Month: May 2017

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

Um. Space, or something? I had to listen to this thing like six times in the course of writing this and I think I have brain damage now.

Ratkin (I hear he’s the world’s first trillionaire. Did you know that?) is annoyed by the president’s speech because it means that he’s competing with foreign governments now to get his space ship launched and to Mars in time to stake a claim. Jessica thinks that Japan could launch in six months, and the EC in ten. “The EC”, for those of you who aren’t familiar, is probably not what he actually means. It refers to the economic pillar of the European Union, from back when the European Union was organized into things called “pillars”. But they’re probably using it to refer to the Common Market, which was a pre-EU economic organization of European nations, which evolved and expanded into the first of the pieces that eventually came together to form the EU. But this is neither here nor there, because what they almost certainly meant was the ESA, Europe’s international space agency, which is not a part of the EC, the Common Market, or the European Union (It was supposed to be integrated into the EU by 2014, but that hasn’t happened yet). For those of you reading from the future, “The EU” refers to a political union of European countries with the goal of making Europe as a whole remain relevant in the era of superpowers, and also preventing those pan-European wars that tended to break out like clockwork every 40-50 years for all the rest of history. It collapsed some time in the second quarter of the twenty-first century after an incident in which the UK overheard someone calling them “The US’s less-racist uncle,” and national pride forced them to say, “Less racist? You know blackface was still socially acceptable here until 1986? Hold my warm beer while I scuttle our economy just to show how much we hate eastern European immigrants.” Ratkin isn’t worried about the EC, since they’ll balk at the cost and “run for cover like children from a doctor’s vaccination needle.” Who the fuck talks like that? Japan does worry him, though, since Japan is an economic powerhouse obsessed with profit over all else. Because even though this was made in 1995, the writers are apparently unaware of the Lost Decade, or how Japan abruptly stopped being on a course to completely dominate the world economy. Honestly, the window when people assumed the Japanese were going to take over everything was fairly small, since it only really fit in the space between when people stopped believing the world would end in a nuclear war between the US and USSR in 1989 and the Japanese asset bubble bursting in 1990 (I mean, Americans can always be counted on to have irrational fears, so there were earlier and later “Oh no the Japanese are going to become culturally dominant and we will all have to eat sushi and take our shoes off indoors!” patches in American pop culture, but it’s only a short window when it was “the” big thing we were culturally neurotic about. It makes a large number of pop-cultural appearances in science fiction of this era, but as a fact-of-life, not source of panic).

Ratkin is happy to “benefit at the expense and labor of others,” when Jessica tells him that she’s all set up to receive and decode Orion-1’s next message to NASA. She goes on to muse in her smug-sexy-cartoon-villainess way about how much she looks forward to showing NASA whatfor by besting Ferris and capturing Orion-1. That’s when Ratkin drops the bombshell: he’s having a “clean-up crew” sent along with her to kill the Orion-1 crew. “Are you referring to some kind of hit-squad?” “Regulators. Exterminators. Eliminators. Call them what you will.” I feel like we’re in another comedy bit that forgot to have a punch-line, where the mob boss tells the henchmen to “Have him taken care of,” so they take the guy out to the spa or something.

Jessica foolishly says that he makes it sound, “Like the wild west,” despite the fact that he’s clearly making a mob allusion. Ratkin responds that space is the wild west, and he laments that he was born too late to have been a part of the 1870s… Except that the thing he actually wants has little to do with the wild west: he wants to have gone up against the robber barons, specifically naming Huntington, Vanderbilt and “Rocker… Feller”. His lament is that although he’s acquired empires in all of their respective fields, he didn’t do it by taking it away from them. He wishes he could have known the pure joy of ruining an old-timey rich dude.

Anyway, yeah, he’s gonna have the crew of Orion-1 whacked. Jessica expresses momentary alarm at this, but settles back into Evil Soap Opera Bitch-Queen when Ratkin accuses her of going soft. She complains about what she’s supposed to do for the duration of the trip on a ship full of “manly men”, and I’m starting to worry we’re going to have another “Uncle Terry Writes Feminism” moment. But instead Ratkin tells her that once his hired guns kill the crew of Orion-1, she’s to kill them. She accepts this in the tone of a petulant preschooler agreeing to clean up her toys.

She also suggests that killing the Orion crew might not be trivial, but Ratkin starts giggling about how easy it will be, because, “Who’s going to stop me, the Martian police?” He locks in on the idea that the only possible reason it might be at all challenging to have his thugs murder Ferris and company would be if there were anyone else on the planet at the time, which is utterly laughable, because we are in an odd-numbered scene where the idea of life on Mars is so preposterous as to make the elderly supervillain giggle like a schoolboy. When Jessica asks what’s to stop Ratkin from having her snuffed as well, Ratkin concedes that there isn’t anything, then tells her to, “Use that 180 IQ of yours,” and realize that he won’t kill her because she’ll still be useful to him as head of his Mars colony. There will be enough money and power to go around, he says, which totally means he is definitely going to try to kill her. Pretty much in his next scene.

Back on Orion-1, the votes are in. Despite Rutherford’s objections — they stop for a second in the middle so that Nikki and he can get into it over whether he’s going to scuttle their mission, and Ferris has to step in and insist that they can’t jump to any conclusions about who a hypothetical dissenter is — everyone votes to “continue on”. Well, everyone except for Talbert, who votes “Affirmative”. This prompts Ferris to ask for an explanation, since language doesn’t work the same way in their universe and “affirmative” could equally mean, “affirmative, we continue on,” or “affirmative, we go back.”

Having a unanimous decision to continue, Ferris introduces them to some of the equipment they’re carrying with them for the trip. Unbeknownst to the crew, Orion-1 is carrying two solar-powered rovers which will serve as vehicles for exploring the surface. There’s a weird exchange when Ferris mentions that one of their survey sites will be Olympus Mons, and Townsend responds by giving the dimensions of the Martian volcano as if that were, all on its own, a valid objection. If she means that it’s too big an area to explore in a reasonable amount of time, okay (Olympus Mons is similar in size to France), but the fact that Ferris considers her complaint adequately addressed by mentioning the two rovers doesn’t seem right. It’s not the only weird exchange in this scene, either; when Ferris asks if they’re curious about the equipment in the cargo bay, Nikki says, “Oh, no sir,” and he completely misses the sarcasm. Not that I entirely blame him since the conversation, like every conversation, is weird and stilted. Also, didn’t Rutherford climb back into the cargo bay a couple of episodes ago? And he didn’t notice the rovers then?

