Fireball XL5 Episode 31 Review: Invasion Earth

[Jubal]

Fireball XL5 Ep 31: Invasion Earth

Rating out of 10: 6.8
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0819050/?ref_=ttep_ep31


Invasion Earth is basically "Fireball does War of the Worlds". Now you know that there's not that much more to be gained from watching the episode, unfortunately.

It could certainly be worse - the tropes are played fairly straight, with a degree of humour around injections and vaccinations that brings a level of warm familiarity to the episode. And War of the Worlds isn't in itself a bad story - the "aliens defeated by disease" is a good idea in itself. It's also effectively foreshadowed in the episode, which is good. The threat is also well set up, with the actual destruction of XL18 and XL24 (the deaths of World Space Patrol pilots are extremely unusual in the series, so this is pretty notable). The aliens actually do have answers to everything that the humans can throw at them, making them pose a genuine threat, and the sight of their ships coming down from the cloud is (for Fireball) a pretty evocative and imposing sequence.

The aliens themselves are the biggest minus, rather than looking and feeling like super high-grade galactic conquerors, they basically look like a lot of 1960s racist archetypes were combined into a single grotesque franken-being. I'd like to think that this wasn't the intention, but even ignoring the overtones, the resulting creatures just aren't very scary or awe-inspiring. They also lack detail or backstory; it would have taken literally a few seconds of dialogue to give their species or their leader a name or some other key trait. Lacking this, despite their very high threat level, they're too one-dimensional and don't actually work well. The result is that a good if unadventurous action build-up, and a not horrendously written script, actually end up with the end feeling a bit weak and anticlimactic, doubly so given the means of the aliens' demise. The War of the Worlds trope works not only because it is shown that the aliens are on the brink of victory, but because the reader/viewer has been conditioned to be scared of the aliens by that point. Invasion Earth failed at the latter, fatally weakening it as an episode.

This could certainly have been a decent episode and possibly a very good one, but as it is I found it fell a bit flat and subpar, so it gets a 6.8.