Some astronauts die in a mysterious way, so you know that David Vincent is gonna look into that. After a bare minimum of pretending to be a reporter to get into a NASA press conference, he winds up giving his real name and being recognized. But, fortunately for NASA Vincent wasn’t recognized by the Invaders, he was recognized by Gavin Lewis, who is a human who works for NASA. Eventually the two men team up, with Lewis bringing Vincent in as security.
See, the thing is, NASA is right about to make their first trip to the moon and those astronauts that got killed off were replaced by fresh astronauts, and Vincents investigation makes him suspicious that one of them is an Invader. Here’s the thing: the aliens on this show take human form, sure, but they don’t take the form of existing humans. It isn’t a pod person situation where they step into an existing person’s life, right? Well, this time it is. This Invader has taken over the life of a guy: Hardy Smith, who was badly burned in a fire in Saigon, and had his face reconstructed, thus explaining why he looks different. He was an existing guy, with a life, including a wife. It’s the wife who is finally able to confirm this ain’t the real Hardy Smith and gets NASA to call Smith off the moon mission. But the Invader posing as Smith isn’t happy with that, so he hijacks the rocket and it explodes. The moon mission will have to be postponed, but the Invaders’ mission has been foiled.
When I learned we were getting a story about the space race, I was hoping we’d see a lot of footage from real space stuff, like in the Gary Seven episode of Star Trek. There’s a bit, but I would’ve preferred more.
Still, overall a good one. We learn that the Invaders don’t have heartbeats, which is something I don’t know we’ve heard before. The fake Smith had a little machine he could shine on himself (that he can charge with the cord from an electric razor) that makes him have a heartbeat long enough to pass a medical though. Oh, and also there’s a bit where Vincent disarms a gun-weilding Invader and flips him in one smooth motion. He’s getting to be a regular action hero he is.
This one mixes things up a bit. David Vincent is following a trail of mysterious deaths. He finds the killer easily enough: it’s an Invader going by the name Nick. Nick, it turns out, has a virus that causes a slow death for the Invaders if untreated, but if he comes into contact with a human is freezes them to death. He’s just trying to get to a saucer landing site so he can get fixed up, and he’s willing to kill any human who gets in his way (and even a dog!). Anyway, he is captured by Vincent and there’s a family that gets involved, that stuff is less interesting, but in the end, when Nick makes it to the saucer landing site, they casually shoot him. They absolutely did not care about saving this kid’s life. I mean, the fact that he had some other Invaders trying to kill him for the whole episode could have clued him into that, but I assume he was in denial. I mean, what other choice did he have.
Obviously I am very interested in the alien aspects of the show. I definitely want to know more about the Invaders, and the introduction of this disease is interesting to me. But also, while Nick is captured by Vincent, he makes his case that not all of the Invaders are bad. He points out that there are good humans and bad ones, and his people are like that too. Most of them, he says, are simply following orders. Is there any truth to what Nick says? He’s certainly willing to lie to everyone else he meets, and has no qualms about killing humans (and a dog!), so he could be trying to play Vincent. But is there a “working class” among the Invaders? We know there are sub-groups, like the mutations who have emotions and are disliked. I don’t know if the show will ever give us answers, but I am curious to find out.
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.
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.
