Mini-cap: Harsh Realm E9 "Camera Obscura"

Camera obscura: A darkened chamber in which the real image of an object is received through a small opening or lens and focused in natural color onto a facing surface rather than recorded on a film or plate.


Last episode.  We start in church, with a Tom-voiceover about the origins and purpose of the Harsh Realm program as a military terrorism response training program that began with a nuclear explosion in virtual reality NYC.  4.5 million digital people were obliterated in 3.2 seconds and "they were the lucky ones."  The Harsh Realm world arose out of the ashes of the nuclear blast.  Tom is now sifting through the ashes, looking for volunteers to help him fight against Santiago.  Instead he finds a guy who wants to pay him and Pinnochio lots of gold to protect him and his family.  They're living in a power plant in NYC, however, which is ground zero for the nuclear blast, so Pinnochio raises the price, despite Tom's protests that they aren't mercenaries.  Well, he isn't.


When they get to Stewart's hidey hole, they learn that his family, who controls the power plant, is in a wicked feud with the McKinley clan, who controls the Federal Reserve building across the street.  They eventually learn that Stewart and McKinley originally came to NYC after the fabled vault of gold under the Fed, but one of them doublecrossed the other and now it's all out war.  McKinley can't get down to the vault because the elevators need electricity - hence Stewart's control of the power plant.  McKinley offers to double what Stewart is paying so Pinnochio sides with him, leaving Tom in the Stewart camp.  Complicating things further, Stewart's daughter and McKinley's son have a little Romeo & Juliet thing going on.  Complicating things even further is the presence of a Catholic priest, horribly deformed from the radiation, who has found a data stream in his cathedral that shows him what will happen next, and he uses this information to manipulate and control the two families.


The priest tells Stewart to turn on the electricity long enough for McKinley to head down in the elevators, then turn it off, trapping him there.  Thing is, it's Pinnochio and Tom who go down.  They are being affected by the high levels of radiation and Pinnochio gets a little nuts, clawing at the brick walls, convinced that the vault of gold is down there.  Tom ends up knocking his friend unconscious and dragging him back to the surface.  There, he tells the two families that yes, the gold is down there but it is so heavily contaminated by the radiation that anyone touching it will sicken and die.  The boys get in their car and leave; the two families give up their dream of gold and leave the city too, abandoning the crazy priest to shout and slobber in the deserted streets.  Down below, the camera zooms in on the little hole Pinnochio made in the wall - the camera obscura shot, I presume - and the vault is full of glittering, glowing deadly gold.


And that's it.  That's all she wrote on this poor little failed show.  No resolution to Tom being stuck in the game, no actual progress made in hunting down Santiago, a total abandonment of the real world/Sophie storyline and worst of all, we haven't seen Dexter the digital dog in ages.  Who knows, with better acting and better writing, maybe this could have worked.  The source material was a comic book, but it was more a noir/detective story, unraveling mysteries in the game world, not the military focus that the television show had.  I'm not inclined to go read the original but I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has how different and/or better the comic was.


Previously on Harsh Realm

Mini-cap: Harsh Realm E8 "Cincinnati"

In the Harsh Realm version of Cincinnati, Ohio, Tom, Pinnochio and Florence have a man on his knees with a bag on his head.  They pull off the bag: it's Santiago.

72 hours earlier:  Ah, a voiceover from Tom explaining how no one has tried to stand against Santiago until Native American rebels in Cincinnati took over an army depot.  Santiago sends Waters against them.  Outside the city, Escalante, the Republican Guard soldier whose life Tom saved in the last episode and who is now apparently sympathetic to their cause somehow, tells the gang that Santiago is planning to assassinate the rebel leader himself.  Tom sees this as an opportunity to grab Santiago for themselves.

