all you new fandom members need to QUIET DOWN oh my god you're going to get us KILLED. we're happy to have you but if you keep talking about BULLSHIT like PUBLISHING fanfic for MONEY, Anne Rice is going to come back from the dead to KILL US. looking at YOU, maurauders fans, heated rivalry fans, byler fans...out here giving out interviews to news channels SHUT UP. we're going to have to start setting off firecrackers to keep the rent down.
I'm not saying companies should crack down on fanartists, that's the last thing I want, but I am saying that anyone who hears "you can't make money off fanfic, you can't make money off fanfic, you can't make money off fanfic" and then walks through a convention's artists alley might experience some extremely reasonable confusion.
I don't know if this is true. I don't know who any of these people are. I don't know if they knew Ms. Smith 30 years ago or if they are internet randoms making stuff up. LJ Smith was pretty young when she started getting published so there's not a huge window of time for her to write a lot of fanfic beforehand.
But google does bring up two titles: Witness and The Blink of an Eye, both published in the fanzine "Oblaque." Oh look, they're quite reasonable on ebay. The two stories are both dated 1990 on fanlore so... *checks release dates* after Night of the Solstice but before the first Vampire Diaries.
Looks like you may be able to read them here.
Blake's 7 is a British science fiction series, made about the time that Tom Baker was being Doctor Who. Blake is rebelling against the evil empire, gets captured, and is being transported to a prison planet or something when a mysterious alien ship appears. Blake and some other prisoners escape to the alien ship and find it empty with only a talking computer for company, so they use it to escape and continue their rebellion. It's not totally unlike Firefly if firefly was made at that time and without Whedon's banter writing.
Blake's 7 is notable for the fans yaoi-ing the heck out of Blake and the dark and grumpy Avon. They were such a popular ship that I knew about it before I understood the concept of shipping.
And Blake's 7 is being remade! It'll be a few years and it may still flounder as so many TV projects do, but it'll be interesting to see what happens.
(and seriously, if they do not get Morena Baccarin to play Servalan that'll be such a missed opportunity...)
Not sure what else to make of this other than damn it's tragic. If Ms. Smith was queer, and if she wanted to write queer stuff, she couldn't then but she could now except she can't because she's no longer with us. And she can't see if this Blake's 7 reboot's gonna be any good because she's no longer with us. Seriously grim reaper, this lady had stuff to do still you shouldn't've taken her.
He was drawing back in the 90s, on some not-in-English site or other with progression from early stuff that all looked like this:
With his skill growing until his art looked more like these:
But eventually he just kind of vanished, had whatever life circumstances that meant art was no longer on the front burner and these days I can't find a full gallery for him anywhere. He seems to have shifted to writing, and has a wattpad. He's still my favorite fanartist.
Chewing over things in the pilot that don't make sense, possibly starting to repeat myself, madness impends... I'm loving this so much.
-That last page though! So after seeing the kids get their powers two baddies say it’s “15%” and “it’s not enough” and “we’re behind schedule” and “We’re going to push—hard.” 15% of what, enough for what, behind what schedule, push how?!
First guess: only 15% of alien kids are showing powers and that’s not enough future super powered pawns to do the missions the government wants them for.
I feel like 15% should say something about how many aliens are in the town. 15% is not very many so there must be a lot of aliens if 15% of them is like, more than 3 people. 15% kind of makes more sense if there are no aliens in town, if instead the agents found some alien dna potion in the crashed ship and spiked the town’s water with it. Then it’d be 15% of thousands of people and the percentage would make more sense.
Also possible: Tia and Ben are only showing 15% of their full powers. That’s a weird way of saying it, these powers aren’t very percentageable. It’d be way more natural to say it like, “This isn’t their full abilities” or something. But this would make sense in terms of “15% of their powers is not enough for them to be able to fly the UFO like we want them to so we have to push them to get them to use their powers so they’ll develop and then they can fly the UFO.” That does make the “push” thing make sense...
The “schedule” could just be there’s a certain mission they need the kids to do, or the government demands the project show results by a certain time. It could also mean that an invasion of evil aliens is coming and the kids are being prepared to use their powers to fight it off.
I keep wondering if there will be a twist that Schoolcraft is herself an alien. Not sure how that would work out exactly it just seems like something the creators might pull just because they wanted a shocking twist.
-In the dream of the alien planet, Tia and Ben are chased by something unseen. Not just the stalagmites, that do move around and try to grab them but might just be terrain or animals. What is the unseen thing? The boss villain that destroyed the planet I guess maybe? I was not expecting to go potential intergalactic warlords here. Maybe it’s just a monster.
The whole alien planet dreams thing is weird. Magical dreams about a place hint that this is their true home, their destiny. But this alien planet is a scary destroyed place. So the message is “Man am I glad we’re not there anymore!”? It can’t be their true home because it’s not a safe place for them to live! And in the original Witch Mountain story their true home isn’t the planet they left, because that planet is gone, their true home is where their people are. And the Planet of the Two Suns was presumably a post-capitalist solarpunk utopia, because that was the world Alexander Key dreamed of even though those words weren’t invented during his lifetime.
It could also be a dream of the future, but Tia and Ben can see each other in the dream, which feels a lot more like they astrally traveled to the planet in realtime.
The whole thing is hard to make match up, just like the timeline...
-there’s a scene where Ben and Corey are googling “human puppeteering” to see if they can learn more about Ben’s power. They find a promising looking website that vanishes as they go to look at it. The agents deleted it so they wouldn’t see it.
This means 1)the agents knew this was a thing to watch out for, so it’s a known power the aliens can have not a one-off. And 2)someone out there also knows about this power and made a web site about it. The potential settlement of aliens? Though if they had a website you’d think the government could track them down, but maybe they’re in another country or something. Government can’t track down scammers in other countries so they wouldn’t be able to track down aliens there either I guess.