Do you like bad science? You’re in for a treat, because things are going to get weird in a minute. The rovers also serve as landing vehicles, since Orion-1 can’t land unless they happen to find a natural runway (Was this sarcasm? If this was sarcasm, then that’s why Ferris didn’t recognize it from Nikki, as he has no idea what tone a human uses when conveying sarcasm. If it turns out Ferris has really been an alien this whole time, I will be mildly impressed). Talbert (I think in the previous few episodes, I have confused Talbert and Pirelli at least once) points out that the gravity on Mars is “negligible” compared to Earth. That is… Um… The gravity on Mars is about 38% of that on Earth. Does that count as “negligible”? I could maybe see someone calling lunar gravity negligible, but Martian gravity is more than twice that. Less defensible is Rutherford’s conclusion that the low gravity means that Orion-1 would land “Like a twenty-story office building,” a statement which is so bizarre that it’s not even wrong. I’m not even sure what it would mean for something to land “like a twenty-story office building”, but I’m pretty sure that “In a manner consistent with very low gravity” isn’t it. Ironically, a shuttle would fly like a brick on Mars, because shuttles land like airplanes, and the aerodynamics of the shuttle would not work in the thin Martian air, but that’s nothing to do with gravity. Weirder is that Ferris adds that in addition to landing “like a twenty-story office building,” they would bounce half a mile up if they hit too hard. Put those together, and you’re left with the image of a twenty-story office building bouncing half a mile, and you start to see that this metaphor has gone well off the rails and probably needs new tires.

More bad science: the rovers are equipped with space suits that can protect against even the cold temperatures of the Martian nights, which they repeatedly claim average something like 220° below zero. I will just give them that they should really be using metric, since the actual NASA made a dumb-ass metric/US system mistake with an actual Mars mission in the actual 1998. But the temperature they give is too cold even for night time at the Martian poles in the winter — I’m pretty sure the number they pulled out is the all-time record for lowest temperature. Olympus Mons and the Tharsis bulge (their other destination) are basically equatorial, and except in the coldest part of Martian winter, the nighttime temperature would rarely get much below -100. Not that that isn’t very cold or anything. They also make a big deal about the size and ferocity of Martian storms and the powerful Martian winds. And here, their mistake is more reasonable. The winds on Mars do kick up pretty high (though they claim the average wind-speed of a Martian storm is two hundred miles per hour. My research says that they top out at 60), and Mars has huge, long-lasting dust storms. But the atmosphere on Mars is far thinner than on Earth. Even though the air is moving at high speed, there just isn’t that much of it: a 60 mph Martian gale would apply as much force to a stationary object as a 7 mph breeze on Earth. And that dust? Martian dust is finer than cigarette smoke. After all, it has to be light enough to be carried on that thin air.

Since stuff like character growth, or at least us getting to know these characters might happen during a long trip to Mars, we time-skip over that via the narrator. In the intervening time, that ice miner’s union merger thing happens, putting Ratkin in control of all the ice miners world-wide, and promptly makes them go on strike for more expensive equipment, knowing that the prices would “of necessity”, be passed on the the thirsty public. This little detail, I assume, is there just to show off how evil Ratkin is, but it’s another one of those, “Let’s show he evil so hard that it makes him look dumb,” moments, since it implies that he actually cares who ends up paying the bill and wants the public to pay usurious prices. Because if you raise the price of water to the point where no one can pay it, this will somehow still lead to you profiting, and not to you being killed by an angry mob with torches and pitchforks. And again, this sounded more ridiculous before we had an actual cartoon supervillain as president in the real world.

Continue reading Deep Ice: The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader (“Howard Koch’s” War of the Worlds II: Episode 1, Part 4)

Previously…

Someone cut a bolt. A president declined to have a supervillain whacked for fear of protesters. We spent some time with Alexis Carrington and Looten Plunder as they cackle over their plans to defeat Captains Planet and/or Kirk. Also, someone sabotaged Orion-1 and the crew didn’t bother reporting this or looking into it or thinking about it at all.

In case you were worried that narrator would be a one-off, he’s back after the Rimbauch segment to tell us that we’re skipping ahead a few days. I just checked, and the movie Apollo 13 doesn’t come out until June of ’95, which surprises me, because the next scene feels inspired by it. And maybe it was anyway; it’s not a direct parallel or anything, so it could be that the writers saw the press for the upcoming movie and it shaped some of their presentation. A Colonel Stryker (Stryker? Stryker…. Stryker!) from NASA drops in on Nancy Ferris at home, just as she’s getting off the phone with her mother. He’s got bad fake news: their cover story for the Mars mission is that a navigational fault developed on Orion-1 which means they’re stuck around the back of the moon until they either fix it or get rescued. Nancy is not happy. I think. I mean, she says things which indicate anger, but her tone never changes from tired, bored and slightly annoyed. Also, her voice actor sounds so much like Tweak from The Octonauts that I am continually disappointed that she never proposes fixing the problem on the shuttle faster’n you can say, “Buncha munchy crunchy carrots.”

This is another super-clunky dialogue scene too. You know how in TV and movies, sometimes someone will take a phone call, and since we’re only hearing one side of it, the other person will repeat back everything that’s said to them in a questioning tone? Nancy basically does that, only we can hear both sides. “I’m hear to talk to you about the mission,” Stryker would say. “The mission?” Nancy would respond. “Your husband’s mission to the moon.” “The moon? What is it?” “It’s a nickel-iron ball that orbits the Earth about a quarter of a million miles away, but that’s not important right now.” “There’s been a navigational fault.” “A navigational fault?” “It might take them weeks to get back.” “It might take them weeks to get back?” Stryker claims that NASA’s got the ground crew working on a solution, but Nancy blows him off, insisting that, “You mean the ground crew is going to sit around a desk and eat pizza while trying to figure out how to dodge the blame,” and that she’s been, “Making excuses for the military ever since I met Johnathan.” When she warns him that she’ll speak her mind to any reporters that make it into her presence, Stryker borrows her phone (It’s next to the credenza. For some reason, I find the transition from her angry ranting about NASA incompetence to the phrase, “It’s over by the credenza” to be the single funniest thing in this entire episode. “Credenza” feels like a very 1950s word to me. And if you image search “credenza”, most of the hits are for mid-century styled furniture. It contributes to the recurring feeling I’ve had that the Ferris family and their side of the plot are living in a silver-age sci-fi movie, unlike the political side of the plot, which is a bad ’90s political comedy, or the Ratkin side, which is an ’80s cartoon) to call his boss, who sends out dozens of military policemen to set up a cordon around her house.

