Invasion ambitiously explores the unknown with its complex depiction of an advanced alien species, leaving audiences curious about their motives, abilities, and inner workings. Created by Simon Kinberg, Invasion attempts to subvert science fiction tropes by portraying aliens in a unique light. Instead of depicting them as humanoid creatures who intend to wage a war on humanity, the show shrouds their purpose and origins in mystery.
From the fallen spaceship in the Amazon forests to the spiky alien creatures that wreak havoc on Earth, every element of the alien species in Invasion seems to be connected to a hive mind. Unlike the human world where a clear distinction between the animate and the inanimate exists, the aliens and their technology in Invasion seem to have a collective sense of consciousnesses. Invasion season 2, episode 1 brings more clarity to this by highlighting how even the walls of the fallen alien spaceship have microscopic neural networks that connect to the alien species' higher consciousness.
The spiky alien creatures in Invasion tesseract as they move and use the sharp black shards emerging from their bodies to attack humans. Invasion's creators confirmed in a promotional video that they wanted the alien to have a primal, organic look to make them stand out from every other representation of aliens in pop culture. The showrunners also revealed that the alien creatures are made of ferrofluids, making them hard in appearance but soft in touch. Their magnetism explains why they absorb bullets but can be destroyed using fire. It also hints that other alien technologies like the claw probably change shape and develop strange ripples on their surface as a reaction to nearby magnetic fields or electrical impulses.
On the surface, it is hard not to believe that the aliens are on a pursuit to conquer the planet by terraforming its atmosphere and ecology to make it more suitable for their species. However, this theory stops making sense when Caspar, Luke, Aneesha, and Mistuki's connection to the alien's hive mind is considered. While the aliens are clearly "invading" the planet by spreading their spores and gradually wrapping its surface with a black membrane, their motive is not as one-dimensional as it seems. By carefully manipulating the biology of the planet's natural resources, could it be possible that the aliens are rectifying the environmental damage caused by humans?
While at it, could they also be evolving humanity's perception of existence by wiping out their physical bodies but sustaining their consciousness on a higher dimension? These speculations surrounding the alien species' motives might ring true in Invasion's future episodes. However, they still do not explain why the aliens are resorting to violent methods if they are not ill-intended. Considering how Invasion has been extremely ambitious with its depiction of alien life forms, one can also speculate that the alien species' reason for invading Earth is so complex that it is beyond human comprehension and will always remain unknowable unless humans like Caspar learn to understand them.
Invasion season 1 established that Caspar was a doorway to understanding the alien species and the higher power that controls them. By putting himself in a seizure, Caspar also proved that he had the ability to stop the aliens from invading the planet. In season 2, while he dives deeper into the alien hive mind and understands its true motives, Trevante can use his drawings as a guide to determine what the alien species plans to do next. Meanwhile, Mitsuki can use her connection with Hinata as a conduit to control the alien's technologies, and Aneesha can exploit the claw's powers to fight back against the invasion.
Since Caspar has now immersed himself in the alien's plane of existence, he will be the key to solving its mysteries and possibly deducing a way to stop it from taking over the planet. However, given the direction in which Invasion season 2 is heading in, all four protagonists will likely have an equal part in either destroying the alien species before it completes its invasion or realizing its true motives. As the four main characters band together to confront the looming alien threat in Invasion season 2, their individual tools, strengths, and unique ties with the alien will determine the planet's fate.
Alien invasion or space invasion is a common feature in science fiction stories and film, in which extraterrestrial lifeforms invade the Earth to exterminate and supplant human life, enslave it, harvest people for food, steal the planet's resources, or destroy the planet altogether. It can be considered as a science-fiction subgenre of the invasion literature, expanded by H. G. Wells's seminal alien invasion novel The War of the Worlds.
In 1892, Robert Potter, an Australian clergyman, published The Germ Growers in London. It describes a covert invasion by aliens who take on the appearance of human beings and attempt to develop a virulent disease to assist in their plans for global conquest. It was not widely read, and consequently H. G. Wells' vastly more successful novel is generally credited as the seminal alien invasion story.[2]
In 1898, Wells published The War of the Worlds, depicting the invasion of Victorian England by Martians equipped with advanced weaponry. It is now seen as the seminal alien invasion story and Wells is credited with establishing several extraterrestrial themes which were later greatly expanded by science fiction writers in the 20th century, including first contact and war between planets and their differing species. However, there were stories of aliens and alien invasion prior to publication of The War of the Worlds.[2]
Wells had already proposed another outcome for the alien invasion story in The War of the Worlds. When the Narrator meets the artilleryman the second time, the artilleryman imagines a future where humanity, hiding underground in sewers and tunnels, conducts a guerrilla war, fighting against the Martians for generations to come, and eventually, after learning how to duplicate Martian weapon technology, destroys the invaders and takes back the Earth.[3]
Six weeks after publication of the novel, The Boston Post newspaper published another alien invasion story, an unauthorized sequel to The War of the Worlds, which turned the tables on the invaders. Edison's Conquest of Mars was written by Garrett P. Serviss, who described the famous inventor Thomas Edison leading a counterattack against the invaders on their home soil.[4] Though this is actually a sequel to Fighters from Mars, a revised and unauthorised reprint of War of the Worlds, they both were first printed in The Boston Post in 1898.[5]
The War of the Worlds was reprinted in the United States in 1927, a year after the Golden Age of Science Fiction was created by Hugo Gernsback in Amazing Stories. John W. Campbell, another key editor of the era, and periodic short story writer, published several alien invasion stories in the 1930s. Many well-known science fiction writers were to follow, including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Clifford D. Simak, plus Robert A. Heinlein who wrote The Puppet Masters in 1951.[6]
This is a familiar variation on the alien invasion theme. In the infiltration scenario, the invaders will typically take human form and can move freely throughout human society, even to the point of taking control of command positions. The purpose of this may either be to take over the entire world through infiltration (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), or as advanced scouts meant to "soften up" Earth in preparation for a full-scale invasion by the aliens' conventional military (First Wave). This type of invasion represented common fears of the American public during the Cold War, particularly the fear of infiltration by communist agents.[7]
This theme has also been explored in fiction on the rare occasion. With this type of story, the invaders, in a kind of little grey/green man's burden, colonize the planet in an effort to spread their culture and "civilize" the indigenous "barbaric" inhabitants or secretly watch and aid earthlings saving them from themselves. The former theme shares many traits with hostile occupation fiction, but the invaders tend to view the occupied peoples as students or equals rather than subjects and slaves. The latter theme of secret watcher is a paternalistic/maternalistic theme. In this fiction, the aliens intervene in human affairs to prevent them from destroying themselves, such as Klaatu and Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still warning the leaders of Earth to abandon their warlike ways and join other space-faring civilizations else that they will destroy themselves or be destroyed by their interstellar union. Other examples of a beneficial alien invasion are Gene Roddenberry's movie The Questor Tapes (1974) and his Star Trek episode "Assignment: Earth" (1968); Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End,[8] the novel (later anime) series Crest of the Stars, the film Arrival (2016), and David Brin's Uplift Universe series of books.
A similar trope depicts humans in the role of the "alien" invaders, where humans are the ones invading or attacking extraterrestrial lifeforms. Examples include the short story Sentry (1954) (in which the "aliens" described are, at the end, explained to be humans), the video game Phantasy Star II (1989),[9] The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, the Imperium of Man in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Invaders from Earth by Robert Silverberg, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, and the movies Battle for Terra (2007), Planet 51 (2009), Avatar (2009) and Mars Needs Moms (2011).
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