Antithesis: Video Messiah (War of the Worlds 2×16, Part 1)

It is April 16, 1990. Dalton Prejean, a mentally handicapped man condemned to death for the murder of a Louisiana police officer, is denied an appeal of his sentence to the Supreme Court. In Michigan, Doctor Jack Kevorkian helps a 54-year-old Alzheimer’s patient end her life. Johns Hopkins University researchers release a study showing that over-the-counter ibuprofen can cause kidney failure in people with mild kidney disease. In the past week, Lothar de Maizière became Prime Minister of East Germany, heading a coalition government favoring reunification. President Bush will be meeting with various world leaders this week to discuss global warming. He’ll call for more research before doing anything, especially research into the economic impact of doing anything. The rest of the world, West Germany in particular, will call for more concrete action, and surely under that sort of unified pressure, the US will do something to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and— well, you know the rest. Emma Watson was born yesterday, the same day that Greta Garbo died.

The August Wilson play The Piano Lesson opens on Broadway today. Nothing much out in theaters or home video this week. Wembley Stadium hosts Nelson Mandela: An International Tribute Concert For a Free South Africa. Oddly, this isn’t the only South Africa media news this week, as The Gods Must Be Crazy II has its US theatrical premiere. Tommy Page holds the top spot on the Billboard charts with “I’ll Be Your Everything”, knocking Taylor Dayne down to fifth. I have no recollection of “I’ll Be Your Everything” whatever. The only newcomer in the top ten this week is Calloway with “I Wanna Be Rich”, replacing Phil Collins.

Star Trek the Next Generation is still off this week and Friday the 13th the Series hasn’t returned from their spring break yet. In Canada, The Beachcombers will be cancelled this week (I think. There’s some dispute among my sources whether the show aired October-December or December-April). It will be the longest-running Canadian dramatic series until Degrassi passes it in 2012. CBS becomes the official network of Major League Baseball. In Living Color and Wings premiere this week. We also see the premiere of ABC cop show Sunset Beat with the first part of its two-part pilot airing this coming Saturday. Coincidentally, we’ll also see the final episode of ABC cop show Sunset Beat, with its final episode, the second part of its two-part pilot, airing Saturday. MacGyver airs “Rush to Judgment”, the penultimate episode of the season. It’s kinda a riff on Twelve Angry Men, only with MacGyvering. Twin Peaks, which I have neglected to mention until now, airs its third episode, “Episode 2” (It’s David Lynch. What do you expect? The episode is also called “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer”, a back-translation of the title created by the German translators).

So, a little more than a year ago now, I saw that I was running out of episodes of War of the Worlds, and reckoned I should finish up the last few non–TV-series related things in my queue. Only that spiraled out of control when I ended up needing six months to force myself through Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II and it turned out that there were a bunch of reasonably-priced War of the Worlds derived books for sale on Kindle, and then I went looking for the Superman–War of the Worlds crossover and it turned out that there were actually like a dozen War of the Worlds-related comic books (I’ve still got a couple more in my queue, and I haven’t even bothered to shell out for a copy of Scarlet Traces yet) then I basically spent January just fucking around because I was bummed out about the state of the world and stuff. I never actually meant to spend so much time away from the show; I just really wanted to finish off the other stuff before we got into the last block of episodes. I’m staggered by how much there turned out to be, since I’m pretty sure there was not nearly this much the last time I went looking. That’s what you get for starting a multi-year project based around something which is just about to go out of copyright, I guess.

Anyway, if you can manage to recall back to last year, we’re in a little block of episodes which are strangely upbeat for this show. “Candle in the Night” was as light and fluffy as this show gets, and these next two are quite a bit darker, but they’re still episodes that end much more positively than we’re used to. The majority of the episodes so far have ended on partial, Pyrrhic, or false victories for our heroes, if not outright losses. The only episodes I’d class as straightforward wins so far have been “No Direction Home”, “Terminal Rock”, “The Defector”, and “Candle in the Night” (And “The Defector” is marginal given that the Morthren basically succeed in destroying the Grapevine). We’re going to return to the usual mode of episodes where the team ekes out a partial win at great cost at the end of the month, but for now, we’re going to stick with the show’s other, less-frequent mode of “The Morthren nearly succeed but underestimate human strength in a key way that ruins their plans.”

