Category: War of the Worlds

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

Suzanne had a bad date.

While this is going on, Ironhorse and Harrison dress as hoboes and break into the alien facility via the sewers. “Are we insured for this?” Harrison asks. “Yeah, by Uncle Sam,” Ironhorse responds. Maybe the script editor was sick? I think I remember reading in one of these articles that they had a lot of trouble with the scripts, logistically. Despite the music telling us this scene is tense, their search goes off without a hitch. They stay out of view of the only aliens on duty, and no one’s watching the eggs themselves. Harrison decides to steal one for study. Ironhorse is not cool with this, wanting to leave basically the second they see the pods. This is yet another thing that feels like a throwback to earlier in the season: Ironhorse having a somewhat unjustified instinctual response to back away rather than confront when face-to-face with the aliens.

This was something we saw in the first few episodes, and at the time, I mused on the possibility that it was related to the “alien amnesia” angle. That Ironhorse, despite his bravery and professionalism, is just more affected than the others by whatever it is that makes people want to reject the reality of alien life. But, of course, that’s been pretty much ignored for like 17 episodes now, so is it coming back now intentionally, or just by coincidence, or because Jon Kubichan was working from nothing more than a couple of early-season scripts to get his sense of the characters?

What with his date ending early, Cash is able to follow Suzanne home and snap a picture of Ironhorse’s car as he and Harrison return from their raid. “Piece of cake,” he says, having trivially gotten the evidence he needs that… Um… That… A thing is happening at this government facility. A thing involving people entering it. I don’t know. I think the script has too much faith in us being impressed by them just saying Cash is a journalist. We see him do exactly two pieces of investigation in this entire episode, and one of them is “Takes a picture in the dark of a car entering a gated property.” At no point do they indicate Cash has learned a single thing other than what Quinn told him. Couldn’t we at least have gotten a montage of him bribing guards and looking through ledger books and scanning microfiche about, oh, I don’t know, all those military operations Ironhorse has been running across the country? This would be a perfect time to reference past episodes. Just dummy up a few newspaper pages with headlines about people disappearing and various things being locked down for counter-terrorism exercises.

Instead, Cash McCullough, who will stop at nothing to get a story, does, near as I can tell, no legwork whatsoever. The next time we see him, he’s returned to the Korean Bathhouse to do a vaguely racist impression of the proprietor’s accent and meet with Quinn again to ask for help getting hard evidence. Quinn can’t get him inside the Cottage, but he agrees to give him a time and location for the Blackwood project’s next operation. He also claims that his reason for doing this is that he’s got a mistress in common with General Wilson. Once Cash is gone, Quinn pulls back the hood on his robe to laugh hammily at the camera.

We have to bid John Colicos goodbye now. I hear they’d wanted to bring him back as the primary antagonist had there been a second season, but we won’t be seeing him again. His character is terrible and doesn’t make much sense, but come on. He doesn’t have to, does he? He’s John Colicos. He’s hammy and ridiculous and I love him. We are never going to get an explanation for why he’s doing all this, and really, what explanation could possibly help here? Is he trying to expose the aliens? Is he trying to shut down the Blackwood project? Is he trying to get Suzanne back together with her ex? Who can tell?

But before all that, Suzanne got a crack at studying the egg. She’s interrupted when Ironhorse demands to know how her date went. She explains about Cash’s investigation, with the possibly good news that the presumed leaker must not know the actual details of their mission. “That’s terrific,” Harrison says, and I’m going to blame the director for the fact that I can’t tell from Jared Martin’s delivery whether he means it or not. He’s exactly in the middle between exasperated facetiousness and being genuinely happy that Cash is so radically misinformed and thus their cover isn’t blown.

Suzanne barely has time to get angry at Ironhorse for bugging her table when Norton summons them over to see the supercomputer’s reconstruction of the inside of the egg. It does not look like anything in particular to me, but Suzanne quickly identifies it as an alien fetus. Harrison claims there were thousands of eggs in that icehouse, even though it seemed like no more than a couple of dozen at best to me.

While Harrison and Ironhorse are making plans to storm the place, Suzanne notices the egg move in response to alien transmissions Norton’s playing. I think. She says as much, but then Norton says, “Maybe it got too hot,” and the rest of the scene proceeds from that, with Suzanne working out that the eggs have to stay cold to avoid hatching prematurely. In what totally ought to have been the epigram over the title sequence instead of the Deep Throat thing, Suzanne tells Norton to summon the others because, “I could be midwife to a monster.”

The egg does hatch, and let me tell you, they do an admirable job on the alien baby. It’s this utterly uncanny fusion of the look for the adult aliens and… Cute baby animal. In the close-ups, I think they’re just using their regular alien animatronic, but there’s two longer shots where it’s a very tiny model with little spindly hands. The baby is premature and dying. Ironhorse wants to speed it along with a couple of bullets, but Suzanne stops him in the name of Science(!). A second later, she sticks her hands into the glove box to examine it, and it grabs her hard enough that she’s got bruises on her arms afterward. Ironhorse immolates it with a bunsen burner.

In the aftermath, Ironhorse is utterly deadpan and emotionless when he goes on to let everyone know that, “My plan is ready. We’ll attack tonight.” William Fruet directed four episodes of War of the Worlds, and the other three are pretty solid. Yet Harrison and Ironhorse both seem off this week, and Michael Parks is wildly inconsistent. It’s hard to blame anyone other than the director for this, but why is it only this episode that feels that way, when “Among the Philistines“, “To Heal the Leper” and “The Meek Shall Inherit” didn’t suffer from these problems.

The entire rest of the episode is an extended action sequence. I guess we should be used to that by now. I guess it hasn’t really occurred to me to bring this up. War of the Worlds has kinda fallen into a pattern. Since “The Meek Shall Inherit“, pretty much every episode has pushed its big action sequence all the way to the end and has usually run out the clock on it. More, I think, than they really ought to. Quite a few episodes, particularly in the last third of the series, haven’t had a proper coda. And it’s weakened some of them. My feeling is that there was a sense behind the scenes that the action scenes were their strength. And I won’t argue that. When I compare this to other military-style action-adventure, the action scenes do hold up pretty well. But by pushing it all the way to the end, they give up the chance to really resolve the narrative in any meaningful way.

For instance, the last we see of the Advocacy comes between Harrison and Ironhorse’s nighttime raid and the pod hatching in the Cottage, and it just consists of them ranting a bit about the humans having stolen one of their babies. They don’t even force the alien who dropped the ball on guard duty to commit ritual suicide. They just make the usual noises about how important this job is and how the troops on-site have to protect the eggs with their lives. They don’t send reinforcements or anything. I mean, given how important this whole “produce a viable next generation for our species” thing is, you’d think they’d send literally every alien they have.

But there’s, like, a dozen at most. If there is meant to be a large army off-screen, then the climactic battle suddenly comes off a lot worse, since, really, no, it’s a pitched fight between Ironhorse’s small, elite taskforce, and the aliens’ roughly similar numbers, but it’s not a massively imbalanced fight. (I am similarly hard-pressed to believe Harrison’s claim that there are thousands, or even hundreds of eggs; we see a few dozen at best and the layout and arrangement of them doesn’t indicate that there’s an order of magnitiude more offscreen somewhere.

The humans win. Ironhorse does lose a couple of men, and once again, we get some of Richard Chaves’s fantastic physical acting in the way he refuses to yield his professionalism with an outsize reaction, but he still makes it very clear that it hurts him to see his men sacrifice their lives. You can feel that he’s going to need to go have a talk with Bernard Behrens to talk about this tomorrow. But it’s a complete rout for the aliens.

That’s been happening a lot recently. Not every time, to be sure, but more often than not. I have feels about this. On the one hand, I am kinda bored with the tradition in this kind of show where basically, the heroes lose every single time up until the grand finale, or where the heroes are allowed “small” victories but never make any progress in the overall war. What we have here is actual, tangible escalation. Back at the beginning of the series, it felt like they were establishing a pattern: the team would uncover the alien plot, go in, kill some aliens, stop the plan, but it would turn out that the aliens had already accomplished enough of what they wanted that they made significant forward progress. “Thy Kingdom Come” ends with Harrison frustrated that they’re losing the war due to so many resurrected aliens escaping. The aliens evacuate their town in “A Multitude of Idols” before Ironhorse can bring in the cavalry. The aliens at Fort Streetor are defeated in “The Second Seal“, but the list of alien dump sites is lost. But when you get to the middle of the season, the team starts actually winning outright, not just stopping the immediate scheme of the week, but preventing the aliens from achieving their larger goals.

Continue reading Thesis: My Soul to Keep, Concluded (War of the Worlds 1×20, Part 3)

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

Ahem:

Quinn tells Cash that the Blackwood Project is a covert ops group tasked with the mass murder of illegal immigrants on American soil.

It’s moments like this that feed into why it’s taking me roughly ten times longer to write about this show than it took them to make it. It’s not like we haven’t seen this sort of thing before; the repeated times Ironhorse has called in military strikes on small midwestern universities or declared martial law over hospitals, and everyone just rolls with it? This show has repeatedly proceeded from the supposition that it is entirely reasonable and believable for the military to be engaged in combat operations on US soil apparently against US citizens, and even if they do have to cover it up, it’s still not enough of a big deal that anyone reacts to an army Colonel marching into a small-town morgue and demanding access to an active crime scene with anything other than mild frustration. This was emphatically not the way the world actually worked back then. But on some level, I think we sorta felt like it could be.

And yet…

It ought to completely derail the believably of the show that any reporter whose credentials extend beyond the check-out at the supermarket would fall for this. Because it ought to be too obviously false. I mean, cui bono? The penalty for getting caught is tremendous, and what’s the reward for doing it? The main benefit you get out of a hardline stance against immigration is that you get the votes of people who don’t like immigrants. Which means that anything you do to hurt immigrants has to be public. You can’t run for reelection on a platform of, “Immigrants are mysteriously disappearing and we swear we have nothing at all to do with it. Wink.”

If I’d stayed on the ball and this article had come out two years ago, we could go back to my plot exposition now. But we can’t. Because it’s 2018, and the United States of America rounds up the children of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers and places them in concentration camps. And it turns out that the actual thing that is unbelievable in this story is that the government is trying to cover it up. The current administration has proposed using the army for immigration enforcement. If news broke tomorrow that the Trump administration was sending out the army to perform mass executions of undocumented immigrants, it would be a surprise, but can you honestly tell me you’d find it unbelievable? Within a week, Stephen Miller would be bragging that the whole “Final Solution” thing was his idea, Sarah Huckabee-Sanders would be calling journalists unprofessional for using the term “death-squad”, and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions would be citing 1 Samuel 15:2 to explain how genocide is sometimes okay.

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The hook for Cash is that the Blackwood Project is under General Wilson, his ex-wife’s uncle. And Quinn reveals that Suzanne is involved, which reels Cash in rather than making the whole thing sound incredibly fishy given that he has, in fact, met Suzanne, and ought to know that she is:

• Morally opposed to mass murder, to the point that she quit her previous job when she found out her research was being used to develop bioweapons.
• A microbiologist. A quick perusal of ICE’s careers page shows openings for jackboots, thugs, fascists, and administrative assistants, but not currently any for microbiologists.
• A civilian.

