Skylar Reagan (Alicia Ziegler) is having some problems. She failed her last training exercise, one where she was asked to fire nuclear warheads on London after butting heads with her deputy — and one-time lover — Malik Wheeler (Chris Jones). When he commanding officer Kathleen Wolff (Carolyn Hennesy) remarks that she needs people who will follow orders — as most of her soldiers believe in Q-Anon-style conspiracy theories and ask to be paid in crypto — for what’s coming.

The next day, Reagan plans on breaking off her military team with Wheeler and leaving him behind for good. And just minutes after picking up Smith (Brian Gilleece) and Diaz (Matias Ponce), as well as meeting up with security detail Chelsea Lin (Nina Yang), a routine check of a warhead — well, it is a warhead being protested by people open carrying submachine guns — leads to a mysterious attack that may be from another world and which requires Reagan and Wheeler to do what their last training mission proved they couldn’t: launch a nuclear weapon at a friendly target. This one isn’t in London, though. It’s in America.

Directed by Craig Goldstein and written by Mark Keavey, Echo Base was a movie announced several months ago that I’ve been anxiously awaiting on Tubi. This really plays off the uncertainty of our time with no one believing what they are seeing, chemtrails getting discussed, people doing their own research and even other soldiers putting family and religion above duty when they believe that they are in Armageddon.

It also takes from The Outer Limits episode “The Architects Of Fear,” but I bet the filmmakers thought that they were ripping off Watchmen.

There’s plenty of stock footage, some dodgy CGI and nuclear tension the likes of which you haven’t seen since the Cold War. The slick way that this plays with the anxiety in which I now navigate a world in which the conspiracies that I once looked at as fun and now being espoused by people who can’t comprehend a seventy-year-old rich person never caring for them or needing them other than to fuel his need for power, well, that kind of made me really on edge the whole time I watched this. I think someone could watch this and say. “See? They admit it. It is true.” And then someone else shouts, “Disinfo!” And then someone says something super racist. You know how it goes.

Someday soon, someone is going to make a MAGA anti-trans zombies movie with this line: “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you, Barbara, and I’m just standing in their way.”

You can watch this on Tubi.