There seems to be plenty of puppeteering in fiction, there’s a whole tv tropes page. It's a villain power! But I’ve never heard of it in real life as a psychic power anyone thinks they have. Except... maybe as part of the “everyone is reading my mind” delusion that some very unfortunate people have? I can see that as possible. But it’s not like, a psychic power I’ve ever read about people training their minds to have like people try to learn telekinesis or mindreading. *deals out the zenner cards*
Happily my googling did not show up any kinky stuff, but I’m sure it’s out there...
But there is one example of real life pupeteering (kind of) in the first episode of White Rabbit Project Kari and Tori do a skit where they have electrodes stuck on their arms and connected together somehow so that every time Kari jerks her arm the electricity of the muscle movement zaps the same muscles in Tori’s arm so his arm makes the same movement. Then they go have a spaghetti dinner and Kari makes poor Tori spill stuff all over himself for a laugh. In the episode they called it mind control but it was just some amount of muscle control and only larger movements on larger muscles. But it is a little bit neat to have that in real life so I had to mention it!
-So this town. I’m assuming mostly ordinary people, a small number of aliens and alien kids, and a medium number of agents keeping an eye on them. That’s why the agents hide, they don’t want the ordinary humans to notice them either.
We have 4 agent hotspots: The garden center van, the bakery that doesn’t smell like baking, the auto repair shop that doesn’t repair cars, and the rich people who travel to ski but their skis aren’t used.
Because the garden center van was in the first minutes of the show I’m gonna guess it’s the most important thing the agents use. It seems to be Schoolcraft’s mobile spy base and she’s the main baddie. But is there a garden center or just the van? A plant nursery would be hard to keep up with since plants need care, unlike cars.
Hiding your secret base in an active business... so, a speakeasy? Do the agents have a password they have to say to get into the secret underground tunnels? Do all the agents know who else is an agent?
What are these spy businesses used for? I’m assuming they're all connected to the base under the mountain by passages and used to bring in supplies for the people experimenting on the UFO. The businesses are also places for the agents to have visible jobs without having to actually work, so they have free time to do sneaky spy stuff. And they’re a way that everyone from the secret base could come out and invade the town if they need to, they have doors all throughout the town.
The skiers. If they go skiing every weekend but aren’t really skiing, where are they? Are they down in the secret base? But presumably they drive away with skis on their car, that’s probably what Peter saw. So are they reporting in to Washington DC? Hunting for other alien settlements?
There’s also an agent working as the counselor at the high school but her job is clearly to watch for signs of powers among the kids.
I have a job now! It’s manual labor, so while my manos are laboring my brain can spend my whole shift trying to think of a good explanation for Tia and Ben’s powers. Because they’re weird. Why did the writers pick these powers?
Tia’s is less weird, it’s useful for the plot that she can learn people’s secrets but also guaranteed to freak her out and make her look like she’s losing her marbles. And if you interpret it as “seeing people’s truth” it’s quite spiritual. It gives her the opportunity to know when others are in trouble and try to help them.
But Ben’s is extremely weird because puppeteering people is a villain power. I mean, it’s moving someone’s body without their consent which is evil. And giving a teenage boy that power, a real teenage boy would probably puppeteer a girl to flash her chest or something, just because teenage boy + experimenting with new superpower. Thankfully Ben seems not to be a creep but he does have a bit of anger impulsivity issues, he punches people who deserve it but still, punching people easily spills over to punching people who only kinda deserve it... this could go to bad places, I'm saying.
In the plot Ben’s power can be used to stop attackers, which is useful, and maybe force people to unlock a door or something. In the pilot his power seems to be just “move you hand like this” but if it expands to “push the right buttons to stop the countdown” that would be amazingly useful.
So I’m trying to think how these powers will be used in the plot, and I’m still working on that.
But I did have a flash of inspiration about what the powers could be for in-universe.
They’re for piloting the UFO.
The UFOs are alive, they’re made of the same stone-that-turns-into-goop of the stalagmites just set into the shape of a spaceship. Tia’s power is used to interface with the ship, by “seeing its truth” she uses can monitor the condition of the ship and use its sensors to detect everything around the ship. Ben’s power is for piloting, he puppeteers the ship. That’s why the humans in the underground base can’t make it go, the control system is a person. That’s also why Tia and Ben are a mystical pair born on the same day; it takes a pair to fly the ship. The fact that their powers work on humans too is an unintended side effect.
I gotta say, “you were born to be a living component of a UFO” is not Witch Mountainy. At all. But it’s such a freaking neat idea! It’s cool! It explains the weird choice of powers!
Or... the people of the alien planet evolved alongside these obsidian creatures. The creatures did not have higher thought but they did have the ability to reshape their bodies and just ignore gravity, and a set of senses that could analyze atoms or something. The humanoids evolved the ability to telepathically connect with the creatures, so they could share each other’s senses and thoughts. They worked together. The creatures were happy to take whatever shape their new friends needed, and science advanced quickly on the planet. The humanoids moved past their species adolescence and reached a stable society with no war or scarcity, all species having enough habitat, and the people and creatures did their work and had plenty of time to read books and garden and make art and invent stuff that was just for fun. Eventually someone looked up at the stars and began to think about exploring other planets just to see what was out there. The creatures could shape themselves into spaceships, they’d already been doing asteroid mining and poked around on the moon.
But then something bad happened on the planet, maybe a disease spread among the obsidian creatures that turned them violent and destructive. The aliens set out to find the cure, and it’s an element common on Earth. Only the ship crashed and now the alien planet is in a sad state with the survivors hiding underground with as many animals and plants as they can protect, while the maddened obsidian creatures destroy the surface. As soon as the cure is brought back, things can be set right but the rescue party is not stuck in a town being exploited by human greed.
How’s that work? I kinda like that.
