Warning! SPOILERS for Invasion episodes 1-4
Apple TV+'s Invasion just sneakily revived a classic J.J. Abrams alien design in its latest episode, "The King Is Dead." Invasion chronicles the decidedly human accounts of various individuals worldwide, as they struggle against an imminent alien threat looming above Earth. Despite Invasion's extraterrestrial premise, the series to date has shown very little of the aliens descending upon the planet, instead opting to utilize brief frames of a largely offscreen presence in favor of bringing an abundance of character development to the fore.
Episode 4, "The King Is Dead," continues one of Apple TV+ Invasion's primary storylines, as lost Navy SEAL Trevante Ward (Shamier Anderson) resumes his search to reunite with his missing platoon. Towards the end of the episode, Ward finds his close friend and comrade-in-arms Chavez (Alex Hernandez), who is lying gravely injured in a dilapidated Kandahar hospital. As Trevante attempts to rescue Chavez, he is attacked by a militant group who pursue him through the tunnels underneath the hospital. While Trevante escapes his attackers, the remaining militant soldier is suddenly pounced upon and killed in the shadows by a mysterious black creature with three legs.
Despite the blink-and-you'll-miss-it nature of the alien attack on the militant soldier, it appears Invasion has invoked a classic J.J. Abrams and Neville Page alien's movie design. While Invasion shows remarkable restraint and refuses to reveal a clear look at any of its aliens, the creature that kills the militant soldier bears strong ties to the three-legged parasites seen in the found-footage epic Cloverfield. Invasion's willingness to include gratuitous sci-fi Easter Eggs that pay homage to the show's genre, coupled with the series taking inspiration from Abram's and Damon Lindelof's multicultural classic Lost, means that a version of Cloverfield's monster designs could well be on Invasion's cards.
While it must be stressed that Invasion's look at the Kandahar alien aggressor is brief, the design of its rapid, three-legged creature bears striking similarities to the alien horror in Cloverfield. Nicknamed "Clover," this giant three-legged extraterrestrial smashes its way through downtown Manhattan in J.J. Abram's creature feature, while also dropping an innumerable amount of smaller, identical parasites from its body that infect and kill New York City's residents. The thrusting, writhing way these parasites move -- coupled with their tripod-like physiology -- appears similar to the alien shown in Invasion's "The King Is Dead," which, if confirmed, would mark the biggest sci-fi homage in Invasion to date given creators Simon Kinberg and David Weil's apparent admiration for Abrams' work.
Despite the Apple TV+ series' infancy, Invasion is already no stranger to including overt references to classic science fiction tropes and films within its narrative. From Invaders From Mars' iconic 1953 quicksand scenes to the systematic shutdown of global communications à la Independence Day, Invasion has proven it can unabashedly take the best of science fiction's collective ideas and meld them into a new portrait of an alien takeover. With that in mind, it would be no surprise if Invasion's alien designs are in part modeled on J.J. Abram's groundbreaking alien film that redefined the limits of "lost footage" cinema in 2008.