Invaders within

For one thing, unlike movie creatures, the aliens on TV usually look like people. In part this is because TV has lower make-up and special-effects budgets, but many alien dramas have made a virtue of that deficiency. The X-Files often takes place in underlit, nocturnal locations, and the ambiguity that comes from withheld glimpses of its monsters forces the imagination to work overtime and create a scarier impression. Toward the opposite end, the low-budget humanoid look of the aliens on the original Star Trek emphasized their similarity to humans; Captain Kirk would win them over by appealing to their human nature and human dignity. That tradition continues today, even among the more elaborately configured aliens, on Star Trek's stepchildren.

If aliens on TV dramas have lacked the flash of their movie counterparts, they shared similar origins in Cold War paranoia. As in the drive-in classics of the era, aliens on The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits were often invaders bent on destroying American life as we knew it. Star Trek's frictions among the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans served as an interstellar metaphor for the geopolitics of the 1960s. The parallel to Communist subversion was made explicit in the '60s series The Invaders, where the aliens looked (superficially) like us and infiltrated our society. Later, in the '80s series V, the aliens used the methods of totalitarian regimes (the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge) to subdue the populace and make scapegoats of the scientists and intellectuals who might recognize their true evil. More recently, the series Alien Nation addressed such contemporary issues as immigration and racial integration, with its newly arrived humanoids trying to integrate into an unwelcoming American society.

The X-Files aliens are also zeitgeist products. First, their paranormality and ambiguity reflect a New Age yearning for a spiritual component lacking in our perhaps too earthbound, too secular lives. A presence from above, they fill the same need as the belief in angels and ghosts. (Does Hillary Clinton watch The X-Files? The White House did just hook up the Sci-Fi Channel.) Second, as in The Invaders, there is the implication that a force alien to our interests has infiltrated the highest levels of government, a notion that resounds with conspiracy theorists on both the left and the right. In both cases, the presence of aliens provides an apparently rational and oddly comforting explanation for the otherwise inexplicable.

If aliens on TV dramas are usually sinister, the ones on TV comedies are usually benign, or at least unthreatening. The pattern was established on My Favorite Martian, where, as on the other supernatural sit-coms of the '60s (Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie), the question was, how does a talented, free-spirited outsider keep from ruffling the surface conformity of the family, the workplace, and society at large. The perspective was that of the embarrassed, "normal" human companion, with the alien (or witch, or genie) as comic foil. This tradition continued into the '70s on Mork and Mindy, despite Robin Williams's comic unearthliness, and into the '80s on ALF. In fact, the aliens' humorousness is what rendered them harmless.

The aliens in the new hit 3rd Rock from the Sun share Mork's ability to score mild satirical points about human foibles. However, they are the first TV extraterrestrials since the Coneheads to get to be the point-of-view characters. Having taken human form, the ironically named Solomons of 3rd Rock are only just learning what it feels like to be human. As a foursome, they are a travesty of a human nuclear family, and like the Coneheads, they have taken to human appetites with a vengeance. It's as if all four of them were going through puberty; for all their intellect, they're slaves to their human hormones. That's something all the show's viewers (over age 12) can identify with, but it's something new to TV aliens -- unless you count the ones on The X-Files who enjoy cigarettes. In watching these shows, to paraphrase Pogo, we have met the alien, and it is us.