I’ve been watching Invasion since the pilot, which was excellent. The first few episodes were also quite good. But it’s been a bit of a yawner since then, and now it’s dropping into stupid territory while trying to go all X-Files on us.
See, here’s the thing. One of the supporting characters is a cop with only one arm. We’ve been wondering why he has only one arm because, well, you don’t often see one-armed police officers in real life, what with policing being a physically demanding job and all that. Last week, we discovered why he has only one arm: So he can cut it off again.
No, seriously. This guy suddenly becomes a pain in the ass to the series villain, who happens to have been taken over by the aliens ten years ago. He Finds Out Too Much. So the sheriff decides to turn him into One Of Us. (A quick review: Aliens are these glowing, sting-ray shaped things that attach themselves to humans, kill the human host, and regrow their own human body, who then always appears naked out of the water [get it? get it? Naked, water, rebirth? Deep, mon!], often disoriented, and usually different. So we picked up on the fact that the aliens regrow via human DNA, and when one of them attacked the one-armed cop–who lost his arm while serving in the Marines–I thought, “Uh-oh. Sheriff, you don’t know your basic science. Everyone’s gonna know something’s wrong.”)
So One-Armed Cop comes back with two arms, Sheriff knows he’s screwed, so he tries this “God is testing you” line on the one-armed cop, replete with chainsaw, shed in woods, and no one around. Now the writers would have us believe that One-Armed Cop was devout enough to cut off his own arm because God wanted him to.
Hokay. He’s devout, not stupid. And neither are we.
I suspect I will not be watching this show for much longer.
And let me ask you: What was with the alien leaking acid during the autopsy? Could you be any more derivative? (See: Alien, Ridley Scott version.)
Last week’s episode also gave us the most amount of information to date: There’s something in the water in the Florida Everglades that is allowing the aliens to successfully integrate with their human hosts. Yeah, we coulda told you that. Florida is already home to hundreds of thousands of aliens.
Hm. Maybe the true subtext of the series is illegal immigrants. We’ll have to keep watching to be sure.
Hmmm…let’s see. Critters that are reborn by emerging nekkid from flowing water…
Any chance the aliens are Jewish, and they come from the Mikvah in Outer Space?
I’ve been watching Invasion too. Frankly, I liked the new plot development that featured the man and woman out to uncover the truth about the invasion as underground operatives. (To keep up with Lost, the woman was Iraqi — a new ethnic casting fad?) But frankly, when they asked us to buy that go-chainsaw-your-new-arm business, I think the show may have jumped the glowing stingray-shaped thing. Only if the bad cop had hypnotized or otherwise controlled the mind of the regenerated cop could this have made sense. The way the show did it, though, was unconvincing to say the least. Maybe the writers will knock off the four-martini lunches in the future — if the show has a future.
And up until that point, the episode had really been great. We met the anti-alien underground and had a nice shock when the one-armed cop revealed his regrown arm. And in what was the first truly funny moment in the show, the now-two-armed cop delightedly bantered with himself about his amazing new limb as he shot baskets, with the sinister police chief chatting nervously with the sinister minister about how they’re supposed to explain a magically re-grown arm. It was really a delightful scene.
And to top off all this bad news, Threshold has been canceled.