Well, at least having the military cut off a suburban neighborhood won’t lead to protests from those annoying pacifists or special interest groups. It’s not like having a paper-wrapped sandwich delivered via motorbike. The narrator tells us that they have MPs stationed “every few feet” to keep out anyone unauthorized, including Nancy’s mother, who is turned away “glibly” by Stryker. We hop over to DC, where DeWitt is meeting with Ed and her “political scientist” (Scare quotes here because although “political scientist” is actually a thing, I’ve never heard of it being used as a White House job title) Marcia Weiss. They’ve caught wind of Rimbauch’s upcoming broadcast, set to blow the lid off the Mars mission, and have to act quickly. Unfortunately, no one involved in this production has anything resembling a penchant for acting.

I do not like this whole thing where Rimbauch early on insists that the administration is obsessed with him and fears him as the guardian of truth and reality… And it turns out that he’s exactly right and the administration makes important policy decisions specifically to undermine him. I would say that it’s unrealistic and in any story with any resemblance to reality, a conservative pundit would indeed think himself to be a major mover-and-shaker, but the actual White House would consider him an annoyance at best and largely ignore him. Except, y’know. It’s 2017 and you can google “Catheter Cowboy”. Fuckity-fuck. But it drives home how bad War of the Worlds II is: it is as unbelievable and ridiculous as the world we are all living in now. Only somehow, despite the fact that the real-world White House and congressional majority are enacting policies that will literally kill thousands of the most vulnerable Americans, reality is also funnier.

DeWitt was always planning to tell the public about the Mars mission eventually, but she’s got to let the cat out of the bag now to avoid letting Rimbauch scoop her. The reason for the secrecy in the first place turns out to be that they’re worried about other countries or private interests launching their own competing Mars missions. The discussion about Rimbauch is weird and meandering; Rimbauch got his information from a mole, and they think the mole is at NASA, but the mole isn’t leaking to journalists, but to Ratkin (The world’s richest man, in case you’ve forgotten). This leads them off on a tangent about how Ratkin has bought an aftermarket Soviet space ship, and how he’s always wanted to be, this is the actual phrase they use, “Emperor of the Universe”. Apparently, it’s a well-known public fact that that Ratkin has always wanted to own a planet. “Yeah, but Mars?” Marcia challenges, as though the choice to focus on the only planet that is even remotely plausible for this sort of thing is the most unbelievable aspect of a wealthy asshole’s plan to privately fund a mission to colonize another — Jesus fucking Christ 2017. (No one ever questions Ratkin’s motivations, because “He wants to conquer Mars and become King of Space” is a perfectly ordinary sort of thing for an evil trillionaire to do. When Elon Musk announced his plans to go to Mars, no one questioned his choice of planet; the actual question was, “Yeah, but for altruistic reasons based on wanting to improve the odds of the long-term survival of the human race, and not just so you could declare yourself god-king of space?”)

DeWitt already knows Jessica Storm is working for Ratkin, which is symptomatic of the plot structure clusterfuck we’re going through. There is no point in this story when something that should be a secret is actually unknown to the people it’s being kept secret from. At this point, the only people who don’t already know where Orion-1 is going are on Orion-1.

Marcia advises DeWitt to give an unscheduled TV address right after the Sunday Football game (“Football?” DeWitt asks. It’s a team sport where opposing groups of large men attempt to move a prolate spheroid from one end of a field to the other, but that’s not important right now), when most of America will be watching TV, and shortly before Rimbauch’s show. “But football?” DeWitt asks, “Isn’t that a little sexist?” Oh come the fuck on. It actually is Terrance Dicks writing this, isn’t it? And worse, Marcia’s response isn’t, “No, there is nothing sexist about giving your address after a football game, at the last possible minute you could give it without having the news you want to break scooped.” Instead, she says, “Political realism and sexism often go hand in hand,” which is irrelevant and also gibberish.

Since it might be vaguely interesting to hear the tense scene in the writer’s bullpen as Sandra’s best writers try to come up with a speech for her, that’s relegated to the narrator, who tells us that the process, “lacks the usual camaraderie,” because of the tension and tight deadline, and that the writers decide that an “inculpatory” speech wouldn’t work, because the American people don’t like when their leaders admit to faults even though they claim to want candor. Notice how even the narrator gets in on this program’s favorite game of calling the public a bunch of hypocritical jerks?

Before DeWitt gives her big speech, we switch back to Orion-1 so that the crew can learn what their mission is a few minutes before the rest of the free world does. Ferris plays a tape from the president, which reveals that they’ve got a secret mission. The tape does not disclose it because the mission is so secret that, “It could never be reduced to a recording,” for fear of discovery, as that might lead to someone trying to sabotage their mission. Good thing that no one found out what their mission was or tried to sabotage it. Oh, wait.

Ferris tells everyone that they’re going to Mars, and everyone’s immediate reaction is to spend five minutes explaining how Orion-1 is not capable of making the trip. I know that we need an explanation for how it is that a space shuttle — a vehicle designed for LEO — can now travel all the way to Mars. But the tone of the conversation is weird. They’re already in space. The shuttle got launched with this as its destination. Yet everyone approaches it as though they’re contributing new information to say, as Rutherford does, that, “The moon is two-hundred and forty thousand miles from Earth. Mars is slightly farther,” and that it’s beyond the capacity of their shuttle to get them there. Skepticism makes sense, but they all start from the position of, “No, not possible. NASA sent us on this mission somehow overlooking that they had not equipped us in a way that makes it even slightly possible,” rather than, “Well clearly the people who set this up have some trick up their sleeves to make this mission possible; what did they do?”

