My life was pretty hectic in the mid-2000s, and my television-watching time was mostly swallowed up by Rome, Deadwood, and The Wire. So I should be pleased that it only took me ten years to finish watching Invasion; for comparison’s sake, it will probably be ten more before I bother to find out what happened after season two of Lost.
Thoughts follow:
- It was a weird year in the water; for some reason, the three big networks all picked the fall of 2005 to be the perfect time to launch suspiciously similar sci-fi dramas about monsters in our H2O. That meant Invasion already had to fight with Surface and Threshold to gain an audience; it was better than the other two, but it needed to be perfect to survive, and it simply wasn’t.
- What really doomed Invasion in particular was that creator Shaun Cassidy built the show around a town getting walloped by a series of hurricanes and tropical storms, and then tried to launch it less than a month after Katrina. It’s possible the timing could have been worse, but not without considerable effort.
- But divorced from it’s context, what can I say about it? As with Cassidy’s previous work –meaning American Gothic, not The Hardy Boys— it has moments that range from legitimately creepy to fairly badass, powered by a murky but still propulsive plot. Lots of things happen throughout Invasion, and those happenings are usually interesting or unsettling; unfortunately, the characters are almost entirely Stock Types who are far less curious about their plight than those of us in the audience. To their collective credit, the actors bring many of those cardboard personalities to life, but the script gives them little help.
- I can’t say that Eddie Cibrian is actually good as the nominal protagonist, but he huffs and glowers and takes his shirt off a lot, so at least he’s working hard. And he’s not as annoying as…
- …Tyler Labine, who is saddled with 90% of the series’ most ridiculous dialogue, and the thankless task of embodying the era’s lamest brand of goofy hipster, The Pre-Twitter Blogger. It was obvious that Labine would end up being funny someday, in something else, but here, he’s just a hyperactive weirdo with bad hair.
- That the show works as well as it does is owed almost entirely to William Finchtner as the town’s conspicuously shady sheriff. Finchtner has has spent a lot of his career as a humorless version of Christopher Walken, but Invasion plays to his strengths; he starts with a baseline of dead-eyed, reptilian malevolence, and then slowly layers in the bits and pieces of humanity that make him more than a rote Bad Guy.
- Spend twenty-two hours watching this thing, and you’ll see that Evan Peters was already well on his way to perfecting the Sensitive, Alienated, Sporadically Violent Cherub character that kept him at the center of four seasons of American Horror Story. Perhaps one day, he’ll choose to perfect something else. Like, anything else. Seriously, Evan… time to move on.
- She’s only in four or five episodes, but Elisabeth Moss steals every scene as an embittered, trailer-trash sociopath whose maternal instinct makes Mad Men’s Peggy Olson look like Angelina Jolie. Her ruthless, atavistic feminism is striking to behold, particularly since biology keeps kicking the shit out of her, no matter how hard she fights against it.
- Watching the behind-the-scenes cast interviews, I’m struck by the fact that none of the adults working on this multi-million dollar production have even a foggy clue of what “evolution” means, or how it works. I guess that shouldn’t disqualify them from working in science fiction… but then again, maybe it should.
- That finale. I mean, you see the kick to the nuts coming a mile away, but still… nuts, being kicked.
