Month: December 2015

We all have to die some time.

Let’s close out the year. It is December 26, 1988. Since last we spoke, the Spitak earthquake killed 25,000 in Armenia. Estonia declared Estonian to be its official language, which probably seems hilarious to anyone too young to understand the whole “Soviet Union” thing. Pan Am 103 was destroyed by terrorists over Lockerbie, Scotland. US Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche was convicted of mail fraud, ruining once and for all his chances of winning the 1992 election. NASA unveiled its plans for a moon colony and manned mars mission. I haven’t looked, but I assume that all went according to plan. Vanessa Hudgens was born, and Roy Orbison died. Tomorrow, Bulgaria will give up jamming Radio Free Europe, and Hayley Williams will be born.

Two days ago, Mega Man 2 was released in Japan. Out in theaters are The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad, Rain Man, Working Girl, Beaches, Twins, and, of course, Dangerous Liaisons. Poison leads the Billboard top ten with “Every Rose Has its Thorn”. Also charting are Bobby Brown’s “My Perrogative”, Boy Meets Girl’s “Waiting for a Star to Fall”, and Guns N Roses’s “Welcome to the Jungle”. New in the top ten this week are Doctor Who-fan-music-video favorite Phil Collins’s “Two Hearts”, The Bangles’s “In Your Room” (Which honestly, I didn’t even know was a single), and Taylor Dayne’s “Don’t Rush Me”. Speaking of Doctor Who, the novelty song, “Doctorin’ The Tardis”, a mash-up of the Doctor Who theme song with Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part 2 by The KLF (performing as “The Timelords”) is on the Hot 100 for its second week at 83. It’ll peak at 66. Former Kids Incorporated star Martika’s “More than You Know” enters the charts at 91.

TV is virtually all reruns this week, including, I am not making this up, a rerun of the made-for-TV movie Ewoks: Battle for Endor. Is that the one with the big spider? Friday the 13th will not be back for another week. Star Trek the Next Generation is off this week, but while War of the Worlds was on break, they cranked out “Where Silence has Lease” (the one where they get sucked into a Weird Space Hole where a big disembodied face wants to murder them because it’s curious about this whole “mortality” thing), “Elementary, My Dear Data” (the Sherlock Holmes one), and “The Outrageous Okona” (the one where they hang out with a Han Solo-inspired vaguely rogueish antihero and also holographic Joe Piscopo).

You only have to get a few minutes into “The Good Samaritan” to notice two things. The first is that this is densely and effectively written episode. The second is that there’s something seriously wrong on a mechanical level. The audio mix is weird. The foley is awkward. The looping is painfully blatant. Characters speak with odd cadences and tones. Some of this may not be their fault. There’s several audio glitches in my DVD copy — a half-second of the wrong audio warps in during the credits, and the sound track goes out of sync after the commercial breaks. Perhaps these have been fixed in later pressings (I am not optimistic). But other audio oddities must have been audible to the original audience. Maybe stuff like this was less noticeable on a cheap ’80s television set?

“The Good Samaritan” was the third episode produced, after “The Resurrection” and “Thy Kingdom Come”, made while Sam Strangis was still operating with a skeleton crew due to the strike: the writing credit on this one is the obvious pseudonym “Sylvia Clayton”. That might explain some of the technical issues, if the production team was still finding their feet and under pressure.

All the same, like I said, the actual story is really well put-together. We see the best examples we’ve had so far of the writing conveying information to the audience effectively and efficiently without resorting to direct information dumps. There’s also a strong display of the rapport between the characters, which is especially interesting given that this episode was filmed before the relationship development they put on display in “A Multitude of Idols”. There are a few oddities though: Ironhorse is far more casual with the others than he should be, and they’re still clinging to that idea of there being sexual tension between Harrison and Suzanne.

We open with four extremely ’80s-looking thirty-year-olds pretending to be college students in a diner. Noticing that one of them has a cold, the waitress talks them all into trying the chicken soup. When she slips into the back to deliver their order, she lapses into alienese just for the phrase, “and four soups.” Really great way to be discrete: if anyone were listening in, they wouldn’t learn that she’d put in the soup order she’d just been given, they’d only learn that she’s an alien who speaks a language that sounds like backmasking. The line cook adds something from his flask to the soup, while they discuss their plans in alienese which, this time, hasn’t been subtitled, in order to increase the suspense for the ten seconds before we cut to the last survivor of the group being wheeled into the hospital.

If you were hoping that the horrible alien toxin would produce some satisfying body horror, like his chest cavity collapsing or alien goo issuing from his orifices, sorry; it’s not that kind of show. The kid just dies painfully while one of the cooks watches from a distance. Back at the Land of the Lost cave, an alien identified only as “Commander” explains to the Advocacy how they’ve proven that their “spores” are fatal to humans, and they’re ready to start using them to wipe out the locals. They also bring by a bound young blonde in a halter top with a bare midriff, which the Commander explains is a “gift” to the scientists to use in their experiments. Also, presumably, a gift to the anticipated target audience’s “dudes who like seeing a young blonde in a halter top with a bare midriff in bondage” demographic.

Meanwhile, at a stock image of looking up at a skyscraper that I think I’ve seen before, a businessman with the incredibly unlikely name “Marcus Madison Mason” is giving a press conference. Seems he’s invented some kind of new miracle food-crop which, among its other magnificent properties, is completely radiation resistant, which will come in important after the inevitable nuclear conflict that’s coming. That’s not me being wry: Mason actually literally states this as his reason for adding radiation resistance. Mason speaks in a strangely slow monotone that makes him sound like he’s on something. It’ll probably come in handy when he gets alien-possessed later since no one will think it odd that he suddenly sounds like a robot. A quick pan around the room does a surprisingly modern job of communicating character wordlessly. Mason is disingenuous. The board of directors — which includes future Robocop regular David Gardner — is bored with all this humanitarian bullshit. Mason’s wife, an elegant middle-aged woman is proud of her husband. Mason’s personal assistant, a much younger woman, wants to bone him, and probably already has. The wife is clueless, as indicated by her whispered promise of a “special dinner” when they do their obligatory chaste post-press-conference smooch for the cameras. The secretary looks away, clearly pissed at Mason’s flagrant flirting with his own wife right in front of her.