I’m also... my whole theme of “this town is full of aliens living under oppression” is the best way I could think of to explain the facts that need explained, but I don’t think it’s right. I don’t think it’s what the explanation would have been in the show. So I’m still letting my brain roam around sniffing for a better explanation. I wish this fandom was more than six people so other people could have theories lol. I posted the script on the facebook group and crickets! I’m having so much fun with this.
I had more thoughts. Of course I had more thoughts.
Extra thought about powers:
So there’s a very random scene where Tia walks out of school and sees the UFO in the sky. An undamaged version of the UFO that crashed. Then it turns out it’s just a helicopter-- I assume the camera cute to Tia gaping up at the sky and then she blinks and then we see the sky and it’s a helicopter. So no UFO, Tia was having a vision.
I think this is maybe part of her power, she sees people’s true selves appear and tell her their secrets, so this is a vision of the town’s secret. But if their dreams of the alien planet are dreams of the future, this could be a vision of the future. Either way, cool!
Can Tia see the astral spirits of animals?
What-all can Ben’s power do? He can puppeteer people but can he give more detailed commands like “take out the right key and unlock the door”? Because someone’s going to get locked up somewhere before the end of this story lol. Or will he upgrade to telekinesis of unliving objects?
Who else in town has powers? Logically there are probably other kids in the high school who just discovered their powers and are confused. Or there could be high school students who have joined the bad guys, happy to oppress their own people in exchange for a cushy life. An understandable if evil choice.
There have to be other adult aliens in town who are looking out for the kids and hoping to protect them from the agents.
And are there adult agents with powers? People who “graduated” from the town’s system for creating super powered spies and now use their powers to keep their fellow aliens in the fold. I expect the kids will encounter one of these when they succeed in sneaking into the secret base.
Which makes me wonder what the baddies’ whole plan is. What are all the steps the baddies take to get from a baby to a grown agent with special powers. They let the kids grow up normally so they come out mentally stable, they wait for a few of them to show powers because they don’t want to let non-powered ones in on the secret, then what? They have to turn these teens into dedicated agents, put them through some kind of navy seal training, and ensure their loyalty.
I wonder if Tia’s “New York University Summer Scholarship program” is actually recruiting, and Ben will win a scholarship too. Someone will take them aside and go, “You’ll be one of the elite, protecting the nation and its freedom, defeating terrorist plots and stuff. Don’t you want to help defeat terrorists? And you’ll also get to live in luxury except for not having your freedom. Oh, and the other choice is to live in a cell and get experimented on. So come do military training!”
And then everybody thinks Tia is in New York and the baddies send deepfake videos back to her friends so nobody worries about her. There could be other kids who this happened to, who never come home but they send plenty of emails and videos. Peter could investigate these people and discover there are a whole lot of them and it’s suspicious. Peter could look up people’s interests and realize that the video game nerd never mentions video games when he calls or something.
The other option is that after being accepted for this summer program it gets canceled because teens with powers are not allowed to leave the town, and that sudden cancellation sparks suspicion.
Back to the town, who else in the kids’ lives is an agent? I’m assuming lots of people, like Peter and Corey’s families, are ordinary people who just live in the town because it is a town, it needs an economy and people to run the plumbing and garbage trucks and stuff.
Probably Audrey has at least one friend who is just in her life to keep an eye on Tia. Once Tia starts to show powers this friend would react... how? Try to push the idea that Tia is becoming unwell and needs to be institutionalized or put on medications that are supposed to help but actually don’t? Try to push mother and daughter apart so Tia doesn’t have her mother’s support?
Tia and Ben share dreams, the two of them seem to be mystically a pair. Do all the aliens come in pairs? What happens to one member of a pair if the other one gets killed or hauled off to a cell to be experimented on?
Do the dreams of the alien planet evolve through the series? They must, because these dreams are how the kids learn more about what they really are. But what happens?
Do the stalagmites communicate? Are they even alive? They might just be terrain!
Do the kids see what the something in the clouds is? I’m guessing it’s a mothership but it could be a giant flying monster.
So far the alien planet is just a desolate landscape, lightning, and weird stalagmites, but as the kids wander through it will they find anything else? Ruined strictures? A lone survivor in a tattered cloak wandering the surface? An underground vault where the survivors who haven’t left the planet are hiding? I feel like there should be an obsidian tower because the planet kind of has a “black glass” theme but what the heck would be in the tower?
And maybe the devastation is only on part of the planet and if the kids wander far enough in their dreams they’ll find some kind of front line beyond which aliens are holding off the advancing destruction?
What’s in the base under the mountain? The UFO in a big vault, labs to analyze the bits cut off the UFO, diagrams of the UFO on the wall. Lots of surveillance cameras on screen showing different parts of the town. Files on everybody they’re watching.
Cells with alien captives being experimented on and brainwashed.
Barracks; people must live down there, though most of them probably live in the town. A garage for various vehicles that could chase our heroes around. 4-wheelers to get around on the mountain. Probably some drones. Corridors to run through.
There also must be more than one entrance. If there are lots of agents in the town then there are probably entrances in the basements of a lot of buildings. (Like the town of Hackdirt in Oblivion!) And there have to be ventilation shafts leading out to the sides of the mountain or connected to caves, because the people working in the secret base need to breathe.
Easter Eggs and making a real Witch Mountain story
Easter eggs they should’ve did:
-Ben’s harmonica. Seriously writers, there is no reason Ben can’t have a harmonica. Playing music would give him the vibe of the “soulful bad boy” which is I think what the writers were going for with him anyway, and be a clue to the audience that he is Tony. It wouldn’t have to be anything to do with his powers, he could just play it. They could give Corey a casual instrument too.
-put movies with The Rock on in the background if the diner has TVs. I’m sure Disney owns a few movies with The Rock that they could use.