The answer to what they did was that they refitted Orion-1 using a new tissue-thin metal that had recently been reverse-engineered from Martian craft recovered after the 1938 invasion. This made the ship 40% lighter, and gave them the extra space needed for hibernation chambers and extra fuel (Don’t worry about the hibernation chambers; they’re not mentioned again). Everyone’s real shaken about the idea of going to Mars (“Mars?” Rutherford asks. It’s the last of the inner, rocky planets, named for the Roman god of war, but that’s not important right now), especially Rutherford, who can’t see any sense in their mission. Townsend, the geologist, quickly guesses that they’re being sent there to look for water. And, you should be used to this by now, they spend five minutes reminding us how it’s the general public and the useless politicians and the self-serving scientists who are to blame for the water crisis. Rutherford can’t see how it makes economic sense to import water from Mars, and Ferris reacts as though he’s suggesting they should import it from somewhere else instead. Rutherford also jumps really quickly to, “Why don’t we just use our military to protect our water?” Ferris dismisses this on the basis that the military is apparently incompetent in their world, and couldn’t stop “some terrorist” from poisoning the water supply with a toxin or radiation. Everyone but Rutherford very quickly gets on-board with the idea of going to Mars to find water. They clearly want Rutherford to be the stick-in-the-mud, which is why after starting out strong with such arguments as, “There’s a good chance that there isn’t any water on Mars,” or “Importing water from another planet is not a sustainable business model,” or “We’re all going to die,” he quickly starts tossing out strawman arguments. When Ferris says that without a new water source, governments will be forced to choose for some to live while others die, his incredibly weird response is, “But isn’t that what we’re doing? By being on this mission, we’re choosing to live, so someone else must die.” What?

They wander around the topic, saying how the public won’t stand for draconian rationing (Finally, someone gets around to calling the public “bleating sheep”), and how they can’t wait for a political solution because politicians are useless, and they can’t wait for a scientific solution because scientists are greedy and self-serving. Yeah, scientists suck, especially astronauts. And politicians suck, you’d never catch a politician planning a mission like this. The conversation wanders around even more; when Rutherford asks how they intend to stop the “fat cats” from ending up in control of the water they bring back from Mars, Ferris explains that their mission includes setting up a permanent Mars base… In case there’s a nuclear war on Earth and they have to abandon ship. Ferris declares that they’ll have a secret ballot to decide whether to continue to Mars, or turn back, because the mission is too important to bring along any dissenters. But before that, the president’s speech.

Continue reading Deep Ice: But as a group, they stink (“Howard Koch’s” War of the Worlds 2, Episode 1, Side 3)

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

Astronauts introduced themselves to each other. A boring dinner party was held where people complained about the public being too selfish and short-sighted and I’m amazed no one used the word “sheeple”. I spent a lot of time questioning the series of life choices that got me to this point.

Reed questions his boss over why he took the job when he clearly hates Mission Red and everything it stands for. He took the job because if he didn’t, someone less qualified would. His objection to Mission Red is that he views space exploration as repeating the mistakes of colonialism, and humanity is bound to exploit other worlds as they did their own. Now, you and I know, because the title of this episode is, “The Invasion of Mars: 1999”, that this is indeed exactly what they are going to do. But Reed isn’t in on the plan, and thinks that Orion 1’s mission is to orbit the moon. You can’t make lunar orbit in a space shuttle, but I’ll allow it since it’s been heavily modified. And the weird thing is, Boness doesn’t indicate that he knows better either. Maybe he was meant to, and it’s just his weird rhetorical style that makes it sound like he doesn’t. His entire argument seems to be based purely on being curmudgeonly and suspicious of any notions of “progress” He argues that, even though Orion 1’s mission is to orbit the moon, this is clearly the first step to pillaging other planets.

Reed points out that the most likely planet for them to pillage is Mars. And, “Extensive experimentation absences an absence of life on Mars.”

Lolwhut.

Boness responds by challenging the validity of the scientific process. This is only mild hyperbole. “There’s an inherent flaw in your reasoning. Who conducted the experiments on Mars, Reed? Doesn’t the fact that the same greedy humans who raped Earth and have now turned to space raise a little suspicion in your cranium?” He challenges Reed on the basis that the scientific research saying Mars is devoid of life was done by humans, and, in the mildly condescending tone of a global warming denialist, claims that scientists always fabricate their results to get the answers they want when their funding is on the line. That is his argument. Reed doesn’t actually dispute this, but points out that his boss is basically a luddite, which he concedes, admitting that he’d prefer to lose himself in Rockwellian pastoral simplicity (He has to explain what “Rockwellian” means) over dealing with the complexities of 1999.

Then he says that he fears humanity is reenacting the events of ’38 (He has to explain what “38” means. That it is short for “AD 1938”). Reed, who just a minute ago, told us that there was no life on Mars, quickly realizes that he’s talking about the Martian invasion. If, before, he had meant “the science tells us that life on Mars died out shortly after the failed invasion,” why wouldn’t he have said that? Once again, it feels like the narrative keeps forgetting that it’s a sequel. Boness, who’s in his late ’60s I guess, flashes back to a few minutes of Carl Phillips reporting on the initial Martian landing, and suggests that the Martian invasion was motivated by the same impulses that are now leading humanity to the moon. Or wherever. Boness seems genuinely not to know where Mission Red is really going. He eventually more-or-less concedes that he’s just being old and curmudgeonly and agrees to put in an appearance at the wrap party if Reed will run interference for him with the reporters.

After a scene change marked by terrible music trying its best to sound like a Star Trek theme, we cut to Washington, where President DeWitt holds a late-night meeting with the cabinet on the DL. After spending a whole minute dispensing with formalities so that the SecDef can call her “Sandra”, they get on with the bad news: their project to build a fleet of supertankers to ship ice down from the arctic is seven months behind. The “good news” is that it doesn’t matter, since their ice mining efforts are pretty much at a stand-still. They’ve been unable to buy modern ice sectioning equipment, and now they can’t buy replacement parts for the equipment they have, and the American ice miner’s union is slowing down work in protest because they want to join with the international union. This is all tied back to Ronald Ratkin (In case you’ve somehow forgotten, you will be reminded that he is the “World’s first trillionaire”); he controls the supply of ice sectioning equipment, and he also controls the international ice miner’s union, and now he wants the American union as well so that he can, to put it bluntly, take over the world. Of course.

The SecDef proposes that DeWitt declare martial law and have Ratkin rubbed out. And, again, I have no deep principled objection to having abusive rich assholes snuffed for the good of humanity. But DeWitt puts the kibosh on the plan on account of the fact that it would prompt protests from the pacifist lobby.

That is her objection. That pacifists would complain if the President of the United States had a civilian (Almost said “citizen” but later it becomes clear that Ratkin’s citizenship is somehow ambiguous, as he’s rich enough to shop around for one) whacked and declared martial law to seize a private company.

Now, we are not told what her plan is instead yet. I mean, we all know what her plan is, because we know what this series is about. But they do that thing where someone says, “Here’s my plan:” and then you cross-fade to the next scene so that the audience will be left in suspense. Only the audience isn’t left in suspense, because even inanimate objects know what the plan is at this point.

