Month: August 2015

Did you see that Parkins boy’s body in the tunnel?
Just the photos. Worst thing I’ve ever seen. Kid had no face. What kind of monster would do that?

It is November 14, 1988. This week, the Soviet Buran space shuttle will make its first and only unmanned test flight. The Soviet Union would collapse before the next scheduled test flight in 1993, and the Buran shuttle would spend the next decade gathering dust in a hanger in Kazakhstan until a storm brought the dilapidated hanger down in 2002. Here’s some neat pictures of the two remaining unused Buran shuttles. Pakistan holds its first free election in a decade, electing Benazir Bhutto as their Prime Minister. She’d hold the office until 1990, then be reelected in 1993, and was widely assumed to be about to return to that position in the 2008 election before her tragic assassination.

The Escape Club’s “Wild Wild West” unseats “Kokomo” in the music charts. Yesterday, The Wonderful World of Disney aired “Mickey’s 60th Birthday”, which I remember pretty well, but not as well as 1984’s “Donald’s 50th Birthday”. Mickey angers a Peter Cullen-voiced wizard and is cursed such that no one recognizes him, and has to get help from the casts of Family Ties(History doesn’t back me up on this, but I could have sworn this was after Family Ties had ended its run, making this a reunion show), The Golden Girls and Cheers to make his way home, while the cast of LA Law defends Donald against mousenapping allegations. ABC will spend the week showing the first half of the World War II miniseries War and Remembrance, the sequel to 1983’s Winds of War. Friday the 13th the Series brings us “Wax Magic”, in which, let me see if I can get this straight, a sculptor wax-dips his wife, then uses a cursed handkerchief to bring her back to life, but then she’s got to commit axe murders to stay alive.

I’m very worried now, after last week, because three weeks ago, if you’d asked me what my two favorite episodes of War of the Worlds were, I’d have said “The Second Seal” and “Goliath is my Name”. And then it turned out that “The Second Seal” was loaded down with gender essentialist bullshit, so what are we in for this week?

We’ve touched just a little bit on the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. That multi-headed hydra grew out of a storm of influences that were all coming together at this point in history: the growing influence of the religious right and their fierce desire to cast themselves as holy warriors against a demonic conspiracy; reactionary disapproval of the increased visibility of women in the workforce (particularly in the association with ritual abuse at day care centers, which caught zeitgeist of a public already primed to disapprove of working women leaving their children in the care of “strangers”); growing distrust of academia; increased visibility of religious and sexual minorities; increased visibility of psychological disorders and any number of other forces that made people particularly willing to believe that dark forces were conspiring to kill their children.

In 1979, James Dallas Egbert III attempted to commit suicide in the steam tunnels under Michigan State University. The media, incorrectly, decided that this had something to do with his interest in Dungeons and Dragons. In 1981, Rona Jaffe published a fictionalized version of the misreporting, Mazes and Monsters, later adapted into a TV movie starring a young Tom Hanks as a college student who suffers a psychotic break while live-action-role-playing in the steam tunnels under his college (Neither the book nor the movie asserts that the game caused the break, but both imply that his interest in the game was symptomatic of the underlying pathology). In 1982, Patricia Pulling founded the group “Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons” after she decided, for no clear reason that her son had committed suicide due to a D&D curse on his player character. In 1984, Jack Chick’s tract, Dark Dungeons asserted that D&D was a satanist recruiting tool (But then, Jack Chick thought that about freemasonry, communion wafers, rock and roll, the NIV, and women wearing pants). And in 1988, Chris Pritchard and a group of friends conspired to murder his stepfather to inherit the family fortune. Since Pritchard and his friends were D&D players and admitted to mapping their college’s steam tunnels (Am I the only person who went to a college without a network of underground steam tunnels?) for the game, the media decided that must have been the catalyst, directly blaming the game in both of the 1992 TV movies about the crime.

Going out on a limb here, I’m going to guess it’s that story that put the writers in mind to do an episode whose plot revolves around LARPing in the steam tunnels under a major university. What we have this week, in part at least, is essentially War of the Worlds crashing into Mazes and Monsters.

The advocacy has dispatched a pod of alien soldiers to the then-fictional “Ohio Polytechnical University” (In an odd coincidence, the University of Akron recently adopted the phrase as part of their branding) to steal the “Y-fever”, an experimental bioweapon they plan to use to make North America “look as pleasing” as the documentary they’re watching about the Bhopal disaster. For some reason, the alien unit goes under cover dressed as Blues Brothers (their incidental music even includes a jazzy harmonica riff). For some reason, this works, as they show up at what I assume is a Blues Brothers theme party.

Why they go to this party is a mystery, since they’re under orders to stick to the steam tunnels under the campus in order to remain covert. Like I’ve said before, there’s a lot of evidence that the aliens… Are not all that smart. The plan here is something like, “This is a sneaking mission, so dress up in fancy dress. If by some chance the fancy dress lets you blend in, make yourselves look extra suspicious by wandering around restricted but easily-accessible steam tunnels.”

