a week later to coincide with my birthday.

American Bandwagon censors The Beastie Boys. Bruce Willis releases his debut album, The Return of Bruno. Gregory Abbot’s “Shake You Down” takes the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 from the Bangles “Walk Like an Egyptian”. Duran Duran, Madonna, Janet Jackson, Genesis, Wang Chung and Survivor are all in the top ten. 1987 actually seems like a hell of a year, but it’s really still just spinning up. Television is almost entirely new, full of shows I have heard of but episodes I have not. MacGyver gives us “Soft Touch”, in which Mac and his disaster-prone friend Penny Parker prevent an assassination, and I will provide a little linklove to Philip and Casey by noting that ALF is A Little Bit of Soap, and Perfect Strangers provides Trouble in Paradise. Charles in Charge and Remmington Steele have both unexpectedly returned to TV after being cancelled, the former resurrected in syndication, and the latter pulled out of retirement by the network apparently just to screw Pierce Brosnan out of playing James Bond for a few years.

But never mind all that, because we’re not talking about TV or film this week, but sequential art, the field I don’t know a lot about despite it somehow coming up about once every six weeks on this blog. I’ve read one or two Disney comics. Reprints of the old Don Rosa-era Donald Duck stuff I think. It’s not nearly as well-known in the US, but over in Europe, where the comic book market is considerably more diverse, Mickey, Donald, and the lot inhabit a universe far more fleshed out and consistent than the one-off cartoon shorts that largely defined their American mythos up until the debut comics-inspired Ducktales (woo-oo-ooh!).

Under the localized name “Topolino”, Mickey Mouse had been a fixture of Italian comic book stands since the ’30s. By the 1950s, Topolino was a monthly and later biweekly comic, and started occasionally offering up literary parodies, starting with L’inferno di Topolino, a Mickey-fortified retelling of Dante’s Inferno. They followed it up with such offerings as Paperino Don Chisciotte – Donald Quixote – and Donald Duck versions of The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Orlando Furioso, and Les Miserables. Yeah.

Donald is sadly absent from today’s tale, but the original mouse himself instead takes the lead in Alessandro Sisti’s 1987 literary parody, Topolino e la Guerra dei Mondi: Mickey Mouse in War of the Worlds. Holy crap.

So when I say it’s a “parody”, I probably ought to explain myself a little. If you’re used to contemporary usage, you might be expecting a sort of Zucker Brothers kind of “over-the-top nonsense made up of pop-culture references and hyperbolic exaggerations of genre tropes.” But this is a parody in an older, more subtle sense: more of a Man from UNCLE sort of parody that’s less about being overtly ridiculous and more about a take on the genre that’s lightheartedly self-aware.

The War of the Worlds might seem like a hard sell as a children’s comic. But it’s easier than it sounds. We already saw the weird Magic Lantern adaptation that “For kids!”‘d the story up and left it largely unrelated to the original. This version sanitizes the story and makes it more gentle and more, well, Disney, but it still tells basically the same story. Tragedy, when you get down to it, is often just comedy with a different soundtrack. All you really have to do is make the heat ray do a little less “zaps you into a smoldering skeleton” and a bit more “makes you jump up ten feet in the air with a comical shout and your underwear showing through a smoldering hole in your pants.”

And that’s exactly where we find ourselves. Mickey Mouse stars as a character of the same name, a well-respected citizen of Maybury Hill in Woking, whose friend O’Goofy invites him to try out his new telescope just in time to see the explosions on Mars that foreshadow the Martian invasion. Well, I say invasion; these invaders are far less hostile, and only rarely attack without provocation. Atypically, we get to hear conversations among the Martians, who speak to each other in emoji which is subtitled for our benefit. And their dialogue is, I think, deliberately ambiguous. They certainly consider the humans to be primitive, but they mention conquest only once in passing, and mostly just express frustration at the hostility they’re met with. They do still fire on O’Goofy, hitting his flag of truce, but they otherwise tend not to shoot first, leaving open the possibility that the “war” was more of a series of misunderstandings unfortunate escalations.

Continue reading Deep Ice: Floating Green Weirdness (Mickey Mouse’s War of the Worlds)

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

We cross-fade to an idealized version of the team’s underground lair, with a formally set dining table under a crystal chandelier. Suzanne is done up like a ’50s housewife archetype, with Blackwood beside her, smoking a pipe, wearing a sweater, and doing a damned fine job of playing the sitcom dad. Kincaid is in a smoking jacket. They very gently strongarm her into sitting down for a nice pleasant dinner together.

The reason I question the editing is that we see all of this before Blackwood and Suzanne announce their intention to impose on the game as well. Had we reversed the order of the scenes, we could’ve had a moment where it wasn’t clear whether the versions of Blackwood and Suzanne in the game actually were manifestations of their real-world counterparts. Instead, it’s pretty obvious that they’re essentially puppets created from Debi’s memories, but controlled by Sendac.

Oh, and that thing about Suzanne talking to Debi from the control room? I think a few pages of the script must’ve gotten mangled here, because that side of the plot immediately backpedals. Suzanne has no idea how to interact with the Morthren computer. Fortunately, Blackwood shows up and shoves her to the side, declaring his intent to use the tracker cells to interface with the computer, linking himself both to the game and to the Morthren at the same time.

This bit is hard to follow, and it really didn’t have to be. I think the reason for it is some late changes to the script. The way the scenes in the control room are filmed, it feels very much like we are supposed to perceive Blackwood as actively doing something to resolve the story. All he actually does is gurn a bit from the strain of being connected to… Whatever he’s connected to. We never actually see what he’s seeing from his link with Sendac and with the game, and the only information he communicates about it is at the end, when he announces that the alien computer is dying.

I think we’re meant to understand that Blackwood interfacing with the game is what allows Suzanne to get through to Debi, appearing on the videophone to remind her that she’s still in the game and none of this is real. Game-Suzanne turns the phone off, as it’s dinner time, and guides her back to the table. Suzanne’s contribution here doesn’t seem like it adds anything. We haven’t seen any indication that Debi actually believes that she’s out of the game and back in reality. That would be a valid idea if they’d established that the nature of the game made that kind of messing with her mind a possibility, like in the Captain Power episode when Lord Dread suggests that maybe he’s already won the war and has messed with a defeated John’s memories to torture him. They could’ve established the game as having a dream-like quality. But they haven’t. On the contrary, the phrase they keep hammering home is that the game is “totally real”. This is the only point in the game where we switch to being totally surreal, and they haven’t done anything to suggest that the game is trying to trick Debi in that way.

On the contrary, Kincaid offers Debi the ray gun from the previous scene, and the others announce that they’ve caught the champion for her. A second Adrian Paul stumbles in, still wearing the tuxedo, but this time in zombie makeup. Between puffs of his pipe, Game-Blackwood explains that she can end the game by shooting him.

Ardix makes it back to the Morthren base in time for Mana to fret that Blackwood interfacing with the game has caused them to lose control. This is not reflected in any obvious way within the game, but again points to the idea that some of these scenes were written with the expectation that it was Blackwood who was going to save the day here. Malzor, in a complete reversal from before, orders the game shut down, even though this would kill Sendac and for some reason lose all the combat data they’ve acquired.

Yes, this makes no sense from the standpoint of how computers work. But this sort of, “Oh computers are magical and data can’t be copied or backed up,” thing is incredibly common even unto the modern era in television shows, and at least War of the Worlds has the justification that Morthren computers are biological in nature so we can guess their basic principles might be very different from real computers.

Malzor’s reversal, though surprising, is justified. When it was just Sendac’s life on the line, he was willing to take a risk to finish the experiment. But the humans being able to interface with their technology wasn’t part of the plan, and opens up the possibility that they’re dealing with an actual threat to them. Before this point, the Morthren had no reason to think that their involvement in the game was known to or even relevant to the attackers: Nikita screwed up and kidnapped someone with a family. What were the odds that he’d have grabbed the daughter of a professional alien-fighter?

The fact that Mana is suddenly the one against shutting the experiment down and losing the data is a reversal less easy to justify. She’d been the one before who had wanted to end the game early when things started to go south. There’s been some inconsistency on this front about Mana all season, really. She’s butted heads with Malzor when he’s jeopardized her scientific research for his more militaristic goals, but at other times, they’ve come into conflict because she views his plans as too risky. I think this episode can actually serve as a bridge on this front, since it shows us both sides. We saw Mana getting hot and bothered over the latest game update earlier, then she’s reluctant and wants to pull the plug when things don’t go to plan, but she gets excited again as Sendac adapts to fighting both Debi and Kincaid. You can read this as Mana being not inconsistent so much as conflicted: she’s a pragmatist, but she’s also a scientist. Her instinct to shut down the game happened before the game “got good”.

But Mana concedes and starts shutting the game down remotely. Not that this is reflected in the game world. The only person we see it affect is Blackwood. We don’t see the game glitching out, or really anything to give a sense of urgency to Debi’s final showdown.