But let’s pause here and reflect on this plan. Just so we’re all on the same page here:

• President DeWitt got five billion dollars redirected from water subsidies to NASA
• By telling congress that it was for a military space project
• Which was sold to the public as an emergency mission to fly around the moon
• So they refitted a space shuttle, a vehicle designed for Low Earth Orbit, to travel to Mars
• With the project lead and crew believing they were only going to the moon
• Mars is 141 times farther away than the Moon
• Also, DeWitt doesn’t expect this plan to actually pay off for decades
• And to keep it a secret, they code-named it “Mission Red”
• And they can’t do anything about the Bondian Supervillain who is holding the world’s water supply hostage because it would be a scandal.
• Unlike the President lying to Congress to secretly invade Mars.
• She’s telling this plan, now, to the cabinet. None of them knew. NASA apparently didn’t know. The crew (aside from Ferris) doesn’t know. The only people who actually know about the plan at this point are DeWitt, her chief of staff, and Commander Ferris. This seemingly includes the people who did the refitting of the shuttle to make the trip. Who’s executing this secret plan?

What I’m saying is, this plan is stupid and implausible. And don’t think I didn’t notice the random dig at protesters. In the space of an hour, they’ve twice already suggested that protesters who believe in good causes are a worse problem than the things they’re protesting. Even the Trump administration isn’t that far over the top about victim blaming.

Once DeWitt has faded out to explain her plan, we hop over to the Tosh Rimbauch show. Tosh rants about DeWitt and her wasting of taxpayer money to fund Mission Red. His bullying antics come off as so schoolboy that it’s impossible to imagine his show would have gotten on the air with a male president — I would say “at all”, but it’s 2017, so I know that a grown man can indeed make a successful career taunting female politicians with “Women be shopping, amirite?” jokes. Even his misogyny is lackluster; there’s no nuance, no clever dog-whistling. He basically just flat out says “She’s a woman, therefore she will blow off important affairs of state for manicures and shopping.” And again, I live in 2017, where we’ve all seen how creatively misogynists will prey upon all that is nasty in the psyche of the American public to discredit a woman while maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability that affords them the luxury of turning any accusation of sexism back on the accuser with phrases like “woman card”. He doesn’t bother, instead proudly advertising himself as a proud misogynist. Hell, Rimbauch doesn’t even use the word “Feminazi.” About the only thing he does that shows even the slightest evidence of actually knowing how real political pundits manipulate their audience is that he consistently over-emphasizes the “de-” in DeWitt. That’s actually a something of a realistic kind of petty power play for a character like that.

In between shitty misogynistic jokes, he takes a call from Gary, a listener in Iowa, whose slack-jawed yokel shtick is so thick that you expect the call to end when he shoots at some food and up from the ground comes a-bubblin’ crude. He complains about having a lady president and suggests that she be shot into space. Also there’s a bit where Tosh has a sci-fi audio effect play to indicate that he is scanning for listening devices because DeWitt has his nationally broadcast radio show bugged. Gary mentions family farms being sold “for peanuts”, which prompts Tosh to make a Jimmy Carter joke Gary doesn’t get. Gary also didn’t get the “Gary, Indiana” joke Tosh made earlier, but I don’t blame him because it wasn’t funny.

Orion-1 finishes its OMS burn and stabilizes into orbit, making me wonder how time works in this universe, since I think the implication is that the past three scenes have all taken place at the same time. Never mind. It’s time to open the cargo bay doors, because the shuttle has to open its cargo bay doors as soon as it reaches orbit, because the radiators are on the inside and otherwise, the shuttle would overheat. This is an actual true fact about the shuttle which was often overlooked when it was depicted in film and television — basically, the shuttle keeps its cargo doors open whenever it’s in space (Also frequently mis-depicted in media: the shuttle orbits “upside-down”, with the underside away from the Earth). You earn a small amount of goodwill from me whenever you get this right. This audioplay is so far in the hole for goodwill right now that I’ll take what I can get.

The pod-bay doors won’t open, Hal, and this causes an immediate and tense crisis. Nikki tries the emergency manual release, but that doesn’t work either. Ferris orders Rutherford to try the manual release, and they promptly blow that small amount of goodwill they just earned by stopping the plot dead for a minute while Nikki accuses Ferris of sexism for asking Rutherford to try the control after she’d failed. “Commander, are you implying that I’m not strong enough to move the lever because I’m a woman?” I haven’t seen a block of dialogue so egregiously “Middle-aged white man imagines what a feminist is like based purely on his imagination because he has never bothered to listen when a real one was talking,” since Terrance Dicks used to write dialogue for Sarah Jane Smith in ’70s Doctor Who. In any case, Rutherford can’t open it either, and they all worry a great deal about whether they’ll have to abort the mission. One of them — I’ve lost track of who and can’t be bothered to check — suggests using the external camera to check for anything jamming the mechanism. Ferris placates Nikki by assigning the task to her on the grounds that she’s the most dexterous.

And now we have a narrator all of a sudden. For the first time in this thing, about eighty minutes in, they cut to a voice-over to elide the action. The camera finds nothing, so they shove Rutherford into the cargo bay to have a look at the mechanism himself. With time running out before they have to abort, he finds that the issue is a snapped bolt (or “bolt-like part” as the narrator calls it. Wouldn’t want to be vague on that point), which they replace and open the doors just in time. Pirelli takes a look at the bolt and discovers that it failed due to having been precisely cut half-way through with a laser, which means that someone sabotaged the ship, and I’m not sure we will ever get around to saying who or why. The crew is faced with the possibility that one of them is a saboteur. I bet it’s Doctor Smith. Ferris, fearing a breakdown of crew cohesion, basically orders them not to worry about it.

This tense and dramatic scene… Is told to us by the narrator. Glad they didn’t waste time on that so we had an extra few minutes for Nikki to make unrealistic accusations of sexism. We return to regular voice acting for Ferris to call NASA and, rather than informing them about their issue or the possibility of sabotage, just says everything is fine, and then switches to an encrypted channel to… Tell them everything is fine and he’ll call them back in the morning.

