This one starts with a guy named John Carter who has been seeing flying saucers around his town. In spite of his name, he’s no champion of alien fighting, he’s just seen as the town kook. But David Vincent is willing to look into his claims and it pays off, with them locating one of the Invaders’ flying saucers, getting aboard to capture it, and trying to hold onto it when the Invaders come back. It’s a siege situation!

John Carter is a motorbike-driving guy with four cats (mentioned, but sadly not depicted) who has been trying to prove that aliens exist. This guy could have his own spinoff! He tries to help Vincent by going into town (the saucer is out at the Vasquez Rocks location) to get the Sheriff and an expert of some kind who will finally be able to see this undeniable proof of the invasion. Some other characters show up, a couple who are on the run from the law. They stay with Vincent at the scene of siege.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I like seeing Vincent suffer a big loss now and then. He’s had some major victories in the last few episodes, so we were due for it: this time he loses badly. Of course, there’s no real ongoing continuity to the show, so whether he wins or loses in any given episode will not make a difference to his status quo at the next one, but I do feel like many of the episodic shows I watched growing up would have had the hero winning every week and making it look easy. David Vincent struggles for his victories.

Here, not only does he lose the flying saucer to the Invaders, but three of his allies are killed off before they can even arrive to help. I pointed out last time how when the Invaders vaporize a whole car to kill their target, they run the risk that the target could escape and be mistakenly assumed dead. Well, this time they prove that when the targets actually are in there, it’s a quick and effective method of destruction. John Carter and the local sheriff and another guy are wiped off the mortal coil in an instant. So much for that spinoff show.

Worth noting: near the beginning the Invaders try to disprove the flying saucer photos that Carter has taken by showing up with a kid who has been throwing a frisbee around. Who is this kid? Is it an Invader or is it a real kid who has been taken in by the Invaders to be used at times like this. Neither scenario is good for humanity, but the former would be the first time we’ve seen a child Invader. Either scenario is creepy.

Also worth noting: the guy in the fugitive couple has experience with engineering or something and is very impressed by the flying saucer. He thinks it may not even have fuel, and may operate on some kind of magnetic principle. That’s kinda neat.

The second season of the Invaders begins! In this one, David Vincent foils another alien plan. They tried to infiltrate NORAD and shut down their scanning do-dads so that they can have a bunch of flying saucers land without being noticed. Here’s some of the things worth noting:

To infiltrate NORAD an Invader woman poses as the new wife of a NORAD major (Dan Keller) who recently lost his wife. The idea that he remarries a quarter year after his first wife’s death is raised as a weird thing, but that could easily be a result of mind control, given that as it is she is using a mind control device to make Dan give her secrets. This device is different from the usual little hypnotism crystals they use, it’s an actual thing placed on Dan’s head that leaves a sore spot on his forehead. I assume this setup is for more long-term hypnotism than the crystals or something. So while mind control may explain why he remarries so soon, what I don’t think we know is if the Invaders bumped off his first wife or simply took advantage of the situation when she died. It doesn’t matter, and they are certainly callous enough to have done it, I kinda prefer the latter.

Speaking of killing humans, the thing that sparks this episode is a doctor seeing the Invader woman fall off a horse and checking her for a pulse, finding none, and calling her in as dead. The Invaders then proceed to do a pretty brutal drowning of that doctor. When it turns out she isn’t dead, after the doctor’s report was made public, Vincent correctly surmises that if a doctor checked a person and found no pulse, it could be an Invader. He’s very good at his job sometimes.

Speaking of Vincent being good at his job sometimes, this is one of those rare occasions (maybe the second or third time) when he’s shown up at a place undercover! He goes to NORAD using an alias (Robert Davis) and pretending to be a reporter! Good for him! Unfortunately for him, it’s probably too late for David Vincent to go undercover given his time spent publicly fighting aliens. NORAD’s security guards have a whole headshot of the man that they carry around on their clipboards just in case he shows up. We have to assume most government security have been briefed on the man at this point.

And also, I think this is two weeks in a row that the Invaders have used their vaporizer guns to vaporize a car they think their target is in, so they assume the target has been vaporized, but actually the target got out just in time to avoid it. I feel like if you use weapons that vaporize the proof you killed your target, just take a moment to look around a little more. Just to make sure.

Anyway, as I said, Vincent wins in the end, though Dan Keller dies. It’s all a pretty standard Invaders fare at this point, but it isn’t a bad start to season two.

In this one David Vincent investigates the Invaders again (with a lead from a little girl’s story of seeing a melting truck that made the news) and he winds up in a plant they are using as a communications hub and kills an Invader in front of a crowd of people at the beach. Since he did all of this under his own name, as always, the Invaders know this is their constant enemy David Vincent and they have a chance to frame him. The body of the Invader disappears, as always, but they provide a corpse that is unidentifiable from the sea and claim this was the man Vincent killed. And what’s more, they claim is was Mr. Tate, another of their enemies, one who they think they killed in that melting truck incident. So Vincent is at risk of going to prison for a crime the Invaders committed. It may have worked, if Tate had actually been killed.