Instead, we get a cliche so obvious that you have certainly already guessed how things play out in the game world. It’s competently executed, but it’s also played painfully straight. Can we all say it together? Everyone entreats Debi to shoot Zombie-Kincaid to win the game, then Zombie-Kincaid tells Debi that she should shoot both of them, so Debi shoots the Kincaid in the dressing gown. Sendac falls off his chair and dies conveniently off-screen so that we don’t need to pay for the complicated Morthren decomposition effect. Debi and Kincaid are released from the game, and Kincaid runs off to help Blackwood, who was knocked out when Sendac died.

We return to the sewer for a coda, which finds Blackwood with a severe headache from the tracker cells.I wonder if this scene is meant to mirror Kincaid’s hangover at the beginning of the episode? Good thing they never bother with those again if it leaves him this messed up. Before refilling his ice bag, Suzanne gives him a little kiss on the cheek, and he watches her leave with an expression that hints at something I’ll get to in my own coda.

Continue reading Antithesis: Totally Real (War of the Worlds 2×17, Part 3)

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

While Debi is busy getting kidnapped by an unscrupulous underground casino manager, Blackwood and Suzanne are doing some unethical human experimentation with their new toy. They swab their respective wrists with q-tips after poking the two cultured samples made from the Morthren drone. A few seconds later, Suzanne starts having a bad trip, pressing the heels of her hands to her temples and shuddering with pain, but she urges Blackwood to go on, and her pain turns to what starts to look maybe just a hair more orgasmic than you’d really want as she gets a blurry glimpse of what Blackwood is looking at. They’re both delighted when it comes into focus enough for her to watch Blackwood type out “Eureka” at the computer keyboard. Suzanne having a strange and disproportionate emotional reaction when influenced by alien technology seems somehow familiar to me, despite the fact that it’s not something we’ve seen in this season…

Back at the Morthren base, Mana is working on an update to the game which, “Links together the senses of human and Morthren alike in an extraordinary universe!” I wonder if there’s some intentional parallelism here, because, like Suzanne, Mana’s tone as she explains this conveys a kind of excitement that feels disproportionate and has maybe just a hint of a sexual charge to it. I’m not upset or anything, but it’s odd, especially because it’s not something I really recall us seeing much of before.

In fact, everyone seems to be hamming it up this week, well beyond what the plot requires, and in some cases beyond what the plot justifies. Honestly, if they’d been acting like this all season, maybe it would’ve been a more fun show. Take Sendac for example. It’s pretty clear to me that Michael Woods is modeling his performance on Dolph Lundgren as Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, playing Sendac with a kind of abstract, detached “I must break you,” arrogance. Enough so that there’s a moment where Malzor shoots a concerned look over his shoulder to Mana, hinting that he’s worried Sendac might be getting carried away. He reminds him that the only reason for his involvement is to study human creativity. Sendac shrugs it off, insisting that creativity won’t help humanity.

I really like that Malzor shows concern over this. There’s been a handful of little hints across the season that the Morthren are becoming “tainted” by humanity, and the idea of Sendac putting personal glory ahead of the mission could very well tie into that. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s probably intentional, though it’s not fully-formed, likely due to the bounty of issues the production of this series had with consistency. Like I said last week, so many things in this episode are interesting on their own and work well, but they fail to slot together into a unified whole.

They never spell out Malzor’s concern, for example. That would be okay if it played into a larger series-long arc, but of course they don’t have the time or the focus for that sort of thing, so as it is, we’re left with an incomplete sketch of Malzor possibly under-reacting to what sure looks like a breakdown of the Morthren philosophy.

Speaking of Morthren philosophy, we’ve seen both Malzor and Sendac (though he reverses on the point) express respect for human ingenuity in this episode. Again, if it were part of a pattern, that would be really interesting. As a one-off, though, it doesn’t match up with the Morthren arrogance in their superiority we’ve seen elsewhere. It’s a nice change to switch from, “Humans are so stupid and useless and weak. Huh, they somehow keep beating us anyway. Let’s double down on the same failed strategies because the problem can’t be us,” to, “These humans seem to have something going for them. We should really look into that.” But it’s a blip here, not the promise of interesting future developments.

From Kincaid’s failure to subdue a henchman without killing him, we cut immediately to Debi being introduced to Nikita’s gambling pit, Hannibal Lecter-style, tied to a chair with a leather gag over her mouth. Which makes me uncomfortable right in the moment, but not as uncomfortable as the Fridge Logic when I realize that in the space of the cut, she’s also been re-dressed in white fencing gear. We were clearly not meant to think about it, but in addition to kidnapping her and restraining her and gagging her, Nikita’s goons stripped and re-clothed a fourteen year old girl.

What the fuck, War of the Worlds?

At least Sendac has the decency to be shocked by this, complaining at being asked to fight a child. Of course, he was right there when Malzor made these plans, and it doesn’t really make any sense for him to be acting like this for show. Again with the disjointed bits of the story not seeming like they were really meant to go together.

You know what I’m thinking now? A lot of the inconsistencies in this episode stem from scenes at the Morthren base. If you drop those, you get a more consistent Sendac, and you don’t get mixed messages. It would be too much to imagine them doing an episode without the aliens showing up, but it’s just about possible to think that this script was originally written with the Morthren involvement being a surprise. Maybe in an earlier draft, there were no scenes with Malzor and Mana, and it wasn’t until the very end that we would learn that the game was alien in origin. Forget Malzor coming up with the plan to use children – maybe recruiter for a VR company is actually Nikita’s day job, and kidnapping Debi to play in the death-game isn’t something he was doing on orders from the Morthren, but on his own initiative.

Heck, maybe the game wasn’t Morthren in the early drafts. Aside from his last exchange with Malzor, Sendac’s general behavior would make a bit more sense if he’d originally been conceived not as a Morthren, but as a clone. In this hypothetical “first draft” version, perhaps it really was just a money-making scheme for the Morthren, and Sendac was a human VR gladiator who the Morthren had cloned to win them some cold, hard cash. In that case, it’d be entirely consistent with what we’ve seen of clones that he’d behave basically like a stone-cold prizefighter in the employ of evil totalitarians, justifying the whole Canadian Ivan Drago thing he’s doing.

It would also resolve a moderately serious plot hole in the fact that without commenting on it at all, the Morthren are taking a tremendous risk here: what the hell happens if Sendac loses, and proceeds to bleed green glowstick fluid before melting and vaporizing the way the Morthren do when they die, before a live studio audience? Sendac you could justify being too proud to consider the possibility, but that’s the sort of thing that ought to prompt a complaint from Mana at least.

​At this point, it would maybe feel like showing off for Nikita to describe the game as “totally real” again, so instead he tells Debi that it has a, “Higher reality quotient than any other.” The phrase “reality quotient” is nonsense, of course, but it has a lovely cyberpunk feel to it. Nikita assures her that it’s her choice whether or not to play, but it’d be a real shame if she didn’t, as, y’know, she’s getting plugged in to the murder machine in either case. The assembled spectators are, of course, shocked and scandalized because they assume the fight will probably be lame since the big burly guy is probably going to murder the teenage girl pretty quick. No, none of them are concerned that this is pretty damn evil and the teenage girl clearly didn’t volunteer for this. What kind of dystopia do you take this for?

Debi finds herself in a virtual simulation of shogunate Japan so realistic that it consists of a couple of paper screens and a gong in a black void with some low-hanging carbon dioxide fog. Virtual reality has equipped her with an ill-fitting samurai costume, because I guess this being a totally real simulation, the costumes are all off-the-rack. Sendac approaches through the fog, hamming it up for the audience by doing his best Russel Crowe “Are you not entertained?” shtick. Debi remains fearful, but manages to regain her composure when a samurai sword appears in her hand.

Meanwhile, Blackwood, Kincaid and Suzanne take a teenage boy to a strip club.

They do not call attention to this or anything, but we’ve been here before. Kincaid needs information about something that went down at the simulator expo, so he goes to his hacker contact, and that’s Scoggs, and her day job is exotic dancer. David recaps the previous scene for Scoggs’s benefit, and she helpfully reveals that there’s been rumors of mercenaries being kidnapped to play murdergames that are (Sunglasses) totally real (Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhh!).

We will pause here very briefly for me to be surprised that Nikita was kidnapping mercenaries for his murdergame. I mean, okay, I can believe you might need to engage in a little bit of friendly gunpoint abduction to conscript children into playing deadly video games. Actually, I don’t really think that; I’m pretty sure Nikita could easily get volunteers. But I’ll allow it. Mercenaries, though? First, you’ve got a significantly higher labor cost here in using force to compel an adult combat-trained person to play video games. We just demonstrated that Nikita’s goons are, to put it simply, pretty easy to kill in a crowded tech expo with their own knives without raising so much commotion that you can’t discretely leave afterward via the handicap-accessible exit. And, like, they’re mercenaries. You can just hire them. You give them money, they give you fighting. That’s basically the business model.

Nikita kidnapping Debi made sense in the context of her being a rare talent he’d never seen the like of before (Even if the evidence of this was not effectively conveyed to the viewer), and him making a rash, one-off decision. It’s easy for me to accept that this is the first time he’s resorted to kidnapping anyone. Scoggs suggesting that abduction is actually the regular MO doesn’t fit at all. Another example of the sloppiness with which the scenes are connected.

An incredibly clumsy block costs Debi her sword, and house odds favor the champion 78-to-1. But Debi hucks the gong at Sendac like it’s a frisbee while he’s showing off for the audience. And… I don’t know. I mean, actually I do know, but it’s very badly choreographed.

