The Midwich Cuckoos is the TV series adaptation of John Wyndham's 1957 novel.
One day, all the town's women of childbearing age suddenly becomes pregnant after a blackout. As a result, the government has become interested and put the women, along with their families, into secrecy. Their extraterrestrial children look each like their mothers, displayed rapid growth, and has uncanny mental abilities.
This series provides examples of:
- Adaptational Deviation: Apart from the obvious time updating, there's the fact that Dr Zellaby is now female and her daughter's child is one of the Children. There's also the fact that the Children are not, as far as can be told, telepathic in this version - they don't have any idea about Dr Zellaby's plan - but they do seem to have telekinetic abilities that were not present in the original, where they had to influence people to move things on their behalf.
- Adaptation Dye-Job: The Children in series appeared more human, matching with the skin, hair, and eye color of their mother, unlike in the novel, where all of them have pale skin with blond hair and gold eyes.
- Aliens in Cardiff
- Gender Flip: For this adaptation, Dr. Zellaby is played by Keeley Hawes.
- Hive Mind: The children are presented as this, although Doctor Zellaby tries to argue that she has seen some, such as Evie, express more individual preferences that go against this idea.
- Missed the Call: Basically applies to Doctor Zellaby; while she is old enough to still have children, she was out of Midwich on a date the night of the original pregnancy and got back too late to be affected.
- Mole in Charge: Bernard Wescott is ultimately revealed to be the survivor of the Russian group of children years ago, infiltrating the government to ensure that the present batch are protected.
- More than Mind Control: The children were able to exert enough influence over the mothers to stop them having abortions even while they were still developing. After birth, emphasis is often placed on how the parents, particularly the mothers, make excuses for the children and genuinely want to accept them, until later acts turn all of the parents more subtly but actively against the children.
- Psychic-Assisted Suicide: The children at least threaten to do this to their guardians more than once, but Doctor Zellaby is able to talk them down before anyone actually dies, although others will kill the attackers in defence of the children.
- Token Good Teammate: Nathan is the only one of the children to explicitly reject his "siblings" in favour of being human.
