Schlocky 'Invasion' takes some baby steps in the right direction
In its first months, ''Invasion" was all come-on, all ''maybe, but maybe not." The show was like an unnervingly still face, unwilling to reveal anything specific, smugly withholding valuable information. While ''Lost" was tossing out clues every 108 minutes or so, building the mystery while keeping the mystery, ''Invasion" was growing as stagnant as its Florida glades. The plot was too tightly bottled up, too controlled, just like its sketchy antihero, Sheriff Tom Underlay.
Diagnosis: Enigmatic but empty.
But in the past two weeks, after a tryingly long holiday break, ''Invasion" has finally let go of its precious restraint. The ABC series has been taking what Underlay creepily calls ''baby steps" when he advises alien-human ''hybrids" on how to move forward on Earth. It has begun to give us action, facts, and, most important, a rich sci-fi metaphor. ''Invasion" has started to realize its potential to be the best of the post-''Lost" network sci-fi series. While the likes of ''Threshold" and ''Night Stalker" have already been shipped out of prime time, ''Invasion" just might shape up into something worthy.
Don't get me wrong. This show is no ''Lost." It's a proudly cheesy UFO series, one whose title makes the show's similarities to ''Invasion of the Body Snatchers" explicit so that critics can't call them unintentional. While ''Lost" is a true original, a TV epic with cinematic aspirations, ''Invasion" wants to be little more than a schlocky B-movie, the kind of flying-saucer flick Tim Burton tried to lampoon in ''Mars Attacks!"
But it's beginning to have a good time, reveling in overheated apocalyptic melodrama, even giving us the campiness of a man who grew back an arm -- then chain-sawed it off. ''Invasion" is embracing its 1950s roots, its little-green-men ancestry (though they're little orange sea creatures here).
The show, on Wednesday nights at 10 on Channel 5, is set amid a family in Homestead, Fla., that has been invaded by alienation. Square-jawed Russell (Eddie Cibrian) and cool blonde Mariel (Kari Matchett) are divorced and each has remarried. And so their two children get unhappily shuttled back and forth between Russell and his second wife, Larkin (Lisa Sheridan), and Mariel and her second husband, Underlay (William Fichtner). Russell and Larkin are clearly the forces of good; Mariel and Tom, who've been inhabited by the aliens, are corrupted. They are hybrids, although Mariel has begun to struggle against the new direction of her own body. ''Whatever is happening," she says, ''I'm going to fight it." As she fights it, of course, she gets closer to good-guy ex Russell.
The show's producers, including Shaun Cassidy, are increasingly using the alien infestation as a symbol for bad parenting. Tom and to some extent Mariel have been co-opted by the aliens, and so they don't much like human children. Some hybrids in Brazil and Cuba have even been known to kill their own kids. The local survivors group -- supposedly for those who survived a hurricane, but really for new hybrids -- is more like a refuge for people who've lost their basic human instincts, including parental love.
Provocatively, Cassidy and his writers also hint at a broader political interpretation of their setup. Many of the authority figures in this Florida microcosm seem to be hybrids -- fake people. A few of the most haunting images in the show have been of Father Scanlon, played with barely masked glee by the odd-faced Ivar Brogger. He's head of the church, but he's been tainted since the hurricane. Underlay, who has been tainted since 1996, is the town's top dog, an armed police figure who appropriates Christian dogma to manipulate people. Even the military -- if those people in uniform are indeed the military -- may be a bunch of frauds with compromised DNA.
At the same time, the heroes trying to expose the alien invasion could be qualified as ''down to earth," if not tree-huggers. They're not exactly the local power center. Russell is a close-to-nature park ranger; Larkin is an investigative reporter who hates lies; and Larkin's brother, Dave (Tyler Lapine), is an unemployed slacker. They don't literally wear white hats, but they have a social underdog air about them. If the hybrids are artificial, these guys are decidedly organic. While the Underlays live in a modern suburban home, Russell, Larkin, and Dave live in the woods in a group of weathered shacks that have a junkyard feel to them. If the hybrids look like Homestead's ruling class, the humans are ''the people."
The actors were cast to emphasize this black-and-white approach to good and bad, human and alien. As Underlay, Fichtner has a stony look to him, even when he's smiling -- indeed, most of all when he's smiling. With his mile-long forehead and his height, he's a tower of quiet malignancy. Sometimes you think he might be good -- but no, he's very bad. As Russell, Cibrian is the conventional hero whose dimpled face leaves no ambiguity about his allegiance to humanity. And as Mariel, the woman torn between these two men, and between good and evil, Matchett has an anxious beauty that leaves plenty of room for inner conflict.
It's hard to know where ''Invasion" will go, now that it's going somewhere, now that it's more forthcoming about what dark things are happening in the bright Florida town. It faces the same plot-development problem that haunts all mythology TV series: How do you make progress but never get to the end? The advantage to ''24" is that while the plot unfolds all season long, it must wrap up at the end of each year. ''Lost" and ''Invasion" will need to keep putting down cards but not tip their hands, perhaps for many years to come. Like ''The X-Files," they'll need to reveal for as long as the network needs them, and not necessarily for as long as the story requires.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. 
