This one has a pretty great cold open. A guy is fleeing from the Invaders, winds up at the airport and tries to get the help of a guy who works there. The airport guy doesn’t know what to make of the guy raving about aliens, so he’s relieved when two official-looking types show up and tell him that guy was crazy. They calm him down (using the hypnotism crystals) and have him walk in front of a landing plane to his death.
Anyway, that poor man was a hotel owner and the whole thing was a plan the Invaders did so they could take over the hotel. Not just for the fun of owning a hotel! Oh my, no. They’re doing it as step one in another plan! A famous scientist named Paul Cook is coming to advise the government in matters of missile defence, and he’s staying at the hotel. The Invaders are gonna do a scheme about that!
I’ve mentioned before that these Invaders are NOT pod people. They can take human form, but they can’t just take over the form of an existing person and pretend to be them. I mean, sure, there was that time in Moonshot that they posed as that astronaut, but that was possible because the real version of that guy had been burned up and got plastic surgery, so the fact he looked different could be explained. That’s a coincidence that isn’t going to happen too often. Anyway, Paul Cook is a bit of a recluse who hasn’t been seen in public for years and was in an accident that scarred up his face and also left his niece Maggie, his only living relative, blind. See? It’s a slightly different scenario.
Anyway, the Invaders are spying on Paul (hence the title of the episode) and learning his voice and mannerisms so they can trick Maggie. Then they bump off Cook’s assistants, so that when Maggie assures the government that this imposter is their man, they’d believe her. Probably would have been a good plan for this very specific scenario if David Vincent hadn’t heard about a man who claimed aliens were after him and then got an airplane to the face. David Vincent notices things like that.
Our man Vincent has never been great at subterfuge. He takes a job as a bus driver, less to pose as a bus driver than just to drive it to the hotel. Once he’s there he absolutely introduces himself by name and explains his job as an anti-alien crusader. There is an admittedly hilarious bit where he sneaks in the hotel room door in the second that Maggie has it open, then just awkwardly tries to find evidence while she absolutely knows he’s there. A flaw in Vincent’s plan is that he assumes that Cook is going to be one of those people working with the Invaders, a traitor to humanity. He was not prepared for the impersonation aspect of their plan.
But, if David Vincent is bad at subtlety, he’s good at being an action hero. Once the imposter makes a slip-up that lets Maggie know he’s not really her uncle, Vincent makes short work of them and Maggie explains things to the government as best she can.