Instead, Cash falls for it, hook, line and sinker. Still not sure what Quinn expects to happen. Maybe Cash is able to ply his sources to follow the money and verify the existence of the project. Possibly he’s able to get access to some redacted reports which reveal things like Ironhorse taking over a hospital or driving tanks into Beeton. Is Quinn is banking on Cash being exactly tenacious enough to get that far, but not enough to find out what’s really going on? Or does he actually want Cash to find the truth and is providing a cover story because “The aliens which everyone knows exist because of the 1953 invasion are back,” somehow isn’t as believable as secret government death squads? (Spoiler: It’s probably that one).

Meanwhile, back at the, ir, cottage, Norton goes to see Harrison, because he’s wound up about alien transmissions. “Norton, it’s three AM. How come you’re always showing up at meal time?”

What’s bothering Norton is that, while he still can’t decipher the alien language, he has enough experience now to gauge the tone of the transmissions. I like the way this acknowledges some growth for Norton: he’s getting better at understanding the aliens, even if he can’t understand their language. We already saw Norton being the one to recognize the alien transmissions becoming chaotic when the Advocate was sick back in “To Heal the Leper“, and how he’s gotten even better at interpreting the patterns in the messages.

The thing he’s interpreted at three in the morning today is that it sounds like baby talk.

Dammit, War of the Worlds. I give you a compliment, and you pull this shit? The aliens are trying to hatch their babies, so the alien transmissions are in baby-talk. Makes sense. Sure. Okay. To be clear, there’s no scene later where they indicate the aliens are, like, doing some kind of prenatal education thing where they transmit messages to the eggs to help with their development. The eggs aren’t even in place yet. No, the assumption here is that because the aliens have babies on the mind, their normal radio chatter is being conducted in baby talk.

It’s like they looked back at “To Heal the Leper” and thought, “Okay, so when the aliens are sick, their transmissions become chaotic and random, I guess because the transmissions are feverish?” instead of the much more straightforward, “The transmissions become chaotic because the aliens are confused without their leadership.”

Harrison has no wisdom for Norton, but slaps him away from his crudites. Harrison’s a vegetarian, you’ll recall, which is why all he ever eats are salads and platters of raw vegetables. It’s almost as though no one involved in dressing the set actually knew what vegetarian cuisine was like.

I assume we skip forward a few hours, because the next scene has Ironhorse delivering the mail to Suzanne, and she, quite bizarrely, makes a flirty joke based on substituting “male” for “mail” and saying, “I’ll take one.” Plus five points for foreshadowing, but minus a hundred for what they’re foreshadowing. In case it’s not obvious, this is going to be a plot about Suzanne seeing her ex-husband for the first time in years, and it’s an ’80s TV show, so yes, of course the thrust of the episode is going to be how Cash is a shitty human being, but damn if Suzanne doesn’t still have unresolved affection for him and damn if they’re not going to tease the possibility of eventual reconciliation between them because after all, they’ve got a kid together and the laws of TV morality means that you always have to give the deadbeat dad at least one on-screen try.

And to “justify” all of this, we lead off by reminding us that Suzanne is an adult human woman, and that many such people sometimes have needs and desires for which they might desire the companionship of a man, other than the three she spends ninety percent of her life with because of her job. And that’s fine. That’s great. Except that it’s not really all that great because it’s here entirely as an excuse for Suzanne’s judgment to be compromised when it comes to her shifty asshole ex-husband on account of she hasn’t been gettin’ it regular and is feeling all tingly in her nethers.

Suzanne’s mail includes a note from the main switchboard informing her that her ex-husband called. Ironhorse tries to seem all casual and just showing a friendly interest, but since he’s facing the camera, we can see that this is a cunning subterfuge, and he is in fact subtly trying to grill her for information, since Cash McCullough is, of course, a journalist, and journalists are enemies of the state, fake news, what about Crooked Hillary’s emails?

Because Ironhorse has approximately zero chill, when Suzanne muses to herself that she wonders what her deadbeat ex could possibly want to be calling her for the first time since the divorce, he immediately wheels around and asks what Cash wants in an accusatory tone. We’ve established pretty solid by now that this sort of thing is part of his job, so why does he need to be a dick about it? He literally could have just come down and said, “Your ex-husband called the switchboard. He’s a scumbag reporter, so I’m extra concerned about this. Let’s coordinate on this so that I can ensure the security of the project.” But instead he plays all coy and then suddenly wheels on her like a hardass for the fact that her scumbag ex called her unbidden.

Other than that bit of subterfuge, Ironhorse is entirely reasonable about the whole thing. He knows that Suzanne wouldn’t tell him anything about the project, and just needs a report from her afterward. What he’s really concerned about is Debi. Not sure why, given that it’s been nine episodes since we’ve seen her. Suzanne promises to “have a word with her,” which is good enough I guess? I mean, seriously, he goes to all the trouble of being a dick to Suzanne about her daughter possibly seeing her dad for the first time in two years and then he’s like, “Oh, yeah, just make sure you tell her not to say anything.” I’m not even clear whether Debi knows what they do at the Cottage. We saw her down in the lab once, but we’ve also heard her talk about alien life as something speculative.

Anyway, Ironhorse thanks Suzanne for her cooperation and we cut back to Suzanne to see her have absolutely no reaction whatsoever. Not even one of her bizarrely-timed smiles. Just nothing. And then we cut to an outdoor ice rink, because this show is just galloping forward through its plot, unlike me, with my constant asides and shameless digressions into more exciting subjects like the Trump administration’s miscarriages of justice or ’70s porn movies.

Debi sees her dad across the plaza, but has to ask for confirmation that it’s him, because that is how shitty a father Cash McCullough is. That talk Ironhorse wanted Suzanne to have with Debi? Addressed in its entirety by the line, “Do you remember what we talked about?”

Upon seeing her father for the first time in years, Debi’s first reaction is to want to go off and ice skate so he can watch her. This is a touching bit of realism, as Debi, who’s very young now and was even younger the last time she saw Cash, clearly is desperate to impress her father, out of an internalized, probably pre-conscious notion that she needs to win his affection. Nah. I’m just foolin’. The writers barely comprehend Debi on a level beyond that of a prop, and they’re getting her out of the way so that the “real” characters can talk. Cash portrays himself as wanting to reconcile, apologizing for his past and claiming that he’s grown weary of the way the life of the globetrotting journalist has left him bereft of interpersonal connections deeper than the random women he bangs. He apologizes for that too. As long as we have the actors on-screen, the writers reckon they should stick to shallow platitudes; the actual meat of their conversation is handled in the recap Suzanne gives Ironhorse back at the Cottage later.

Cash claims to have been covering the Armenian earthquake when the human suffering prompted him to reevaluate his life and the fact that no one would know or care if he died. Pretty pat story, easy enough to believe, and one thing I want to note about it is that the Armenian earthquake of December, 1988 is a real thing. I mentioned it back when we crossed through December, 1988 a couple of years ago for “The Good Samaritan“. That’s a bit remarkable, because it’s a real event, contemporary to the making of the show that dates the setting of this episode within a pretty narrow window — it’s still winter for them (Though a perusal of historical data suggests that it was a very mild winter in the Bay area, and hardly the Toronto-esque conditions we see on the show). In the past, references to major events in the outside world have been both fictionalized and sensationalized: a nuclear summit a few months earlier, a reference to a catastrophe involving biological weapons, and what might have been some stock footage of the Bhopal Disaster passed off as current events.

Consider this a minute. One of the elements of worldbuilding, such as it is, in this series is a faint underlying notion that War of the Worlds is set in a slightly nastier version of 1988 than the one we inhabit. I can’t say whether this is a deliberate departure from the real 1988, or more of an embracing of certain cultural narratives that are strong even today — narratives about society being on the brink of collapse. But if it is deliberate, then isn’t it odd, in a world where nuclear accidents and bioweapon attacks and armies opening fire on their own people and special ops units taking over hospitals and tanks rolling into small towns and all the attendees of a lima bean festival suddenly disappearing and counterterrorism operations on college campuses, the thing that allegedly makes Cash McCullough do some soul-searching is an entirely natural disaster?

Heck, maybe that’s meant to be a clue that he’s not on the level. Not that we need the clue. There’s no ambiguity for the audience in this; we already know the real reason Cash is trying to reconcile with his family. Whatever the case, Cash’s magic is working on his ex-wife. She’s agreed to have dinner with him. “While my mind was saying no, my mouth was saying yes,” she explains. Look, I get that it is reasonable for exes to have some unresolved stuff between them and it’s complicated. But Jesus Christ do I not need to see this story any more ever, and Jesus Christ do I not need another, “Oh, the smart and strong and determined woman is completely powerless before the rougeish bad boy.” Plus, Suzanne was married to this guy. So this whole “He’s got a power over her” thing boils down to “We couldn’t be arsed to think of any reason why someone like Suzanne would pursue a relationship with this jackass at all, let alone one that progressed to the point of marriage,” so let’s just make it “He’s got this magic power over her.”

I’m as angry as Ironhorse is. Sure, he shows some sympathy when Suzanne tells him how Cash has no living family other than them, and accepts that he didn’t ask Suzanne anything about her work, but the moment she leaves his office, he slams his fist on the desk and calls Stavrakos to set up surveillance on Suzanne’s date.

Dick.

Hey, remember when this show used to be about aliens and not Suzanne’s sex life? While I was busy complaining, the aliens took over a refrigerated warehouse and moved their eggs there. Now, they’re only seventy-two hours from hatching. Fortunately for humanity, even though Norton hasn’t been able to convince Harrison of his “baby talk” theory, he has been able to triangulate the source of the transmissions, so Harrison convinces Ironhorse to take some time off of spying on Suzanne’s dates to spy on refrigerated warehouses. In a lucky turn, the aliens have holed up in the industrial district in Eureka (or whatever city the Cottage is supposed to be near. As we’ve previously established, there’s contradictory evidence for that, but when Norton is locating things which are “nearby”, he inevitably pulls up a map showing Humboldt Bay).

Just a reminder here: the aliens are based in the Nevada desert. The closest place they could find to refrigerate their eggs was in northern California. Are there no refrigerated warehouses in Reno? Ironhorse himself points out what a big risk that is. Obviously, he doesn’t know where the aliens are and the aliens don’t know that they’ve moved in a few miles up the street from the enemy, but Ironhorse essentially hangs a lantern on the fact that there’s got to be refrigerated warehouses that aren’t in major metropolitan areas, no? For example, there appears to be one right off of I-80 in Storey County. I don’t know much about dairy logistics but I assume it’s a thing that exists and all.

At this late stage in the series, we forgo the usual back-and-forth where Ironhorse has to be skeptical for a scene or two. In fact, it’s reversed: Harrison doesn’t see anything noteworthy at first glance, but Ironhorse’s trained eye notices the passive security. We see a binocular shot of the cameras on the roof, and Ironhorse mentions electronic locks and sensors. We are not shown these because it beggars the imagination to seriously believe that he’d be able to see those from this distance.

Then he mentions that the guards are all covered in radiation sores. Way to bury the lede. They make plans to have Omega Squad secure the perimeter on the DL and return for a look around. In the mean time, they return to the Cottage so that Harrison and Ironhorse can muse at each other about why the aliens would take such a big risk. The scene reminds me a little of the scenes in both “The Resurrection” and “The Walls at Jericho” of Harrison guiding Ironhorse to use his military expertise to guess at alien strategy. But like before, this just makes it all the stranger that neither of them draws a comparison to that time the aliens took over a liquid nitrogen factory. Harrison gets as far as theorizing that the aliens need to recreate the colder climate of Mortax, but he can’t come up with a reason. Come on, Harry. You already know that the aliens are susceptible to heat, and you know that there’s been times in the past where the aliens have taken big risks like this. Even if he can’t work out that it’s a delivery ward, the comparison to Jericho and to “To Heal the Leper” should at least get him as far as guessing at it being something healthcare-related.

