The title makes quite a bold promise. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t deliver.
The aliens have blocked off the city’s water supply in the middle of a heat wave. The city sends exactly two people into the tunnels to investigate and they’re handily dispatched by alien soldiers. With no water, the residents are going full Mad Max, ready to knife each other for a jug of water.
In the world of Team Blackwood, Debbie comes down with heat stroke, so they need to get her some water pronto. Kincaid says he knows a place and they take her to a church. The church doesn’t have any water, though, so I’m not sure why that’s a good idea.
Well, the aliens come through, though. They’ve been reading the Bible and they get the idea that if they perform some “miracles” they can get people to worship the Eternal. So they make water flow from the holy water basin and everybody’s just delighted. Then they stage a “healing” where a woman with distorted joints is suddenly fine.
They clone the preacher and his son, make it look like the kid dies, and then “resurrect” him. The people are whipped into a frenzy and Kincaid gets suspicious. He goes to investigate and learn the truth, quickly getting sidetracked and killing aliens.
Blackwood and Suzanne find alien tentacles in the basement and sort out that the aliens are behind the water miracle. Somehow they trace this into the tunnels and find the blockage. They meet up with Kincaid, have a shootout with the aliens, and plant charges to free up the blockage.
They find the real preacher and rescue him so he can duke it out with his clone in some kind of weird battle of wills that kills them both, along with the kid clone. The aliens vaporize the clones – in front of everybody – and then bail.
Then it finally rains, breaking the drought, which Harrison calls a miracle.
If my synopsis makes any of this sound remotely interesting, be assured it isn’t. The whole thing plods along like a tortoise on valium. There’s no suspense whatsoever, the characters are bland and uninteresting, and what little action there is fails to entertain.
Beyond that is the sheer strangeness pervading not only this episode, but the entire season so far. Why the hell is everyone dressed like it’s 1950? Why is there no color in the production design? Why does the church look like something you’d find in a third world country? Why does the city put so little effort into emergency relief efforts? Where’s the rest of the world? What city are we even in? What is the alien agenda? How many of them are there? Why does it feel like we’re in some kind of post-apocalyptic landscape when nothing has happened to indicate that an apocalypse has happened? So far, every episode has left me asking WHAT’S GOING ON?!!!
This episode was frustratingly bad. It may actually be the worst thing I’ve ever seen on television, and I’ve seen some pretty bad television. Season one of this show was a train wreck, a blend of bad writing and bad production quality that made Ed Wood look like a genius. But at least it had a sort of campy charm that made it somewhat fun. There’s none of that here. It has all the flaws of season one without being remotely fun or interesting. It tries to be dark and edgy but winds up just being bland and boring. I gotta be honest … I’m not sure if I’m gonna make it to the end of the series. There’s one more episode on this disc. I’m going to watch that. And then I may just have to call it quits. We’ll see.
It Came From the 20th Century 