The book rocked.  All of the alien corpses from the 1953 George Pal invasion were stuffed in barrels and hidden away at various nuclear waste dumps.  Their battle machines, a mystery to the government, were broken up and put in Raiders of the Lost Ark-style warehouses, along with various other sci-fi equipment recovered from the invasion. 

Then , one fine day in 1988,  a group of terrorists head out to a nuke dump with the idea of retrieving the waste and using it to terrorize US cities with what I guess would be dirty bombs (not very 1988, is it?).  In the ensuing gun battle with the guards, a few of the waste barrels get machine gunned.  This is all the Martians need to revive themselves and escape.

Turns out that the nuclear waste has destroyed the germs that killed them, see?  So as long as they keep themselves fully irradiated, the Martians will be able to survive.  This means that they need to constantly smear themselves with horrible goo. 

Using another clever trick, they are also able to crawl inside the skin of the dying human terrorists and use them to escape back to civilization where they begin a new mission -- freeing the other Martians scattered around the world, retrieving their battle machines and getting back into the invasion business.  (The pilot episode enjoys scantily clad, mousy terrorist girls and, best of all, a Martian battle machine rising from a buried bunker and zapping the fuck out of everything until our heroes figure out that it can be destroyed with spitballs and tin cans.  Drat, foiled again by those pesky humans!) 

Headed by a triumvirate called "The Advocacy," the Martians establish contact with Mars and get new orders from the super-duper Martian leader.  In the book, Foster goes into detail about the social status of the surviving Martians and builds some storylines undeveloped in the series where the warrior class, which answers to the scientist class, are pretty goddamned pissed off about the failed invasion and want to go rogue.  The Advocacy, in the book, are under fire from within and without, their power seemingly usurped by a shadow-Advocacy of Martian army officers.

In the series, they're all just standard bad guy aliens who hatch a plan and fail in every episode. 

Representing the Human race is Clayton Forrester, played by Jared Martin.  Forrester is the nephew of the main girl in the 53 film and remains scarred by the invasion, which he witnessed as a child. Ann Robinson reprises her movie role as the now-crazy Sylvia van Buren.  Can you do better than that?  Set up a TV series and get as many of the surviving stars from the 1953 film as possible? 

Forrester, living with this broken past, is a top astrophysicist at poopy-pants university.  Thanks to this show, I entered high school with plans to become an astrophysicist and took really hard math classes, which broke my soul and ruined my life forever. Forrester is recruited by a Cherokee colonel in the employ of the secrety secret US government.  So we get our space scientist, our tough guy Indian, a super computer hacker and bombshell biologist Brunette Boobs together at a big mansion that's sort of like the M.A.S.K. headquarters.  A secret battle between this crack team of Martian hunters and the evil aliens rages on while you and you and you go about your daily lives, unaware that a second terrible invasion is coming.  

Inexplicably, the populace has forgotten that the cities were all destroyed in 1953.  That would be okay if the series was something of a reboot, but they do go ahead and admit that the 1953 invasion nearly wiped us out.  So...okay.  I'll accept these idiot fucking flaws in the poorly constructed scripts that were written by a team of gerbils on PCP with pens stuck up their asses because, still, it's a pretty fun series.  At first.

Season two.  Let's call this the Rape of a Somewhat Promising Series.  All of a sudden, we flash forward 10 years to the apocalypse, kill half the cast (without showing how they died!), replace the Martians with Star Wars bad guys in tight grey jumpsuits and...I don't know.  Not a single scene in all of season two is memorable in the least.  

So while I was sitting there thinking, oh, god I just missed nine seasons, I'm blown out of my chair when the new Martians take the beloved comic relief of the Advocacy, burn them alive, and then turn to the camera like in a really bad street performance and say, "We are the new rullaaarz!"  Right, then.  Okay.  No, wait - what?

Space: 1999 did the same thing.  Season two:  All of the main characters are dead, and we'll just act natural.  Keep going, don't mention anything.  Martin Landau's still there, right?  No problem. Oh, and we fired every script editor and replaced them with...nine year old children.  Angry yet?  We'll cool you down with a scantily clad alien that can change into animals to save the day.  Except she changes into mice and sparrows and gets in even more trouble than the person she's trying to save.  Roll film! I won't even mention Galactica: 1980.  What's with low budget sci-fi shows and their second seasons?  Hey guys, you got a second season because we liked the first season.  We would actually want more of that, not a plotline set 60 years in the future starring puppet versions of your daughter's My Little Ponies. 

The Advocacy walked around in these wild radiation suits, issuing shrill orders to clumsy soldiers who inhabited the bodies of bikers and bums and evil Wall Street brokers, the radiation eating away at the skin and slime pouring out of the holes.  Fierce devotees of the "Morthern Deity," the head boss on Mars, they'd throw themselves into battle against our clever heroes, fail miserably, get blown up by A-Team like gadgets pieced together by Jared Martin, and yell out "To Life Immortal!" as their greeting (always a giveaway that the guy with the rotting flesh and questionable agenda sitting next to you at the bar may not be what he seems).

The second season aliens killed them all within about 90 seconds.  Cut to our heroes and it's just Jared Martin and Brunette Boobs who have survived...something that isn't being explained.  Roll film!  Seriously, can we, at least, get a little narration telling us what happened? 

The show was what we call a "gateway drug."  I think it's fair to say that I wouldn't have ever watched Highlander: The Series if not for War of the Worlds.  Philip Akin (he's our token black man) also played the token black man in Highlander.  Adrian Paul, who helped to ruin the second season as a replacement for our Cherokee tough guy, went on to become the Highlander himself.

Then there was Forever Knight.  Any young teenager watching Catherine Disher slink around in her polyester jumpsuit in season two just had to go on to that show where she played the kindly doctor helping Nick Knight recover from vampirism.  

With season one due on DVD in November, I can brush off my loose-fitting radiation suit.  Then I'll set up jerry-rigged, retro-fitted Martian technology in an old LA warehouse, summon the Morthern Deity, and scream "To Life Immortal!" whenever it tells me I must defeat the small group of poor actors selected by the US government to fight against my superior force of highly irradiated Martian soldiers with their small cache of laser guns and their fierce, suicidal devotion to my orders.  I'll watch my boys get fucked over by an egghead and a washed-up Indian armed with a jar of ammonia, a pistol and a really fast jeep. 

Wait, says the Morthern Deity.  We leveled the cities in 1953.  What's the matter?  Do we need to have an all-staff meeting and review some bullet points here?

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