They get interrupted when Suzanne stops in to tell them she’s off on her date with the ex. This leads, as it must I guess, to a scene where the two men and the incidental music are all left helpless for a few seconds because Suzanne did her hair and now looks ’80s hot. This is supposed to be cute, and it is not, first because I do not live in 1989, and second because it is literally the exact same scene they did the last time Suzanne had a date back in “The Good Samaritan“, and I do not even wish to dignify it with any more commentary.

We leave Harrison and Ironhorse to their failure at working out the alien plot and follow Suzanne on her date. As we’ve only got like three minutes for this scene, Cash cuts to the chase and asks if Suzanne would consider taking him back, on account of he’s lonely, she’s horny, and Debi is desperate for her father’s love. Suzanne, thankfully, rejects him on account of he’s an asshole. She accuses him of having a habit of disappearing when husbandry and fathering are needed, which gives Cash a perfect opening for a fantastically forced segue:

“Disappear? You mean like illegal aliens?” He assumes Suzanne is playing coy, but lays his cards on the table, accusing her, though he is stunned to imagine it, of working with a government project that lures undocumented immigrants out of hiding with false promises of amnesty, then shoots them. He alternates between suggesting Suzanne has been an unwitting pawn in all this and softly threatening her, since he plans to do “the same thing” as “they” did with ABSCAM.

This forced me to look up what ABSCAM was. And it makes no sense at all as a point of comparison here. ABSCAM was an FBI sting in the early ’80s that caught about a dozen public officials taking bribes. Is Cash supposed to be the FBI in this analogy? That might make sense if he were setting up some kind of “sting” with fake immigrants for them to try to shoot. But still, he’s a reporter investigating a secret death squad, not law enforcement investigating corruption. When ABSCAM became public, there was some controversy over the possibility that the FBI’s tactics bordered on entrapment, but all of the convictions were ultimately upheld. Does he just mean that “When it came out that a bunch of members of Congress were on the take, it was a big scandal”? Had you heard of ABSCAM? Far as I can tell, there’s no “intrepid reporter who broke the story and forced the powerful to their knees,” element to the ABSCAM story like there is in Watergate. It seems pretty clear that the point of comparison Cash wants here is to Iran-Contra, but it doesn’t work out because Reagan essentially got away with it and by the time this episode was written, most of the related trials either hadn’t started yet or were still ongoing. Was it just a last-minute, “Watergate is too on-the-nose, swap that out for some other scandal”? Or maybe an ’80s audience would be carrying a different understanding of ABSCAM than I’ve picked up from googling it thirty years later.

Cash promises to keep Suzanne and Debi out of it in exchange for her help. She tells him to go to hell, realizing that the only reason he’s come back into their lives is for his story. “You’re the kind of bastard who makes the case for divorce not enough,” she says. I can’t even fully parse that sentence. It only really makes sense to me if I assume that “The Case For Divorce” is the title of some seminal women’s studies essay. But the only one I’m familiar with is from 2009, so probably not. He cements his asshole status with an ominous warning that he always gets his story at any cost. She throws her drink in his face.

I hope his redemption arc involves him dying. The incidental music agrees with me, going full-on Lifetime Movie as Suzanne storms out, leaving Cash to glower after her with a total, “The climax of this show is going to be me trying to murder you,” expression.

Gee, I bet that won’t be totally undermined in the name of a last-minute heel-face-turn to make Cash a sympathetic character and thus leave open the possibility of eventual reconciliation with Suzanne…

To Be Concluded…

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• War of the Worlds is available from amazon.

Author’s note: Due to the exceptional length of the angry tirade I go on, this episode’s treatment will be split into three parts. Thank you for your patience.

And what would your name be?
Woodward and Bernstein didn’t need a name.
You’re Deep Throat?

It is April 24, 1989, or as they call it in Massachusetts, “New Kids on the Block Day”. The District of Columbia has, for the second time, been blocked from enforcing a new law that would forbid minors from being out on the streets of the nation’s capital after 11 PM. Deposed Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda lost a SCOTUS appeal on the freezing of their assets. In China… My website is definitely getting blocked for saying that stuff is happening in Tiananmen Square. Noboru Takeshita will resign as the Prime Minister of Japan tomorrow, in the wake of the Recruit scandal, which we’ve mentioned before. Motorola will release the MicroTAC cell phone this week, the world’s smallest cell phone, which is pretty much the size of a modern cell phone, once you remove its camel-hump-like six-hundred pound battery pack, which can provide the phone with enough power to work for possibly as much as thirty seconds. Dad had one. To check the battery, you dialed *4 (From the mnemonic 4=GHI=”Gas”). He got an adapter kit for it that let you run it off of a dozen double-A batteries.

In the past week, a gun turret exploded on the USS Iowa, killing 47. In New York, Trisha Meili was assaulted while jogging in central park. She was given last rites due to the severity of her injuries, but emerged from her coma twelve days later and largely recovered. Because of media policies about not identifying victims of sex crimes, she would largely be known to the public simply as “The Central Park Jogger” until publication of her memoir in 2003. The case provoked huge amounts of public outrage, feeding into a culture of paranoia about urban violence, which has since been partially explained as the result of systemic lead poisoning from pollution, but, between genuine ignorance of how to deal with a then-growing violent crime problem and the political expedience of playing upon America’s history of racism, the attack was one more incident that served to help justify escalation of police militarization and mass incarceration, mostly of people of color over the next thirty years. Five young men were quickly apprehended, coerced into confessing, and were convicted the following year.

The actual assailant, Matias Reyes would confess to the crime in 2002 while already serving a life sentence. His confession was validated by physical and DNA evidence. Reyes would claim to have acted alone, though some connected with the case maintain that some or all of the “Central Park Five” likely acted as accomplices. All five convictions were vacated in 2002. Strictly speaking, this next bit goes next week, but let’s get it out of the way now: On May 1, real estate mogul Donald John Trump will take out a full-page ad in New York’s four biggest newspapers calling for the execution of the five suspects. The state of New York did not have the death penalty at the time. Trump’s advertisements are thought to have swayed public opinion in the rush to convict. As of October, 2016, Trump maintains that the Central Park Five were guilty of the crime and should have been executed for it.

Okay. Deep, cleansing breath, and try to pivot back to pop culture. Nintendo releases Super Mario Land for the Game Boy. Tom Petty releases his first solo album, Full Moon Fever. Madonna unseats Fine Young Cannibals for the top spot on the Billboard charts with “Like a Prayer”. Bon Jovi has a new song in the top ten, though I imagine he’s got other things on his mind, since he’s marrying his high school sweetheart this week.

Child’s Play is released on home video. Pet Semetary and Teen Witch open in theaters, but the real big news on the silver screen is Field of Dreams. Lucille Ball will die Wednesday. TV is generally new this week. Perfect Strangers, for example, gives us “Teacher’s Pest”. Here is a link to a Perfect Strangers review blog I really rather like, because I am sharing the love, and I imagine he would be happy if some of my many “one or two visitors a week” would swing by there. MacGyver gives us “Brainwashed”, where Mac has to stop a brainwashed assassin from killing a diplomat. BBC1 will air a documentary on spontaneous human combustion. Dragon Ball Z premiers in Japan Wednesday, while today, The Disney Channel will debut the third incarnation of The Mickey Mouse Club. It’ll air at 5:30, right after Kids Incorporated. Well, right after the ten minutes of music videos and time fillers they have to add to make up for the fact that The Disney Channel doesn’t show commercials yet, so the Hal Roach-produced Kids Incorporated, like all of their programming that was created for syndication, is ten minutes too short. This is the incarnation of the show which will introduce the world to Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, Kerri Russel and Ryan Gosling. Sunday, The Wonderful World of Disney will show a special introducing the world to Disney-MGM Studios (Now “Disney’s Hollywood Studios“), which opens the next day. Here is a link to the History Honeys podcast about Disney’s Hollywood Studios, because I am in sharing mood and also because Grant and Alaina are fantastic. Bionic Showdown, the second of three TV films reuniting The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, airs afterward. I am not currently following any Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman review blogs.

Star Trek The Next Generation airs “The Icarus Factor”. I should refer you to Josh Marsfelder on this one, because I remember this one as just being boring and about Riker not getting along with his dad while Worf is pissy because he never got to go through Klingon Fraternity Hazing, so his pals set up the holodeck to let John Tesh in Klingon Makeup zap him with a cattle prod. This week’s Friday the 13th The Series has the wonderful title, “The Secret Agenda of Mesmer’s Bauble”. The plot can’t live up to it. Just another “Cursed antique grants wishes in exchange for murder,” leaning heavily on stunt casting: singer Denise Matthews, then performing as Vanity, guest starred.

This episode is a callback to previous episodes in a lot of ways, but it’s strange about it. It’s not really an “arc episode” like you’d see in a post-The X-Files TV show. No, when I say that this episode calls back to previous episodes, it’s more of a feeling that this episode was filled out with trimmings from previous episodes. It’s somewhat adroit that we’ve happened upon this episode right after introducing ourselves to the Eternity Comics story. Much like how issue 3 there had that strange repetition that seemed meaningful but didn’t add up to anything, this episode is full of echoes to the past that are less “callback” and more “My typewriter ran out of ribbon. Just reuse page 24 from last week’s script here.”

Our writer this week is Jon Kubichan. This is his only contribution to the series. I wonder how much background he was working with. Given the production, let’s say, “difficulties”, maybe he simply didn’t know which elements of the series were meant to be recurring character and world tropes. Kubichan is probably best known as a writer and producer for the original Land of the Lost (he actually wrote my favorite episode, “The Repairman”, which guest stars Laurie Main, the voice of the narrator from Winnie-the-Pooh, as an eccentric, mysterious man with a British accent and knowledge of the workings of space, time, and the Land of the Lost, who wears a tweed jacket and a bow tie. Yes. The Winnie-the-Pooh narrator plays the eleventh Doctor in 1976), though this gives me very little enlightenment here. Near as I can tell, this is Kubichan’s last TV work. It’s also the only thing on his resume in the entire decade. Did he come out of retirement to write one middle-of-the-road episode of a failing first-run-syndication science fiction show? Sure, why not.

The aliens are in a pickle when we open, as it turns out that ten gallon food-grade buckets half-full of dry ice fog in their radiation-filled Land of the Lost cave is not actually a suitable environment for gestating the leathery, triangular eggs that the aliens hatch from. The heat is causing them to break open prematurely, and that’s bad news since the aliens can only lay eggs every nine years, which means that if this batch doesn’t make it, the, “Circle of life will be broken,” a sentence that is going to get really funny in a minute.

It’s actually kinda weird that they didn’t see this coming, since the second episode of the series was all about the fact that the radiation also makes it too hot for the adult aliens without those refrigerated suits. War of the Worlds hasn’t been great about following up on things. This is understandable. After all, it’s still the ’80s and any continuity from episode-to-episode beyond broad strokes isn’t really a thing you do in TV of this era. The fact that episodes often aired out of production order meant that trying to reference past details could bite you, and, in fact, we’ve already had them reference events from the future back in “Among the Philistines”. This episode is going to bring back some elements we’ve seen before, though, which makes it all the more surprising that, at least insofar as the “We need to find some refrigeration because it’s too hot in our radioactive cave,” angle, the show seems possibly to not have noticed they were doing it.