-Tia’s star box is an item that only appears in the book and the first movie, and it’s the only object the kids have that came with them from their planet. In the movie it’s just a decorative thing Tia carries with her and the map is engraved in metal under the star decoration.
In the book it’s much more practical, it’s a purse and since Tia can’t talk she carries little notebooks and pencils in it so she can communicate. It has a false bottom and under that their people hid money and a scrap of a paper map giving them clues where to go.
In the series the star box could be an item in Tia’s house that has a hidden compartment where her father hid something to give them clues. Probably a journal that he uses to remember their culture on the alien planet, maybe plans to escape the town, maybe warnings he writes for Tia in case he isn’t there when she grows into her powers. Or it could be a macguffin they need for the plot, like a stolen key to get into the secret base or an alien doodad that does whatever the kids need.
The box could be anything with the double star symbol on it. Could be a purse sized case but it could also be something Tia’s dad made. A big pottery jug with the macguffin baked between layers of clay to be revealed when the jug is smashed, a wooden box or desk with a secret compartment and the double star symbol carved on the side.
The double star could also be a secret logo the aliens us to identify themselves to each other and be a reminder of where they came from. Tia and friends are investigating the town and finding agents spying on them and making sure people don’t leave, but they could also start finding people who help them and may also have special abilities, and those people could use the double star.
I’m imagining the small group of aliens trying to hold onto their true selves and their true culture while being not allowed to talk about it and stuck in this town, I’m not sure if the real show would’ve gone that route but I like it, it works as a plot and has emotion to it.
-A Winnebago RV. Obviously needs to be the mode of transport if the kids escape the town going to travel to another settlement of aliens.
-Give Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann a cameo! Only in one episode, since I don’t think they’re acting as a career anymore. If there’s a scene where the kids get into the base under the mountain and find Tia’s dad and Ben’s mom, Kim and Ike could appear as other prisoners who also get released. If the kids go on a road trip, Kim and Ike could appear somewhere they stop, and help them on their way and give the agents false information, like their appearance in Race To.
But... Easter eggs are fun, but then there’s the bigger level, how could this show work in the deeper themes of a Witch Mountain story?
-Reverence for nature should be easy to fit in, since Vermont where the story is set and Vancouver where it was filmed has lots of gorgeous forests and maybe even some mist. It’s cold and foggy, not warm and foggy like Appalachia where we really should be, but good enough!
-Animals are hard, since working with an animal actor is a challenge and really expensive, especially for a long series instead of a short movie. So I can see why they didn’t decide Tia’s power should be animal communication, though I hope they thought about it. In the book Tia is beloved by animals, they are drawn to her-- not as a “power” but more because Tia is a magical creature herself. But you can’t really have that kind of character as your protagonist because you have to see all your protagonist’s fears and confusion
But Winkie is a black cat, so she could be played by several black cats... this seems do-able, Disney!
-A Witch Mountain story is a journey story, but while the kids go on a physical journey to Witch Mountain they’re also going on a figurative journey to knowing who they are and where they come from. That second type of journey would have happened in the show, but I wish we could have had the first type too. And maybe we would have in a later season. Once the kids figured out everything that was going on in their town they would’ve left to find their true home. In that way the series would have been a very Witch Mountain story, it just happens before the journey begins.
-The rich guy. And in the opposite direction, the series happens in the middle of a Witch Mountain story. The kids are, figuratively, living at Mr. Bolt’s house having a nice time but slowly realizing that they’re in danger. Or this could be an alternate story in which we see what would have happened if Mr. Bolt’s plans had succeeded! So in a way, we could have seen a ‘what if’ version of the story. Cool!
With these reflections I think the series could have been a very Witch Mountain story, a new take on the same themes. Though I have a feeling it would have enough shipping to make me roll my eyes... ah, I wish it hadn’t been canceled. I wish the pilot would get leaked. I did risk my computer by checking Pirate Bay just in case, but no joy. It had a million torrents for Race To and no torrents for Purple. C’mon guys, the real use of piracy should be to provide stuff that you can’t get legally! I’m disappointed in y’all.
This may be all my thoughts about the pilot. Or maybe not. But the other question is: to write a novelization or nah? I was going to do one for the show and I’m sure I could just skip the middle step. And a fanfic version would be a fanfic and wouldn’t disappear if Disney’s lawyers come for whoever posted the script.
powers, the spaceship, and the other kind of ships
These are the posts I wanted to write since 2022. If it hadn't got cancelled there would've been liveblogs for each episode too, but at least i get to write these.
Another possibility:
The migration has been going on for years. The aliens decided not to tell their children their true nature to avoid, y’know, getting kidnapped and exploited for their powers. Then the UFO crashed 30 years ago and the government agency discovered aliens were on earth. They tracked down the unknowing descendants of the first arrivals and invited them to this town to exploit for their powers.
This would explain Schoolcraft’s “15%”, only 15% of the descendants were showing special abilities. But the idea that the aliens would purposefully leave their children in ignorance and just erase their own culture is both unlikely behavior and no fun as a plot.
Powers
Tia’s power is to have visions in which people’s inner selves appear to her and tell her their true feelings. It seems to be activated when Tia notices a person and that person is close enough that she can see them. But it doesn’t always happen, it doesn’t activate when she’s talking with her mom or with Peter. But it’s pretty freaky! Visions of people appear all in her personal space and she naturally goes “yikes!” and freaks out because what the heck. She’s also anxious because she is having hallucinations, and for someone concerned about her mental health that’s really scary.
I assume as the series goes on she’ll be able to control when it activates so it stops jumpscaring her. Then this power will be a great tool for gathering information. ...probably. Because the visions seem to be of people talking about their feelings, not spilling lots of facts. I think Tia will have visions of her school counselor saying things like, “What they’re doing to these kids, it’s not right. But we have to do it...” and Tia will have learned that her counselor is up to something but she’ll have to use spying to find out the details.