Because I’m sure the script says that she hits him in the gut hard enough to double him over and disorient him long enough for her to slip past him. But what it looks like is that he just catches it in a very normal sort of catch right in front of his chest, then doubles over for no reason, and kinda just stops paying attention and starts looking all around him for a bit to give her time to escape. Throwing a gong is taken by the audience as evidence of Debi’s tactical genius. Nikita claims that the game promises “hours of excitement”, which I guess means it’s a good thing that the champ didn’t just win the thing with his first blow in the opening seconds.

David identifies a grainy dot matrix printout of Nikita, and Scoggs gives them the bad news: he runs a “snuff game” out of an underground casino in quadrant nine with a thousand dollar cover. Everyone emotes quite a lot, then rushes off to the rescue. Except for David, who they don’t wish to further endanger, and so leave behind.

In the strip club. And tell the stripper to make sure he gets home safely. Y’know, the fact that David never once seems, in spite of the circumstances, to acknowledge that he is a teenage boy in a strip club having a conversation about underground bloodsport gambling with a stripper is either a testament to the strength of his character, or a testament to the weakness of his casting.

The kicker? They don’t actually rush straight off to rescue Debi. They go home first, because Kincaid has to roll himself a cigarette-sized tranquilizer dart and blow gun so he can use it at a dramatically convenient moment later, and Suzanne can propose the dangerous idea of taking the experimental alien tracking q-tips with them.

In VR, Sendac walks through the fog doing menacing flourishes with his sword. I don’t know, guys. I’m not sure they’re really committed to this whole “He’s an alien killing machine without human emotion” thing. Debi somehow realizes that she can spin around real fast and create a cyclone of fog. Because this game is… totally real.

This confuses Sendac enough that Debi is able to sneak up on him and knock him unconscious with the hilt of her broken sword. Though the crowd bays for blood, Debi refuses to deliver the killing blow, shouting her refusal to murder for the audience’s amusement before discarding her sword.

Under orders from Ardix in the control room, Nikita uses smelling salts to arouse Sendac, whose body vanishes in the game world. Lucky job smelling salts work on Morthren. It’d be super awkward if it turned out that aliens had a massive allergic reaction to ammonia or something.

Continue reading Antithesis: Totally Real (War of the Worlds 2×17, Part 2)

It is April 23, 1990. Namibia, recently independent from South Africa, joins the UN. Paulette Goddard dies at 79. The golden-age actress had appeared alongside Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times and The Great Dictator. Dev Patel is born. Robert Polhill is released from captivity in Lebanon, the first hostage to be released since 1986. The New England Journal of Medicine recommends that men avoid sunbathing in the nude due to the risk of genital cancer and also because no one wants to see that. Tomorrow, East and West Germany will agree to merge their currencies, with the West German Deutsche Mark becoming the official currency of both nations in July. Space Shuttle Discovery will launch tomorrow, carrying the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. Later this week, in Nicaragua, Violeta Chamorro will become the first woman elected to the presidency in the Americas (Previous female heads of state in the Americas had been appointed to their respective offices). Michael Milken will plead guilty to six felonies in the junk bond scandal, and will face punishment so severe that to this day, he is only the 606th richest person in the world.

Janet Jackson receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Jimi Hendrix’s Stratocaster brings in close to three hundred thousand dollars at auction. Sinead O’Connor spends a second week at the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Nothing Compares 2U”.

Among this week’s movie releases is Spaced Invaders, which … (looks at capsule summary) … Well shit. I guess I’m going to have to watch it, aren’t I? Fine. This past Saturday gave us a multi-network simulcast of the infamously bizarre multi-franchise crossover PSA Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue, in which the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Smurfs, ALF, the Muppet Babies and a half dozen other animated franchises team up to save America’s youth from the dangers of that most deadly of drugs, the demon weed marijuana. This is utterly convincing, and causes young people to forswear the substance, meaning it is never used again and certainly never gets legalized for medicinal or recreational uses.

TV is mostly repeats otherwise, up through the middle of the week. I guess maybe Earth Day threw off everyone’s schedules? Friday will bring us a new episode of Perfect Strangers. I will defer to the expert on this one, but at a guess, I’m going to say “Cousin Larry in ambitious and unscrupulous, while Cousin Balki acts like a mentally handicapped toddler, and ultimately the status quo is preserved. Other members of the regular cast are not given any worthwhile material.” Star Trek The Next Generation gives us “Tin Man“, which I’m told is a very good episode, but I’ve never been able to really get the details to stick in my head much. Friday the 13th the Series gives us “The Elecrocutioner”, in which a cursed electric chair grants electric powers to people in exchange for murders. Sure. Why not.

1990 is right in the middle of the transitional era for the suite of technologies we collectively refer to these days as “Virtual Reality”. This was really when virtual reality was moving from being primarily experimental into the first serious stabs at mainstream commercialization. Too soon, as it turned out; that generation of VR was a bit of a flash in the pan, with no one achieving any real commercial success, and the era best known, perhaps, for its more extravagant failures, like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy.

But even though “real” virtual reality went back to the drawing board for a couple of decades to regroup and figure out a way forward that didn’t induce nausea, it remained in the public consciousness a thing which seemed “up and coming” enough that mass media science fiction pretty much had to address it. It was so obviously going to be a big part of the future that if you were writing a story set in the future, its absence would be as surprising as the absence of flying cars, robots, videophones, or the internet. Just kidding; no one thought the internet was going to be a thing.

And in a way popular science fiction utterly failed to do with computers, it recognized with virtual reality that while, sure, education would be a thing, the “killer app” for VR was definitely going to be recreation. Stories featuring computer-generated realities transitioned away from the fantastical “Magically zapped into a computer-world where actual computer concepts are represented by physical analogies,” (Either in the more fantastic Tron style, or a more “realistic” cyberpunk “Hack the computer by punching it with your computer-fists” sense) and toward a more naturalistic “Computer-generated simulacra to give bored astronauts somewhere to play and/or masturbate.” Star Trek, of course, popularized the holodeck style of “VR is a room you go to which shows you a fake reality and maybe it can hurt you because [tech], but it’s not like we actually beam your brain out of your head and into a computer or anything.”

If War of the Worlds had ever had time to settle down and develop a house style, it seems like a likely candidate for a “standard” episode-of-the-week plot would be “Morthren take something mundane which is currently big in the pop-science consciousness, and turn it into a murder machine.” There’s a basic similarity between that kind of plot and what Mancuso was doing over on Friday the 13th all this time. It opens up a broad range of possibilities, and gives an easy, repeatable framework that you can use as the backbone for a lot of episodes, and then sort of fill in around the edges with things like ongoing story arcs and character growth.

None of this actually happened, of course, because, near as I can tell, no one was actually at the wheel of this show. And I know that TV of this era didn’t really have the modern “showrunner” concept, where a single creator’s creative vision was the dominant driving force behind the show. That’s a much more modern concept. But there’s not even a sense here of a single coherent vision within individual episodes a lot of the time, let alone across the series. Historically, we know that the show lost its script supervisor early on. And over the course of 20 episodes, we have at least 16 writers. Which means that the closest thing we have to a consistent narrative voice is Jared Martin and Adrian Paul scribbling notes on the scripts between takes in a desperate attempt to maintain some vague consistency.

At least we get a returning writer for “Totally Real” this week. Unfortunately, it’s Jim Trombetta, who previously gave us “Time to Reap“, an episode which I believe I described as “incoherent garbage” due to it taking an interesting concept and implementing it as… well, incoherent garbage, I guess.

But maybe I can be optimistic. “Time to Reap” had an interesting premise, but it failed mostly because it used that concept poorly, hitting some time travel cliches as a sort of paint-by-numbers exercise, getting absolutely nothing out of the choice to revisit the context of the movie, magically transferring knowledge to the protagonists as convenient, and completely ignoring causality after making a big deal out of it. VR bloodsport is maybe a less interesting concept, but it’s okay. And there’s not nearly so many places for it to go wrong. I mean, we kinda know where this is going to go, right? The Morthren invent some kind of VR esports thingy which kills the loser, and Kincaid’s going to have to risk his life in the arena to save the day. VR’s probably going to pretty much look like a Laser Tag arena, except there will probably be a segment that gets slightly surreal and has a lot of filters.

That’s basically all you have to do in order to meet the absolute minimum requirements for this episode being basically functional. So let’s see if they fuck it up…

We still have the dateline of “Almost Tomorrow”, in case you’ve forgotten. Seeing it now made me wonder, so I looked back. The dateline is absent from “No Direction Home” through “Night Moves”, and the episode after this one replaces it with something else on account of opening in a flashback. Is it just an oversight that it’s missing for seven episodes? Yeah, probably. I also notice that “Almost Tomorrow” (and next week’s alternative) is rendered in a different font from the rest of the titles.

The first thing we see, after an establishing shot of a contextless building at night, is a pair of men in combat. You could describe what they’re wearing as cheap samurai costumes, but it’s be more fair to say that they look like samurai-themed uniforms, sort of akin to fencing gear, one all-black, the other all-white.