This episode has an odd feel to it too, though. The regular cast is bracketed more than usual in favor of the guest cast — though we’ve obviously seen that before. But the whole tone and concept is a little more Max Headroom than we’re used to. Admittedly, War of the Worlds has been a little Max Headroom all along, with its brokedown 80s-punk near-future dystopia. But War of the Worlds has for the most part been primarily a street-level dystopia so far. There certainly is a cyberpunk flavoring to it, but we’ve really lacked the other aspect of a cyberpunk dystopia: the evil megacorporations that run everything. We got a bit of it in “Synthetic Love”, and maybe a hint in “Path of Lies”, but those were more stories about individuals than corporations. We haven’t had a story that really looks at corporate culture in a world that seems to be a mix of anarchy, kleptocracy and military rule. Oh, and also one of the characters appears mostly as a disembodied head on a TV screen.

The self-help industry has a long history, and I think by the numbers, it had really peaked back in the ’70s. But in the late ’80s, you saw the rise of a particular subsect of that, thanks in no small part to the explosion of daytime talk shows in the wake of the success of Oprah Winfrey in 1986. We’re getting into the era of media-saavy self-help personalities who are themselves their brands. This was a move away from self-help gurus who were primarily marketing books and seminars to gurus for whom the books and seminars were backstopping a media empire that was first and foremost about selling personality-as-lifestyle. And again, it’s not like cults of celebrity hadn’t existed possibly forever, but we’re getting into the era where our modern interpretation of it is climbing to dominance.

I bring this up because, hearkening back to their attempts in “No Direction Home” and “Doomsday”, the Morthren have decided the path to power is to clone a spiritual leader. But this time, rather than another confrontation with the old gods, they’re taking on a new one: self-help guru to the rich and powerful, Doctor Van Order. That’s his whole name; first name “Van”, last name “Order”. It doesn’t feel quite right to me either, but there it is. Roy Thinnes is a bit of stunt casting as Van Order; his best known role is as David Vincent in The Invaders. If you’re not familiar, it’s basically a knock-off of The Fugitive where instead of a one-armed man, it’s aliens who can’t bend their pinky fingers. He reprised the role in the 1995 sequel/reboot miniseries which starred Scott Bakula. Thinnes also did a number of stints in daytime and prime time soap operas, and was up for the role of Jean-Luc Picard. Oh, also he was the lead in the Mystery Science Theater 3000-mocked made-for-TV spy film Code Name: Diamond Head. 

So okay, the Morthren have cloned a self-help guru, and through him, they can manipulate the rich and powerful to their ends. That’s got some promise. Maybe Van Order has a following that they can push into being an outright cult. There’s an episode of Stargate SG-1 along similar lines. And “The Morthren want an in to control powerful people” is a storyline they’ve used before, most directly in “Path of Lies”. But as in that episode, the broad idea of manipulating powerful humans is paired with another, more narrowly scoped plot. That narrowing of scope, I think, helps keep the plot grounded and makes it more reducible to a specific problem the heroes can interact with and solve, but handled inexpertly, it can also feel like a waste of a premise. This is not a unique setup to War of the Worlds; I can think offhand of two separate episodes of Knight Rider where villains go to the trouble of stealing and reprogramming KITT, with no greater plan than to use him for something incredibly trivial, like shooting a lock with his laser.

What’s distinctive this time is that the initial plan — clone Van Order to manipulate his followers — is the setup for a broader plan… Which is itself the setup for a narrower plan. The broader plan in this case is a subliminal embed that encourages violence and sociopathy, inserted into advertising produced by Hardy Galt Industries, an ad agency. Yes, we’re back to subliminal embedded mind control. And you know what? I don’t even mind that they’re reusing it, because frankly it was getting tedious that the Morthren abandon every plan at the first failure and have, until now, never tried going back to an old plan and tweaking it. (I guess technically, the embedded signal in “Terminal Rock” was never identified as being subliminal in nature.)

