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.