8. The story, part three

Elliott and co are now prisoners of the nasty new alien arrivals.

Korel and his team question them endlessly about "Zrek" and tortures them when they stick to the story about him having left the planet.

Meanwhile, Mary and Keys come home from a date to discover an empty house. Disturbed, they start to look for the kids and notice a strange sound coming from the roof.

ET's communicator system is going nuts, and the keyboard read-out keeps repeating the words ET HELP ELLIOTT SOON".

When they climb back down, the pair see the geranium - which is blooming back to life. From this, they somehow figure out that they should head for the clearing.

Korel and the invading aliens have tortured Elliott to the point of exhaustion and dump his unconscious form in a cage with his friends.

But then there's a hum from outside the ship - and the hatch slides open to reveal... you guessed it... ET!

With his heart light pulsating and his finger pointed almost like a weapon, he makes Korel and the others freeze and quickly helps Elliott recover.

After helping the kids out, he reprograms the evil alien mothership and sends it flying off to a remote corner of the galaxy.

The reunion is sweet but short-lived as ET's own ship arrives to take him home again, and Elliott must once more say goodbye to his friends.

Cue the sound of a thousand childhood hearts breaking all over again...

Admittedly, the story is only in very rough treatment form, but it hardly seems to have the same meat or impact as the original ET.

The plot, in this early form, is brutally simplistic - evil aliens arrive, take the kids hostage, ET rescues 'em. And for a sequel to a movie about the character, he's barely in it.

We'd hope that any final draft would add the required layers of subtlety and theme to this bare skeleton.

But we'll never get to see that happen (which which is probably for the best), since Spielberg decided against the idea.

Why? Glad you asked...

Next: So what happened?