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Taken: Aliens, America, and Collectivism (sorta)

by Tristan J. Nankervis on July 14, 2025

An underrated alien abduction miniseries that almost lives up to its ambitions.

Taken is absolutely the kind of show they’d make now, but I wouldn’t trust them to make it with this level of competence. The plot premise of the story is that the Roswell incident in 1947 – in which debris was recovered and has since, infamously, been considered parts of an alien craft – was in fact debris from an alien craft; the story premise is that we’re following three generations of three different families over the course of fifty years as the conspiracy is investigated, people are taken (that’s the name of the show!) by aliens, and the government conspirators try and piece together what the aliens were trying to achieve.

In a lot of ways, this is a miniseries for people who were exasperated by the failure of The X-Files to have a clear idea of what the solutions to its various mysteries were; I personally found the solution to be disappointing in how obvious and simple it was, but if you’re into a story for big questions with clearly worked-out answers where everything fits together, this is the show for you. This is the upshot of limited miniseries; it can be coherently worked out ahead of time and brought to a natural conclusion.

To me, though, this is simply a cool structure and aesthetic for many much smaller stories. Russell Keyes (Steve Burton) is an American fighter pilot who is taken by mysterious lights as he pilots planes in World War II – what we now would refer to as ‘foo fighters’, more on that later – and then finds himself repeatedly taken by them when he returns to America. Owen Crawford (Joel Gretsch) is a US military Captain who is present at the Roswell crash (which is related to but otherwise not the debris found in reality) and begins the US Government’s investigation into the aliens, who uses the project to climb the ladder. Sally Clarke (Catherine Dent) is a small-town housewife who meets the alien survivor of the crash (posing as a human) and ends up having his child.

The show follows them, and then their children; Russell’s son Jesse (played as a child by Connor Widows, a teenager by James Kirk, and an adult by Desmond Harrington) is, to Russell’s horror, also taken by the aliens; Eric Crawford (played by Trevor Pawson as a young child, Branden Nadon as an older child, and Andy Powers as an adult) grows older and takes over the project; Sally’s half-alien son Jacob (played by Anton Yelchin when young and Chad Donella as an adult) grows up and deals with having strange powers and Owen Crawford coming after him. And then these people go on to have children, who take up their parent’s causes.

Now, I get annoyed when people dismiss the films of Quentin Tarantino as overstuffed with references for two reasons: firstly, I identify with the perspective of Mr Tarantino’s films and take criticism of them as a criticism of my identity, and more importantly: everyone does it and it’s really cool when they do. The interesting underlying point of Taken is that both the conspiracies and the mundane explanations are true – Sally is, at once, someone who was met by an alien visitor and a sad, lonely woman in a shitty small town with a terrible husband, for whom the story of an alien encounter gives great meaning to an otherwise pointless-seeming life.

The clever part of Taken is how well it weaves together disparate mythology of alien abduction narratives; I read such things obsessively when I was a kid, and there’s a lot to recognise here – the foo fighters (yes, I know a famous band took the name) and initial indication of aliens via radios and car engines failing are big examples; the design of the alien ships lifts heavily from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind*; one episode draws heavily on cryptozoology and mysterious writings found in the woods; later episodes set in the Nineties are riffing very heavily on The X-Files, with Mary Crawford (played by Anysha Berthot when young and Heather Donahue as an adult) the third generation government conspiracy agent, namedropping the series.

(*Spielberg was executive producer, and the series draws heavily on the tone from his films.)

On top of this, writer/creator Leslie Bohem draws heavily on cliche for the character’s personal lives; Jesse Keyes is my favourite of these, living out the late Sixties and early Seventies as a heroin-addicted Vietnam War veteran; Lisa Clarke (played by Taylor-Anne Reid at the age of eight, Alexandra Purvis at age thirteen, and Emily Bergl as an adult), child of Jacob Clarke, has a trailer trash grunge childhood. This works for me, partly because of the sheer scope we’re operating on, and partly because he finds really nuanced, specific character arcs.

My favourite of these is consistently the Crawford family. Owen Crawford kicks the whole thing off as a guy who is definitely a fucking psychopath who ruthlessly murders anyone who stands in his way; the helpful example is that he marries a woman (Tina Holmes) because she happens to be the daughter of a general and he sees that as a useful stepping stone to advancing his career, then decades later murders her and his closest subordinate, making it look like a murder-suicide, because she’s starting to drink heavily and risks revealing his secrets. The sheer commitment to thinking through extreme behaviour makes him fun to watch.

