Okay, this time the aliens are growing something in a big vat! Those dastardly dastards!

The episode opens with a cop pulling over a car that turns out to have Invaders in there. And they’ve got something so shocking that when the cop see it, he basically goes catatonic. What did he see? Well that’s a secret.

Our hero David Vincent hears about this cop going comatose and figures “that sounds like alien work” and comes to town to investigate. He arrives, once again using his full name and not at all pretending to not be an anti-Invader crusader. He winds up teamed up with the cop’s friend, other cop. The first cop dies, so now the second cop gets to be called “the cop” for the rest of this.

Anyway, Vincent gets absolutely almost killed by an alien who know who he is, but the cop saves him and witnesses the disintegration that occurs when the alien dies, and thus learns about the aliens. So, once again, Vincent has an ally in the form of an authority figure. They go on an investigation and learn that the Invaders are taking over a sea lab. I don’t need to go through full details, but fisticuffs at the sea lab result in a fire that burns the place down and foils the aliens’ plans. The cop and another ally who works in the lab both survive and Vincent has two more allies in the world. He really needs to make a team of these people. But in this one, the cop offers to accompany Vincent to the FBI and Vincent basically says “Nah.” I would guess the idea is that he’s worried they have infiltrated the government, but it sure isn’t consistent with how his life has actually been going.

What were the aliens’ plans in the sea lab? Well, they’re doing an experiment that simulates primordial conditions in a vat so they can grow new life, but also they seem to be growing their leader? I guess. Considering I’ve started taking notes while I watch, I’d like to have a better idea, but I don’t. Blame the episode, not me. Or blame me. Either way. What’s important is we learn the aliens also have some sort of hypnotism technology and, even more important, we see some more of the pinky fingers being used to spot aliens. I thought that might have been forgotten, but it hasn’t!

Hey, Internet! This website has been active for TWENNY YEARS TODAY!

I don’t remember the exact details of what I was putting on here two decades ago, but I made this post in 2006 to announce that the Book of PDR was beginning. That’s this very website! It’s twenty years old.

It’s some kind of accomplishment, surely. How many still-active websites are older than two decades old? I don’t know! Someone probably has a general idea, but I don’t. But probably not a whole lot of them. I have to assume The Book of PDR is now a venerated old pillar of the Internet community.

Haiku!

Book of PDR.
A most important website.
Twenty freakin’ years.

Here’s to another twenty years and another twenty visitors to the site.

This one time, one of Spider-Man’s villains (it was a Mysterio, for posterity) wanted to know Spider-Man’s secret identity so badly that he kidnapped a bunch of people who know Spider-Man and stuck them all in a machine that combined their memories and personalities and stuff to create an illusory virtual world. But one of those people, Flash Thompson, apparently had a personality so strong it overwhelmed the illusion and created a fantasy world in which he and Spider-Man were a heroic team of heroes. Et cetera, et cetera, amen, this ends with Flash imagining his wedding day and it getting attacked by a bunch of supervillains.

One of those supervillains is the Rocket Racer.

And look, he’s wearing a neat silver version of his suit and board. I prefer the yellow and red, but I admit it’s neat to see him in a different way for a change. The question that arises is, why is Rocket Racer a silver-clad criminal in this fantasy? It’s a world made up of the combined minds of a bunch of people Spider-Man knows, so who there provided this imaginary version of Bob? The story is a bit vague about who is in the machine. We know for sure it includes Flash Thompson, Peter Parker and MJ and Aunt May, Jonah Jameson and his wife Marla, Robbie Robertson, Jill Stacy, and at least one other guy I don’t see identified. But there’s also tubes in the machine that could imply several more people. Basically, I don’t think I can actually narrow it down based on that information. It’s all supposition.

