The Toledo War

“My fellow Americans. I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

President Reagan before a broadcast, unaware his microphone was on 

Katie is a soldier for Michigan’s all-female army, growing tired of the monotony of the War. Ike is a soldier for Ohio’s all-male army, growing tired of the cruelty of the War. When a new Michigan recruit, Jackie, wins the hearts of both Katie and Ike (good to mention here that every character in the series is bisexual, every single one; commence the love triangles, pentagrams, dodecahedrons) – even though Jackie’s only intention in enlisting was getting the Wyandot their land back – all the soldiers are launched into a conflict for the liberation of humanity against our own evils.

The period piece is finally having its cake and eating it too. Exotic and fun costumes, hair and makeup, and production design used to be anchored by saltine storylines, but enter Bridgerton, Hamilton, The Favourite, The Great — audiences are revolting against the historically accurate. They demand new olds, sex, representation, quippy dialogue, “I actually care about these historic characters and can’t wait to see the next direction;” in the end, they demand grounded yet airborne stakes; anyone can die, no matter how much you love them. They also demand balls-to-the-wall clusterfucks of chaos and glory. That is the thesis of The Toledo War. 

SETTING

The Toledo War was an 1800s land conflict between Michigan and Ohio that resulted in 1.7 million casualties, the creation of an opium empire run by John Quincy Adams and his gay S&M brothel, a skyrocket in masked vigilantes trying to overthrow the government, and the first ever contact with year 3000 technologies that allowed time travel, bringing back the dead, and a monster truck with a laser gatling gun on the back. Some of that is actually accurate.

TONE

Killing General Ulysses Grant and replacing him with a drunk Wanda Sykes. 

AUDIENCES

• Period piece fans. More women were straight before Keira Knightley put on a corset; I do not have the pie charts with me to prove this. Audiences demand the novelty of the era.
• War piece fans. The festering of a musket wound. The betrayal of cowardice. The brilliance of upside-down strategy. Audiences demand grit. 
• Advocates for representation. Not only should the cast be majority actors of color, but feature disabled actors, genderqueer actors, actors that don’t fit skinny and Westernized beauty standards, be radically inclusive both onscreen and off. Audiences demand themselves. 
• Comedy fans. The dialogue should feel like Succession and Arrested Development fell in love and had Damien Omen. It should be coarse as sandpaper. It should be like biting a Wonka bar and not only realize you’re scarfing down the corner of a golden ticket, but the ticket is printed on a big tab of LSD. Audiences demand a chaotically good time.
• Romance fans. Romance isn’t repetitive; it’s just used the same rhyme scheme for centuries; as soon as you alter that model, you can discover why love is more important than anything all over again. Audiences demand something old, new, stolen, and devastating.
• Sex fans. Sex. 

WHY MAKE THIS SHOW TODAY

Everything is so fucked. The politics, the corporate greed, the end of the world via coal plants and cow burps, social media being both the escape and the cause of everything going to shit, a pandemic sprouting variants like Disney spin-offs; we were at the Fuck Yourself Buffet and put way too much on our plates. In every era of humanity, later historians always looked back and said, “That made sense” — our current solution to that is to just avoid having future historians. 

The Toledo War is not a lie, but an admission that every story of the past is a lie; we’re just too scared to talk about today’s events without getting yelled at so we put costumes on and pretend we’re airing some kind of recurring documentation. It’s all always been skewed to fit our current situations; Toledo is just more opportunist with the fun parts of that. More than we need comfort now, we need to see some characters, as diverse and varied as we all are today, at their most fucked, most broken, most ruined, and watch them still win. We need those blueprints for ourselves right now. We earned it, despite all our claims of shitting the bed otherwise. 

YOU HAVE JUST READ THE PILOT AND ARE ASKING WHAT THE FUCK:

If you decide to go about eating spiders, chew and take your time before swallowing — or you’re fucked with a throatful of survivors. Season 1 will have a wild storyline that keeps building; the pilot needs to be a sturdy episode in order to provide perspective on this universe’s growing chaos. No John Quincy Adams brothels yet, or time travel, or monster trucks, but the earliest seeds that those things can happen. The rollercoaster can only go fast with a good enough climb. 