Naturally, this plan puts them in the path of a group of body-doubles for The Goonies LARPers. They’re playing “Aliens and Asteroids”, which is an entirely realistic name for a late ’80s role playing game trying to cash in on the success of Dungeons and Dragons. The market was flooded at one point with such stuff: Tunnels and Trolls, Shinobi and Samurai, Villains and Vigilantes, Bandits and Basilisks, Bunnies and Burrows, Orcs and Oubliettes, Ninjas and Narwhals, Houses and Humans, Powers and Perils, Sense and Sensibility, and the like. Now, as you all know, the mutants have invaded our universe, and we have but one choice. The mutants travel over time and space to do battle. They are foresworn [sic] to annihilate us. This is something we can not allow. Intelligence reports that their staging area is in the Orion chamber. We’ll intercept them there and wipe them out. With luck, we’ll be the rulers of the universe by lunch. But I should be clear here: we can safely guess that no one involved in the writing of this episode actually knew a damned thing about Dungeons and Dragons or about role playing games at all, beyond what they’d seen in Mazes and Monsters. Because this game isn’t a pen-and-paper RPG. From what we see of it, it’s Urbex Laser Tag with a sci-fi backstory. Fun fact: there is a modern laser tag-based LARP. It’s called Lasers and Logic.

The “Venusians” are your standard well-balanced eigenvector of ’80s teen stereotypes: the preppy (as indicated by his popped collar), the classic nerd (as indicated by his glasses), the rebellious indie chick (one large, exotic earring), the hot chick (The one they send to distract the guard, one of the first screen roles for future Crossing Jordan star Jill Hennessy), the allegedly homely chick who is actually way hotter than the hot chick, the short, smarmy wisecracker who is usually from Brooklyn (Think Marshall Blechtman or Vinnie Delpino or The Booch or anything Samm Levine has done), and the jock (who isn’t actually here yet because he’s got football practice or something). So basically a bunch of people who would almost certainly never be seen together in real life mixed with a certain amount of confusion as to whether they’re college or high school stereotypes. I note that we’ve got an even gender balance, which is a nice touch abstractly, even if it’s kind of hard to accept as a historical reality given the considerable social pressures of the 1980s.  Also, they look like the cast of Kidd Video. I am not going to bother to learn most of their names, and I am not even sure they all have them.

Parkins, the classically nerdy one, gets separated from the others while mutant-hunting and comes across one of the Elwood gang. There’s an odd presumption here that the players would not recognize each other on sight (Later, the preppy will mention that the mutant players don’t know the jock), as he assumes the Elwood to be a mutant. And despite the fact that it was only 30 seconds ago that the preppy explained to the homely chick that you have to shoot a mutant in his laser tag target for it to count, he immediately shoots him in the face. With a visible laser beam. Jerk. Once the Elwood realizes that he has not just been decapitated, he walks over and peels the kid’s face off, which I’m not going to show you, in case you are eating.

As was the case in the past two episodes, the Blackwood Team becomes involved in events more due to coincidence than anything else. Norton interrupts Harrison’s meditation to accuse him of upsetting Suzanne. There’s a callback to the friction we’d seen between them back in “A Multitude of Idols,” with Norton referring back to them working out their differences. The usually laid-back Norton is up in arms because Suzanne is crying in her lab, and he assumes it’s Harrison’s fault.

Philip Akin is playing Norton a bit differently in this episode from previous ones. There were moments before where he’s bring out this hangdog, put-upon thing, but he goes all-in this week: rather than the unpleasant fratboy persona he’s defaulted to recently, he’s focusing on being irritable, annoyed when his work isn’t appreciated or when he’s distracted from it. It’s an improvement over the way he’s been acting, except for the fact that there’s no justification for it or any build-up.

Harrison, on the other hand, shows some actual character growth. Indeed, these first scenes at the cottage seem like a direct response to “A Multitude of Idols” that’s very parallel in construction. Rather than taunting Suzanne and justifying his own behavior, Harrison instead goes down to the lab to check on her, and preemptively apologizes on the assumption that he actually had done something to upset her without realizing it.

Instead, she’s crying because she’s received word of Parkins’s disappearance. They actually go to the trouble of filling in a bit of Suzanne’s backstory here: we know from the pilot that she’d been in Ohio prior to coming to Pacific Tech. We now learn that she’d left Ohio Polytechnic (Home of the Molecules) when she found out that the “pure research” dream job she’d been working was actually developing bioweapons. Admittedly, I am not a microbiologist, but I am not sure how one could be developing bioweapons without realizing it. Parkins had been her lab assistant, and he was the one who blew the whistle on the project. Though Harrison suggests that he’s just out somewhere on a bender (it’s Greek Week), Suzanne is worried that there’s been a lab accident and cover-up, as the bioweapons under development include Y fever, which she warns us is, “The same biotoxin that killed all those people”. Um. Oh, those people. Yeah. Lynda Mason Green is way too over-the-top in this scene, crying and sobbing when literally all she knows at this point is that he missed debate club this morning.

Harrison offers to help, by which I mean he volunteers Norton. A search of the AM and FM bands turns up campus security walkie-talkies (just roll with it or we’ll be here all day) where they hear the title-card conversation, confirming Suzanne’s fears. Harrison and Suzanne set out for Ohio, with Ironhorse in tow to bring them back after the 48 hours he’s grudgingly allowed them. “You’re my hero, colonel,” Harrison says, “Strong, determined, and sensitive.” Continue reading Thesis: Goliath is my Name (War of the Worlds 1×07)

So let’s talk a little about “Breeding Ground” and “Seft of Emun” as relates to the first season, and about “Eye for an Eye” and “The Second Seal” as relates to the second. I was originally just going to babble a bit about the use of alien-induced mind-altering in “The Second Seal” compared to “Terminal Rock” and “No Direction Home”, but then I actually watched the episodes, and…