Just a thought here. Isn’t “Hardy Galt Industries” a weird name for an ad agency? I mean “Hardy Galt Enterprises”, sure. Or “Hardy Galt Advertising”. “Hardy Galt Media” might be a little too twenty-first century for this show. But “Industries”? The only thing I can think of is something that puts a smile on my face: that Hardy Galt might be inspired by a certain fictional industrialist named Galt. I so want this to be true. Because what Hardy Galt thinks he is very much reflects the Randian ideal of a self-made man, utterly responsible for his own fortunes and completely self-made, without any help from anyone. And the fact that Galt is, in fact, a weak-willed idiot who is utterly useless without the affirmations of a self-help guru, easily manipulated to serve alien masters who plan to use and discard him and the rest of humanity is easily the most delightfully subversive thing this show has done. Which means it’s probably a coincidence, but I’ll take what I can get.

Since the story starts out with Van Order already a guest of the Morthren, we never get to see what he’s like when he’s not an evil alien-controlled clone. But we can guess that being cloned hasn’t much changed his temperament. He’s upbeat, charismatic, and even with his loyalties shifted to the aliens, he frames their project in terms of “guiding the future of humanity” rather than conquest and domination and there’s no point in the story where he lets on if he doesn’t genuinely believe he’s helping. The content of his lessons is largely inoffensive in and of itself, expressed in broad platitudes on the themes of self-reliance and personal responsibility: “It’s your world,” “Take responsibility,” “No one is to blame but yourself,” “You can’t hurt others by loving yourself.” It’s compatible, sure, with a kind of antisocial Randian sort of objectivist individualism, but it doesn’t really rise beyond your basic self-help 101 stuff about mindfulness and self-awareness. Indeed, there’s a strong component of “Your failures are your own fault; don’t blame them on other people,” which is, at least in practice, missing from the philosophies you generally see espoused by today’s crop of staunchly individualistic libertarian types, who tend more to view their successes as entirely their own doing, but their failures as entirely the fault of sabotage by lesser kinds of man.

Watching the Morthren latch onto these themes, though, gives me a moment of panic that one of my series-long themes might be falling apart; after all, the Morthren are a fundamentally collectivist culture who view individualism as anathema. But the more I think about it, the happier I am with it. We’ve already seen, numerous times, the Morthren attempt to assert dominance over humans by trying to manipulate humans into their mode of thinking. As far back as “Doomsday”, we saw the Morthren trying to convert humans to devotion toward their Eternal Spirit. Later we see them trying to instill Morthren values in the Creche children in “The Pied Piper”, and in Seft’s son in “Seft of Emun”. It would seem natural, now that they’ve got someone with Van Order’s power and influence, that their first order of business would be to change his message to promote a more Morthren worldview. But remember that thus far, trying to convert humans to their philosophy hasn’t generally taken. To the Morthren, human individualism is a perversion. So perhaps, now that we’re getting late in the game, the Morthren have decided that controlling humanity is better achieved not by making humans more like Morthren, but by exacerbating humanity’s own “weakness”: all the way back in “The Second Wave”, the clone Ironhorse believed that the human tendency to put the individual above the collective would ultimately be their downfall. So why not use that? Why not have Van Order spread a gospel not of the Morthren way, sublimating the individual to the collective, but of utter self-reliance and instinctive distrust of others. Humans bond with each other on the individual level, Morthren on the collective level. Attacking those individual-level bonds, and using a very human philosophy of individual self-actualization to do it might reflect that the Morthren are getting better at understanding their enemy and learning to attack humanity where it’s weakest at an existential level.

And the only real problem with that analysis is that they never say anything about this, and the Van Order clone never indicates that he’s less than 100% sincere — there’s no hint, as there had been with previous clones, that the cloning process has altered the original’s system of values to bring it in line with Morthren ideals. Now, they don’t actually need to say it outright. This could all be implicit, and that would be fine. Better than fine. This whole episode in so many places works really well if you assume a certain subtlety to its messages. As I already said, the actual text of Van Order’s teachings is perfectly fine: take responsibility for your own success and don’t blame others for your failure; be mindful of what you want to achieve and take concrete action to achieve it. Having that perfectly fine message be used manipulatively by the Morthren to subvert and twist humans toward sociopathy is a far cleverer idea than just having the message be forthrightly and cartoonishly evil. Unfortunately, we’re four-fifths of the way through this show now, and even when the show wasn’t coming off the rails with the scripts being written as they were being filmed and Jared Martin and Adrian Paul forced to act as de facto editors-on-the-set to keep things coherent and what seems to be a blind rush to bring this story to a conclusion before they get cancelled, there was very little to persuade me that the powers that be behind War of the Worlds: The Series were actually into that kind of subtlety. Instead, it feels more like this episode’s been inexpertly pared down, to the point that they’ve cut out things that might have been load-bearing. It works in this episode’s favor that I watched it immediately after covering the Big Finish Doctor Who story, which also suffered a lot from the feeling that important linkages between plot elements had ended up on the cutting room floor. But “Video Messiah” does better than “Invaders From Mars” in two respects. First, the “missing” parts are less important to the plot — they result in small plot holes or weaknesses in theme rather than entire subplots having seemingly little justification for existing at all. Secondly, the edits aren’t paired with dubious inclusions: this episode doesn’t have a half-dozen weakly-connected subplots which serve only to waste time. The plot is pretty tight and well-connected.

