Okay, I’ll say it. Uncle.
I tried. I really tried to watch the whole thing. Last time I posted, I said I had one more episode on disc one and that I was going to at least watch that before calling it quits. But I couldn’t even bring myself to do that. Season two is just… so, so bad. So bad it makes the crappy first season seem like gold by comparison. I fully intended to at least watch that last episode, but when the time came, I just couldn’t. I thought maybe I’d watch it the following week, but nope. Week after week, this went on, and I felt like I couldn’t write about anything else till I’d finished all the episodes, hence no new posts. Well, okay. I’m throwing in the towel. Maybe someday I’ll polish it off, but it probably won’t be anytime soon.
It’s kind of a shame, too. I have to confess that one of the main reasons I bought the collection was that I had always been curious about season two. I’d never watched any of the episodes, although I’d caught snippets here and there and was somewhat intrigued. I had heard that the premise of season two was that the Earth had been overrun by the aliens and Blackwood was leading a ragtag band of rebels against the aliens. That not only sounded cool, but much more in keeping with the novel.
In Book II, chapter VII, “The Man on Putney Hill,” the narrator encounters an artilleryman he’d met in a previous chapter. The artilleryman outlines a plan to resist the invaders by setting up bases in the sewers. Together, they will recruit more survivors, watching and learning from the aliens, collecting stores of knowledge where they can until they can mount an effective counter-attack, perhaps even taking control of some of the Martian War machines and mounting a real offensive. Right here we have a premise for a War of the Worlds TV series that I would absolutely watch. And season two easily could have played into this.
In season one, Quinn had already told Blackwood that a new invasion force was on the way. Season two could have opened with the arrival of that invasion. The season finale had also introduced a new race of aliens, enemies of the Mortaxians, who wanted to harvest humans for food. This also harkens back to the novel, in which the Martians fed on the blood of humans. Having two races of invaders fighting over Earth could have been interesting too, with humanity caught in the middle. There was a lot of potential there, and it’s a real shame it was wasted.
One might argue that they never would have had the budget for such an ambitious concept, but I disagree. Going completely on the cheap, they could have used stock footage from the movie for many of the effects. Or, if they wanted to splurge on an impressive season opener, they could have created new special effects for the premiere and then recycled the footage for the remainder of the season. Many of the episodes would see Blackwood and Ironhorse or whoever else sneaking around in the woods or in ruined backlots and such, every so often cutting to a stock shot of a war machine on patrol. It could be done very easily, with big fx set pieces only occasionally needing to be freshly created. Sure, the premise deserves better than to be done on the cheap like that, but those were the conditions, and I think I would have been satisfied with it, especially at the time, when expectations from TV shows were lower than they are now.
But alas, they did what they did, it was disappointing, and there it is. And I’ve got other stuff on my mind. Peace out, War of the Worlds. You were fun for a while, but it’s time to move on.
It Came From the 20th Century 