Their arena for this battle is a featureless black void partially filled with low-hanging smoke — it’s the laser tag arena we were promised! To further highlight that we are watching a video game, it’s presented in the the frame of a projection within a pyramidal display. That’s kind of neat. I assume the use of a pyramidal display here is meant to evoke the Pepper’s Ghost illusion. That’s a nineteenth century illusion where reflecting images off angled glass creates the illusion of depth. By arranging four of them into a pyramid, you can approximate a 360° view. It doesn’t actually produce a volumetric image, at least not on its own, but it’s been the basis for lots of “3D” gimmicks, and it’s also been the basis of some legitimate (or, at least, “legitimate”) attempts at doing proper autostereoscopic displays. We’re still a year out from Sega’s seminal Time Traveler game, which used a similar kind of illusion (using a parabolic mirror rather than Pepper’s Ghost. Devices to produce both types of illusion are now popping up in my targeted ads just for talking about it.) to simulate a volumetric display, but I think the transparent pyramid display still would’ve been something the audience would instinctively understand that they were seeing some sort of futuristic 3-D display. Never mind that it’s not actually a Pepper’s Ghost illusion — the pyramid itself is also part of the projection, and vanishes when the game ends. The visual shorthand of “A hologram is a three-dimensional projection which appears inside some kind of enclosure. Let’s say a pyramidal one,” is powerful enough that it justifies not just having the image appear unbounded in the air above them, even though obviously that would be more impressive for the spectators.

Spectators? Yeah, we’re in a room full of men and women shouting out bets on the competitors. The men are all in tuxedoes, the women mostly dressed in 1920s-style eveningwear. Quite a few of them are fairly old. We’re shown pretty straightforwardly that this is an underground gambling ring, but a high-class one. There’s a sort of speakeasy atmosphere about it, which might be a little hard to justify. I’m sure we’ll be told that such things are highly illegal, and it at times seems like this show is set in a police state. But on the other hand, we know that narcotics are legal in this world, and that the government is in a state of collapse and life is cheap. Frankly, it would come as a surprise at this point if bloodsports were illegal in this world.

The black-clad samurai dominates the fight. We’re told by a bettor that he’s the house champion. There’s one brief moment of reversal when the samurai in white breaks his opponent’s sword, but this doesn’t faze the pit boss, who calls for final bets before the champ impales his opponent. The physical bodies of the competitors, also color coded, sit wearing adorable simulacra of VR headsets at opposite ends of the pyramid table. The man in white falls to the floor and is confirmed dead by the pit boss, who assures the audience that the game is, as they had been promised, “Totally Real”. I sort of like the way they title drop the concept of “Totally real” before ever uttering the phrase “virtual reality”.

One does wonder why they’re all so excited about a video game that kills people when they lose a swordfight when, like, they could just have the competitors actually swordfight. But now I’m just being a downer. We’ll let that slide.

Continue reading Antithesis: Totally Real (War of the Worlds 2×17, Part 1)

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

And now, the conclusion.

The frontispiece tells us that War of the Worlds is published bimonthly — a slight exaggeration since this is the last issue — so that would put us in March or April of 1990, which fits with the advertisements in the back for “Silver Storm”, a new superhero series starting in May. The “Malibu Hotline” page at the back announces the upcoming releases of an adaptation of Logan’s Run, a Captain Harlock collector’s video, Ninja High School: A Boy and his Dog Supreme, an “adult” miniseries called White Devil, and Gun Fury Returns #1, in which the, ahem, “squirter of justice” faces off against the, ahem, “Notorious clown killer Buttman and his twisted sidekick Throbbin'”. Ahem.

Sorry. Bit of a chest cold. Anyway, issue 6’s splash page does not remind us that it is 1938. Instead, we just get Meat tending to the injured Boyd against a white background with the issue title, “Dead Godheads”. How am I supposed to know that a whole year hasn’t passed since the last issue? Other than the fact that Meat’s still trying to stop Boyd from bleeding out.

He fails, but the old man’s apparently not dying so fast that he can’t still have a subplot this issue. This is demonstrated when he picks up Meat’s flamethrower and immolates one of the brethren who was sneaking up on them.

n another apparent mismatch between the narrative and the art, Boyd proposes that he and Meat stop Gash by, “Forgetting that we’re alone,” having Meat call in the “cavalry”. Meat doesn’t understand this, so presumably Boyd explains off-panel; the next we see, Meat has said his goodbyes, strips naked, and jumps into what looks like a river. And Boyd looks completely shocked by this, apparently not having expected it.

 

The remaining female hybrids, who have some reason decided to strip naked, are trampled by Gash’s tripod while he babbles semi-coherently about his grand plan to, “scour away the surface and bring our mud people into the light.”

What happens next is a bit confusing because it gets a little metaphysical. You could be forgiven at this point for thinking that Meat swims back to the Aarach city, which is, you’ll recall, below England. But in this case, the art and the narrative align, though both remain vague. We’ve established that the Aarach are telepathic. Gash made comments about concealing the details of his plan from the others so the knowledge wouldn’t leak from their “fragile crania”, and Gash and Meat have been able to locate each other telepathically. Except that one time he had to send Sniv to murder a petty bureaucrat to get the location of Boyd’s asylum. Never mind.

Once under the water, Meat is able to commune with the old Aarach telepathically. Possibly being underwater helps with the range, since they made a big deal about Gash coming to America to get out of range. More concretely, Meat needs to keep Gash from overhearing this communication, though he will turn out to have underestimated him on this point. We get a large tableau of the Aarach domain which is lovely, though it does give the impression that the old Aarach don’t actually do much of anything, since they’re all just kind of standing around in a large cavern, with their fleet of tripods as the only obviously-constructed thing there.

 

The Aarach are not pleased with Kids These Days, and immediately lay into Meat for being a “product of that hate” that they were met with when they visited the surface, years earlier. Meat calls them out on it, that it’s not his fault he was born and that they’ve been kind of shitty parents. I guess they’re impressed by this, and ask him what he wants.

 

This gives us a good segue back to Boyd, who, apparently simultaneously, has walked, despite his mortal wounds, to the nearest army base, and is asking to borrow a B-17. The B-17 first entered service in 1938, so, as with the Lockheed Electra last time, the plane is historically reasonable.

Maybe a bit less reasonable is the dramatic necessity of having the airmen not notice Gash’s tripod bearing down on them until Boyd points it out to them.

In the Beneath, once Meat finishes making arrangements with the Aarach to intercept Gash with their own tripods, Gash reveals that he’s been listening in on the whole conversation. Once the flying fortresses have taken to the air, Boyd persuades the crew to leave the ship to him and bail out by threatening them with a grenade. Since I am taking so damn long with this, you may be wondering what Boyd is doing with a grenade. But we actually established in the previous issue that Boyd had stopped somewhere on the way to Pittsburgh to buy grenades. If you are not from the US, you may find it odd that Boyd was able to just casually buy two of them. But in the close-up, the grenade he’s holding is quite clearly a US Army Mk I; a World War I-era grenade which was withdrawn from service during the war due to it being considered too easy to screw up when starting the fuse, in which case you didn’t so much throw a grenade at your enemy, as give them a gently used grenade in convenient ready-to-use form for them to properly start and throw back at you. So I assume, twenty years later, the Army probably still had crates of those things they were looking to get rid of. Y’know, I bought a grenade at Sunny’s Surplus once, about 30 years ago. Admittedly, it was a Mk II, not an Mk I, and the guts had been taken out. But I think my point stands. Whatever it was. Boyd is planning a suicide mission and wants to spare the pilot because this unnamed character who appears in all of four panels reminds Boyd of himself as a young man. To punctuate this, we see the pilot shout, “Shit ‘n perdition!” as he parachutes away.

Meat narrowly avoids being trampled by Gash, and even manages to retrieve his flamethrower, but is ultimately caught up in the tripod’s tentacles and captured. Like most of Gash’s scenes, especially in this issue, it’s a little confused between the visuals and the writing. In particular, Gash keeps talking about how he wants to capture Meat and force him to watch from the tripod as he destroys first England, then the world. But the whole time, the tripod is pretty unambiguously trying to kill Meat, to the point that when we do cut to Meat, tied up inside the tripod, a few pages later, it’s clearly meant to be a surprise that he’s still alive.

Certainly, a lot of Gash’s inconsistency can be explained as him having gone mad, twisted by the discovery that his biology won’t allow him to survive long on the surface. But on balance, it feels more like a lot of Gash’s plans and motivations were tweaked late-in-the-day. You get the impression that Gash’s “plan” is sort of like the plan the Cylons had in Battlestar Galactica — that is, the writers asserted that their was a plan back at the beginning, and just hoped they’d think of one before it was time to reveal it.