Having established the basic premise of the episode, it’s time to introduce our guest star.  Lori Hallier plays Mindy Cooper. She’s been in a ton of things over the decades, but never seemed to break big. She did an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard, and one of Trapper John, MD. Around this time period, she did the full circuit of American-Canadian first run syndication genre series, with appearances in RoboCop The Series, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, Forever Knight, Friday the 13th the Series, and so forth. She’d turn up in the ’90s in an episode of Star Trek Voyager, and played one of the moms on Strange Days at Blake Holsey High, which I have either talked about already or should have. Why do I have a strange feeling of deja vu? Of the most direct relevance, she was female lead in the 1981 slasher film My Bloody Valentine, which is kinda relevant here since this episode is going to get just a little bit slasher filmy at the end. We’re using the “Old friend of Kincaid’s” approach again this week, another link between this episode and “Terminal Rock”. Our Old Friend this time is Mindy Cooper, an ad exec at Harvey Galt. John is more than a little sweet on her, and the others suggest that this has been an ongoing relationship for several months. She will not appear again after this episode, but with only four episodes left, that wouldn’t be surprising either way. When we’re introduced to her, she’s just sort of standing around in a bad neighborhood waiting, presumably for Kincaid. We’re not privy to why she’s there, how she got there, or why she’s waiting for Kincaid; she’s clearly meant to be on her way to work, and it’s not even 100% clear to me if Kincaid actually is who she was waiting for, or if he just happened to show up at a convenient moment, since they don’t seem to have any plans together. She doesn’t seem to belong here, and it doesn’t seem like Kincaid normally drives her to work. Why would she plan to meet Kincaid on her way to work in a strange and rough neighborhood? It would fit really well for, say, her to be waiting for Kincaid to come give her a ride after her car breaks down in an unsafe place. But, par for the course, there’s nothing to hint at this. You could easily have shown her standing beside a broken-down car.

After suspiciously staring at her for thirty seconds, one of the shifty-looking hoboes nearby punches Mindy in the cheek and steals her briefcase, but it’s at exactly this moment that Kincaid shows up in the Awesome Van, ready to give chase. As in, he does not even stop to see if she’s okay, but instead drives past her to the next block before hopping out, gun drawn. The sequence runs a bit long, but Kincaid ultimately prevails, largely because the miscreant stops to open the briefcase and rifle through it literally one second after Kincaid walks past where he’s hiding. He seems oddly intent on stealing paperwork. There’s no indication that this was some kind of corporate espionage thing; just some random punk trying to make a quick buck by stealing the contents of a businesswoman’s suitcase. Is that a thing? What was he expecting to find in there, anyway? Seems like the case itself might be fenceable, but the contents would likely be of little interest to anyone but the owner.

Though in this particular case, there is one thing of value, the only thing Mindy cares about when John recovers her briefcase and chases off the punk. She fawns over her “vidbox” like a junkie checking that her stash is intact. The “vidbox” is a personalized interactive device containing a simulated version of Dr. Van Order with whom she can interact for guidance. The device itself looks like a Sony Watchman, probably an FD-42A turned upside-down, with a numeric keypad glued to the front. When switched-on, it shows a black and white image of Van Order’s smiling face, who addresses the owner by name and offers canned platitudes. Though Mindy claims that it’s psychologically customized for her, nothing they show us suggests that this is something even as complicated as an Eliza-style chatbot. Indeed, there’s a montage a few minutes later showing Mindy and four other people receiving nearly (though not exactly, which seems like a missed opportunity) identical advice from their respective vidboxes. She tries to convince Kincaid to try Van Order — the first hit is free, of course. He suggests that Van Order might be “A collection of impulses in a memory bank somewhere, like the Wizard of Oz.” Ah, yes, that famous scene where the Wizard of Oz is revealed to be a collection of impulses in a memory bank. This may be the bit of Zardoz I nodded off during.

