A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A strip club.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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