Boyd, meanwhile, as you’ll remember, dismissed the crew of his Flying Fortress, but, like, he’s up there with two other ones. Those dudes are screwed. Boyd reflects on how they don’t stand a chance since they don’t know that the tripod’s weak spot is the eyes. Okay. It’s not necessarily a showstopper, and maybe if I weren’t so damn exhausted from the effort of trying to figure out what the hell was going on, I’d overlook it. But I have a couple of concerns here:

1. Like, aren’t the big eye-shaped windows kind of an obvious target even if you haven’t been told that it’s the weak spot? Are the gunners in the other planes saying “Aim for the undifferentiated gleaming metal shell, guys; I bet that’s a better target than the big glass windows”? This is like how in Power Rangers everyone finds the Z-putties completely indestructible unless they have the keen fighting instinct to work out their one highly secret weak spot: the giant clearly-marked symbol covering their entire chest. (This once led to them being defeated by children with dodgeballs).
2. Boyd talked to these guys. He couldn’t have mentioned the fact that the eyes are the only useful place to shoot them? He knowingly sent them to their deaths? Dick.

But then, even knowing the weak spot, Boyd only fares a little better. I can’t tell exactly how it goes down. At least two of the four planes are hit by the tripod’s heat ray, and one of them crashes into a third. I think an engine from one of the destroyed planes hits the front of Boyd’s, destroying the bombardier’s compartment. My gut tells me that this should be the kind of injury a plane like that could limp home with, but I don’t have anything like the aviation knowledge to dispute Boyd’s assertion that his plane is dead.

Before the showdown, Boyd monologued about how he can’t sense Meat anymore. I think possibly this might have been an attempt to build up suspense that Meat really is dead, since we last saw him being dragged into a cloud of steam with Gash laughing at the prospect of boiling him alive. But the suspense is undercut when Gash shouts to his unconscious and restrained prisoner that, “I just killed daddy, yes.”

It just seems like a bad move in terms of the emotional beats of the story to show us Meat here. The logic of the scene is mostly solid: Gash sees that the fighters have been dealt with and he taunts Meat, which is what wakes him up. Indeed, the fact that Gash considers the battle won figures into what happens next. How Gash knew Boyd was in one of those planes, we’ll just have to handwave. But from an emotional standpoint, the right place to show us that Meat is still alive is actually on the next page, and here’s why:

Boyd decides to point his crashing plane at the tripod’s eye and sacrifice himself to stop Gash. “Sometimes the only option left is the unthinkable. This one last thing I’ll do right.”

In a strange twist that I think is emblematic of the whole series in its failure to quite know what it wants to be, the emotional climax of the story turns the plot climax into an anticlimax. Because just as Boyd is about to take Gash down once and for all, Meat stirs briefly. The light switches back on in Boyd’s head, and Stanley Boyd leaves our story not by nobly sacrificing himself to defeat Gash, but by diverting the plane away from the weak spot at the last moment, the flying fortress uselessly exploding against the tripod’s armored side.

Harrumph. It’s not like Boyd was a great character, but he is the one who sticks around the longest. It’s an ignominious end, and he doesn’t even really get a character arc. There’s a hard cut from him as a brash, cocky middle-aged man to a broken old man, but we don’t actually get to see him grow or change. There’s hints at the beginning of this issue and at the end of issue three of him growing a more philosophical side, in parallel to Rebecca, but it just comes and goes rather than following an arc. Having him die in a noble sacrifice — even an ultimately doomed one — could be a solid idea, but there’s nothing to earn here: he doesn’t grow into it. He instantly commits himself to helping Rebecca, at no point shows any reluctance to sacrifice himself, instantly commits himself to helping Meat, and never has any real trouble facing down the various challenges put in front of him. He’s practically an action movie hero, except for the fact that he’s old and can’t shake off bullets as “only a flesh-wound.” (Well, except that he actually does spend a good chunk of this issue only mildly inconvenienced by the process of bleeding out.) There’s a saving throw in the last few pages to frame his death as a parallel for Meat, but it’s too little too late.

After Boyd dies, Meat blacks out for another sixteen hours, because Finley and Hagan realized that Gash still had to walk back to England for the climax proper. The Aarach cavalry arrives, a wall of black tripods facing off against Gash’s white tripod in the water near the coast of England. The fight that follows is three and a half wordless pages, a rare show of trust from Finley to just let the visuals tell the story for him.

It’s… Fine. It has its moments. Like all the fight scenes, it gets a little confused in the details, but the gist is clear enough that this doesn’t matter. The fight is entirely one-sided: Pittsburgh steel is apparently immune to heat rays. They never come out and say why, and the only reference to it before sounded like a joke. The old Aarach are unable to scratch Gash’s tripod, while he’s able to dispatch them with little effort.

There was a thing about the white tripod being solar-powered and this making it stronger than nuclear power, but it’s not clear what that meant or how it’s applied. The only thing I can tell definitively from the fight is that the black tripods can be damaged by heat rays, but the white one can’t. If the white tripod’s weapon is more powerful, that is not made clear (Remember, we already learned in issue 3 that the tripods can take each other out). I don’t necessarily need it all spelled out for me, but everything about Gash’s plan and his tripod has been vague and confusing, and I have little enough faith in this production that my default assumption is just “Finley has no idea what’s going on and is just handwaving it.”

You could just say that Gash worked out how to block heat rays by adding something not found in the Beneath to the alloy, instead of the confused nonsense about harnessing the power of the sun and needing to go to Pittsburgh for the steel. Especially since they never once address how it is that Gash knows how to build a tripod at all, let alone one superior to the Aarach ones. Gash, after all, does not really seem like the engineer type.

With the only remaining opposition taken care of, Gash prepares to, “Peel away England – layer by layer.” Though, “Boyd would know what to do. He flowered in hopeless tableau,” Meat finds that his only ally is desperation. And in desperation, he does “the unthinkable”.

Well, actually, he just struggles against his bonds until the fine wire holding him to the wall breaks. I guess the idea here is that while Meat compares himself unfavorably to Boyd, he ends up executing the same plan: just power through it despite it being impossible and throw himself directly at Gash. Before Gash can open fire on the English coast, Meat grabs him from behind and… Then I do not know what the fuck happens.

Seriously. I do not understand the next page. We see Meat’s bleeding hands, still bound together at the wrists, grabbing for… A thing. The heat ray controls, I guess? The tripod shoots at… Something? It explodes with a big mushroom cloud. Then there’s a bunch of streaks going up through the tripod, blasting the cockpit open in a vague parallel of the damage to Boyd’s flying fortress. And then there’s a panel where it looks like a meteor hits the tripod.

My best guess is that Meat shoots the ground and somehow this creates a frickin’ volcano, which burns the side off the tripod. What? That’s not just a natural feature of shooting heat rays at the ground; we’ve seen that before. The tripods back in issue 3 returned to the beneath by burning their way down. So… What? Did it just so happen that the tripod was standing right over a pocket of magma? Did Gash take the long way around and they’re actually in the North Sea and Meat shot an undersea gas deposit? Did he know that was going to happen? Was it just good luck and all Meat actually meant to do was spoil Gash’s aim? And what about Scarecrow’s brain?

Gash begs for his life, but Meat isn’t having it, and garrotes his brother with the bindings between his wrists, pulling until they break.

It does not become clear exactly how Gash dies until the next page, where we see his severed head on the floor at Meat’s feet while he surveys the burning tripod and reflects that he is, “The last remnant of the war.” Like his father, he declares, “This one last thing, I’ll do right,” and jumps into… Something. A plume of smoke that’s still rising in front of the tripod. The maybe-volcano. The smoke clears, leaving us to end on a wordless full-page panel of a planet (I can’t swear it’s the Earth; in black-and-white, I can’t tell if it’s meant to be clouds and ocean, with the shapes of the continents obscured. There are some hard lines mixed in there too, so possibly this is meant to be Mars, because… I have no because here) floating in space.

END

Oh, were you hoping for closure? Well, we made sure everyone was dead by the end, so that counts, right?

I mean, sure; the story is pretty well all wrapped up with nowhere obvious to go from here, so it’s a fine place to stop. But still, with everyone dead, it just feels abrupt. Though I am a little suspicious about the whole “everyone dead” thing: I feel like they kinda glazed over that part. Sure, we see Boyd kill a bunch of the male hybrids and Gash trample a bunch of female ones, and Melina is killed by Meat. But back in issue 4, I thought they said only five of the bretheren were going to America. And are we really just taking for granted that Meat murdered Sniv after interrogating him?

Are we supposed to conclude the old Aarach are all dead too? Did they send their entire species up to lose to Gash? I guess we don’t really have to decide one way or the other, as surviving Aarach content to stay underground forever doesn’t actually constitute a loose end the way a surviving hybrid would.

Ending this way, I don’t really know what we’re supposed to take away from this. There’s no lesson to be learned here since there’s no one left to learn it. There is a kind of optimism in the first half, with its talk of “synthesis”, that is completely undermined by the second half’s presumption that, “Upon reflection, contact between different races was a mistake,” a moral which makes my skin crawl.

There’s good stuff mixed in here, of course. The decision to make Meat dark-skinned while Gash is an albino helps soften what would otherwise be H. Rider Haggard-levels of unpleasant racist implications. Doesn’t fix the fact that this still comes off as pretty much a sci-fi tract warning of the dangers of miscegenation.