Here's the thing - this episode is rife with those dang voiceovers, Tom droning on and on about Santiago's inner thoughts instead of trusting the audience to be smart enough to pick up on it from the acting and the story. STOP WITH THE EFFING VOICEOVERS!  The rebels plan to move their leader to a safe house; Santiago plans to ambush the convoy; Tom, Pinnochio and Florence plan to ambush the ambush, laying out explosive charges.  Santiago's men attack the rebel motorcade and Tom sets off the charges, blowing up shit indiscriminately.  There's a firefight.  They think they got Santiago but no, he's run off into the underbrush.  He finds a wounded soldier who says he's got a [miraculous gadget that seals up the worst wounds].  Santiago heals the guy's gut wound, then uses the gadget to (1) grow skin over the guy's whole face, suffocating him (Fringe used that to good effect in S1) and then (2) modify his own appearance so that he sort of but not really looks like himself anymore.  That's a handy gadget!  Santiago runs off deeper into the forest.

Back at Capital City, Waters thinks Santiago is dead but is reluctant to take control of the army.  Meanwhile, the Native American rebels think that Tom, Pinnochio and Florence, whom they have captured, are the erstwhile assassins.  Also meanwhile, Santiago trades clothing and dog tags with an old guy, then leads the rebels to him and after they shoot the old guy, everyone thinks that they've really killed Santiago.  The real Santiago manages to get himself a janitorial job with the rebels so he can keep an eye on their leader.  The rebels decide to hang Tom, Pinnochio and Florence but Florence manages to get them all free.  They and Escalante infiltrate the rebel HQ where the disguised Santiago sees his traitorous soldier and kills him.

It's kind of confusing and a little boring and I'm not really paying attention as Santiago keeps changing his identity and no one has any names.  Needless to say, the Santiago with the bag over his face is not actually Santiago but the rebel second-in-command, whose identity Santiago has stolen in order to get close to the rebel leader to stab him.  The rebel insurrection is quickly put down without their leader. Later, back at Capital City, Santiago puts his own face back on and demands that Waters bring him Tom and Pinnochio.

One episode left, thank goodness / previously on Harsh Realm

Mini-cap: Harsh Realm E7 "Manus Domini"

Two things, before I start this mini-recap.  First, "manus domini" is translated to mean "hand of God" and this episode tries to explore faith a bit, as in is there a God at work in a virtual reality made up of computer code?  Second - and I'm not saying the first thing is the cause of the second thing - this was another friggin' boring-ass episode.  Add that to the less than stellar acting and I can totally see why Harsh Realm was cancelled.  And yet, here we are, so let's begin!  Also: the third thing (there's a third thing) is that this episode is WAAAAAAAAAY heavy on Tom's effing voiceover, as he narrates a letter he's writing to Sophie, exploring the whole God-in-the-machine thing.  I hate those droning voiceovers.

Tom and Pinnochio are searching for/chasing after Florence, who has taken it into her head to go sprinting off through the Maryland forest.  She is searching for a group (coven/cult) of silent healing women like herself.  She finds where they were, and a man is there, saying that his son is sick, can she help?  Florence attempts to heal the boy but he isn't really sick; the man wallops her upside the head with a stick.  When she regains consciousness, she's tied up: some scruffy thugs think she can lead them to the "sisters" - seems Santiago will not tolerate the women's healing or their faith in a higher power.

Meanwhile, the boys follow Florence's trail through a field and soon learn it's a minefield, as Pinnochio steps on a mine.  Tom tries to defuse it but BOOM!  They are badly hurt.  The healing sisters appear, fix Tom up right there in the field, and drag Pinnochio off for further treatment.  When he wakes up, in a barn somewhere,  he is being tended to by a pretty young sister.  Problem is, one of his legs got blown off and it is beyond their ability to heal; every time a sister heals someone, it takes a lot out of her physically - the worse the wound, the harder it is for the sister to bounce back.  Pinnochio is so angry, upset, depressed about his leg.  And for good reason: when he was a real-world soldier, he stepped on a mine in Yugoslavia and lost both his legs, and pretty much half his face.  Soon after that, he volunteered for Harsh Realm so he could be whole again.  This loss is too much for him to bear.  He looks for his gun - I just need one bullet - and when the sisters look at him reproachfully, he scoffs at their belief that they are doing God's work: no God in the game!

