Update June 6

Streaming News

The Cinemaholic likes to tease us a bit, telling us first where War of the Worlds Season Two will NOT be streaming.

But eventually they tell us what we need to know:

Is War of the Worlds on Amazon Prime?

You can head here to watch ‘War of the Worlds’ on Amazon Prime if you are subscribed to Epix on the platform.

Where to Watch War of the Worlds Online?

‘War of the Worlds’ is available on live T.V. streaming platforms such as YouTubeTV, SlingTV, and Philo. You can also stream the science-fiction show on AppleTV and the official website of Epix.

How to Stream War of the Worlds for Free?

Epix, DirecTV, and AppleTV offer a seven-day free trial, while YouTubeTV comes with a fourteen-day free trial. You can stream the show free of cost on these platforms during the trial period. However, we encourage our readers to watch their favorite shows and movies online only after paying for them.

Gabriel Byrne as Bill Ward and Daisy Edgar-Jones as Emily

Another Gabriel Byrne Interview

This one is from The Daily Herald, a Chicago outlet. Spoilers ahead, so be careful. Gabriel puts Season Two in perspective and notes “I think people will find Season 2 really gripping and exciting.”

We think so, too! heart

Byrne allows that the “War of the Worlds” theme of a global crisis has special relevance during the coronavirus pandemic, though he adds that “hadn’t happened when we shot Season 1, and people were speculating on what the nature of the aliens was. Of course, they understood that at some level, it was metaphorical. Some thought it stood for corporate power or the environment.”

Resuming production during the pandemic was “a risk, for sure,” notes Byrne. “We were the first major production to go back, I suppose, and we were being watched by a lot of production companies to see how it went. We were really lucky to a great extent because we were in a very controlled studio environment. We were tested every single morning … the extras, the costumers, everybody.”

As Season 2 opens, Bill is “carrying the grief of the death of his son and the death of his (former) wife,” Byrne explains. “Part of his motivation to solve this crisis is to pay tribute to their memory. When you have something to play like grief, you don’t have to emphasize it very much. It’s an internal journey, and the audience knows.”

During the first “War of the Worlds” season, Byrne enjoyed working closely with “Downton Abbey’s” Elizabeth McGovern, who played Bill’s ex-spouse Helen. The character met her fate in a confrontation with an alien. “We both knew our time was limited,” Byrne recalls. “I did miss her company the second season, I have to say. We’re good friends anyway.”

With other series experience including “In Treatment” and “Vikings,” the Irish-born Byrne reports his own familiarity with “War of the Worlds” dates back to reading the Wells novel long ago.

“As with a lot of books you read in your teens, I didn’t really ‘get’ it, but the story was fascinating. Then, someone gave me a present of the famous Orson Welles radio broadcast and I thought, ‘What an imaginative vision.’ He broke the boundary between fiction and reality, but this version is up-to-the-moment, and I think people will find Season 2 really gripping and exciting.”

I’m going to save us. Or die trying, as someone has noted. wink

June 5

Beginning Sunday, June 6, on premium cable channel EPIX in the USA!

They’re Back! Our heroes and their enigmatic enemies from outer space are set for another eight episodes of mysteries, chills, possible death and destruction, and lots of survivor bonding.

And, according to the EPIX website for the series, you can watch all episodes of Season One for FREE.

We can’t wait! To help with the waiting, we have an interview with Gabriel Byrne, who plays the grieving and very focused neuroscientist Bill Ward, and HeyUGuys Stefan Pape. And we also have a splendid recap of Season One to jog your memory and prepare you to jump right into the action and scariness of Season Two!

Interview

Recap of Season One

This in-depth recap of Season One of War of the Worlds over at Den of Geek provides all of the details that might be a bit hazy for you now that so much time has passed. You can always binge the season (see above), because it is only 8 episodes, but if you don’t have time for that, this will help put you in the frame for the beginning of Season Two. Louisa Mellor is the UK Television Editor for Den of Geek and her work on this recap is fantastic, so enjoy! The images below are mostly my own screencaps from Season One but, (don’t tell anyone) I’m quoting the entire Den of Geek article to make it easier for you to translate, if you need to, and read. wink

What happened last time on War of the Worlds? With spoilers, here’s everything you need to remember about the UK-French sci-fi dystopian drama before season two lands…

The first thing to remember about Howard Overman’s moodily atmospheric War of the Worlds is that if novelist H.G. Wells were here today (and had the required TV streaming package), he probably wouldn’t recognise it as his story. Aside from an alien invasion that wipes out much of Earth’s population, the TV drama had little crossover with Wells’ novel. Instead of tripods with heat rays, it had cyborg dogs with machine gun heads. Instead of a solitary journalist wandering around Woking, it had a large cast of scientists, soldiers, teenagers and others, spread across the UK and France. Instead of dealing with themes of colonial imperialism, it was mostly about family and loss. And instead of red weed-spreading Martians it had… well, that’s the question. Ahead of season two’s arrival on Epix in the US and Disney+ in the UK, here’s the story so far…

Emily’s Eyesight and Alien Tattoo Connection

The series one cliff-hanger appeared to reveal that the aliens behind the invasion were human, and dying. When London teenager Emily (played by Daisy Edgar-Jones) entered an alien ship, drawn there by what seemed to be her psychic link to the aliens, she saw a humanoid with the exact same circle-inside-a-circle tattoo as her. In some mysterious way, the invaders were connected to her.

Before the invasion, Emily had been blind as a result of degenerative condition Stargardt disease. After the alien ships landed, whenever she was close to a ship, or to the killer cyborg dogs that formed the invaders’ vanguard, Emily regained her sight in black and white. The murderous cyborgs didn’t attack her, and when she touched one, she had a vision of herself with a young man she didn’t recognise. Emily could feel what the aliens were feeling: they had come to Earth because they wanted to live. 