The crypto-racist implications are this interpretation of War of the Worlds‘s greatest sin, hands down. But for the purposes of this project, there’s another sin we really need to address: this just isn’t an adaptation of War of the Worlds. I’ve asked before how far afield you can stray from the source material before you stop being an adaptation. I think we’ve found it. Alien Dawn may have strayed a long way, but you can still watch it, and see that it’s about vastly more powerful aliens quickly disrupting the Earth, with the bulk of the story following its heroes trying to survive in a world dominated by the aliens. This comic? This comic has nothing to do with the source material. You could’ve adapted War of the Worlds with the aliens as a secret underground Earth race rather than aliens and still had it be recognizably War of the Worlds. But there’s no invasion here. There’s no “life under the Martians” here. There’s no sudden reprieve after all man’s defenses had failed here. The fact that the Aarach use tripedal mechs is the one and only tie to the source we’ve got.

So it’s false advertising to try to slot it into the War of the Worlds hermeneutic, and it’s got a pretty abominable moral message. But I watched Kerblam! a week ago, so I’m well aware that being reprehensible on a moral level does not preclude a work from being really good as a work of fiction. So is this?

Not especially.

It’s not terrible, by any means. But its good points never quite manage to be good enough to make headway in the light of the bad points. The art is where it fares best. The character work is solid. People stay on-model; we rarely lapse into Escher Girl poses; there’s far less dongs-face than, say, the Captain Power book. Landmarks and aircraft are recognizable, and bonus points for using period-appropriate planes, clothes, and weapons. And there’s some really striking tableaux, and excellent use of black-and-white (There is an odd inconsistency with the shape of the Aarach tripods, though, with them switching between the sort of vaguely fox-head shape that Gash’s design uses and a simpler oblate spheroid, but I don’t know what to say about that).

But the strengths of the static shots turn into weaknesses any time Hagan wants to convey action. The action scenes tend to be confused messes. There’s a lack of continuity of motion from panel to panel, with directions and relative positions changing for no reason over the course of a page. And despite the fact that Hagan is clearly pretty good at drawing backgrounds, the action scenes are often set against blank backdrops or confusions of smoke.

And I guess now that I’ve written it down, the problem with the narrative is similar in nature: there’s some ideas which are interesting taken on their own, but when things are moving, the story gets confused and messy. The first half is something of a kitchen sink of ideas. The business with Shona trying to get Rebecca murdered by an angry mob for witchcraft? Or the Aarach having a vaguely defined problem with human religion? And the whole thing where what they want is to mate with a human in order to achieve “synthesis”? That’s an interesting idea, sure, but it isn’t actually consistent with their behavior.

But never mind that, because the second half of the series has almost nothing to do with the first, and all that weird esoteric stuff about the Aarach seeking knowledge through synthesis really has nothing to do with anything from issue 4 onward. The second half is just a very straight “CHUDs want to take over the world” affair with only a very tenuous link to the first half of the series. The whole thing is full of sloppy logic where major plot points turn on characters doing things for no apparent reason or knowing or not knowing things for no apparent reason.

In a strange way, I’m reminded of some less-remarkable mid-90s adventure games. It was a transitional period when there was a push to move to higher-quality graphics and a lot of full-motion video but the underlying technology wasn’t quite there yet, and you had an odd little subgenre there of games composed of a lot of video clips playing over prerendered 3D backgrounds, running in game engines which were essentially hacked PowerPoint slide decks. So they didn’t have a lot in the way of state tracking, and as a result, you could pretty easily end up reaching some points in the story without passing through all of their logical antecedents. So to patch this up, there were a surprising number of games which simply baked into their premise, “Oh, and something weird and existential is going on so causality might not always work the way you expect and possibly you might sometimes randomly hop between parallel universes.”

Nothing here is quite on that level, but you certainly get a sense that the story kind of got away from Finley at some point, leaving him to make some hasty last-minute changes to keep things on track.

The Eternity version of War of the Worlds, therefore, is probably not worth your time. If you do happen to read it, you probably won’t be angry about the use of your time, but I can’t imagine it would make anyone’s top ten lists.

Between now and the end of the year, I’ve got two birthdays in the family, plus Christmas, plus I really want to watch the rest of the new season of Mystery Science Theater 3000, so I’m probably going to need something more lightweight for these War of the Worlds articles. We’re in the home stretch on the TV show, so maybe I can carve out time to watch a couple of those. If not, there’s still more comics I have to put myself through. See you then…

 

Moving right along. It is now January or February 1990, and Eternity is continuing with the increasingly unbelievable fiction that there is some connection between their comic book and “A HIT TV SHOW”, which would be really obviously false even if this comic did have anything more in common with War of the Worlds The Series than an incredibly tenuous connection to a book by H. G. Wells, since the show, at this point, has been cancelled.

We left off, if you’ll recall with Stanley Boyd and his Aarach son Meat had just escaped from an insane asylum and were about to steal an airplane to fly to America because Meat’s brothers are plotting the destruction of mankind.

Issue 5, “Overmen and Underdogs”, begins with… a recap. Not just any recap. It begins with the first three paragraphs of the previous issue’s recap. Jesus Christ, I know it’s 1938. We add only the knowledge that the new generation of Aarach view humanity as, “An irritant, and one that must be removed.”

Fine. Okay. These recap pages are probably mandated by the management for the benefit of new readers and don’t really fit into the core of the storytelling Finlay and Hagan are trying to do. Let’s just move past the cliche establishing shot of the Statue of Liberty and into the story proper.

I admit, I don’t have the patience I used to. But okay. In keeping with our new approach to this story, I’m going to continue to basically try to read the comic two separate ways. First, just interpret it on a strictly visual level, as an abstract story about the weird CHUD children of a strange and irascible race of elder gods. Then, read the actual dialogue and see how it shapes that abstract story into something more concrete. Typically what we find is that the story is perfectly comprehensible without the dialogue. At best, the written part of the story adds a bit of detail. At worst, it actively undermines the visual narrative.

So… In the purely visual version of the story… Meat gets airsick, so they jump out of the airplane for some reason, which Meat finds scary. Minor point here: according to the dialogue, Boyd assumes Meat’s airsickness is due to agorophobia, Meat being overwhelmed by the experience of flight after a life lived underground. Leaving aside that it would have taken close to a day for them to make the trip and he only got sick at the end (In 1938, heavier-than-air transatlantic flight was still mostly experimental; the first commercial transatlantic flight would only occur in August), this is a good solid guess. It is also wrong, but in context, Boyd is right to assume it. That said, when the actual reason Meat got sick comes out, no reference will be made to this bit, so I kinda suspect it was not drawn with that assumption. Hm. Well, I guess we’ll have to resort to the dialogue. The written version tells us that Boyd reckons that it’ll be easier for them to enter the country by getting fished out of the harbor after their plane crashes than by just landing somewhere. The logic here is… I mean… Well…

I guess I can sorta see the shape of the logic. They land their stolen plane after flying over from England, and the authorities are liable to take umbrage. But if they’re survivors of a plane crash, I guess that could be seen as giving them some cover. Maybe. I mean, there’s a lot of weird assumptions here. But okay. They ditch, get rescued by the Staten Island ferry, and… I guess in the 1930s the police won’t be waiting when the ferry docks to ask about the plane crash?

I’m just saying, this seems like an extravagant way to avoid immigration. But I guess it works. Next, they go to immigration.

Whut.

Yeah. Pretty sure the whole “Ditch the plane to avoid immigration” thing wasn’t part of the storyline Brooks Hagan drew, and it’s kinda awkward. But you know what’s even more awkward? What happens between them jumping out of the plane and turning up at immigration. They’re taken aboard a ferry, and, after agreeing to pay the full fare despite only needing half a trip, Boyd is invited to dry off in the cabin. Meat will have to stay outside because he’s a [redacted slur for African Americans]. “‘Less of course you’s a [word for people of hispanic descent which is not as offensive as the first one but still pretty offensive] or [old-timey slur for Native Americans]. Got some [redacting that second one again]?” There’s something kinda wild about the tone of it; the boatman seems to be genuinely trying to find a loophole in his racism to do Meat a favor. Sadly, Meat turns him down. “No, I think I am [that first one again].”

To get out in front of it, yes it is good that Finley contextualizes the boatman’s racism in a way that shows it as fundamentally ridiculous. There’s even an overt implication of race being a broadly arbitrary societal construct. And the fact that Meat understands and internalizes the concept of being a [yeah, that one] is telling: “You want to know what race I am so you can decide how to treat me? I’m whichever one you think the least of.” And Boyd follows the scene up with a statement directly rejecting the concept of “undesirable races” as fascist (prompting me to remember that, hey. it’s 1938, and we’re edging right up to World War II).

But still. That’s a lot of racial slurs in one word balloon. And… Despite the first half of the series’s foray into being philosophical, this is basically a Bond-esque action thriller. It’s not the last time we’ll see racial overtones, but ff there is a broad statement to be made about race in Finley and Hagan’s War of the Worlds… It’s… Not… It’s… Ugh. When you get right down to it, the narrative as a whole is going to just tacitly accept the idea that the Aarach hybrids are a failed, fallen race, that they are essentially animals able only to put on a show of being civilized, that they are physically unfit to share the surface with proper humans, that both humanity and the pure-bred Aarach are right to reject them, and even that Meat’s heroism is a product of his own self-loathing. This grand idea of synthesis between human and Aarach we saw in the first half is utterly rejected in the end with a message that comes damn close to outright saying, “It’s a bad idea for races to interact since they just contaminate each other.”