In Dillard’s novelization, there’s a reference to a third alien gender which gestates alien embryos, with an explanation that those ones were less hearty than the gamete-providing genders, and none had survived the initial invasion. That could serve as a setup for this episode, with the aliens struggling to find a means of artificial gestation in light of the impossibility of doing it the old fashioned way. I wonder if it was written that way in an earlier draft. Sadly, it doesn’t mesh with the dialogue of the episode as aired; instead, the Ilse von Glatz advocate orders the soldiers to find them somewhere safe and cold to put the eggs, “As on our planet.”

Before they can get on with that, the stillborn egg has to be disposed of. We’ve seen the weird green pit in the cave before, but there’s never been an explanation for what it is. Possibly it was formed by the underground nuclear testing which rendered this place suitable for the aliens. But this time, I notice that there’s something orange-red and quivering slightly at the bottom of the abyss. With the quasi-religious significance the aliens seem to give the pit, I’m curious about it. Did they stick something down there? In any case, one of the advocates says a few words, including the word “thee” to make it sound extra religious, in a scene that humanizes the aliens to an extent that’s largely unique for the show. And then we get another poorly composited shot when he tosses the little egg at the matte painting of a hole.

Continue reading Thesis: My Soul to Keep (War of the Worlds 1×20, Part 1)

Let us proceed from the assumption that it is March, 1989. The US joins the Berne Copyright Convention. Iran severs diplomatic ties with the UK over the publication of The Satanic Verses. Eastern Air Lines declares bankruptcy and their shuttle service, offering hourly flights between New York, DC, and Boston, is sold to Donald John Trump, who predictably renames it the “Trump Shuttle”. Speaking of disasters which threaten the global ecosystem, the Exxon Valdez runs aground and dumps almost a quarter million barrels of oil in Prince William Sound.

When we left Stanley Boyd and Rebecca McMannis, he’d just noticed that she had a bunch of velcro growing on the back of her neck, and this prompted him to point his gun at her, because the glowing hands and ability to summon spectral images of girls she’s never met and an unexplained affinity for the attacking aliens he can put up with, but she’s in serious danger of becoming too weird-looking for him to want to bang.

The dateline for issue 3 places us outside of Sheffield, where, now on the ground, Boyd again demands an explanation for Rebecca’s mutations. The dateline also assures us that it is May, 1913. Every dateline in the first three issues does this. This story takes place over the course of about five days, and every single establishing shot reminds us that it is May, 1913. In 2018, it is a four and a half hour drive from Edinburgh to Sheffield. The world record for flight airspeed around this time in history — May, 1913 — is around 110 miles per hour, so if Boyd could sustain that the whole way, it’s still a trip of more than two hours. Has he been holding the gun on her the whole time, but not actually pressing her for an explanation?

She calls his bluff, asserting that he won’t shoot her because he’s in love with her. He admits to it, but demands she disrobe so he can see “How much of you is still woman.” I am pleasantly surprised to report that the story acknowledges that this is an abusive thing to do, even under the circumstances. When Boyd says, “You’re not the Rebecca I knew,” she retorts that the Stanley Boyd she knew was a gentleman.

Of course, these two have known each other for what, a couple of days at the outside? But yeah, they actually made a point in the last issue of Boyd’s gallantry, with him apologizing for taking the “liberty” of picking her up when she’s unconscious.

Shamed, Boyd asks if the physical changes hurt, and Rebecca gives the rather wonderful answer that it’s, “Nay dif’erent than any woman’s aches and troubles. Only, they don’ show t’the eye, so men dinna’ fash ’emselves.” She tells him not to worry about it, since women have “Far more experience in copin’ than a man will e’er understand.” I am all for a streak of feminism in my apocalyptic aliens wars, so it’s really wild and interesting to have Rebecca essentially equate having her body slowly chimeratized to menstrual cramps, and then go on to turn it into an indictment of the extent to which men are generally oblivious to women’s pain.

Life is naught but dif’rent levels o’ sensation, you know. The rest is interpretation. Rebecca is strangely chill about the whole thing. She was at least a bit surprised by the glowing hands last issue, but it seems like the changes to her body are bringing along some changes to her thinking as well. For example, she now knows the name of the invaders, which is just slipped in there with no fanfare or even acknowledgement that this is the first time we’ve been given a name for them. While skinny dipping, she explains that the Aarach are a race older than man which has lived underground, and where does he get off thinking that humans have exclusive claim to the surface anyway?

We get a full page showing a town under Aarach attack. Sheffield, I assume. Some of the Aarach have come down out of their machine and shoot a man with a weapon that looks kinda like a flamethrower.

Rebecca does… Something… And the Aarach respond by… Something. It’s not clear to me at all, but Boyd gets it: they’re offering him and Rebecca a ride. When Boyd refuses to board the tripod with them, Rebecca does another thing, and the Aarach flee.

After a bit of fumbling with the controls, Boyd topples the thing over, and Rebecca takes over. Boyd is confident in his masculinity and, “Not the sort to be emasculated by a suffragette’s brazen display of female efficacy.” Though I guess she does some fancy maneuvering because on the next panel he’s feeling kinda emasculated by her brazen display of female efficacy. I can’t tell what she does to show off. Rebecca asks him what a suffragette is. Which I guess is supposed to be funny because it’s 1913 and women’s suffrage is a fringe position or something, but after the whole skinny-dipping sequence with its elements of postmodern feminism, it feels slightly misplaced and more-than-slightly cheap.

Their tripod acquires an escort to protect them on the way to London, but Boyd seizes the controls and fires on them after watching them dispatch attacking soldiers. Rebecca claims to object equally to human and Aarach death.

When they reach London (3 hours 11 minutes driving), Boyd demands to get out of the tripod at the sight of Westminster Abbey in flames, and demands Rebecca explain why they’d attack a church. He even offers her an out, suggesting she tell him that the militia had cannons behind the pews.

She says she’s going to explain, but doesn’t really. Rebecca says that the Aarach are like curious children, looking to learn. What does this have to do with them destroying a church? Nothing directly. Indirectly, nothing that is explained well enough to make sense.

Rebecca confuses Boyd for her dead husband, calling him John. A shot from her perspective shows that she’s even seeing him as John, though he reminds her of her husband’s death at the hands of the Aarach, cut down for “the sin of trying to reason with them”. She says that John died because he, “Dinna’ let them learn from ‘im. He blocked the process.”

You might recall, though, that the Aarach didn’t kill John. They traumatized him, but he survived and was starting to recover when the townsfolk dropped a boulder on him. But it’s what Rebecca told Boyd when she woke up. At the time, I assumed she was playing fast and loose with the details to abridge out the bit where her neighbors tried to murder her. Now, though, I’m starting to wonder if Scott Finley isn’t pulling a mild retcon.

A frame of flashback shows the bible in John’s hand when he confronted the Aarach. Since Boyd can’t see the flashback and Rebecca never says anything other than that John was “carryin’ resistance,” you’ve got to wonder what he made of that. A second flashback explains that weird sequence of panels back in issue 1 showing her crucifix. Since Rebecca “Dinna’ believe n’ more,” she, “Dinna block the learnin’.”

Okay. This much actually makes sense. Something about religious faith interferes with the Aarach. They tried to communicate with John, but he was carrying a bible, so the attempt left him cataleptic. By the time they grab Rebecca, she’s lost her faith after watching the townsfolk murder her husband. Possibly the Aarach tried to commune with Rebecca because they’d picked up something from their failed communion with John. They just flat-out murder Charon, and John was carrying a gun, but never mind. Religious angles are common in War of the Worlds adaptations, and there’s all sorts of places they could go here. There’s a straightforward Four Horsemen sort of approach of saying that, oh, something like, “Religion is the opposite of rational thought so the advanced logical minds of the Aarach can’t accept it.” Or maybe go exactly the opposite direction, and since the Aarach are underground-dwellers, maybe propose that they’re inherently demonic, and thus weak against Holy. You could push it to a Stargate sort of place and suggest that human religion is actually a corrupted race memory of an earlier encounter with the Aarach that implies the existence of some angelic aliens. Ooh, that’d be a twist if you had the angelic aliens swoop in from Mars at the end.

None of this is going to happen. I don’t believe the religious angle ever comes up again. We certainly never get an explanation for why they burned down Westminster. No, where we go instead is:

They’re readyin’ me. The truest learnin’ always comes from a mergin’. A thesis joined with its antithesis t’create the synthesis. That’s what they want from us– synthesis.

So that’s weird and florid and doesn’t really hold up under close inspection. But… I can’t honestly say that it’s unclear where they are going with this. Boyd will figure it out in two pages, but it only takes that long because they’re interrupted: a group of soldiers shows up. They saw Boyd and Rebecca disembark from the tripod and declare them traitors. I guess they didn’t see that bit where Boyd blew up all the other tripods. Just standard practice: if you see one of your own people get out of an enemy craft which is now vacant and isn’t doing anything aggressive, you don’t consider the possibility that he captured it, you just assume he’s a traitor and open fire instantly without even trying to capture him for information or anything.

Continue reading Deep Ice: Or maybe to make little baby aliens (Eternity Comics’ War of the Worlds, Issue 3)

Please note: This article covers a science fiction story which prominently features infant loss and infertility as a theme.

I guess it’s January 1989? The only dates we’re given are “1989”, and we’re told that this is a bimonthly publication, a word which means both “twice a month” and “once every two months”. So two months after October, 1988 is… Okay, never mind. Let’s say it’s January, 1989. Reagan and Hirohito are out, Bush and Akihito are in. I turn ten.

Okay, so last time on Eternity Comics’ War of the Worlds, the townsfolk of the Isle of Skye tried to kill Rebecca McMannis as a witch, and in return, they got exterminated by a race of giant tentacled mushrooms and giant creatures who looked like the love children of Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still and the Statue of Liberty (I am not alone in this interpretation; in his endnote to issue 3, Scott Finley says that artist Brooks Hagan refers to them as “matte black statues of liberty”).

This is an adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel.

Issue 2 may be the peak of incomprehensibility out of this series. Issue 3 is weirder, but it balances that with a bit of actual exposition. The plot isn’t actually that complicated, it’s just that the structure of the narrative makes it hard to follow. It’s particularly bad about establishing who characters are and how they relate to one another or even why they do things. The very first page of issue 1 did a great job of establishing the relationship between John and Rebecca. That they have a close bond despite recent tragedy, that he’s doing what he can to comfort her insecurities, and that they’re passionate toward each other. But this doesn’t carry over to any of the other characters in issues one or two. I spent a lot of issue 1 thinking, “Who are these people and why are they acting like this?” And I’ll still be doing it for issue 2.

For reasons which make even less sense when we find out what’s going on, Rebecca, last seen cradled in an Aarach’s tentacles, is now floating naked on a raft in the sea off the Isle of Skye. She’s spotted by a passing boat and taken aboard under orders of Stanley Boyd. I guess the boat is meant to be a Thunder Child analogue. We’re never given a name or anything. Boyd isn’t the captain, either. So why do they take his orders? Best guess is that he’s the owner. Boyd’s rich, his mother owning “about two acres” of Edinburgh’s market district. He doesn’t have a job per se, but he’s a flying enthusiast, and the boat is on its way to an exposition in Johannisthal (Germany’s first airfield) hoping to best “That red-headed Fokker kid”. The fact that he is a competent pilot will indeed be relevant later. Be happy about this, because it’s one of the few times that a character’s reasons for doing things is actually explained to us.

