Taken is a Science Fiction miniseries made in 2002. It's about three families, beginning with Russel Keyes, an Air Force pilot who is abducted by aliens in the middle of a battle; Owen Crawford, an Air Force captain who is the first from the military to see the crashed alien spaceship; and Sally Clarke, a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage who meets a strange man in her shed. Three generations of conflict unfolds from these events, and we, along with the characters, slowly learn the motives behind the abductions that have been going on for almost a century.Despite the overuse of cliches, it's actually pretty good. It focuses just as much on the characters as on the plot, as we watch them grow from children to adults.
This series contains examples of:
Alien Invasion: Owen fears this is the alien's ultimate plan.
Aliens Made Them Do It: The penultimate goal of the aliens. Not played for humour OR sexiness.
Anyone Can Die: And not just of old age. In fact, death by old age is pretty rare.
Ascended Extra: Characters go from kids with little-to-no personality to protagonists.
Dysfunction Junction: Alcholism, Oedipus Complexes, multiple cases of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, drug abuse, outright sociopathy... Yeah, people in this show are pretty crazy.
Eagleland: Jacob's teacher in 1962 is a type 2 version that thinks he's a type 1.
Game of Nerds: The quiet, bookish Jacob plays baseball. He says that he enjoys it because he can never make assumptions (which is probably important to a psychic). His daughter assumed it was because it's impossibly hard, and had a lot of useless statistics he could memorise.
Generation Xerox: No matter how much he denies any similarities to his father, Eric Crawford's life is very much like Owen's.
It's actually a plot point regarding the Keys family. The reason the aliens are so interested in them is because all of them are fighting the abductions.
Journey to the Center of the Mind : Of a sort. People who walk into the alien ship see people and places from their mind. Owen Crawford claims to be a manifestation of Mary's view of him. It turns out Ally was psychically manipulating everyone.
Meaningful Echo: Sally tells Jacob this phrase every now and again. Jacob repeats it, first to his mother when she sends him away, and again to his daughter just before he dies. She repeats it to Ally just before Ally goes with the aliens.
I love you. Every day and twice on Sundays.
When Jacob is about to Mind Rape somebody, he says "Look at me". When Ally is about to save her dad, she says "Look at me".
Mind Rape: Alien technology has a bad habit of inducing this.
All your memories play at once. All your memories and all your fears.
Naked First Impression: Charlie and Lisa first meet when the aliens coerce them into having sex with each other. Much, much less funny and erotic than it sounds.
Pet the Dog: While he isn't evil so much as an industrial-grade Tin Man, Jacob's gesture for his dying mother is very heartwarming.
Power Incontinence: The aliens need to practice their natural psychic abilities, otherwise they kill humans. Half-humans need to be even more careful - they could accidentally kill themselves.
Power Nullifier: A minor example. The military develop a helmet that can stop the aliens tracking Ally.
Reassigned to Antarctica: Actually carried out on the entire first team assigned to the crashed spacecraft (though to Iceland), then used as a threat for the rest of Owen's career.
Retraux: Subtly used. The direction of each episode tried to mimic the direction of movies from the time period. For example, the first two episodes used older tungsten lights, while the later episodes used more modern lighting systems.
Title Drop: The word 'taken' is used in place of 'abducted'.
Those Wacky Nazis: Dr. Kreutz is an ex-Nazi scientist. As a physicist he is more von Braun than Mengle, but he certainly doesn't have much problem with grusome medical procedures.
The Unfavorite: Eric, to Owen. Interestingly, Sam, the favoured son, hates his father. It turns out the reason that Owen ignores Eric is because when Owen got Mind Raped by Jacob, he saw how he died, with Eric standing over him.
The Unfettered: Owen Crawford really wants to find out what's up with the aliens.
Unperson: Owen did this to his minions to force them into working for him.
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