Tom is still out in the minefield.  A lone soldier, scouting for one of Santiago's squadrons, finds him and they tussle, landing on another mine.  This time Tom manages to defuse it, and also gets the better of the soldier, relieving him of his gun.  Tom runs off to try to find Florence and Pinnochio.  He finds her but manages to get captured his own self.

Pinnochio is lurching around on a crutch, looking for another mine in the field to finish the job, sees the rest of the squadron show up.  He hobbles back to the sisters and says he'll help them.  When the soldiers move off, the sisters go out to the minefield and collect a bunch of mines.  Later, the bad guys arrive at the farm where Pinnochio and the sisters are hiding out, Florence and Tom in tow.  The bad guys step on the mines Pinnochio planted and there's a lot of gunfire, with both Pinnochio and another soldier getting shot.  Florence, showing no ill will, heals the soldier.  Pinnochio gets taken back into the barn where he woke up before, and the pretty sister kisses him and then regrows his leg for him.  He wakes up and catches her as she falls into his arms, dead and then digitized, having sacrificed herself for him.  Tom closes us out with a voiceover, saying that he (and possibly Pinnochio too) now has renewed faith.

But where was Dexter the dog in all this?  That's what I'm really interested in.

Previously on Harsh Realm / next time on Harsh Realm

Mini-cap: Harsh Realm E4 "Kein Ausgang"

Google German translation: Kein ausgang = no output

Seriously, I hate these voiceovers.  Someone needs to goose Tom, get a little energy into his voice.  Anyway, the gang is looking for a certain assassin, one of the first men sent into the game to take out Santiago: one Captain Wolf.  They're out in the boonies somewhere and Dexter runs off into the woods.  When Tom and Pinnochio chase after him, they encounter some weird computer code/glitch so that Mute Girl/"Florence" and the car are gone when they go back to the road.  Also, they seem to be back in World War II.

A troop of U.S. GIs, including Doug Savant, desperately trying to butch it up, captures our boys, thinking they're German spies.  Tom notices something weird[er] right off, however, when he catches Doug Savant reciting the VCs' lines before they speak.  The soldiers lock Tom, Pinnochio and Dexter in a storeroom where they find a little VC boy hiding in the woodbox; Pinnochio finds a pinup of Betty Grable and tucks it into his vest (ha!).  He explains to Tom that this is a battlefield simulation, an early version of Harsh Realm, that apparently someone forgot to delete.

The boys try to escape but there's no way out of the simulation.  Doug Savant/"Scott Somer" tells them that he's been stuck in here for 18 months.  When Pinnochio learns his name, he nearly rips Somer's throat out because Somer was in Desert Storm with him and got four of his men killed.  When everyone settles down, they brainstorm that since the objective of the simulation is to capture the bridge over the river, maybe the simulation will end if they blow the bridge up.  Or, another option is the simulation crashes and kills them all.

That night, they sneak out and set the explosives on the bridge.  Dexter and the VC kid wander out onto the bridge after them and Tom gets captured by ze Germans as he's shooing them to safety.  The kid makes it back to Pinnochio; Dexter scurries off the side of the bridge in a hail of bullets.  Some wants to blow the bridge anyway - nearly frantic to get out of this simulation - but Pinnochio won't let him.  He's going after Tom.

Tom is beaten/interrogated by ze Germans for a while until the ranking officer comes in: it's Captain Wolf, the assassin they've been looking for.  Wolf says that he actually prefers the simulation to Harsh Realm (it helps that he speaks German).  He also says that the boys shouldn't blow up the bridge - which Tom takes to mean that the jump-port (the escape switch out of the simulation) is located there.  Wolf leaves, giving Tom a knife with which to cut himself free.  Shortly thereafter, Pinnochio shows up and Tom takes him to see Wolf.  Meanwhile, Somer can't stand it any longer and tracks down another detonator, determined to blow the bridge since he doesn't know about the jump-port.

