Invasion

This episode had tons of potential. Maybe that's why I am so bothered by how it ended up. What kind of logic was that? God wanted you to loose you arm so now He has given you a test to see if you'll follow his will. That is only one (extremely skewed) way to view the events surrounding the arm. It comes across as insulting to those who hold strong religious views.



And this is without discussing the ridiculousness of using a *chain saw* to remove the arm again. Seriously? I can buy not wanting to involve too many people. By why couldn't the sheriff do it? I just cannot imaging the person who could use a *chain saw* *one handed* on their *own arm*. The guy who removed his own hand while trapped in Utah took *days* to come to that conclusion and then used a much more appropriate tool.



And this is without talking about the illogical couple who kidnapped Dave. A few *simple* explanations up front and *both* sides gain a valuable ally. The only redeeming stuff was the full revelation about the lights in the water and what they do. The ending blew the whole episode for me... not that it was doing great before that.

Someone abducts Dave, Russel tracks him down to an abandoned navy base. We learn for the very first time that Tom Underlay is really a hybrid. This explains his creepyness. We're not sure yet about that until this point, it makes us wonder if he is a hybrid, is he good or bad. It's a nice twist. A recurring character Healy is introduced in this episode, he reveals certain details about the lights in the water. It turns out it's been happening for years. This episode is well made, the mystery is given more substance. It makes the next episode a must see.

For all those people who have criticised 'Invasion', I hope this has shut you up, because if you are still not satisfied after this episode, I cant imagine what else you can ask for. Where do I start?!

First of all, Dave's kidnapping is a surprise. I mean, being my least favourite character, I wasnt so much concerned for his well-being, as intrigued to see what would happen, and why he was taken. These scenes were played out excellently, with the lingering question of 'should he trust them or shouldnt he?' ever present in our minds.

Dave's dilemma was interesting enough, but this episode gives us a whole lot more. When Sirk starts to investigate the body found in the bay, Tom decides to take drastic measures and lets him be taken by one of the light-creatures. This scene was breath-taking as we finally get to see the creatures up close. There was no hint of disappointment in this scene which you might expect after waiting so long to see them. My theory is, that the creatures take in all the DNA and genetic data through the pincer like leg's that they attach to the person's temples, abdomen and chest. They then create a duplicate of the person in the womb-like structure inside them, and leave the original copy to die. This is what was implied in this episode. I was so pleased that they actually showed us this happening, rather than just explain it.

When Sirk resurfaces, arm intact, it was a real shock-horror moment! We can clearly see now, that Tom doesnt know everything that is going on, as he obviously didnt plan on this happening. The scene where he convinces Sirk to remove his own arm again, is harrowing and very chilling, and I felt really sorry for Sirk.

The revelations keep coming in this episode as it is revealled by Dave's captors that the invasion has been happening all over the world, but it is only here that the effects of the take over have worked. All around the world the duplicates have turned violent and killed themselves and others. It is great to be given a little more backstory and gives the show a lot more scope and realism.

The most exciting part of the episode was in the final moments, when after being shot by an unknown shooter, Pria reveals that it was her who stole the skeleton from way back in the pilot, and she has reconstruced the face on the skull. Before dying, she tells Russell and Dave where it is, and they go and look at it, and discover that it was Tom's skull! Completely unexpected and such a great plot-twist! Of course we knew that Tom must be a duplicate too, but it had never crossed my mind that the skull was him!

This episode answers a lot of questions, but again poses a lot more. Such as, who shot Pria? What will Russell and Dave do now that they know about Tom? And just what makes the Everglades so special a place for the invasion to occur? This is definitely the best episode yet, and had me gripped all the way through. I think it's clear that things are going to heat up from now on, and that the Invasion has definitely begun!

the bad part of this show isa that the wqriters take to long to deliver us the clues for us to find out the truth, but in this episode we had a delivery of a substancial amount of info. With the adding of to actors thaty play the couple and put more spice to the story

Well, loads happens, but I was almost ready to stop watching... and when even I\'m ready to stop watching, you can tell a show has sunk very low.



Can we expect 9 episodes when nothin much happens, then a massively revealing episode and a cliffhanger ending.



Still, a much better episode than I was expecting going on what's happened so far this half of the season.

Sigh. What a good episode up until the last scene.



Seeing the E.B.E. up close was great.

Seeing how it attaches to its victim was great. Seeing the deputy get his arm restored as a result of being replaced by the E.B.E. was great.



