GIR sings the “doom song” in the premiere episode, “The Nightmare Begins”

Note: Does not contain any spoilers for Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus, streaming now on Netflix.

“Doom” is the single most commonly used word in the early 2000s television show Invader Zim. I didn’t do any sort of analysis to come to that conclusion — I just know it to be true. Now, you may be thinking, “That can’t possibly be it. It’s gotta be like ‘the’ or something,” and you’re probably right. The point is that “doom” in all its tenses and conjugations is a constant refrain for the characters of this short-lived but beloved children’s show.

From the very first episode, Zim’s alien race, the Irkens, embark on operation “Impending Doom 2” (the first having failed when Zim started destroying things before leaving their home planet), Zim announces they’re going to “reign some doom down upon the filthy heads of our doomed enemies,” GIR sings his “doom song,” Ms. Bitters teaches a lesson on how “the universe is just doomed, doomed, doomed, doomed,” and so on. It starts to lose its meaning after a while. Doom. There’s something phonetically appealing about that long o͞o sound. But I want to pause on the word for a moment and really consider what it means.

While the show won over many kids with its random rubber piggies, adorably incompetent robot, and taquito-related non-sequiturs, Invader Zim was ultimately a children’s show about death, destruction, and other terrible fates.

Its history goes back to the late 90s when a Nickelodeon producer stumbled upon the comic book Squee! by series creator Jhonen Vasquez. The four-issue series is a spin-off of another comic, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, and features a young boy who is trying his best to live in a world of hideous monsters, alien abductions, resentful parents, cruel classmates, and abject terror in general. It is a comedy of sorts, but one born out of our darkest fears.

Basically, someone read this and thought, “We gotta get this guy making television for children.” At the time, Nickelodeon was looking to expand beyond its core demographic of six to ten-year-olds with shows aimed at a slightly older crowd and was explicitly looking for “edgy” content. “Even went so far as to make that wiggly ‘edgy’ gesture with their hands that implies… ‘edgy,’” Jhonen said. They approached him about developing a show, and he pitched an idea about a rogue alien invader hellbent on enslaving the human race but spending most of his time going to school.

“Since he was creating a show for a children’s network, Vasquez compiled together many things he loved during his own childhood, including: robots, monsters, horror films, paranormal investigators, sci-fi flicks, Monty Python, the works of Douglas Adams, and, of course, aliens.”

And like any good story about aliens, it’s more about our own humanity than the extraterrestrial invaders. What distinguished Invader Zim from its animated contemporaries was its unflinching satire of the modern world and a willingness to expose children to the horrifying possibilities of life on Earth.

For instance, in the episode “Walk of Doom” Zim updates GIR’s guidance system and purposefully gets lost in a dense city in order to test it, but once they’re ready to go home he finds GIR replaced the chip with a cupcake. In one of their first attempts to find their way back, they get on a bus. The driver says they need money. “You expect me to pay to be on this filthy machine?” Zim asks. For anyone who’s been on a public bus, this is a valid question, but they’re promptly tossed off.

Their next attempt involves Zim staring into the sun until he goes blind. Once the skin grows back on his eyeballs, he finds they can make money as street performers. Zim finally makes it onto the bus, pays the fare, and is on his way home. However, the bus is immediately stuck in traffic. Zim looks around at the people riding with him. There’s a baby drooling, a woman rubbing her nose, a man drooling, an old guy who might be dead, an obese clown glaring at him. There are flys buzzing and a constant torrent of sneezes and coughs.

Invader Zim, “Walk of Doom”

Finally, Zim stands up and screams, “I CANNOT STAY ON THIS BUS ANY LONGER.” In the next shot, the bus pulls away and Zim and GIR are left standing on the sidewalk.

I laughed at this scene as a kid, but little did I know that ten years later I’d be sitting on a city bus stalling in traffic thinking the exact same thing. The conflicts in Zim’s world are often the petty and mundane obstacles in everyday life meets the ever-present threat of death and destruction. The story is driven by Zim’s extreme reactions—in order to stop an overzealous friendship he rips out the child’s eyes and replaces them with robotic ones that will misdirect their affection, in order to fit in better at school he harvests people’s organs—but what disgusts Zim about humans truly is disgusting.

Zim can’t ever actually conquer Earth, because then the show would be over, and so Zim must always be stopped from enslaving all humans, usually from a combination of his own ineptitude and hubris. However, he is still the protagonist and so the audience is made to identify with his point of view. After getting kicked off the bus he asks, “What is wrong with these people? This planet is just begging to be destroyed.” The more you see humanity from his perspective the more reasonable that sentiment becomes.