At the end of the pilot Tia is in a car with a jerk who’s driving crazy, because she was freaking out and chose the wrong guy to give her a ride. She sends her own inner self out of her body to yell at him to stop the car because just yelling it the normal way isn’t working. So... I guess she has the power to jumpscare people, which is useful. Can she also command people? Did the guy hit the brakes because he was compelled to obey or just because he was going yikes? Can she send her ghost out farther than right next to her body? Can she do astral projection and see things in places that she can’t physically get to?
Tia also has a vision of a spaceship overhead. It seems like she hears a sound, looks up, sees the spaceship then—it’s a helicopter. But it’s the real spaceship, the same as the one that crashed except not busted up from crashing.
Her father’s illness is described as dreams about unlikely things like the doors of the house being locked so they can’t get out. A sensible nightmare for a guy who’s, y’know, trapped in a town under the thumb of government agents! Audrey didn’t mention him talking about being watched, which is both a common delusion and something that was actually happening in the town. Maybe the writers thought it would be too on the nose.
And Tia and Ben have a connection. When Tia is in danger Ben is able to see through her eyes and is able to find her and help rescue her. And they’re born on the same day. This so reads to me at them being twins in the Purple sense sense not the literal sense. I want this to be a sibling connection, because Witch Mountain is a sibling story. They’re siblings in every Witch Mountain story so they need to be siblings in this one and mystical-not-literal siblings is just fine!
I... wonder if I could ask the writers how much of the franchise they consumed. I’m here seeing references to Purple and maybe they never even watched Purple! I should see if I can email them, it’s not impossible they’d tell me stuff. But they also might come for whoever leaked the script so maybe I’ll wait a bit and make sure it’s spread around. Sorry Disney, you aren’t allowed to lock the barn door until all the horses have well and truly escaped!
The two of them also astral project to the alien planet in their dreams. They had the same dream, they could talk to each other in their dream and even touch each other. They seem to be able to interact with stuff on the planet since they get grabbed by a stalagmite so their astral bodies can physically interact with stuff.
Ben’s power is puppeteering people. At first he does it by accident, then he does it on purpose as an experiment. Then at the end of the pilot he stops a truck that’s barreling towards Tia by puppeteering the driver to hit the brakes.
The UFO
The book describes the “lifeboat” as a silvery flying saucer, and the fact that it’s called a lifeboat suggests a mothership that’s probably still up there so that’s cool. In the movies we see generic flying saucers.
The script describes the ship in the underground base as “angular, glassy” and that it’s “made of glassy material that swallows the light” like the rocks on the alien planet. So, black rather than silver? And isn’t that from Game of Thrones? “Oily black stone that swallows the light”? I’m getting an ominous vibe about this UFO!
If the UFO is black and ominous... and we don’t know if it is, because we don’t have pictures unless someone leaks some... does that signal the aliens may not be benign? The whole plot could be leaning the opposite way from my theorizing! The humans are certainly being very shady doing surveillance on this town but maybe the aliens came to invade and then interbred with humans and Tia and Ben get powers from their alien heritage and humanity and kindness from their human heritage!
I’m not going to bother with that line of thought much, because that does not suit a Witch Mountain story.
But jumping back, if the UFO is made from the stone of the nightmare planet that means that is the planet the UFO came from so the planet Tia and Ben or at least their ancestors came from. So the planet was much nicer before it got invaded by stalagmite monsters, I guess? And it can’t be returned to unless the monsters are defeated? Or something.
Relationships
I also wanted to ramble a bit about the shipping.
Tia has a boyfriend, Jace. He is very obviously the mundane human boyfriend who the mystical girl will have to leave behind as she embraces her mystical destiny. He likes his overachiever beautiful girlfriend, and we learn from his inner self that he’d like to take their relationship physical. Which... nothing wrong with wanting to take things to the next level but the way his ghost says it is just the trope of a guy who’s going to be pressurey.
Tia also has Peter, her childhood friend who loves her so much it hurts but she doesn’t notice. He’s coded to be the kid who doesn’t get the girl. Peter has a blog that tracks strange things in the town of Witch Mountain so he’s been investigating the mysteries that our heroes need to figure out for a while. But do the government agents know about his blog? Are they tracking everything he knows? Probably.
And Tia has a supernatural connection with Ben. I think this should be a sibling-ish connection, because Witch Mountainishness, but the script clearly wants their mystical sparks to be the sparks of romance too.
Ben’s best friend is Corey, who is a she in the script but is played by B Norwood who is nonbinary so I think after the script was written the character was changed to be nonbinary. Which is cool. In the script I read Corey as Ben’s best friend, they suggest going to the internet to investigate Ben’s strange powers. So Corey is Ben’s human investigation partner like Peter is Tia’s. I think the four of them will become the show’s Scooby team—they just need Winkie the cat!
Like in Mystery Incorporated, it’s always four people and an animal!
If the show insists on shipping, maybe Corey and Peter would have ended up a couple. I think Jace would only be there for Tia to outgrow. But since the show isn’t being made it’s all ours, and we can ship as we please!
Last post I put together an explanation for the mysterious town that works, whether or not it would have been canon in the show. (And you better believe I googled “Witch Mountain Disneyplus show bible”... but no luck.) But we need to figure out more stuff! Why did the UFO crash and drop the aliens here?
Tony and Tia’s people came escaping the natural destruction of their planet. They were living in their own towns but integrating into human society, and perhaps in the future they would have revealed their presence in order to help the people of their adopted planet.
Danny and Anna’s people come to Earth just to have fun but sometimes get sidetracked and lose their way. In fact the purple guy hints that everybody on Earth now is descended from people from the other dimension who lost their ability to connect with each other and make the light and forgot where they came from.