Seeing the deputy be so weak-minded because he has faith in God that he is willing to chop off his own arm with a chainsaw upon the mere suggestion of his boss was......STUPID!!!



The deputy said early in the episode that he prays on everything. Umm...shouldn't he have prayed on this? Shouldn't he have spoken to his minister or priest or whatever? Shouldn't he have had some trace of independent thought before taking a chainsaw into a shack to chop off his own arm?



I understand the logic Tom used to convince him. He basically said that God took your arm as a test of your faith. If you can lose an arm and still be faithful, God knows you are a good Christian. So, he gave you the arm back as a test. He doesn't want you to have it. He's just testing that faith again. And by keeping it, you're spitting in the face of God (basically). You're failing his test so you need to cut it off to show that you have faith.



Sigh



How incredibly stupid. Tom isn't even that stupid. He would have hired someone (like he did the fisherman) to kidnap the deputy or shoot him or something or somehow get him into an altercation in which the arm could be "accidentally" cut off. he wouldn't have tried to convice a man who just miraculously regenerated his missing arm to cut it back off. He never would have suspected that he could convince the deputy, so he never would have tried.



The fact that he tried was ridiculous and the fact that the deputy actually did it was unbelievably ludicrous.



I also have a problem with the writers' assumption that anyone who has a strong belief in God is so weak-minded as to fall for a ploy like this. I'm not a bible-thunping holy roller or anything, but I believe that fiath in a higher power does not equate to a simple mind. The deputy would have laughed in Tom's face and gone straight back to police h.q. and put in for a transfer. Other precincts would take him now that he has two arms. He had no reason to stick around with an idiot like Tom Underlay.



Good episode until the stupid-ass last scene...



Period.

As many have noted, this episode was very revealing and was on its way to being one of the finer episodes. That was until the very disturbing ending with the gas powered chainsaw.

Well...that pretty much made me hit the erase button on the ol\\\' DVR. The family will not be watching this episode or program in the future. I am in my forties and this is the first time I can recollect feeling so disturbed about the writing of a single segment of a tv show that compels me to never watch it again. The weird thing is, if it were a movie, it would not bother me a bit.

I've been eagerly watching this show and up until the ridiculous chainsaw scene I was totally into the show. I thought it was completely interesting they were willing to tackle the issue of faith and the invasion process, but it totally lost all believability towards the end when extremely weak logic was used to justify sawing off a man's arm, and it showed a lack of depth with the way religion was used ineptly as a blunt instrument for justification. I would have given the show a 10 for content outside the final scene because it had a lot of breakthrough moments, yet that final scene scores a 0 in my book for it's mind-numbing silliness. Which brings my total down to 5 for the episode. I honestly can't remember a less-believable scene in a sci-fi show, certainly any time recently. I hope we don't see any more reoccurences of this magnitude, or it could spell doom for this show, which has been excellent otherwise.

I thought this episode was really good.

Very interesting ...then unpredictable ...in

regards to the ending with the sherrif and his deputy. Making himself "armless" again..

Oh God. I had to hit the "mute" button on my

remote !



I have a question ...why doesn't the sherrif want

Mariel, his wife, to realize that that WAS her

body in the cove ?

WHy did he put another body in there ....?

This was easily the best episode so far. We find out the most information about the light-beings. The episode was well-written with a concise, tight, storyline and excellent dialogue. The episode features two "experts" who work (begrudginly) with Dave and Russell to uncover more evidence. We discover that the aliens have tentacles linked to some kind of womb-like organ. We also see first-hand how the creatures attack their victims. They inject a tentacle into the abdomen, chest, neck, and temples. They presumably use DNA to reconstruct the body, as Louis is returned to shore with his left arm intact. We learn that the aliens have attacked other coastal villages, but with dire results -- all others have died from their inabilities to reconcile the changes. And most significantly we find that Pria has reconstructed the face of the 10-year-old skeleton Dave and Russell were hiding in Dave's trunk and it is clearly that of Tom Underlay! Superb writing.

Okay, I'm writing this as I'm watching the episode, so right now I'm really liking this one. (Too bad it didn't last.)



I loved the bit where the deputy gets dragged off and you see where those marks are coming from on the victims, but I was confused - did Tom not take him out there to have that exact thing happen? I thought that was the point... Later, too, Mariel's comment about being "only human" - I laughed at that one. Of course, Lewis got his arm back - I knew that was coming...



