At this point I assume David Vincent just scours the newspapers for any report of a cerebral hemorrhage because when the aliens kill two guys in their usual way, of course Vincent comes to town to check it out. There he finds them doing their thing, he investigates, winds up on a saucer going into flight, and then lands somewhere else (it’s the Vasquez Rocks again). For a moment he isn’t sure if he’s still on Earth and neither is the viewer, which was neat. But he was on Earth, and he comes across a science class on a science hike or whatever. A teacher and five teenagers. Vincent tries to convince them there was a flying saucer nearby and it doesn’t go well.

Then we get a scene that I can’t help but find darkly amusing. Vincent and the teacher go off to explore the supposed aliens and they find a military base to sneak around in. They find what may be the biggest Invaders operation we’ve seen on the show so far, there’s like twenty of them around. Anyway, Vincent takes the opportunity to sneak in like a cheeky little guy and steal a piece of their technology, and it ends up getting the teacher killed. So then Vincent has to go back to the student and be like “Yeah, I went off with your teacher and he’s dead now, but you can trust me.” A very funny situation for our hero to be in (actual line of dialogue: “He’s dead. The people from the flying saucer killed him.”), though the Invaders make it easier on him by showing up posing as the real army and bringing the whole lot of them in.

What follows is the Invaders trying to get their crystal back from Vincent and the students, the students don’t know who to trust, various alien schemes, eventually the kids come around the Vincent’s side and win the day. Of course, when they bring in the real military to see the base, the Invaders have left no evidence of their operation there. A victory for Vincent and his allies (five of them survive this one!), but they can prove nothing. Typical fare, but not a bad episode.

The operation at the base, incidentally, was one we’ve seen before where they bring their people in to regenerate them. One Invader at the start of the episode (named Fletcher) is being brought there because he has chicken pox. That raises some questions for me. Is there something about their human forms that make them semi-susceptible to our diseases? If so, Vincent needs to look into biological warfare. The other question though is about why they’re bothering to heal Fletcher at all. We’ve seen these guys throw their lives away pretty casually (like the ones who killed themselves immediately after testifying against Vincent’s friend) so why is Fletcher worth saving? Was he a key part of some scheme? Alien stuff. Hard to get one’s head around.

The most important thing, though, is that one of the students is played by Dawn Wells! Another Gilligan’s Island actor! Between the previous one showing up in The Trial we’ve had the entirety of “The Rest” on the show.

Captain Quaid is a beekeeper who appeared in a couple episodes of a show based on the Disney movie Tangled.

In a town called Vardaros, Quaid was once the sheriff. He was good at the job and beloved by the people of the town until some especially tough baddies show up and he can’t defeat them alone. But the people of the town don’t step up to help Quaid, so he fails to prevent Vardaros from becoming a crime-ridden cesspool and he retires, ashamed and hurt that nobody was willing to help him. But then, in the present day where the show happens, the protagonists bring him back into the job to help clean up the town again. He is reluctant at first, bitter about how the townspeople left things, but he does come back out of a sense of duty, as well as to protect the fields where his bees live.

It isn’t specified that he didn’t keep bees before retiring, but he really becomes a beekeeper only after leaving his job as the protector of Vardaros. He loves the bees because they come together and work for a common cause. He seems like a pretty big success as far as beekeeping is concerned, with many hives making multiple varieties of honey and he knows how to use bee pheromones to achieve various effects. And, I doubt it has to do with his apiarist skills as much as existing in a cartoon world, but his bees are also really smart and can do the thing where they cloud together to make shapes that are pictures communicating ideas.

So, he’s good at bees, is he good at the other parts of being a cool beekeeper? Well, in his prime he was so good with his sword that they called him Quaid the Blade. He was cunning and strong and could use a lariat. In the present he’s a bit rusty, but his talent has not abandoned him and it comes back as he goes, but now he has the additional skills offered to a beekeeper. He can use honey to make things sticky, or he can sic his bees on a foe. He’s older, but still powerful, and now he has allies both human and insect to help him do his job. He even manages to bring down a baddie who is wearing a suit of armour that is essentially the medieval equivalent of a mech.

I also appreciate that his job is not just fighting criminals, but he does things like saving cats and discouraging polluters and even just build town spirit. He’s genuinely trying to protect “the hive” that is the city. And from what we see in the episodes we get, it is working.

Four Honeycomb out of Five. This feels like a low four, once again proving it would have been smart for me to have done a scale of six, but the thing that just barely gets him into the 4 bracket is that when he comes out of retirement he gets a sheriff’s badge with a bee on it. That’s cool.

