Dark Harvest (Invader Zim)

File:DarkHarvest01.jpg

Invader Zim in Dark Harvest.

Dark Harvest is a particularly dark episode of Invader Zim.

Plot

Out on the playground, Zim is hit with a ball and cries "My squeedly-spootch!" (Apparently, an Irken organ.) Dib quickly points out that it's not a human organ.

Later in class, a pigeon flies into the classroom and lands on Zim's head. As Ms. Bitters tries to teach the children about the bubonic plague, she's distracted by the cooing of the pigeon. She angrily tells Zim to go see the school nurse because he has head pigeons. She gives him a hall pass, which is a collar that will apparently explode if he leaves school grounds. On his way out, Dib tries to scare Zim by telling him that his organs will probably be inspected, and he's sure to be discovered. So Zim gets an idea.

File:DarkHarvest02.jpg

Zim and Dib.

Dib quickly realizes Zim is up to something so he asks to see the nurse as well, telling Ms. Bitters that a pencil is lodged in his brain. (He appears to have broken a pencil and stuck it up his nose.) After he convinces her that the pencil is in far enough to be a danger, she allows him to go. She also gives him a hall pass—a 62 lb. radiator. He soon discovers Zim's intentions: stealing the organs of the other children by teleporting them out and replacing them with various items (a carton of milk, a Game Slave, a kitten, etc.). Dib desperately tries to protect the kids from Zim's organ transplanting, but to no avail, and soon, Zim corners him.

In the final scene, Zim and Dib are being looked at by the nurse. She shoos the pigeon away and tells Zim he's the healthiest child she's seen, "and such plentiful organs!" Dib, however, moos like a cow from the novelty item Zim zapped into him. The nurse cries out in a panic and calls Dib inhuman and a newspaper spins onto the screen with the headline, "Hideous mooing cyborg boy found!"

Quotes

(Student hit with dodgeball)

Student: "M-my organs!"

Zim: "(laughs) Inferior human organs! (Zim then hit with ball) My squeedly spooch!"

Dib: "Squeedly spooch? Did you hear that, Gaz? That's no human organ! Humans don't have squeedly spooches!"

Gaz: "I have a squeedly spooch."

Trivia/Themes

• The scenario of Zim harvesting organs from students is similar to the popular theories of aliens harvesting cows for unknown use. [1]

• Jason Marsden voices the jock who Dib fails to protect (as he rambles about being kidnapped as a baby). He has also voiced the Boy in the zit commercial. [2]

• Dib reveals his vague memories of being kidnapped as an infant for unknown reasons, though he says it's possible that he was used to create some kind of "evil-genius-super baby?"

See also

• List of Invader Zim episodes
• Invader Zim