He orders Rebecca taken aboard because, “My mother raised three children, none of them to be fools.” See what I mean about motivations? The sailors aren’t sure if they should bring aboard the pretty naked lady drifting at sea. Okay. Sailors are a cowardly and superstitious lot — ir. No, wait. That’s criminals. But “sailors are uncomfortable with having women aboard boats” is a common trope. But how does his mother not having raised him to be a fool figure into his decision? There’s an alien invasion going on. Either she’s a refugee, in which case it’s not a matter of wisdom or foolishness; or else, she’s some kind of trap, in which case “My mother didn’t raise me to be a fool,” is the sort of thing you’d say before avoiding the trap. You don’t get to “Yes, let’s bring the naked pretty lady floating unprotected out at sea all alone aboard aboard our ship” from “We have a realistic decision one way or the other about taking this person on board, and I am not a fool.”

Rebecca dreams of the gallows. This is another wordless scene that is very powerful but doesn’t necessarily advance the story. And I’m not going to show it to you, because it is disturbing. A mob of dark-eyed townsfolk led by a demonic version of Shona has her hanged. As the rope snaps her neck, one dark panel shows the silhouette of a newborn dropping from her skirts. The final panel shows the neonate strangled by its umbilical cord.

Boyd tries to be reassuring as he wakes Rebecca, who claims her husband died in the attack before she was captured. Boyd warns her to “Be cautious about that kind of talk,” because they lost radio contact weeks ago and the men are close to mutiny. And for the second time in three pages, I’m not clear how what he’s saying connects to the situation. How much do they know about the invasion? Taken at face value, they don’t know that there’s been an invasion; they just know that they’ve lost radio contact. They’re still on their way to Johannisthal, with full intention of Boyd still making his air exposition even though the sailors are worried enough to be, “setting covetous eyes on the lifeboats.” And I guess, “Don’t tell the men that Scotland’s being invaded by aliens because the men are already wound up and I don’t want them abandoning ship,” is reasonable, but doesn’t it seem like if Boyd doesn’t know what’s going on, a better immediate reaction might be, “Wait, what alien invasion?”

Rebecca’s reaction is a little strange too: “I know what I know.” It’s enough to make me think maybe the text in Boyd’s speech bubble is misplaced and he was meant to say something else here. His reaction makes far more sense a few panels later, when Rebecca discovers that her hand is glowing.

At least, I assume that it’s glowing. This black-and-white, you know. Maybe her hand has just developed Spider-Sense.

After showing off his plane, Boyd climbs down onto… Something… I guess it’s the raft they found Rebecca on? For the love of God, explain something other than the Boyd family’s real estate holdings. Boyd shoots a hole in it… For some reason.

Okay. After a whole bunch of rereading, I guess maybe the “raft” was a hull plate from an Aarach ship, and he’s shooting it because he can’t tell what it’s made of and wants to see how resilient it is? But none of this is communicated to the audience. All we get is “For some reason, Boyd climbs down onto a black thing in the water, inexplicably asks for his gun, and shoots it.” And though the raft is indeed flat black like the tripods, there’s one panel where it kinda looks to have a grain to it, like wood. Or maybe that’s just the inking? The first time I read this, I thought he shot it by accident — he shoots immediately after Rebecca makes a joke about him accidentally shooting his foot off.

Whatever the reason, the instant he shoots it, a tripod emerges from the water. Rebecca orders him to throw his gun away, and he does, then Rebecca looks at her glowing hand. The tripod takes off, headed straight toward Edinburgh according to the captain. Rebecca asserts that the tripod wants them to go to London. No explanation for this is given. The captain tells her to shut up if she knows what’s good for her, but Boyd gives the bizarre response, “My mother’s in Edinburgh. We’ll talk of London once I know she’s safe.”

The next few pages are confusing. The ship sails by more tripods, which seem uninterested in it. The captain warns Boyd that they won’t make Johannisthal in time if they stop in Edinburgh and has to have it pointed out to him that competitive biplane handgun marksmanship might be obsolete in the face of these giant mechanical death machines stalking the countryside. And it’s only at this point, a day after their first encounter with the tripod, that the captain thinks to ask Boyd if he believes, “Th’ missy’s story,” or if he thinks she’s “one of them.” This is weird on two fronts. Most obviously, because the captain has not yet put his foot down and had her thrown off the ship for witchcraft. You know, once you’ve established that this is a world where a woman can be attacked by an angry mob and nearly murdered on suspicion of witchcraft for, near as I can tell, having had a miscarriage, there is a certain onus on your story to establish why everyone didn’t freak out when Rebecca turned out to actually have unnatural powers and some kind of mental link with the invaders. But they don’t.

The other thing they don’t do is give any context for, “Th’ missy’s story.” Because she hasn’t told a story, beyond “I got captured and I don’t know what happened after that.” Big chunks of this comic seem to either be missing or out of order or something. The captain being worried that Rebecca might be in league with the invaders makes perfect sense, but the framing of it is impossible to make sense of, since she hasn’t actually offered any explanation, and, in fact, she’s only ever been silenced when she tries to provide any sort of context.

Boyd decides to test Rebecca’s loyalties by smooching her, since he’s, “Never met a creepy-crawly with lips could do that.” Um. Okay. She turns out to be into it, and the preceding wordless panels of them exchanging looks can be taken as establishing some level of attraction between them, so I won’t object on the grounds of consent, but still, dude. Her husband’s been dead for less than a week. And, like, what if she were some kind of otherworldly creature? You want chestbursters? Because that’s how you get chestbursters.

Edinburgh is under fire when the ship arrives. Boyd tries to leave Rebecca aboard, ordering the captain to take her wherever she asks if he doesn’t return. But she goes with Boyd instead, as the captain’s men, “All think yehr glands are cryin’ oot louder th’n good judgment,” and won’t allow her to remain aboard. And if Boyd’s dialogue hasn’t been confusing enough, when the captain prays that God protect them from the monsters, Boyd answers, “What if these monsters are God?”

Wow, that’s an intriguing question that will not really be addressed in any meaningful way. Never mind then. We cut to Edinburgh to introduce Boyd’s mother with the rather wonderful description, “Yeh’ve admirable sized testicles for a woman.” Widow Boyd is trying to talk a Captain Bolander out of a futile defense of the town by pointing out that the tripods only fire when fired upon, “Returning your antagonism with tenfold the force.” This does something to explain the earlier scene with Boyd’s gun, and the fact that the Aarach don’t take any obvious interest in Boyd’s ship as it approaches. But I am not entirely convinced. I mean, it does appear that when we see individual people killed by the Aarach in issues 2 and 3, the comic takes some care to depict them firing first. But there’s also plenty of shots that look like they’re just shooting indiscriminately down at the city.

The gunners see the logic in Widow Boyd’s words, but Captain Bolander is from the tradition of pointlessly obstructive and stupid military officers in speculative fiction, and orders them to keep firing, threatening to replace them with his daughters, who, he claims, have, “Bigger clock-weights than yeh’ll ever see in the loo.” Y’know, that is a pretty high lines-of-dialogue-to-talking-about-a-woman’s-pendulous-testicles ratio. I feel like I should make a joke about transphobes here, but transphobia is too unfunny for me to think of a good one.

A confusing couple of frames later, one of the tripods is on the ground. It got shot by Bolander’s cannon, but the way the frames are arranged on the page, the causal relationship between the cannon firing and the tripod collapsing isn’t clear. It kinda looks more like the tripod suffers a friendly fire accident (This isn’t the only time it looks like the tripods fire on each other, and the way the story is going, the possibility of the Aarach having violent disagreements on strategy isn’t a stretch). Continue reading Deep Ice: Ah, a kiss. Yes. (Eternity Comics’ War of the Worlds #2)

Please note: This article covers a science fiction story which prominently features infant loss and infertility as a theme.

Let us begin again. It is October, 1988. For the sake of not treading the same ground again, let’s say the first week. Charles Addams, creator of The Addams Family, died last week. Space Shuttle Discovery will be returning to Earth on Monday, completing the first US manned space mission since the Challenger disaster. In Seoul, the 1988 Summer Olympics come to a close. This is the first Olympiad I really remember as a specific event, since I was five for the last one and this one carried a bit of extra cultural weight because it avoided the major boycotts of the previous three games (The Soviet Union had boycotted the 1984 games in retaliation for the US boycott of the 1980 games, and 29 nations boycotted the 1976 games in protest after New Zealand violated the sporting embargo against South Africa). It was the last Summer Olympics for the Soviet Union and East Germany, neither of which would exist by 1992. Both countries outperformed the US in the medal count. The retirement of Andrei Gromyko makes Mikhail Gorbachev the head of state of the Soviet Union. If that sounds late to you, Gorbachev had basically been running the place since 1985; historically, the Chairmanship was a largely ceremonial role when not held simultaneously with the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party. Gorbachev would be the last head of state to hold the Chairmanship, as executive powers would stay with him when he moved to the newly-created presidency. Gorbachev would oversee the restructuring of the Soviet Union from an “Evil Empire” to a more democratic federation that would usher in a new era of friendship and peace between east and west and surely lead only to good things, unless somehow they ended up handing over power to a handful of rich, corrupt oligarchs who would eventually mount a stunning campaign to sow chaos in western democracies by influencing the elections of far-right ethno-nationalist faux-populist crazy people, themselves falling under the leadership of, basically, a Bond villain. But what are the odds of that?

But you can feel it, here in 1988. Change is in the air. The Olympics, the US return to space, Glasnost and Perestroika. Things are a-comin’. Speaking of Glasnost and Perestroika, “Don’t Worry Be Happy” is at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Cheap Trick, Robert Palmer, UB40, Guns n’ Roses and Joan Jett are also in the top ten. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is released in theaters, and you could say, “This is where the franchise really starts to go downhill,” except that most Halloween fans hated Halloween 3 (I don’t) and the smarter fans consider Halloween 2 the real downfall of the series. Nice to see Donald Pleasance again. Disney releases Cinderella on VHS and Laserdisc. They also release The Wind in the Willows on VHS in an edited form, but it’ll be another four years before the theatrical version, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (an anthology film which, in addition to a longer version of The Wind in the Willows also contains an adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) gets a home release.