But Seth and Sara’s people are a little less utopian. Their people destroyed the environment on their world and the military wants to move to Earth by conquest and wipe out the locals. But Seth and Sara’s parents are scientists and they invented... basically a GECK, a gizmo that will bring their planet back to life. The GECK is on Earth for testing and the kids have to find it and take it back to prove to their people that the peaceful option exists.
And in the series the kids have dreams of a destroyed planet with creepy stalagmite things with needle appendages that move by turning to liquid and try to engulf them, and hints of worse monstrous creatures both on the ground and in the sky.
What planet is this? Is this the planet the kids’ people come from? And what happened to it?
My first guess is the stalagmites are monsters, some kind of “they swarm across the universe, devouring all life from every planet they visit” thing like in Warhammer. Since the script suggests other creatures, maybe there are masterminds herding the stalagmites or using them for something. Maybe what’s in the clouds are the motherships that transport the stalagmites.
It could be that the stalagmites have taken over the aliens’ home planet and that’s what Tia and Ben are seeing. But if that’s true, where are the rest of the people who lived there? All dead? All moved to other planets? Are there other alien communities on Earth that the government’s secret agents haven’t discovered? Maybe in other countries? The answer to this question could give us the ending to the story and it is the right ending: Tia and Ben escape the town to find their people.
It’s also possible that their people found a different planet to move to. In Zenna Henderson’s stories of The People they find a new planet to move to but some still choose to stay on Earth. It could be that the UFO that crashed on Earth was headed to this new planet but went off course and at the end of the story Tia and Ben with their friends will head to the stars.
The other possibility is that Tia and Ben are seeing a future threat. The stalagmites are coming for their home planet, then for Earth. The aliens came to Earth to warn the humans, or maybe Earth has a mineral that’s toxic to the stalagmites or some human tech could fight them, or something. But the ship crashed and they were captured. Tia and Ben have to find the anti-stalagmite macguffin and signal their people to send another UFO to take it and use it to get rid of the threat.
Or it could be that Tia and Ben and the stalagmites are the same kind of creature-- shapeshifters that turn into whatever will survive on the planets they visit. On earth, they’re humans. On the desolate planet, they’re stalagmites. They have their own chameleon circuit, hah. The stalagmites in their dream are trying to engulf them in order to communicate, not devour. This theory probably isn’t right, it’d be pretty weird.
I feel like it’s an important part of a Witch Mountain story that the home planet isn’t a place that they can go back to—but Danny and Anna do, and so do Seth and Sara, so I should consider it a possibility. And returning to the home planet is a good ending for the story.
Any of these theories could be true, and I’m not sure the endgame was ever decided for the series. With the way things get canceled halfway through these days the creators of the show wouldn’t have confidence they would ever get to film the ending to the story. So we can just choose our favorite!
I think I like the idea that the aliens came to earth to get something to fight off the stalagmites. I’ll say it’s quartz. Quartz is a suitably mystical substance, common, and it’s the element the Pirate Planet was after in the Doctor Who story of the same name so that’s cool. The aliens came to get some quartz and their ship crashed, leaving them stuck in the town being oppressed by a secret government agency who believe they can just fight the stalagmites with nukes if they ever arrive.
Tia and Ben figure out their powers and slowly find out what’s going on with their town. In the finale of season one they find the tunnel into the mountain and see the UFO and find their missing parents. The parents have been test subjects for experimentation for some years and are rather the worse for wear so they need the kids to travel somewhere to find and activate the communications thingy in the UFO and tell their people what’s been happening and to come and get... the mountain! Maybe I should make the macguffin the element granite, they can just beam up the whole mountain and turn it into whatever they need to poison the stalagmites and stop their advance of destruction. That’d be cool. Then Tia and Ben and their friends and family go back to help rebuild their home planet which was attacked but not wiped out.
Something like that anyway. I’m not sure it’s the best storyline, but it’s an ok one.
So Witch Mountain 2022 was what I was expecting. It’s just an alien kids story. A cool one, and I am so bummed we don’t get to see it, but not terribly Witch Mountainy.
The other reason I say this is “just” an alien kids story is that the original Tony and Tia... kind of aren’t aliens. I mean, they literally are aliens, they’re from another planet, but figuratively the people of Witch Mountain are implied to be more like advanced humans. Their natural way of life seems to value music, learning, and living in harmony with nature. They don’t understand money since they’ve achieved a post-capitalist society where people’s needs are met. They have learned to use the mysterious powers of the mind.
If you read Alexander Key’s other books, especially the Golden Enemy and The Magic Meadow, he has this Utopian vision of people living without cities in small towns in harmony with each other and with the natural world. I think Alexander Key believed this was where humankind was going to get to with a little more time including the mental powers. Which, looking around right now, makes the guy look endearingly naive. ^^;
Reading the script answered one question I had been wondering about: whether Ike Eisenmann and Kim Richards would get to have a cameo in the series. They got one in Race To, and it’d be cool if they got one in this show. But if the writers thought of it, there was no mention in the pilot script. Maybe they would have gotten to appear in a later episode.
How’d that script get there? It is indeed there if you google “Witch Mountain Disney pilot script” and it’s on a squarespace page but I wasn’t able to cut off bits of the url to get the main page it was linked from. So I don’t know whose page it was on. Lots of people had the script since the pilot was made, and I like to think that perhaps one of those people felt pity for us fans and thought we should be able to see what we were missing. That was nice of them.
So 30 years ago we had, presumably, adult aliens who know they are aliens. And now we have teenage aliens who don’t know they’re aliens. How did this break in knowledge happen? It’s hard because we have parents. Knowledge is passed from parents to children, to disrupt it you have to not have parents. Like the “residential schools” in our real world where Native American children were separated from their families and forced to talk, dress and believe in the ways the colonizers wanted.
I think both the kids are only half alien. I think Tia’s father is an alien but couldn’t mentally handle his powers so the government agents faked his death and whisked him away to a cell inside the mountain. I think Ben’s mother was also an alien and also whisked away and Ben’s dad went downhill after his wife died/ran off/whatever the cover story was.