The simplest thing in this cluster of episodes to get worked up about is the appearance of the first-season alien costumes in the Seft’s flashback. We got a little glimpse of them in “The Second Wave”, but not a good look. The costumes are the same for obvious reasons, but you’ll note that if this version of the alien form is meant to have three arms, we never see them pull the middle one out. Of particular note is the accouterments (Did you know that the plural of “accoutrement” is “accouterments”?). You may notice that the Morthren in “Seft of Emun” are wearing the suits we saw them manufacture in “The Walls of Jericho”. That’s a very easy thing to get upset about, but this one, ironically, I think actually makes for better continuity with the first season. Obviously, it’d be a mistake if the aliens in the flashback, aliens who haven’t yet come to Earth (they’re vague about when the invasion of Emun happened. Mana says only that Seft has been asleep for “the time it takes to cross a galaxy.” The invasion could have happened before the 1953 invasion, or closer to the series’ present as a prelude to the arrival of the second wave) were wearing literally the same refrigerated suits. But there’s nothing to imply that the aliens didn’t have combat uniforms prior to coming to Earth, and it makes a lot of sense to imagine that the suits made in “The Walls of Jericho” were typical of alien fashion. So there’s really no reason that the uniforms worn by Morthren soldiers at some unspecified point in the past shouldn’t look basically the same as the uniforms they made for themselves on Earth. That said, much later in the series, keep an eye out for a completely different style of Morthren clothing. We saw an alien hand weapon in “The Second Seal”, an elegant sort of metal dousing rod. It’s a new design for the show, but one that looks perfectly in keeping with the visual style of the alien technology in the 1953 movie: it looks like copper, it has the same sort of curves and lines, and it fires green pulses that closely resemble the “skeleton beam” of the war machines. Even though we never saw anything like it in the George Pal movie, if you hold that thing up next to the Al Nozaki war machine, there’d be no question in your mind that they were designed by the same race. That’s particularly pleasing after just how unimaginably fucking awful the detached gooseneck weapon-arm looked in “Eye for an Eye”.

The Morthren weapons used on Emun take an entirely different approach. They’re essentially just sci-fi rifles, but for one very interesting addition. They’ve got these bulbous lamp-heads attached to the top like bayonettes. What’s strange is that they’re so very clearly meant to look like the cobra-head of the Nozaki prop, but they’re incredibly different in a way that’s deliberate, rather than the incompetent clusterfuck we saw in “Eye for an Eye”. Rather, it feels like Mancuso’s propmasters set out to harmonize the 1953 designs with the visual motif of the show and meet in the middle.

This was going to be tricky business, given that absolutely nothing we’ve seen of Morthren technology looks even the tiniest bit like the technology from the 1953 movie. The Morthren weapons therefore are the right shape, but they’re made not out of a coppery metal, but out of a dense, fiberous substance, and the weapon fires not a heat ray or skeleton beam, but a narrow beam identical to the usual Morthren hand weapon. In some regards, it’s a nice touch to try to bring the styles together like this, but on the other hand, it really serves to draw a big red circle around just how little this show has to do with its namesake. It reminds you that, so far, there’s been nothing in the show which requires or even benefits from this being a sequel to the 1953 movie — you can attribute the societal collapse to the invasion if you like, but the show is never going to come right out and do that itself.

Season 1, on the other hand, has just done a pair of episodes which draw heavily on the past continuity of the universe, even attempting to harmonize the 1953 movie with the 1938 radio play (I wonder, had the Strangises remained in command for the second season, would the Blackwood Project have set out for Buffalo to investigate a series of small sorties in ’68, ’71 and ’73?). Once again, when the first season draws from its source material, it does it with an eye toward details and and very literal, straightforward reference of the past. The second season approaches its past much more abstractly, almost impressionistically.

The big point of comparison in the last four stories we’ve visited, of course, is the unforgivably awful way women are treated in “The Second Seal” and “Breeding Ground”. And while it’s miles better on this front, “Seft of Emun” still features the shameless fridging of Blade, and to a lesser extent, Seft. These three articles were uncharacteristically difficult for me to write, almost as much of a chore as some of the late-season Captain Power ones. For the first two, the difficulty was essentially the same: these are both technically proficient episodes, that hit on a good mix of action, adventure and drama, and which speak to some of the issues I’ve been having with the series so far. They’re both episodes I very much want to like. There’s a fantastic guest cast in “Breeding Ground” and amazing performances out of Julian Richings and Patricia Phillips. And “The Second Seal” had always been one of my two favorite episodes. But how do I overlook something like Harrison grabbing Suzanne, violently shaking her, then throwing her to the ground shouting, “You’re not my mother!”? Or Kincaid stonily asserting that they’re going to give a seventy year old woman an abortion in their squalid underground lair whether she likes it or not?

War of the Worlds is, at the end of the day, part of the sci-fi horror genre. This was true to some extent in 1953, and it’s far truer in 1988-1989. There’s undeniably a history of violence specifically against women being a staple of the horror genre — season 2 is the work of Frank Mancuso Jr., a man who’s very well known for his work on a film series whose entire premise (particularly during the part of the franchise he’s most associated with) is built around a masked revenge-zombie taking a machete to teenage girls for the sin of putting out. But even Friday the 13th doesn’t have Jason forcibly impregnate someone, then treat Jason as the victim for the remainder of the movie (I think. The last few movies got pretty weird). The kind of violence we see in these episodes isn’t within the tradition of the slasher movie, but is much more in line with simple, straight-up abuse. And while that abuse may not be outright glorified, it is at no point treated with the gravity it deserves.