When Tom, Pinnochio and Wolf get to the bridge, Somer has lit the fuse.  Pinnochio goes for the fuse while Wolf and Tom cover him, but Pinnochio gets tagged and falls off the side of the bridge.  Wolf gets shot and killed, but before he expires, he tells Tom that the jump-port is off the side of the bridge, right where both Dexter and Pinnochio went over.  Tom makes a dash for it, falling into the jump-port just as the bridge explodes.  Somer tries to follow but gets caught in the explosion instead.

In the aftermath, Tom, Dexter and Pinnochio have made it back to Harsh Realm where Florence is patiently waiting by the car.  Somer, however, reawakens back in the simulation.  There is no escape for him (except doesn't he now know where the jump-port is and can go there since the simulation seems to have reset?).

Mini-cap: Harsh Realm E3 "Inga Fossa"

In the real world, the army is worried about keeping their Harsh Realm program a secret - Sophie is asking too many questions.  Also, Sophie's voiceover is just as boring and sucky as Tom's are.  The Woman-In-Black who gave Sophie Pinnochio's dog tags works for the military in I-Corps; Sophie follows her as she leaves work one day and drives to an army supply depot.  Once inside one of the warehouses, WIB hooks herself up to a machine and is transported [somehow - it's not clear/evident] to Harsh Realm.  Once there, she meets with Santiago.  She's on good terms with him but is not actually on his side - she's working against both the Army and Santiago?  What's her game?  He gets all intense when he asks if she's uncovered the leak yet but she plays it cool.

Outside Santiago City, Tom, Pinnochio and Mute Girl are looking for Freddy the Forger in a club where illegal "zip-fights" are being held.  Zip-fights are actually less exciting than those motorized skateboard fights with knifes on Max Headroom: they're holographic zip-files that holographically bludgeon each other.  Whatever.  Pinnochio finds Freddy, who is S&Mishly chained to a guy who doesn't want to share his pet, so Pinnochio beats the crap out of him.  The army busts in and Tom, Pinnochio and Freddy scarper off, Freddy dropping a bunch of his forged ID chips.  MG tries to gather the chips up and gets nabbed by the army.

The boys manage to find a glitch in the game code and slip into some blank, unprogrammed game space where they wander in the dark until they catch a glimpse of Waters in the latrine.  They bust through the wall - scaring the piss literally out of Waters - and carve the ID chip out of his chest.  They need it to access the building in Santiago City where Santiago keeps the portal between the two worlds.  Tom steals a Humvee and they head for the city.  Later, WIB commends Waters on achieving his objective and smooches him.  They do it on the conference room table.  When she notices the wound on his chest, he smirks that it was all part of the plan to catch Tom.

Once in the city, the boys stop in at the apartment of Freddy's contact to (a) steal his clothing and (b) cut the ID badge out of his chest.  When they come back out, the Humvee has been towed so Pinnochio tells Tom and Freddy to take the bus. He's not going with them - he doesn't want to go back to the real world for some reason.  When the bus pulls away, however, Waters is there with a squadron and they nab Pinnochio, taking some time to beat the snot out of him.  Apparently Pinnochio used to have Waters's job before he was insubordinate to Santiago and there are some lingering hard feelings.

WIB watches Tom and Freddy go up to the fourteenth floor where the portal is; she waylays them there, telling them that it's a trap.  She hands Tom the message from Sophie and tells him that Santiago's master plan is to destroy the real world so that Harsh Realm is all that is left.  Tom doesn't care: he wants to see his girl.  The alarm sounds.  WIB begs Tom to stay in Harsh Realm and defeat Santiago.  When Santiago arrives at the portal room, only poor Freddy is there, WIB and Tom having disappeared.  Freddy gets dragged off and I'm guessing his VC gets terminated.  In a droning voiceover, Tom tells Sophie that he's going to stay in Harsh Realm and take down Santiago.