But, I mean, I take his point. The possibility that Van Order isn’t a real person at all but a computer construct designed to manipulate people is an interesting Sci-Fi conceit. And so is the whole thing where Mindy’s attitude toward her Van Order vidbox seems perhaps a bit like that of a junkie — it’s not just the disembodied computer-controlled head on a TV that reminds me of Max Headroom: when you add in the subliminal angle the Morthren are pursuing, I’m reminded a lot of “Whackets”, the Max Headroom episode where Bill Maher guest stars as a guy who’s embedding highly addictive subliminal signals in a terrible game show.

They aren’t going to do anything with either of these concepts, infuriatingly. What we get instead isn’t bad, but there’s enough care put into the setup with the vidbox that its failure to pan out feels wrong. It’s awful late in the day for it, given that no one should have been under any illusions at this stage about the show getting another season, but this episode, rather like “Path of Lies” and “The Defector”, seems in several places like it might be setting up sequel hooks.

Kincaid drops Mindy off at work after getting her to agree to dinner with him in return for his act of heroism. I find it a little weird that the armed guards outside Hardy Galt don’t take any notice of Kincaid’s urban warfare-kitted van. They also don’t notice the Morthren watcher which is hovering outside the building. For their part, Mana and Malzor don’t recognize Kincaid though the watcher records him and Mindy smooching. I also notice that there are these “Big Brother is Watching”-style posters for Van Order all over the place, full to the brim with Van Order’s smiling face and one of his slogans. And not just around the Hardy Galt building; we see them in the background in the rough neighborhood where Kincaid picked up Mindy as well.

Malzor isn’t convinced that Hardy Galt has the level of sociopathy necessary to follow through on this whole “Embed subliminal messages that make humans violent” thing, and orders the Van Order clone to plant the idea that Galt should take on a partner. The Morthren plan gets a little convoluted here. They clearly could, but choose not to clone Galt. They clearly could, but choose not to send a clone, or indeed a Morthren to be Galt’s new partner. Instead, Galt selects a group of his high-level executives for an intensive “training program” hosted by Van Order. The training program is really a front for the Morthren to test their new subliminal embed, with the expectation that whichever participant is turned most successfully psychotic will become Galt’s new partner. I get this weird sense of the plot being simultaneously too big and not big enough. While Big Finish’s “Invaders From Mars” was full of subplots that didn’t go anywhere and didn’t interact with each other, “Video Messiah” feels like it ought to have four or five good solid subplots that all work and make sense as subsidiaries of the overall story, but they’ve been squished together into just one or two actual subplots. The Morthren want Van Order for his ability to manipulate powerful and important humans, so they clone him. Okay. Great. (Despite some previous episodes offering potential reasons, they haven’t really followed through with a comprehensive explanation why, multiple times now, they’ve had to find ways to manipulate the rich and powerful rather than just cloning them. But that’s okay. I’m willing to accept that cloning is a limited resource without an explicit explanation) They want Hardy Galt for his media empire, so they don’t clone him, but rather use Van Order to manipulate him. But they still don’t trust that he’ll do what they want so they give him a partner. But the partner isn’t one of their agents; it’s one of Galt’s employees. So they don’t clone the potential partner, but instead use their subliminal messages to turn them into a sociopath. And also, they do this to test how well the subliminal embed works.

Though on top of this, it appears that Galt Industries is already running commercials using the embed they’re testing (this is not quite clear; we see the ad airing in the wild, but possibly it’s a pre-embed version). And how exactly is turning an ad executive into a sociopath and the making said sociopath into Galt’s partner supposed to help the Morthren anyway? Sure, such a person might be morally okay with putting out harmful material, but you’d think they would be less than inclined to do anything at all for the benefit of the aliens. “We’ll damage them psychologically to the point where they don’t care about anyone but themselves. And that will clearly make them willing to care about doing the things we want. Step three: Profit!”

