Recap / Philip K Dicks Electric Dreams S 1 E 10 The Father Thing

• Awkward Father-Son Bonding Activity: Road trip, camping, playing baseball — it's every Americana cliche of "quality time" with Dad in one. (Perhaps intentional: Charlie's dad is about to divorce his mom and move out, and is feeling highly insecure about how this will affect Charlie.)
• Big Brother Bully: Henry, the brother of Charlie's best friend Dylan. Turns into the Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other version of this trope when he finds out about the alien invasion.
• Coincidental Broadcast: The news story on the radio about the freak meteor shower blanketing the Midwest as Charlie and his dad drive home from their camping trip.
• The Conspiracy: The pod people have infiltrated the police force, child protective services, the school administration, and probably most of the rest of the local government.
• Creator Cameo: Charlie's history teacher is named Mr. Dick, as in Philip K. Dick. He also vaguely physically resembles Philip K. Dick and, like the author, is haunted by feelings of unreality that drive him into suicidal depression.
• Driven to Suicide: Charlie's teacher, Mr. Dick, after the constant Gaslighting about his wife being killed and replaced by a duplicate.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Charlie has killed the Father-Thing and destroyed the pods being prepared for himself and his mother. However, he's also destroyed any proof of his story by doing so, he's revealed his identity and his actions to the aliens by posting his story online, and he has no actual plan (other than "#Resist") for fighting aliens who've already apparently taken over the local government and police force. Moreover, it's ambiguous whether he's even told his mother why his father is dead, or, if he has, whether she believes it or thinks something much more mundane yet much more disturbing happened.
• Game of Nerds: Charlie and his dad both come off this way, obsessed with baseball trivia and asking each other "stumpers".
• Harsher in Hindsight: If you see "Human Is" after this episode. In that episode, Vera decides to accept the Body Snatcher replacing Silas as her husband because he's so much kinder than the real Silas was. This time, the Father-thing tries to pull the same thing on Charlie's mother only for Charlie to kill him anyway. Of course, in this episode Charlie is the better judge of character.
• I Never Told You My Name: How Charlie picks up on Detective Fernandez being one of Them.
• Kill and Replace: The nature of this invasion, making it far more sinister than the "merging" depicted in "Human Is".
• Milkman Conspiracy: The pod people initially target garbagemen for replacement, which initially seems like an odd choice until the reveal that the garbagemen are taking all the replacees' bodies to the dump to avoid discovery.
• Mythology Gag: The idea of all garbagemen being inhuman monsters who are part of some inhuman conspiracy was the idea behind Dick's classic story from the point of view of a frantically barking dog, "Roog".
• Naked on Arrival: The pod people, as is traditional. May double as Fan Disservice in the case of the Mother-thing in her pod.
• Narm: Charlie typing the hashtag "#Resist" in the caption of his video post describing the alien invasion.
• Not Himself: Charlie is convinced this is true of his father, although actually seeing his dad's soul being horrifically consumed by his duplicate might be influencing his perceptions.
• Older Than They Think: This episode comes off as a ripoff of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers franchise because the original Philip K. Dick story it's based on was written two years before the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers film and helped inspire it.
• Signature Scent: How Charlie knows for sure that his mother hasn't also been replaced (that and she's still a jerk to him about picking up his stuff).
• Spock Speak: When the Father-thing drops the act he begins seemingly intentionally using stilted words like "other" for "wife" and "progeny" for "child" to highlight his alien-ness.
• Squick: The pod people's true forms are Insectoid Aliens who apparently wriggle around freely under the skin of their Meat Puppets when they think people aren't looking.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Charlie's mother thinks he's upset because he just found out about the pending divorce, only for him to angrily reveal he's known about the divorce for a long time now and come to accept it despite all his parents' tiptoeing.