As soon as they leave the conference, Mason, still speaking weirdly slow, drops the humanitarian facade and starts complaining about recouping their research costs, and making plans to bleed the third world dry and bribe government officials to expedite their export licenses. Once behind the locked door of his office, he starts making out with Teri, the personal assistant. The actress who plays Teri looked a bit familiar to me, and a little research turned up that she’s Lori Haller, who would go on to appear in a handful of things I’ve seen, most prominently, as Josie’s mom in Strange Days at Blake Holsey High, a show that I find kinda wonderful for the way that it is quite obviously an attempt to do a lighter and fluffier version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with all instances of the word “supernatural” struck through and replaced with “SCIENCE^TM!”. For example, there is an episode whose actual plot is that when one of the characters starts to feel unnoticed by his friends, he turns invisible. Only instead of it being due to the hellmouth in the basement, it’s due to the wormhole in the science teacher’s office. He blows off her offer for sex on the claim that he has to work late, and gives her a gold watch to make up for it. We immediately cut to him giving a gold necklace to his mistress, another, more pinup-y kind of young blonde, who responds by taking off her clothes to give the audience an eyeful of the kind of PG-13 near-nudity that could only come about thanks to the ever-laxening broadcast standards that have come with the breakdown of Big Three Network dominance.

Back at the cottage, a nice exchange with the regular cast. Norton’s reading an article about Mason in Plot Convenience Magazine, while Harrison is picking horses from the track list — a very obviously redubbed Norton explains to the befuddled Ironhorse that Harrison’s mathematical genius gives him an impressive betting record, even if it’s only on paper (Harrison likes probability but doesn’t approve of gambling). Ironhorse struggles with a Rubik’s cube, then tosses it away in frustration just as Suzanne enters to vent about how hard it is to genetically engineer radiation-resistant biological weapons.

Norton helpfully comments on Mason’s grain, which inspires them to have General Wilson get Suzanne a meeting. Mason explains the radiation resistance as being purely of his own personal invention, but doesn’t let on any of its secrets. But it’s clear from his thoughtful looks that, despite Suzanne’s high neckline and enormous shoulder pads, he’s concocting a plan to bed her, and she agrees to have dinner with him for further discussion and artless flirting.

The aliens, meanwhile, have decided that Mason’s grain would be a good way to distribute their killer spores, which is a good thing because otherwise, this episode is going to be kind of pointless. They send three possessed little old ladies to acquire him. The little old ladies are played by Anne Mirvish, who hasn’t done much else, Billie Mae Richards, a prolific voice actor best known for the voices of Brightheart Racoon and Tenderheart Bear across multiple incarnations of the Care Bears franchise, and Maxine Miller. Miller is this episode’s second actress who looks really familiar. Not from anything in particular as it turns out, though. In addition to considerable voice-acting credits which include Babar, Double Dragon, The Baby Huey Show, and Martha Speaks, she’s a fairly prolific character actor who pretty much always plays “little old lady” characters, in such shows as So Weird, Seven Days, First Wave, The Outer Limits, Dead Like Me, Smallville, Supernatural and The Flash (Ironically, in an episode titles “Who is Harrison Wells?”)

If you were thinking “Hey, three little old lady aliens, and this Mason guy is boning three different ladies!” you’re actually way ahead of the episode. The little old ladies watch Mason at lunch with his girlfriend, then follow her as she goes shopping. A scene later, the girlfriend, accompanied by only two little old ladies, calls Mason to make a date.

Intermixed with all this, we get some more boardroom scenes with Mason to establish that he’s a pretty typical Robber Baron (According to IMDb, one of the suits in these scenes is our old friend Barry Flatman, but there’s only one guy I can’t rule out, and he doesn’t look much like him), and a scene back at the Cottage where Debi establishes that she likes playing with Suzanne’s lab rat, Caesar. The rat’s name should really be “Chekhov”.

While we’re back at the Cottage, Ironhorse spends a scene ribbing Harrison about Suzanne’s impending date with Mason, trying to get a rise out of him by noting that Mason’s “not a bad looking guy,” which, well, I guess I’ll just take his word for it, and that, “We may be losing our lady doctor to big business.”

So, um. What the fuck? I know it’s the ’80s and it’s a forelorn hope for me to imagine they might treat Suzanne like a human being and all, but “lady doctor”? And what’s up with Ironhorse trying to make Harrison all jealous? I guess Ironhorse sniping at Harrison shouldn’t be too surprising at this point, but this feels sort of dudebro for a guy who’s supposed to be a military hardass-type.

In keeping with the kind of heavily trope-aware show this is, Suzanne walks in on them to seek make approval on her little black dress, because clearly an academic weirdo and a straightlaced soldier are exactly the right guys to help her decide if her hair and shoulder pads are big enough. We get the cliche “Men awkwardly react when the female character they’d always been purely platonic with walks in all dolled up for a date and is Suddenly Hot.”

I do not like this cliche. I don’t like it so much that I am going to read against obvious intention here. Because while it is true that the writing clearly assumes that, yes, Harrison is attracted to Suzanne and is just in denial, and that yes, he’s supposed to be flustered by the thought of her being all sexied up and going out with a rich businessman, the truth is that Jared Martin does absolutely nothing to sell that. Given that we kinda know that Jared Martin can play Stupid Sexy Harrison, I’ve got to conclude that this is on purpose, and someone — the director, perhaps, or Martin himself — is mutinying against hamfisted attempts to ship those two. There’s no indication of repressed desire in Harrison’s reaction to Suzanne. The only emotion he shows in the scene at all is annoyance toward Ironhorse. His glower in the face of Ironhorse’s smug expression is easy to read not as anger at being “caught” by the soldier, but rather as frustration with Ironhorse’s insistence on treating his colleague as some sort of prize to be won. That is my story, and I am sticking to it.