The eighties were a different time, and the public sense of social consciousness wasn’t as advanced as it is now. But somebody ought to have noticed Harrison acting like a wife-beater. Somebody ought to have noticed that Kate might as well have been a sack of potatoes for all the agency she has in the plot. I didn’t get it when I was nine. I didn’t get it again later when I was fourteen and it was airing in reruns on The Sci-Fi Channel. But I get it now.  You can explain, and you can justify, but people still had to write this. Someone sat down and said, “You know what would make a good story? Let’s have an alien crystal zap Harrison and make him slap Suzanne around a bit. Ooh, and let’s have that make her horny, and she can spend the rest of the episode trying to get into his pants.”  Someone had to sit down and say, “Let’s do a tragic story about a noble doctor who is tricked by the Morthren into sticking an alien fetus in an elderly woman. Oh, never mind how the woman feels about this; the story’s really about the doctor and his pain.”

Those someones were Patrick Barry and Alan Moskowitz. Patrick Barry’s resume is pretty short. He’ll go on to write two more episodes for the first season of War of the Worlds, his only later credit is for an episode of Transformers: Beast Wars almost a decade later. He was also a staff writer for the mid-80s animated series M.A.S.K., a sort of Transformers/GI Joe hybrid about a counterterrorism agency that used transforming vehicles (Twenty-five years later, GI Joe adopted the MASK toyline, recasting the lead character as leader of a Joe specialist unit), which I liked because, did you just listen to the premise, of course I would like that. His biggest credit is for the first-season Star Trek the Next Generation episode “Angel One“. It’s surprising that the same writer who gave us TNG’s first explicitly feminist episode would turn around and give us this. Though “Angel One” is also complete crap, and fails so hard in its attempt at feminism that I think Vox Day nominated it for a Hugo, so maybe that explains why Barry didn’t have a little light go off in his head to tell him this was a bad idea.

Alan Moskowitz is harder to dismiss. His resume is fluffy, but long, with a lot of sitcom credits, including the 1991 revival The Munsters Today (This version was my first introduction to the franchise, which managed to transcend its status as a really shameless knock-off of The Addams Family by being really clever and visually appealing. The series would go on to be rebooted in 2013 as Mockingbird Lane, an absolutely beautiful clusterfuck that couldn’t decide what kind of comedy and/or family drama it wanted to be. Also its theme song is sampled in the Fall Out Boy song Uma Thurman), Charles in Charge, and the TV adaptations of Harry and the Hendersons and Police Academy, as well as Out of this World, on which he served as a story editor. That seems pretty far afield from sci-fi horror, which might explain why the story is set up like body horror but all the emphasis is on the tragic downfall of Doctor Gestaine instead.

It’s hard (and probably unnecessary) to declare one or the other “worse”, but on balance, I’m bothered more by “The Second Seal”. “Breeding Ground” does manage to deliver some reasonably good tragedy, even if its heart is in the wrong place. And it doesn’t involve character assassination against the leads.

Now, with the distance of years and the insight that comes from looking through the lenses of how television has matured over the past quarter-century and how much more socially aware we are now of the culture of violence against women, what “The Second Seal” reminds me of is — you’ll have to bear with me here — “The Twin Dilemma”.

I’m going to have to unpack that a little, aren’t I?

“The Twin Dilemma” was the final story of season 21 of Doctor Who. Back in 1984, executive producer and sexual predator John Nathan-Turner made the really bizarre decision to pull Colin Baker’s first story back up to the end of the season, rather than giving the creative team a couple of months to think things over and doing it at the start of season 22. It was declared that the previous Doctor had been too nice, so the next one would be meaner, and that maybe the audience shouldn’t entirely trust him. Also they dressed him in a clown costume.

So to really drive home that this new Doctor was Edgy and Unpredictable, ten minutes into his first episode, he tries to strangle his companion to death with his bare hands.

Just as we can try to “justify” Harrison’s behavior by the fact that his mind is being affected by the alien crystal, defenders of “The Twin Dilemma” (NB: There is actually no such thing as a defender of “The Twin Dilemma”) can point to the fact that the Doctor is suffering a particularly intense bout of post-regenerative trauma when he does this: his brain literally isn’t working correctly. But like I said before, someone had to write this. Neither the Doctor nor Harrison Blackwood are real people, alien mind-control crystals aren’t a real drug, and post-regenerative trauma isn’t a real mental illness. These things all do what the writer says they do. And Anthony Steven in 1984 and Patrick Barry in 1988 both, at some point in the creative process, asked themselves, “What’s a good way to show that this character has become dangerously unhinged?” and the answer they came up with both times was, “Let’s have him batter a woman he’s close to.” Right from the get-go, there’s an assumption that having your male lead commit violence against women is a way to make him “dangerous” and “edgy”, rather than, y’know, abusive. The whole scene, in both cases, is set up to minimize the importance of the victim and emphasize the altered state of the attacker. If you’re a kid in 1984, watching “The Twin Dilemma”, the lesson you’re learning is that when you see a man attacking a woman, you should think, “That poor man! I wonder what adverse influence is compelling him to do this?”

But you know, for me, these are things you could walk back. Okay. This happened. You have the hero confront that. Have him come down, and realize the horror of what he’s done, and have to live with the fact that something like that is inside of him, and have him work to make it better.