Invader Zim showcased a world where most everyone is more stupid and apathetic than they are malicious, where big business runs supreme by making shoddy and disposable products, and where pop culture and greasy foods placate people into a stupor. There are not so subtle jabs at large American corporations, like the fast-food chain MacMeatie’s (which makes their meat out of recycled napkins), the family entertainment restaurant Bloaty’s Pizza Hog (complete with horrifying animatronic characters), and Gaz’s portable console Game Slave (originally called the Game Slave Advanced). No one learns any moral lessons. No one is ever saved. Inevitable destruction is just pushed off for another day.

This philosophy is often best articulated by their “skool” teacher, Ms. Bitters, who is sort of like the teacher from Pink Floyd’s The Wall meets a nihilistic vampire. She has so many great lines it was hard to choose which to include here. In one episode the class gets a pet hamsters, it’s running in place on a little hamster wheel, and she says, “Take a good look, children: It will prepare you for your adult lives in our nightmarish corporate system.”

In another, Dib rushes into the class speaking of horrible nightmare visions. Ms. Bitters says, “It’s called life, Dib, sit down.”

But perhaps the perfect encapsulation of the show is the episode “Door to Door.” It starts with the students of Ms. Bitters’ classroom building a large house of cards on Dib’s desk as part of a “civics” lesson. Each card represents a social ill, like “the overworked education system” and “the deadweight of students like you.” Eventually, the stack of cards wobbles and comes crashing down. Ms. Bitters concludes her lecture by saying, “So, you can see, children, that our whole society is nothing more than a perilous house of cards…destined to collapse under its own weight.” The cards crush Dib’s desk as well and he’s told to, “Get a replacement from the pile.” It’s revealed that the rest of the students are sitting behind random detritus — cardboard boxes, overturned barrels, old tires — as the desk budget for the year has run out.

This segues into the students being tasked to sell candy (made of sawdust) in order to help fund their school. Zim scoffs at the prizes they can win, until the candy mascot, Poop Dawg, reveals that the top prize is a secret. He concludes that any hidden prize must be immensely valuable and commits to selling the most candy. We then see an idyllic suburban neighborhood preparing for the day when the school kids appear on the horizon. “Fundraising…ch-children!” someone cries. The residents run inside, cars speed off, lasers fly by for some reason. Zim makes his first sale to an old lady wielding a bat. He claims his little brother (GIR) will go insane if she doesn’t buy his candy. When she bites into it she starts to choke and falls to her knees. “Mmhmm, that’s the sawdust,” Zim says.

But selling candy like this is taking too long, and after a hallucination in which he confronts Poop Dawg, Zim creates a helmet that shows people the horrible future hellscape that will come to be if they don’t buy his candy. He ends up selling “1.2 million revolting candy units” and goes to claim his prize. Ms. Bitters, however, reveals that there is no prize, “They just made it up to make kids work harder for no money,” and the episode just sort of ends.

Tens of thousands of real live human children every year go out into their neighborhood to raise money for their schools. The fundraising industry generates billions of dollars in annual sales. Invader Zim is telling them that adults hate it when they try to sell them candy, that the candy itself is garbage, and that just the fact that they need to sell candy to raise money for their education is indicative of something deeply wrong with our society. That’s not the type of message we expect from a children’s show, but it’s also the truth.

“[Jhonen] made a kids show where Santa was a scam, corporations were capricious monolithic edifices constructed only for greed, public schools failed their students in every conceivable way, and everyone turned a willful blind eye to Earth’s existential threats.”

Unfortunately, this did not endear the show to the network. By the time they show aired, they had largely abandoned their plans to appeal to an older audience, leaving the series between shows like The Fairly OddParents and Rocket Power. Six months after the show premiered, there was the tragedy on September 11th. In Jhonen’s words, “I don’t think people wanted to see shows that were about any kind of destruction or anything that had to do with someone trying to conquer the Earth.” The episode “Door to Door” had to be changed because Zim’s alternate reality showed New York being attacked. In the end, only 27 of its initially contracted 40 episodes were finished, and the show was unceremoniously canceled.

But despite the quick cancellation, there were millions of us in that pre-teen/early-teen range that caught the show as it aired. I was eleven when it premiered on Nickelodeon, and the show quickly became me and my friends’ single most favorite thing. Jhonen said in a 2012 interview that “it became apparent that Nick was the ‘place for kids’ but not ‘kids who want their eyes ripped out,’” which is maybe true, but its enduring cult following and sprawling legacy suggests otherwise.

“Arguably, Invader Zim is one of the most influential animated shows to come out of that time period, with echoes of its humor and tone present in Adventure Time, The Regular Show, Gravity Falls, and Steven Universe.”

Today, the millennials are more anxious and depressed than past generations. Surveys show that we’re worried about climate change, pessimistic about the social order, and unhappy with our jobs. A recent report says that “more millennials are dying from deaths of despair.” Invader Zim was the only show geared towards these children that was honest with them about the future to come. The only show that predicted that each day we’d read the news and think to ourselves, “What is wrong with these people? This planet is just begging to be destroyed.”