But Tate survived the attack on him and he stole a valuable file from the aliens that eleven of the highest-level Invaders, so they want that back. Anyway, Tate and Vincent team up. There’s a whole thing where the Invaders capture Tate’s estranged daughter as bait. There’s a bit where Vincent bribes a kid who works at a pharmacy for info, which the kid does for the money, but then the kid calls the cops on the suspicious man anyway. In the end the good guys win, though Tate is vaporized by one of the alien’s space guns, and we’re told that Vincent getting the file out and shutting down the communications hub is actually a major setback for the aliens. Most of the time Vincent is just barely getting by, surviving and doing what little he can, but we’re told this was a world-wide operation that he shut down. Good for him.

Overall it was a standard episode of the show, but no complaints.

This episode is so star-studded that they kill off Peggy Lipton from Twin Peaks in the cold open. She is one of two newlyweds who are accidentally exposed to a crystal that destroys the oxygen in the immediate area, causing them both to suffocate even though they are outdoors. Obviously David Vincent investigates that, discovers the crystal, and knowing that the regular authorities won’t be help enough, he brings it to a news guy called Booth who has both a radio show and a regular news article to use to spread the news about the aliens. Booth is played by none other than everyone’s favourite Burgess Meredith: Burgess Meredith! Booth is impressed by the crystal, but isn’t convinced about the existence of the aliens until he hires a scientist to study it and the aliens kill that scientist. Booth is in. He’s going to help Vincent spread word about the Invaders.

So then the Invaders need a new plan. The leader of this group of Invaders is played by everyone’s favourite Ed Asner: Ed Asner! The Invasner is head of a batch of Invaders who are developing this crystal so they can destroy the oxygen on Earth and make the planet more suitable to the aliens. He knows he can’t let humanity find out about them, so he has to stop Booth’s story. To that end, he brings David Vincent’s family into it.

It turns out that Vincent has a brother, Bob, who has a pregnant wife, Grace. That’s right, it’s Bob and David! The relationship between the brothers has been strained over the last year or so, however long it has been since David has been on his alien-fighting crusade. Bob doesn’t believe in the aliens, so he believes his brother has gone crazy, which changes when the aliens kidnap him and hold him hostage unless David gets Booth to drop the story.

I don’t need to go through all the details, but our heroes struggle with this one. Bob tries to fight his way out of the alien base, proving that action hero-ness runs in the family, but he is not successful. David is willing to discredit himself to save his brother, but Booth asks if Bob’s life is more important than the human race. Booth refuses to back down. It all ends in a climax wherein Invasner, his batch of aliens, and Booth are all killed and all evidence of the alien scheme erased, as usual. And, also as usual, David Vincent walks away leaving just a few new believers behind, except this time, they are his family.

We get some minor details about the aliens’ true forms as well. Oxygen is often considered a necessity for life in our universe, but these guys? They don’t care for oxygen! It actively harms them. It makes me wonder if they aren’t in some way metallic in nature, and they are rusting in a way. It also makes me wonder why they’re bothering to conquer Earth when Mars is right there, with much less oxygen.

Some astronauts die in a mysterious way, so you know that David Vincent is gonna look into that. After a bare minimum of pretending to be a reporter to get into a NASA press conference, he winds up giving his real name and being recognized. But, fortunately for NASA Vincent wasn’t recognized by the Invaders, he was recognized by Gavin Lewis, who is a human who works for NASA. Eventually the two men team up, with Lewis bringing Vincent in as security.

See, the thing is, NASA is right about to make their first trip to the moon and those astronauts that got killed off were replaced by fresh astronauts, and Vincents investigation makes him suspicious that one of them is an Invader. Here’s the thing: the aliens on this show take human form, sure, but they don’t take the form of existing humans. It isn’t a pod person situation where they step into an existing person’s life, right? Well, this time it is. This Invader has taken over the life of a guy: Hardy Smith, who was badly burned in a fire in Saigon, and had his face reconstructed, thus explaining why he looks different. He was an existing guy, with a life, including a wife. It’s the wife who is finally able to confirm this ain’t the real Hardy Smith and gets NASA to call Smith off the moon mission. But the Invader posing as Smith isn’t happy with that, so he hijacks the rocket and it explodes. The moon mission will have to be postponed, but the Invaders’ mission has been foiled.

When I learned we were getting a story about the space race, I was hoping we’d see a lot of footage from real space stuff, like in the Gary Seven episode of Star Trek. There’s a bit, but I would’ve preferred more.

Still, overall a good one. We learn that the Invaders don’t have heartbeats, which is something I don’t know we’ve heard before. The fake Smith had a little machine he could shine on himself (that he can charge with the cord from an electric razor) that makes him have a heartbeat long enough to pass a medical though. Oh, and also there’s a bit where Vincent disarms a gun-weilding Invader and flips him in one smooth motion. He’s getting to be a regular action hero he is.