Guess what both “The Twin Dilemma” and “The Second Seal” do next? Did you pick “not that”? They both instead go on to compound their sins by never once having the hero apologize. Doctor Who could have, maybe, recovered from having the Doctor try to murder Peri with his bare hands, but it would have had to try, and to do that, it would have to have first admitted that it had done wrong, which never ever happens. Rather, the Doctor simply dismisses his behavior as a temporary aberration due to his trauma — he never actually addresses the fact that the person he tried to murder is a person and might have feelings about almost being murdered. In fact, he compounds his sin by declaring that he’s immediately got to go live as a hermit and take her with him. At no point is his vicious unprovoked attack on Peri treated as something about her: he engages in what looks for all the world like classic abuser behavior by making himself out to be the victim, cruelly betrayed by his own synapses, and then making a direct move to isolate the actual victim by dragging her off somewhere where she’ll be alone with him and unable to escape.

Harrison doesn’t do that. I’d probably say that Harrison does not behave as badly as The Doctor (Even beyond the fact that Harrison never gets as violent as The Doctor does). But War of the Worlds behaves at least as badly as Doctor Who on this count. Because while the Doctor may have behaved exactly like you’d expect a domestic abuser to behave, at least Peri, the actual victim, never backs him up. But once Harrison’s forcefully exposed Suzanne to the crystal against her will, mind-altered Suzanne responds to his macho bullying by getting turned on by his rugged manliness. And when they speak about it later, Harrison talks about the incident as though him roughing her up and her coming on to him were morally equivalent things. The juxtaposition between their behavior, particularly in light of Harrison’s reaction to it once he comes down, implicitly sexualizes the violence. The show itself is going out of its way to frame Harrison’s actions in a particular way that completely hides the fact that physical abuse and heavy flirting are not even remotely the same thing.

When Doctor Who did this, it was the third of the classic series’s three cardinal sins (The others being the Doctor’s abandonment of Susan in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” and Nyssa’s failure to react to the murder of her father, destruction of her planet, and genocide of her entire species with anything other than dull surprise in “Logopolis”), and the one that finally killed the show off, and that was a show with twenty years under its belt. I’m not prepared to give up on War of the Worlds for this, but this show can’t afford to keep pulling shit like this.

It is November 6, 1989, and there’s no point in burying the lede: the cover of Time this week proclaims, “Moscow lets Eastern Europe go its own way,” and that about sums it up for this week in international news. Last Wednesday, East Germany opened its border with Czechoslovakia. By Friday, East German refugees were filtering into the West German city of Hof. Tomorrow, the East German leadership will resign en masse, save for head of state Egon Krenz. This Thursday, they’ll save their fleeing populace the trouble of a stopover in Czechoslovakia (And the resulting hassle in Hof) by opening up the Berlin Wall. They hadn’t actually intended to just open the thing up, but rather introduce new regulations for border-crossings, but the word got out and when a mob of East Germans showed up at the wall, no one was left in the government with balls big enough to order the guards to shoot them, so that was that. Years ago, I read about a woman who considers herself married to the Berlin Wall. On her website, she says, “My husband used to guard the border between east and west Germany. He is currently retired.” Mrs. Berlin-Wall’s husband suffered numerous small indignities over the following days and weeks as unofficial demolition commenced months in advance of the wall’s official decommissioning. This was all greatly exciting to the Germans, as well as to the Americans, who largely attributed the whole thing to former President Ronald Reagan. Far less optimistic about it were British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President François Mitterrand, neither of whom were especially happy about the prospect of Germany reuniting, or, well, existing at all, really.

All other news pretty much pales in comparison to the news from Germany. In other Cold War events, on Friday, Petar Mladenov will replace Todor Zhivkov as the head of Bulgaria’s Communist party, beginning that country’s transition to democracy. At home, tomorrow’s elections will see the first elected African American mayor of New York and Governor of Virginia, great and historic moments we can now look back on and say, “Why the fuck did it take so long?” even though we all know the answer. Friday, the WordPerfect Corporation will release WordPerfect 5.1, proficiency in which will, according to my mid-1990s High School teachers, be the single most marketable skill for a person my age who works with computers.

Unseating Janet Jackson, Roxette takes the top spot on the Billboard chart with “Listen to Your Heart”. Network TV is all new this week. Star Trek the Next Generation does “The Enemy“, a pretty straightforward “Enemy Mine” plot about Geordi getting stranded on a hostile planet and having to work together with a shifty Romulan to escape. Only it also apparently has an uncomfortable subplot about Worf refusing to donate blood to a dying Romulan which I have completely forgotten. Friday the 13th The Series gives us “Hate on Your Dial”, in which the cursed radio out of a ’54 Chevy helps a racist travel back in time to save his klansman father from a murder conviction.

After the bad taste “Breeding Ground” left in my mouth, “Seft of Emun” is refreshing. A good, solid, enjoyable episode. Not, as I find myself saying all the time, perfect: the plot stumbles in a few places, characters have unjustified mood swings, and the resolution feels forced and there’s a shockingly awful child actor. But all the same, it’s a very likeable episode.

It’s also a very visual episode. War of the Worlds has been fairly distinctive, visually, among shows in this style and format of the era. This is less profound watching it now, because making your sets damp and filthy and keeping your key lighting low are fairly standard practice these days for anything trying to be Dark and Gritty. But TV has a long history of clean, brightly-lit dystopias, probably because TV cameras have a hard time with low light: War of the Worlds could only look the way it does because it was shot on film — though there’s a couple of scenes at the Morthren base in this very episode that have the “flat” look of video tape. This episode in particular uses more than the average number of special and visual effects. When they roll out the visual effects, you can really tell that this is a Mancuso show: there are certain effects and techniques that I guess he must like or something, because War of the Worlds looks a lot more like Friday the 13th The Series when the folks in the post-processing department get their Video Toaster on.

