TOXIC SKIES: DTMWaGL #12

TOXIC SKIES: DTMWaGL #12

Listen. Listen. I know we’re all going through a lot. We’re adrift in a sea of chaos and fear and boredom and shit is real bad. Some people would say that this is a terrible time to watch a movie about how chemtrails caused an outbreak of the plague in Washington state, but I am not one of those people. I sprinted headlong into TOXIC SKIES, starring Anne Heche, and I am dragging you all along with me. (Content warning for uh, the plague? And a suicide mention? Otherwise this one’s pretty fine.)

Aw yeah baby, the skies, they’re toxic as fuuuuuuck

In 1996 Seattle, a guy drives to his apartment, taking evasive maneuvers and constantly peeking at a package in his backseat. When he pulls into the parking garage, a black car smoothly pulls in behind him, and he sprints up the stairs to his place, clutching the package. He calls someone named Jack and leaves him a frantic message about how he has proof and he’s not just being paranoid, but unfortunately for this fellow, he is absolutely right. They are indeed after him. Actually, they’re before him, because they’re already in his apartment. He pleads with these two men, swearing that he won’t tell anyone, but who are you gonna believe, this guy with his Seattle layered look, or this chloroform-soaked rag? And that’s the last we see of him.

Now it’s 12 years later, but we’re still in Seattle, in the apartment of a guy who has a murderboard about chemtrails in his apartment. Really, the whole apartment is a murderboard about chemtrails. He seems fun! He has a picture of the guy from the first scene on his desk, so I’m gonna go ahead and assume this is Jack. We are also introduced to Anne Heche here, who is a fancy doctor being driven to a hospital, and when she arrives, Jack stands outside his car very unsubtly taking pictures of her. Okay. Also. The on-screen text said they were in Seattle, but then the entire movie takes place in Spokane? Spokane is 279 miles away from Seattle. They are definitely in Spokane though, they say it several times. I’m not sure any part of this, except maybe the first scene, takes place in Seattle. But. Sure. Anne Heche is a doctor named Tess Martin, an expert on viral outbreaks with the “Global Health Organization,” and she is here to consult on three patients with mysterious respiratory symptoms. She and another doctor, Dr. Patel, put on those big spacesuit-looking deals and examine a patient while saying doctor words at each other. The patient, a young woman, is bleeding from her eyes a little bit and has black sores on her thighs. It doesn’t look great for her, and it also doesn’t look great for the emergency room full of people who are coughing and poking at their sores. Uh oh!

Now we’re at a meeting of dudes talking about chemtrails. Just guys being guys! Are they all white, and are about 80% of them wearing camouflage, even though they’re indoors, in a warehouse? They are. The guy leading the meeting exhorts them to spread information, pass out flyers. People love flyers! Jack is here, and he shows the leader, Edgar, the pictures he took of Tess. Edgar tells him, why, that’s Dr. Tess Martin, she works for the GHO, and she’s the best there is! In the universe of TOXIC SKIES, the biggest rock stars they have are virologists, and Dr. Martin is “a friendly” who could be just the rock star they need.

Look how neat this conspiracy theorist’s handwriting is! So orderly, just like the world

Next we go to a meeting of exposition and character introduction. Dr. Martin, accompanied by Dr. Patel (he has a first name too, it’s Raj), is explaining to the mayor of Spokane, some army guy named Major Stein, and the CEO of Kellor, the chemical company that’s also the main supplier for the hospital, that they don’t yet have a diagnosis, but that a quarantine might be in the cards, because new cases are arriving at the hospital every hour. She doesn’t want to speculate, but it might, it might be the bubonic plague, even though she’s never seen it outside rural Asia. The fancy men are like, “okay, so, it might be the plague but also? It might not be the plague, go figure out what it is, because nobody wants the plague.”

Tess and Raj return to the hospital and are greeted by Jack, who is pretending to be a reporter and using the spectacular fake name “Denver Gates.” Tess brushes him off, telling him there’s no quarantine, and then she and Dr. Patel, joined by the only nurse we ever see on the ward, try to figure out the connection between their patients. It takes them way too long to figure out that the common bond is a professor at the university who just returned from a trip to Malaysia. One was a flight attendant on his plane, and the others all either work for him or, in the case of one of his students, are sleeping with him. This is why you shouldn’t fuck your professors! You might get the plague!

Dr. Martin heads to the professor’s house, followed semi-covertly by Jack. He’s not great at covertly. No one answers the door, so Tess puts on a fucking dust mask and gloves and heads in. And THEN she puts her glasses on, with her GLOVED hands, while inside the house of a person who is the first known patient of a PANDEMIC. Tess!!!! After finding a dead cat in the kitchen, she finds the professor dead in his bed and takes some swabs from the blood in his eyes and mouth. And then she just pulls out her phone and calls Raj and puts her phone RIGHT up on her face and I’m so mad about the hygiene on display here, and anyway yeah she’s pretty sure it’s bubonic plague. Also, Jack is just wandering around the plague house too. He’ll be fine.

