David Vincent is staking out an alien operation, sneaks in and starts randomly pushing buttons. This is his right, and I won’t take that from him.

Anyway, this one picks up three months into Vincent’s current investigation. He’s got a job (under his real name, of course) with an oil company, and there’s a whole thing where he steals some alien stuff and he brings it to a guy who used to work for NASA to study it and there’s hypnotism and subterfuge and all that. But what this episode is really about is that David Vincent has a love interest. Susan Carver, the daughter of the oil company boss. During those three months we didn’t see, she and Vincent fell in love (why would a story want to focus on that part, when it can just introduce her and tell her they are in love at the same time?). The thing is, her father has some shady dealings in his past and the aliens use that information to blackmail Susan into working against Vincent. She comes to regret it, but the story still has her sacrificing her life to save our hero, who shall single-manly go on to have more adventures.

I got to thinking during this one how shows in this era would just roll in a love interest for the hero now and again, and how often they were doomed women. My mind went to David Vincent’s contemporaries Captain Kirk and Batman. I haven’t seen it in decades, but I swear there’s an episode of Batman where the love interest is a criminal woman who, per the narrative must be punished for her crimes, and she dies in a similar radiation thing to the one Susan does here. And, of course, the closest thing Vincent has had to another love interest in the show so far, the Invader with the mutation in The Mutation episode of the Invaders, was not as close to Vincent as Susan is here, but she was similarly doomed. I’m definitely gonna keep track of how many more doomed love interests we get during the run. (I also just remembered that during that episode with the hallucination of a better life working with the aliens, we learned of an old girlfriend he had in the past. She probably got out fine because he wasn’t an adventure show hero when they hooked up.)

Um. In other news, the aliens have some sort of energy weapon guns in this one. I don’t think we’ve seen those before. They’re getting more dangerous.

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.