6) The Invisibles
Those familiar with the concept of “radical chic” and the penchant of leftist cultural elites to romanticize, valorize, glorify and depreciate themselves before even the most barbarous and deviant members of society (the Black Panthers etc.) will like The Invisibles. The episode is about a secret cell of subversives who serve alien creatures (which look like a cross between a more ferocious kind of trilobite and a lobster) that desire to conquer the earth.
The leadership chooses three societal outcasts – criminals and sociopaths – to lead the coming conquest by taking into their bodies the alien creatures (which enter into the body and bond with it as a kind of parasite). The aliens are then able to command and control the humans, and their mission is to infect others with other alien crustaceans.
One of them is actually a government agent, sent to infiltrate the cell. The revolutionaries here are not the heroes, but the U.S. government and its agents. That in itself is rather startling, and there is no particular ideology in play (a modern treatment would surely cast the bad guys as Nazi-like racists, or, as with John Carpenter’s They Live, corporate CEOs) save the naked desire for power.
No trendy ideology to massage here, just “sick, nameless nuclei that waited a billion billion years for that precise, ungodly moment.”
Except for the billion billion years, this sounds a lot like the Bolsheviks, doesn’t it?