Then, inexplicably, Tom waltzes into the jail where MG, Dexter, Pinnochio and dozens of other people are being held.  He lets them all out.  Pinnochio snarls: "She got to you, didn't she, Inga?"

Real world:  When Inga/WIB returns to the real world, where her real body has been lying on a gurney in that huge warehouse, Pinnochio's RW body is on the gurney next to her: his face and body have terrible burn scars and it looks like he's lost an eye.  No wonder he doesn't want to leave Harsh Realm.

Meanwhile, back at Santiago's headquarters, he's getting ready to conquer New Jersey and add it to the other five states he currently controls (looks like all of New England on the map).  WIB catches Waters as he heads out to lead the strike force.

Mini-cap: Harsh Realm E2 "Leviathan"

We open with a long shot of a farmhouse ... hey! That's the farmhouse from that awesome X-Files episode from S4, "Home," that never gets rerun because of the incest and the deformities and the violence and the incest.  But I digress.  A couple of rough-looking guys go up to the farmhouse, briefly terrorizing the woman and children inside.  They're looking for her husband.  One of the kids goes running across the field to warn his dad but the tough customers get there first and tell him that they're after a soldier he served with.  He cocks his shotgun (not a euphemism) but one of the rough guys zaps him with a remote control, effectively pausing him.  Oh, right - this is a VR game.

In the poverty-stricken "Pittsburgh Encampment," Tom, Dexter, Pinnochio and the mute chick roam around, looking for gas for Pinnochio's car.  Tom's voiceover drones on and on - it's very stiff and I'm not paying attention to it.

Back in the real world, Sophie goes to the army base and demands to know why Tom has been missing for over a week.  The army tells her that he's been KIA on a top-secret mission and his body is being shipped home. As she runs out, upset, a dark haired woman from an adjoining office watches her go.

Back in Harsh Realm, Pinnochio tracks down some gas but it's a trap set for him by those two rough looking guys.  They're bounty hunters and Santiago has a price on Pinnochio's head.  In the next scene, Santiago himself is at the farmhouse where the wife tells him that the bounty hunters took her husband away.  The soldiers drag the family outside and Santiago orders the house to be torched.

Real world:  After Tom's funeral, the dark haired woman approaches Sophie and tells her that the army is lying to her about Tom's death.  She gives Sophie Pinnochio's dog tags and Sophie's all, WTF is this?

Harsh Realm:  Out on the "Pennsylvania Frontier," Tom, Dexter and Mute Chick find Pinnochio's car and follow tracks to where the bounty hunters are holding their buddy, along with "Johnny," the dad from the farmhouse.  Johnny has been beaten pretty badly but he's still alive.  Outside the fence, Tom and Mute Girl plan to go in after nightfall; Dexter has other plans and tunnels under the fence, trotting right inside past a dozing bounty hunter.  There's a girl there, girlfriend/whore of one of the bounty hunters, and she sees the little dog, snatching him up and snuggling him, obviously desperate for some affection.  But on the outside, Tom hears yelping and foolheartedly rushes in to save his dog.  It's a trap, of course - Dexter is fine - and Tom gets tossed into the holding cell with Pinnochio and Johnny.  Nice rescue, snarks Pinnochio.

Meanwhile, Santiago's troops are torching the Pittsburgh Encampment.

Real world: Sophie follows the Mike Pinnochio lead and finds Johnny's real world wife.  The wife has been unable to learn anything about her husband's disappearance either but shows Sophie a photo of Johnny and Pinnochio's unit: each of these men have disappeared and are presumed dead.  Sophie thinks that fishy.

At this point, I was getting a little bored with the episode, so, in short, Mute Girl frees the boys and, with the help of the girlfriend/whore, they all escape just as the army closes in on them.  The girlfriend/whore gets shot but she's just a virtual character, so it's no big deal. The gang delivers Johnny to his VC family before heading off on the next adventure.

Real world:  The dark haired woman tells Sophie that she can get Tom a message [somehow].  In a droning voiceover much like her fiance's, Sophie tells him - and us - that he needs to get back to her from wherever he is: she's pregnant.