Continue reading Thesis: The Good Samaritan (War of the Worlds 1×09)

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

We’re somewhere around the end of January, 1898, and readers of the New York Evening Journal have for a couple of weeks now been reading the adventures of an all-star cast of a war-fleet two thousand men and a hundred electrical space ships strong, set out under the command of Thomas Edison on an expedition to make war against the red planet in bloody retribution for the War of the Worlds they’d recently visited.

H. G. Wells had described the Martians as, “Minds which are to our minds as ours are to the beasts that perish.” Garrett P. Serviss is more direct: “During the brief war with the Martians upon the earth it had been gunpowder against a mysterious force as much stronger than gunpowder as the latter was superior to the bows and arrows that preceded it.” But thanks to the inventive genius of the Wizard of Menlo Park (with some nonspecific assistance by the world’s other great scientific minds), Earth was now equipped to go on the offensive. Though the Martians possessed superior intelligence, Edison had discovered the underlying scientific principles of their warships, the breakthrough which allowed him to develop technology that equaled and in some cases exceeded the would-be invaders — this will eventually be explained as a simple stroke of serendipity: Edison’s most fantastic inventions derived from highly precise manipulation of electromagnetic fields using a particular combination of metals not found on Mars.

Of the original crew of 2000, 940 remained when the fleet descended into the Martian atmosphere. And I can’t for the life of me account for those losses: I put the total number dead at fifty-five (Three to a meteor strike, forty in the two ships destroyed by heat ray, and twelve in the ground battle on the gold asteroid). It’s a bit difficult to square away the possibility of Edison losing half his fleet without the narrative noticing, so I’m going to assume this is just an editorial blunder.

Regardless, really, of whether the Earth expedition numbered just under a thousand or (as seems more likely) closer to two thousand, their initial survey of Mars daunts our heroes a little. Without coming right out and saying it, it seems like they’d taken for granted that Mars was a dying planet, and were surprised to find, “There could be no longer any question that it was a world which, if not absolutely teeming with inhabitants, like a gigantic ant-hill, at any rate bore on every side the marks of their presence and of their incredible undertakings and achievements.” They had somehow neglected to consider that two thousand men was not really a lot to conquer a population that numbered in the millions.

Descending for a better look at the surface, Edison’s fleet runs afoul of a fleet of Martian airships, prompting more concerns that perhaps humanity had not thought this invasion all the way through, and maybe it wasn’t a great idea to stick every competent scientist on the planet on one ship. Returning to orbit, they decide to circumnavigate the planet for a reconnoiter before launching a proper attack. This leads into a brief but enjoyable “marvel at the alien wonders” segment, where everything on Mars turns out to be weird exaggerations of their terrestrial equivalents. Like the canals, much like irrigation canals on Earth, but far vaster in scope. These “canals” had been “discovered” by Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877, and basically kicked off the whole notion of Mars being potentially inhabited, and thereby being one of the inspirations for this story’s antecedent (though Wells doesn’t reference them directly). Two problems with this: first, that Schiaparelli didn’t actually claim to have seen canals (“canals” being only a loose translation of the Italian word “canali”, which can refer equally to man-made canals and to natural gullies or riverbeds), and second, that the canals don’t exist. In the early 20th century, improved telescopes, photography, and later, satellite imagery revealed that what Shiaparelli had seen was not a network of interconnected straight-line canals, but random disconnected dark streaks in the landscape. But in one last twist, earlier this year, NASA confirmed that liquid water does indeed still seasonally flow on the surface of Mars. And what’s more, the reason we know this is that these seasonal flows are extremely briny, and therefore they leave behind evidence of their passing in the form of hydrated salts in the Martian soil which appear as — I really hope you’ve guessed it — dark streaks in the landscape. Everything on Mars is huge and exciting and classy in a way that if you mix it with the narrative’s casual racism, means it could probably pull 35% of the vote in the Republican primary. The red trees average a thousand feet in height. The buildings are made entirely of metal. The density and composition of the clouds makes them iridescent. They’ve got dogs the size of oxen. The Martian capital stands at the edge of a lake half again larger than the Caspian Sea.

No sooner have they completed their circuit than the Martians mount their defense, shrouding the entire planet in a cloud of black smoke that seems like it must be related to the black smoke from the novel, though the narrator doesn’t seem at all familiar with it. The smoke is identified as stifling, but not poisonous, its main feature being its opacity, which precludes any sort of direct attack on the surface without the risk of being ambushed. Before Edison can consider the logistics of settling in for a long-term siege, the commissary decides that this would be the most dramatically appropriate time to reveal that something’s gone wrong with their food cube storage and they’ve only got about ten days worth of food left before they’re forced to resort to cannibalism.

Which honestly would make an awesome story, but instead, Edison works out the frequency for smoke and sets the disintegrator for it. They rain down disintegration through the smoke at the huge city around the Lake of the Sun until the Martians start shooting back with heat rays (though by now, they’re just straight-up “electric beams”), destroying one ship and damaging three or four more. For no clear reason beyond bloodlust, the fleet descends through the smoke and has a go at laying waste to the city below, but they’re badly outnumbered. Though the flagship “seemed charmed” in escaping destruction, the rest of the fleet is less fortunate, and of the more than 90 ships that had descended through the smoke, only sixty survive to retreat back to low orbit. Down another 600 men, they realize that a direct assault won’t work, but with their provisions dwindling, retreat isn’t an option.

At this point, the narrative gains a new character, Colonel Alonzo Jefferson Smith (who I think must be actually fictional, since I’ve found no reference to a real one), described as an, ahem, “Old army officer who had served in many wars against the cunning Indians of the West.” In another of those moments of over-the-top comedy racism, he later refers to the Martians as “Indians”. Colonel Smith comes up with the idea of sending a third of the fleet around to the opposite side of the planet on a raid, while the remainder stays in orbit over the Lake of the Sun, outside the range of Martian weapons, basically just firing randomly at the planet to keep the Martian defenses focused there. Naturally, the narrator accompanies Smith’s expedition, because otherwise the story would get really dull for a few chapters. Colonel Jefferson’s ship is able to land undetected in a sparsely populated area, and he and the narrator become what they briefly assume to be the first humans on the surface of Mars.

