Second week in July, Leah and Dylan went on vacation (I don’t travel well, due to my trick neck, sleep apnea, and coworkers who are not shy about summoning me back to the office to help on some triviality during my vacation) to $LOCAL_RESORT_TOWN, and had a fantastic time. But one difficulty Dylan had with adapting to vacation was the concept of hotel-room TV. Having been born in the era of Netflix, as I think I have mentioned before, the temporal aspect of television is utterly alien to him, so the idea of being constrained to only watch the shows which happen to be airing at the exact moment you’re in front of the television was hard to wrap his young mind around.
In the nexus, the VCR was already pretty commonplace. All but the fanciest models retailed for somewhere in the neighborhood of $200. My family had at least two by this point, having locked ourselves into a requirement to keep seeking out Betamax machines because we’d bought out the stock at the local video rental place (Now a Cracker Barrel restaurant) some years earlier. All the same, TV maintained a certain air of disposabilty. Maybe for a few of the most celebrated TV series with the most dedicated of fans with the most disposable of incomes, it might be worth releasing old shows on VHS. But no one was going to pay for a complete box set of, say, M*A*S*H or The Rockford Files or Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. At $30 a tape, no one could afford it, and where would you put them all anyway? You might release a quarter-dozen of the most marketable episodes as a “Best of…” Compilation, but the vast majority of episodes were at best only going to be seen in syndication. Or more likely, never seen again.
So in 1988, if you were the sort of person who wanted to experience last year’s TV shows again, that was only liable to be possible if you’d had the foresight to record them off-air the previous year (And hung on to them permanently rather than watching once then erasing, in violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the loose agreement hammered out between Congress, Mr. Rogers, and Sony over the movie industry really fucking hating the idea of people being able to record things). People who were into this sort of thing may remember the careful waltz of timing and tape-management that went into maintaining a full archive of your favorite shows, seeking to keep costs down by maximizing recording time, always fearful that the eighth episode wouldn’t quite fit on the tape. The horror at realizing you’d neglected to unpause when the commercial break ended. The unbearable nuisance of inaccuracies in the TV listings leading you to miss 2×18 (“Max”) three times in a row.
We did a lot of this sort of thing in my house. Star Trek the Next Generation is the first one I remember us consistently recording to keep (And contrariwise, the last show I recall recording in this fashion, VHS tapes and all, is Star Trek Enterprise), but my mom also made a point to record Stingray. I recorded Doctor Who, Kids Incorporated, Knight Rider (in reruns, a decade after the fact) and the first season of Sliders. I’ve even got me an ancient database in some Lotus-clone format that nothing can speak which documents exactly which episode is on which of the tapes that probably don’t even exist any more. We did not record War of the Worlds in 1988, but I did when it re-aired in the mid-90s on The Sci-Fi Channel.
If you weren’t one of the dedicated few who maintained an archive of off-air recordings filed away in faux-woodgrain sliding-drawer cabinets under your bed, your only real choice to re-experience old TV was in prose form.
The advent of the home movie industry and its explosive growth through the ’80s and ’90s did not do away with the novelization, but it certainly cut into the demand. Target, of course, is well known for the series of novelizations it produced for the Doctor Who canon, and James Blish had novelized the original Star Trek back in the ’60s. Star Trek the Next Generation, by contrast, only had a handful of episodes novelized. A certain percentage of blockbuster films still receive novelizations, as it’s a fairly inexpensive way to squeeze a few extra bucks out of the franchise, and you also see novelizations crop up in franchises that also support a line of original fiction — Alien Nation for example.
I’d like to think it’s a sign that Paramount had a lot of faith in the property that in the lead-up to War of the Worlds, they commissioned prolific (I say “prolific”, but in 1988, she’d only written three Star Trek novels. But that’s two and four-fifths more novels than I’ve written. She’d go on in the coming years to produce the novelizations of every classic-continuity Star Trek movie from V onward.) novelizer and novelist J. M. Dillard to adapt the screenplay of “The Resurrection” for supermarket magazine-section shelves.