Continue reading Deep Ice: A word picture of the strange scene before my eyes (“Howard Koch’s” War of the Worlds 2, Episode 1: The Invasion of Mars 1999, Side 2)

It is May, 1994. This month’s biggest story is the inauguration of Nelson Mandela to the presidency of South Africa. That same day, John Wayne Gacy is executed by the state of Illinois. The Channel Tunnel opens between England and France, and for all the mind-blowing innovations of the twentieth century, I think, “England and France voluntarily spent billions so that people could travel from one to the other faster,” would be the most confusing to a Victorian. In addition to Gacy, this month will see the deaths of actor George Peppard, East German leader Erich Honecker, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Sony and Phillips announce their collaboration on the new technology that will eventually become DVD. The first two Beverly Hills Cop movies are released on VHS and Laserdisc for the first time, coinciding with the theatrical release of Beverly Hills Copy III. Also out this month are the live-action adaptation of The Flintstones, as well as The Crow and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Four Weddings and a Funeral is released in the UK. The associated rerelease of Wet Wet Wet’s “Love is All Around” will spend fifteen weeks at the top of the UK Singles Chart.

In the world of music, Michael Bolton is found guilty of ripping off the Isley Brothers, Weezer releases the Blue Album, and Michael Jackson marries Lisa Marie Presley. Ace of Base holds the top spot on the charts for half the month with “The Sign”. If you’ve forgotten what song that was, imagine you’re listening to a college’s acapella group. It’s that one. All-4-One takes the spot for the second half of the month with “I Swear”. Also in the top ten are Enigma’s “Return to Innocence”, Madonna’s “I’ll Remember”, Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love”, Prince’s “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” and Big Mountain’s cover of “Baby I Love Your Way”.

My Fair Lady closes on Broadway. The Simpsons airs its one hundred and first, second, and third episodes. Ending their runs this month are Roc, a show my dad always tried to watch because it was set in Baltimore, and TV fixtures LA Law, In Living Color and The Arsenio Hall Show. Also Cafe Americain, one of those shows that didn’t last long but sticks out in my memory, largely because I was going through a phase of being obsessed with Casablanca at the time, though the show was only tangentially related. It followed the exploits of an American woman in Paris, who gets a job at the eponymous cafe after discovering that the job she’d come to Paris for (English-to-English translator) was actually intended purely as a cover for “Boss’s mistress”. She hangs around with a collection of quirky expats, most prominently, an Imelda Marcos-inspired deposed dictator’s widow who was constantly concocting moneymaking schemes to raise a counterevolutionary army. One plan involved selling ice cream made from all-natural ingredients, “Mint, chocolate, and Chip.” It’s also the origin of the phrase, “I keel you! I keel you bad! I keel you two times!”, a recurring threat from the perpetually jealous Italian lover of a fashion model. Oh, and also something else. Star Trek the Next Generation airs, “Bloodlines”, “Emergence”, “Preemptive Strike”, and “All Good Things…”, the series finale.

There is a new Columbo this month, the second of the year. It’s unusual, in that it eschews the standard “reverse whodunnit” format for a more traditional structure, largely because it’s been adapted from an Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel. Ed Begley Jr. guest stars. CBS airs the miniseries The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, NBC airs a biopic about Joan and Melissa Rivers. The Rocketeer has its broadcast debut on ABC. There are new episodes of The X-Files, seaQuest DSV, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (dubbed “Must-Sleep TV” by dad), Walker, Texas Ranger, Full House, Lois and Clark, Martin — I don’t know if this was an especially memorable time for TV, or if it’s just the intersection in my life of when I watched a lot of TV and was old enough to remember it? And Angus MacGyver returns to the small screen for the TV movie MacGyver: The Lost Treasure of Atlantis. I was upset that they destroy the technologically advanced ancient artifact at the end, having been too young to remember that this is what happened in every other archaeology-themed episode of MacGyver. John Goodman and Heather Locklear host the season’s final epsiodes of Saturday Night Live. Sesame Street‘s upcoming 25th anniversary is celebrated with a prime-time network TV special on ABC titled “Stars and Street Forever”.

I’m stalling. Because this is gonna suuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. But I had to shell out cash for this, more than I probably should have, so we’d better get on with it. Today, we’re looking at a direct-to-cassette full-cast audio drama which presents itself as a sequel to the Mercury Radio Theater’s 1938 adaptation of War of the Worlds. I do not recall the exact circumstances behind my first listening to Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II. It was some time around 2003, I reckon. I’ve found a link on the web to a copy of it in Real Player format, but you probably don’t have Real Player now, and the .ra file probably went away with Geocities. But I feel like I had a physical copy at some point. Maybe from the library, because I ripped all my audiobooks back in ’09 and it’s not there. Which is why I had to buy it again. The upside, such as it is, is that I managed to get an episode I didn’t catch the first time around. The downside is that I didn’t get one of the episodes I did catch the first time. Also that I spent money for this crap.

I exhausted my desire to do research on Pharoah Audiobooks well before I actually found out anything about them. They came and went before the era where an internet presence was a requisite, and when they do turn up in catalogues and registries, there’s little more than the odd title or author. My best guess, based on experience, is that they were a small line whose primary audience was people whose careers involved long-distance driving and whose primary market was truck stops and travel plazas in the days before the iPod was a thing and “Podcast” was a word. It’s been long enough since I spent much time in a Stuckey’s that I don’t know if low-end audio adaptations of niche titles for purchase on physical media is still a thing, or if Audible, iTunes and the smart phone have done away with it all.

So of course when I saw the title, I was interested. This series of four or maybe five episodes purports to be a direct sequel to the 1938 radio play, after all. We’ve already seen, with the TV series, one idea for how to weave the radio play into the backstory of a modern invasion. Could this be the tale of a second invasion? Or perhaps a tale set in a world where human technology has benefited from the study of alien artifacts? A world where the global tensions and wars of the middle part of the twentieth century were rerouted by the experience of an alien invasion?

It is none of those things. What it is instead, is terrible. The dialog is bad, and the voice acting is bad. The story itself is… An ambitious concept that is not without merit. But it’s a jumbled up mess is what it is. In 1994, Howard Koch was still alive, so I presume he signed off on having his name attached to this, but I see no reason to think he had any actual involvement beyond branding. It’s a “sequel” only nominally: they say that this is indeed a world which experienced an invasion from Mars in 1938, but nothing about the story or the world in which it’s set that is consistent with a massive alien invasion in the 1930s. Not everyone seems to be aware of it — some characters treat the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence as purely speculative rather than documented historical fact. At other points, it’s taken for granted as something so well-known that of course everyone knows it happened, and it just goes unmentioned because people do not normally bring up things that happened sixty years ago when they aren’t directly relevant to the situation at hand.

