Main cast: Troy Donahue (Dr Thomas Becker) and Belle Avery (Paula)
Director: Anthony Santa Croce

Micro Minds is a reference to the aliens in this episode—they are microscopic and they live around us, unseen.

Their IQ isn’t micro, however. The microbrain here would be the male lead character, but I am getting ahead of myself.

That’s what student Paula discovers when she accidentally makes contact with them one day in the lab while doing her usual experiments. When Dr Thomas Baker checks up on her, he initially pooh-poohs her finding, but changes his mind when he soon realizes that, oh my, there really are tiny, tiny aliens having dialogues with them.

Are these aliens friends or foe? Well, this is a show called Monsters, so…

This episode is clearly a homage of sorts to those horror movies from the 1950s and 1960s, because the props and even the monster all look like they could have been lifted straight out from those movies like Island of Terror and Sting of Death.

Even the acting feels like that in those movies—everyone talks so slowly and each word is enunciated carefully like it’s an alien-themed audiobook to teach people how to speak English—and much of the episode sees the older male character talking down to the female character. Ah, those were the good old days when we can always identify the source a gal’s daddy issues.

The homage elements aside, this episode is still well paced and intriguing enough to be worth a look. The aliens’ true intentions can be seen coming from a while away, but how these intentions are revealed have their interesting moments.

If anything, this episode drives home a truth that most people think is rude to acknowledge: never trust a professor to make significant decisions that would impact more than his own ivory tower bubble, because I can say with certainty from experience: the longer one stays in academia, the more warped their perspective becomes, due to being treated like a god by fawning students and staff alike.

Some people may say it’s also an unwisely serious episode, given how cheap and ridiculous everything here could look, but come on, some of the movies it seems to be paying homage to were just as earnest while looking like they ran out of money one day into filming!

Anyway, this is a pretty cute episode that, for once, has a good reason to boast laughably bad special effects and low budget realness.