But the alien parents are the right age to have been the crew of the crashed UFO so they would have full memories of their lives before coming to earth.
Ok, I think I’ve got it. The ship crashes. Government agents scoop up the survivors, figure out that they have cool powers, and decide these people are a resource that must not be allowed to wander free. So they set up a town where the aliens can live, and let carefully selected humans move in. The aliens are forbidden to tell anyone about their true nature, but other than that they can live normal lives. The government agents set up jobs for them, they have houses and whatever they need, they can even get married. But the town is under close surveillance to make sure the secret doesn’t get out. Any alien who spills the beans, tries to escape, or uses their powers openly gets whisked away to the secret base under the mountain where they’re locked in a cell. Any human who finds out the secret gets disappeared. So the alien survivors can have physically comfortable lives, but they must live in constant fear and cannot be honest with the people they live with and come to care about. No wonder they may suffer from shaky mental health in that situation!
Sooner or later it is discovered that aliens and humans can have children together, and that the children also have special abilities. Perfect! Young people can be kept in a controlled environment and raised to be used by the government for their shady plans. Since the government wants emotionally stable agents they let the kids grow up normally with loving families, but once their powers show up then... the next step begins. Not sure quite what the next step is; the agents didn’t immediately whisk Tia and Ben away to cells inside the mountain, but something should start happening to begin shaping them into whatever the government needs in a super-powered secret agent.
I’m assuming the final goal is to have loyal aliens who will use their powers to do spy stuff. Stealing secret plans, assassinations, whatever. For the protection of the country maybe, or just for money. The Mr. Bolt characters in the movie and Purple are keen to use the kids to find oil deposits and stuff like that.
I think this theory is probably more or less right. It makes sense, it explains things mostly. It does not explain why Ben and Tia were born on the same day... well unless the government agents were sabotaging people’s birth control to schedule when babies would be born, which ew creepy but maybe they want to create pairs of agents to work together or breed for more super powered babies.
More likely the reason is more mystical. Maybe the aliens are born in pairs who have a special connection with each other. This could be a callback to Purple, where the people from the other dimension are always born as twins. Purple isn’t the most beloved entry in the franchise but a lot of people including me have a soft spot for it.
Other possibilities I thought of that didn’t work as well:
-An alien had a memory-erasing power and was compelled to use it on everybody. This would explain things but... it’s dumb.
-Some adults do know, but are under pressure not to share it with the younger generation. Audrey may suspect what’s going on with Tia and she’s just not sure when to spill the beans. But would the government agency need to do so much sneaky spying if the adults in town know about them? And is it realistic that no parent would tell their child the truth?
-The UFO didn’t contain living aliens, only bodies or some mysterious alien genetic potion. The government organization infects people with alien genetics and waits to see if they develop powers.
-The “evacuate the babies first” theory. The UFO contained dying alien adults and living alien babies, who were given to parents in this town to raise. This doesn’t explain the timeline-- teenagers when the ship crashed 30 years ago-- and doesn’t really explain things between Audrey and Tia. Audrey could tell Tia that she’s adopted, and then she wouldn’t have to fear inheriting her father’s mental illness.
I kind of like the idea of this show being a sequel to the original movie, that this is THE town of Witch Mountain where the aliens settled, 50 years later. That would mean the peaceful settlement was invaded and I hate that idea as much as I love the idea of connecting the two stories... and I can’t figure out how it would work as a plotline anyway.
Some years back Ike Eisenmann got a bunch of people from the Witch mountain movies together to make a silly video.
Ike seems like a fun dude, I gotta say.
He also wrote a book. Just recently so I haven't read up yet, but if you're curious about the behind the scenes of Witch Mountain it's probably worth looking up.
I was not expecting such a banger of a song in a Nancy Drew game! I also noticed that the voice actors had quite Northern names, so HERInteractive learned their lesson after Shadow at the Water's Edge suffered from having not-actually-Japanese voice actors with varied levels of skill at doing the right accent. ^^; I think Sea of Darkness was great all 'round! Good characters, lots of puzzles only a few of which were really annoying, you could buy souvenirs, and some cute Ned/Nancy. They are peak couple energy, Ned's unwavering support for his hilariously danger prone girlfriend.
and because I play them in random order I wasn't expecting to follow the song with the preview that is all that remains of the original Midnight in Salem.
Not exactly lost media because, there it is *gestures at Midnight in Salem* but underneath the really quite mid game you can see the bones of the better game we could have had if HER hadn't imploded.
Kind of. It vibes a lot more Tomorrow People than Witch Mountain to me. No animals, no music, no reverence for nature. The show kept the theme but stripped out the mood and the soul. But I would’ve watched it.
Placing the characters
Meadows is indeed a military dude, Mitchell Stewart is Ben’s dad. I didn’t see a Mikey in the script but there’s a “Clive, 17, MAGA in the making” who’s probably Mikey. Just a guess. Heh. (this poor actor, I feel like I’m insulting his face, sorry dude...)
Tia and Ben
Ben is definitely Tony, I don’t think there's an extra Tony knocking around somewhere. They could at least have given him a harmonica so we know for sure! Come on writers! At least I don’t dislike Ben as much as I was worried I would, his essay forgery business is presented in a weirdly endearing way in the script and the dude he almost punches kinda deserves it.
But the hints of romance between him and Tia can heck right off. Do we really need Tia having a Love Square with her boyfriend Jace, her hopeful young knight Peter and her fellow powers-haver Ben? Can we please not?
Tia and Ben were born on the same day. That clearly is a Meaningful Fact. If Audrey wasn’t here I’d assume they were separated twins, but I’m fairly certain she’d know if she gave birth to an extra baby. Possible both kids are half alien? Tia’s dad and Ben’s absent mom being aliens?
