"Hi everyone. My name's Matt... and I've gone six days without seeing Invasion"
I'll admit it. I'm a little worried. No sooner do I announce the intention of giving the new ABC series Invasion a moderately favorable review than I get hooted on by multiple fellow newmoanyeah staffers. Their peals of caustic laughter echo even now down the marble corridors of newmoanyeah headquarters, past the mission monitor board, past staff writer Jay's Whistletorium, past the practice field for staff writer Missie's home-grown softball team, past the large screen plasma TV that plays Gymkata on a continuous loop (blessed be the name of Editor Steve's most cherished of terrible terrible movies amen). The laughter gives me pause. Have I lost my touch? Am I growing weary of my unrelenting battle against crap? Do I wave my endorsement of Invasion as a white flag, the unmistakable portent of an ignominious surrender?

Perhaps. I do not think so, but perhaps.

Does being better than bad make it good?
I suspect that part of the resistance to Invasion among my co-scribblers stems from the company it keeps. It is one of three series debuting this fall revolving around an extraterrestrial / aquatic menace. Threshold I've only seen in brief scraps. Surface just might be my Dad's favorite show this fall. For me, though, Surface was scarier when it was Jaws. Surface was funnier when it was ALF. It is neither scary nor funny now that it is Jaws and ALF Go on Spring Break. This may be damning Invasion with faint praise, but it is light-years better than Surface.

It should be admitted, though, that Invasion is no less derivative than Surface. In the aftermath of a hurricane-talk about touchy timing-several members of a small Florida town are feeling not entirely themselves. It's almost as if their bodies have been…altered? Nah, that's not the right word. Appropriated? Still not it. Purloined? Getting warmer. Snatched? Yeah! It's almost like their bodies have been snatched. So we've been here before, and it could get tedious watching half-witted characters take a whole season at least to figure out what we already know two episodes in.

Duh! How can they not know?
Just because we the viewers are inordinately clever, though, does not mean that the characters are therefore dim. Consider Dr. Mariel Underlay, who hasn't quite figured out that she's feeling a little off because she's a shape-shifting extraterrestrial manta ray in Helen Hunt-skin clothing. Since she improbably survived her night out in the middle of the hurricane, she stares at running water the way that Roger Clemens stares at a triple-glazed ham on a bed of hundred dollar bills. Also, she can breathe underwater now, and her incredibly annoying daughter has pointed out that she smells different. Which leads her to take more baths, which offer even more proof that she can indeed breathe underwater. These subtle hints that she ain't quite right are not exactly rushing her headlong to the proper diagnosis. And yet her confusion, her reluctance to face up to the sheer enormity of her transformation, doesn't seem all that stupid. She's still enough herself that she knows something's wrong. She just doesn't know how much of her is left, or what to do about what she's lost.

Mariel's plight is intriguing in itself. More intriguing still is the fact that her husband, Sheriff Tom Underlay, is apparently the shape-shifting extraterrestrial manta ray emeritus. He doesn't seem to have let this fact slip in their wedding vows, and it's tantalizingly unclear just how much he's told his wife about the diversification of her respiratory portfolio. SEMRE has this beautiful knack for offering reassurances that are the complete opposite of reassuring, like when he informs the incredibly annoying younger daughter that he "saw the lights too." Or when he tells the Typhoid Zeke of a virulent flu that "you're not contagious to me." Or when you realize that he's only "drowning" the teenage punk who's dumped his daughter to hit on his wife in order to prove that the punk, too, can breathe underwater. See, he was just trying to provide the troubled young man with some much needed guidance. Guidance, it should be pointed out, that he seems not to have offered so far to his bewildered and equally amphibious wife. As far as we know.

It's these ambiguities that distinguish Invasion not only from its extraterrestrial conspiracy minded competition on other networks, but from its most illustrious and obvious predecessor as well. Invasion of the Body Snatchers got a lot of mileage out of the unsettling notion that "they" were infiltrating and replacing "we" with such skill that we won't notice until it's too late. Underneath it all, though, you had to be either "we" or "they"; the resemblance could only ever be superficial. Invasion is slowly but surely unfolding the notion that someone can be "we" and "they" at the same time, and this wrinkle casts the initially predictable elements of the plot in a new light. That light might be the glaring beacon of Dastardly Government Plot 1086 *yawn* sorry, Dastardly Government Plot 108637-L. It might be something else, though. It might be nothing other than an eerie glow out in the swamp, a glow that doesn't seem as strange as we might want it to seem.