The Twilight Zone: The Invaders
Aug. 25th, 2026 06:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerFor some time I’d been counting down the Twilight Zone episodes left until I reached “The Invaders.” It was another one of the handful of titles I’d picked up something about in advance of beginning to watch the series. In its case, though, that knowledge seemed a bit different from a sense of people being amused to the point of potential condescension about the concluding twist. (With that said, part of what I knew about the episode was its concluding twist...)
The episode began with a house in the middle of nowhere and a woman alone in it. It somehow got my attention that she was plain in appearance and, as the saying once went, “of a certain age”; I suppose I thought back to the early episode “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” and how one issue for its aging actress main character was being offered the chance at a role, but as “a mother.” The utter spareness of the house (although it’s a bit more elaborate than “four walls and a roof”) did seem to pare back the possibility of defining the woman by her status in relation to marriage and children and that being that. Another part of her enigmatic status is that she never says anything, although the episode isn’t quite a “silent movie.”
With her preparations for a meal interrupted, the woman went up a ladder to what I first thought was an attic but turned out to be a flat roof over part of her house. I have to admit the small flying saucer that had touched down there amused me because I supposed it at once to be the C-57-D miniature from Forbidden Planet, joining stock footage and the exterior and interior sets on this later series. The small perhaps-armoured beings associated with the saucer were also amusing at first sight, perhaps because I couldn’t associate them with “tin toy robots of the 1950s.”
I’ve read a skeptical history of UFOs, Curtis Peebles’s Watch the Skies!, that makes brief mention of a few early theories of “saucer pilots” being not just “little green men” but much smaller than people. Part of what interested me about the episode was the sense it wasn’t quite beholden to what I understand to be the conventional image of flying saucers at that time, much less the imaginatively sterile later dogma with its myopic focus on the wickedness of authority that hasn’t changed much since Peeble’s book from the mid-1990s.
Attacked by invisible rays and her own best kitchen knife, the woman managed to resort to an axe at last. That did get me wondering if the episode amounted to the miniature’s final outing for all that I’m not quite sure I saw it actually being demolished or if some simpler substitute had been assembled for when the action was over. The markings on it as much as the only lines not delivered by Rod Serling (who hadn’t struck me as making use of “forced perspective” when he appeared in the opening) amounted to the twist ending, but there I was left wondering about “pre-Vietnam perceptions” as opposed to the aggressiveness of the invaders and if I was just succumbing to the dangers of simplifying the past. Amid thoughts of other tales of size differentials I could also acknowledge one certain part of a perhaps-formative story for me (regardless of certain questions I now ask myself as to whether I’ve managed to overstate Robotech’s importance for me at the time I was actually able to watch it as a Saturday morning cartoon) and how, for all that two of the three anime series turned into it could be seen as “drawing inspiration from” or “trying to cash in on” the first to the point of a few later efforts to proclaim “unifying themes,” they didn’t imitate every distinctive element of Macross.
The episode began with a house in the middle of nowhere and a woman alone in it. It somehow got my attention that she was plain in appearance and, as the saying once went, “of a certain age”; I suppose I thought back to the early episode “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” and how one issue for its aging actress main character was being offered the chance at a role, but as “a mother.” The utter spareness of the house (although it’s a bit more elaborate than “four walls and a roof”) did seem to pare back the possibility of defining the woman by her status in relation to marriage and children and that being that. Another part of her enigmatic status is that she never says anything, although the episode isn’t quite a “silent movie.”
With her preparations for a meal interrupted, the woman went up a ladder to what I first thought was an attic but turned out to be a flat roof over part of her house. I have to admit the small flying saucer that had touched down there amused me because I supposed it at once to be the C-57-D miniature from Forbidden Planet, joining stock footage and the exterior and interior sets on this later series. The small perhaps-armoured beings associated with the saucer were also amusing at first sight, perhaps because I couldn’t associate them with “tin toy robots of the 1950s.”
I’ve read a skeptical history of UFOs, Curtis Peebles’s Watch the Skies!, that makes brief mention of a few early theories of “saucer pilots” being not just “little green men” but much smaller than people. Part of what interested me about the episode was the sense it wasn’t quite beholden to what I understand to be the conventional image of flying saucers at that time, much less the imaginatively sterile later dogma with its myopic focus on the wickedness of authority that hasn’t changed much since Peeble’s book from the mid-1990s.
Attacked by invisible rays and her own best kitchen knife, the woman managed to resort to an axe at last. That did get me wondering if the episode amounted to the miniature’s final outing for all that I’m not quite sure I saw it actually being demolished or if some simpler substitute had been assembled for when the action was over. The markings on it as much as the only lines not delivered by Rod Serling (who hadn’t struck me as making use of “forced perspective” when he appeared in the opening) amounted to the twist ending, but there I was left wondering about “pre-Vietnam perceptions” as opposed to the aggressiveness of the invaders and if I was just succumbing to the dangers of simplifying the past. Amid thoughts of other tales of size differentials I could also acknowledge one certain part of a perhaps-formative story for me (regardless of certain questions I now ask myself as to whether I’ve managed to overstate Robotech’s importance for me at the time I was actually able to watch it as a Saturday morning cartoon) and how, for all that two of the three anime series turned into it could be seen as “drawing inspiration from” or “trying to cash in on” the first to the point of a few later efforts to proclaim “unifying themes,” they didn’t imitate every distinctive element of Macross.