But this is a strange way to behave in context, because if there is one thing the characters in this audiodrama like to do, it’s to exposit at great length about things that are not directly relevant to the situation at hand. Years ago, when I had a longer commute, I got interested in amateur audio drama for a while, and devoured it voraciously. One thing that kept getting to me is that even in the better works, say, the output of Darker Projects, or this one I can’t remember the name of that was clearly a sequel to Independence Day with the serial numbers filed off (Twenty-second century space-based humanity prepares for a second invasion by aliens who’d invaded in the ’90s and were defeated by a computer virus) things tended to be tremendously over-written. Characters would repeat themselves, inject contentless noise-dialogue like “I am just trying to say,” or “As you know,” inject needless exposition about the writer’s personal bugaboos (their Star Trek series were awful about having characters randomly go off on tangents about how Classic Rock would remain a respected musical movement into the twenty-fourth century, while 2000s pop-rock was entirely forgotten) or self-promotion (So many Star Fleet lieutenants whose favorite twenty-first century novelist just happened to be the same guy who wrote the show), prove the writer’s research credentials (three separate instances of someone saying “Lead on, MacDuff,” and being corrected) and just generally spout a lot of dialogue that didn’t need to be there.

The dialogue in War of the Worlds II is like that, only without the frequent good (or at least clever) ideas and… Just generally any other redeeming qualities. Like, imagine if the first, say, half hour or so of the story consisted of, for example, a bunch of people at a dinner party complaining about how the various societal woes that plague their modern times, and the failure of the government, private industry, and the public to deal with it properly. And now stop imagining, because that is exactly what the first half hour of War of the Worlds II is.

Broad strokes then. The basic story of War of the Worlds II is that the Earth is facing a global shortage of potable water, so the US sends a secret mission to Mars to look for some. Never mind that this is stupid, because that thing I just said? At least until you get to episode 3, that’s really more of a side-plot. Because primarily, War of the Worlds II is a political satire and/or political thriller.

Yes. I really did say that. See, the actual primary plot of the story is that most of the world’s water supply is being de facto held hostage by Ronald Ratkin, whose name is hardly ever spoken without someone reminding us that he’s “The world’s first trillionaire.” He holds the patents to ice-mining technology, and he’s got control over the ice-miner’s union, and he’s basically a Captain Planet villain, straight up, and will stop at nothing to prevent the government from finding more water. And the government is sort of inept and ineffectual, and while they are careful to only ever have the bad guys blame this on the fact that the president is a woman, there’s a kind of understated implication that they maybe have a point.

In case you were hoping, the political satire is not especially biting, relevant to the real-world concerns of the day, or, when you get down to it, good. For example, one of the major antagonist characters is a radio pundit named — excuse me a minute while I mentally prepare myself for the ordeal of saying this — “Tosh Rimbauch”. This is what passes for comedy. He is predictably terrible. Awful as Rush Limbaugh is, I can admit there is some artistry to the way he works. Tush Rimbaugh comes off more like a conspiracy theorist. And a George Noory sort of conspiracy theorist, not even an Alex Jones conspiracy theorist. His voice actor is clearly trying a Rush Limbaugh impression, but it’s so dire he sounds more like Richard Nixon. Not that it’s a decent Nixon either, just a better Nixon than Limbaugh.

Continue reading Deep Ice: Another Senator skipped bail (Thomas and Yvonne Phelan’s “Howard Koch’s” War of the Worlds II: Episode 1, The Invasion of Mars: 1999, Side 1)

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

Ironhorse killed an innocent woman, and the writer thinks it’s very important that we not blame him for it. Her husband didn’t get the memo and is planning to murder our hero…

While Martin has been off writing his manifesto, we get some exposition about the alien plot from over in the Land of the Lost cave. Those aliens back in the opening scene had been stealing high-end optical lenses. The reason, it turns out, is demonstrated when a pair of possessed bowlers tie their unpossessed buddy to the triangular crucifixion jig we’ve seen once or twice before. The stolen lenses are a component in a great big laser gun, which they wheel out and shoot at the guy, burning a hole through his head. The advocates are suitably impressed, and command that the laser be miniaturized and mass produced so that each of their troops can have one. This, they conclude, will allow them to conquer the planet by “the hot season”.

Yes, this is a major breakthrough, a weapon powerful enough to kill a single, unarmed human in about five seconds. With thousands of these, they will be… Slightly less formidable than if they had a thousand of those ordinary uzis their soldiers normally carry. Look, the alien plan in this episode is fractally stupid. Every layer of it is dumb, starting here. Sure, this isn’t even close to the first time the aliens have tried to acquire advanced weapons. In most of the other instances, they were reacquiring the weapons they brought with them in the war, and we have some idea of what those were capable of. But you might remember that I had misgivings about this back in “Eye for an Eye“: the formidability of the “Martian” war machines in the movie came from the combination of their firepower and their invincibility. A soldier armed with a ray-gun is still vulnerable to bullets. If they have the numbers to conquer the planet armed with hand-held ray guns, then they have the numbers to conquer the planets with ordinary guns, which, because they are in America, can be freely purchased in all fifty states and the District of Columbia.

The demonstration serves the opposite purpose to what was intended. Yes, sure, the laser gun is a terrifying weapon in that it burns a fist-sized hole in a person’s head. It’s even more terrifying when you contrast it to the unrealistically bloodless death of Susan Cole. But to evoke Stargate SG-1, the laser is a weapon of terror. Guns are a weapon of war. There’s nothing in the demo that indicates the laser’s efficacy against an armored target. Maybe it can shoot a hole in a tank, but we don’t know that. And even if it can, can it do it faster than the tank can blow you up with its tank-size bullets? It can kill a human slowly and horribly. But the aliens can do that with their bare hands already. There’s a complete reliance here on the assumption that laser guns are Just Better because Reasons, even as it shows us otherwise.

For the next layer of stupid to their plan, each laser requires a high quality ruby. Okay. That’s fair. Rubies are one of the things you use to make lasers. Even by 1989, ruby lasers were kinda on the decline in favor of better lasing media, but it’s a small thing, and besides, this is an alien laser. I’m even willing to call the fact that their design calls for a high-quality cut gemstone rather than an industrial-quality synthetic ruby rod an acceptable break from reality. There’s been lots of media from this general period where someone’s jerry-rigged a laser using a gemstone, including MacGyver and our old friend Tomes and Talismans.