Doctor Who returns this week on the BBC to kick off its silver anniversary season with part one of “Remembrance of the Daleks”, a serial widely considered the best of the era, and even possibly better than the best of several other, generally-better eras. The serial returns the Doctor to the time of the series’ premiere and the setting of the very first episode. Coincidentally, William Russell, who was introduced in that very first episode twenty-five years earlier, and now just a few weeks shy of 64, becomes a father this week with the birth of his son, Alfred Enoch. Enoch would grow up to play Dean Thomas in the Harry Potter movies. The Oprah Winfrey Show makes its debut on UK television. ABC airs Liberace, a biopic about the legendary singer. Next week, CBS will respond with their own biopic, Liberace: Behind the Music. The ABC version has the advantage of having the rights to more of Liberace’s music, jewelry and costumes, while the CBS version has the advantage of being honest about the fact that he was gay. TV is mostly repeats and specials, thanks to the Olympics and the Vice Presidential debate cutting into prime time. ALF is one exception, with a new episode. Debuting this week are the horror-anthology series Monsters, the Judd Hirsch vehicle Dear John, and Golden Girls spin-off Empty Nest. This week

Next week, some time between Friday and Monday, many Paramount-affiliated independent stations will air the two-hour premiere of War of the Worlds. But we’ve been through all that. What I want to talk about this week is something else which popped up at the same time. Eternity Comics was an independent publisher in the ’80s that specialized in creator-owned comics and licensed properties. Their best-known titles were Ex-Mutants (A “lighthearted post-apocalyptic adventure”, and not, as it totally sounds like, a shameless X-Men knock-off) and their adaptation of Robotech. The company would gain a little infamy from frequent legal issues, such as when it turned out that they’d bought the rights to adapt Captain Harlock from just some dude, and not anyone who had any legal authority to grant them a license. Or when they published unredacted reprints of old Mickey Mouse comics which had fallen out of copyright (The sticking point being the lack of redaction; Disney would rather everyone just forget about just how ridiculously racist their 1930s comic strips were).

But we are here, of course, because they decided to take a swing at War of the Worlds. The timing is unlikely to be coincidental, but then, nothing is, really. It’s the thirty-fifth anniversary of the George Pal movie, and the cover of issue 1 reminds us that it’s “Now a hit TV show!”  Based on that, you might be forgiven for thinking that Eternity Comics had picked up a license to adapt the TV series. Have you learned nothing? No, despite the coattail-riding, this is a completely independent adaptation of Wells’s original story.

Or… Not. I’ve asked more than once now just how far afield you can go before you stop being an adaptation of War of the Worlds. There’s hardly anything in either season of the television series that really stands out as “Oh yes, clearly this is drawn from the source material written by Wells a hundred years ago.” But they clearly count because they’re both explicitly sequels to the 1953 movie. Is it enough to say, “A technologically superior alien race invades Earth without warning and humanity proves defenseless until the aliens are abruptly killed off by disease”? Alien Dawn omitted the disease, and several of the adaptations we’ve looked at gave humans agency in the aliens’ defeat. Is it the presence of tripod battle machines? The George Pal film is a stretch on that point, but of even more concern, has the entire Giant Robot Mech genre of anime now fallen within our definition? Certainly Goliath is an argument that a War of the Worlds adaptation can have some overlap with Robotech. And what do we do with something like John Christopher’s The Tripods, which is clearly inspired by War of the Worlds, but which no one has ever tried to pass off as an adaptation of it?

We open with a note from author Scott Finley, which claims that despite the breadth of adaptations the story has seen over the years, none stray too far from the original story. Clearly, he never watched the 1980 Polish version. He seems to reckon — with a certain amount of humility, as he doesn’t suggest that his version is better — that there’s value in trying out a radical departure or “blood-doping” as he calls it. But what is it, in a radical departure, that makes this still count as a reinvention of the original story, rather than a wholly new story in its own right?

I’ve been over the Eternity take on War of the Worlds a few times now, and I haven’t managed to get a comfortable hold on it. Here’s the basic plot of issue one: Rebecca and John McMannis live in a rural Scottish fishing village in the early 20th century. They’re a close, committed and loving couple, despite the trauma of a recent stillbirth that has left Rebecca unable to bear children (This is demonstrated by a page-long nude scene where she wakes in the night, has John remove a spider that’s crawled onto her, and then they make love).

For reasons that aren’t really clear, though, Rebecca is an outcast in town. Shona, a round woman with no neck who kinda looks like a Shel Silverstein drawing, is openly pushing the idea that Rebecca is a witch, that she’s responsible for poor recent catches, and that she’d actually murdered her baby to use its blood in satanic rituals. The closest thing to a reason for her accusations we see is a pair of panels indicating that Shona and John had been lovers at some point, but there’s nothing close to a reason the rest of the town would go along with it.

One of Rebecca’s sheep wanders off the next day, forcing her to visit the grave of her lost child. The sight of Rebecca visiting her child’s grave just gives more fuel to Shona, since, I guess, a grieving mother visiting her child’s grave is unusual enough to be clearly nefarious. Rebecca finds the missing lamb, mutilated by a tentacled, mushroom-shaped device that has sprouted from the ground. When she summons John to the scene, both the machine and the dead lamb are gone, and he assumes she was simply overcome by her grief.

Continue reading Deep Ice: We’re Going to the Bottom (Eternity Comics’s War of the Worlds #1)

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

The Morthren have cloned motivational speaker Dr. Van Order to control the rich and powerful. Specifically, to control advertising executive Hardy Galt. Specifically, to get him to embed subliminal messages in commercials to make people more flexible on the matter of evil. To this end, he’s having his seniors all sent off to a corporate retreat and brainwashing, including Kincaid’s girlfriend, Mindy Cooper.

Kincaid returns to the base disappointed after being turned away by the receptionist with the news that Mindy had been unexpectedly sent on an overnight seminar. He pushes aside his disappointment to watch the results when Blackwood, Suzanne and Debi hook the watcher up to an image converter (You know what would’ve been nice? Some kind of allusion to the similar scene in the 1953 movie, to which this show is technically a sequel. There will be, if I recall correctly, only one more reference to that connection in the series), in the hopes that the watcher has a recording buffer, “like one of our own satellites.” They’re all surprised to find that the watcher they caught hovering outside Hardy Galt Industries has been watching Hardy Galt Industries, and when they zoom in on the image, they’re even more surprised to see that it is watching Hardy Galt himself.

The fact that they see Galt with Van Order is a legitimate thing for them to find interesting. No one goes as far as to suggest that Van Order is a clone, and the fact that the watcher was surveilling them is the only thing the Blackwood team ever sees to indicate that there’s a Morthren angle here. I’m not saying its a big leap. But Kincaid seems to just intuitively conclude a lot more than he really ought. He doesn’t know what the Morthren plot is, or how far along it is, or even which direction it’s flowing. He and Blackwood assume Van Order is up to no good in an alien sort of way for really no better reason than a personal distaste.

Blackwood describes executive retreats of the sort Van Order runs as, “Replacing your entire personality.” He joins Kincaid when he leaves to rescue Mindy from the Van Order institute because he, “hates mind control.” It’s not at all surprising to see Blackwood siding with Kincaid here; I can’t imagine him as the sort of guy who’s have a lot of tolerance for new-age crap like self-help gurus. Still, there’s an odd absence in that they don’t address the alien angle at all; the watcher (which helpfully burns out seconds after showing them Van Order and Galt) establishes that a connection of some sort exists, but no one ever discusses or speculates on the nature of that connection. Blackwood and Kincaid seem to be motivated primarily by a more generalized suspicion of Van Order, and the aliens figure in mostly in terms of, “Van Order is bad, and the fact that aliens are involved somehow makes this technically fall under our remit.” There’s no consideration of the possibility that Van Order is a target rather than a conspirator, or, hey, that maybe this is a trap, what with the staggering coincidence of Blackwood and Suzanne trying out their watcher-stunning gizmo in front of Kincaid’s girlfriend’s office and having it lead them to the retreat Kincaid’s girlfriend is currently going on.

Anyway, Hardy Galt’s best and brightest are taken to the Van Order institute. Here’s a picture of Bob checking out a Louis XVI chair while Clark apparently checks out Bob’s ass. Bob is played by Keith Knight, who was mostly a voice actor. Clark is Alex Carter, who I remember best as Detective Vartann on CSI. Something seems familiar about him. While we’re on the subject, that unnamed Van Order employee is played by Suzanne Coy, who seems familiar too. Can’t think why. Off-screen to the left are our additional cannon fodder, Kurt (Michael Caruana) and Jane (Angela Dohrmann).

Kurt and Bob are basically the “weak” ones who aren’t fully sold on having their personalities rewritten, while Jane and Clark are the ambitious, cuthroat ones we’re supposed to hate, with Clark sniping at Kurt and Jane at Mindy. They’d been selected earlier in a little slideshow on the Morthren viewing membrane that was organized to make Mindy’s selection a shocking reveal to lead into a commercial break. Once everyone’s changed into hip ’80s fascist uniforms — basically coveralls with shoulder pads and big brass snaps at the collars — Van Order appears via video screen to tell them how at this weekend’s seminar, their, “Weaknesses will be exposed and then irradicated.” Or as Malzor put it they’ll be pushed, “Beyond their natural abhorrence of human suffering until their perception of what is right is flexible.” Even though I’m not fully convinced it’s intentional, I really dig the follow-through here; unlike previous episodes where the Morthren were trying to convert humans to a more Morthren worldview, Malzor is forthright that he’s trying to break these humans and make them worse, rather than “perfecting” them.

Step one of this weakness-exposing involves making them… Well, pretty much do their jobs. They stay up all night watching a new Hardy Galt commercial — one with the embedded images — on an loop, alternating with clips of Van Order’s platitudes, ostensibly so they can take notes on it. The ad is not much different in concept to the one we’d seen Galt show them earlier and decry as a failure. I couldn’t get an animated gif to be a reasonable size of it, but it’s just two naked people lubricating each other on the set of a Meatloaf video. We see a montage of Mindy and the others taking turns going stir crazy, negging each other, eventually breaking out in a fist fight, which the clone Van Order watches via a monitor in his office with a creepy gentle smile. A cutaway to Blackwood and Kincaid gives John a chance to tell us that Mindy has “really changed” since she fell under Van Order’s spell. Since we’ve never seen Mindy before, nor do we know anything at all about her, this is not exactly a convincing claim. We also haven’t exactly seen anything about Mindy’s Van Order-induced behavior that seems out of line, except maybe that she’s really enthusiastic about it. It’s a bad case of “tell, don’t show” all around. See, with Clark and Jane, we can see that they’re cruel and ambitious, and it would be easy to convince me that Van Order’s “It’s your world; take what’s due you,” teachings had made them into assholes. But Mindy isn’t like that; she seems to still be a pretty decent person. Her biggest flaw seems to be a lack of self-confidence, and maybe that’s meant to be something Van Order engendered in her, but it’s not a consuming flaw, certainly not profound enough to stick out, and, unlike Hardy Galt, we don’t have contrasting scenes of him being a pushover with Van Order while still playing the strong leader for his employees. We know nothing about Mindy, so there’s no context from which we can see Van Order as having an effect on her, and what little we do see of her under Van Order’s influence isn’t especially bad.

Fortunately for the A-plot, it will take until morning for Kincaid and Blackwood to reach the Van Order institute. I’m not sure how to make this timeline work out. They left some time during business hours, and are already there. Kincaid and Blackwood left a couple of minutes after Kincaid got back from his failed attempt to take Mindy out on a date, and it’s going to take them what, ten to twelve hours to get there? Blackwood looks super pissed when he finds out how long it’s going to take. Like he totally had something else to do tonight and only came because he thought this would be a short trip.

Dawn finds that the fighting at the executive retreat has died down. The unnamed employee informs them that they’ll be interviewed one-on-one by Van Order in person.  And while it might have been interesting to see some of what he tells the others, I don’t think we should be at all surprised that it’s only Mindy’s interview that we see. Van Order cautions her that she’s not nearly sociopathic enough, and that she should be more overtly evil like her colleagues. I notice, though, that when he tells her she’s not doing as well as some of her colleagues, he names Kurt, Jane and Clark. Bob is so fucked. In order to remove hew “flaws”, Van Order does this sort of cross between the Pain Box scene in Dune and the Room 101 scene in 1984: Mindy has her hand strapped to a metal cage which suddenly contains an angry rattlesnake. Van Order insists that the snake isn’t real, that, “Fear has tricked you into seeing something that isn’t there.” After a few seconds of him telling her to look at him and trust him and ignore the snake, she looks down to see the cage empty.

