The Father Thing

There is nothing inherently bad about The Father Thing, however there is nothing that notable about it apart from on the surface it tells a similar story to the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

After a meteor shower, some of the townsfolk in a Chicago suburb seems to have been replaced. A few people notice the strange behaviour. Charlie Cotrell (Jack Gore) has a shared love of baseball with his dad (Greg Kinnear) but then suspects that his dad has been taken over by an alien entity.

Charlie starts an online resistance movement and ropes in other school kids in the town to expose the aliens.

Maybe this story is a parable of kids growing up in a hostile adult world or households that have been split by divorce and the child inherits a substitute father or mother figure.

You can't avoid having a « déjà-vu » feeling watching this episode; it's literally a mash-up of movies such as « The Body snatchers », « The Faculty » and the recent TV show « Stranger Things ». But it's not just a cheap rip-off; the SFX are good and the strange atmosphere is well set, and Greg Kinnear is great as usual. If anything it's a little short on time; 15 more minutes would have been nice in order to give some characters more run-time and backstory.

I don't know how many cold war films were made where invaders took over common folk. "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is probably the prototype. This one borrows from that and a host of others, including the series "Stranger Things." Because the character of Charlie is so well drawn, this works. It would seem that the fatal flaw in the aliens is that they need host bodies. Charlie could have been killed at any time, but they wanted to assimilate him. There is good suspense and some interesting kid characters. The closeness of Charlie and his father makes his task so much more dramatic. The cinematography is very good with some quite positive special effects. Greg Kinear as the father is certainly quietly threatening. We can only wonder what will happen next.

This one is the real deal, friends, don't confuse this episode as a "mash-up" from other shows, because this one is based in the original short story from Philip K. Dick (hey, his name is in the show's title!) from 1954. If anything, other shows took ideas from these kind of stories.

I think it was a very good episode. And I'm enjoying a lot watching this show and seeing Mr. Dick's stories come to life (because he didn't just write _that blade runner_ book ;) ).

Playing out like a combination of "Invaders from Mars" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", this story centers on a young boy, who, while camping with his father, observes a meteor shower, and later, something much more sinister.

Convinced that more and more people are not who they appear to be, the tension ratchets up as he investigates what's going on with his father and seemingly everyone else.

Nicely done riff on a classic science fiction story.