I also think that our introduction to Hardy Galt himself is done in the wrong order. We first meet the man in a conference with Van Order, and he seems conflicted and indecisive. HGI is on the verge of losing the important Lange and MacDougal account, and it’s got Galt rattled. Van Order tells him that the problem is in himself: “As your company has grown, have you grown with it?” and proposes that Galt needs someone he can trust to “share the load”. We cut away for the bit where Van Order introduces the concept of subliminal embeds, but when we come back, Galt is indecisive about that as well, though he caves quickly enough. Van Order implies that the embedded messages will just be typical Van Order-style catchphrases, though we’re shown with the Morthren that the actual embeds will be photographs of war crimes being committed.

The reason I think the introduction is handled badly is that later, when Galt summons his leadership team to a meeting, he’s shown to be confident, tough, and self-assured, referring to his employees as “soldiers” and coming down hard on them for their failures before ordering them to the Van Order institute for a corporate retreat that will rid them of their weaknesses. It would’ve worked a lot better, I think, if we’d led off with the image of Galt as a strong and confident leader, and only later shown him regress to indecisiveness and self-doubt in Van Order’s presence. There seems to be an underlying theme here of a basic contradiction inherent in Van Order’s style of self-help: that while the content of Van Order’s message calls for self-reliance, self-responsibility, and taking control of one’s life, his technique leaves his disciples conflicted, weak-willed, and utterly dependent on external validation. This will have some really interesting effects as we get to the climax. It’s a really cool idea… But the way it’s been slotted into the plot, it’s hard to tell if it’s intentional. I think it is, but since this contradiction is never addressed by anyone in the narrative, doesn’t end up figuring into how the story unfolds, you almost get the idea that Van Order and his philosophy were imported from a different story. This episode really needs a scene — probably right at the end of the episode — where someone who can speak from a position of moral authority says something like, “Van Order may have been an evil alien clone trying to manipulate you into becoming a monster, but the things he taught you, about taking responsibility for your actions and taking control of your own destiny, are still valuable messages. Remember the lesson, forget the man.” But it never comes. In fact, the character of how people outside of Van Order’s circle call him out suggests that they object to the message as much as they do the technique. When Kincaid is derisive toward Mindy’s vidbox, he doesn’t call her out for the way her dependence mirrors drug addiction; instead, he mocks the content of it.

Also, Galt demands that his “soldiers” commit themselves to a “holy crusade” with him, or else take a walk. Dude. You run an ad agency. Your holy crusade it to shill for cologne and massage oil.

Meanwhile, the rest of the cast has their own subplot going on, in a minor sort of way. Blackwood and Suzanne have been developing a remote control device that can disable a Morthren watcher. By studying a lump of green alien stuff — no explanation of what it is or where they got it — they’ve built a device that kind of looks like a tuning fork stuffed down the end of a remote control. There’s something strangely familiar about the image of Blackwood holding a tuning fork, even if it doesn’t really fit at all with Jared Martin’s rough-and-tumble man-of-action persona.

Because “Kincaid doesn’t believe in the scientific method,” they’re on their own with this. Besides, Kincaid’s got a date to get ready for. Debi helps him pick out a tie. It’s nice to see Debi in an episode that isn’t really “about” her. And even nicer, the team does involve her to a limited extent, with several scenes where she joins in on discussions and they explain what they’re doing to her. There’s one big disappointment with Debi in this episode, though, and you can probably guess where it’s going to come up.

In another bit of “For the sake of keeping the show to forty-two minutes, we’ll just conveniently smush all the plot elements together,” while Kincaid goes to pick up Mindy at Hardy Galt, Blackwood and Suzanne independently go to Hardy Galt to catch the watcher outside. They do not cross paths, nor is it ever indicated how Blackwood and Suzanne know to find a watcher there, nor did they think to mention to Kincaid that there was a watcher hanging out in front of his girlfriend’s office. In their defense, it’s not clear that they are actually aware of where they are when they catch it. Blackwood’s device works perfectly, and they bag the flying green semi-organic glowing thingy without anyone on the street taking any visible interest.

To Be Continued…

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• War of the Worlds is available from amazon.