The series is perfectly set up to explore topics surrounding race but doesn’t dare progress with it. This series could have been like The Leftovers, beginning with a supernatural event and then focusing on the real, human consequences in a thematic way, but instead it is too caught up in its basic sci-fi plotting. Given the focus on pregnancy, female insight is a welcome addition to the television series, but just making the change doesn’t mean much if you don’t do anything with it. For example, being a novel written by a man in the 1950s, it has an overwhelming male perspective, with the opinions and feelings of the village’s women either ignored or told second-hand. In this respect, the novel was dying for a new adaptation which could modernise these topics for the 2020s, but the series wastes the opportunity after initially seeming like it’ll embrace it. The brood parasites offer the chance to explore teenage pregnancy, sex outside wedlock, and abortion. The other is a satirical look at topics, many of which were taboo when the novel was published, surrounding pregnancy and child-rearing. Yet, as stated, the sci-fi ‘invasion’ narrative is just one half of The Midwich Cuckoos. Sky’s recent seven-part television series forsakes the majority of these ideas, paying mere lip service to some, and ends up being a disappointingly simple and straightforward story counter to that of the novel. A story designed to actively, yet lovingly, rebuke those simple invasion stories of H.G. It’s heady sci-fi, exploring everything from group think vs individualism to evolution.
Part satire on British life, lambasting village gossip and taboo subjects, and part moral and philosophical examination of humanity’s place in the universe: the cosmic fear we hold of being usurped by nature, or supernature. One in which our children were the invaders, metaphorically in the rise of a new generation alien to our own and literally considering they are parasitic brood extraterrestrials implanted into women during a freak blackout one summer night. With his 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham sought to write a different kind of alien invasion story. This would seem to be one of those unfortunate situations where no solution is morally defensible.”
“It makes one long for H.G.’s straightforward Martians.
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