The scene’s emotional beats are strong, but, once again, the job they do of communicating what’s going on here isn’t great. Was this some bit of alien trickery? Or is it a more mundane trick, part of the real Van Order’s program of psychological manipulation. Remember, all the complaints we’ve heard about the morality of Van Order’s “messiah”-hood are just as applicable to the original; it’s not at all clear whether or how much Van Order’s process has been altered now that he’s an alien-controlled duplicate. The goal of the exercise, in retrospect, seems to be to convince Mindy to trust Van Order over the evidence of her own senses. But this is a little murky since there’s enough going on that it’s hard to say where to focus. The Morthren want Hardy Galt to take on a partner who they can trust to do their bidding, and in light of that, it makes sense that this “training” would be designed to ensure the new partner would trust and obey their proxy, Van Order, above their own senses and judgment. But there’s also this whole thing with the subliminals making them violent, and the message about ruthlessly pursuing their own goals at any cost.

If I trusted this show more, I might claim that it’s actually being clever, leaving some things unsaid and trusting the audience to work it out. But after sixteen episodes, I have little enough cause to believe they’re being clever. Last week, I suggested that we needed someone to explicitly tell us that Van Order’s message isn’t the problem. Even more now, if I am to believe they know what they’re doing, we really need a scene where, say, Malzor explains that Van Order’s disciples believe they are being taught to think for themselves and prioritize their own goals, but really they’re being taught to defer to Van Order and to want what he tells them to want. We also need for that contradiction to be something more than an informed disconnect: very little of what we actually see does anything to convey why or how Van Order teaches the opposite of his textual message. These complaints are mostly variations on a theme, I know. The underlying issue here is the extent to which War of the Worlds expects us to just take it on faith that “He’s a new-age self-help guru” is sufficient all by itself to communicate to us that Van Order is bad news, that his message isn’t sincere, and that he brainwashes his students into dependency. This isn’t the first time War of the Worlds has gone here, just taking for granted that the audience will instinctively accept certain things as surprisingly specific kinds of “bad”. “Synthetic Love” took for granted that we’d all accept without evidence that narcotics legalization was “bad”, “The Pied Piper” took for granted that we’d all accept without evidence that test tube babies were “bad”. There’s an ongoing assumption that it just goes without saying that the government is corrupt and self-serving. It’s easy enough to blame sloppy writing for this — and I do — but since part of my goal here is to look at how this show is part of the story of the world in which it existed, there’s an informative element here. That in this specific time and place — American TV culture of the early months of 1990 — these were things you could take for granted: drugs are bad (mmkay?); test tube babies are bad; self-help gurus are bad. And it’s somewhat curious to consider what they don’t assume they can take for granted. “Terminal Rock” takes the time to show us that the Scavengers are bad news when they easily could have just taken for granted that punk rock was “bad”. And Hollywood is fairly notorious for reductivist approaches to major societal issues. Despite how “liberal” Hollywood is supposed to be, they almost inevitably portray things like corporate malfeasance as the result of greedy bosses, racism as being entirely about individual bigots with personal racial animus, and institutional violence as purely a matter of a few “bad apples”. Yet War of the Worlds takes the surprising tack of doing several episodes which embrace the idea of humanity’s failings being on a systemic level — in “Synthetic Love”, “Path of Lies” and “The Deadliest Disease“, they don’t simply take for granted that the individuals running with the drug companies, the media and even the smuggling rings are simply evil, but rather they make the effort (with varying levels of success) to show how the systems themselves force people to behave worse. Remember, this is just part of the technique used by the original Van Order; the subliminal messaging isn’t connected. Though it’s close enough to muddy the waters, because we’ve got, essentially, two different forms of brainwashing going on at the same time, with different proximate goals. We don’t ever really get any sense of why Van Order telling people over and over to take responsibility for their lives, to listen to their reason and ignore fear, or to pursue their own goals leads to people handing over responsibility for their lives, ignoring their own reason and senses in deference to an authority, and doing what they’re told by Van Order. This scene with the snake is the closest we get.

Meanwhile, back in the city, Suzanne has been tasked with investigating Hardy Galt himself. Using the false identity of “Miss Hope”, a silk and cotton clothing manufacturer, she’s set up an appointment with Galt. They meet just after Galt finishes a brief meeting with Mana, inexplicably dressed as a sexy widow, to receive a tape of the new subliminally-embedded commercials. At first blush, this scene strikes me as superfluous. But since we saw Malzor and Van Order assembling the commercials, and we’ve only seen them shown at Van Order’s institute so far, the small detail of establishing that the embedded commercials have been given to Galt, but only just now (I guess this means I was wrong before when I assumed they were already on the air),  is an unusual example of War of the Worlds dotting its i’s and crossing its t’s that on the one hand, raises my trust that the writers have thought this all the way through, but on the other, makes me wonder why they’d take the time to show us this detail when they didn’t feel the need to establish, say, what Mindy was like before she started following Van Order.

Another small detail I like is that Suzanne claims Galt was recommended to her by Van Order, which seems to help her gain his trust. Most of the meeting takes place conveniently off-screen. The major thrust of it is that he shows her the video tape of his new commercial, in order to give her a sense of what sort of work HGI does. See how convenient that was? And there’s a hint here of the effect it’s having on Galt, even with such limited exposure: when Suzanne claims that one commercial doesn’t paint a complete picture, he snaps at her that it should, before regaining his composure. This was actually a rouse to get him to step out for a minute, in order to grab some more tapes, giving Suzanne a moment to steal the tape from the VCR. She bails while Galt is out of the room, which is a big no-no when you’re performing a social engineering hack. You’ve got to finish the interview so that when they find the tape missing, no one remembers you as the person who disappeared right in the middle of a meeting right after the last time anyone saw our only copy of this super important new tape.

While Blackwood and Kincaid apparently spend all morning sneaking into the Van Order institute, it’s time to winnow down some of our guest cast. Everyone’s put on treadmills to prove they are physically as well as mentally competent to be Hardy Galt’s new partner. I would say this whole plot has shades of The Apprentice, but I don’t want to think about that. The smiling face of Van Order pushes them on from a video screen. Eventually, the treadmill electrocutes Kurt. Only Mindy is fazed by this. Everyone else has a good laugh at how Kurt’s dead now, because they are not meant to be sympathetic characters. They even mock Mindy for caring about the “born loser” when “only the strong survive”. They don’t think it’s at all odd that Van Order’s staff simply carries Kurt’s body off and the police aren’t called. I guess given the world this show has portrayed, it’s not too weird, but, like, most sociopaths know you have to at least fake humanity. There is no point here where anyone considers that callous disregard for human lives might be bad for busin— eh, y’know what? I’ll allow it.

But I do wonder: there’s no indication that the rest of Van Order’s staff are clones or Morthren or anything. As far as I know, they’re just ordinary people who worked for the real Van Order before he got cloned. So… is covering up the death of the occasional corporate executive on retreat part of their normal duties? We only need one line of dialogue here; have the clone tell Malzor that he’s replaced the usual staff with mercenaries or something because they need people who, “Won’t ask questions about the new itinerary.”

Continue reading Antithesis: Video Messiah (War of the Worlds 2×16, Part 2)

It is April 16, 1990. Dalton Prejean, a mentally handicapped man condemned to death for the murder of a Louisiana police officer, is denied an appeal of his sentence to the Supreme Court. In Michigan, Doctor Jack Kevorkian helps a 54-year-old Alzheimer’s patient end her life. Johns Hopkins University researchers release a study showing that over-the-counter ibuprofen can cause kidney failure in people with mild kidney disease. In the past week, Lothar de Maizière became Prime Minister of East Germany, heading a coalition government favoring reunification. President Bush will be meeting with various world leaders this week to discuss global warming. He’ll call for more research before doing anything, especially research into the economic impact of doing anything. The rest of the world, West Germany in particular, will call for more concrete action, and surely under that sort of unified pressure, the US will do something to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and— well, you know the rest. Emma Watson was born yesterday, the same day that Greta Garbo died.

The August Wilson play The Piano Lesson opens on Broadway today. Nothing much out in theaters or home video this week. Wembley Stadium hosts Nelson Mandela: An International Tribute Concert For a Free South Africa. Oddly, this isn’t the only South Africa media news this week, as The Gods Must Be Crazy II has its US theatrical premiere. Tommy Page holds the top spot on the Billboard charts with “I’ll Be Your Everything”, knocking Taylor Dayne down to fifth. I have no recollection of “I’ll Be Your Everything” whatever. The only newcomer in the top ten this week is Calloway with “I Wanna Be Rich”, replacing Phil Collins.

Star Trek the Next Generation is still off this week and Friday the 13th the Series hasn’t returned from their spring break yet. In Canada, The Beachcombers will be cancelled this week (I think. There’s some dispute among my sources whether the show aired October-December or December-April). It will be the longest-running Canadian dramatic series until Degrassi passes it in 2012. CBS becomes the official network of Major League Baseball. In Living Color and Wings premiere this week. We also see the premiere of ABC cop show Sunset Beat with the first part of its two-part pilot airing this coming Saturday. Coincidentally, we’ll also see the final episode of ABC cop show Sunset Beat, with its final episode, the second part of its two-part pilot, airing Saturday. MacGyver airs “Rush to Judgment”, the penultimate episode of the season. It’s kinda a riff on Twelve Angry Men, only with MacGyvering. Twin Peaks, which I have neglected to mention until now, airs its third episode, “Episode 2” (It’s David Lynch. What do you expect? The episode is also called “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer”, a back-translation of the title created by the German translators).

So, a little more than a year ago now, I saw that I was running out of episodes of War of the Worlds, and reckoned I should finish up the last few non–TV-series related things in my queue. Only that spiraled out of control when I ended up needing six months to force myself through Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II and it turned out that there were a bunch of reasonably-priced War of the Worlds derived books for sale on Kindle, and then I went looking for the Superman–War of the Worlds crossover and it turned out that there were actually like a dozen War of the Worlds-related comic books (I’ve still got a couple more in my queue, and I haven’t even bothered to shell out for a copy of Scarlet Traces yet) then I basically spent January just fucking around because I was bummed out about the state of the world and stuff. I never actually meant to spend so much time away from the show; I just really wanted to finish off the other stuff before we got into the last block of episodes. I’m staggered by how much there turned out to be, since I’m pretty sure there was not nearly this much the last time I went looking. That’s what you get for starting a multi-year project based around something which is just about to go out of copyright, I guess.

Anyway, if you can manage to recall back to last year, we’re in a little block of episodes which are strangely upbeat for this show. “Candle in the Night” was as light and fluffy as this show gets, and these next two are quite a bit darker, but they’re still episodes that end much more positively than we’re used to. The majority of the episodes so far have ended on partial, Pyrrhic, or false victories for our heroes, if not outright losses. The only episodes I’d class as straightforward wins so far have been “No Direction Home”, “Terminal Rock”, “The Defector”, and “Candle in the Night” (And “The Defector” is marginal given that the Morthren basically succeed in destroying the Grapevine). We’re going to return to the usual mode of episodes where the team ekes out a partial win at great cost at the end of the month, but for now, we’re going to stick with the show’s other, less-frequent mode of “The Morthren nearly succeed but underestimate human strength in a key way that ruins their plans.”