They are disillusioned in this respect very quickly, thanks to the combination of the dumb luck that keeps working in favor of the Earthmen and the sorts of things that always have to come up in this kind of old-fashioned pulp adventure story. To wit, the first building they come to, they find four Martians just sort of hanging out listening to the singing of a human slave girl, a descendant of ancient abductees — if I’m not mistaken, that also makes this the first alien abduction story. After murdering the owners, they get the girl to show them where the pantry is, and are able to reprovision the fleet with food cubes (They call it “compressed food”, one of the few inventions that the Martians and Edison both mastered). Colonel Jefferson’s expedition returns to the main fleet, pausing only long enough for a few paragraphs of exposition about Mars’s moons that is so randomly inserted that you expect it to end with Serviss telling us that knowing is half the battle.

An unnamed linguistics professor from Heidelberg identifies her native tongue as proto-Aryan. I get the feeling he might be based on a real person, possibly a parody, due to his distinctive Yoda-like speech pattern: “I have her tongue recognized!”, “This girl, to the oldest family of the human race belongs. Her language every tongue that now upon the earth is spoken antedates” (Holy fuck, an SOV dependent clause in the middle of an SOV sentence). But he’s no one I could identify. With a month’s worth of food, Edison decides that their only chance at winning the war will be if the human woman can reveal some key weakness. So the fleet withdraws to the shadow of Deimos for two weeks while he asks the linguists from the fleet to learn her language. They say they’ll try. Except for the Heidelberg professor, who says, “It shall we do.”

It takes them three weeks, in the end, during which tensions are raised by a love-quadrilateral between the rescued woman, Jefferson, the Professor and “another handsome young fellow in the flagship”, but the Heidelberg professor eventually “masters the tongue of the ancient Aryans,” which he is confident, “will the speculations of my countrymen vindicate.” Which sounds kind of ominous in retrospect. The woman, who now identifies herself as “Aina”, tells the story of her people, and, um. Wow. This is some prime grade-A Von Daniken stuff. Her ancestors came from “The Vale of Cashmere”, which I think must refer to an old-timey name for Kashmir Valley, and not the section of Prospect Park. The Martians invaded and for some reason forcibly relocated the population to Egypt, where they used their amazing alien technology to build the Sphinx and also the pyramids, as a kind of reproduction of the mountains they’d been so impressed by in Kashmir (Serviss’s Mars being mountainless). Because the pyramids couldn’t possibly have been the work of “puny man”.

The Egyptian Martians were eventually afflicted by disease, just like their modern counterparts. I notice that it seems like Serviss has modified Wells’s presentation of the Martian downfall: it seems not to simply be that the Martians have no immunity to bacteria, but rather that they’re overly susceptible to one specific illness, not unlike the “Martian Flu” in The Great Martian War. They’d abandoned Earth then, but took Aina’s ancestors with them because they liked Earth music, but couldn’t get the hang of playing it themselves. Thousands of Mars-bred human slaves had served as entertainers to the Martian elite for millennia until Edison’s fleet had shown up. Fearful of a slave uprising, the Martians had slaughtered the humans, sparing only Aina, because this is a late nineteenth century adventure story and it always ends up being the undoing of one of the native chiefs that he’s taken a particular lecherous interest in the pretty white woman.

She goes on to explain that Mars is heavily fortified due to a war with, of all places, Ceres, and as such, the human force isn’t nearly great enough to defeat them head-on, but she does, as hoped, know their weakness. What follows is a detailed and boring account of nineteenth century scientific theory about Mars which is detailed and reasonable and which we have long-since learned to be wrong in every major respect. In brief, at the height of summer in the southern Martian hemisphere, the southern ice cap melts rapidly, and what with Mars being so flat (In the story. In real life, Mars is about three times bumpier per capita than Earth. But in 1898, all we knew of Martian topography came from its albedo, based on which Mars appeared to decompose neatly into “uniformly more shiny” and “uniformly less shiny”), the only thing that prevents the whole planet from flooding is that the water can flow from the shallow ocean on the south side of the planet to the shallow oceans on the north side through the Syrtis Major, where, it being winter up there, they rapidly freeze into the northern polar ice cap. Only the Martians threw up a big dam across Syrtis Major in order to control the movement of water back toward the poles and extend the growing season. And Aina reckons, because it seems to be something the Martians had worried about the Ceresans trying, that if they close the floodgates right around the solstice, it’ll flood the planet. That seems a little extreme to me, but I guess maybe they just mean it’ll flood the densely populated parts of the planet. And as luck would have it, the height of the seasonal flooding is happening right as we speak.

Which just leaves it to a small group of five — Edison, Smith, Serviss, Sydney Phillips (the “Handsome young man” from earlier) and Aina — to break into the most heavily guarded facility on the planet and sabotage it… Did Serviss just invent the Five Man Band trope? The actual mission doesn’t have much to it: they break in, shoot the guards, and close the floodgate. There’s two moments that might possibly be described as tense. When they reach the controls, Aina proves unable to help them determine which one closes the floodgates. And immediately afterward, they’re caught unawares by three Martian dam operators. The second problem is solved by the simple expedient of Serviss, Phillips and Smith shooting them with their disintegrators, which isn’t even as exciting as back when they rescued Aina, because it’s three-on-three rather than three-on-two, so they don’t even have to do any clever aiming to hit them all (Yeah, that was a thing. They had to angle their shots to hit two of them at a time because you’ve got to fiddle with the disintegrator for a minute to reset it between shots). The first is resolved by the even less exciting method of “Edison looks at the control panel for a minute and uses his genius to deduce which knob it is.”