Where the stupid comes in is with how they plan to get the rubies. They can’t steal them because, “Humans hold these rubies in the highest regard. They are under heavy security. Casualties will be prohibitive.” So instead, they’ll have to buy them. Now, to buy them, they’ll need money. So… They’ll steal the money. Because humans don’t hold money in the highest regard, and large quantities of money aren’t held under high security, I guess. Their plan is a string of brazen daylight armored car robberies. So they can get money to buy rubies, because stealing rubies is too dangerous. What?

They send a clique of aliens to go meet with a gem dealer who — Wait. She looks familiar somehow. Who is that? Oh, huh. That’s Alannah Myles. Her self-titled debut album is the other new album out last week I mentioned before. And almost exactly a year from now, the second single off of that album, “Black Velvet”, will hit the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks. Weird. I’m getting that feeling of deja vu again. It’s probably nothing. Anyway, she shows off three rubies. A cheap synthetic that she claims is mostly used for industrial lasers despite being princess-cut, a Thai stone, and the breathtakingly beautiful Burmese Gemstone, which visibly arouses her to talk about. The aliens, of course, want the Burmese. And this all represents a massive misunderstanding of how the ruby media in a laser works, but whatever. I’m only bringing it up in the hopes I’ll find an excuse to insert a clip from the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers second season finale where Zordon says, “Too much pink energy is dangerous.”

Alannah Myles thinks they’re having her on briefly when the aliens request a thousand five-carat rubies. But they promise to have the necessary five million dollars within a week and this pretty much causes her to have an orgasm on the spot. The lead alien will return to her halfway through the episode to deliver the down payment and double the order and she will respond by trying to bone him. It may be implicit that she in fact does bone him once the camera has discreetly cut away. No explanation is ever offered for why they don’t just possess her and have her quietly route a bunch of rubies to them and “lose” the paperwork.

In another meanwhile, at the Cottage, Norton gleefully breaks into computer systems to learn about a second theft of high-tech optical lenses, this time in Sacramento, with the characteristic radiation traces of alien activity. Harrison and Suzanne assume Ironhorse will be on board with setting out immediately, but Ironhorse, who is distracted by obsessively drawing little crosshatch patterns in his notebook, is reluctant, and isn’t even sure any more that it’s appropriate to treat their campaign against the aliens as a war.

That’s an interesting thought, and one that feels very prescient to a person living in the era of Wars on Abstract Concepts (ie., me). But of course they go nowhere with it, because Ironhorse’s misgivings are meant to be symptomatic of his internal crisis, and he’s meant to get over it and go back to being a contented war machine. The shame of it is that it comes so close to actual active awareness of something I’ve been increasingly aware of as we move through this series. We have talked about the cultural neurosis that this show infuriatingly won’t engage that stems from being set in a world where an all-out alien invasion occurred in the fifties. It’ll hint at it, but never really let it properly into the light. I think there’s a strong case to be made that one of the big ways that it surfaces is in that whole “Always think of it as war,” attitude. Has the show ever really addressed just how weird it is that Ironhorse regularly runs military operations on US soil? That Ironhorse seems to be able to pull rank in order to take charge of civilian facilities? That at one point he seriously considers calling in an air strike? This is not normal. The things Ironhorse is empowered to do would normally require martial law, and not only does he do them, but, even ostensibly not knowing about the aliens, no one ever acts as though this is at all odd. People can’t remember that there was an alien invasion in the fifties, but they do think that the US Army occupying a hospital is a perfectly normal thing to happen. Ironhorse is granted a tremendous amount of latitude by civilian authorities simply by saying that he’s investigating suspected terrorists. To you and me, that reads as a largely technical mistake — that it’s the army taking the lead and not the FBI, but we can maybe accept (unhappily) the gist. But think about what this looked like to people in the ’80s, people from a pre-9/11 world. This ought to have been hard to swallow. There’s no real cultural precedent for it. Hell, think about how the deranged anti-Obama conspiracy nuts real true American patriots who Democrats ignored at their peril went nuts over Jade Helm 15, a normal training exercise that was widely mistaken for a vast conspiracy between the US government and Wal-Mart to establish a military dictatorship. We’re supposed to somehow believe that Ironhorse and Omega Squad shooting real bullets at real people on a college campus would be something the civilian authorities would just shrug off? At the same time, though, it was the ’80s. Even with the lack of evidence that anything like this would ever stand, the zeitgeist of the ’80s was still wrapped up in the idea that “soft” martial law — that the military kinda sorta could just roll in and take over our lives whenever they felt like it — was entirely plausible. I mean, the Ruskies might drop the bomb at any minute, after all.

Suzanne and Harrison take turns trying to talk to Ironhorse, who alternates between being polite and being annoyed, but maintains that he’s got himself under control. After advising restraint when Norton reported the second lens theft, he’d inexplicably wanted to roll out to “bust some heads” in Sacremento when Norton picked up four more alien transmissions without any context and without any details that would make the information actionable. This culminates in him shouting about how he can handle killing all the aliens himself personally and punching the elevator door hard enough to make the set wobble. Harrison eventually pulls rank and gets permission directly from General Wilson to order Ironhorse to take some time off to get his act together, and offers him the use of a cabin in the woods left to Harrison by Dr. Forrester (Is this the first direct confirmation on-screen that Forrester is dead? I think it is).

This prompts Ironhorse to go see his therapist again, where, with difficulty, he explains that the reason he’s been so affected by this killing is that, “I just keep expecting her to walk through the door, alive. Not dead.”

Whut.

THAT IS NOT A REASON. THAT IS A RESULT.

Also: Whut? I mean, what does that even mean? He didn’t know this woman. If she’d survived, it’s not like there would be any reason for him to expect to ever see her again. What does it even mean for him to expect her to “walk through the door, alive”?

No, never mind that. Why does he think that? He still hasn’t answered why this killing is affecting him so much. At least Ironhorse himself agrees that this doesn’t make any sense.

If the therapist has a useful answer for him, we don’t see it, because we cut to Ironhorse returning to his car. Once again, Martin Cole is waiting for him, but this time he gives chase, launching his explosive helicopter after the Colonel. And I won’t lie: this is far and away the most thrilling car-versus-remote-control-exploding-helicopter scene I have ever seen on television. And that is not me damning with faint praise, even though I am pretty sure I have seen no more than one other car-versus-remote-control-exploding-helicopter scene. But it’s actually really good in the sort of Stephen King way that it legitimately makes you feel like this tiny yellow toy presents an actual threat to a decorated special forces officer. Martin eventually forces Ironhorse off the road and he crashes into an embankment, knocking himself unconscious.

Continue reading Thesis: Vengeance is Mine (War of the Worlds 1×19, Part 2)