The Morthren are having an energy crisis. They’ve resorted to attacking smugglers to acquire “radioactives” — there’s apparently a big street-trade in radioactive minerals. No one ever specifies why. The world is a post-apocalyptic hellhole, so I assume the default response is so that punk-rock addicted juvenile delinquents can build dirty bombs in their basements, but you’d think trade like that would be handled clandestinely, rather than in a big Portabello Road-style street market, which I’ll get to in a bit.

After a shootout with some stylishly-dressed radioactive material smugglers, the Morthren try to clone themselves a guy who can get them the materials they need, but Earth-based power supplies aren’t compatible, and they cook him instead. I’ve noticed that the Morthren have a hard time using locally-sourced materials: they can’t use human power sources here, have a considerable failure rate trying to breed, and in a couple of weeks, it’s going to come up that they can’t eat the local food. This whole conquest of Earth thing seems like they may not have thought it all the way through. Indeed, the notion that the invasion of Earth was not a strategically well-thought-out idea is going to be something that haunts the end of this season.

Malzor consults the Eternal about their power supply issues, and returns with the news that the Eternal has ordered him to awaken “Seft of Emun”. Mana doesn’t like the idea, given how much power it will take to bring her out of stasis, and Malzor shouts at her about defying the will of the Eternal. Given that Malzor had just said himself that he hadn’t wanted to do it until he’d been ordered to, his reaction seems a little intense.

Mana begrudgingly plugs some crystals into a casket-shaped pith-pod, which ejaculates some steam and opens up to reveal Seft in a really nice practical effect. She’s a priestess from the planet Emun, with the psychic ability to convert radioactive minerals into the sort of energy crystals the Morthren use. Unlike the Morthren, Seft’s natural form looks humanoid, and the Emun seem to follow an at least roughly human family structure: Seft has a son, Tori, also in stasis, and she refers to a husband, presumed deceased. A flashback as she awakens depicts Emun as a sylvan world with two suns and a purple sky, and shows its conquest by the Mothren.

The Morthren are depicted in their original form, the best look at them we’ve seen so far. While clearly inspired by the 1953 movie, this version is larger and bulkier. They have two arms with three enormous fingers, a single, three-segmented eye, and wear cloaks with large cowls. They carry energy weapons that remind me a bit of the copper-powered weapon from Tobe Hooper’s remake of Invaders from Mars. The shape of the bulbous end of the weapon is probably based on the cobra-head of the heat ray from George Pal’s War of the Worlds, though it’s made not of metal, but a dark, dense form of the organic material that makes up most Morthren technology. From the sound of it, the Morthren completely exterminated Seft’s people and devastated their planet. Given that the Morthren seem to have no problem hanging out on Emun in their natural form, and the natives are able to spontaneously produce a compatible power source, it seems a little odd that they chose to move to Earth rather than Emun when their own planet went up. On the other hand, back in “The Second Wave”, Malzor said that Mothrai was an idea created by the Eternal rather than a physical place. Could it be that the Morthren did invade Emun, and it was actually a conquered and renamed Emun that we saw explode at the beginning of the series? That would actually simplify a lot of things and make a lot of sense, though there’s one great honking wall-banger with it that will come up at the end of the season.

Malzor is alternately polite and cruel to Seft, addressing her politely and referring to her by title, explaining her situation and their need for power crystals, and channeling a 1930s movie gangster by reminding her what a shame it would be if something were to “happen” to her son’s stasis pod. One touch I really like is that she doesn’t recognize the Morthren at first: she’s never seen them in humanoid form before, and it isn’t until Malzor starts making demands that she figures out what’s going on. Seft agrees to make crystal for the Morthren to protect her son, and she’s whisked of to a street market.

The street market is a kind of Mad Max-themed Renaissance Festival, with vendors selling exotic foods on sticks, weapons, drugs, clothes, and even muppets (I am not making this up). As it happens, Blackwood is at the market as well. He’s at the minerals booth, because he needs sulfur and magnesium. He never says why. It sounds like it might be dietary, as Suzanne is out at the same time looking for vitamins (Which are obtainable only via a “contact” who has demanded that she come alone. This will not come up again). The vendor, Blade, is one of the smugglers from the opening scene. She is the textbook archetype late ’80s successful post-apocalyptic female trader, with big earrings, big hair, and big shoulder pads, like a less colorful version of the cover of the April 1987 issue of Playboy (G’head, look it up. I’ll still be here when you get back). She reminds me a lot of Mindsinger from Captain Power, and claims to have, “Alum to zinc and everything in-between.” Later, we’re going to find out that she’s another of Kincaid’s parade of old female friends he’s on a flirty basis with. While Blackwood is inspecting rocks, some Morthren soldiers escort Seth to the booth so she can pick out raw materials. No one recognizes Blackwood, but Seft manages to brush his hand as they’re ushering her away, and this apparently creates some kind of psychic connection between them, as Blackwood is compelled to follow after her until he loses her in the crowd.

When he returns to the bunker, he hears her voice in his mind, and is drawn into a shared vision of the market at night, where she begs for his help, but does not yet specify the details. She’s forced out of the vision when Mana shows up with a crystal and a couple of rocks for Seft to play with. She cuddles them for a bit, strains, and then a bluish halo effect replaces the crystal with a bigger one. Seft refuses to do any more, since the low-quality rocks don’t work quite right and trying to use them will kill her. She and Mana get into it a bit about the whole genocide of Seft’s race thing, which leads to Mana slapping her. Well, it leads to Mana gently waving her hand in the general vicinity of her face while an impossibly loud slap sound effect plays.