For publishers who aren’t Target (with their hard 114-page requirement for novelizations of Doctor Who serials ranging from 50 to 300 minutes in length, which meant that about half of them were either edited with a weed whacker, or ought to have been) , adapting a screenplay into a novel requires fleshing things out quite a bit, doubling or tripling it in size. Dillard’s novelization in particular is 405 pages (plus a bonus tear-out alien-hand-gripping-the-globe bookmark). A lot of this comes from translating the visual elements: the characters’ appearances, descriptions of the setting, and describing physical actions in more detail than a script would. But matters of timing (as is the case here; Dillard’s adaptation was published in August, and remember that production was delayed on War of the Worlds because of the WGA strike) would mean that the author isn’t working from a finished product, perhaps from nothing more than a draft script. As a result, you’re going to see details about characters that may have been cut, changed, or delayed in the final product.
The past few episodes we’ve talked about, for instance, give the distinct impression that the writers have decided to retool Norton considerably, making him more acerbic and less of a fratboy. Norton remains a fairly minor character in Dillard’s novelization, but he does avoid the excesses on screen — first and foremost, he doesn’t force coffee onto Suzanne unwillingly: she eagerly accepts his offer, and we’re even treated to Suzanne’s interior monologue, revealing her as coffee-obsessed herself and desperate for a cup at the time. There’s also the incredibly bizarre and utterly incongruous tidbit that Norton is ex-military himself.
Harrison, too, has his rough edges ground down a bit. His “charm”, mostly an informed ability in the Stupid Sexy Harrison scenes from the pilot, actually gets some airtime here, as he easily strikes up casual conversations at the boring party he attends with his fiancee and makes a point of treating a busboy with the same grace and politeness as he does a powerful corporate executive. He behaves pretty much just as badly as in the show, but it’s framed differently. His penchant for naps, for example, isn’t simply a quirk, but the result of insomnia and night terrors: the book opens a few months after the invasion with Clayton Forrester comforting Harrison when he wakes up from a nightmare in which he relives his parents’ deaths. As per the standard boring cliche, we learn that his parents died because he fell down while fleeing from the advancing war machines and they had to run back to save him. One of the silver ships was drawing closer, its great red eye blinking at him. The hair on the back of his neck rose until it stood on end.[br] His parents broke free of the crowd and began to turn toward him.[br] A blast of heat singed the top of Harrison’s head. The briefest flash of his mother’s and father’s bodies glowing brilliant, unearthly red imprinted itself on his eyes before he was dazzled into blindness[…][br] When he looked up again, he saw two charred, smoking lumps where his parents had stood. (pg. 10) Yes. It is the exact same scene as the first scene of Goliath, similar enough that I’d accuse the Pearson movie of ripping it off except that, come on, everyone in the world knows this cliche already. Harrison is also much more up-front with Suzanne: he doesn’t wait until after their visit to Jericho to mention the 1953 invasion, but instead brings it up immediately after they meet Norton. His reasons for hiring a microbiologist are much more concrete, none of this “Daydream about conditions for alien life” stuff. Rather, he’s acquired a preserved alien corpse, and very straightforwardly wants her to study its blood.
Suzanne, on the other hand, becomes altogether less sympathetic. Because there’s no ambiguity about what she knows about the invasion, her unwillingness to believe Harrison is less justified, and is framed largely as cowardice, and Dillard includes mentions of Suzanne’s childhood fear that the aliens might come back. The biggest change to Suzanne, though, is her family. In the novel, Suzanne is Sylvia Van Buren’s cousin (Harrison says “second cousin”, but also that she and Sylvia have an uncle in common, which implies first cousins. Also, Pastor Matthew is referred to as “Matthew Van Buren”, while in the movie, his last name was “Collins”). In the book, this is in fact the biggest part of the reason Harrison has chosen his team: Norton is also a survivor, having lost his entire family in the war (The canonical Norton seems to contradict this, claiming to have a larger number of younger siblings than would be possible for a man his age whose parents died in 1953). I note, of course, that the idea that Harrison had hand-picked Suzanne contradicts him not knowing her when they’re introduced by Dr. Jacobi, a scene which occurs both in the TV version and in the book. The novel handwaves this away by simply declaring that Harrison had lied when they first met, because he thought, “My dad almost married your cousin,” would be coming on too strong.
