Invasion: Earth (TV series)
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Invasion: Earth is a BBC science fiction series, made in collaboration with the Sci-Fi Channel, and released in 1998 as a six episode series of approximately 50 minutes each.
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[edit] Plot
London 1944, during the height of the V2 rocket blitz on England, an unidentified and notably non-German object crashes, devastating the surrounding homesteads. Bomb disposal troops arrive on the scene, led by Lt. Charles Tyrell, an Oxford Don and anthropologist. While searching the scene the soldiers discover two of the crashed craft's occupants, one of whom is shot dead while running from the scene, the other badly injured in the crash itself. It soon becomes apparent that the occupants are not human in the classic sense, with their domed heads and speckled pale skin. Tyrell builds a rapport with the survivor, just as Military Intelligence arrives.
The action then moves to Scotland, 1998, centred around a joint RAF / NATO airforce base. Flight Lt. Chris Drake and his navigator, Jim Radcliffe, are launched in their Tornado Fighter to intercept an unidentified craft over the North Sea. During the ensuing identification, the base and intercepting RAF planes are seemingly attacked by a weapon that shuts off their main power, forcing Drake to act against orders and shoot down the UFO. In the process, his own craft is forced to ditch into the sea. He is recovered alive; his best friend and navigator dies of hypothermia. Drake is grounded as a result of his hasty actions.
At the same time a local group of government-sponsored university students, who moonlight as amateur SETI watchers, pick up a strange transmission aimed at the far reaches of space. Led by Dr Amanda Tucker, the group comes to the conclusion that this is an extraterrestrial message and are soon recruited by HM Government, who believe the transmission to be terrestrial rather than alien, to decode what it means.
A man-hunt occurs, as RAF personnel race to hunt down and capture the downed UFO pilot and his craft. Equipped with alien technology, including a cloaking device, the pilot evades them for some time, before finally being captured. When stripped of his strange garb and apparatus, the pilot is found to be none other than Tyrell, who refuses to communicate with his captors, even though they assume him to be a test-pilot for a foreign nation's air-force.
The danger Tyrell poses only becomes apparent when, during examination, he is found to have a tracking device in his tooth. Before it can be removed, a strange portal opens - apparently attempting to retrieve him. During the ensuing gunfire, one of the RAF's own men is killed. Realising his own side is trying to rescue him, Amanda Tucker rips out Tyrell's tooth, which allows the portal to home in on her instead. She and a number of British troops are drawn into another such portal, vanishing into the beyond.
Taken back to the base, Tyrell is interrogated, but gives nothing. The NATO commander of the base, Maj. Gen. Reece, is open-minded as to the pilot's reasons, while his 2i/c Group Capt. Preston, angry that Tyrell may be a British traitor in the pay of a foreign power, orders his torture.
A day later, Dr Tucker and the RAF troops sucked into the portal are returned, suffering from terrible nightmares of being tortured by strange creatures. Attempts to press them further causes terrible seizures. Amanda, on the other hand, seems fine, although she's scratched the letters "nD" into her arm. A wound that seems unable to heal.
Drake and Amanda, having come to the conclusion that their enemy is now extraterrestrial in origin, and that the kidnapping aliens are part of a third force unrelated to Tyrell's faction, investigate further, finally getting Tyrell to tell his story. The alien survivor in 1944 was part of a pacifistic race called "Echos" who have studied other planets. Now shot down during one of their surveys, the survivor is remanded in a lunatic asylum reserved for the degenerate offspring of the elite. Tended to by Tyrell, the government is adamant that the traveller is the test-pilot of a V2 rocket, picked from the Nazi concentration camps due to his physical deformities. The alien eventually dies of mishandling, but not before giving Tyrell the means of communicating with others of the Echo kind.
Tyrell, having lived with the Echoes for more than 50 years explains that the Echoes are in a war with the nDs; a race of farmers that harvest organic matter in order to turn it into living machines, and that exist in multiple dimensions, using portals to manipulate and interact with our own reality. He helps the RAF restart his craft and launch a distress signal. In response, a lone Echo arrives in Scotland bringing with him a message.
Tyrell is informed that the Echoes have given up the fight and committed self-genocide rather than allow the nDs to harvest their race for their malignant ends. As a coup de grâce, Tyrell kills the last surviving Echo and explains that Dr Tucker was taken for a reason: she has been genetically changed in order to become half-human, half-nD, an overseer for the nDs latest crop - humanity.
During the night, the soldiers who were kidnapped by the nDs originally attempt to escape, killing their guards. One of them, who is undergoing curious physiological changes, manages to do so. He drives to a reservoir some miles away, cuts his wrists and bleeds to death in its waters. Around the same time, the base staff attempt to capture an nD, which goes disastrously wrong, killing a number of personnel and destroying equipment.
It becomes slowly apparent that the reservoir death is designed to infect a local town with an illness of alien origin, and is part of a larger conspiracy designed by the nDs and only put in motion due to Tyrell's accidental landing on Earth. Tyrell himself is shot by Drake in order to stop him falling into nD hands (or, perhaps, tentacles). As the disease spreads through the townsfolk, portal kidnappings become more frequent, and the base personnel - ignored by their superiors and lacking reinforcements - attempt to hold off the vanguard of the nD invasion using SA80 rifles loaded with, what is hoped to be, a toxin designed to kill the malignant alien species.
The nDs are kidnapping the populace in order to use them as living batteries. An amorphous mountain of alien tentacles and design appears on the outskirts of the town soon after, and begins growing, swallowing up the surrounding organic matter - transporting it back to the nDs home world. Weapons are powerless to stop it, and Group Capt. Preston, attempting to atone for her earlier disbelief in aliens, flies a Tornado fighter into the portal in order to carry out reconnaissance. She does not return. Drake and Amanda, using the resultant data, fly an operation in, launching a rocket directly into the portal in the hope of causing a chain-reaction to destroy it. The plan works, but before celebrations can occur, another mountainous portal appears and recommences the work begun by the first portal.
With Earth's future in the balance, and the world finally paying attention, it becomes clear that only a truly drastic solution might work; the government decides to use a thermonuclear weapon to destroy all the organic matter for miles around the portal, stopping it from growing any larger. The same tactic will be used again and again whenever a new portal appears, anywhere in the world. As Dr. Tucker's transformation continues unabated despite all efforts, she walks out to stand in the kill zone as the bomber approaches and releases its weapon. The screen blurs to white, with the rumbling roar of a detonation as the final credits roll.
[edit] Cast
- Vincent Regan as Flight Lt. Chris Drake
- Maggie O'Neill as Dr. Amanda Tucker
- Fred Ward as Maj. Gen. David Reece
- Phyllis Logan as Squadron Leader Helen Knox
- Anton Lesser as Lt. Charles Terrell
- Sara Kestelman as Group Capt. Susan Preston
- Paul Medford as Nick Shay (as Paul J. Medford)
- Jonathan Dow as Flight Lt. Jim Radcliffe
- Gerard Rooney as Sgt. Tuffley
- Christopher Fairbank as Wing Cmdr. Friday (as Chris Fairbank)
- Nicola Buckingham as Echo
- Diana Payan as Gran
- Laura Harling as Emily Tucker
- Bob Barrett as Flight Lt. Stewart
[edit] Trivia
The nDs are amorphous aliens, named so due to their living in n-dimensional space.
The series was created an written by Jed Merchio, who had written Cardic Arrest, and later created the hit BBC3 series Bodies.
It also, thanks to Sci Fi Channel co-production support, featured Fred Ward, from Tremors.
