This time, instead of David Vincent learning about an alien plot in the newspaper, he sees a guy he recognizes as an alien from one of his other adventures (I assume an off-screen adventure, but I didn’t look into if the actor had been on the show before or not). He follows the guy to a place called the Midlands Academy and he learns it is an alien training headquarters! They are teaching newly-arrived Invaders how to fake human emotions. They are using Venture Bros-style learning beds to fill their brains with all sorts of information they’ll need to know about Earth and humanity. And they are training all the Invaders posing as young people (especially the ones who look like teen girls drawn by John Romita) to promote all sort of subversive thoughts like drugs and disrespecting the police (gasp!).

Naturally Vincent is captured, but naturally Vincent escapes. He gets a cool moment where he crawls around on the outside of a moving van. He’s really growing into a top-quality alien-fighting action hero.

But Vincent isn’t the only human caught up in this Midlands Academy business. The aliens are once again trying to recruit a human, and it is once again a war veteran with marriage troubles. Barney Cahill is a pilot with a younger wife who loves money that he has trouble providing. When he stumbles upon the aliens, they decide not to kill him, but instead pay him for his services as a pilot. He will pick up newly-arrived Invaders and fly them to Midlands for training.

Vincent’s attempt to bring cops to the school is a failure (they’ve covered their tracks and appear as a normal school) but he learns about Cahill and is able to track him down and talk to him. Eventually, Vincent is able to convince Cahill to work with him, they are gonna betray the aliens, but Cahill’s wife wants money and she betrays them. But Cahill doesn’t let that stop him. He crashes his plane into the Midlands Academy, dealing what must be quite a blow to the Invaders.

Some things of note: When reporting the school to the authorities, Vincent refers to the Invaders as “foreign agents” which helps them take him seriously. What tips off Cahill about the aliens is seeing one of them wounded, with a big crack in his arm that doesn’t bleed. It makes the human disguises they use seem like plastic shells or something, which is kinda neat.

I’ve given thoughts on Rocket Racer’s villain who is way more popular than he is but how about we discuss a villain who was created as if to be Bob’s arch-nemesis, but has not caught on as such.

This guy here: Skinhead.

This is/was Eddie Cross. He was a Neo-Nazi asshole who was leading a white power group causing trouble at the university that Bob was attending. Bob wanted to beat the heck out of him, but Spider-Man kept showing up to say “Don’t do that!” so Bob and Spidey fought over whether beating up the Nazi was good or bad and then they accidentally spilled some experimental chemicals on the asshole. Those chemicals turned Cross into a big shapeshifty flesh blob (more details here). Bob blamed himself (Spider-Man never really seemed to blame himself much and he’s the one who MADE the chemicals. Which also means Peter Parker could probably be able to reproduce this origin and create more flesh blob guys if the wanted).

When you’re trying to create an enemy for a superhero, it’s about the contrast, right? Bob is a Black man, Eddie Cross is a violent racist. They both spent time hanging out in junkyards, Bob to find parts for his feats of engineering, Eddie as a place to hang out with his Nazi pals away from the eyes of society. Both are college students with complicated family relationships. Their differences and similarities could have provided fuel for many stories. And Bob blames himself Skinhead’s origin, so it’s got the kind of personal stakes they’d want if this was a movie. You’d think that Rocket Racer and Skinhead would clash all the time.

And so Bob does try to investigate Skinhead and put an end to his rampage. He gets knocked out and Spider-Man shows up to save the day. But don’t worry, Skinhead shows up again and Bob is nearby to do something about it! He doesn’t have his gear that time, though, so all he does about it is meet the superhero Captain Marvel (the Monica Rambeau one) and give her the exposition she needs to handle the problem.

So Skinhead has been taken out twice, never by Rocket Racer. Oh well.

I’m happy to say that this one is another loss for David Vincent. I don’t want to sound like I’m rooting against our guy, but I do think this kind of show works better if the hero can lose. It needs to seem like it’s a struggle for the hero to get by.

The story is like this: Vincent is investigating a guy called Nat Greely, who saw the aliens. The government is going to hold a committee of some kind about the aliens and a military guy named Mitchell Ross wants Vincent to testify that they exist. And another boss alien is working against them all. Like Mr. Nexus, this one has a name: Magnus. These aliens love having a cool villain name.

Vincent is willing to go along with Ross to testify, but he figures that if he finishes his investigation into Greely, they’ll have another guy who can testify with them. Unfortunately, it all goes bad when Magnus captures Greely’s wife and son and convinces Greely to betray Vincent. Vincent is captured and shown the inside of a flying saucer, then is shown a fake vision of how great the world would be if he worked with the aliens. They apologize to Vincent for the mistakes they’ve made so far, reminding him of the history of colonialism on Earth to show how mistakes can be made when cultures meet. They appeal to his old career as an architect, showing him a city he always wanted to design and he would be able to with then. They make him feel less lonely, seeming to reunite him with an old friend and an old girlfriend. I have to wonder if the other people who have been brainwashed by the Invaders have had similar visions. Anyway, Vincent sees through it all and escapes the delusion, but not the grasp of Magnus’s forces.

Then we get back to the plot of the episode, when we find out that Magnus is going to have Greely’s wife and child murdered unless they agree to call Ross and tell him they aren’t going to testify, that there are no aliens. Vincent doesn’t want the innocent people to die, so he does as he was told. That saves the wife and son, but the aliens then proceed to force Vincent and Greely to get drunk and stick them behind the wheel of a car and send it careening downhill. It’s lucky for our hero that he is able to wake up and drunk-drive well enough that their accident is non-fatal. It’s even luckier that the aliens decided to try to dispose of them with this make-them-look-drunk manoeuvre instead of just using their usual heart-attack inducing technology. But anyway, Magnus had David Vincent, their biggest foe, at his complete mercy and this was how he decided to handle it. Sure, Magnus. Why not? But hey, the plan did indeed ruin Ross’s testimony with that political committee thing. So, though Vincent survived, the aliens won this one.

There’s good stuff in the episode, but I really think it ought to have been two episodes. The whole brainwashing thing could have been one plot, and the stuff with Greely and the government committee could each have been given more room.