Bill, Helen, the London Survivors, and the Biological Weapon

Emily Gresham was part of a group of survivors in central London, which included her mother Sarah (Natasha Little) and younger brother Tom (Ty Tennant). The family had survived the aliens’ brain-destroying magnetic wave because they were in an underground car park when it was triggered. Anybody underground, underwater, or surrounded by metal survived. That left the Gresham family (whose dad Jonathan was in Paris at the time of the attack and also survived the wave when his taxi drove into the river), neuroscientist Bill (Gabriel Byrne) and his ex-wife Helen (Elizabeth McGovern), who were in a metal elevator at the time of the wave, and former child soldier Kariem (Bayo Gbadamosi), a refugee who’d entered the UK smuggled inside a tanker. The group joined up with hospital worker Ash (Aaron Heffernan), whose pregnant fiancée had died in the first attack. 

Bill and Helen’s son Dan had also survived the wave in a government bunker, but he was killed by the cyborg dogs soon afterwards. When Dan’s parents discovered his body, Helen made Bill promise to find a way to destroy the aliens. They took an inactive cyborg dog to Bill’s university laboratory where he performed tests and discovered that it contained a very simple organic organism and therefore was just a foot soldier created by the real invaders, who had yet to show themselves. Bill planned to develop a biological weapon that would wipe out the invaders, but before he could, Helen was shot dead by one of the cyborgs. Emily was unharmed in the attack, which made Bill mistrust her and her mysterious connection to the aliens. 

Sacha’s Incestuous Origins and Alien Connection

Meanwhile, in Paris, Emily and Tom’s dad paired up with Frenchwoman Chloe (Stéphane Caillard) to travel together in safety. He wanted to return to his family in London and she wanted to find her teenage son Sacha (Mathieu Torloting), who was being raised by her parents. In Amiens, Chloe found her parents dead, but Sacha and her older brother Noah alive. It was revealed that Noah, who was suffering from the early stages of muscular dystrophy, was Sacha’s father as well as his uncle. He had raped his sister when she was 15 years old, resulting in Sacha’s birth.

When Sacha learned what Noah had done, he allowed him to be killed by a cyborg dog, and gradually became more and more untrustworthy and violent. Sacha had survived the brain-frying wave despite not being underground or underwater, and shared the same connection to the cyborg dogs as Emily. They didn’t attack him, and when he touched one, he saw a vision of himself with a pregnant future version of Jonathan’s daughter Emily, whom he recognised thanks to a family photo he stole from Jonathan. That trio ended the season on their way to the UK to help Jonathan find his family, but secretly, Sacha was really going there to find Emily. 

Astrophysicist Catherine and the Observatory survivors

Also in France, at the Grenoble Observatory, scientist Catherine Durand (Léa Drucker) was investigating the alien invasion. She learned that they had landed on Earth exactly one year after her team of astrophysicists had sent a signal into space containing a recording of the Nick Cave song ‘Into My Arms’, which the aliens had intercepted. During that time, the aliens had completed a full scan of the Earth and its people’s DNA. 

The Observatory was protected by a group of soldiers led by Colonel Mokrani (Adel Bencherif) with whom Dr Durand started a romantic relationship. Her drug addict younger sister Sophia (Emilie de Preissac) had also found her way there, having survived the alien attack by hiding in a mountain tunnel. The estranged sisters reunited, and Sophie brought with her a young British boy named Theo, whose family had been killed by the aliens. 

Why Did They Take the Babies?

Catherine Durand traced the signal and found the aliens’ mothership in the atmosphere. She also theorised that the aliens and the Cyberdogs communicated using a neurological network, which she was able to disrupt by broadcasting at a special frequency, which disarmed them. It was this neurological network that Emily and Sacha were somehow able to tap into, enabling them to know what the invaders were feeling.

As well as machine-gunning the surviving humans, the Cyberdogs had another modus operandi. In London, they stole several new-born babies from Ash’s hospital ward – infants that were later seen alive in incubators on the alien ship Emily entered in the finale. The Cyborgs were also seen murdering pregnant women to steal their unborn babies. 

If the pregnancy vision Sacha saw showed his and Emily’s future child (instead of hers and Kariem’s, with whom she’s in a romantic relationship), perhaps it grew up to be the first of a race of humans who left Earth to go into space. Because Sacha and Emily had inherited genetic diseases (Stargardt for her and Muscular Dystrophy for him, who was also a product of incest), perhaps their genes caused the new inbred race to become ill, requiring them to return to Earth to find a way to save themselves? Season two will tell.

War of the Worlds season two is currently airing on Canal+ in France, starts on Epix in the US on Sunday the 6th of June, and is due to arrive on Disney+ in the UK from July. 

To close out this “Let’s Get Ready for Another Invasion” posting, here’s another HeyUGuys interview, this one with Bayo Gbadamosi, Daisy Edgar-Jones, and Ty Tennant.

Screencaps and my version of “The Recap” for Episode One of Season Two will be ready as soon as I remember how to get this show on my computer.

Stay safe, stay calm, and stay ready for more Gabriel in the coming weeks! heart

6 Comments

  1. “I’m going to save us, or die trying?” -as *someone* has noted.

  2. Well, I really hope for Bill…that he saves us…and not the other thing. As I have said before…be nice, let Gabriel’s character live, please….

  3. He could save me and he wouldn’t have to die trying! I hope that I can see some of the new shows! Thanks Stella!

    • I hope you can too, Boo! If you can get to Amazon, you can do a 7-day free trial of EPIX Channel once the 8 episodes of War of the Worlds have aired. That’s one way to see it. Good luck! :bear:

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