Continue reading Deep Ice: We’d bring everybody down to his knees (Edison’s Conquest of Mars, Continued)

It is January 12, 1898. The modern city of New York just came into being when Brooklyn merged with the other boroughs. Tensions escalate between the US and Spain, and war is widely considered inevitable even with the sinking of the Maine a month away. Also, fun fact, some in Congress are suggesting that we ought to annex Japan. Tomorrow, Emile Zola will publish J’accuse, his defense of Richard Alfred Dreyfus. Friday, Lewis Carroll will die.

Topping the charts are “Eli Green’s Cake Walk” by Cullen and Collins, and the Manhattan Beach March by John Phillips Sousa and his band. Also, a bunch of songs I won’t mention because I am fairly sure their titles are now considered racial slurs. Speaking of which, Way Down East opens in New York, a play which will later be adapted to film by pioneering racist filmmaker D. W. Griffith. Yeah, sorry. 1898 is not a time period I have a lot of source materials for.

If you’re the reading sort, though, you may have just finished up reading one of two serials entitled Fighters From Mars, one in the New York Evening Journal, and the other in Boston Post. These two serials were attempts to capitalize on the popularity of a certain serial that had made its US debut the previous year in Cosmopolitan. And by “capitalize”, I mean, “rip the fuck off”, because Fighters From Mars, in both its versions, were just The War of the Worlds with all the geographical references translated to New York and Boston respectively, and all the boring science parts omitted. And they got away with it because I don’t know why. Probably something to do with international copyright law being a total clusterfuck back then, as opposed to the mild clusterfuck it is today.

But in both cities, Fighters From Mars was followed up by a piece of original fiction by science and science fiction writer Garrett P. Serviss. A bit of a late Victorian Carl Sagan, Serviss was a writer and lecturer on science who helped to popularize astronomy at the turn of the century.

At the time, there was a bit of a fad on for a genre of fiction now called the “Edisonade”, fictionalized accounts of the life of Thomas Edison, who, at the time, was basically the Chuck Norris of Science, and because no one had found out how awesome and crazy Nikola Tesla was yet. And as Fighters From Mars wound up, Serviss decided to follow it up with a sequel in the form of an Edisonade, Edison’s Conquest of Mars.

Preemptively fulfilling the promise of Goliath, it’s the story of Thomas Edison and a star-studded cast unlocking the miracles of super-science to take the fight back to Mars. Hilarity and genocide ensues.

If we take The War of the Worlds to be Science Fiction’s Dracula, Edison’s Conquest of Mars is Varney the Vampire. It’s a pulpy action story that does all the tropetastic science fictiony things Wells refuses to. It’s got space battles, disintegration beams, alien abductions, food cubes, even aliens building the pyramids. If it weren’t for the fact that every chapter doesn’t begin with retconning the end of the previous one, you could see this getting turned into a Republic serial. It’s also weirdly star-studded, featuring Thomas Edison, of course, but also Lord Kelvin and Wilhelm Röntgen in prominent roles, with guest appearances by William McKinley, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Emperor Mutsuhito. Which must have been awkward what with Congress grumbling about whether or not we should conquer him. Weirdly, the book retains Wells’s convention of telling the story from the point of view of an unnamed (It’s an author self-insert. He’s named in an illustration caption as “Professor Serviss”, but his name doesn’t appear in the text of the story) science writer.

But just because Serviss’s sequel is aimed at a more lowbrow audience, it’s not simply a big dumb space adventure. Serviss’s science-fetishism has a different focus from Wells’s, but it’s no less prominent. Where Wells would go on lengthy digressions about alien biology and obsess over the horror of something that can be explained and justified enough to sound plausible yet utterly other, Serviss’s interests are based more around engineering. He devotes a lot of time to describing the man-made technological miracles that result from studying Martian derelicts. Rather than an interest in what shape life and technology might take arising under completely different conditions, Serviss’s speculative science is grounded more firmly in being just one or two steps askew of reality. Space flight and death rays are depicted not as something utterly alien, but rather as only a couple of breakthroughs away from the readers’ own reality. It is, in essence, steampunk, but approached from the opposite direction: rather than contemporary writers trying to invoke the trappings of Victorian science fiction, this is a Victorian writer trying to anticipate science fiction of the 1950s. Being just a step askew of reality describes the science of Edison’s Conquest of Mars in other ways too: his Martians are not cephalopods, but large, lumpy humanoids, not far off from the rubber forehead aliens of Star Trek.

The story opens with the final retreat of the Martians. New Jersey briefly reenters our larger story, as the few Martian survivors evacuate the planet from Bergen County in a “projectile car” launched by an explosion so powerful that it collapses the Palisades and levels the remains of New York City (which, don’t forget, literally only started existing in its modern form today). But despite the great destruction around the globe, mankind recovered, with the countries and regions which had been far from the fighting sending aid to help in the rebuilding. Serviss makes a surprisingly insightful observation, and one which is particularly relevant to us, given what I’ve been saying about the “alien amnesia” angle of the TV series:

But the worst was not yet. More dreadful than the actual suffering and the scenes of death and devastation which overspread the afflicted lands was the profound mental and moral depression that followed. This was shared even by those who had not seen the Martians and had not witnessed the destructive effects of the frightful engines of war that they had imported for the conquest of the earth. All mankind was sunk deep in this universal despair

Further dispiriting mankind were the observations by astronomers of increased activity on Mars, taken to indicate that a renewed invasion was being prepared. “But there was a gleam of hope of which the general public as yet knew nothing,” Serviss tells the reader, though: “It was due to a few dauntless men of science, conspicuous among whom were Lord Kelvin, the great English savant; Herr Roentgen, the discoverer of the famous X ray, and especially Thomas A. Edison, the American genius of science.” Headquartered at Edison’s lab (whose survival is kind of a surprise, given the scale of the destruction to north Jersey: Edison was based, as the story confirms, in West Orange), the world’s most famous scientists had learned from the Martian debris and figured out how to reproduce and counter the power of the invaders.