We cut over to Gash and his party, who have bought a steel mill just outside of downtown Pittsburgh, where they are working on something that is going to be a big visual reveal but oddly understated in the narrative. I will not bother with the pretext: he’s building a tripod. Well, the others are building a tripod; Gash is sitting around in a dressing gown watching. And yeah, it appears they simply bought the factory, paying, as Meat did before, with silver nuggets. There’s a short scene with uncertain purpose a few pages later where they buy oranges from the local grocery store which I guess implies that the hybrids are trying to keep a comparatively low profile by doing things non-violently. Except…

Continue reading Deep Ice: We have the weapon (Eternity Comics’s War of the Worlds, Issue 5)

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

After an interlude of Gash doing some exposition and Stanley washing his face, angering his nurse for daring to be in a good mood because of “A tingling in my hands”, we find the now-dressed Meat asking around the city to try to find Boyd. And… No one really reacts to him. I mean, the drunk called him ugly, and a woman on the street says he’s, “A right queer one,” but those both seem muted reactions to a seven-foot-tall dude with no pupils, a crested head and an unnatural skin color. (I think. There haven’t been any black humans to compare to, so I guess it could be that this is just how a normal human sort of dark skin comes out in this art style. But that doesn’t sit right with me.

Spoiler: this comes up later in a way that is not good. Not good at all.)

Gash and his gang attract similarly little attention, at least until Gash decides on a whim to murder a grocer for trying to sell him an orange. He immolates the orange (All the hybrids, including Meat, carry flamethrowers) and makes a speech using the orange as a metaphor for how he means to scourge the surface of the Earth, leaving the inside, “safe, juicy.” Then they go on a little murder spree.

Gash’s plot benefits a lot more from having dialogue than Meat’s. Too bad the dialogue isn’t any good. There’s some variety among the different characters, but they’re all variations on a sort of sing-songy thing that’s part philosophical, part caveman-speak.

Meat goes to a government office and loses his cool when the government man is all snooty over being interrupted by a “commoner”, overturning his desk and baring his claws. One of Gash’s men witnesses the meeting and relates the news to Gash, who’s taken up residence for no clear reason in the clock tower at Westminster:

Gash: News of Meat, yes?
Other Guy: I see’d him at a leader building.
Gash: And you ascertained his purpose, yes?
Other Guy: He had some writey scratches on paper.
Gash: Yes, words, they’re called. You saw these words?
Other Guy: The leader man gived me what he gived Meat.
Gash: And you left the government man silent?
Other Guy: Leader men– They jabber and jabber till I fill jabber hole with these lady pictures (Banknotes. I can’t help thinking the “lady” he’s talking about is Elizabeth II, who woulda been like 12 at the time. But give the benefit of the doubt and say it’s Britannia, who did appear in a small vignette on pound notes of that period. But this seems like a lucky break, since the previous version of the pound note had George V on it) he give me. Jabber and spit. Jabber and go purpley and jabber no more.

 

Yeah. So…

Meat is shaken by how easily he resorted to violence, but eventually gets control of himself by the time he accidentally breaks in to the Mountbatten Home For the Mentally Infirm. He just tries the doorknob, but it breaks off in his hand. He quickly befriends the night caretaker, who takes him to Boyd’s padded cell.

Again, the art seems just a little at odds with the text, with the caretaker clearly frightened, and Meat trying to calm him, while the next has the caretaker, not unlike the drunk earlier, being mostly interested in whether Meat will pick up the tab for a new doorknob.

While Meat introduces himself to his father, the others appear and dispatch the caretaker, Gash ordering that his death must noisy enough to get Meat’s attention.

His dying shriek of “Kshudd Graaaaaaaaaaaa!” prompts Meat to shout the wonderfully awkward line, “My new friend!” and try to peel the cell door open. You know what this book is lacking? A couple of scenes of Meat wandering around London marveling at the beauty of the surface. The handful of panels we get of him just walking around are always with him distracted by his quest. But in three of his four interactions with humans on his way to find Boyd, there’s an implication that Meat actually has a really easy time getting close to people, a contrast to the antisocial tendencies of his siblings (And, probably unintentionally, a contrast to the way that almost everyone Rebecca crossed paths with wanted to kill her). The idea that Meat thinks of the caretaker as a friend, even challenges Boyd when he says to leave the caretaker as a lost cause, is really cute, but it would work better if we had more insight into Meat’s character at this point to contextualize it.

Or, y’know, they could just leave out the word bubbles, and it simplifies down to “Meat realizes the others are there, his instinct is to confront them, but Boyd talks him down.” Boyd pulls up the bedding, revealing that he’s spent the past 20 years digging an escape tunnel.

Continue reading Deep Ice: Right under their feet (Eternity Comics’s War of the Worlds #4, Part 1)

Author’s Note: Writing this piece was taking too much time away from me shaking my fist in impotent rage over the recent confirmation of the attempted rapist Blackout Bart Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States of America and the systematic gaslighting of the public by the Senate Majority as we are forced to pretend to believe a litany of obvious lies such as “The Devil’s Triangle is totally a drinking game,” “I believe Professor Ford except for the bit about her being attacked,” “We care about women,” “Brett Kavanaugh will be a fair and impartial Justice,” and “Oh, I would totally still be saying ‘innocent until proven guilty’ if it were a poor black man being accused instead of a rich white one”. Thusly, I have split it into two parts, the second of which will run next week.

I suppose we’d better get on with it. It is still 1989, but the closest I can narrow it down to is “before September”, based on an ad announcing issue 1 of Aircel’s The Walking Dead. Which is a different thing from the comic book called The Walking Dead which you have actually heard of.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. — H. P. Lovecraft

I didn’t mention it at the time, but issue 2 began with a quote from The Call of Cthulhu. Issue 3 began with a passage from Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. For issue four, we’ll lead in with this quote from Human, All Too Human:

War. Against war one can say: It makes the victor stupid, the vanquished malignant. In favor of war: Through both of these effects it barbarizes and thereby makes more natural; it is a sleep or a winter for culture, and man emerges from it stronger for good and evil.

It is attributed to “Fred Nietzsche”.

Sigh.

Breaking with the convention of the first half of the series, we’re done with this series ripping off my titling convention a quarter century before I thought of it. This is a mixed blessing, because I’ve been desperately trying to come up with other words that end in “-thesis” in case I find some War of the Worlds ‘zines on eBay for a price I’m willing to pay, or I ever get another chance at the original 1988 press kit which is holy fuck beautiful but the only one I ever saw got bought for several hundred dollars by someone who definitely thought it was linked to the Spielberg movie.

Anyway, issue 4 bears the title “Zarathustra Syndrome”. In case it wasn’t sending up enough red flags that they opened on a quote from Nietzsche.  And I like Nietzsche, and think that he gets way too much of the blame for the fact that he didn’t rise from the dead to denounce the Nazis for misreading him so badly.

Our next red flag is the opening text, which tells us that it is no longer 1913, but now 1938. Yes, that 1938. This can only mean one thing:

Superman Crossover!

It now becomes clear, of course, why they chose the date they chose for the first part of the story: because “twenty-five years later” is a nicely-shaped amount of time for a big time-skip and 1938 is a significant date to put at the far end of it.

“25 years ago,” we are told, “The first generation of Aarach arose from the strata.” A serviceable recap tells us how the Aarach sought not conquest but nookie, and kidnapped Rebecca to get their fuck on. “That was 25 years ago. Now mankind is about to know the razor-fine disparity between the generations.

“Teeth.”

Overblown, much? Also, I realize that I myself sometimes get lost and begin three consecutive paragraphs the same way, but there aren’t a whole lot of words between “25 years ago” and “That was 25 years ago,” and even fewer between establishing that it is 1938 and hopping back a quarter century for backstory.

Anyway, the first proper page is a full-page spread of a nude Rebecca, still looking like a cross between an H. R. Geiger and a self-portrait by Jean-Michel Basquiat, being murdered by a very large, very butch looking hybrid, who is also nude. I mean, they’re all nude down here, it’s not a sex thing in-story, but it’s hard to imagine the decision to play up the sexualized aspect of the violence was accidental.

On page 2, Rebecca’s murder at the hands of her offspring is intercut with scenes of Stanley Boyd, now an old man, and institutionalized. And also nude for some reason. It’s not exactly clear why and of it. He says, “Like a fool, I continued to talk while the rest of the world struggled manfully to forget.” Does he mean that this world, like the one of the TV series, has so completely repressed the memory of the invasion that he’s considered insane for remembering it? They know his hand glows, right?

So I guess now we have to count “The guy who insists on reminding people of the invasion afterward is widely dismissed and reviled,” as a recurring theme. We’ve seen it with Doctor Forrester in the backstory to the TV series, a bit with Walter Jenkins in Baxter’s book, and now Stanley Boyd.

In back on issue 2, commenter Seed of Bismuth brought up the in-hindsight-obvious fact that this was series was probably drawn first, and the dialogue was only added in hindsight. That seems to get less true in the back half, but it’s still definitely a thing, and the story holds together fine as a purely visual experience. Boyd’s narration from the mental ward is a place where it holds together somewhat better without the words even. In particular, this passage:

I think it happened during my- was it? – Sixth year here. My mother passed on. And lacking the means to attend the funeral, I attempted to join her in another fashion. I severed the chartreuse veins in my left wrist with my teeth. My departure was interrupted and my hands, uh, removed. But I could feel Rebecca still. Almost taste her.