And speaking of coming on too strong, someone very clearly told J.M. Dillard that they wanted there to be a will-they-or-won’t-they thing between Harrison and Suzanne. During their first few meetings, we’re constantly pestered by references to Suzanne being attracted to Harrison, and Harrison likewise reflects on his own attraction to Suzanne, which comes off as markedly more legitimate than his feelings for Charlotte — it’s even more of a mystery why the two of them are together in this version than in the show, given that they seem to have nothing in common and don’t really like each other that much. The most positive thing Harrison ever says is that he appreciates her assertiveness. I was left with the impression that Harrison was looking for an out in the relationship (At one point, he considers the possibility that he’d deliberately pursued a relationship with someone he didn’t really care about due to his childhood abandonment issues), and he certainly doesn’t spare her a second thought after she officially dumps him. Suzanne comes off mostly as lonely. Her divorce from her husband, Derek (Proposed names for Debi’s father: 2/3), seems very fresh on her mind, and it’s implied to be the major reason she’d left Ohio. Debi (Who Suzanne universally calls “Deb” in this, except once scene where she uses the pet name “Chicken”) is still bitter over it. In the show, we eventually learn that Suzanne had actually left Ohio because her project had turned out to be related to bioweapons, and that’s interesting, because her feelings about that do come up in the book: she’d made a point of insisting she wouldn’t work on anything related to biological warfare when taking the job, and Harrison’s slowness to explain the nature of the project makes her fear she was being manipulated into doing it anyway (In neither the show nor the book does her distaste extend to making biological weapons against aliens). Harrison also makes a point of obsessing over Suzanne’s safety in the action scenes.
Ironhorse is a bit of a cipher. His character in the show is sort of slow in developing as well, but here, we get little more than an exposition dump when we first meet him. He’s characterized as being obsessed with discipline, having joined the army to learn “the white man’s discipline,” and blaming his own people for having lost theirs when they’d stopped fighting against their white oppressors. Which kinda sounds like the sort of thing you’d expect from a 2015 Republican Presidential Hopeful, and we know he loves Reagan, so maybe it’s fair, but I don’t have to like it. He’s also an Olympic bronze medal decathlete (Which reinforces my long-time notion that “Olympic athlete” is both a really prestigious thing, and also something you could suddenly be surprised to have the guy in the next cubicle at work turn out to be) and a “hard-nosed ass-kicker” who doesn’t fraternize with his men, though Reynolds apparently likes him well enough that he asks him to be his best man, which would make it work a bit better when Ironhorse had to plead with him to hang on to his humanity at the climax, but for an issue that I’ll mention later. There’s also a scene added where Ironhorse gives a quick primer in how to use a gun, a bit of extraneous detail about the “BRAS” method for better marksmanship. It reminds me a little of the weird little bits of military fetishism you often see in a certain very traditional sort of science fiction when the author wants to prove they’ve done their research, but it’s also very in-keeping with the scenes we’ve seen later in the series that have Ironhorse drop a random anecdote about Native American folklore or military procedure that seems like a setup for later in the episode but has no payoff. There’s a similarly odd technical exchange in which Suzanne explains to Harrison that microbiologists often develop the ability to focus their eyes independently from working with microscopes. Continue reading Parenthesis: JM Dillard’s Novelization of War of the Worlds: The Resurrection