“The Father Thing” is episode seven of season one of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams and is based on the short story The Father-Thing.
The episode opens with a young boy with cuts and marks on his face making a video. He is talking about his father, and how great he was. How he was always there and came back two days early from a conference in New York simply so that he could see his son in the baseball playoffs. The boy says that he thinks that, after everything that’s happened, his father would be proud. It then goes back three days.
An unusually dense cluster of meteors are approaching the Earth. The young boy, Charlie, and his father are out camping in a tent and quizzing each other on baseball trivia. They are settling down to sleep but go outside to watch a rather strange meteor shower. The meteors all appear to be fireballs and are descending what looks like vertically and perhaps oddly slowly.
On the way back from camping, there is news on the radio about the meteorites, how they were unusually dense and covered a large swathe of the continent.
Charlie’s parents are having problems, but they haven’t broached the subject with their son yet. That night, after returning home from camping, there is another meteor shower similar to that of the previous night. The next day at school, quite a few people appear to be missing from Charlie’s class. When Charlie’s father comes home that evening and enters the garage, Charlie sees strange lights coming through the windows. He peers in and sees a humanoid being of some type projecting energy towards his father.
Following this, Charlie becomes uncertain around his father and notices some oddities with his behaviour. He checks online and sees that many people are posting the same thing about friends, neighbours and loved ones. There are more affected people in the neighbourhood too.
Charlie’s statement that his father has been taken over by an alien is not exactly met with widespread belief. Except by the aliens themselves, who already appear to have extensively infiltrated. Charlie’s only recourse is his friends.
This is very reminiscent of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with the pod people influence. This was apparently fairly common in fiction at the time, and both stories, and other similar ones, were released at the same time (it’s not clear whether this short story or Invasion was out first).