Okay, this time the Invaders try a sort of religious tactic to get their conquest of Earth going. Brother Avery is an Invader posing as a preacher or something who does a trick for his congregation: he takes a pill that starts killing him, then he starts to glow in the way the Invaders do as they die. But instead of burning up, after he shows off the glow he heads off the stage to one of the regeneration chambers they use to not die. It’s a pretty effective scam, so he’s got a whole bunch of people showing up to his performances. What’s more, he’s preaching that they should prepare for “the coming host of angels” so they will accept saucers bringing people from space with glee instead of trepidation. It’s a good plan, but obviously David Vincent is on the case.

Vincent knows the alien red glow, so he sees through this one immediately, including understanding that they’ve probably got the regeneration chamber backstage. He offers his services to Now Magazine (We must sadly assume that in the universe of the Invaders this magazine is not owned by J. Jonah Jameson’s) to get pictures of Avery’s whole operation. To get into the church, he actually bothers to use an alias! He almost never does that! He poses as Dennis Victor and, though the Invaders see through, but he focuses on a non-alien member of the church, Sister Claire.

Most of the episode is typical Invaders stuff, with Vincent doing action hero stuff like dodging a car and sneaking around, but the Claire stuff is interesting. It’s clear that Claire has made a lot of mistakes in her life and that Brother Avery’s miracle has given her a faith that has helped her turn her life around. She does not want to believe David Vincent and his claims, but the Invaders have no qualms about using her to capture Vincent and then killing her. And the thing about a show like this one is that when Claire is in danger, there’s as much chance that she could be saved or be killed. Watching the episode, I have no way of knowing if she’ll survive or not. One may say that, since the show doesn’t bring back characters like this, it doesn’t actually matter if the guest stars survive or not, but if we go that way we’d say it doesn’t matter in any movie who survives if there isn’t a sequel. As far as this story is concerned, we want the characters to survive, but the fact that the Invaders is willing to kill off such characters means we can’t be certain. That’s what I love about horror, and I’m glad the show does it. Anyway, Claire survives and Vincent ends the episode with another ally ready and willing to join the fight against the Invaders but we presumably never see her again. Maybe Vincent sent her off to help his brother with his underground alien-fighting operation.

A couple of special-effects-related comments on this one: One, when we see Brother Avery regenerating, there is a sort of wiggly mass visible inside him that we’ve not seen before and I wonder if anything can be inferred from it about the Invaders’ true forms. Two, there’s a scene where Vincent shoots through a car window to kill an Invader and to show the bullet breaking the glass they do a special effect wherein they just draw a crack pattern over the window. It’s very badly done and, in a show that usually has fairly good effects for its time, really stands out as funny. It’s better than I’d do, for sure, and I’m sure the people doing it had budget and time concerns to worry about, but it doesn’t change that it is an amusingly bad effect. I loved it.