After Seft demonstrates a failed attempt at crystal making, by hugging some rocks until they turn into a pile of broken glass, Mana agrees to let her go pick out her own supplies. I know I’ve said a lot of times that it’s borderline criminal how badly this show uses Catherine Disher, but she seems really on the mark here. It’s clear that she’s disgusted by the idea of being dependent on an alien, but she’s also pragmatic, and she’s scientifically curious about the process. She cottons on to the very obvious fact that Seft is up to something, and cautions Malzor that she might possess other weird alien powers than just hugging rocks into magic power crystals.

Kincaid stops by to visit Blade at the market. Luckily for us, this is charismatic, flirty Kincaid rather than the mopey version we get so often. Blade tells him about the attacks on her radioactive materials shipments. Kincaid is aloof, not really interested in her problems. Blade starts to explain about the alien weapons used in the attack, but is interrupted by a customer. While he’s off getting a drink, Seft returns with Ardix and a soldier to make some late-night purchases. For no very good reason, though, when Blade brings up the matter of payment, Ardix loses his cool and has her killed, and then they run away just before Kincaid returns, summoned by Blade’s death-screams. The aliens have too big a lead on him, but Kincaid does get a good look at both Ardix and Seft — though he somehow misses the fact that she’s in obvious distress and being forced.

Between Malzor patiently explaining how scary and violent humans are and them sending Seft back out to try again, Blackwood has a nightmare. He’s summoned back to a vision of the market where Seft leads him to a store (I assume it’s a store. We never see any actual wares for sale, or indeed a shopkeeper or customers or anything. It could be a restaurant for all I know) then her face turns into a Morthren in natural form. This freaks Blackwood out so bad that he wakes up in a sweat and instinctively grabs his gun and waves it around, and needs to be calmed down with hugs from Suzanne and Debi. He blows off Kincaid about Blade and sneaks out to find the shop from his dream.

Continue reading Antithesis: Seft of Emun (War of the Worlds 2×06)

Contact with that crystal is affecting your behavior!

I’m in total control, Suzanne.

It is November 7, 1988. Since last week, Geraldo Rivera got his nose broke when a fight broke out on his talk show and Emma Stone was born. Tomorrow, George Herbert Walker Bush will win the presidential election, inaugurating the Bush Presidential Dynasty, and 900 people will die from an earthquake in China. Today, Donny Lalonde fights Sugar Ray Leonard at Caesar’s Palace. Had Senate Joint Resolution 390 passed, today would be “Memorial Day for Victims of Communism”.

“Kokomo” is the number one song on the Billboard charts, the only number one from The Beach Boys since 1966, though they’ll crack the top 40 once more in 2013 when a new Greatest Hits compilation comes out. They Live had its US theatrical premiere Friday. Election coverage will preempt prime-time TV until Wednesday. On General Hospital, Dr. Tom Hardy marries Dr. Simone Ravelle, the first interracial marriage on daytime TV, another thing for your checklist of, “Wait, that only happened in the ’80s?”. Friday the 13th The Series airs “Master of Disguise”. This week’s murder-powered cursed artifact is the makeup case of John Wilkes Booth.

No particular idea why, but “The Second Seal” is one of two episodes of War of the Worlds that tends to pop to the front of my brain, and I implicitly think of it as being archetypical of one of the series’s two major modes. Like most of the episodes so far, this one’s plot is based around the aliens trying to acquire resources to build their army and assure their survival on Earth. This episode also follows the format that I kind of nostalgically think of as the default War of the Worlds structure (Even though it isn’t really all that common in the series; that’s just me imposing my own assumptions about default storytelling structures onto the show), with Harrison and Suzanne off having an “adventure” plot, while Ironhorse goes off on his own to have an “action” plot, and Norton stays home to act as “mission control”. Also, Jared Martin and Lynda Mason Green act drunk for half the episode.

Based on Norton’s discoveries, Harrison, Suzanne and Ironhorse have traveled to nearby (This episode establishes that the cottage is located in the San Francisco Bay area) Fort Streeter to look in the vaults of “Operation Deep Ice”, a large collection of alien artifacts and Dr. Forrester’s research papers. Original Mission: Impossible alumnus Greg Morris takes a break from his recurring guest role on the Mission: Impossible revival to play the fort’s commanding officer, General Masters. Because it’s a tiny, tiny world, Masters went to school with General Wilson, and also knows Ironhorse from the invasion of Grenada. He invites Ironhorse to an awards banquet in order to get him out of the way for act 2.

Sadly, General Masters will not make it to the banquet himself, as the news reporter parked outside trying to get an interview is really an alien, and when the General stops to sexually harass her (Seriously. He makes suggestive comments about her twice, and later, one of the other officers will imply that Masters is a bit of a skirt-chaser), he gets possessed. There’s a slight misdirect, as you kind of expect the reporter to possess him (They’ve already established that she’s an alien as the General’s attache had been possessed by an alien hiding in her van), but it’s actually his driver who does it once he waves her off.