This episode has an odd feel to it too, though. The regular cast is bracketed more than usual in favor of the guest cast — though we’ve obviously seen that before. But the whole tone and concept is a little more Max Headroom than we’re used to. Admittedly, War of the Worlds has been a little Max Headroom all along, with its brokedown 80s-punk near-future dystopia. But War of the Worlds has for the most part been primarily a street-level dystopia so far. There certainly is a cyberpunk flavoring to it, but we’ve really lacked the other aspect of a cyberpunk dystopia: the evil megacorporations that run everything. We got a bit of it in “Synthetic Love”, and maybe a hint in “Path of Lies”, but those were more stories about individuals than corporations. We haven’t had a story that really looks at corporate culture in a world that seems to be a mix of anarchy, kleptocracy and military rule. Oh, and also one of the characters appears mostly as a disembodied head on a TV screen.

The self-help industry has a long history, and I think by the numbers, it had really peaked back in the ’70s. But in the late ’80s, you saw the rise of a particular subsect of that, thanks in no small part to the explosion of daytime talk shows in the wake of the success of Oprah Winfrey in 1986. We’re getting into the era of media-saavy self-help personalities who are themselves their brands. This was a move away from self-help gurus who were primarily marketing books and seminars to gurus for whom the books and seminars were backstopping a media empire that was first and foremost about selling personality-as-lifestyle. And again, it’s not like cults of celebrity hadn’t existed possibly forever, but we’re getting into the era where our modern interpretation of it is climbing to dominance.

I bring this up because, hearkening back to their attempts in “No Direction Home” and “Doomsday”, the Morthren have decided the path to power is to clone a spiritual leader. But this time, rather than another confrontation with the old gods, they’re taking on a new one: self-help guru to the rich and powerful, Doctor Van Order. That’s his whole name; first name “Van”, last name “Order”. It doesn’t feel quite right to me either, but there it is. Roy Thinnes is a bit of stunt casting as Van Order; his best known role is as David Vincent in The Invaders. If you’re not familiar, it’s basically a knock-off of The Fugitive where instead of a one-armed man, it’s aliens who can’t bend their pinky fingers. He reprised the role in the 1995 sequel/reboot miniseries which starred Scott Bakula. Thinnes also did a number of stints in daytime and prime time soap operas, and was up for the role of Jean-Luc Picard. Oh, also he was the lead in the Mystery Science Theater 3000-mocked made-for-TV spy film Code Name: Diamond Head. 

So okay, the Morthren have cloned a self-help guru, and through him, they can manipulate the rich and powerful to their ends. That’s got some promise. Maybe Van Order has a following that they can push into being an outright cult. There’s an episode of Stargate SG-1 along similar lines. And “The Morthren want an in to control powerful people” is a storyline they’ve used before, most directly in “Path of Lies”. But as in that episode, the broad idea of manipulating powerful humans is paired with another, more narrowly scoped plot. That narrowing of scope, I think, helps keep the plot grounded and makes it more reducible to a specific problem the heroes can interact with and solve, but handled inexpertly, it can also feel like a waste of a premise. This is not a unique setup to War of the Worlds; I can think offhand of two separate episodes of Knight Rider where villains go to the trouble of stealing and reprogramming KITT, with no greater plan than to use him for something incredibly trivial, like shooting a lock with his laser.

What’s distinctive this time is that the initial plan — clone Van Order to manipulate his followers — is the setup for a broader plan… Which is itself the setup for a narrower plan. The broader plan in this case is a subliminal embed that encourages violence and sociopathy, inserted into advertising produced by Hardy Galt Industries, an ad agency. Yes, we’re back to subliminal embedded mind control. And you know what? I don’t even mind that they’re reusing it, because frankly it was getting tedious that the Morthren abandon every plan at the first failure and have, until now, never tried going back to an old plan and tweaking it. (I guess technically, the embedded signal in “Terminal Rock” was never identified as being subliminal in nature.)

Just a thought here. Isn’t “Hardy Galt Industries” a weird name for an ad agency? I mean “Hardy Galt Enterprises”, sure. Or “Hardy Galt Advertising”. “Hardy Galt Media” might be a little too twenty-first century for this show. But “Industries”? The only thing I can think of is something that puts a smile on my face: that Hardy Galt might be inspired by a certain fictional industrialist named Galt. I so want this to be true. Because what Hardy Galt thinks he is very much reflects the Randian ideal of a self-made man, utterly responsible for his own fortunes and completely self-made, without any help from anyone. And the fact that Galt is, in fact, a weak-willed idiot who is utterly useless without the affirmations of a self-help guru, easily manipulated to serve alien masters who plan to use and discard him and the rest of humanity is easily the most delightfully subversive thing this show has done. Which means it’s probably a coincidence, but I’ll take what I can get.

Since the story starts out with Van Order already a guest of the Morthren, we never get to see what he’s like when he’s not an evil alien-controlled clone. But we can guess that being cloned hasn’t much changed his temperament. He’s upbeat, charismatic, and even with his loyalties shifted to the aliens, he frames their project in terms of “guiding the future of humanity” rather than conquest and domination and there’s no point in the story where he lets on if he doesn’t genuinely believe he’s helping. The content of his lessons is largely inoffensive in and of itself, expressed in broad platitudes on the themes of self-reliance and personal responsibility: “It’s your world,” “Take responsibility,” “No one is to blame but yourself,” “You can’t hurt others by loving yourself.” It’s compatible, sure, with a kind of antisocial Randian sort of objectivist individualism, but it doesn’t really rise beyond your basic self-help 101 stuff about mindfulness and self-awareness. Indeed, there’s a strong component of “Your failures are your own fault; don’t blame them on other people,” which is, at least in practice, missing from the philosophies you generally see espoused by today’s crop of staunchly individualistic libertarian types, who tend more to view their successes as entirely their own doing, but their failures as entirely the fault of sabotage by lesser kinds of man.

Watching the Morthren latch onto these themes, though, gives me a moment of panic that one of my series-long themes might be falling apart; after all, the Morthren are a fundamentally collectivist culture who view individualism as anathema. But the more I think about it, the happier I am with it. We’ve already seen, numerous times, the Morthren attempt to assert dominance over humans by trying to manipulate humans into their mode of thinking. As far back as “Doomsday”, we saw the Morthren trying to convert humans to devotion toward their Eternal Spirit. Later we see them trying to instill Morthren values in the Creche children in “The Pied Piper”, and in Seft’s son in “Seft of Emun”. It would seem natural, now that they’ve got someone with Van Order’s power and influence, that their first order of business would be to change his message to promote a more Morthren worldview. But remember that thus far, trying to convert humans to their philosophy hasn’t generally taken. To the Morthren, human individualism is a perversion. So perhaps, now that we’re getting late in the game, the Morthren have decided that controlling humanity is better achieved not by making humans more like Morthren, but by exacerbating humanity’s own “weakness”: all the way back in “The Second Wave”, the clone Ironhorse believed that the human tendency to put the individual above the collective would ultimately be their downfall. So why not use that? Why not have Van Order spread a gospel not of the Morthren way, sublimating the individual to the collective, but of utter self-reliance and instinctive distrust of others. Humans bond with each other on the individual level, Morthren on the collective level. Attacking those individual-level bonds, and using a very human philosophy of individual self-actualization to do it might reflect that the Morthren are getting better at understanding their enemy and learning to attack humanity where it’s weakest at an existential level.

And the only real problem with that analysis is that they never say anything about this, and the Van Order clone never indicates that he’s less than 100% sincere — there’s no hint, as there had been with previous clones, that the cloning process has altered the original’s system of values to bring it in line with Morthren ideals. Now, they don’t actually need to say it outright. This could all be implicit, and that would be fine. Better than fine. This whole episode in so many places works really well if you assume a certain subtlety to its messages. As I already said, the actual text of Van Order’s teachings is perfectly fine: take responsibility for your own success and don’t blame others for your failure; be mindful of what you want to achieve and take concrete action to achieve it. Having that perfectly fine message be used manipulatively by the Morthren to subvert and twist humans toward sociopathy is a far cleverer idea than just having the message be forthrightly and cartoonishly evil. Unfortunately, we’re four-fifths of the way through this show now, and even when the show wasn’t coming off the rails with the scripts being written as they were being filmed and Jared Martin and Adrian Paul forced to act as de facto editors-on-the-set to keep things coherent and what seems to be a blind rush to bring this story to a conclusion before they get cancelled, there was very little to persuade me that the powers that be behind War of the Worlds: The Series were actually into that kind of subtlety. Instead, it feels more like this episode’s been inexpertly pared down, to the point that they’ve cut out things that might have been load-bearing. It works in this episode’s favor that I watched it immediately after covering the Big Finish Doctor Who story, which also suffered a lot from the feeling that important linkages between plot elements had ended up on the cutting room floor. But “Video Messiah” does better than “Invaders From Mars” in two respects. First, the “missing” parts are less important to the plot — they result in small plot holes or weaknesses in theme rather than entire subplots having seemingly little justification for existing at all. Secondly, the edits aren’t paired with dubious inclusions: this episode doesn’t have a half-dozen weakly-connected subplots which serve only to waste time. The plot is pretty tight and well-connected.

Having established the basic premise of the episode, it’s time to introduce our guest star.  Lori Hallier plays Mindy Cooper. She’s been in a ton of things over the decades, but never seemed to break big. She did an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard, and one of Trapper John, MD. Around this time period, she did the full circuit of American-Canadian first run syndication genre series, with appearances in RoboCop The Series, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, Forever Knight, Friday the 13th the Series, and so forth. She’d turn up in the ’90s in an episode of Star Trek Voyager, and played one of the moms on Strange Days at Blake Holsey High, which I have either talked about already or should have. Why do I have a strange feeling of deja vu? Of the most direct relevance, she was female lead in the 1981 slasher film My Bloody Valentine, which is kinda relevant here since this episode is going to get just a little bit slasher filmy at the end. We’re using the “Old friend of Kincaid’s” approach again this week, another link between this episode and “Terminal Rock”. Our Old Friend this time is Mindy Cooper, an ad exec at Harvey Galt. John is more than a little sweet on her, and the others suggest that this has been an ongoing relationship for several months. She will not appear again after this episode, but with only four episodes left, that wouldn’t be surprising either way. When we’re introduced to her, she’s just sort of standing around in a bad neighborhood waiting, presumably for Kincaid. We’re not privy to why she’s there, how she got there, or why she’s waiting for Kincaid; she’s clearly meant to be on her way to work, and it’s not even 100% clear to me if Kincaid actually is who she was waiting for, or if he just happened to show up at a convenient moment, since they don’t seem to have any plans together. She doesn’t seem to belong here, and it doesn’t seem like Kincaid normally drives her to work. Why would she plan to meet Kincaid on her way to work in a strange and rough neighborhood? It would fit really well for, say, her to be waiting for Kincaid to come give her a ride after her car breaks down in an unsafe place. But, par for the course, there’s nothing to hint at this. You could easily have shown her standing beside a broken-down car.

Continue reading Antithesis: Video Messiah (War of the Worlds 2×16, Part 1)