This is simultaneously the most and least steampunk thing about the book: there’s actually no steam. It’s 1898, the age of the miracles of electricity. Everything, everything in this story is electrical. The word appears over a hundred times. Edison’s key breakthrough from the Martian debris is, “How to produce, in a limited space, electricity of any desired potential and of any polarity, and that without danger to the experimenter or to the material experimented upon.” Pretty much everything falls out from that. First and foremost, since (Serviss finds this somehow both too technical and too obvious to need to explain beyond an analogy to the tail of a comet which sounds like complete bullshit to me) gravity can be counteracted by an electrical force, Edison’s discovery leads immediately to the invention of powered flight, a whole five years before a non-bullshit method of powered flight would be invented by a couple of bicycle repairmen. By polarizing the exterior of an airtight metal craft, one of those great old-timey bullet-shaped science fiction space ships, Edison could make the ship repel itself away from the Earth. A test-flight to the moon proves the whole thing plausible enough that humanity gets the bright idea of invading Mars, and it’s on.

Edison’s next miracle invention is… A sonic screwdriver. Sort of. The word “sonic” never comes up — not “electric” enough for this story. But that’s pretty much what it is. A weapon which induces harmonic vibrations in whatever it’s aimed at. Turn the dial to the resonant frequency of the dominant material in something, push the button, and it vibrates itself out of existence. Edison demonstrates this by setting it to 386 MHz (Yes. Edison has documented the harmonic frequency of feathers) and vaporizing all the feathers off of a bird. And then he does a quick frequency sweep to disintegrate the rest of the bird. Because Edison is a dick. To demonstrate that the device had applicability beyond torturing small animals, he deploys a battery of the devices to safely demolish a dangerously unstable condemned building.

A warfleet is commissioned, and ahead of its launch, all the important nations send their leaders to Washington to celebrate, and here things get silly for a bit. Kaiser Wilhelm throws a brief fit, jealous that a good old-fashioned monarch like him should have to take a backseat in the greatest war ever waged by man to a democratic republic. He also gets upset when Edison declines to attempt to make the science of the Disintegrator, “Plain to the crowned heads.” (Czar Nicholas gets a kick out of that). Wilhelm is also bothered by the smell when Edison demonstrates the disintegrator on an inkwell. I know next to nothing about Kaiser Wilhelm, but I do love the idea of him just being a belligerent jackass who wants to prove his length and girth by getting his war on, given that more or less that is how the history of the German Empire is going to go.

There’s a big go-round to fund the mission, whose price tag is estimated at $25 billion (Being 1898, it’s phrased in the delightfully archaic “twenty-five thousand millions of dollars”), about $650 billion in today’s money. Which frankly is ridiculously cheap for an interplanetary war. With no one wanting to be outdone, the US immediately puts up a billion, to the delight of everyone, even, “One of the Roko Tuis, or native chiefs, from Fiji,” who, “Sprang up and brandished a war club.” Yeah. This book is going to be just delightful in its fair and nuanced treatment of other cultures (The author seems to be particularly enamored with the Emperor of China, who’s described as friendly and affable, is amused by everything, prone to dispensing Ancient Chinese Wisdom, and whose dialogue I won’t quote here because it all sounds like it’s coming out of the mouth of a white college girl whose YouTube video is about to go viral. Sufficed to say, if this were adapted for the screen, he’d be played by Christopher Lee in yellowface). A bidding war breaks out between the Germans and the British, and the king of Siam throws in a huge diamond. Since the author is American, the US agrees to scratch up the difference after the various countries of the world have all been shamed or goaded into bankrupting themselves, and Edison’s given a no-bid contract not subject to any sort of oversight. Nice work if you can get it.

The fleet launches six months later, a hundred ships strong. The narrator scores a spot on Edison’s flagship. It’s never explained why he’s got so much access to Edison, but you don’t really need to justify a media-savvy guy like Edison singling out a reporter prone to fawning. Also assigned to the flagship are Lord Kelvin, Lord Rayleigh, Röntgen, Sylvanus P. Thompson, and, randomly, Moissan (the guy who invented Moissanite). During their shakedown cruise to the moon, one of the ships is pierced by a meteor, killing “two or three” of the crew. The others are safely evacuated from the airless ship and eventually recover, because what’s a couple of hours sucking on hard vacuum?

They stop over on the moon to bury the dead and repair the damaged ship, and discover that though it’s just as uninhabitable as in the real world, it had presumably not always been so, as there’s evidence of a long-gone civilization, including a giant footprint. Now, when I was a kid, it felt like it was a convention in adventure stories, children’s and adults’ alike, that the heroes in an adventure story weren’t allowed any sort of material gain: the Grail falls into the pit when the seal opens up, One-Eyed Willy’s ship breaks through the cliff wall and sails out into the sunset, Alexander the Great’s tomb self-destructs, the treasure in the old haunted mansion is “worthless” Confederate money, the Atlantean computer made out of platinum falls into the magma pit, the alien healing device disintegrates when touched, the super-warp-drive engine breaks after one use, that sort of thing. The only stuff you got to take home with you was fake rewards like “self-confidence” and “character”, and if any of the plot coupons you collected along the way actually did have a resale value, they had to be expended in the final battle. I didn’t cotton on at the time, but that was a fairly recent adventure trope when I started encountering it. In older adventure stories, like, say, this one, adventuring was in large part all about that, ahem, booty, with loving descriptions of the valuable swag the heroes won along the way. Accordingly, the moon’s got mountains made of diamond (Probably. Moissan offers that they might be something similar to diamond but even more valuable. Because space.), and everyone resolves that what with the moon diamonds, this invasion will basically pay for itself.

Continue reading Deep Ice: I believe they’re learning how to fly (Garrett P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars)

Well, here we are, another of these “obligation” articles, where I don’t really have an angle or know what I can usefully say, but it feels like I ought to cover it all the same. Of course, because I put the article off so long, I don’t get to claim credit this time, since The CW’s new Friday the 13th TV series was announced months ago. But, of course, the newly announced series is going to be about Crystal Lake and the legend of Jason Voorhees. To which you’re probably thinking, “Well duh, obviously. What the hell else would a TV series called Friday the 13th be about?”

