Much like when they were trying to detonate that anti-matter bomb, this is one where the Invaders are just trying to do massive amounts of damage. And this time, they do a good job of it. They create a hurricane that does damage to a bunch of towns and the only reason David Vincent comes to investigate (other than the fact it was a hurricane in February) is because they spared the town they were in. But David Vincent does indeed come to investigate, but gets amchurched (which is when you get ambushed in a church, as you all know) and even though he manages to take out one of the attackers with his own weapon (I don’t even know if I’ve mentioned that the aliens have these little weapons they can stick on people to make it look like they died of natural causes, but Vincent turns it on one of the aliens here), our boy is still beaten up. But, luckily, he fell on the church organ, so before they can kill him, some people come to investigate the noise.
As I assume must have been normal in the ’60s, because Vincent was injured in the church, he has to stay with the priest at the rectory. Probably hospitals weren’t invented yet. Anyway, the priest is more or less the main character in this one. His friend was killed by the Invaders, his housekeeper is secretly an Invader, and his church is being used as a hurricane-making headquarters by the Invaders. This is his episode as much as Vincent’s (though Vincent gets to take up a huge portion of it by getting drugged and taking forever to walk down some stairs). Anyway, the priest is turned against Vincent at first, but then it made to realize who the real villains are and becomes Vincent’s latest ally. They defeat the Invaders, but not before one of them actually throws himself on the sci-fi weather controls and kills himself so that they all dissolve with him as he dies. Gotta give that one Invader credit for his devotion. Against Vincent’s wishes, the priest lets the other Invaders escape alive because of his religion or whatever.
This was a decent episode and, for whatever reason, the focus on a priest kind of mentally moves the story from the purely sci-fi space it usually occupies to something closer to, say, the John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. There’s no real focus on religion in the episode. Sure, the priest prays, but there’s no God Magic unless you count David Vincent’s cool alien-fighting skills. But somehow the mental shift is there, and the episode feels more like cosmic horror to me, and I like it.