As we’ve seen a few times by now, there’s often a feel in War of the Worlds that we’re watching the aliens and the Blackwood team coincidentally happen upon some other, more ordinary show already in progress. That’s the case again this week, as Harrison and Suzanne pass briefly through some sort of military-themed office romance. You probably know the one. Lt. Amanda Burke is thoroughly smitten with her coworker, Lt. Hamil. But he’s cool and conventionally attractive and kinda looks like a young Ted McGinley, while she likes opera and is Hollywood Homely, which more-or-less means that she’s fairly attractive but has an unflattering haircut and glasses. So of course he’s constantly brushing her off with lame excuses while she’s trying to be all subtle and win his heart through dogged persistence. Later on, Suzanne will probably give her a makeover. There’s also an administrative assistant who’s warm for Ironhorse, and of course that’s supposed to be hilarious because she’s middle aged and therefore the thought of her having a sexual identity is obviously laughable.

Is it just me, or do they look like they’re posing for their freeze-frame in the credits?

And because this is 1988, the audience is supposed to find this cute and relatable rather than looking forward to all of these characters dying messily. It’s okay. We’ll get through this. After tracking down the vault number (it takes a little while because it’s misfiled as “Operation Dee Pice”), Lt. Burke uses her voiceprint to unlock the elevator down to the vast underground storehouse (because of course voiceprint locks are a thing they use. Amanda’s password is “Yabba Dabba Doo”.)

The vault in question turns out to be mostly empty. Amanda doesn’t go out of her way to be obstructionist, but she won’t let them check any of the others without authorization. Ironhorse promises to get it and leaves the others for the General’s party, despite the fact that his spider-sense is piqued by the alien-possessed soldiers milling about outside.

While Lt. Ted McGinley is getting himself possessed, Harrison sets up his Tandy T1000 laptop and acoustic modem-slash-speakerphone (The most outlandish thing in this show: in this underground military archive, Harrison finds a rotary phone with a direct outside line on which he can multiplex voice and data.) and calls Norton, who, as per usual, promises to hack into the secure military network and search the archive’s inventory for the rest of the haul. There’s a bit of a fresh side to Harrison in this scene: in the past, he’s generally tended to get manic and forceful, but here, he’s melancholic instead, disappointed to be denied access to his father’s (I think this is the first time Harrison refers to Clayton as his father without qualifying the relationship as “adoptive”) work when he’s so close.

Suzanne puts some tissue samples under the microscope and reveals that these isolated samples are still showing cellular activity, which is terrifying and interesting and won’t come up again. The former General Masters and his legion of aliens decide this would be a good time to take the vault. Doudy middle-aged administrative assistant is killed, but Lt. Burke narrowly escapes because rather than stopping to notice the sound of the secretary getting shot, she got on the elevator to bring Harrison and Suzanne a box full of sandwiches and fashion magazines.

Suzanne and Lt. Burke settle in for a bit of girl-talk while Harrison naps, and holy crap, Suzanne actually does give her a makeover. Well, she takes off her hat and glasses, and teases her bangs a little. Look, I’m not going to go all indie street cred and disparage Hollywood standards of beauty in favor of I don’t know what. But look, Burke looks the way she looks, and it’s not like she can trade in her uniform while she’s on duty. She can make the sexy librarian thing work with a little effort. “Take off your hat and glasses and tease your bangs a little” is not an improvement on this. In fact, it kinda just makes her look silly. Also, Suzanne’s advice for snaring the hunky Lt. Ted McGinley is pretty much just to throw herself at him. I am in favor of taking the direct approach, and heartily disapprove of the societal pressures that more or less order women to express sexual interest only in the form of subtle hinting. But there’s at least two problems with this: first, she’s already tried that, directly asking him out on a date a few scenes ago. He shot her down so hard that I was rooting for him to get hollowed out and used as a meatsuit. Secondly, this is Suzanne giving the advice. One of the very first traits the show explicitly gave us about Suzanne is that she’s not the type to throw herself at a man. And to add insult to injury, that’s going to be a major part of the next act.

Amanda gets a brief chance to think that her “makeover” has paid off, as Lt. Ted McGinley comes on to her the moment he sees her. As it turns out, the voiceprint lock on the elevator door is sophisticated enough to detect when someone is alien-possessed, and thus, his password (The most obvious dudebro password of the ’80s) won’t work. So he ushers her into the elevator with sloppy makeouts, and once she’s exclaimed her “Yabba-Dabba-Doo!”, right when she’s expecting him to whip out his third appendage and stick it in her, instead he whips out his third appendage and sticks it in her.

A typo leads Norton to locate another vault of interest: it had been filed under “D. Eep Ice”. Suzanne and I both think this sounds like par for the course with bureaucracy, but Harrison is instantly convinced that this is, in fact, a brilliant form of added security, intentionally misfiling the collection in order to obscure it, and orders Norton to look up various misspellings. Unwilling to wait while Ironhorse gets the paperwork lined up, Harrison picks the lock to the next vault, which is chock full of thirty-year-old file boxes and alien artifacts. And also a boom box that’s so 80s that it is identical to the first picture that comes up if you google “80s boom box”.

Harrison reaches for an alien device that looks kinda like a dousing rod — it’ll later be revealed as a handheld weapon — but his approach wakes up a small crystal pyramid that glows green. When he tries to show it to Suzanne, it tosses him into a pile of boxes. Harrison appears no worse for wear physically, though: he pushes the boxes aside, shouting at Suzanne that he doesn’t need her help, then violently shoving her away with a shout of, I am not making this up, “You’re not my mother!” so he can get back to fondling his crystal.

Continue reading Thesis: The Second Seal (War of the Worlds 1×06)