Around the campfire, a recent downpour soaked the furniture. Megan arrives to find the others sitting on the ground. She drapes a red blanket on the stone chair, and sits. Have they no conception of what might lurk beneath their feet? Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, she calls this story "The Tale of the Lunar Locusts".
Beneath a bright, near-full moon, a patch of school field bulges ominously. On a blanket, Jake and Julie admire the night sky. Beneath the moon, a tiny orb of yellow light flits into view, and floats swiftly away.
Next day, alone in a biology classroom, Jake searches online for UFO sightings. From behind the monitor pops new girl Ellen. She asks to try on his gemstone-set ring. Just then, Julie arrives in the doorway, calls Jake to Spanish class, and strides off. After school, could Jake perhaps give Ellen a computer class? They arrange to meet at his house.
Later, on the near-deserted football field, Julie spies Ellen hunched across some sort of portable device: a foot long grey pole, attached to a mechanical box. Julie steals into the empty Biology classroom, and investigates. She reaches a forbidden door. Inside, around the room’s perimeter, equipment-packed shelves are crowded with foliage. She leaves - and fails to notice, curled up atop a shelf, a sleeping Ellen...
Later, Jake drives Ellen home, and on a woodland road, is told to stop. Ellen asks to wear Jake's ring. From behind, Jake hears a slithering. He looks onto the backseat, and sees a long, thin, dark green tentacle squirm nimbly onto the floor beneath the driver’s seat. When Ellen next turns to him, her irises glow bright green, and are set with vertical pupils. Her voice now has a rasping echo. Jake screams in fright, opens the driver’s seat door, and legs it across the forest floor. With a lashing sound, something trips him. At lightning speed, Ellen hurries over, kneels on his chest, and puts a hand over his mouth. She apologises for scaring him; claims not to be from around here, and that her visible form is a disguise. She needs his help. From a pocket, she takes a newspaper. She says headline, "Flesh Eating Bacteria Strikes Again" to refer to interstellar locusts which ravaged her planet. Behind a nearby bush, Julie, binoculars in hand, watches the confrontation.
From beneath her blouse, Ellen takes a necklace, which holds a semi-transparent light grey pendant - like the one on Jake’s ring. She takes Jake’s hand, and her own stone above his. With a soft whine, each stone meets the other with a white glow. Both stones are needed to kill the locusts. That night, the jeep parks on school grounds. Jake and Ellen get out. She gestures to the field, under which the mother locust has laid her eggs. From two cops brought to the school by Julie, Jake and Ellen run to a windowed door. It’s locked. From her index fingernail, Ellen produces a green claw. She cuts a circle in the glass, reaches inside, and opens the door from within. With a cop in hot pursuit, they race down the school corridors, into the Biology classroom, and through the door by its front wall. Via Ellen’s "suction", they cling to the ceiling, and when the cop withdraws, drop to the floor. Ellen hands Jake a pair of sunglasses…
Onto the football field, Jake and Ellen carry two pronged, cylindrical devices. When the moon passes directly above the school, they need to channel its light. As the cops approach, Jake runs off to distract them. He sneaks into the passenger seat of his jeep. In the driver’s seat is Julie. He explains the perilous situation, and declares his love for Julie. They kiss.
A region of the football field bulges ominously. The cops are distracted by loud music from Jake’s jeep. They approach - only to find Ellen, who apologises for the volume. Between the goalposts, Ellen attends one of the cylindrical devices, which are now both mounted on tripods. She and Jake each sprint to either side of the field. A cop bounds onto the scene, and grabs hold of Ellen. She tosses Jake her stone. With the moon high over the school, Jake flings one of the stones, which lands directly between the prongs of of a cylinder. With a flash, the prongs glow green. Jake splints across the field, fights off two cops, and throws the other stone to the other cylinder. A third cop wrestles him into submission. The stone misses by several feet. Just then, Julie arrives, picks up the stone, and throws it to the cylinder.
From each end of the field, each upward-slanting device projects a beam of brilliant green light, which arc diagonally upward, to meet in mid-air. With a flash of white, a colossal dome of green light descends across the field. The police officers grimace against the blaze. As it fades, they fall to the ground.
Jake and Julie hug - they've stopped the flesh-eating alien locusts. Confused, Julie reveals the headline to reveal to bacteria stopped in Brazil with antibiotics. Between the dazedly stirring cops, Ellen removes her sunglasses. Green eyes aglow, she giggles. From beneath the steaming field, numerous slim, pointed green tentacles push their way up through the soil…
As Megan heads off, the others suddenly realise how wet the ground is. In mutual chagrin, they gather round the fire, turn their backs to it, and bend down.
This episode provides examples of:
- Alien Invasion: Ellen warns Jake of a planet-eating virus. It’s actually her own people who seem to want to invade.
- Aliens Among Us: Ellen is an alien in the form of a teenage girl.
- Combat Tentacles: From beneath her human disguise, Ellen deploys slim, green, pointed tentacles. They’re very fast.
- Evil All Along: Instead of helping her destroy a planet-eating virus, Jake unwittingly helps Ellen aid an apparent invasion.
- Glowing Eyes of Doom: Ellen’s suddenly green-glowing eyes ominously indicate her to be an alien of possibly sinister intent.
- Good All Along: Subverted. Jake is initially frightened by Ellen’s revelation to have green eyes and tentacles, but she assures him that her mission is to kill a flesh-eating virus beneath the school football field. There is no virus: on refracting the moonlight into the field, Jake and Julie help Ellen nurture her tentacular kith, whose emergence from beneath the field isn’t obviously friendly.
- Horde of Alien Locusts: A planet-eating virus. Which Ellen apparently just made up.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The reason Ellen and her people are successful at arriving to Earth for the invasion is thanks to Jake and his gullibility in the "flesh-eating bacteria". Had he bothered to read more of the news article Ellen gave him, he might've seen past her deception and known not to trust her.
- Nothing Is Scarier: We only see hints of Ellen’s true form, which include glowing green eyes, tentacles, and a long, green talon.
- Opposites Attract: Jake and Julie. Jake is a big, gentle (if somewhat gullible) jock, Julie is a bright, petite nerd girl. They can't be any more different than night and day. Yet, before the plot got rolling, they took to each rather nicely.
- Police Are Useless: Averted. The police pose a significant obstacle, and only fail because Ellen tricks Jake into helping her.
- Power Crystal: A semi-transparent white stone, found by Jake on the beach, aids Ellen’s light refractor gizmos.
- Properly Paranoid: Though she was primarily concerned with losing Jake to her, Julie had every right to be suspicious of Ellen.
- Scenery Porn: Some lovely shots of the nearby woods.
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The happy ending, in which Jake believes himself and Julie to have helped a bereaved, lost alien save Earth, is quickly subverted by revelation of the supposed threat to be fabrication, and by emergence from the field of distinctly unfriendly-looking tentacles.
- Too Dumb to Live: Jake blindly trusted what Ellen told him about herself and how she supposedly zapped the parasitic aliens in Brazil, not even bothering to read the article that she shoved into his face. If he had done that, he would have discovered that it was really bacteria that was killed by antibiotics. It's only when Julie tells him the truth at the end does he start to wonder if something's up. Unfortunately by then, it's too little, too late.