Dave's whole abduction thing - it seems they can't decide if they're being serious or farcical. One minutes it's like the Keystone Kops, the next they're holding a gun in his face.



It seems that Tom's little world is unravelling somewhat, with the "miracle" of Lewis' arm. It is nice to see that his arm is there, because the cgi erasure of said arm was not done overly well... Looked pretty fake. I must say, though, cutting it off again with a chainsaw - besides being nuts is pretty tacky.



Of course the skull was Tom's - after Mariel's experiences with the girl who murdered her mother-in-law, you knew that was coming. How else would it have had his wedding band on the finger?



Sometimes I wish I didn't watch quite so much tv - then maybe I would be surprised at the not so twisty turns these things take...

Anyone who was starting to actually doubt this show was just brought back into it. This episode brought to are attention a lot of new useful information and also character development to go along with it. From learning more about the mysterious lights to actually having prove that sheriff Underlay is actually dead but some how alive and trying to control the towns fate change isn’t always good.

This episode was excellent, but the last 5 minutes ruined it for me.



Excellent development of the plotline. Why did they have to go for the gross out?



I knew that underlay was going to either cut his arm off or convince Lewis to do it himself. At first I didn't find it at all plausible that any person in their right mind would be so gullible to cut their arm off because they were told to - no matter how close that person was to them.



But Lewis isn't in his right mind - every pod person is off kilter for the first few days after being "invaded" - that's what they said in the pilot.



However, why on earth would Underlay be so cruel to make him use a chain saw to do the deed? A machete would seem to be much more humane.



I'm wondering how they are going to explain why his stump is suddenly bloodied & raw? Mariel will definitely find out about Lewis at the hospital.



Episode would have been a 10 if it hadn't been for the ending. I'm still sick to my stomach. Any more like that & I'm switching it off - and Invasion is my favorite of the 3 new Sci-Fi shows.

Starts out with a kid napping! Explains several other invasions. The deputy gets converted and a new arm. I thought all of the above made for some good information and action. I know a lot of people have doubted about the sheriff being good, bad and possibly one of the pod people. Well I hope its clear NOW! The SHERIFF is one of them and not a good guy.

It certainly took long enough, but now I feel like this series is loving in the right direction. Shipping off half the cast to a safe location for a while gives the narrative a chance to focus on the two sides of the invasion equation. The fun part is that both Russell and Underlay are searching for answers and reacting to what they uncover, even though they stand on opposite sides of the fence.



Dave’s blog is a bit too open for the topic at hand, and it’s good to see the writers going somewhere with that. Dave is also the character that ultimately knows the most “truth”, and so it stands to reason that he would be the one to find himself in this exposition dump of a situation. The process was a bit painful and contrived, but the writers do explain a few things that help add depth to the mystery.



It’s intriguing…previous contact between the “aliens” and human populations led to an imperfect process of conversion. That process seems to have led to a predictable outcome: the Pod People go after their own young. That’s not good for anyone, but it does highlight something very important: something is unique about the situation in Florida, and not just at this point in time. Underlay’s experience strongly suggests that he was the first person to go through the process successfully.



So why would that be the case? One obvious possibility is that the “aliens” just got it right with him and then waited for the chance to do it again. But that doesn’t account for the fact that his encounter took place before the nasty incidents all over the rest of the Atlantic coast. So it’s not just that the “aliens” worked it out with him; there’s something about the location that matters.



Now another question is: how long has this been happening? Just a few decades? Or does the trail of unusual killings after hurricanes go back centuries, even thousands of years? That’s important, because if it all began after Underlay’s experience, that is a huge clue. It would suggest that his experience was something unforeseen, and that the “aliens” then attempted to replicate the process. (This is assuming, of course, that the “aliens” have been around for a while underwater; they could have landed right around the same time as Underlay’s plane crash.)



Russell and Dave now know that Underlay is something inhuman, and they have reason to believe that the other “survivors” are also Pod People. The biology of the “aliens” is geared towards the whole Pod Person concept, anyway. If someone tried to kill Connie (or Pitra, or whatever), then that suggests that someone knows about the incursion and wants it to happen…someone other than Underlay. The military is the most obvious suspect.



