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.

In this one, our main guy David Vincent learns how he can’t trust anyone during this alien invasion. I mean, he already knew that, but this one really drives it in.

He comes along for his latest investigation. He read reports of a plane that crashed and when it was investigated, there was nobody on board. He figures, the aliens disintegrate when they die, so they were probably flying. The military or science types who investigated the crash found a cylinder made of alien technology in there and bring it back to their base, and ol’ David Vincent assumes they’re gonna want to get it back so he shows up to stop them, once again not even hiding his name. He’s able to convince the organization to help him set up a trap for the Invaders, but they don’t show up and Vincent looks a bit of a fool.

That’s not the worst of it, though, because after that he gets captured by one of that company’s security guards, a guy named Swain. Swain tells his story, about how his daughter thought she saw a spaceship and his wife went with the kid to see and Swain saw them both get killed. And now he wants to kill Vincent, saying he thinks that he’s an alien. Vincent is able convince Swain that he’s human and they agree to work together. Vincent has had plenty of allies on the show so far, but this is the first time he’s had a guy who is going about it like he is, proactively hunting the Invaders for as long as Vincent has, if not longer. These guys, working together, could be the beginning of a true resistance to the Invaders.

Of course, instead, it turns out that Swain is one of them. It was all a plot to trick Vincent into helping them steal the cylinder, which has alien war plans on it, from the company for them. Vincent figures it out, but way too late. There’s a big foot chase and Swain dies, but he’s touching the cylinder when he does, which apparently means that it disintegrates with him. The aliens don’t get their plans, but neither does Vincent or the science people who wanted to study it.

Vincent already knew that looking for the bent pinky fingers wasn’t a reliable way to spot the aliens (and Swain even checks Vincent for it when he’s pretending he thinks Vincent is an alien), but in this one he looks in Swain’s eyes while he tells the story of his doomed family and he sees the tears. With the exception of the woman from The Mutation, Vincent knows that the aliens don’t have emotions as we understand them, so he was certain Swain was human. And it failed him. We don’t know if Swain had a mutation similar to that woman, or if he was just good at pretending for the sake of deception, but Vincent got a real kick in the teeth there. This is the kind of thing I want in a show like this, an atmosphere of paranoia. Anyone can be your enemy during this invasion. I bet he doesn’t just show up at his next investigation using his real name. I bet…

But perhaps most importantly, there’s a bit where Vincent is going to a bar to meet with Swain and he catches the eye of a woman, who hungrily stares at him until a man, presumably her boyfriend or something, pulls her away. It plays out entirely in the background never getting any attention drawn to it. Funny that way.