So there’s that. I don’t know if you remember, but when I introduced my series on War of the Worlds, I went on a little digression whose point was that you could be excused for thinking that the only reason there is a War of the Worlds TV series is because Sam and Greg Strangis wanted to do an Invasion of the Body Snatchers TV series but couldn’t get the rights. Well, sort of a similar implicit story here; Larry Williams and Frank Mancuso, jr. had this idea for a TV series based around hunting down cursed antiques, and they were thinking about calling it The 13th Hour. But then Mancuso suddenly realized that he had the rights to use the name of the popular horror film franchise he’d been working on for some years, and figured that would trick some unsuspecting audiences into watching their ridiculous little show be a better name. So that’s what they called it.

Our old friend first-run syndication is really what rears its head here. See, for the first few decades of television, the networks pretty much had enough power to keep television in line. If your show wasn’t bland enough to appeal to a big ol’ swath of middle America, your show did not get made, because it wasn’t going to get aired.

But in the ’80s, things were changing. It wasn’t going to last long, to be sure, but technology was changing the economics of running an independent station. In 1986, News Corp bought Metromedia’s little collection of TV stations — the remains of the long-defunct DuMont network. These would form the basis of the FOX network. But of course, FOX took several years to spin all the way up to programming a full prime-time schedule. Paramount too was starting to position itself to build what would, though not until the middle of the next decade, eventually evolve into UPN.

There was a perception that network TV, in its march to pander to the lowest denominator it could find, was largely banal and inclined to play it safe. FOX, of course, from its early days tried to position itself as “edgier”, with the crude humor of Married… With Children, and later with the edgier humor of In Living Color. At the same time, there was increasing tension over the impact of violence in the media. That would come to a head when the decade rolled over, but just at the moment, here in the nexus, really the only limiting factors on violence in television were economic. I mean, the FCC would step in if you showed a boob other than Al Bundy, an ass that didn’t belong to Dennis Franz, or said one of George Carlin’s infamous seven words, but in terms of horror-movie gore, it was a lot more vague where the limits were. And this was the decade when cable television really exploded, which put the pressure on broadcast television to push the boundaries.

In reference to Mystery Science Theater, we talked about the tradition of the TV horror host. Now, that was a phenomenon that attached itself to syndicated airings of old horror movies, but there’s a related tradition of horror hosting from the world of comic books. And it’s that tradition that inspired the 1982 film Creepshow, written by Stephen King and directed by George Romero.

The success of Creepshow got TV-makers thinking about the possibility of doing the same sort of gore-heavy anthology horror for television. Of course, Sci-fi/horror anthologies had been a thing already. The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Science Fiction Theater, all those. But we had something new here, going into the eighties. So we take just a pinch of The Twilight Zone, and stir in some of that pre-Code comic book horror, and we do it with a very ’80s desire to push the limits of acceptability.

I’d say “It could only happen in the nexus,” but the truth is that it really started out way back in 1983 with Tales from the Darkside, itself pretty much a continuation of Creepshow. Its very name is meant to remind you of the old EC comics like Tales from the Crypt (Which would, of course, get its own direct adaptation, but not until 1989). For some reason, the one that always sticks in my head is a particularly cerebral one, though, “Going Native”, the story of an alien who comes to Earth as an observer, and slowly lapses into depression as she internalizes the human conditon. Tales from the Darkside ended its run in 1988 and its makers moved on to Monsters, which to a large extent was just a continuation of Darkside, though, as the name implies, it was more monster-oriented.  Weirdly, I can’t remember a single episode of Monsters, though I remember watching it (I found the title sequence unpleasant to watch for some reason). And in 1988, Freddy’s Nightmares would see Jason Voorhees’s main ’80s slasher film rival Freddy Kreuger take a spin as an anthology horror host (I remember quite a lot of these. I always inexplicably freaked out at the Nightmare on Elm Street films, but for whatever reason, I rather liked the series). These shows would push the envelope for just how horrific and gruesome you could get on broadcast television.

But why am I talking about horror anthologies now? Well, mostly because I’m still struggling to find an angle for talking about Friday the 13th. Which isn’t an anthology.

Except that kinda sorta it almost is, but not quite. Friday the 13th the Series can’t really be properly called an anthology because it’s got the same characters from week to week in an ongoing storyline. But at the same time, it’s got a large guest cast, and there’s a lot of episodes where the regulars are really only sort of tangentially involved in the story, and every episode is, first and foremost, a self-contained horror story that’s connected to the rest of the series only at its periphery.

We’ve talked before about the concept of the series but I might as well spell it out here. Lewis Vendredi (The titular “Friday”, I guess), was an antiques dealer who sold his soul to Satan, as you do, gaining the power to magically curse antiques. Uncle Lewis and the hoofed man-beast had some sort of falling out, though, and Lewis breaks the deal, resulting in his death. Model, actress and singer (she had a minor Canadian hit with a dance cover of One Night in Bangkok that came out contemporaneously with Murray Head’s version) Louise Robey (credited as just “Robey”) and John D. LeMay play Micki Foster and Ryan Dallion, distant cousins who inherit the cursed antique shop, and sell off half the inventory before they find out what’s going on. They feel super bad about that.

Chris Wiggins plays Jack Marshak, an occult expert who’d spent years acquiring antiques for Vendredi, somehow not realizing what his old friend was up to. He becomes the de facto leader of the group, using his expertise and experience to help them reclaim an assortment of magical items which generally grant the user some magical boon when the necessary conditions are met, typically human sacrifice.

At the start of the third season, a run-in with Satanists transforms Ryan into a small child. Fortunately, his absentee mother just happens to have recently reentered his life and is happy to take another swing at childrearing. Yes, that does sound stupid. He’s replaced by Steve Monarque as Johnny Ventura, a freelance writer and sort of petty ne’er-do-well. He’s more or less playing the same character, except a little bit more naive and a little bit rougher. His more character-specific plots tend to involve him getting in trouble by yielding to temptation.