Underlay’s plot thread had its moments, but it fell apart with that final act. It’s hard to tell if he really knows what the process is. He clearly wanted something to happen to Lewis, but when Lewis was pulled under, he seemed surprised. Why would that be the case? And his conversation with the priest strongly suggests that the vast majority of the Pod People don’t know how or why they survived or what they are supposed to be doing.



It was easy to guess that Lewis’ arm would be restored; after all, the Pod Person process would likely involve quick gestation of a genetic hybrid, which wouldn’t take into account loss of limb. And certainly, that was too obvious a sign to the rest of the world that something was happening. But I don’t care how religious Lewis is…the man wouldn’t have the conviction or stupidity to cut his own arm off with a chainsaw!

It's about time they starting revealing something. I mean i was thinking how much longer are we going to have to waite. It seems that the aliens or whatever they are wants to just live peacefully. I hope it's more than that though. Maybe some rough aliens that wants to kill or some crap. I can't wait for next's week's episode.

I want to like this show, and up until now it has been developing slowly but surely. However, the whole incident with the chain saw was ludicrous. It was a cheap attempt at emotional drama, completely farfetched and unnecessary. Why would the deputy, after only a brief conversation with his boss, see no other possibility except to comply? What human would just chop his arm off, and in such a ridiulously painful manner? It was completely unbelievable. My respect for the writers just plummeted. I hope that they refrain from any further plot twists of this sort. I will probably give one more episode a try, but if there is more like this, then forget it.

One of the stupidist shows on TV, for real. LOL, like a guy that believes he got his arm back as a miricle would cut it off again, if he believed god gave his arm back he would also believe that he had no right to take it away. Hollywood has no idea what people are really like anymore, all they can see is their own asses, and assume so much, oh screw it.. Bad writing, bad character development, soap-opera based crap that would never happen, people are not this way, Hollywood has no vision, they have recycled their ideas so much now, they are like the government but the other side, they listen to each other and have no idea what people are really like anymore, or want to see anymore.

Like this weeks episode of "Lost", the writers of this episode answers many, many questions and leave more in the wake, but in a good way. This was a great episode going into the winter hiatus. Sheriff Underlay is trying to stay in the loop but it's looking more and more like he's losing control of everything. He's still very creepy, though.

I was really excited by this episode because it feels like we're finally getting to the "guts" of the issues being dealt with on the show. Dave and Tom are my favourite characters and what I'm finding particularly interesting is that Tom is who we've suspected he is all along except that I'm not sure that he really believes it! I think he is a good man who really does want to do what he feels is best for his community but he's denying what he has become and is therefore denying his family and community the truth because he can't handle the truth! I can't believe he suggested that the young deputy should cut his new arm off! That scene seemed a bit unlikely in that the deputy's screams went on a bit too long while the chainsaw was running...wouldn't a person have passed out before then? But other than that it was a very suspenseful and dynamic episode. I also wonder why none of the main characters are being honest with each other when they're supposed to love each other? Secrets are definitely what this show is all about.

This was defenetly the best episode of Invasion i have watched so far. Finally it seems like the show is getting somewhere. The previous espisodes have been very boring and slow. As mentioned by the 2 kidnappers all the other people who encountered the creatures killed themselves. I believe this is because they did not have the guidence that the sherrif gives the "survivours" in this town. That is why they have those meetings, to understand what has become of them.

The shocker was actually seeing the sheriff's deputy Lewis being taken over by the alien creature. That scene gave me the chills. He later ends up at the sheriff's house but has his left arm back - a miracle for him. Tom explains to Lewis that people will not believe it to be a miracle and offers to solve the problem - with a chain saw! In the end, Lewis takes the chain saw, walks into a dilapidated shack - we hear the saw and his screams. Chilling!



Dave ends up being abducted by 2 people: Pria and Healy. who already know about "the lights". The woman (Pria), an archaeologist, lost her husband and children in Brazil when her husband killed himself and their children. This was after he was taken over by the aliens. Pria has reconstructed the face of the remains Dave found in the Everglades - the face is that of Sheriff Tom Underlay. Pria is also the person who stole the remains from the trunk of Dave's car. The man (Healy) has marks on him showing he was almost taken over by the alien creatures when he was in Cuba.



What the heck is in the locked room that Tom Underlay was about to unlock when Lewis came? Tom has something locked up in his house? I think it is actually Mariel's body - the one she saw. We all know Tom took the body from the morgue and put in the water so it could be found to convince Mariel it wasn't her.



So when is the next episode going to air? January??