Tess!!!!!!! You are a doctor!!!!!!!!!!! Stop it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The city of Spokane declares a quarantine, no one in or out, and the military is here to enforce it. They brought barbed wire and everything! At the hospital, Jack hounds Tess some more, and she tells him to get out, she is trying to DOCTOR in here. He grabs her arm and tells her that he knows about the professor, and that there’s more going on here than she realizes, and then “Denver Gates” leaves the building. Denver Gates, everyone! Nurse Emily, the only nurse, tells Dr. Martin that something is wrong, the patients aren’t responding to the antibiotics, because apparently it’s usually pretty easy to treat the plague with antibiotics! Who knew.

We meet the patients of the plague ward: there’s Tom, who wants to bone Nurse Emily, Anna, who was boning her professor, and Maria, a Latina woman who named her kids Juan, Pablo, Jose, and Fred, because you know who’s great, is Fred Astaire. Tess promises to bring in a TV so she can watch “Swing Time.” She’s not just a doctor, she’s a musical fan! Another thing about Tess, Raj quietly tells Nurse Emily, is that two years ago she had a daughter who died after Tess misdiagnosed her meningitis as rubella, and she’s been trying to save the world ever since. So, you see, Tess Martin is a well-rounded character, and Anne Heche can feel good about taking this part.

After asking Nurse Emily to get in touch with Kellor for some diagnostic stuff, Tess gets in her car and finds a mysterious envelope with a bunch of Kellor promotional material, and also several flyers about chemtrails. Ha ha! Awesome. Back at her motel, Tess types “chemtrails cover up” into Dogpile, which I cannot BELIEVE still existed in 2008. Remember Dogpile? It was all the search engines in one! Anyway, it takes her to a frankly magnificent website called Chemtrails Cover Up, which says a bunch of stuff about Kellor on it. Well, I’m convinced!

There is literally nothing about this image I don’t adore

I have no real sense of time in this movie, but now we’re in a lab with Drs. Martin and Patel. Tess is looking for metals in the patients’ blood, because their immune systems are too depleted for the antibiotics to have any effect, and the plague doesn’t do that, but heavy metal toxicity might. “This might sound a little weird, but have you ever heard of chemtrails?” Tess asks Raj. He has! It occurs to me that maybe not everyone reading this knows what chemtrails are? No, that can’t be. You all know what chemtrails are. Well, asks Dr. Patel, what exactly is your theory here? How does that explain the outbreak? Okay, so, Tess doesn’t know, but did you know: a lot of people think the large corporation Kellor is bad? Raj thinks this is a bit much, and he goes to check on his patients, because he’s a good doctor. Or, he’s a doctor, at least.

The doctors meet with the mayor, and he tells them it’s not fucking chemtrails, jesus christ. He knows the CEO of Kellor! That’s his son’s godfather! Can’t they just remove the metals from the patients’ blood? Yes, but that will take weeks, and they’ll be dead by then and it won’t matter how much metal is in their blood. The mayor tells them to call when they have something less ridiculous than chemtrails. Chemtrails! Honestly. That can’t be it.

In the plague ward, one of the enplagued starts yelling at Dr. Patel that he doesn’t want to die, and like, nobody wants to die of the plague, you’re not special, but he grabs Raj and scratches him under his glove. Whoopsy doodle! I hope Raj wanted the plague! Raj washes the cut and Tess tells him he’s going to be fine, but then she remembers her kid died and she’s sad. Remember? Her kid died. Did her kid have a father? Did Tess have a partner? Did that relationship fall apart due to the stress of losing a child? Did her child’s father blame her for their child’s death? Was the father ever in the picture? Was the child adopted? This is never explored. This is not as important as chemtrails.

