JohnHopper
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- John Hopper
TZ S2 E15: The Invaders
REVIEW
It’s a crude and repetitive ‘survival’ segment that plays like a silent film in which music, sound effects and grunts punctuate the drama. It shows how a lonely farm woman reacts to the intrusion of science and here in the confrontation to a spaceship and an alien invasion: you witness a sociological viewpoint expressed with broad strokes and it tends to describe the woman as a wild mute cave female. I wonder if this takes place in the XIXth century which would make it as a western narrative so in that case it would be the companion piece to “Execution” in terms of human contrast. It’s considered as a fine segment by many people but it doesn’t work for me because the main drawback of the tale is the childish tin can toys that are supposed to be astronauts and ruins the realism of the situation. Picture if you will, the ludicrous situation of an old woman crushing kids toys! But on the second thoughts, I find it experimental and radical, especially the twist ending that reveals the origin of the spaceship: US Air Force, Space Probe N° 1. It still remains an over-rated segment that is laborious. Even writer Richard Matheson didn’t like how his script was shot.
Find another season 2 drama (see “Eye of the Beholder”, “The Lateness of the Hour”) centered around a woman fearing the unknown and the first alien contact entry but from a reversed perspective. It’s literally a one-woman show and a horror fable. It’s the second script by Richard Matheson after “Nick of Time” during season 2. The high point is the tense strings/piano/bells-filled score a la Hermann’s Psycho by Jerry Goldsmith that can be linked to his corpus on the horror anthology Thriller (1960-1962). The score was so good that it was tracked on The Fugitive to a greater effect. The alien spaceship is recycled from Forbidden Planet: see the season 1 “Third from the Sun” (also written by Richard Matheson) and “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” and in both we witness again a civilisation contrast.
REVIEW
It’s a crude and repetitive ‘survival’ segment that plays like a silent film in which music, sound effects and grunts punctuate the drama. It shows how a lonely farm woman reacts to the intrusion of science and here in the confrontation to a spaceship and an alien invasion: you witness a sociological viewpoint expressed with broad strokes and it tends to describe the woman as a wild mute cave female. I wonder if this takes place in the XIXth century which would make it as a western narrative so in that case it would be the companion piece to “Execution” in terms of human contrast. It’s considered as a fine segment by many people but it doesn’t work for me because the main drawback of the tale is the childish tin can toys that are supposed to be astronauts and ruins the realism of the situation. Picture if you will, the ludicrous situation of an old woman crushing kids toys! But on the second thoughts, I find it experimental and radical, especially the twist ending that reveals the origin of the spaceship: US Air Force, Space Probe N° 1. It still remains an over-rated segment that is laborious. Even writer Richard Matheson didn’t like how his script was shot.
Find another season 2 drama (see “Eye of the Beholder”, “The Lateness of the Hour”) centered around a woman fearing the unknown and the first alien contact entry but from a reversed perspective. It’s literally a one-woman show and a horror fable. It’s the second script by Richard Matheson after “Nick of Time” during season 2. The high point is the tense strings/piano/bells-filled score a la Hermann’s Psycho by Jerry Goldsmith that can be linked to his corpus on the horror anthology Thriller (1960-1962). The score was so good that it was tracked on The Fugitive to a greater effect. The alien spaceship is recycled from Forbidden Planet: see the season 1 “Third from the Sun” (also written by Richard Matheson) and “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” and in both we witness again a civilisation contrast.