Continue reading Deep Ice: Oh yes, dear. Quite mad. (Eternity Comics’s War of the Worlds #4, Part 1)

Just when I thought I was out, you pull me back in.

You guys. Seriously, you guys. Come on. I mean come on.

It is, I can hardly believe I am saying this, September 15, 2017. It is so recent that I will tell you what is on my DVR from that week which I haven’t gotten around to watching yet:

• Noah Antwiler’s livestream of “The Testament of Sherlock Holmes”
• Power Rangers Ninja Steel episode 14, “The Royal Rival”.
• Five episodes of Late Night With Stephen Colbert including his second anniversary special.
• Adam Ruins Everything 2×09 “Adam Ruins His Vacation”
• An episode of The Great Space Coaster, which actually aired in 1981, but I saved a copy because it was mentioned in a blog post I read and I wanted to see if it was one of the shows I half-remember from early childhood.
• Ana Mardoll’s Let’s Play of 2064: Read Only Memories

Metroid: Samus Returns, a remake of Metroid II: Return of Samus, comes out for the Nintendo 3DS. Out in theaters are Mother!, Molly’s Game, The Lego Ninjago Movie, and Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Starship Troopers, A Fish Called Wanda, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Wonder Woman all get new high-definition home video releases.

I could spend all day sharing the parade of horrors that is the news these days, but I’ll keep it to just a few things. The space probe Cassini-Huygens throws itself into Saturn. Toys ‘R’ Us files for bankruptcy. Donald Trump tells the UN he might destroy North Korea. 29 are injured in London in a bombing at Parsons Green Station. Harry Dean Stanton dies.

I near the end of the purgatory that is Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II, and begin my treatment of Robert Carlyle’s first season playing the lead in Doctor Who because real Doctor Who finished up months ago and the ill-fated spin-off Class won’t start for a few more weeks.

Taylor Swift dominates the Billboard Hot 100 with “Look What You Made Me Do”, and I recognize almost a third of the other songs. Including Shawn Mendes’s “There’s Nothing Holding Me Back” only because last week Dylan told me he didn’t like the Kidz Bop version of it because they changed the line “just picture everybody naked” to “just picture everybody smiling”.

I don’t really have much to say about this. It just popped up while I was trying to google some background for something else. But how could I pass this up?

I couldn’t find out too much about Kedoo. They’re some sort of new media distribution outfit, probably Russian. They’re described as a competitor to Vevo by industry info sites. They’ve got their own app.

At least one branch of their bread-and-butter seems to be low-end computer-animated shorts for children. Which brings us to Magic Lantern. Near as I can tell, the framing story is this: two big-headed 3D animated children tell each other stories very loosely adapted from works of literature, accompanied by 2D still images projected by the titular “magic lantern”. They refer to it as a slide show, but it’s pretty clearly a filmstrip projector.

I have an unreasoning love of the various obsolete formats of home media that abounded in the ’70s and ’80s and early ’90s. Filmstrip. Super-8. Slides. Laser Disc. CVD. Fisher Price Movie Viewer. It’s just amazing that there were so many different ways of bringing the magic of movies into the home for children, and that entire market sector vanished into thin air because of DVD and then streaming video and DLP projectors. I mean, filmstrips, man. Filmstrips were basically Read-A-Long books for classrooms. It was basically a reel of 35mm film that carried positive images instead of negatives, and you’d use a filmstrip projector to shine it on the wall, and there’d be an accompanying tape that would narrate, and it would go “bing” when it was time to advance the frame, only the teacher almost always missed one, so you’d always be off at some point. Most of them were educational short films, and I assume they’d originally been shot as actual films and then decimated down to one frame a minute because 35mm film projectors were outside the budget of most grade schools.

I could easily believe that the backstory of this series could be “Grandma’s a retired Kindergarten teacher, and she took the old projector and a pile of filmstrips home with her when the school was getting rid of it and one day the kids found it and are making up stories to go along with the old filmstrips because neither one of them knows what an audio cassette is.

Continue reading Deep Ice: We can find out about their optics (Magic Lantern Episode 20: The War of the Worlds)

I think, when you get down to it, most of these long-term projects I try to throw myself into tend to come off the rails because I hit something that is a breaking point for me. I tried to do a Michael Moriarty Movie Marathon years ago, and it fell apart four movies in because I watched Hitler Meets Christ.

It isn’t always because I encounter something bad even. Just something that fills me with an ineffable desire not to go on. And obviously, living in a slow-motion action replay of the worst sins of the 1980s has not really helped fill me with desire to finish off the TV series. But what has actually broken me and made me stall out is something more inexplicable. So consider this my surrender: I am giving up on trying to be an absolute completist about this whole War of the Worlds thing, and I’m going to just move on and knock out the things that are actually left in my queue — one movie, I think three comic books, and seven TV episodes — and address anything else that pops up purely on the “if it tickles my fancy” basis.

I got through the Pendragon movie. I had no trouble with the two grammatically whimsical DG Leigh novellas. But for some reason, Stephen Baxter’s authorized sequel to the original novel has just brought me to a crashing halt.

Through some weird twist of irony, I first became aware of Stephen Baxter about twenty years ago, when I read The Time Ships, which is another sequel to a Wells novel. I liked it. I found it a pretty quick read, and I liked the way it fused a fidelity to Wells’s style with more plot-driven storytelling, and the way it confronted a lot of Wells’s conventions head on, such as having the Time Traveler learn a bit of Freud and realize that his visceral revulsion toward the Morlocks wasn’t purely rational, but might have had something to do with getting briefly locked in the root cellar as a small child.

One cool thing about The Time Ships that I learned years later is that Baxter had originally pitched it as a Doctor Who novel, but it was rejected. The basic plot of The Time Ships is that the Time Traveler, attempting to return to help the Eloi against the Morlocks, arrives in a completely different future, where a race of intelligent, nonviolent Morlocks have enclosed the sun in a Dyson sphere. The Time Traveler and his Morlock companion attempt to return to his native time, but only make it as far as a version of the 1940s where World War I never ended and London is covered by a concrete dome to protect from aerial bombardment. The changes in the timeline are suggested to be the result of the Traveler’s own story having inspired the H. G. Wells surrogate. The Traveler ends up going back millions of years, then forward to a version of 19th century Earth whose ecosystem has collapsed, where post-human creatures build the titular Time Ships, which they use to travel back to the Big Bang in order to find a universe with the optimal initial conditions before going back to his own “historical axis” to bootstrap his own story by giving his younger self the initial sample of the radioactive isotope used to build the time machine. Which, yeah, sounds like possibly a bit too weird even for Doctor Who… But… Weird esoteric beings seeding the moment of creation to force creation along the path they want is the plot of the eventual Doctor Who eighth Doctor novel Timeless, and that plot arc ends with the Doctor’s origin story being rewritten into a time loop in Sometime Never, plus, Baxter’s basic original idea of a first Doctor adventure based around history being repeatedly changed by the travelers’ presence shows up in Simon Guerrier’s The Time Travellers. Baxter himself would end up writing a Doctor Who novel in 2005, The Wheel of Ice. But this time, I don’t know. All the idea in here that I got to, I rather liked… But I found that no matter how long I spent reading it, I never seemed to make any forward headway. I’d look at the number of pages behind me and the number ahead, and I’d just be overcome with despair at the thought of going on for the length of time it would take me to finish the book.

How far did I make it? I made it to the end of chapter 14. Does that sound like a lot? Most of my reading these days has been to Dylan and Evie, so it sounds like a lot to me.

Chapter 14 is about the midpoint of Book I.

There are four books. I made it 70 pages, about a sixth of the way through the book. I stopped just after the Martians put in their first appearance. Seventy pages is kind of a long time to take to get to the actual warring of the worldsing. It’s not like I didn’t enjoy what I read, it just left me with no sense that the story was going to go anywhere in a timely manner.

Right from the get-go, Baxter makes cool and interesting choices in its characters. The narrator for our sequel is Julie Elphinstone, the ex-wife of the original narrator’s brother. That original narrator? He’s even got a name and for once, it’s not some play on Wells’s. Walter Jenkins gained world fame for his history of the war, but then went on to a certain amount of infamy for his unpopular persistence in reminding people that the Martians were still out there and might come back some day.

Reprising one of the things I enjoyed in The Time Ships, Walter’s therapist calls out a lot of issues from the original novel. Walter is suggested to be suffering from PTSD, which, given the circumstances of its discovery, they call by the adorable name “heat-stroke”. More than that, there are some hints that Walter might be on the spectrum, with his therapist, lacking modern terminology to describe it, suggests that the “heat-stroke” exacerbated an already-existing condition involving an unnatural detachment and difficulty connecting with other people. As an example, he cites the way he borrows his neighbor’s horse to help evacuate his own family without warning the neighbor about the imminent danger. Or that he never bothered to learn the name of the curate. It’s Nathaniel.

Continue reading Shallow Ice: A Couple of Chapters of Stephen Baxter’s The Massacre of Mankind