Tess tries to go back to her motel but hey what’s this? Jack is already in her car. He tells her that he won’t hurt her, but he’s being followed, and he needs to talk to her, how about we go chat in a diner, not like I’m kidnapping you or anything, ha ha, just like, we really need to go to this diner or we’re all going to die. Once they get there, he lays all his chemtrail cards on the table: he’s with a small organization that’s trying to take the fight to the corporations that are killing Americans! Diseases have been on the rise since the early nineties! Diabetes, cancer, autism, Alzheimer’s, just! All the diseases! And you know what, people who live under flight paths are getting sicker, so obviously this is all because the government is working with the corporations to adulterate the jet fuel, somehow, for reasons. What reasons? Jack just kind of shrugs that maybe it’s population control, maybe it’s to make people dependent on Big Pharma, maybe it’s just because honestly “chemtrail” is a word that is fun and cool to say. Tess points out that even if she believed him, she’s a virologist, not a….jet fuel expert? Jet fuel: it can’t melt steel beams, but it can give you Alzheimer’s. Jack dismisses her expertise creep concerns, and tells her that she’s a respected scientist, so it’s fine. She tells him about the barium and aluminum they found in the patients’ blood, and says that if they can prove it’s the same metals that Kellor puts in their jet fuel adulterant, they’ll really have this massive corporation nailed! Tess leaves the diner, and the Edgar guy from the chemtrail group picks up Jack, who had to leave his motel because They Were Onto Him.

Just an extremely artfully framed shot, very typical of the TOXIC SKIES vibe

Can I just say that it’s really endearing that Tess found out about chemtrails like, yesterday, and today, she is all in on chemtrails. We have all been there! We have all learned about a conspiracy theory and gone way overboard for two days researching it. Nobody tell Tess about the Dyatlov Pass incident, or the Taman Shud guy, or the tiny coffins on Arthur’s Seat, we’d lose her forever. Also one time at a party I made a joke about chemtrails, and the guy I was talking to said, “you mean contrails?” and I had to explain the whole thing, and he just kind of squinted at me and smiled and said, “but that’s stupid,” and I was like, well, yeah, also he was wearing a leather jacket and no shirt and had body glitter on his chest, because it was a Twilight-themed party. Okay. Onward!

At the hospital, Maria crashes and dies as she lived: while watching “Swing Time.” This brings the death toll to 14. Doesn’t seem like that much, here in mid-2020, but okay. Major Stein and the CEO of Kellor, Dick something, corral Tess into a room so they can “run something by [her],” which has never led anywhere good in the history of the world. They fill her in on Jack’s backstory, because they know he’s the one filling her head with the vapors of chemtrail knowledge. You see, Jack graduated from Columbia with a degree in journalism, because the writer googled “best journalism school,” but then his younger brother Jason, who worked for Kellor, died by suicide and he’s never been the same. Except we, the sophisticated viewers, recognize that his younger brother is the guy in the first scene, who was definitely murdered by Kellor’s goons. Goons! It was fine when he was just kind of mad at Kellor by himself, but then he hooked up with Edgar and the two of them kept suing Kellor and breaking in and it’s just been really annoying. He’s violent and unstable! Don’t trust him! By the way, this has all been happening with Jack’s mug shot projected on the wall, which seems very unnecessary, but if you own a projector you’d be a fool not to use it in your movie. Okay, says Tess, but what about the metal in the blood? Well, unless she has any evidence that’s linked to their jet fuel additives, she should probably just get back to doctoring and forget about it.

Jack is hiding out in a warehouse somewhere, and a Kellor employee named Alex meets him there. He used to work with Jack’s brother, and he isn’t as brave as Jason, which is why he’s been sitting on this information for twelve years, but he’s here now, to give Jack a little vial of something. Jack says he’ll get it tested, but then here are two dudes in suits shooting at them, and this guy is rewarded for his one moment of bravery by being shot in the chest and killed after about twenty seconds of screen time. So long pal. Jack escapes out the back and heads to the hospital to try to give Tess samples of jet fuel from “the top five airlines” (sure), which she can take to “Channel 7 News” after she gets them tested (sure). But hang on a second, how does Tess know she can trust him? He lied about his name, he isn’t named Denver Gates at all! She tells him she doesn’t like being manipulated and gets out of his car, but then notices that he has been shot in the arm and insists he come in for stitches. She still doesn’t take the vials, but she says she’ll be back and goes to check on the plague ward.

So, there’s good news and bad news on the plague ward: good news, the quarantine seems to be working, since they haven’t had a new patient in a few hours. Bad news, they’re getting reports of plague cases in far-flung places, because did you know? There is usually more than one person on an airplane. More bad news: Dr. Patel’s nose is bleeding, because he definitely has the plague. He seems to take the news of his diagnosis pretty well. God it’s so funny that it’s the plague. All the diseases in the world and they chose the plague.

Ok so I googled “Coby McLaughlin” and he appears to be an actor on General Hospital?? What

Tess retrieves Jack and they hide in the morgue to test the jet fuel samples. She tells him that if they can’t contain this thing, millions of people will die, and he says, right, too bad there’s not a vaccine. Tess doubts Kellor would have released this thing without having a vaccine to cover their asses, and here, here is where the plot loses me. The problem is that the chemtrails are destroying people’s immune systems, I think? So that the plague can take hold in them? Because someone brought it back with him from Malaysia? Did Kellor know this whole thing was going to happen? Because it seems like an unlikely series of events. Anyway, they have to go to Channel 7 with the results of their tests, because otherwise Kellor would never release the vaccine? Because it would be like admitting their guilt? Also, vaccines aren’t cures, and it won’t help the people who already have the plague? Also, it takes time to manufacture vaccines, even if you have the formula down? Listen, I don’t know. On the way out of the morgue, Jack manages to scratch himself on a dead body. What are these people doing?

