The first alien invasion story I ever saw was The War of the Worlds. Not the new one with Tom Cruise, but the original 1953 version. I couldn’t have been more than seven when I watched it on TV one sunny Saturday afternoon. Do you know why I’ve never seen the remake? Because the original scared me half to death.

There’s a scene where an alien camera-thing sort of sneaks up behind a woman. It looks like a head with three glowing eyes and it slinks down from the ceiling on a long tube of a neck. When she finally notices this monstrosity she lets out an impressive blood-curdling scream before the hero lops off the offending head with an axe. The neck then zips back up through the ceiling and into the ship hovering above them in the sky. I may have screamed.

And what do these humans do after inflicting bodily harm on the alien camera-head thingy? They grab the head to take back to their lab for study and get the heck out of Dodge because there are giant killer aliens with laser beams in the sky and all the humans have is an axe. See, smart humans. The humans in Falling Skies, however, are from the shallow end of the gene pool since rather than doing smart things, these guys excel at Stupid Human Tricks that surely have the aliens laughing as they destroy the planet. [Spoilers ahead]

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