But, in the real world, at this time Bob is a good guy, harmlessly trying to get through university. Peter, at the very least, would know that. My instinct is to just blame it on Jameson. That guy’s always judging people, but usually he’s more concerned with masked vigilantes than the likes of a publicly-known figure like Bob. And the Daily Bugle ran a feature about Bob’s life story once, so surely he’s aware that Bob is actually a good guy (That goes for Robbie too). That still leaves us with too many suspects.

I could, perhaps, argue that one of the unseen people in the machine we don’t get to see if Bob himself. He’s known to be a Spider-Man ally and could on a villain’s list of people to be kidnapped, right? If he were in that machine, imagining some other world, would he cast himself in the role of a criminal out of some kind self-hatred? Possible, but I’d need even one single more bit of confirmation before I committed to that reading.

We’ll never know who imagined Bob to be a baddie during the period in his life when he was most on the side of “the law”, but I guess we can probably just assume it’s Aunt May’s fault. Maybe she just confuses him with the Silver Surfer.

Also, I need to address it: by the rules (such as they are) of Marvel’s multiverse, they say that any reality that can be imagined is real out there somewhere in infinity. I’ve always found that silly, but that’s how they roll, and at some point they designated this world as Earth-99727, so this counts as a Into The Rocket-Verse post. I have to wonder what the life of this version of Bob is like as if he exists as a real person. Well, I’m gonna say that both the fact he’s wearing silver and that he’s an actual supervillain (not for hire or nothin’, he’s just attacking the good guy’s wedding here) indicate that his lust for wealth has overcome his good sense. And Spider-Man and Flash have probably foiled his schemes so often that now he’s degenerated into a standard “out for revenge” type of villain. A truly tragic specimen of Alternate Bob Farrell.

Of course even if, on that world, we can accept that Spider-Man is not Peter Parker, but some person whose identity is as-yet unrevealed, we also have to assume that when Rocket Racer and a bunch of his criminal allies attacked Flash Thompson’s wedding, the whole affair did NOT end with them realizing their reality was fake, but continued on in some other way and that this silver Rocket Racer probably got beat up or something.

I give David Vincent some crap for not going deeper into hiding as he opposes the alien invasion conspiracy, but I guess there is one upside: when a scientist notices that a bunch of other top scientists have disappeared and he suspects aliens are behind it, he goes to Vincent for help. David Vincent is well known enough by not only the aliens, but the humans, as a guy who is opposing the alien invasion. It’s interesting because, as I’ve said, it is not at all what I expected from the show. I thought it was gonna be a guy wandering from town to town with nothing but the shirt on his back stumbling into alien schemes. But no, he’s public and active and defying my every expectation.

Anyway, the scientists are being kidnapped by the Invaders, who then use fancy machines to drain the information from their brains. The process does a lot of mental damage. So Vincent joins the security team to prevent the main scientist from being taken, but the main scientist absolutely gets taken. The Invaders park a big truck in front of the scientist’s route, then grab him and his whole car and put him in the trailer. Classic. And then, when Vincent and Other Guy try to follow, their car doesn’t work because the engine disintegrates. The aliens have some manner of Engine Destroyo Rays that I bet will never come up again.

But then Vincent keeps searching for the scientist. Other Guy gives up, but Vincent keeps at it. But then, when Vincent is in danger, Other Guy comes back to save the day. He’s like Han Solo, except that he ends up dead. But you know who does not end up dead? The scientist that Vincent was helping! They rescue him and some of the other kidnapped scientists, though those other ones are not doing well. Still, this is probably Vincent’s most successful outing so far! If I had not been spoiled that there are no recurring cast members until the second season, I’d assume that the scientist here becomes a steadfast ally. Instead, who knows what happens to him?

Also, I’m pretty sure this was the episode that had the climactic showdown at the Vasquez Rocks.

This is the last of these episodes I watched before I decided I should post about them on here. Potentially that means that the from now on they will potentially be more detailed, because I’ll take notes while I watch, but also I’m only watching one episode a week, so posting will go more slowly.