Okay, they definitely said “Channel 7” but Dr. Martin is at Channel 4, Spokane’s News Channel. It doesn’t matter though, because a bunch of goons, including Major Stein, grab her and take the samples before she can get in the door. It’s broad daylight in an office park, but it’s probably fine. They take her back to the hospital, and Major Stein decides it’s time to let Tess in on some secrets. Okay so yes the military has been putting stuff in the jet fuel, but only to slow the effects of global warming! Hahahahahahaha oh ohhhhhh okay. Kellor won the contract to make the additive, but the military had suspected them of changing the formula to make it cheaper, which was confirmed by Tess’s results. And now people are dying because their blood is too full of metal to fight the plague! Just as the Dr. Bronner’s bottle foretold. The military will be conducting a full investigation, but obviously not a public one, that would be ridiculous. Major Stein tells Tess it would be in her best interest to not leave the hospital until they find Jack and sort the situation out. Jack was hiding in Tess’s office and he sneaks out of the hospital, because no one in this movie has ever spotted someone who was acting sneaky. You just say, “I’m sneaking,” and they can’t stop you.

Tess and Jack meet with Edgar to break into Kellor to get the vaccine. It’ll be easy! Tess also announces that she’s going to fax the test results to the mayor, because if he’s in on it, he already knows, and if he isn’t, well then he’ll probably be on their side here. So they basically just waltz into Kellor, which is understaffed because of the quarantine, and while Jack rummages around looking for the vaccine, Tess tells CEO Dick that she has proof that the metals in their jet fuel stuff are destroying people’s immune systems, and they need that vaccine. She’ll even pretend the GHO or whatever came up with it! CEO Dick says they don’t have a vaccine, and then Jack comes in and roughs him up. Luckily for the CEO, he has panic buttons installed on all the tables in the building, I guess. Unluckily for him, Jack is beating him up and Tess has covertly pulled out her phone and put the mayor on speaker so he can hear her say, “We know you have the vaccine, Mr. Taylor,” and Taylor reply, “Of course we do, you don’t think we’d release the chemicals without protection, do you?” Which, again, I still simply do not understand the mechanisms at play here. This absolutely does not make sense. Do they have vaccines for literally every disease any person could possibly get? No, they do not, because for one thing that isn’t how viruses work, we all KNOW that at this point, but like: what? Anyway, Kellor’s goons are here, but they’re terrible shots, and also the mayor is still listening to all the stuff that Dick is confessing to, and he sends the SWAT team into Kellor’s offices. As the SWAT guys rush in, Jack tells Dick that he should know by now he’s not that easy to kill, and Dick replies, “not as easy as your brother.” Woof! Oof. Rude. The cops lead Dick away.

This is the face of a man who is learning that his son’s godfather caused a plague outbreak

After the mayor declares that they’ll find the vaccine and send it to the hospital, he sits down with Dick and says, “tell me you weren’t holding onto a vaccine the whole time,” to which Dick kinda shrugs. Major Stein interrupts to tell the mayor that this is a federal matter, and the mayor is like, “well, okay, fine, also you’re a disgrace, Dick.” It is one of my favorite tropes to name your most loathsome characters Dick, it makes me very happy.

Nurse Emily, the only nurse, carries a box of vaccines into the plague ward while everyone in the hospital watches a news report about the immediate demise of Kellor and indictment of Dick Taylor on federal charges. What’s a more fantastical notion: chemtrails, or corporations forcing consequences for their actions? Let’s ask Massey Energy, Dow Chemical, Boeing, or BP! And now Dr. Martin is giving the vaccine to the patients in the plague ward and now they will get better, even though I am really pretty sure that, again, vaccines do not work that way? “It was a tough three days,” says the mayor to Tess. Three days! Three DAYS. Three days. And then he points out a guy passing them in the hallway as the CEO of Varntex, the new chief supplier to the hospital. Tess recognizes him as someone she’d seen having a chummy meeting with Major Stein the day she got to the hospital. “Oh,” she says. And then the movie is over! I hope all your questions about pandemics and the bubonic plague and chemtrails and vaccines have been answered. Mine have not, I am unmoored from reality, but maybe it’s different for you! Thank you for reading, see you next time, perhaps for a movie that makes me feel less unhinged!