Mini-cap: Harsh Realm E1 "Pilot"

I don't think I remembered that Harsh Realm ever existed.  It certainly wasn't around for long: nine episodes were made (based on a comic book by James D. Hudnall and Andrew Paquette (thanks, Wikipedia); developed by Chris Carter of The X-Files fame) but only three aired before FOX yanked it.  And I can't remember what prompted me to move it up my Blockbuster.com queue.  Be that as it may, I've got a DVD of it and might as well run through it for you.  The pilot was a little confusing and hard to hear - I'm particularly fuzzy on names - but it's got several ringers cast-wise and by the end of the episode, I was ready to watch another one.

E1 begins in war-torn Sarajevo, 1994.  A solider, name of Waters, tries to help a little girl and gets pinned down inside a derelict building that U.S. forces are going to bomb the bejeezus out of to clean out the rabble.  Waters's buddy, Tom Hobbes, goes in after him and saves his life, Waters's gut shot notwithstanding.

Fast-forward to Fort Dix, New Jersey, "present day," which would be 1999.  Tom Hobbes, now a lieutenant, is just a couple weeks away from his discharge and eagerly looking forward to moving to California with his fiancee, Sophie, and dog Dexter (a fairly charismatic Jack Russell terrier), when the military sucks him into one last mission.  They've got this virtual reality (hereinafter referred to as "VR") training program that they want him to test.  More to the point, they want him to try to defeat the current high scorer, Omar Santiago.  Tom puts on the headphones and watches the introductory video - narrated by the extremely recognizable dulcet tones of Gillian Anderson herself!

The video cuts off halfway through.  We the viewers know that Tom is now in the VR program but he hasn't figured it out yet.  He figures it out pretty quickly when people start shooting at him and blowing buildings up and when he tries to help a wounded guy, the wounded guy fades away in a blur of pixels.  He gets himself shot but a mysterious and mute woman finds him and heals him by laying on of hands.  Next, Tom finds his home at Fort Dix, but it's destroyed and empty, except for his dog, Dexter.  Then Tom hooks up with the cynical and cranky Mike Pinnochio (D.B. Sweeney!) who promises to take him to where Santiago is in exchange for Dexter, whom Pinnochio says he's going to eat. 

Pinocchio shows Tom a highly fortified fence around a bustling, well-lit city - Santiago City, because Santiago has hijacked the program and become the defacto despot, controlling all the power and money, and leaving rebels like Pinnochio and others to live in darkness outside the fence - and shows him where to get through.  Tom goes in (taking both Dexter and Pinnochio's car keys) and finds his old army buddy, Waters.  Waters is now working for Santiago: he too was given the same mission Tom was - to defeat/kill Santiago - but it's no use and now he's working for the guy just to stay alive since there's no way out of Harsh Realm.  And also, Waters is married to Tom's girl Sophie, or at least a virtual character (hereinafter "VC") version of her.  Tom has a tough time getting it through his head that VC Sophie isn't his actual girl, even when she doesn't know who he is, and runs off with her.

Soon enough Tom and Sophie get arrested by Santiago's men and comes face-to-face with Santiago himself, played by Terry O'Quinn, a/k/a John Locke from Lost.  Meanwhile, Pinnochio and the mute mystery woman are at a scruffy bar outside the fence, Pinnochio drinking steadily.  She writes on the dusty bar, "It's him," and Pinnochio grunts that he knew it from the moment he saw Tom - and they head into the city to rescue him.  As they're all escaping, Waters shoots and kills VC Sophie.  Tom is Very Angry about this, but Pinnochio drags him away.  Santiago shakes his head and tells Waters that he just made a big mistake as now Tom will never stop coming after them.

The last shot is of Tom in the real world, lying comatose on a gurney, sensors stuck to his head.  The camera pulls back and we see that he is not alone hooked up to Harsh Realm: he is in a warehouse-sized building and there are thousands of unconscious Harsh Realmers around him, stretching as far as the eye can see.