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE REST OF SEASON 1 

• Ike confronts Jackie on Winston’s shooting, to which Jackie claims to know nothing and even aids in saving Winston’s life. Ike and Jackie share a quick kiss, but Jackie shakes it off, making clear she could never be with him. Ike flees before Yuengling can begin the assault, convincing Yuengling not to follow through despite the fact that the Ohioans “are already there.” Yuengling jokes Ike’s fallen in love with his captors. 
• Winston wakes from a coma, telling his interrogator, Katie, of trippy visions from a futuristic “Cult of Lyra.” He claims the Cult is telling him where they’ve hidden weapons so that the Ohioans win the War. Katie dismisses this as psychosis. 
• Theresa learns through a budding friendship with Jackie that Jackie was raised by her father in Kentucky, but her mother was of the Wyandot tribe and forcibly removed during Ohioan Governor Lucas’s tirade against the Indigenous. She and her father had moved back to Toledo to find clues where her mother was sent so they could reconnect, but her father died of TB on the trip. Jackie enlisted to get revenge on Ohio, but more so to help arm the Wyandot through heisted Ohioan weapons. 
• Vernor catches Jackie smuggling equipment out of the base and orders her to duel their best marksman, Katie, or be drowned. Katie’s cowardly obedience is tested, but she’s pressured to compete, killing Jackie, devastating Katie and Ike to their cores equally. 
• Ike sneaks in to kill Katie as revenge for Jackie, but his cover is blown by a pacifistic Winston yelling to save Katie’s life. Katie kills Ike in defense. Winston blames himself.
• Theresa privately takes over Jackie’s plan to arm the Wyandot, beginning a plot to assassinate Governor Lucas herself. 
• Winston foresees a Site of Lyra where he can revive only one life, in which he wants to place Ike’s body and a desperate Katie wants to place Jackie’s. Katie takes Winston to a hidden, buried cell away from the base as she tries to privately interrogate the location of the Site. Winston’s loose lips struggle. 
• Eve, a Cultist of Lyra, drowns herself in the Maumee when Lyra is at its height. Out swims a confused, younger Eve, who doesn’t know anything about the Cult and had fallen into the River years before the War, not understanding what just happened. 
• Benny aids the Merchant’s cause in overthrowing both Michigan and Ohio in order to implement a communist state, while Benny struggles to keep Winston, his new parental figure, safe from the vigilantes’ wrath. It becomes clear the Merchant will not actually try to create communism but a nationalized capitalist state that puts himself at the top. 
• John Quincy Adams arrives to aid Michigan, instead finding the desperation of Ohioan soldiers in need of inebriation, and begins a lucrative brothel as a front for an opium den. As soldiers overdose, Ohio’s Governor Lucas arrives to assess the problem, causing Michigan’s Governor Mason to feel pressured to arrive as well. The two Governors begin an intimate affair in Adams’ brothel that General Vernor soon is invited to join, to which General Yuengling is devastated to learn he’s not invited. 
• Yuengling accidentally thwarts Theresa’s assassination attempt on Lucas as Lucas departs for the campaign trail. Afterwards, Yuengling privately joins Theresa’s next plot to assassinate Lucas as revenge for the lack of affection, not telling Theresa that he also plans to assassinate Vernor in order to leave the beautiful Mason for himself. 
• The imprisoned Winston is found by Vernor, who frees him in order to immediately reimprison him in her own dungeon, purely for recreational torturing purposes. In an effort to trade for his freedom, Winston reveals to Vernor the location of the ultimate weapon in his visions: a laser gatling monster truck. 
• Katie finds Winston gone, thinking he broke out, and hurries to the Ohioan catacombs to destroy Ike’s body before Winston can revive it. Meanwhile, Vernor finds the monster truck and uses it to assault the Ohio base with devastating casualties, running out of gas inside the courtyard. Katie’s trapped in the sealed catacombs during the assault, not burning the body due to the limited oxygen. Vernor is surrounded in the Ohio base, unwilling to abandon the turret for the surviving Ohioans to then have. 
• As Ohioan reinforcements arrive, Governor Lucas is turned on by this assault, thinking it was a stunt by Vernor to get him to return. As Lucas orders his soldiers to allow Vernor to leave unharmed, Vernor is shot to death by Yuengling. In a fury, Lucas strips Yuengling of his rank, making Henry the new General. Katie escapes with Ike’s body when the Ohioan corpse pileup reopens the catacombs. 
• With Vernor’s death, Eve becomes the ranking officer of the Michigan army, despite claiming she’s not the age they claim she is and has no recollection of military strategy. Underneath her new quarters, Eve discovers a suffering Winston, whom she nurses back to health. Winston thanks her by telling her everything he knows about the Cult of Lyra and his visions. Eve talks about all of this with her only friend, Theresa, including about the location of the Site of Lyra. Theresa goes to the city graveyard. 
• Season 1 ends with Katie getting ready to burn Ike’s body, but realizing she doesn’t want to become as ruthless as Vernor, and instead she brings Ike’s corpse to where she’d held Winston captive, hoping Winston will find Ike and revive him. Katie mourns Jackie in her cabin — when a fully living and healthy Jackie appears outside. Katie, thinking it’s an apparition, kisses it through the window. Jackie kisses the window back, then opens the window and the two kiss, finally together. As the two are about to sleep together, both bases are assaulted by the Merchant’s army, the citizens slaughtering as many as possible, including Theresa, Governor Lucas, and Winston. 
• Katie, Jackie, and Eve, escape to the Wyandot. Yuengling, Henry, and Governor Mason hide in Adams’ brothel, united by a common enemy but in disarray over who’s in charge.
• Benny mourns Winston, privately swearing to betray and kill the Merchant. In the last minutes, Benny’s duck reveals itself to be part of an intelligent duck society willing to aid Benny’s cause and defeat the Merchant. 

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM FUTURE SEASONS: 

• Fucking anything. Throw three words together. Purple peanut porcupine. Sounds like a Season 2 opener to me. 
• The story should grow as an epic tale juxtaposing ridiculous concepts with legitimate stakes. Great battles. Power struggles. Philosophical inquiries. Benny can do awful things in the name of Winston’s memory. The ducks would remain not too physically present to avoid a parody level of cartoonishness, but still be a voice in advising Benny. The Wyandot and Merchants can become the major armies fighting for the territory. Who knows? Bring fucking Indiana into this. 
• As we learn more about why the Lyra picked Ohio to win, we can see who they pick to champion the Ohio cause after Winston. Why did the older Eve, a Cultist, save Ike if he was only going to die? What are the long-term effects of Jackie’s resuscitation? The Cult of Lyra’s abilities and intentions in all of this leaves plenty of room to explore. 
• As more characters enter, Katie and Jackie have earned the right to have one another’s backs forever. Where gay relationships are routinely tragic in their ends, these two have had their tragedy already and now get to be in love and be loving forever. For everybody else? Elaborate love shapes. Polyamorous relationships shown as loving and real rather than perverted. Fun relationships and betrayals. When anybody can be with anybody, the dynamic possibilities are unlimited.