Resistance is Useful!

On the theme of alien invasion, Tomorrow’s Worlds’ Dominic Sandbrook mentioned the Doctor Who classic story from 1964, The Dalek Invasion of Earth. This wasn’t so much an invasion story as an alien occupation story. The occupying Dalek forces were ineffectively taken on by a ragged and disparate resistance groups using ineffective weapons ingenuity and often futile courage. Very little is mentioned about the actual invasion, other than that the Daleks had initially used biological weapons on their assault on Earth, which so drastically reduced the human population that no effective opposition to the Dalek invaders could be mounted.

The greatest clue to how desperate this period must have been is an emergency regulations poster proclaiming that “IT IS FORBIDDEN TO DUMP BODIES INTO THE RIVER.” This one poster is enough to tell us that there is something seriously wrong in this future London that the TARDIS has arrived. As Dominic Sandbrook points out, this is London under the Nazis, still a chilling nightmare, so soon after the war, to many who would have watched the series at that time. This is explicetly emphasised by the Daleks giving each other Nazi salutes as they trundled across Trafalgar Square. Well known, and loved, locations under the control of an alien and hostile culture is a very distressing image and can be seen as a battle lost, a people conquered. In many ways an invasion story is preferable. It is a crises, a threat to overcome (and it usually is), a triumph for the indomitable spirit of humanity.  A post apocalyptic tale of life under the alien conqueror is harder to swallow.

Another story of conquered Earth and the human survivors’ almost futile resistance is the US TV series Falling Skies. The human resistance has formed itself into the 2^nd Massachusetts regiment, in the style of the Continental Army of the American War of Independence. The parallels are drawn of a rag tag army fighting the super power by the regiments second in command, former History Professor Tom Mason. This view is countered by a cynical ex-con John Pope who more realistically compares their plight to that of the Native Americans faced with the arrival of European settlers.

The aliens we see at first are green-skinned six-legged beings known as 'Skitters'. These are assisted by heavily armed humanoid shaped robots known as Mechs. The incongruity of an alien species not designing its robots on its own body structure is remarked on during the first season of the series and it is eventually revealed that the real masters of Skitters and Mechs, and orchestrators of the invasion, are a humanoid alien species known as the Overlords, or 'Espheni'. It seems as though the Skitters are an engineered species, adapted to serve the needs of the Esheni. Together with the Mechs they form, it seems, a biological robot/mechanical robot combination.

Human children between the ages of 8 and 18 are actively hunted and captured by the invaders and then have obedience device, known as a 'harness', fitted onto their spines. This then inserts itself into their spinal column and begins a process of biologically altering them, possibly in a similar way to the Skitters. All of this hints back to one of the themes of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds; the displacement of humanity from the top of the evolutionary pile to that of a lower order animal to be exploited in the way that we might exploit horses or dogs.

written by Peter Grehan