His son is just as interesting, from a different perspective. Eric grows up hating his father and trying to best him at his own job, confused as to why Owen keeps dismissing and ignoring him; he joins the military hoping to make his father proud, then gradually figures out Owen’s various secrets; as Owen dies from a stroke in front of him, Eric figures out that Owen met Jacob Clarke and was subject with a vision of his own painful death. What’s really interesting is that near-literally killing his own father isn’t enough, and Eric spends the rest of his life trying to get some satisfaction out of beating the old man, only to end up replicating many of his father’s own flaws. When he dies, it’s because he tries to seek redemption when it’s far too late.

This big arc ends up articulating the main theme of Taken: legacy. One recurring element of the first two generations is that they die seemingly pointlessly; Russell is killed during an experiment by the government, Owen dies a bitter failure, Jacob dies of heart failure in his thirties, Jesse is so traumatized by his experiences that he spends the majority of his life in a mental health facility, Eric’s brother is killed investigating an alien hybrid. 

But then, a recurring detail in the second two generations is that they pick up the work left behind by the past generations; Owen Crawford picks up some alien tech that he literally passes down to the next generations and Mary is explicitly motivated by her identification with her grandfather and desire to carry on his work. Meanwhile, Charlie Keyes (played by Devin Douglas Drewitz as a child and Adam Kaufman as an adult) puts together clues via photograph that his father and grandfather couldn’t possibly have access to, and as the military advance in technology, so too does its understanding of the aliens.

The incredibly obvious and heavily foreshadowed twist is that the aliens were intending to breed the Keyes and the Clarkes together to create Allie (played by Elle Fanning as a toddler and Dakota Fanning as a nine-year-old), an alien-human hybrid that would allow them to understand their differences better. This is obvious specifically because Allie is the narrator of the series and is clearly referencing specific characters when she describes her various family members.

This ends up with a very American take on collectivism. Initially, Taken looks like an ensemble piece where every person is a smaller unit in a larger chain of events, where people may contribute in a tiny way but they do contribute to the grand scheme of things. As soon as Allie comes into play, everything ends up coalescing into existing specifically for her and her superpowers. One joke childfree people often make is that parenthood is a wonderful gift for people who otherwise lack any kind of personality; this ends up taking the observation at the heart of that – that people who otherwise lack any internal drive, desire for achievement, or even discernable abilities – and spins a sincere emotion out of it. However shitty Jesse’s life was, he was part of the process that led to Allie, and meaning can be taken from this even if Jesse is unable to do so.

The moral conclusion is that we, the viewer, are like Allie – special, uniquely talented individuals who make vast choices that affect everyone else and were brought into existence at the expense of many, many other people. At the very least, we can see ourselves as capable of creating the next Allie in some way, even if we’re only supporting or teaching or giving a lift to her grandparent. Because of their infatuation with individualism, Americans seem particularly susceptible to the Great Man Theory of history, in which events are shaped largely by unique and special individuals; Taken presents a sympathetic and coherent expression of that idea, generating a Great Man in the form of a little girl.

SCATTERED NOTES

  • I must admit, when the characters look up at the UFO, a bit of me panics.
  • One of my favourite characters in this is Dr Chet Wakeman, a scientist who assists first Eric then Mary. He’s played by Matt Frewer, who is most famous for playing Max Headroom; Frewer sells that Wakeman is gleeful at learning anything he can about the aliens, laughing joyfully even when they destroy his life’s work multiple times, and he sells that Wakeman does have a sense of morality – a loyalty to both Eric and Mary that he doesn’t always expect them to return. He also gets two things; one of the most repugnant twists in any show this side of The Shield when he sleeps with a fresh-from-college Mary and remarks that he’s wanted to do that since she was thirteen (“Me too.”), and a terrible haircut right in line with Stanely Tucci’s in The Core.
  • The major flaw of the series is that, once we catch up to the present, the time is compressed but the dramatic consequence is decompressed. That is to say, the first six episodes cover about fifty years of time, and the last four episodes cover about a week. Episode seven is particularly annoying because Bohem visibly delays the plot by trapping the characters in a room with a man holding a gun and revealing nothing for long periods of time. This is particularly frustrating when each episode is about eighty minutes long.
  • You may have noticed this show is a bit of a who’s who of American and Canadian television of the 00’s. Joel Gretch would go on to play a different character in an alien abduction show, The 4400. Anton Yelchin would appear in Curb Your Enthusiasm later in the decade before appearing as Chekhov in Star Trek. Adam Kaufman appeared on Buffy The Vampire Slayer in its fourth season. Emily Burgl played the lead in Rage: Carrie 2. Julie Benz, John Hawkes, Jason Grey-Standford, and Willie Garson all appear in smaller roles.

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