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TV Is The Fifth Character - Signs: Media Club Plus S02E03
🕑 Added 2025-09-16 19:44:31 +0000 UTCWelcome to Media Club Plus: a podcast about diving into the media that interests us and the stories that excite us. This season we're watching a selection of M Night Shyamalan movies.
This episode we watched Signs and next time we'll be back with The Village.
Signs is a movie about ex-preacher Graham Hess and his faith in god, which is put to the test when his wife is killed as a pedestrian in a car accident. He loses his faith, leaves the Church, and retreats emotionally inside the self-soothing comfort of atheism, or perhaps fledgling nihilism. Unfortunately for him, in M Night's world, God is real, losing faith is wrong, and raising your kid while atheist is toxic. When the earth is suddenly subject to a widespread alien invasion threat, Graham's lack of faith is shattered by God's Grace, and the true extent of His meticulously planned fate is undeniable. In this movie written in 2000-2001, starting production in September 2001, and released in summer of 2002, we find an almost supernaturally early example of the post 9/11 movie. A movie about media, a Christian God, securing borders against foreign threats, pulled from the percolating subconscious of America.
Featuring Keith Carberry (@KeithJCarberry, @KeithJCarberry), Sylvi Bullet (@SYLVIBULLET), Ali Acampora (@Ali-online) and Arthur Martinez-Tebbel (@amtebbel)
Produced by Keith Carberry
Music by Jack de Quidt (available at notquitereal.bandcamp.com)
Cover Art by by Annie Johnston-Glick (@dancynrew) anniejg.com
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Comments
daxleopard
Keith apologising for his voice then immediately cutting to the intro was really good
Taylar
imo the “twist” was that God is real. The aliens are just a red herring.
XF
My theory about the aliens and their deal is that they're basically British dudes on safari. The whole thing never *mattered* to them anywhere near as much as it mattered to humanity; they just rolled up in their nice spaceships with four-wheel drive and radar cloaking, went out to have a fun little hunting trip and get some cool trophies, ran into these freaky apes dumping acid on them, and noped the fuck out. They came in so unprepared and gave up so quickly because they're not a military invasion force, they're just Some Guys, and they're now angrily demanding refunds from the tour organizer and threatening to sue over their friends who got left behind for dead. Also, around when Graham drove over to Reddy's, I started wondering whether anything at all was actually happening outside this one rural town, or whether all the TV footage was fabricated by the government for some reason. We never see lights in the sky over town, we only see them in the TV footage of other cities; the only things that aren't relayed through the TV are the crop circles in the Hess cornfield, the animals on edge, the shadowy figures lurking around, the noises on the baby monitor, and whatever's in Reddy's pantry. *Something's* happening, but maybe it's not actually aliens at all. When Merrill said it was like War of the Worlds, that was definitely another point in favor of the government conspiracy twist. I didn't totally give up on that theory until around when they leave the basement.