I’m torn between thinking it’s cool that they went for something other than the basic telepathy and telekinesis package and worrying these powers may be too useful to the kids. I mean, the first time Tia’s power activates around a member of the conspiracy, like the school counselor she sees at school all the time, the entire truth about the town will come out. And if the baddies kidnap Ben and lock him up, he can just puppeteer the baddies to release him. Maybe the writers just wanted the plot to move along quickly, giving them powers like this.
And I gotta say, as powers-resembling-mental-illness goes, Tia’s id visions are better than some. Hearing loud distracting voices saying negative stuff is a legit symptom of schizophrenia, though real hallucinations mostly aren’t identifiable as individual people. But mental illness does not let a person learn new things about reality, so the moment Tia does some research and then sets up a test she’s going to know that something more is going on. If she tried, which I’m not sure she would. Tia seems like a very overachieving scholar, exactly the kind of person who’d research what was happening... except that she’s so scared. Scared of ending up like her dad, scared of leaving her mom alone. So she might not be able to face the possibility of learning that she’s definitely for sure doomed. But Peter would totally research the heck out of it to help her.
Tia’s father took his own life... but I think there’s a decent chance that he’s still alive and that revelation would be the big moment at the end of season 1. The organization is watching Tia and Ben really well, so I assume they were watching Tia’s father well enough to know he was crashing out. All they’d have to do was knock him out and not let Audrey close enough to see that he was breathing as an ambulance took him away to a dungeon in the underground base where he can be experimented on and told everybody he died.
The suspicious town
Tia got chosen for an NYU scholarship, which would mean she was leaving town. I bet that’s setting up a plot point where she isn’t allowed to leave and that gets her suspicions.
Peter has already noticed a bakery that never smells like baking... which is a neat scene to show how observant and cool Peter is, but doesn’t make a lot of sense practically. I assume this bakery does in fact dispense baked goods it’s just run by spies so they, what, sneak in baked goods every morning? Why not just get spies that can bake...
But a story of teenagers sneaking around town uncovering things that don’t make sense would’ve been freaking awesome.
Witch Mountain is the name of the town, I assume it was named by the government agency. Great secrecy there, guys!
The alien planet
What is up with the alien planet? 10/10 for originality and strong imagery. Dark skies, a monster in the clouds, and needle stalagmites that liquify to move around... this is COOL!
But this is not a planet for a humanoid species like Tia and Ben’s to have come from, so why are they seeing this planet? My first guess is that the stalagmite aliens invaded the Planet of the two Suns and are advancing to invade Earth next, and they’ll be the season 2 or season 3 threat. But it’s also possible that the stalagmites can change their shape and become humanoid, or maybe the UFO didn’t carry living aliens, only genetic material of some sort, which was implanted in human babies to alienify them.
The UFO crash
We have a timeline! The UFO crashed 30 years ago. This doesn’t mean it was the only UFO, it could have been the tail end of the migration.
In the book and first movie the migration to Earth was fairly civilized. The Planet of the Two Suns was doomed, the population was gathered and transported to Earth in stages, the first arrivals bought land for their people to live on and got things ready. Some of the ships crashed on arrival including the one Tony and Tia were in. We get the impression that the colony at Witch Mountain was well established, so the kids were probably on one of the last of the ships.
But if the UFO crash 30 years ago was the only one, if Audrey was on it then she knows she’s an alien. And Tia is 16 so she couldn’t have been on it unless she was in a cryo pod and not thawed out until later.
I can make a plot out of that. The ship crashes and is found by humans. The small adult alien crew are all badly injured, but the ship is full of babies in cryo-pods. This is the first wave of colonization, evacuating the babies first. The adults tell the humans how to unfreeze the babies, knowing they are dying of their injuries and that trusting humans is the babies’ only chance to live. The human government make a town of ordinary people that can be closely monitored and unfreeze a few babies at a time to see what happens in a controlled environment.
The mysterious last page
the script references an “opening” which I assume is the prologue scene with the UFO crash, but doesn’t describe that scene. So the last page is the only bit we get that “reveals the truth” and it doesn’t reveal a whole lot.
Schoolcraft says “15%” and “we’re behind schedule.” I’m guessing 15% of aliens are awakening their powers. So how many aliens are in town? Is Audrey one who just didn’t awaken her powers? Ben and Tia both popped powers on their 16th birthday sharp, so does it happen for everyone on that day?
Schoolcraft then says, “We’re going to push. Hard.” Which means... what? Cause stress for the aliens so they will be forced to use their powers? Do powers show up on the 16th birthday or when under stress? Or maybe stress and using powers just makes the ones with powers stronger, rather than bringing out powers in people who don’t have them.
Then schoolcraft says she’s going to “finish what my father started.” What did he start? Was he the one that found the UFO 30 years ago not her? Her casting document says she was there. I think her dad is Mr. Bolt, whatever the Mr. Bolt character looks like in this story. The guy who wants to profit off these innocent people’s powers.
...and that’s enough for now. After spending all yesterday bouncing off the ceiling in delight, I should probably try to accomplish something IRL today.
found the pilot script and I will DIE mad this got axed
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/67cf4ebc4eb0ec579f246fd9/t/68013a68a9b0600094ee36d2/1744910952563/WitchMountain.pdf
Oh my god. Oh my GOD. *explodes* I am hyperventilating. I never thought anyone would find any more about this show how did you FIND it?! I thought it was going to be lost media forever, I guess the video still is but a script is almost as good. O_o I am amazed.
Ok I'm not going to read this yet. I was going to the print place to print some stuff today so I'm going to print this and then read it in a binder and then make a post of thoughts sometime in the future
Thank you a million times for turning my boring day into an exciting day! :-D
*waves fist happily and shouts to the heavens* See Disney, the power of fandom beats you agaaaaaaaain!
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