The guest cast is also full of familiar faces from the rest of our little wander through the nexus of TV shows produced in Toronto in the late ’80s. There’s a weird tendency to recycle actors as a new character who’s basically just a variation on the character they played previously. Denis Forest, for instance, turns up three times, always as a creepy weirdo. Jill Hennessey turns up three times. Colm Feore turns up twice as a brilliant, pretentious artiste — a choreographer once, and a novelist later. Colin Fox turns up three times, always playing a cunning, ruthless killer. Angelo Ricazos turns up three times, always as a guy who starts out trying not to be evil but who gets twisted by circumstance. Gwynyth Walsh turns up once, as do Catherine Disher, Belinda Metz, and Keram Maliki-Sanchez. Among the guests we haven’t run into yet are David Hewitt, Ray Walston, Enrico Colantoni, Sarah Polley, and Tia Carrere.

I’d hardly call the show formulaic, but there’s certainly a general pattern most episodes follow. The bulk of each episode tends to be devoted to watching the week’s guest star win fame, fortune and/or revenge using a cursed antique powered by human sacrifice. One of our regulars, usually Jack, finds evidence of the location of said antique, through either occult research or happening to read the newspaper on a day when “Bizarre and possibly comical human sacrifice victim found” makes the headlines. They try to acquire the antique, are briefly in danger of becoming the next sacrificial victim, and then take the antique back to the antique store vault after the owner runs afoul of the fine print in the curse’s licensing agreement and gets themself killed, dismembered, transformed into a goldfish, telefragged, or in extreme cases, dragged bodily to hell.

There are, of course, any number of variations you can do on it. The owner might be overtly evil, happy to murder for personal gain. Or they might be an otherwise good person in a desperate situation, such as in “What a Mother Wouldn’t Do”, wherein a desperate mother kills seven people, including herself, to invoke the power of a cursed cradle to save her dying child. Or they might be an otherwise good person who yields to temptation after discovering the curse by accident. They particularly enjoy the pathos of showing someone slowly undo themselves trying to do good with a cursed artifact, say, protecting their loved ones or bringing a villain to justice.  A few of the antiques even display agency of their own and are able to manipulate their owners, such as a tombstone radio in “And Now the News” which even attempts to manipulate the heroes at the end, offering to help them safely retrieve the rest of the antiques.

Our heroes might just show up at the end to sweep up, or they might need to intervene to end the cycle: one common twist is that the heroes are able to trick, manipulate or restrain the owner from holding up their end of the deal, thus causing the curse to backfire. Or they get caught up intimately in events — Mickey has a bad habit of being chosen by murderous antique-owners as the next victim. Other times either owner or victim is someone close to them. Jack’s fiancée, Mickey’s friend, Ryan’s father.

There are a handful of episodes that focus on other elements of the series mythology. Uncle Lewis’s break with Satan turns out not to imply he’s turned face, as his vengeful ghost makes a handful of appearances trying to return to the living world. And there are suggestions of a wider supernatural world: Lewis is revealed as the former head of a powerful coven which continues in his absence to scheme at world domination. Vampires are also a thing that exist in this world, independent of Vendredi’s cursed antiques. And word on the street is that the aborted fourth season would have introduced a subculture of independent supernatural-fighters, and you can almost kinda see this show trying to evolve into some kind of proto-Buffy. Another persistent rumor — no one really knows where this falls on the spectrum of “Someone involved in the production might have kicked the idea around briefly” to “They totally wanted to do it eventually” — is that the original plan was to have the final episode send the gang to Crystal Lake to recover a cursed hockey mask, in order to close the loop on why the show had its comically misleading title.

But the show is frustratingly short on follow-through. Uncle Lewis stops appearing after the beginning of the second season. His coven, though built up as recurring villains, only turn up once. There are occasional hits of romance between Micki and Ryan (They’re only cousins by marriage) or Micki and Johnny, but it never goes anywhere. The third season introduces the notion of three “Books of Lucifer”, whose prophecies endanger the world, but only one ever turns up. At the end of season 2, Micki discovers she has latent magical powers, which she temporarily exhausts her first time using them. It never comes up again.

That’s what I was getting at with that digression about horror anthologies. I get the distinct impression watching Friday the 13th The Series that Frank Mancuso Jr. wasn’t all that interested in an ongoing storyline. What he’s really trying to make is more of a thematically linked horror anthology series about ironically cursed objects, the linkage between them being only a bit less tenuous than in Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders. And that might be the key to understanding what went wrong with his version of War of the Worlds. Because, just as Friday the 13th feels like it wants to be a horror anthology thematically linked by cursed antiques, War of the Worlds season 2 feels like it wants to be a horror anthology thematically linked by alien genocide plots. And just like Friday, most of the individual episode premises are pretty good ideas. It takes very little effort to imagine, say, “Breeding Ground” or “Terminal Rock” being adapted as an episode of ’90s reboot of The Outer Limits. But with War, Mancuso was working with an established, and, importantly, character-driven, series, and his approach isn’t as good a fit there.

It’s widely believed among War of the Worlds fans that their show got the short shrift when it was handed over to Mancuso — that at best, he spent his A-game on the other show, and at worst, he actively sabotaged War. But when you really compare the two shows on an episode-by-episode basis, what becomes clear to me is that Mancuso wasn’t giving War of the Worlds a raw deal. In fact, his approach on both shows was strikingly, remarkably similar. It’s just that War of the Worlds was the wrong show to do that way.

A sci-fi-horror genre anthology style just isn’t quite the right way to continue the story that the first season of War of the Worlds started. It makes about as much sense as doing a cover of a song from a musical about chess at the same time as the original version was still on the charts, without even rearranging the music or anything.

The ’80s were weird.

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• Friday the 13th The Series is available on DVD from amazon.com