When I mentioned the Drifter in my Newsletter last month, I realized I don’t talk about the games I play often enough on here. So now I will try to start doing that. I’m probably not going to be doing detailed reviews or trenchant analysis, but I think it would be good to just plop my thoughts down so I can look back at them later, especially in case I ever manage to live my lifelong dream of getting into designing adventure games. I’m gonna call these Adventure Game Musings

I finished the Mermaid Mask today. It’s the most recent in the Detective Grimoire series of point-and-click mysteries. I’d already played the previous two in the series and enjoyed them, so I am not surprised to enjoy this one too.

The thing I thought about most during my time playing this game was how it is just clicking everything on everything. This is something they complained about in the adventure games of yore, you’d get stuck and just have to click every item in your inventory on every other thing in the game. The Grimoire games are like that, clicking every topic on every suspect, and it can feel daunting as the amount of suspects and topics grows. I find myself walking up to someone and needing to get their reactions to the 40-some things I need to ask them about and it seems like a lot, it seems like it’s gonna take forever, and I wonder “Is that what I want?”

I remember playing games as a kid and I loved the exploration aspect. The hours I spent exploring Mordavia or the Galaxy Galleria didn’t feel like wasted time even when I was stuck. It was fun, it was the experience I was looking for in a game. So why does in feel imposing now? Well, it’s because of the time investment. I don’t long for less time playing the game, I long for the days of youth when I could spend hours exploring a game world and it didn’t make me feel like my time was slipping away. That’s not the fault of the games.

I think that what the games have to do, then, is find a way to make me feel less bad about it. What the Mermaid Mask does to mitigate the issue is that those 40-some questions posed to a suspect are answered in fun ways by characters who are brought to life by great voice acting and animation. It’s a reward for the time invested, so I enjoyed that.

Do I think there are better ways? Well, sure. The opposite of rewarding a lot of clicks is to punish over-clicking, and I liked the way The Seance of Blake Manor did it, with the amounts of clicks you can do being limited. Once you’re told you CAN’T click on everything, it frees you from the feeling that you have to click on everything. Having to think and pick and choose what things you click makes a lot of sense to me in a mystery game. As an example, in the Mermaid Mask I found a box that required a number combination to open and when I asked another character about it, he just opened it for me. It was all sign-posted, the idea that the number could be a birthday is not only obvious in a real-world sense but also was brought up in the game, and the guy mentioned that he had been gathering the birthdays of the people in the cast. I can see how I would connect the dots and use that guy’s knowledge to solve the puzzle, but I didn’t solve it that way, I just got it done because I was asking the guy about everything. I didn’t get a sense of satisfaction of realizing it myself.

Now, that’s one example, there are a bunch of puzzles in the Mermaid Mask that I got to feel clever for solving (especially when I do it before the game started feeding me hints) and I wouldn’t want the Grimoire games to not have a ton of fun characters. The way they do it is the right choice for these games, it’s what I would come to these games for, but if I had to choose which I prefer I think finding a way to limit the clicking appeals more to me.

Good game though!

Gene Hackman as an Invader! This is one of the few things I knew going into the show, that Hackman would appear, but I don’t think I knew he was playing an Invader (and before I had seen the show, I can’t say I would’ve known what that meant anyway). I can say that he is probably not my favourite of the featured Invader enemies David Vincent has faced, but he’s dang good at it.

Okay, so the Invaders’ plan in this one is that they have these spores that they are experimenting with. If they work, they will be able to grow aliens in new bodies by the dozens. This addresses something that I’ve been thinking for a while: it seems like the Invaders are coming to Earth a handful at a time. It can be a struggle for them to get saucer here and when they do there’s only like five of them on there at the best of times. Take that (and the fact that David Vincent has been mowing them down when he can) and I don’t think there are a lot of the Invaders on Earth at any given time. Probably no more than a few thousand across the whole globe at any given time. That’s why these spores are so important, they could really build up their Earth-based armies.

Anyway, the spores are in a box for most of the episode. First the Invaders have . Then it gets stolen by some hot-rodders. Then, to avoid the Invaders who are after them, they stash it in some couple’s car. Then the couple gets rid of it so some kids have it. It’s a regular macguffin chase with the Hackmanvader getting frustrated by how hard it is to get his seeds back. This is the episode you’d have the Coen Brothers direct if you could.

Through all of this, of course, our hero David Vincent is on the case. He partners up with a cop named Ernie who saw the Invaders but he has a history with alcoholism that means he won’t be believed and could lose his job if he reports what he’s seen. Without getting too detailed, David Vincent uses a molotov cocktail to destroy the Hackmanvader and his seeds, so he’s got another victory and another ally. He tells Ernie not to file a report on what he’s seen, though, because he doesn’t want Ernie to lose his job. They can meet up in a year after Ernie has retired, they say, which means that I absolutely believe that in the era after the show ends David Vincent and Ernie do some alien hunts together.

After what I mentioned last time, I would be remiss if I didn’t notice that this episode also features a Black character, another cop at Ernie’s station, with more lines than the guy last episode. If this trend continues, hopefully the show can get to a point when it isn’t noteworthy every time it happens.